Before the third, and what would turn out to be the final, session with Thomas Alexander, I went to meet with my mother privately. It would be a lie to say that I wasn’t somewhat disturbed by the conversation I’d had with Dana about my files. I wanted to know what my mother thought of the psychic’s version of events, or maybe I wanted her to refute what Dana had said. I wanted her to tell me that what I had, what I had spent decades building, would be enough, especially once we found Dee.
My mother was surprised to see me. When I walked in her room, her eyes were closed, and when she tried to flutter them open, only the right eye came awake. She pushed her left eyelid open with her right index finger. I sat on her bed. She looked smaller than I ever remembered, and her skin was translucent and stretched tight over her bones.
“I’m so tired, baby,” she said.
I nodded. “Me too,” I admitted.
“Would you read to me?” She motioned toward a copy of My Ántonia.
“Okay, Mama,” I said. “But I want to ask you something first.”
She frowned slightly. She knew what it meant when our conversations began this way. It also occurred to me that she thought I’d come only to visit: to be with her. I cursed myself for not doing that more often, especially since the prognosis.
“Is it true what you said?” I asked her. “You don’t care what happened anymore?”
“Of course I care,” she said. She broke eye contact. “But knowing won’t change anything for me one way or the other.”
I thought on this. That was how we were different. I believed it would change everything for me. I felt sometimes that I would be consumed by the unknowable. This was why I’d worked so hard to build my own case against Frank, because it’s always easier to believe in something, no matter how flawed, than to believe in nothing and to admit you know nothing. Hardly anyone ever admits this. It was only at the end of her life that my mother was able to do so.
“So if Frank—if the person who did this to Dee—gets away with it forever, you think you’ll feel the same way, the exact same way, as if he is arrested, tried, and sent to jail?”
She shook her head. “I just want her next to me. Finding her is enough. It has to be.”
“It’s not enough.” I felt myself becoming frustrated, which often made me feel like a child again, especially in front of my mother.
She softened her tone. “Peg, baby, we’ve had this discussion. Why are you pressing it again?”
“Because I think this time is different.” My mother looked at me, eyes narrowing, her jaw beginning to tense. “I think this time I’m going to get him,” I kept on. I began to tell her a little bit about the files I had and how Dana was helping me. I tried to explain to her why this time felt different. When I’d exhausted myself, she gasped, drawing in air as if she were breathing through a straw and couldn’t get enough. She was aware that if she told me what she really thought, it would break me, so she did what we do when we cannot bear to be honest with our loved ones: She said nothing. She motioned at her book again. This time I opened it.
My mother was drifting off to sleep when Suze arrived. My aunt seemed surprised to see me there, which I took very personally. As if I never visited my mother. When Suze saw her sister sleeping, she gestured for me to step into the hallway so we could chat. Outside Ma’s room, she wrapped me in a tight hug. I leaned in to it for a second.
“I wanted to ask,” she said. A nurse smiled at us as she hurried past. Suze produced a forced half smile, then turned back to me. “What’s your feeling on these sessions—do you think we have a shot?”
I wondered if she’d come to Ma’s for the same reason I had—to gauge Ma’s hope. Suze needed to know how she should prepare. It occurred to me then that we were all pretending at something for one another’s benefit. It’s hard enough to gauge your own capacity for faith, let alone someone else’s.
“I think—” I paused. I wanted to be careful. I wanted to be honest. “I think we’re going to find her this time.” I saw a twinge of disappointment on my aunt’s face, or maybe it was something else. A feeling we had no name for: hope, but sicker and murkier. A kind of troglobite.
She nodded. “Me too.” She looked past me into the dark cave of a room where her sister was dying. “Me too,” she repeated. It frightened me to admit that I had no idea if this was what she really felt.