June 2019
After leaving the bar that night, Ella didn’t go home. She strode from one edge of Ann Arbor to the other, trying to burn out the rage, crying until she was exhausted. Nothing had gone the way she had hoped. She had thought her mother would comfort her, that she’d have answers, and instead their meeting had devolved into a confrontation.
So let her mother go back to New York City. Let her find her own life and leave Ella’s alone. Ella was making more money now. If this kept up, she could rent a nicer apartment. And when she fully bloomed, when her roots were so deep and strong that no one could pull them out—then maybe she could see her mother again.
SHE IGNORED HER mother’s calls the next day. Her cell buzzed constantly, so she turned it off. This silence wouldn’t last forever though, because, controlling or not, Helen was her mother, and Ella loved her. Of course she loved her.
She even felt guilty that she had snapped at Helen, that she had told her to go home—and what if she really had gone? Ella waited until the afternoon, but when she called Helen, the call went to voicemail, her mother’s recorded voice soft and full of light.
“Call me,” Ella said. She said she was sorry, that she knew a great place they could go to for dinner.
As soon as she put her cell down, it began to buzz. She looked at the screen and there was Pearl’s name. I know, I know, she thought. She was late on the column, but she could do it in an hour if she had to, even if her heart wasn’t in it. But as soon as she answered and said hello, she could feel something like a current in the air. Something bad.
“Pearl?” she said.
“I trusted you! I gave you a chance—”
“Pearl?” she said again.
“Your column’s been pulled from syndication!” Pearl yelled.
“What?” Ella said. “What are you talking about?”
“The phones are ringing. The emails are nonstop. No one wants to take advice from a felon.”
There it was, the hard slap of that word.
“It’s—it’s not true—” Ella said.
“Don’t tell me it’s not true. Have you seen the papers? Turned on the local news? Your Clancy Facebook page is so filled with ugliness that I had to shut it down. We already lost four advertisers,” Pearl said. “Yes, they were conservative with their money, but it doesn’t matter. What else did you lie about?”
“Tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll do it, I swear—” Ella braced her hands on her table, bile rising in her throat.
“You’re not understanding me,” Pearl said, and then Ella realized what an idiot she had been: Pearl had never been her friend, not like Marianna, not even like the checkout girl at the local grocery store who would always chat with her. Pearl was her boss. Those lunches they had shared, the occasional gossip and teasing—they were really just another veneer that could be easily torn away. Pearl had liked her only as long as the column had been building circulation.
“It’s my fault. For giving you a chance,” Pearl said. “I never even checked your references.”
“You’re firing me?” Ella said in amazement.
“You did this, not me. You should have told me the truth to begin with and maybe we could have handled this. I might have still hired you if I had known, but you kept it hidden.”
“I’m so sorry—” Ella cried, but Pearl had hung up.
ELLA WEPT. WITH what she had saved, and the money left from the check Helen had given her, she had enough to keep the apartment for at least six months. But she couldn’t imagine how hard staying there would be. Who would hire her now?
She thought Ann Arbor had become her home. Her safe place.
It’s all over the local news, Pearl had said. Ella turned on the TV, and there, like a shock, was her profile plastered on the screen, the same photo from seven years ago, where she had looked like a wild thing, her eyes round and terrified, her hair blowing crazily about her face. They ran it now with a legend beneath it:
ADVICE COLUMNIST HAS SCANDAL OF HER OWN. HISTORY OF AN ATTEMPTED MURDERESS.
To her horror, the TV news personalities were treating it like juicy gossip they couldn’t wait to share.
Ella slumped into a chair, her stomach roiling. Her cell kept buzzing, and she picked it up.
“Murderer,” someone said, and hung up. The cell buzzed yet again. How did they get her number? It was unlisted. She declined the call.
She looked at the news again, this time the national news, but it appeared only as a mention before they moved on to sports. Then she saw it, like a shout. Helen’s name, and then hers.
EVEN MOTHER UNSURE OF DAUGHTER’S INNOCENCE
She wrapped her arms tightly about her body. “While talking to a reporter, Helen Fitchburg, formerly Levy, described…,” the newscaster said.
Helen had told everything to a reporter, spilling, spilling, spilling, like a river breaking a dam. Her mother had been drunk last night, smothering her with her worries, dismissing with finality her relationship with Carla. As if Ella were ten again, misbehaving.
Andrew Stein had kept Jude’s name out of the papers when it had all originally happened, but now Jude was an adult, and there it was, in print—his new name revealed, thanks to Helen. The only thing her mother hadn’t spilled was the news about Carla.
Everything that is mine is yours, Helen had always said, but what Ella hadn’t seen is that Helen had meant the opposite, too—that everything of Ella’s had been hers, to do with as she pleased. And that included her secrets.
She went to her closet, rummaging around until her fingers felt wool. There it was, the yellow dress with the message her mother had claimed was in the hem. She ripped it from the hanger and threw it to the floor.
She grabbed her cell and dialed Henry at the store to explain everything to him. He picked up but as soon as she heard his hello, his voice stiff and distant, she knew that he knew already.
“I can explain,” she said, starting to cry. “If I can just come to you, see your face, I can tell you the truth.”
She heard him breathing. “And why would I believe you?” he said quietly.
“Because you can—because I’ll tell you everything.”
“My ex always said that she told me everything. Right from the start. I believed her. Right until she left me for my best friend. I told myself I’d never get in a situation like that again.”
“Henry, please.”
She heard something burrowing in the silence.
“I’m sorry, Ella,” he said. “I truly am.”
The line went dead.