Chapter 33

Tara

 

 

My mother, Eloise Reynolds, Miss Faith-That-Can-Move-Mountains, was the last person I wanted to turn to, but she was the only person I could bring this problem to. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust her, or that she wasn’t a good mother. In fact, she was an incredible provider, healer, cheerleader, cook, and nurturer, raising me and Jonah as a single working mom after my dad died. It was the tragedy of losing him to an invisible enemy, the cancer that devoured his flesh but mercifully not his soul, that pressed us closer. In a macabre way, it even joined me and Chris in shared pain after he lost both his parents in the car accident. Death had a way of either exposing your weaknesses, or emboldening your strengths. Through it, my mom became strength incarnate…but she could also be judgment incarnate.

After my dad’s death, Mom turned to God with such ferocity that sometimes she relied too much on faith and not enough on action. Her prayer to witness a miracle hadn’t been answered when Dad got sick, but Dad’s prayer to be free from pain was. Her hope in spending eternity with him kept her company all these long years, and I related to that on some level for the first time. My hope in Chris being exonerated was all I clung to. But it all boiled down to the fact that my mom’s faith didn’t move the mountain of cancer, and as I considered Nora’s future, that nagged at me.

The difference between me and Mom was that while she lived by hopeful words, I lived by solid deeds. It would infuriate me as a teenager when I’d come to her with my problems—so trivial, looking back—and her replies felt flimsy and cheap:

Give it to God.

Let go and let God.

Get out of God’s way.

Let God take the wheel.

These were mantras she lived by, mantras I had been raised by, but I didn’t want to hinge Nora’s future on giving it up, letting it go, or getting out of the way. Right now I needed practical advice, and I hoped my mom could offer that.

When she opened the door and saw me, she gasped. Her painted-on eyebrows, perpetually arched, lifted ever so slightly as her bubblegum pink lips curled downward. Mom applied makeup like she was starring in a burlesque show—always bright and always thick.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” she said, ushering me inside, and I instantly wondered what she saw. Did I have “My daughter is a killer” stamped across my forehead? I didn’t know how else she knew something was dreadfully wrong just by looking at me. Was I that obvious?

“Do you have a minute?” I asked.

The earth had spun around to end another day, and I felt dizzy from the spinning. I wanted sleep, needed sleep, but couldn’t have sleep.

“Of course, honey.”

Mom dragged me to the living room, hugging me, kissing me, pressing her hands to my forehead as she sat me down on the sofa, pulling my legs up and forcing me to lie down. Along the wall behind me was a huge mirror, and I now realized what had given me away. My face was pasty white with hectic spots of color climbing my neck. I was so stressed I was physically rejecting reality like it was an allergic reaction.

“I’ll make some tea to calm you.”

Simply lying here, in the house I’d grown up in, with pictures of Dad and vacations and happy memories, enveloped me in serenity. Being taken care of instead of being caregiver washed my angst away. Mom was a fixer. If anyone could fix this, she could.

I closed my eyes and inhaled the rosy scent that matched the rosy décor. Pepto-Bismol pink walls. Sprigs of roses poking up from rose-themed vases. Rose pillows hugging the corners of her rose-pink sofa. And for good measure, delicate potted roses sat on the windowsill, their blooms happily fragrancing the air with…yes, more rose.

When Mom carried in two teacups sloshing full of rose tea, I couldn’t choose between laughing or crying, so I did both.

“Honey, what’s going on? Other than the obvious,” she asked as she set a teacup in front of each of us, then sat down and propped my legs on her lap. Over the years her maternal instinct had only grown stronger, even as I became an adult with a child of my own. “Is this about Chris?”

I was still laugh-crying too hard to answer.

“You know you can tell me anything,” she added, picking up her tea and taking a proper sip.

I composed myself, took a deep breath, and said, “It’s about Nora, Mom.”

“Nora? Is she okay?”

“No, Mom. Nothing’s okay. I think that Nora…is the one who killed Benson Mallowan.”

“What? That’s ridiculous. She did no such thing.”

“Mom, I wish it wasn’t true, and I’m hoping I’m wrong, but…there’s so many things that point to her.”

“Like what?” She set down her teacup, leaning forward to scrutinize every word.

“Like a sweatshirt that Nora wore was covered in blood. And our kitchen knife that she took over there was the murder weapon. And she had left this little motivational card at their house.”

“That’s all circumstantial.”

“A bloody sweatshirt is circumstantial? What about her sudden depression? She’s not eating, she’s constantly sleeping, she’s not herself…she’s barely even talking to me.”

“But her father’s in jail. How do you expect her to act? Did you even ask her if she did it? You and Nora have a very close relationship, you talk about everything. I think she’ll open up about this too, whatever it is you think she did.”

After my conversation with Jonah this morning, I spent the afternoon wordsmithing ways to broach the subject to Nora while I curried the horses, whose noncommittal neighs were absolutely no help at all. By dinnertime the three of us ate in silence, my brain fizzing with mixed terror and sadness that I had reached a bridge to my daughter that I couldn’t cross. I had stumbled upon the one thing I couldn’t talk to her about, and so I stumbled to my own mother’s door.

“How am I supposed to ask her something like that? To be honest, I don’t want to know. Not with certainty. Because that would mean…”

“You’d have to do something with that knowledge.”

I nodded.

“You’d either have to turn her in or hide it, but either way you’d have to live with it.”

“I don’t want to live with the truth if it’s bad.”

“Can you live with always wondering?”

I knew what Mom was getting at, and I resented her good advice. I thought about how Ginger had spent her whole life wondering about the son she had given up, and how it had nearly destroyed her. Talking to my mother was a lot like talking to Ginger. I often forgot how they were closer in age than I was to Ginger. Maybe that was why I had chosen Ginger as a best friend—or had she chosen me? Either way, that was all gone now.

“What would you do in this situation? As a mother, if this was your daughter, would you want to know? And if it was bad, would you ask your child to turn herself in? And please don’t tell me to give it to God.”

My mom sat there, sipping her rose tea, watching me with eyes that always sparkled with faith…until now. I didn’t see faith in her eyes tonight. I saw fear swallowing everything else.

“You don’t know if it was an accident,” she said.

“And I don’t know if it wasn’t. She could spend the rest of her life behind bars. Is that what fate has planned for her? Is that what letting go and letting God is going to get her—a life in prison?”

“I can’t answer that. You know my stance on doing the right thing and letting whatever’s going to happen, happen. That’s the only way to learn what trusting yourself really is about.”

“You expect me to trust her future to me—the one who caused this whole mess by taking that knife from a murder scene?”

“You made a single wrong choice, Tara, in a very intense moment. That doesn’t change who you are—someone who would do anything for family. Trust your instincts.”

I did not want to make this decision. My instincts had taken a holiday, as every choice I made seemed to have dire consequences. I couldn’t risk doing that to Nora. “So you think I should tell Nora to turn herself in if she killed Benson?”

Mom thought for a long while, so long that I almost wondered if she had ended the conversation without letting me know. When she spoke, it was with a quiet austerity I’d never heard from her before.

“I know I talk a lot about faith, and I do think you’ll need faith to get through this situation. But sometimes life requires we do difficult things. Things to protect our family. Things that maybe aren’t conventionally recommended but that seem right at the time.”

I hated the cryptic speak. I knew there was a message buried in there somewhere, but I couldn’t grasp it. “What are you talking about? I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

She sighed, then continued, “I’m saying that I’ve always firmly believed it is our job as parents to protect our family at all costs. And if you can’t do that, I will.”

“What does that mean, Mom?”

“I’ll show you exactly what that means.”

She set her rose-adorned teacup down, grabbed her cell phone, and excused herself to the kitchen. When she returned, she snatched up her purse, fished out her keys, and said, “Come on. We’re meeting somebody.” When I didn’t budge, she yelled, “Move it!”

I followed her out the front door, wondering what the heck was happening.