Cursed be the Wicked (32 page)

She walks over and gives me a tight hug.

“Don’t be a stranger,” she whispers in my ear before saying goodnight. I want to tell her I won’t. I can’t make my mouth say the words, though. Finn and I walk outside together, hands entwined. Our steps are slow as we make our way to the car. My stomach churns. My chest is tight. The pangs I feel right now are different from the others I’ve been experiencing on this trip.

An emptiness is forming. I know it’s only going to grow once I’m gone. I try to delay that happening as long as I can.

I take Finn’s face between my hands and look into her eyes.

“I’m lucky to know you, Finnley Pierce.”

Her lips quiver slightly.

“I told you not to call me that,” she says, trying to smile.

I press my lips to hers and hold them there. I let my hands feel every inch of her. I want to remember the smoothness of her skin, the warmth of her body, how perfectly she fits here, in my arms. I want to be able to recall her lips against mine any time I want.

When the kiss ends, I immediately regret letting it happen, but then Finn whispers to me, reminding me, it
had
to end.

“Goodbye Coop.”

I can’t put it off any longer. I pull open the door. I don’t want to say it, but I do anyway.

“Bye, Finn.”

I have this urge to ask her to come with me but she’ll just say no. She’s got Geneva here. I can’t ask her to leave her grandmother. Not for me. So I slide into the car and start the engine. I drive away and I watch her in my rearview mirror.

She’s just standing there, watching me go. I can tell her head is tilted slightly and I can’t help but remember every last time she’s done that since I met her.

It crosses my mind that there’s more to Finn than meets the eye but then again, it’s not like I didn’t already know that.

While I wait at the airport, I remind myself that this is what I set out to do. I came to Salem to write a story. I even got some answers to questions about my past. I hadn’t expected that, so I should consider myself lucky.

Now it’s time to go home.

I catch my plane and think about how once I
get
home, things will be better. I can get back to what I should consider normal. I can move forward with my life now that I know what I know about my family. When I think about what moving forward means, though, I think about Finn and how she won’t be there, in my future.

It doesn’t feel right to even think it.

I land and find my own car. I drive home from the airport like I have a million times before. But this drive is different. Instead of looking forward to my apartment, to being alone, I find myself wishing Finn was there waiting for me.

Inside, I note how incredibly quiet it is. I unpack and change, I lay down on the couch. I fall asleep trying not to pay any attention to the hole inside my chest.

I find things to busy my mind with for the next few days. I check in with Bill, he sends me his edits. I submerge myself into getting a polished copy completed.

I type and proof for hours with no breaks, and when I remember to eat, more than once I start to call Finn and see if she wants to join me only to remember I’m not in Salem anymore.

When I’m done with the article, I read it over.

It’s good. Hell, it’s probably some of my best work to date and I know it’s exactly what the big dogs over at the magazine’s headquarters want. But as soon as I send my email to Bill, I know I could do even better.

I open up a new document and start writing another story.

This one’s about a woman who falls in love but chooses the wrong man to spend her life with, breaking the hearts of everyone she cares about. I won’t mention that it’s my mother’s story or that one of the hearts that she breaks is mine.

Within a week, I’m finished. It’s just a novella but it’s the first thing I’ve written since I was in middle school that’s more than just some travel magazine article telling people where they should or shouldn’t vacation.

I send it to Bill, unedited, with a note that I think it could enhance the magazine’s subscription pull if we did more personal stories like this one in some of the cities we cover.

Within a half hour, he writes me back.

Sorry buddy,
he says.
It’s just not what we’re looking for
.

He does tell me how happy the V.P.s are with what I did on Salem and congratulates me by saying I have a week before I need to be in Hong Kong for my dream piece.

It’s a blow to the high I was just feeling and I don’t know what to do with myself. That’s when I look at the calendar and realize I’ve been writing non-stop since getting home.

It’s been two weeks since I left Salem but it feels like forever ago.

Forever since I’ve seen Finn.

I pick my cell phone and call her.

“Hey.” She sounds out of breath.

“Hey, I just-”

“Coop, I’m really busy,” she says. I can hear chaos in the background and I think she almost dropped the phone.

“Shit.”

I laugh.

Until she tells me, “The B&B’s got a leaky pipe system and I need to find someone to come and fix it,
today
.”

“Well listen, I wanted to-”

“I gotta go, Coop, it was nice hearing from you though.”

She hangs up and I stare at the white walls of my apartment for a few minutes, feeling lost.

It was nice hearing from you?

Maybe she really is busy, I think. Or maybe she’s blowing me off.

I reread the email from Bill again as I sit there, dazed.

The phone rings. I assume it’s Finn calling me back. Maybe she wasn’t blowing me off, after all.

“Hey.”

“Mr. Shaw?”

No. Not Finn.

“Hello?”

“Cooper Shaw?”

“Yes.”

“This is the mail clerk’s office on Robinson Street, we were just wondering if you were planning on picking up your mail anytime soon?”

I completely forgot about having them hold it.

“Yeah, sorry about that, I’ll get it today.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Right.”

I hang up, thinking about apologies and how Finn was right. Most of them are fake.

I drive over to find I have a ton of damn mail to go through. When I get home, I know it’s going to be a huge job of figuring out what’s junk mail and what are bills that I’m no doubt late on paying, but I drop all of it when I see a package that’s from my mother’s lawyer’s office.

It’s dated the day before I left for Salem.

I rip the box open and find a letter on top of everything inside. I open it and read, anxious for what it has to tell me.

“Dear Mr. Shaw, We’re so sorry to have missed sending this to you sooner. Yada, yada, yada . . .” I scan the words. “Your mother’s belongings from her room . . .”
blah, blah, blah.
“She specifically asked that this be sent to you.”

I look in the box and there’s no mistaking what’s inside.

My stomach falls out from inside me and I swallow hard. There’s a journal.

I avoid picking it up and finish the letter from her lawyer’s office.

“I hope you are well, please let me know if you have any questions.”

Not a big help on the avoiding thing
.

I drop the paper and eye the journal that’s staring back at me.

I wipe my hands on my jeans before reaching in and taking the diary out. I check to see if there’s a date, but there’s none.

My breath is shaky. My heart beats fast. I sit down and open it, expecting the same cryptic drawings and symbols as Finn and I found in her earlier works. This one doesn’t have any of that. There’s no scribbling. No doodling. She just wrote.

I flip to the first page and wonder if this is the first time she’s written since being arrested. There’s no way to tell since most of her other journals were burned, along with Liz. I find myself feeling a tad nervous about what she might have had to say.

The first entry is short.

Things I regret and can never make right:

Pushing Jack away.

Lying to Ben.

Lying to myself.

Hurting Lizzie.

Leaving Cooper.

I make no mistake as I sit in this cell. I know I deserve my fate.

I linger on the line about hurting Liz. I’m short of breath as I flip through the pages, looking to see if she knew before she died. If she’d learned what a monster her sister was.

I find the page I’m looking for.

Lizzie visited today. I saw it in her eyes. Heard it in her voice. It wasn’t Cooper. He didn’t hurt his father. It was her. I don’t know if I want to laugh or cry at this realization. I should have known and I’m ashamed at my behavior. I don’t know if Cooper would even speak to me if I could find him again so I could tell him I know it wasn’t him. To ask his forgiveness for not seeing him. To maybe tell him, even, that it wasn’t me.

Maybe there’s too much hurt to try and fix the past.

There’s a large gap of space between that entry and the next.

It doesn’t matter. My sister may have completed the task, but it was still my fault. I’m still to blame for all of this.

I read it several times and shake my head.

She knew.

I let it sink in. I wipe my eyes. I move on before I decide I can’t.

The next page I find written on is short.

I saw the lawyers today. At least it will be his choice this time.

The next is a list of words I recognize as Latin, now.

Protego.
Protect.

Amare.
Loosely translated, love.

And
Condono.
I Google this word and find out it means
to forgive
.

I decide that as much as I want to know every thought that passed through her the last few months of her life, even more so, I want to know how this ends. So I flip to the back of the journal and work my way to where I see her final entry.

My heart stops for a minute. It’s a letter. To me.

I take a steady breath and begin reading.

Dear Cooper,

I’m writing this last note to you. Maybe I should have been writing to you all along. I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for so many things.

My only wish now is that when I go, the lawyers will find you, still in Florida, and that you’ll be interested in reading this when you receive it.

There are things I wanted for you in this life, cor meum.

I Google again.
My heart.

I choke back tears that want to flood.

When I look back to the day I found out I was pregnant with you, I want to make a different choice, because seeing what I’ve done with the path I chose, thinking it was best for your father, my heart bleeds.

It wasn’t Ben Shaw, Cooper. That man could never be a real father to you. I should have known that. Another failure.

His name was Jack Diggs. I loved him so very much. Please know that. Even though you weren’t expected, you were never a mistake.

I didn’t want to be the reason he never went to college. Never had a life. He had so many dreams, Cooper. Just like you. Jack was meant to conquer the world.

So I pushed him away, I told him I loved a man that would never be able to hold my heart in his hands and keep it safe like Jack did.

At the time, I thought it was the right thing to do, but now I see I just made all of our lives hell by lying to both men.

I can’t take back the things I’ve done, but I hope that by paying for what I’ve done, I’ll be allowed to see you and hold you in another life.

She still blamed herself, somehow. Even in the end.

My chest tightens. The words are blurry. I rub my eyes until I can see again.

Please learn from my mistakes. Don’t pass an opportunity by because you’re afraid.

Love is always the right decision. Courage is always by your side.

Memoria,

Mom.

“Memoria.”

I Google.
Remember.

As I read the word, I recall this side of my mother with complete clarity. The kind, gentle, loving woman who just wanted what was best for the people in her life. Who took care of me and who stood up to an angry man when he came home drunk at night.

I hear the song she used to sing to me at bedtime playing in the back of my mind somewhere and I grin, thinking for a second or two that I can actually smell the incense she used to burn until I went to sleep.

I stand and stretch, laying the journal back down onto the table for now. I let her words sit in my head as I mix them in with what I’ve learned from Jack and Liz.

It doesn’t hurt like I think it will. I don’t find myself wishing for a way back, so I could fix things. I’m simply grateful that I know things now that I never would have known without going to Salem, that I never would have been open to learning, if it wasn’t for Finn.

Nighttime arrives and I find myself spending the evening reading all the way through my mother’s words, thanking her silently for not making this one so damn hard to decipher. I even chuckle a few times when she revisits certain small moments in her past with Jack.

Carnivals, the psychic fair, haunted houses.
The church.

She’s open and honest in this journal. With herself
and
me.