Now I really wasn’t sure what to say. When I spoke again, I did so slowly and carefully. “I don’t see how that could be true.”
“I got her to come here. I put my mother right in the crossfire.”
“What crossfire?”
Rachel shook her head. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Of course it does. Someone tried to kill you-and last night…” I stopped.
“Last night what?”
“Last night, someone tried to kill me.”
Her body stiffened. “What are you talking about?”
I told her about the Butcher and the fire at Bat Lady’s house. Rachel stood there, stunned. “Is she okay?”
“Bat Lady? I don’t know. I never saw her.”
“I don’t understand this,” Rachel said.
We both looked back toward the room.
“Tell me what happened,” I said.
“I don’t remember all of it.”
“Tell me what you do remember.”
I turned toward Rachel. The lights were low, casting a shadow on her lovely face. I wanted so badly to reach out and touch her cheek and pull her close. I didn’t. I stood and waited.
“I have to go back a little,” Rachel said. “I have to explain why my mom was here in the first place.”
“Okay. No rush.”
“Well, yeah, there is.” She almost smiled. “Don’t you have tryouts?”
“There’s time.”
Rachel stared down at the bloodstain on the carpet. “I was angry at my mother for a very long time. I thought she abandoned me.”
I looked down at the blood too.
“My mother left us when I was ten. My father told me she still loved me, but that she needed to”-Rachel made quote marks with her fingers-“rest. I didn’t know what that meant. I mean, in some ways I still don’t. I just knew that she’d abandoned me. My parents got divorced, and I didn’t see my mother for three years.”
“Three years? Wow.”
“I didn’t even know where she was.”
I thought about that. “The other day, you told me that your mother lived in Florida.”
“That wasn’t exactly true. I mean, she was in Florida, at least part of the time…” Rachel stopped and shook her head. “I’m telling this all wrong.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “Take your time.”
“Okay, so where was I? The divorce. The next time I saw my mother, I was thirteen years old. She just showed up after school one day. I mean, it was so surreal, you know? Mom was just standing there with the other mothers, smiling like… well, a crazy person. She looked horrible. She had too much bright red lipstick on, and her hair was all over the place. She wanted to drive me home, but I was actually scared of her. I called my dad. When he showed up, there was this big horrible scene. My mother went berserk. She started screaming at him, about how he had locked her up, how she knew the truth about him.”
The temperature in the room felt like it dropped ten degrees.
“So what happened next?” I asked.
“My father got really quiet. He just stood there and let her rant, until the police came. It was so horrible. Her lipstick was all smeared, her eyes were wide… it was like she couldn’t even see me. Later, after she was gone, my father explained to me that my mom hadn’t just run off-she’d had a nervous breakdown. He said that she’d always had mental health issues, but when I turned ten, she became manic and even dangerous. He said that she had been in and out of hospitals for the past three years.”
“When you say dangerous…?”
“I don’t know what he meant,” Rachel said too quickly. “Dad said she was out of control. He said he had to get a court order to get her treatment. I was so confused. I was angry and scared and sad. I mean, it made sense, in a way…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. I just thought, well, my mother is crazy. My father, he tries, I guess, but he’s distant. It didn’t matter. I had my friends and school.”
Rachel finally looked away from the bloodstain.
“Two weeks ago, my mom was let out again. By this time there were all kinds of court orders against her to stay away from us. She couldn’t visit me without a social worker present, stuff like that. But I wanted to see her. So when she called, we met up in secret. I didn’t tell my dad. I didn’t tell anyone.” Rachel looked up and a small smile came to her lips. “When we first met up, Mom hugged me and, I don’t know, this will sound weird, but I flashed back to being a happy kid again. Do you know what I mean?”
I thought about the way my own mother hugged me. “Yes.”
“I realized something-no one hugged me anymore. Isn’t that weird? My dad, well, it got awkward as I got older, and boys never just wanted to hug like that, if you know what I mean.”
I wished that I didn’t. I nodded, feeling a lump in my throat. I thought about Troy Taylor and realized how incredibly selfish that was, so I made myself stop.
“So it was nice,” I said, “seeing your mother.”
“For a few days, it was great. And then something went wrong.”
“What?”
“Mom started ranting again, saying what an evil man my father was, how he lied about her and poisoned her and told everyone she was crazy just to protect himself. She became paranoid and started asking me if Dad knew that we were meeting. I tried to reassure her, but she just kept saying he’d kill her if he found out.”
Silence.
“What did you do?”
Rachel shrugged. “I tried to calm her down. I asked about her meds. In a way, I mean, I wasn’t surprised. I had seen her like this before. Maybe I blamed myself too.”
“Why?”
“It’s like, if I had been a better daughter, maybe-”
“You know that isn’t the case.”
“I do know. I mean, my dad explained it to me a hundred times. She was sick. It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t his fault-and it wasn’t her fault. Like Cynthia Cooper’s mother has cancer, my mom had a disease that attacked the brain. She couldn’t help it.”
I thought about my own mother, in a rehab clinic. They told me the same thing, about how her drug addiction was an illness. It wasn’t a question of willpower and I shouldn’t take it personally, the experts said, but still, no matter how much you told yourself that, no matter how much I still loved her and was sympathetic to what had happened to her, a part of me always felt that in the end my mother chose drugs over her son.
“So I’m looking at this woman who had raised me, the last person to show me genuine warmth, and suddenly I started to wonder something strange-something I hadn’t really considered before.”
“What?” I asked.
Rachel turned and suddenly her eyes were dry and clear. “What if my mother wasn’t crazy? What if she was telling the truth?”
I said nothing.
“What if my dad did do something to her?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. She kept going on about how she knew something bad about him. What if she was telling the truth? I mean, my father didn’t just get her committed to a mental hospital-he also divorced her and remarried. He explained it to me-how they had fallen out of love years ago and how he deserved his own happiness and all that. But still. Did he really have to lock her up? Couldn’t he have found another way? This was my mother-the only woman who ever loved me. Shouldn’t I give her at least a little benefit of the doubt? If I don’t believe her, who else will?”
“So what did you do?”
Now a tear escaped her eye. “I started looking a little harder at my father.”
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What?”
“The police say it was an intruder-maybe two of them. Burglars or something. See, my father was supposed to be away for the night, so I had my mom stay at the house with me. He would have been furious if he knew. I was in my bedroom. Mom was down here, watching television. It was late. I was on the phone with you when I heard voices. I thought maybe my father had come home. So I came down the stairs. I turned the corner…”