“Is this Lane? Lane Crowe?”
It was strange to hear my real name, so long had I hidden behind Lana Granger. It was everywhere now, my real name. I was Lane Crowe, hero, freak, lady boy, transgender poster boy for the bullied, for the gender dysmorphic. I was derided by the gay and lesbian community, the feminists, the Republican pundits. I was the number one most-wanted guest on all the major talk shows-I’d be the biggest hit since the pregnant man was making the rounds. The new cell phone I had was the third I’d had in a month.
“Who’s calling?” I asked, ready to hang up and get a new phone.
“It’s Paul Rodriguez,” he said. “I worked for your father.”
It was the private eye who had been calling for some time.
“Don’t hang up,” he said quickly. “I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say. The cops won’t listen. They’re sick of me.”
I held the phone to my ear, kept my eyes on the house. “I’m listening.”
“Your dad fired me because I finally figured out who killed your mom. I’m sorry to be so blunt with you. You’ve been through a lot. But it was what happened to you, with that kid, that made me realize. I can’t believe I didn’t see it years ago. She was investigated and cleared. She had an alibi.”
“Okay,” I said. He was dragging it out. “Tell me.”
“I know you’re going to talk to him in a couple of days, right? I want you to know the truth. Maybe you can convince him to save his own life.”
It didn’t take him long when he finally got to the point. As he spoke, I saw Rachel move into the living room window. She lifted a hand to me, gave me a weak smile. My breath was coming out in clouds.
“Thank you, Mr. Rodriguez,” I said.
“Can you talk to him, kid?” he said. “I think he wants to die.”
No, that’s not what he wanted. I finally understood it after all this time. What he wanted was to take care of his children.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Hey, Mr. Rodriguez, can you do me a favor?”
“Sure,” he said. He sounded like the kind of guy who would do you a favor and never ask for anything in return.
“Can you call Detective Ferrigno at The Hollows PD, and tell him what you told me?”
“Hey, wait a second,” he said. He must have heard something in my tone that he didn’t like. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
But I ended the call and stuck the phone into my pocket, then I walked up the path to Luke’s house.
32
I remembered the shoes. The small pair of practical walking shoes I saw the day my mother died. Not shoes that belonged to a man, but to a woman. The voices downstairs, as I had hid under my bed, were panicked and arguing voices. I had heard my father and a woman. Rachel. It must have been her.
Now, years later, she opened the door wide for me, and I stepped inside. I’d always felt welcomed here, as though I belonged. And that’s because I did belong among the murderous and psychotic. They were my peeps.
She walked into the kitchen and brewed me a cup of tea-peppermint with honey, just the way I liked it.
I sat at the table, in the same place where I sat on the day of my interview. It seemed like a lifetime ago. But it was just a little over a month. I was literally a different person then. I had sat there, presenting myself as a girl. Today, I was fully dwelling in my male self.
I felt real and right for the first time in my life. I had dwelled among women to hide myself, to heal myself. It was so much easier to be a girl, so much sweeter, and truer and closer to the heart and the spirit. I had embraced and accepted that part of my psyche, my anima. And I had let it go. And I was a stronger person for it.
“I just wanted to talk to her,” she said. She knew why I had come and she got straight to the point. “Your mother.”
She looked down at her neatly manicured nails. “It was so crazy for her to keep him, your father, just because of you. They stopped loving each other years earlier. And I had a troubled child, too.”
My mother could not have been more different from Rachel. She was fiery-big emotions, big temper, big love. (Like someone else we know.) How would she have reacted to Rachel’s visit? To her pleas? Not well, I’m guessing. She’d have lost it. In her fights with my father, she was by far the one that blew the hottest, the one who might resort to violence first.
“But she didn’t see it that way,” Rachel said.
My mother let Rachel into the house. She was civil at first, but things got ugly quickly.
“We started to argue,” Rachel said. “We were both angry; he’d made promises to both of us. We each had a child with him. She called me a whore, and I’ll admit that I slapped her.”
I could envision the scene, see my mother reeling back from the blow. What would she do? She’d strike back. Of course, she did. Then she ran upstairs to get away, to lock herself in the bedroom to call the police.
“But I got to her first. We struggled for the phone she had in her hand, and she ran with it out into the hallway. Your father was supposed to be there. We were planning on talking to her together. But he was late. He was chronically, forever late for everything when it came to us. Because he was always with you and her.”
There it was, the bitterness.
“You act like my mother was the other woman,” I said. “She wasn’t.”
We were none of us innocent in this. We all had our roles to play. But of all of us, my mother was the most wronged. If I’d been normal, if my father had been faithful, none of this ever would have happened. I wouldn’t hear her maligned.
“It was an accident,” said Rachel. “In our battle, she tripped over the runner in the hall. The corner slipped from beneath her, and she fell over the railing.”
She took in a little gasp and began to cry. Silently, stoically, the tears fell.
“It was an accident, Lane. Please believe me. It has haunted me. Not a day goes by that I don’t look back in regret.”
And I could see that it was true. Looking at her, I saw how hollowed out she was. I thought it was Luke who had turned her into the small, careful, joyless woman she seemed to be. And surely he played his part, but it was so much more than that. Guilt, if you live to carry it, is a terrible burden. It weighs you down, stoops your shoulders, pushes you right into the ground.
But her sorrow, her regret? It didn’t mean much. Her actions had led directly to my mother’s death. She had let my father go to prison, was clearly willing to let him die for a crime he didn’t commit. She wasn’t that sorry. Not sorry enough to own up.
“Your father came home then,” she said. She reached her hand over the table to me. But I didn’t move a muscle. “But you weren’t supposed to come home. You were supposed to be late at school.”
I didn’t answer her. She nodded and kept her hand where it was, an open invitation.
“I wanted to call the police, to face the consequences. But I couldn’t. What would happen to my special-needs son. I had no family, no husband. No, we decided that he’d hide the body, act as though she’d run off with her lover. She was having an affair, too, you know?”
“Sure, trash the victim,” I said. “That’s always a good defense. The slut got what she deserved, right? Meanwhile, nothing was ever proved.”
She bowed her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
I heard the clock ticking in the kitchen. She was an analog girl in a digital age. I had really liked her a lot.
“I had to take care of Luke, and your father had to take care of you. We were thinking of both of you. I know she would have wanted your father to take care of you, Lane. Our plan was to wait until things blew over. Then we were going to be together, all of us. We were going to be a family.”
“Right,” I said. “The world’s most fucked-up family.”
“No family is perfect,” she said stiffly. “We all have our problems.”