Forever Now (Forever - Book 1) (24 page)

“Why were you waking her up?” Detective Stevenson asked me.

“She doesn’t like alarm clocks. She wants me to bring her coffee in the morning.”

“A second cup?”

“What? No. I mean, I guess so. It was her second cup. Normally, I wake her up and give her a cup.”

“But there was another cup already there?” the detective asked.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. It should still be upstairs next to…you know.”

“Tell me about the pills,” she said.

The pills on my mother’s nightstand. “I don’t know what they are.”

“Was your mother upset? Depressed, maybe?” the social worked asked.

Upset? My mother was always upset, but as far as I knew, it was always directed at me. I had no idea how she was to other people. “No,” I said. “She wasn’t depressed.”

I bit my lower lip. There was something about the pill bottles that morning that troubled me.

“She was taking heavy duty drugs,” the social worker said. “Did you know that?”

“Heavy duty?”

“It looks like she took sixty pills this morning and washed them down with the coffee,” the police officer said. “Do you know something about that?”

“I’m going to be sick,” I said and ran to the bathroom. I locked myself in and turned on the tap. Watching the water run down the sink, I tried to think clearly. My mother was dead, killed by her own hands, swallowing fistfuls of pills with her morning coffee. She had gotten up early, walked downstairs, made a cup of coffee and returned to her room, slipped into bed and took the pills with a half cup of coffee.

I was crap at math, but I knew this story didn’t add up.

Open, empty bottles. That’s what bothered me, what I hadn’t noticed before. She had never left them open before.

She also never made her own coffee. If for some reason I didn’t make it, she would go to Starbucks. But she would go later. Much later. She wasn’t an early riser, no matter how depressed she might have been, according to the social worker.

But there was an early riser in the house this morning. And he knew about the coffee, and he wanted to find a way to get my mother out of my way. In fact, he was determined to help me to get to Paris no matter what.

No matter what.

I rinsed my face off and patted it dry. The mirror reflected back the image of a grown woman, no longer just a girl. I had aged and matured overnight. Tragedy had aged me. With my first day as a grownup, I knew I had to push down my emotions and be smart. If the man I loved killed my mother, I had no idea how to handle it, but I wasn’t going to handle it now.

“Don’t say a word,” I said to the mirror. “Don’t say his name. Just put one foot in front of the other.”

The social worker greeted me when I stepped out of the bathroom. Paramedics passed us on their way out of the house, wheeling a stretcher with a body bag on it.

My mother.

I stumbled backward, and the social worker put her arm around me. “Steady goes it,” she said. “Would you like some water?”

“No, I’m okay.”

We watched them wheel the stretcher out. When it was gone and out of sight, she asked me about my family. Was there anyone I could stay with?

No, I didn’t have any family besides my mother. Dahlia was in the hospital, and I didn’t think the social worker would let me stay with Cruz on Eric’s couch. Besides, I didn’t want her to know about Cruz. I didn’t want her to know that he knew how to make a cup of coffee.

So, I had to stay with a “nice family” the social worker knew until I turned eighteen.

“I’m going to Paris to study at the Sorbonne after graduation in June,” I heard myself telling her. I took a deep breath. “So I need to be an emancipated minor.”

“We can make that happen,” she said, like it was the easiest thing in the world to do. I blinked in surprise, unsure if I heard her correctly. Somehow, within a few hours, Cruz’s plan had worked. The obstacles were removed. I would be on my way to Paris in a couple of months.

She sent me upstairs to pack my things. Just like that, I had to say goodbye to the house I had grown up in to go where, I didn’t know.

My room hadn’t changed, as if it didn’t know that the world had turned upside down and nothing would be the same again. It was still a girl’s room, full of hope and boring routine. I was tempted to go to bed, put the covers over my head, and pretend the day hadn’t happened. Just ignore the police, the social worker, and the zipped body bag with my mother inside.

Instead of hiding, though, I filled a trash bag with my clothes, making sure to pack Cruz’s dress and Dahlia’s hat. I dug my savings out of an old shoe, which had become my new hiding place since Mom had returned, and I stuffed the money at the bottom of my backpack, topping it with my school books.

Then came the hard decision: Which notebooks to take? There were way too many to carry. I rifled through them and picked out the four notebooks that I had filled since Cruz had come into my life. No matter what would happen, at least I would have my memories of him with me.

I was also concerned about the police officer’s nosy quotient. It was probably pretty high. She reeked of suspicion and seemed not above reading a teenager’s diary. I didn’t want her to sniff around Cruz. I wasn’t concerned about the questions she would ask him, but I was concerned about his answers.

I cleared out my bathroom and packed my toothbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, and soap in the trash bag along with the clothes. Then I opened my purse to make room for my lip gloss and perfume. Inside it, I found a piece of paper with a note scrawled in familiar handwriting.

My heart stopped. I crumpled the paper in my hand and listened at the door, sure that the police or the social worker would somehow know I had it. I listened for footsteps or even breathing on the other side of the door, but there was nothing except for the sound of them closing down the house. When I was sure the coast was clear, I sat on the floor with my back leaned up against the closed door.

Taking a deep breath, I slowly unfolded the paper. It was a short message.

“Everything’s going to be all right, now. Call me when you can. Love, Cruz.”

And he included a phone number. I put it in my contacts on my cell phone and stuffed the paper deep inside my purse. What did “everything’s going to be all right, now” mean? What had he done?

I was thinking of all the possibilities when there was a knock at the door. “I’m coming,” I called. I gathered my belongings and opened the door. It was the cop instead of the social worker. Fear gripped me. I was sure she was going to arrest me.

“I thought I was going with the social worker,” I croaked.

“In a minute. I just have a couple quick questions.”

I was tempted to hit her with my backpack and run for my life, but I never could run very well. I could make it about a quarter mile before I needed to rest and drink a bottle of Gatorade.

“I feel like I’m going to throw up,” I said, which wasn’t a lie. I was having visions of spending the rest of my life in prison, which would be a lot like living with my mother but I would have to poop in front of other people, and my bed would be a lot less comfortable.

“Take deep breaths through your nose,” she said, unsympathetic to my nausea. “Tess, I want you to talk to me about the coffee.”

“She liked it with milk, no sugar,” I said. I knew that wasn’t what she was talking about, but I was trying to get her off track.

It didn’t work.

“Why did you bring her a second cup of coffee? Did she ask for it?”

“I always brought her coffee in the morning,” I said. “I didn’t know it was her second cup.”

“Was it normal for her to get up early, make a cup, and go back to bed?”

“No, and it wasn’t normal for her to take sixty pills, either.” I was sidestepping the question, trying again to get her off track. That time it worked. My logic was pretty solid. What was normal for a woman who took sixty pills? She nodded and put her notepad back in her pocket.

“Okay, Tess. Makes sense. I’m sorry for your loss. I’ll be in contact if we have more questions.”

She turned around as sweat dripped down my forehead into my eyes. I wiped it off on my sleeve before she could see the evidence of my guilt. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was hiding from her, but at the very least I couldn’t let her know about Cruz.

“Don’t say his name,” I whispered to myself. “One foot in front of the other.”

The social worker took me to her office and filled out paperwork for hours. It turned out that a seventeen year old, newly made orphan was a complicated problem. There was a will to find, a bank account to close, belongings to sell or keep, and a mother to bury.

“We’ll get you taken care of,” Diane the social worker said. “It’s a process. We just have to be a little patient.”

“May I go to school tomorrow?”

“Of course, sweetie. Your life is going to be as normal as possible.”

Hmmm…Normal. I wondered what that would be like.

Before we could get all the details worked out, I had to face my worst fear and get placed with a foster family right away. The social worker didn’t lie about putting me with a nice family, though. Judy and Gerald Clarke were an incredibly nice couple, who were retired and more than happy to give their luxury guest room in their upscale house to a teenage orphan.

They fed me a dinner of steak and potatoes and were careful not to ask me too many questions, which was a good thing since the surprise had settled into shock, and I was having a hard time focusing and speaking.

I went to bed early. My new bedroom was clean and perfectly decorated except for my trash bag and beat up backpack. It was the home and family that I had always dreamed of. I sat on the bed and took my cell phone out of my purse.

It was time to talk to Cruz.

“Saying nothing…sometimes says the most.”

--Emily Dickinson

It turned out that my mother had a will, and even more surprising, I was her sole beneficiary.

“So you get it all,” Diane the social worker told me in her office over a Subway sandwich lunch. “Which isn’t much. Do you still want us to sell her belongings?”

“Yes,” I said. I was never very sentimental about my mom’s stuff before, but it still felt odd to get rid of it. I hadn’t ever expected to be in this position. Suddenly, in her death, I was in charge of my mother’s life. I didn’t know what was appropriate to do and what wasn’t.

Diane was helpful and patient, though. She walked me through the steps, with the ultimate goal to help me get to college in Paris.

“She had considerable debts, but with the life insurance policy from her work, she’ll come out ahead. It will pay for her funeral and your ticket to Paris. About Paris—“ she started.

We had been working at “the process” for a solid week. For the first time in my life, I was asked for my opinion. Choices and decisions had become my bread and butter.

And Diane cared about my opinions and was efficient handling them. She put me on a fast-moving train towards my goals. All I had to do was “yes” or “no” at the right moment, and she got it done, which was a good thing because I couldn’t get anything done on my own.

I was still in shock.

Paralyzed.

I didn’t know if I was sad, exactly. Was I supposed to be sad? I hadn’t had a Disney relationship with my mother. She hated me, and I wasn’t her biggest fan. But she was gone and was never going to come back.

So there would never be a chance to have a Disney relationship with her. No new beginnings. No second chances.

Our last moments together were her lying to me about her sleeping with the boy I loved and me telling her I wished she would die.

And my wish came true.

My
wish.

The reality of it hit me like a bomb going off in my psyche. I used a wish to make a terrible thing happen. How could I ever have the right to wish for anything again? Perhaps I was the bad guy in my life story and all my dreams and desires were wrong. Maybe I had it wrong all this time: Perhaps my mother was Superman and I was Lex Luther. Perhaps she was Cinderella, and I was only the ugly stepsister.

Now she was gone forever, never to return, and I was alone with my guilt, which I could never talk about because it wasn’t mine alone. I shared it with a beautiful, perfect boy. The boy I loved.

“It’s not your fault,” Detective Stevenson told me a few days after my mom died. I got a note in math class to go to the principal’s office, and she was waiting for me there. She closed us in a room with a table, four metal chairs, and posters on the walls promoting reading and decrying the evils of drugs.

“I thought you would want to know,” she continued. “Your mother crushed the pills into her coffee and drank it down. She didn’t suffer. I wanted you to know that, too. She probably fell asleep a few minutes later and never woke up.”

I gulped and tears stung my eyes. I doubted my mother crushed her pills into her drink instead of swallowing them like she normally did. It would take too much work, and besides, if she was trying to kill herself, why didn’t she drink the whole cup instead of only half?

The police officer cocked her head to the side. “Sometimes they do it that way,” she explained as if she had read my mind. “They crush up the pills and drink them down so it seems normal, like they’re not really taking the pills. It was a sort of denial on her part to convince herself that she was just drinking her morning coffee. It doesn’t make sense to us, but it probably made sense to her.”

I wondered if it made sense to her, Cruz offering her coffee early in the morning. What did he say to her to explain why he was there? Did she even question why a good-looking man was in her room? She probably took the coffee with a smile, got halfway through the cup, and grew so sleepy that she decided to go back to sleep for a little while.

My tears flowed in earnest, and Detective Stevenson offered me a Kleenex. “And your fingerprints weren’t on the coffee cup with the drugs,” she added. “Just your mother’s. Yours were on the other cup. So, you won’t be seeing me anymore.”