Justine was thankful that West was on good behavior. He ate a few snacks then settled down to watch an in-flight movie. The relative calm gave Justine the chance to relax.
Unfortunately, it also gave her the chance to be alone with her thoughts.
As each minute brought their plane closer and closer to Detroit, Justine felt the stone in the base of her gut churning, growing sour. She had to consciously focus on her breaths to keep from hyperventilating.
“Just because you share her genes doesn’t mean you’re going to become anything like her,” Steve had told her years ago. Justine was pregnant, terrified that she would turn into the same kind of monster as her mom.
And thankfully, for then at least, Steve had been right. Justine’s transition into motherhood was one of the most blissful, delightful surprises that had ever happened to her, as natural and as powerful as falling in love.
As it turned out, she wasn’t defined by her genes.
When West was an infant, she held her breath, wondering if her descent into insanity would take her by storm the second her son started crawling or walking or speaking.
And then West turned one and next two. Still no depression, no hint of psychosis. The anxiety was always there, but not to the point where Justine couldn’t control it.
By West’s third birthday, Justine felt like she could finally let out her breath. She’d made it. Hadn’t attacked her child or her husband. Hadn’t slipped into a murderous, psychotic rage and tried to destroy the ones she loved most. At that point, she gave herself permission to stop worrying so much. Permission to forget about the woman who brought her into the world.
And then a few months ago, Steve told her Alice had contacted him.
“She’s changed,” he told her, his eyes and tone begging her to believe him. She couldn’t understand. Why in the world did he want her to give this woman any chance to get close to her or her family? Even the fact that Alice had contacted Steve should show she was just as manipulative and conniving as she’d always been. Why hadn’t she contacted Justine directly if she really wanted to talk?
In the end, Justine attributed her husband’s actions to his newfound faith. Didn’t Christians believe in grace and forgiveness at all costs?
It wasn’t until she’d had that dream that she even considered making the trip to Detroit like Steve was pushing her.
It was just before Halloween. Justine had volunteered all day for the costume party at West’s preschool. She was tired. A little grumpy. The next day was Sunday, and she knew her husband would try to wake them up early to go to church. Couldn’t she sleep in just one day of the week?
That night, she dreamed that she saw Alice trapped in some kind of haunted carnival ride. Her mother was screaming for help, begging for Justine to find her. To save her.
Inside the mansion was nothing but mirrors. Each time Justine thought she saw Alice’s face, it was her own image staring back at her.
Until she got to the far wall. She saw the door, knew she had to open it, knew she was going to open it, knew that once she did open it, her life would be ruined.
Even as she sat next to her son on the flight to Detroit, she could remember staring at her own hand as it reached out for the doorknob. Slowly turned and pushed it open.
Alice was inside, her clothes covered in blood, her face distorted by both insanity and rage.
The knife in her hand was dripping. Disgusting.
The body at her feet wasn’t Justine’s father.
It was her son.
She’d woken up screaming for West. Even when Steve tried to calm her down, she couldn’t stop hyperventilating until she brought her son into bed with them, held him in her arms. Even once she’d managed to convince her logical brain that West was safe, she still couldn’t control her breathing, couldn’t stop her arms from trembling, her mind from replaying the sense of foreboding she felt as she pushed open that door.
“I think you need to see her,” Steve told her the next morning. She thought he was the crazy one until her therapist repeated the exact same sentiment the following day.
Justine still wasn’t convinced. It wasn’t until a few weeks later when she had another dream, the one that finally changed her mind.
It was the same haunted castle. The same freaky mirrors.
But there was no door this time, no bloody knife, no stabbed son.
Instead, it was Alice, lying on a bed, holding a little doll and crying. “Where’d she go?” she wailed over and over. She reached out her arms, and for a split second, Justine wanted nothing more than to bury her head against this frightened woman’s chest and tell her everything was okay.
“Where’d she go?” Alice repeated, her voice so pitiable Justine woke up with tears on her cheeks.
“I think you need to see her,” Steve repeated the following day.
And Justine knew he was right.
Now, she wasn’t so sure.
In her early twenties, Justine had poured over every single newspaper article she could find dating back to her father’s murder. He’d been a beloved TV reporter, which mean the trial made national news. The story had every ingredient of a good scandal for the time. Her father was white, handsome, somewhat famous, and several decades older than Alice. Alice was black, young, and beautiful, with well-documented mental instabilities and quite a few motives to kill her aging husband. Before their wedding, Alice had fallen into a heap of financial troubles, financial troubles that all went away the moment she signed her marriage license. As far as the public was concerned, Alice had every reason to be profusely grateful to her husband, who gave her every material possession she could desire as well as the best medical care for her mental illness that money and fame could buy.
But she wanted more.
A jury member said that he probably would have acquitted her if it hadn’t been for the fact that Alice had taken out three separate life policies on both her husband and their daughter just a week before the killing. That and the fact that the detectives found letters from a secret lover, a lover urging Justine to end her marriage and live with him forever.
Justine read the reports and realized her mother wasn’t just greedy and insane.
She was also stupid.
Fringe groups still believed Alice when she upheld her innocence, in spite of all the evidence against her — her well-documented mental disorder, her secret lover, the multiple life insurance policies. Alice’s supporters argued that the all-white jury and the racial tensions of the time would have made it nearly impossible for her to get a fair trial. And yet her sentence was upheld after multiple appeals, her requests for parole were repeatedly denied, and Alice was doomed to spend the rest of her life behind bars.
Justine didn’t want to admit it to herself, didn’t want to sound like an ignorant child unable to look at reason. The facts of the trial could hardly be any clearer. Alice had killed her husband. She had even attacked Justine. The scar on Justine’s thigh where the knife blade went into her leg was a daily reminder of her mother’s criminal insanity.
And yet Justine had to wonder. It was a question she’d never dared to mention to Steve, to her therapist, even to herself except for when she was at her most open, her most honest, her most raw.
Part of Justine wanted to visit Alice. Part of Justine wanted to hear her mother’s side of the story.
Part of Justine was dying to believe her mom was as innocent as she claimed.