“It’s no bother,” she said, her voice brightening. “I wanted to tell you I was thinking of starting a little memorial fund at the library in your mom’s honor. She loved the library so much.”
“That would be very nice.” I held my tongue and didn’t mention that Mom’s obituary instructed any memorials to be made to the local chapter of a Down syndrome support group. I needed Mrs. Porter on my side. “I was wondering if my mom ever mentioned someone named Elizabeth Yarbrough to you.”
“Is this a friend of hers?” Mrs. Porter asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I thought maybe you’d know.”
“Did you find her name in your mom’s things?”
Who’s asking the questions here, you or me? I wanted to ask. “Something like that,” I said instead.
“What’s the name again?” she asked.
“Elizabeth Yarbrough.”
A long pause. “Hmm. That doesn’t ring a bell with me,” she said.
“Well, thanks. And thanks for the memorial for Mom.”
“I did think of something else after your mom’s funeral,” Mrs. Porter said.
“Yeah?”
“Remember I told you I hadn’t seen your mom in about a month? She liked to come in once or twice a week with your brother.”
“I remember,” I said. “You said she came in alone and was in a hurry to get to an appointment.”
“Right. Well, I remember something else we talked about that day. I remembered it last night as I was dozing off.”
“What’s that?”
“You know your mom liked to educate herself. She read every book she could get her hands on about Down syndrome. And when she’d read all of ours, she requested them from other libraries around the state. She read every new book that came out on the subject.”
“She was thorough,” I said.
“Well, that last time she came in she asked for a book on a different subject. Not Down syndrome. I can’t remember the name of it, but I thought it was an odd thing for her to be looking for.”
Something tingled at the base of my skull. “What was the book about?” I asked.
“Something to do with childhood trauma,” Mrs. Porter said. “I know… it was something like helping an adult deal with childhood trauma. Does that mean anything to you?”
I sat forward on the couch. The phone shook in my hand. I answered Mrs. Porter with complete honesty.
“I have no idea why she’d want that at all.”
Chapter Twenty-six
I sat on the couch holding the phone in my lap. Helping an adult deal with childhood trauma? Who could the book be for? Ronnie had Down syndrome, but he hadn’t suffered trauma. Not that I knew of. Those five words seemed to be the qualifier I needed to add to everything I said or thought about my mother since her death. Not that I knew of. Had Ronnie been abused or subjected to something awful that I didn’t know about? A kid with Down syndrome—or any disability—was ripe for being preyed on. My grip on the phone tightened just thinking about it.
Could it have been something else? Had Mom been abused or traumatized? Her generation didn’t talk about those things as much. Could she have just started to come to grips with it before she died?
The possibility of those things twisted inside me like a rusty knife. If someone hurt one of them… if someone had taken advantage of or abused a member of my family… I just couldn’t imagine. My chest felt compacted, as if someone had placed me in a vise and squeezed, pressing the organs together, crushing bone against flesh until I had no air.
I sat there with my head down, squeezing the phone between my hands, until the pressure in my chest eased. I took deep breaths that sounded close to sobs. They broke the stillness of the house like shattering glass.
What do I do with this knowledge? I asked myself.
I tried to tame my emotions. I tried to let the logical part of my brain have its say.
Just because she wanted the book didn’t mean it was about her. Or Ronnie. Maybe she was just curious. Maybe she had heard about it on TV. The logic didn’t help much. I knew Mom. She didn’t pursue knowledge just for the sake of knowledge. She pursued knowledge in order to apply it. She used what she learned.
I looked at the phone. Paul. Would he know? And if he did, why had he kept it a secret from me?
I dialed his number. Again I heard his voice mail greeting. I didn’t leave a message. The truth was, I just didn’t know what to do.
I went out to the kitchen. In a drawer next to the telephone, Mom kept stacks of mail. Mostly, it was stuff she hadn’t gone through yet. Credit card offers, coupons, magazines, occasionally a bill she hadn’t paid. Things cycled through that drawer pretty quickly thanks to Mom’s thoroughness, but if something had arrived in the house in the days before she died, there was a chance she hadn’t tended to it yet.
I grabbed a handful of the mail. I flipped through it, my eyes not really registering the things as I did so. I was still thinking about my conversation with Mrs. Porter and that book she mentioned. It was eating away at me, a slow scratching at the base of my skull. I was so distracted I almost missed the bank statement the first time I passed by it. Some part of my subconscious must have registered the name of the bank because after I’d paged through a few more letters, it clicked. I stopped, flipped back, and found the bank statement. I dropped the other mail without thinking.
I slid my finger under the flap, tearing the envelope as I moved along. Mom would have chastised me for not using a letter opener and making a neat, narrow slit in the envelope. But I was rushing, so much so that my hands shook. I pulled the statement out of the envelope and flipped the folded paper open.
I scanned the numbers quickly. Mom maintained a decent minimum balance—at least decent in the eyes of a poor graduate student—of about two thousand dollars at all times. Her checks and debit card payments didn’t look unusual. Small to moderate amounts that I imagined went for food, utilities, Ronnie’s speech therapy, and things like that. I flipped to the second page and then the third. Still nothing.
Then I saw the last page. Mom’s savings account. The balance surprised me—just over thirty thousand dollars. I hadn’t realized Mom had so much cash at her disposal. I assumed most of it came from Dad’s life insurance policy. I wasn’t sure how much the policy was worth when he died, but I assumed it was at least one hundred thousand or so. It only made sense. I thought, looking at the balance, that Mom must have kept a certain amount in a savings account in the event of emergencies, and I hoped the rest had been invested somewhere safe. I’d find out soon enough when I began digging through the rest of her things.
But before I folded the papers and returned them to the envelope, another number caught my eye: $14,550. That number appeared in an entry at the bottom of the page under “Yearly Debits to Date.” So far that year Mom had withdrawn over fourteen thousand dollars from her savings account.
What for?
I thought back over the previous year. Had Mom encountered any difficulties? Had the house needed a new roof? Had there been car repairs? Had there been a crisis with Ronnie—medical or otherwise—that required a large outlay of cash? I couldn’t think of anything.
My mother didn’t travel. She didn’t gamble. She didn’t even buy clothes for herself. What had she done with $14,550?
I looked through the drawer for anything else of note and found nothing. There were no other bank or credit card statements, just coupons and pens, rubber bands and paper clips. I shut the drawer.
I decided to look one more place before I left Mom’s house—Ronnie’s room.