Chapter Five

“Mama? Is that you?” I walk toward the woman sitting on my couch, her long, black hair silky against the tweed fabric of the sofa. The woman hums a soft melody and cradles something in her arms. “Mama?”

The faint scent of honeysuckle wafts across the room as she rocks and coos. Soft moonlight filters through the windows casting the couch in light-and-dark slatted shadows. I draw nearer. My blood freezes and a giant fist grips my gut when I recognize the song. “Crazy,” Patsy Cline’s testament to unhealthy love, fills my ears.

My instinct is to run. Run like hell and never look back, but I can’t. I have to know.

With a shaking hand, I reach out and touch the woman’s shoulder. The singing stops, and she turns toward me.

“Mama?”

She smiles and nods toward her lap.

I shiver as icy dread overcomes me. A quick prayer and I lean over to see what she holds in her arms.

Relief washes over me when I see a tiny baby wrapped in purple velvet. Still smiling, Mama offers the baby to me. I reach out and take the bundle from her arms. Such a sweet little thing.

Mama laughs.

One glance at her smiling face, and I knew something was wrong. I turn back to the baby and I scream.

Scream. Drop the bundle. Run. Scream. Can’t get away. Twisting, hissing snakes slither everywhere. Over my feet, up my legs, across my body.

I scream.

I bolted upright in bed. Sweat poured down my back and my hair stuck to my head. Cold sweats. God, I hated cold sweats. Cash and Nelson stood at the front of the bed ready to protect me from my demons.

“Thanks, guys.” I reached over and scratched their ears.

Sweat soaked my bed, and I didn’t feel like changing the sheets. Instead I changed out of my damp jammies, grabbed a blanket and pillow and went into the living room. One glimpse at the couch made me reconsider. I couldn’t help but think of Joe sprawled on it with the cats and his angry awakening. Exhaustion won out. I crawled onto its soft cushions, but sleep eluded me.

Oh, sweet thoughts of Mama.

Mama getting out of prison.

It says a lot about my charming husband, Ray, that he let her take the rap for him. She got arrested less than a week after I disappeared. To be honest, Ray’s spinelessness shocked the hell out of me. Sure, he had beaten the crap out of me for three years. He toyed with my emotions like an alley cat and a Dumpster rat. He tried to isolate me like Enver Hoxha did Albania, and yet it still surprised me that he let my mother go to prison for him. Not because I thought he had a speck of decency in him, but because his sick sense of pride would want the credit. After all, it was in all the papers.

It’s not like Mama was innocent of the crimes, but Ray sure helped with it all—drug trafficking and manslaughter. I could hear the conversation between the two in my mind. “I can’t go to prison, I’m a cop. It’ll be much easier for you.”

“Oh, Ray, you’re so right. Baby, I’ll do anything for you.” My stomach roiled when I thought of the two of them together—like two venomous snakes.

If I had to pinpoint the moment in time that I realized the extent of my mother’s ability to perform dastardly deeds, I’d have to say it was when I was in the eighth grade. I needed a dress for the athletic banquet. I wasn’t attending the banquet as an athlete or because some hot jock had invited me, I’d been assigned to operate the audio-visual equipment for the slideshow. Nevertheless, I needed a nice dress and looked forward to shopping with Mama. She had always made the search for a new garment into an exciting quest. Once we completed the arduous task of trying on clothes, we’d get ice cream.

On that excursion, she snapped at me several times, criticizing every dress I modeled. The pain I felt when I stepped out of the dressing room in a shimmering black and red dress and Mama said to me, “You have to lose weight. Your ass is enormous,” never went away.

I stared at her with my mouth agape. Then assuming she was teasing, I chuckled.

“You think I’m kidding?” she asked. “Look in that mirror.” She grabbed my shoulders and roughly twirled me around so I could see every ounce of chunk from three different angles.

We bought that dress because I had no desire to try on anything else. For obvious reasons we didn’t stop for ice cream after shopping. I managed to hold back the tears until we were home. Then, I ran into my bedroom, buried my face in a pillow and sobbed.

That marked the first day of our declining relationship. It took several more incidents before it sank in that Mama’s opinion of me had changed—overnight and with no warning. One Friday night before a basketball game, my friend, Leslie and her boyfriend, James, dropped by my house. That’s when I fully realized Mama’s change in attitude toward me and the cause.

Mama walked into the living room wearing nothing but a slinky robe that conformed to every toned curve of her body, sat on the couch next to James and started flirting with him. Mortified and furious, I escorted my friends from the house.

“How old is your mother, Maggie?” James asked.

“She’s twenty-seven.” I stopped mid stride. Math never was my strongest skill. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk calculating my mother’s age. “Holy crap. She was my age when she had me.”

“Oh man, Mags,” Leslie said. “That explains everything.” The daughter of a therapist, Leslie could define every level of dysfunctional. “She’s jealous because you’re living the childhood she never experienced.”

I think Mama heard Leslie’s diagnosis and decided to make up for lost time. From that night on, cookies-and-milk mama morphed into party-all-the-time mama. She went to every bar in town and brought strange men home. When she lost her job and went on unemployment, I learned the house we lived in had been given to her by my father and that he paid handsomely for child support.

Mother would never tell me his name. All she would say was that he was a rich, married man.

By the time I graduated high school, our rocky relationship caused me to decline a full scholarship to the University of Arkansas. I moved to Boston to attend Harvard. Mama forced my rich, married father to pay the tuition. I know for a fact Mama didn’t care about my education, but she took great pleasure in blackmailing my father.

Nausea overcame me when I’d overheard her talking to him.

“You’ll pay, little man,” she snarled. She gripped the phone receiver so hard her fingertips whitened. “I’m sure wifey would love to learn about your attraction to young girls.” She laughed. “I believe the term I’m looking for is pedophile.” She nodded a few times. “Yeah. That’s right. You’ll pay.”

All the blood in my body chilled when I heard the word pedophile. How long had Mama been victimized?

When she disconnected the call, I stepped toward her, wanting to offer comfort. “Mama?”

When she saw the expression on my face, she laughed. For the first time in years, she wrapped me in a hug. “He was the victim, sweetie. Not me.” She held me at arm’s length. “I pursued him. And look at me, who can resist this?”

Apparently, no one.

Including my husband.