In the course of my career, I have entered the homes of many grieving mothers and witnessed my share of shrines erected in mourning for a lost child. But I’d never seen anything quite like this.
Broken furniture. Broken liquor bottles. Shattered plates and mugs. The small living area was a complete shambles except for an oval coffee table that featured a green marble urn surrounded by a collection of framed photographs of Rashawn from infancy on up.
The older pictures all looked like yearly school portraits. In every one, Rashawn was grinning magnetically. Seriously, you did not want to take your eyes off that boy’s smile.
Around the entire edge of the table and surrounding the pictures like the spokes on a medicine wheel, there were toys, everything from an air-soft pistol to action figures, stuffed animals, and Matchbox cars. The only things on the table that looked like they hadn’t belonged to Rashawn were a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff vodka, two blackened glass pipes, a small butane torch, and a baggie of some white substance.
On the wall hung a sixty-inch flat-screen. It was split horizontally into two feeds. The lower one was playing The Empire Strikes Back, the volume turned down low. The upper one showed home videos of Rashawn as a young boy, four, maybe five. He was wearing a cape and jumping around swinging a toy lightsaber.
“He liked Star Wars a lot,” Bree said sympathetically.
Cece rubbed at her nose, sniffed, and curled the corners of her lips up in the direction of a smile. “He’d watch those movies over and over again. Like they were new every time. Sometimes we’d watch them together. He knew all the lines. I mean, all of them. Who can do that?”
“A very smart boy,” I said.
“He was that,” she said, putting out her cigarette. She scratched her arm and looked longingly at the pipes and the drugs.
“Tell us about Stefan Tate,” I said.
Cece hardened, said, “He’s a sadist and a cold-blooded killer.”
“Did you think he was a sadist before Rashawn died?”
“Who broadcasts they’re a sadist?” she asked.
“Good point,” I said. “But you had no warning?”
“If I’d had a warning, he wouldn’t have spent a second with my boy,” Cece said, going around the couch and almost reaching for one of the pipes. Then she seemed to realize the drugs were sitting there in the open and pushed the baggie under a teddy bear.
She lit another cigarette. We asked her about Rashawn and Stefan, and she corroborated what my cousin had told us: that they’d met at school and took an instant liking to each other, that Stefan had become a big brother/father figure to the boy, and that something had happened in the days before Rashawn’s death that made him want to sever his relationship with my cousin.
“Stefan says he doesn’t know what was behind it,” I said.
Cece took a drag, nodded to the urn, and said bitterly, “He came on to Rashawn, and Rashawn rejected him.”
“Rashawn told you that?” I asked.
“I’m just reading into the way Rashawn acted the last time I saw him.”
“Which was like what?” Bree asked.
“Like he’d seen something to be scared about,” Cece said, looking at the screen where Luke Skywalker was preparing to fight his father. “I’ve asked myself a million times since why I didn’t push Rashawn to tell me that morning. But I was late for an AA meeting. And trying to stay sober. And trying to do the right thing.”
She paused, and then a shudder went through her, and she choked and wept. “My last memory of my little boy is him staring into his cereal bowl like he was seeing things in the milk. Oh God!”
Cece snatched up the pipe, dug out the baggie, and with shaking hands tried to load whatever it was she meant to smoke. Bree came around to her and put her hand on her arm. She said in a soothing tone, “That’s not gonna help.”
Rashawn’s mother yanked her arm away, turned her back on Bree, protecting the pipe, and sneered, “It’s the only thing that does.”
I said, “Are you planning to go to the courthouse tomorrow?”
Cece snatched up the small butane torch and backed away to the other side of the table, glaring at us.
“You not going to start in on that, are you?” she demanded. “I already heard an earful on that today.”
She lit the torch and stared greedily at the pipe bowl as she sucked and laid the flame. She took a whole lungful, held it, then rocked her head back and exhaled long and slow. I thought she was going to black out, but she just blinked stupidly at us a few times and then set the pipe down.
“Someone talked to you about being in court tomorrow?” I asked quietly.
The anger had left her, replaced by scorn.
“Harold and Virginia, dear Moms and Pops,” she said, plopping into a chair with a broken seat. She began doing imitations of a proper Southern belle and a deep-voiced man. “‘Straighten up for the trial, Cece. You wouldn’t want to be seen like this.’ ‘You’ve got to do it in honor of your dear Rashawn, Cynthia Claire.’”
She leaned over, grabbed the vodka bottle, took a belt, and went off on a tirade. “The fucking hypocrites. All caring and such, now that he’s dead. Alive, they were ashamed of his blood!”
Cece hugged her knees and shook her head violently. “They still don’t give a shit. Only things those two are concerned about is their money and their precious image in the community.”
Deepening her voice, she said, “‘Don’t want to have Cece do any more damage than has already been done. We must do everything we can to minimize our association with the little dead mulatto. With God’s blessing, none of our posh friends down on Hilton Head will hear a word of it.’”
She took another swig of vodka and stewed there as if she were alone for almost a minute before hanging her head and saying, “I don’t go to court tomorrow, it’s like I’m ashamed of him, ashamed to be his mother, isn’t it?”
Bree said, “If you don’t go, you’re saying you’ve given up on him, that he doesn’t matter to you anymore.”
“But he does matter.” Cece sobbed. “Rashawn was everything to me. The one good and decent thing I ever did in my whole life. And look what happened to him! My God, look what happened to him!”
Bree went over and put her arms around the woman’s heaving shoulders. “I know it seems impossible, but you’ve got to be strong now.”
“I don’t have that kind of strength.” Cece moaned. “I never have. It’s the story of my life.”
“Until today,” Bree said, rubbing her back. “The new story of your life is that you hit rock bottom today, Cece. You hit rock bottom, and from the depths of your despair, you asked for help. And when you did, Rashawn’s spirit reached out, took your hand, and gave you the strength to go into that courtroom tomorrow morning clear-eyed and sober, because only you can be his representative at the trial. Only his mother can stand there for him and make sure justice prevails.”
Head still down, straw hair still hanging, Cece tensed up as if to fight again. Then she shuddered long and slow. And as it died out, something seemed to fall away inside the dead boy’s mother. Cece sagged against Bree, and slept.
Bree glanced over, whispered, “I’ll stay with her. All night if I have to.”
Raw emotion welled in my throat.
“You okay with it?” she asked.
I smiled, said hoarsely, “More than okay.”
“Then why are you upset?”
“I’m not. What you did there with her was…just…”
“What?”
“I have never been more proud to call you my wife, Bree Stone.”