Any other night, Mark would be here. He would be the one to answer the door and deal with this. Instead, I am unprotected, exposed in the doorway, when I’m hit with her eyes.
“Mom.” Just a single word, yet it burns on its way out.
“Helena!” Her head snaps back, and those eyes widen in alarm. “Are you all right? You look terrible.”
My eyes automatically drop, to the space beside her, to see if Bethany is there. It is out of habit, and my stomach clenches, my heart frustrated with my rote memory.
“I’m fine.” I pull self-consciously at the neck of my sweatshirt, grateful for the bulky material that hides my thin frame. Her eyes move into the house, darting into the spaces behind me, and I fight the urge to turn, to see what she does.
“May I come in?” She is wearing a rust-colored sweater and her hair is shorter, now almost completely white. She has a scarf around her neck but no jacket, and she rubs her arms as if she is cold. It’s an odd moment for her, preparedness being a skill she taught me early on. You make lists. You pack appropriately. You prepare for unknown situations. I was the child at school with a back-up set of clothes in my backpack. We had fire emergency routes in our home and first-aid kits in the car trunk. We attended CPR training courses on the weekends, and if I’m ever abandoned in the wilderness, I can create a flame from two sticks and determination. In some ways, I am exactly like my mother, and maybe that was always our problem.
She has to have a jacket. If this shivering routine is an attempt to gain entry, she should know me better than that. “No.” I close the door until just a crack shows, enough for me to see everything and her to see nothing. “Go away.”
“Helena—“ she holds up a hand. “I’m here for a reason.”
Oh goody. I can’t think of anything I want to know less than her reason for coming.
“A woman came by the office today.” The office. That sterile room where relationships are judged and families critiqued. It has been half a decade since I pushed open that door, but I bet my life it’s exactly the same. A black tweed couch. A bowl of peppermints on her desk. A view of the city through streak-free windows. The click of her pen against her notebook. Do you have feelings of love for Bethany? My mother swallows and there are more wrinkles than before, the last four years unkind. She thinks I look terrible? Ditto, dear Mother. “She’s a reporter—”
“Charlotte Blanton.” I interrupt, anxious to get on with this exchange.
“Oh. Yes.” She is surprised, and glances away. “So you know her.”
“What did she want?” My mother is a professional, one who considers me to be more patient than daughter. I’m not worried about what she told Charlotte Blanton. Her professional standards wouldn’t allow for idle gossip.
“She had questions, about Simon. About you.” Her hand trembles as it reaches for the scarf, patting the silk into place. “And Bethany. She wanted to know about Bethany.”
Any fear I had over Charlotte Blanton—it turns the corner into something deeper, and darker. It reaches the level where murders are plotted and mama-bear-instincts come out to brawl. It’s a familiar place, and I fight to keep my face calm, my mouth still. I can’t be distracted by Charlotte Blanton right now. I have to work. Mark and I need to write. And my mother—she needs to leave.
Headlights sweep across the dark porch and my mother turns, her hand lifting, shielding her face. A truck turns into the driveway, and it’s Mark. Panic zips through me. She can’t meet him. In the cab I see curls and color, and I open the front door and step onto the porch. “I’ve got to go. My friends are here to pick me up.”
“Your what?” I jog down the steps and she scurries after me, the click of her heels slower as she tries to navigate the dark stairs. I am rounding the front hood of the truck, waving in false enthusiasm to Mark, when she calls out. “Helena, we need to talk!”
I open the passenger door and crawl over Kate’s body, the time too short for her to unbuckle and move over, the truck’s headlights illuminating my mother, and her chase. Pulling the door shut, I hit the door’s lock, my knee bumping into Kate’s midsection, her breath wheezing out in a painful huff. “Sorry,” I mutter, my butt finally hitting the seat. “Go!” I elbow Mark and he only chuckles, shifting the truck into reverse, his elbow all in my personal space.
“Who’s the crazy woman?” Kate stage-whispers, her body pressed away from the window, the scent of her perfume overwhelmingly sweet. My mom bangs on the glass and jogs with us as we roll backward, out of the driveway. She stops at the base of it, her eyes on mine, the connection broken by Kate’s curls, her face turning to me, a smudge of lipstick against her front teeth.
“It’s my mom.” I say quietly, sitting back, my hands searching for the belt buckle. “You guys have good timing.” I turn in the seat and look through the back window, her body shrinking as we pull away, and I suppose I should be grateful she doesn’t chase us by car.
“Oh.” Kate slumps against the vinyl. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean crazy in a bad way.”
“It’s fine.” Crazy just defines a person you don’t understand. “You can turn right up ahead, it makes a big loop and circles back.”
“Circles back?” Mark glances at his watch. “The movie starts in thirty minutes.”
“I’m not going to the movie.” If this was a novel, I’d draw a big fact line through that statement, with the words REPETITIVE in angry text above their vowels. Next to Mark’s character description, I’d add ‘stupid-head’, for no other reason than to make Bethany, wherever she may be, giggle.
“That’s why we were coming,” Kate pipes in, and if there was any perfume left in that bottle once she got done with it, I’d be shocked. “To pick you up!”
“And you’re already here in the truck.” Mark says the words gravely, as if my physical presence means absolutely anything at all. “I don’t really have time to go all the way back to your house.” He looks at me and winces, an overly dramatic gesture that conveys zero remorse.
“Oh please.” I fold my arms across my chest. “This is ridiculous. We’re barely out of the neighborhood and I’m in pajamas, for God’s sake.” Bethany, sitting at her desk. Pajama onesie, a dinosaur print along the length of her leg.
“And socks,” Kate supplies unhelpfully.
“And socks,” Mark repeats, in a tone designed to irritate.
“And socks.” I intone. “Pajamas and socks. So I can’t go anywhere but back to my house. No movie.”
“It’s got Matthew McConaughey in it.” Kate digs around at her feet and produces a purse, one big enough to hold a bowling ball, should that activity also be on the agenda.
“Good for him.”
“And action,” Mark points out. “Very manly action.”
“Anddddd….” Kate finds what she is looking for and pulls a handful of chocolate out of her purse. “I’ve got candy!”
“Illegal candy.” I frown. “That’s against the rules.”
“What rules?” She stops, halfway through opening a bag of M&Ms, the foreshadow to a mess of dropped tiny melted chocolates inside her purse.
“The theater rules.” I may not have been to a movie in five years, but I’m fairly certain that their business model hasn’t changed. Ticket prices cover the movies. Profit comes from concessions. I tilt my head and see the edge of a Ziploc freezer bag. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.” Her hand closes on the top of the bag, clenching it shut. “Are you this way—your way, I mean—about all rules? I thought it was just your own.”
“So you think I create rules but ignore everyone else’s?” There is a word for that. An obvious word, one that I should be able to produce without an iota of effort. My mind clenches uselessly. Oh god. Is this the beginning of dying? How much worse will it get? If I can’t think of this word, this simple, obvious word… Mark turns right, and Kate is saying something about ticket prices being a crime in themselves. Mark swerves around a slow car and her bag bumps against my leg. It’s cold, enough so that I feel it through the thin flannel of my pants. I reach over and pull at the neck of her bag. “You have ice in there?” I can see in now, see the gallon-sized freezer bag full of ice cubes, two diet sodas peeking at me, one inside of a slightly squashed theater cup. “And a used cup?”
She flushes, pulling the bag away and pushing it into the floorboard, her jaw working at the M&Ms before she swallows. “It’s a plastic cup, Helena. They can be reused.” She says it the same way Simon used to speak. As if I’m the crazy one and her actions are perfectly normal.
“I’m not wearing shoes.” It the only response I think of, and it doesn’t really help my cause.
“We’ll get you shoes,” Kate beams, and I can tell right now they are going to try and make this experience FUN. I don’t want fun. I want to be back in my living room, in front of my fire. I could be rereading Mark’s pages. I could be outlining the next chapter, not that Mark will be writing tonight. He seems to have completely tossed aside our work, his focus switching to crap like this.
“The mall is open,” Mark points to the giant complex, one which has grown since my last visit, the movie theater squished somewhere in its depths. “I can run in and grab a pair of shoes.”
“I’ll run in.” Kate sounds offended, and I feel like a child, stuck between two parents. The fact that I don’t want to go to the movie seems to be lost on both of them.
“Mark can go.” I’ll have better luck with Kate in the car, alone. I can order her to cancel this stupid field trip and have her drive me back home before Mark figures out the difference between ballet flats and Toms. I point to the west entrance. “Park there.” He pulls into a spot and I try and remember the layout of the mall, in search of a store as far from us as possible. “I wear size nine. I want—”
“I’ll find a pair.” He turns the engine off and opens the door.
“You aren’t going to leave the truck on?” I overdo my tone of concern, and he cocks a suspicious head at me. “It’s cold out,” I add, sinking back against the seat, in an attempt to look as pitiful as possible. He can’t leave us in the cold. He won’t. It’ll go against every protective bone in that big body.
“I know what you’re thinking, Helena.”
I open my eyes wide, the innocent face one I haven’t used in years, not since I was last questioned by police. He shakes his head at me, shrugging out of his jacket, and passing it to me. “Keep the doors closed and you’ll be fine for the next ten minutes.” He swings the door shut on my reply. I growl against the leather of his coat.
“You guys have kidnapped me, you realize that?” I turn my anger on Kate, who is halfway through unwrapping a Starburst.
She pushes the yellow square into her mouth. “You did…” she ventures, speaking around the candy, “get into the car with us and scream at us to drive away. I don’t think you can call that kidnapping. Besides,” she brightens. “It’ll be fun! When’s the last time you went to a movie?”