Untitled.FR11 (27 page)

“Mom, please. I have to know.” Did she really? Was it important enough to dredge up her mother’s trauma after an eternity of forgetting? She wasn’t sure, but the power she felt now—as opposed to the meekness that overcame her in so many of these calls before—was invigorating. Cruel and kind and necessary, then, her insistence.

“Her mouth was bloody, her chin too. Her dress where she held me on her lap and hugged my head to her was cold and wet and sticky. My younger memory had erased all that and made up this tidy little scene. But I got it back. I got back how I screamed at the gunshots and then ...”

“Then what?”

“Then seeing her with the knife. I just stood there. My head was full of light. They were wax dummies. It was no easy chore she was about. But she worked at it and she was weeping a little and then she put her hands inside the big dummy first and then the litde one.”

The hallway felt cathedral-sdll. “What was she—” “She was too full. That’s why I was spared. She had no room. No room for my love. But she would’ve, if she’d had more time, if they’d found us too late.”

“Why did she do it?”

“The eternal mystery.” Safer ground. “I’d guess she got closed up, kept something boxed in. People do that at times. But I think it was severe in her.” Funny. Katt’s view of her own mother was precisely the same. “Who knows what it was? Some secret that tightened in upon itself, a thing my father refused to let her talk about.”

“They can do that, can’t they?”

“Don’t let it happen to you, Katt. Open up and let a ray of sunshine in. That’s what I always say.” She’d not said it once in Katt’s hearing. “You can tell me anything at all. You have friends?”

“Good ones.” Good one.

“Pick one to tell everything to. Don’t hold anything back. Do you have one you can unburden yourself to?”

“Yes.” Mostly.

“Tell her the whole shooting match. It’s a woman, I’d guess. Usually is.”

“Yes, my friend Sherry. She may move in with us.”

“You’ll find another husband soon enough, no rush but when you’re ready—or he’ll find you. But until that time you tell this friend, this Sherry, everything.”

“Okay, Mom.” Almost everything.

“Open up to her.”

“I will.” Marcus’s sweaty forehead, the wastage he’d become, loomed before her.

“Let a ray of sunshine in.”

“Yes, I will.” Except in certain corners that had to remain eternally dark. She vowed no light would ever find those corners.

“That’s my girl,” her mother said. “That’s my girl.”

There were footsteps on the stairs. Sherry appeared. A stranger, a lover. Miming food hand to mouth, beckoning to dinner, standing there.

An open invitation from a heart-whole woman.

Or was she?

“Are you there, Katt? Are you there?”