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He has cried. I have cried. We are now sitting on the sofa, him holding my hand and turned toward me. We’ve been through the facts. Yes, this baby is his. No, we are not playing house. “I’ll be better,” he says, “I’ll give up the music, and I can get back on at PET. We can make this work.”
I’ll do better. The siren song. I’ll do better, I won’t drink. I’ll do better, there will be food in the house. I’ll do better, I won’t do drugs. I’ll do better, I won’t let my boyfriend fuck you. I’ll do better. I’ll do better. I’ll do better.
“No,” I say. You won’t do better, there will be other women, there will be other friends, there will be music that takes you always away from me.
“Alison,” he says, “our baby.” He melts, dropping his ear down on my stomach.
“You left me.” And all the rage I felt the morning he walked out comes rushing back. These are the facts. “I can’t trust you.”
“Come away with me. We can make this work,” he says, his eyes soft, his lashes thick and wet from his tears.
“No. I ran away with you once, and that didn’t work out very well, do ya think?” I push him away and motion toward my belly, my surroundings.
“I’ll do better.”
“Stop,” I say, rising from the sofa and standing. “Are you ever gonna tell me what you came here to tell me?” Standing by the fireplace, my fingers rest on the fire tools, waiting for him to answer. “Why did you leave?”
“I just got scared.”
“Not enough.”
“I got a call that they were looking for me,” he says, “My brother—”
“And you didn’t think that was something I should know?” My heat rises; the anger is back.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” he says, squeaking at the end.
“Hm.” I blow out air. “Well, I worried.” He looks chagrined, a child being told to go to time out. “Why don’t you just start from the beginning?” I say this with my fist on my hip, looking down at him. He pushes his hand through his hair, and it spikes. My heart pulls, and I look away. “Tell me what you know about my mom,” I say, because that is where this all begins, that is where this all ends.
“Shit,” he says, trying to stall, but seriously it’s all I need to know from him right now. “What’s the beginning?” His hand drops over his neck, dragging his head down between his legs. “Do you remember Christmas?”
“Yes,” I say. Which part? What piece are you asking about? The piece I do remember with lights on the tree and a sorry rendition of “Silent Night”? Or the piece that comes only in my nightmares?
“Well, shit,” he says, “Do we have to do this?” I nod. “That’s where it started. When she stopped using and started trying to get clean, she came to me about a gun, said she was afraid because Cal tried to kill his last woman and she wanted it for the house.” Well, that explains the gun. “So I got her a gun. I wanted you to be safe, you know?”
“Sure.”
“Then Cal went missing.”
“That Monday,” I say, filling in the dates I’ve worked through my mind a million times. “You told me he was missing that Thursday.”
“Yes. I went to see your mom . . . you know, because of the gun and then him being gone.” This is it, this is the part he doesn’t want to tell. I come around from the window and sit down beside him, laying my hand on his thigh.
“And you argued?”
“Yes.” He blows through his hands like they are freezing and he has just held them over a fire.
“Did you kill her?” I ask, letting my voice go cold, without emotion, like I’m asking if he had eggs for breakfast.
“No! I didn’t kill anybody.” His eyes are wide and unblinking, and I feel a little shame for asking, for almost hoping he had. Warren may be many things, but he isn’t someone who could kill. “I confronted her. I asked her, ‘What have you done?’ I told her I knew she had done it.”
He transports me back in time, and I see the apartment, I see her in the baggy t-shirt she was wearing, as he tells me the story of that last day. I see again how thin she had become, how corpselike.
“She said, ‘I did what I should have done to Ed.’” In my mind’s eye, I see her smiling and turning to face him, Warren, with his accusations. He goes on, and I hear only her voice in his words. “. . . ‘I’ve killed him and now I’m going to kill me, and she will be free.’”
He pauses and I wait.
“I told her she was crazy,” he continues. “I grabbed her and shook her, and she laughed at me.”
She had laughed. I know that laugh, that cackling, cruel laugh.
“‘Go ahead,’ she said. ‘Do it for me. Save me the trouble.’ She shoved a water bottle at me, and I thought she had totally lost her shit, but she said, ‘I have it all planned. It will be so easy. It will be clean.’” His voice drops, and his eyes have a faraway look.
“What did you do with the water bottle?”
“I pushed it back at her. I just thought she was nuts,” he says, “but I left my fingerprints, which is why the police finally came looking for me.”
“But what did she want you to do with the water bottle?” I ask, wanting to see if he knows, if he understands what the water bottle means.
He looks at me, with such confusion, his eyes wide, making him look younger and older both at the same time “I don’t know. What the hell could you do with an empty water bottle?” After a few moments, where we sit in silence, both of us trying to understand what she must have been thinking, what she was trying to achieve that last day, before he goes on. He argued with her, telling her she needed to go to the police and help them find Cal. But she just laughed at him. I can hear her laughing, again, that low, scornful laugh of hers. “She told me you had people somewhere around Greenville. She told me a town but I can’t remember it. When they found Cal, I knew I had to get out of town.”
“Why did you have to get out of town?” I ask, letting a small spark ignite against the lie he told me, about me knowing he was going to cut the demo then, but I don’t blame him, not really. It’s too late to blame anybody for anything.
“It was my gun,” he whispers and does a quick look around toward the door, like even now he expects to be taken by the police. When he is satisfied that the door it still closed, he doesn’t look back at me; instead he looks down at his hands, hanging limp and useless between his knees. “I figured they’d get me for both of them.”
“What did they do when they got you?” I ask, remembering that horrible phone call.
“Well, they thought I had helped her, you know, but there was no evidence except the gun, and . . . well, that had only her fingerprints on it. I told them everything, and they let me go.”
“Why did you say she did it?” I ask, looking out the window at the glow of the setting sun.
He doesn’t say anything, and when I finally look at him, he is staring at me with the saddest look in his eyes. I drop my face and feel myself turning red, grateful that my hair has fallen forward to hide me. I should not feel shame—I didn’t do anything—but I do, and the knowledge that people know what Cal did to me makes me burn. I wish I could feel like Cici, that I don't have to own what has been done to me, only what I do willingly. But I own it all, everything. It’s my baggage, and I carry it.
I nod my head. Slow. Not making him say the words.
“So you have people?” Warren asks, changing the subject.
“Yeah. I do.” I smile and look back up, letting my face show. “She left me a letter that told me who they were.”
“Did you look them up?”
I tell him a little about them, that they seemed like nice people. I tell him that she ran away when she was fourteen, and they had always thought she had been kidnapped.
“She said they’d take care of you,” he says, sounding hopeful, like it is important to him that if he can’t take care of me, then somebody else can.
“Yeah well, really, it’s probably time I start taking care of myself, don’t ya think?” I let out a long breath, feeling better for having said it. We sit in silence for a long minute before I take him back to that last day, “What happened then? After you told her she needed to go to the cops?”
“She told me to leave, unless I wanted to stay for the finale.” He says finale with a flourish, and I see her spinning through the living room then flying off the Ripson Bridge in her bat costume.
“But what was the water bottle for?” I ask again, because I really have to know if he understands it.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t know what she wanted to do with it.” His voice rises in pitch, in frustration that I keep at him, like a broken record, nagging him about something he cannot fix, something he cannot change. Then his irritation seems to slide down the length of his face and drops off the stubble on his chin, and he looks at me for a long minute, his eyes wide and haunted. “She said something about it being clean; she read it in a book.” He just shrugs his shoulders, looking even more confused, and I know that he didn’t kill her.
Did she read it in one of the books from that bookstore Molly White worked in—how to kill herself with an empty water bottle? Maybe romances weren’t the only books she was reading; maybe she was looking for her way out. Is that what Detective Adam’s Apple had meant when he said it was a “near thing,” the air? Would that be a painless, clean way to die? I know from my CNA course that any introduction of air to the bloodstream, be it arterial or venous, can cause heart failure, interrupting the ability to pump blood through the body—or air could have traveled to her brain and caused death that way. I keep clinging to my non-comprehension, because to understand is to know that she gave up, that she didn’t think there was anything worth living for, that I failed her. I wanted, no, I needed Warren to have killed her, or at least helped, but I have to accept the facts—nobody murdered her; she wasn’t taken from me. She left me because I gave her no reason to hope.
“I told her I was going to go to the cops if she wouldn’t,” Warren says, dragging me out of my thoughts as I’m beginning to accept the meaning of that water bottle, both literally and figuratively. It was just like the rubber bat suit, something strange but useful.
“But you didn’t go to the cops,” I say, and he shakes his head. “Why not?”
“I didn’t think she’d really do anything. She was just drunk talkin’. You know. I thought she’d pass out and wake up tomorrow and start her AA again.”
“But she killed Cal.” I say. My mother, she was a person who could kill.
“Well,” he shrugs, looking toward the door, “I wasn’t going to help them figure that out unless I had to.”
“Like, if they came looking for you?”
He shrugs, and I see shame sliding across his shoulders.
“So you came to find me instead of going to the cops?” I ask. I don’t blame him for not wanting to get involved with the police. There is a little bit of coward in him, in all of us. “You told me Cal was missing.” He was trying to give me a clue about the things he knew, without telling me anything that would help. “Why didn’t you tell me to check on her?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know how to tell you to check on her without admitting I was there, and if I told you I was there, I would have had to tell you why I was there.” There is some logic to that, but again I see the weakness in him, his cowardice. “I just figured she’d sleep it off and forget everything.”
“I could have saved her,” I say. I couldn’t have, not really. I spent my whole childhood trying to fix what was broken in her, trying to be enough for her so she would be well, and if I hadn’t been able to do it when I was her Little Fish and she still loved me, I certainly wasn’t going to do it when we had moved so far away from each other. She was going to end up dead, or in jail. That’s the path of all addiction, isn’t it? You either get clean, you get busted, or you die.
“I’m gonna fix this.” I hear her voice echoing in the walls of my brain. I remember her coming into my room and looking at all of my things and looking so forlorn and determined. “I’m gonna fix this,” and then she had left the apartment. I had thought she was going out to end her stint of sobriety, but she had gone to find Cal and she had put a bullet in his head because it’s what she should have done to Ed. My mind spins. She knew. She knew. She killed him because of what he did to me at Christmas. She killed him to protect me. I think of the girl flying off the bridge in her bat suit, and I almost laugh. My mother, always trying to do it bigger, always trying to prove something, always putting on a show.
What was she trying to prove by killing Cal? I don’t know. She could have just cut ties, stayed clear, turned him in for dealing. It’s easy for me to say that, but I know she couldn’t have stayed clear, couldn’t have stayed clean, he would have kept after her, especially if he knew she knew what he had done.
“She really loved you, Alison. She was so proud of you.” Warren’s voice is so low that it is almost a whisper, and my floodgates open and I cry—because she loved me. My mom loved me and was proud of me despite all the crazy shit of our life together. He folds me in his arms and lets me cry until I am quiet and still. I let him hold me, not angry, not anything but sad. Sad that she had to die to prove herself to me.