Chapter 12: My Mother's Gift

I read the two messages again.

My hands had gone cold.

"What?" Wells said. "What did she say?"

I turned the phone over on the counter.

"Nothing. Threats."

"About what?"

"My mother."

He waited. I didn't say anything else.

After a while he said, "I'll drive you to Maggie's. You're not sleeping on that cot tonight."

I slept on Maggie's couch, under a blanket that smelled like fabric softener and crayons.

At six in the morning, her middle kid climbed on my stomach and asked if I was the lady from the video.

"Yes," I said.

"Mom says you're a hero."

"Your mom feeds me. She's biased."

He thought about that.

"What's biased?"

"It means she likes crab cakes."

He nodded and went to eat cereal.

I lay there and thought about the summer I turned sixteen.

My father hugged me on my birthday morning, and the kitchen went dark.

I saw him an hour before, at a bar on Oregon Avenue, with his hand on a woman's knee.

I screamed at the breakfast table.

My mother took me into her shop, locked the door and sat me down between the bolts of tulle.

She didn't ask what I saw. She only said, "You got it too."

She made me swear I'd never tell a soul.

My father left that fall.

She never told me what she'd seen. I never told her what I had.

Neither of us ever said the word.

So how did Larissa know?

And then I remembered.

The last week at Jefferson. The morphine.

My mother talked in her sleep. She talked to people who weren't there.

One night I went down to the cafeteria for coffee and left Larissa in the chair by the bed.

When I came back, Larissa was white as a sheet.

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