AS desperate as I was to get to Lilly, to tell her what I’d found out in Mexico and to confront her parents, I couldn’t leave my children that day. They spent the rest of the afternoon and evening pressed up against me, as if they couldn’t bear not to be touching me. They immediately put on their Mexican finery and looked like a couple of grandees from the days when Alta California was just another Mexican territory. It took us hours to get them to bed, and we succeeded only by promising that neither of them would have to go to school the next day. It was an easy promise. The next day was Sunday.
Despite the hour, I called Al and filled him in on my trip. “She didn’t do it,” I said to him, gripping the phone under my chin as I pulled clothes out of my bag, checked for obvious stains, and hung them in the closet.
“But she remembers doing it,” he said.
“Have you not been listening to me? False memories! The memories were all implanted!”
“Okay. Okay, I’ll buy that. So who did? The reverend? The father?”
“Or the stepmother.”
“Maybe,” he said, his voice betraying his doubt.
“Why not her?” I said, sniffing the armpits of a shirt I couldn’t remember if I’d worn. I winced and threw it in the hamper.
“Shooting. It’s a man’s crime.”
I didn’t even argue with him. The man’s sexism was irritatingly ingrained, but neither did I feel like defending a woman’s right to shoot. “Do you want to come with me to talk to Lilly?” I asked.
“Better not,” he said. “But don’t you go confronting Polaris without me. Or the parents. I don’t want you taking any risks, in your condition.”
I sighed, but didn’t bother arguing with him. I hung up the phone and shoved my now empty suitcase into the closet.
“How’s Al doing?” my mother asked. She was stretched out on my bed, propped up on one bony elbow, watching me unpack. My mother is one of those tiny, rail-thin women who get more and more minuscule as they age. By the time she hits her nineties, she’ll probably be visible only with an electron microscope. This trait causes me no small amount of resentment. I’ve been putting on and taking off the same ten or fifteen pounds my entire life, and my mother has to carry Hershey bars in her purse to help keep her weight up. I’ve always believed that she burned calories through sheer busyness. The word “multitasking” was invented to describe my mother. When I was a kid, she used to cook dinner, vacuum the house, take dictation on the phone from her boss, and give me the third degree about where I’d been the night before, all at the same time. This might, in fact, have been the first time I’d ever seen her immobile in my entire life. The kids had definitely been harder on her than she’d been willing to admit.
“He’s okay. He’d be happier if we had more paying work,” I said.
“Do you want me to change my flight and go home early?”
“What? Of course not. Stay. I love having you here.” I wasn’t lying. For all that my mother and I can barely make it through a single conversation without it devolving into a bickering match, I always miss her terribly. I’d never imagined that I’d spend my life three thousand miles from my parents. And I know she hates being so far from her grandchildren.
“I organized your desk while you were gone.”
“You what?”
“It was a mess.”
“Mom! Those are my private files! You can’t just go digging around in my stuff.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I took care of your computer, too.”
“What?” I shrieked.
“Your desktop was a disaster. I cleaned it up. And then I archived all your E-mails into subfolders.”
I stared at her dumbly. “You read my E-mails?”
“Only enough to figure out what subfolder to put them in.”
“I can’t believe you. Did you go poking around Peter’s office, too?”
“Of course not. Although, I did look over that contract he left out on the dining room table. You might want to take a glance at it yourself. I think he’s getting a raw deal on the merchandising agreement.”
My mouth dropped open.
“What?” she said. “I’ve been a legal secretary for forty years. You think I don’t know my way around a contract?”
“You are so damn nosy, Mom.”
She peered at me over the top of her glasses. “Where do you think you get it, darling?”