“What are you doing here?” she asked, smiling despite herself.
Her body ached. She tried to sit up but winced as pain shot through her arm.
“Slow down, Annie Oakley, the nurse on duty looks like a mean one. I don’t want her to come in and stick me if you fall out of bed.”
He helped her into a sitting position and stuffed several pillows behind her back.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“I called that detective this morning. Bell? I was hoping to put a little pressure on him about your mother’s case and he told me what happened. I knew you were tough, but stalking a murderer seems a bit rash,” he joked, patting her leg sympathetically.
“I was more prey than predator last night,” she rasped. “Can you hand me a drink?” She pointed to the cup of water next to her bed.
“My pleasure.”
She took a sip and closed her eyes as the lukewarm liquid flowed down her inflamed throat.
“I feel terrible,” she grumbled.
“Well you don’t look pageant-ready by any means, but you’re still beautiful, Jude. I hope it’s okay to say that.” Clayton blushed.
She smiled and sighed.
“I appreciate it, Clayton. I don’t care all that much right now, but it’s still nice to hear. Did you meet Detective Bell?”
Clayton nodded, studying her eyes.
“Handsome guy,” he said. “I relieved him of his bedside vigil. He seems rather taken with you.”
“Hardly,” Jude muttered.
“I had another reason for coming, Jude. And let me preface this by saying we’re not doing anything crazy. I just wanted you to know.”
“Speak sense, Clayton.”
He lifted his leather case from the floor and unzipped it pulling out a single paper.
“I went to the government building in Cadillac and inquired about tax information on the property your parents owned.”
Jude stared at him.
“My grandmother must have sold it, right? After my dad died?”
“Well for starters it wouldn’t have been hers to sell, without a will it would have passed to your brother, Peter. But that’s assuming both your parents had actually died and we know now that…”
“My mother is alive.”
“Exactly. And,” he laid the document on her lap. “The property is in your mother’s name. She owns it.”
“I’m not sure I get what that means. It’s great, it is, but….”
“That’s where she’d go, Jude. To her home, the home she shared with her husband and children.”
Jude’s eyes opened wide as she gazed at her mother’s name on the document - Sophia Anne Porter - her true name.
“We have to go there.” Jude pushed the sheet to the floor and started to swing her legs off the bed.
Clayton shook his head, putting a hand on her arm to stop her.
“I already spoke with the nurse. You’re approved for discharge after one more check by the doctor. Sit tight and we’ll make this happen.”
Sophia
There were half a dozen jars of canned food, but everything else had gone stale. Despite her days eating from the trees she still hungered for fresh food and had woken that morning with the most intense desire for pumpkin sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.
They’d never grown pumpkins on their own property, but their neighbors, an old couple named Harrison, had dedicated two acres to growing the enormous root vegetables. They donated the pumpkins that didn’t sell roadside to the little school for Halloween decorations.
Sophia pulled on a pair of her jeans, standing before the long mirror in the bedroom she’d shared with Jack. The pants hung from her bony waist, and she used one of Jack’s belts to cinch them tighter. It felt good to wear her clothes even if her body swam in the familiar fabric. She took the silver brush that Jack had given her as gift and ran it through her blonde hair, still long, but much less full. Lack of nutrition, Kaiser’s strange treatments, and jealousy from a handful of asylum patients had all run their course. She braided it and pulled on a ball cap that had belonged to Peter. She smelled it first, inhaling so deep that surely, she could catch some remnant of him.
“Peter,” she whispered, fingering the brim of the hat.
The tears wanted to come, but she felt as dry as dust. One night in the house had emptied her well of tears. The photos, smells, clothing, toys. The places she and Jack had made love, the counter where Jude and Peter sat when she baked cookies, the flower garden where she lay with Hattie and watched butterflies. How had she forgotten so much? The house returned it all like a heaping bouquet of flowers waiting on the front stoop - beautiful and fragrant yet filled with thorns. Every single memory hurt. She cried equal parts joy and sorrow, but now this morning, she could not cry. She was left with long sighs and deep creases in her forehead as she studied the remains of her family.
Where were they? Her children? The electricity had been shut off long ago, ten years perhaps. Some of their things were gone, but most of it left behind like collateral damage from a choice she and Jack should never have made. Their first mistake was trusting his mother, but perhaps it went much deeper. She had run from Rosemary’s death, a scared child, but the choice changed her, made her into someone who ran away and when faced with the option a second time, she made the same mistake again.
“And I paid with my life and Jack with his,” she murmured, sliding her feet into a pair of sneakers she used to wear in the garden. Jack and the kids all had matching pairs. But the kids wouldn’t fit anymore, would they?
She closed the door behind her, not bothering to lock it.
Jude
Clayton and Jude pulled to the overgrown driveway. It had once been a clear trail bright with the wildflowers her mother had planted on the edges. Some flowers had grown up the center, weeds filling in the gaps.
“Better not chance it,” Clayton said. “We’ll get stuck. Just park on the road.”
Jude turned off the car and paused with her hands on the wheel. She felt Clayton staring at her but wasn’t ready to open the door. It wasn’t only the possibility of seeing her mother. If she was honest, her mother felt like a phantom more than a real flesh and blood being. Her childhood home contained a piece of her she had buried long ago. The thought of opening the door, seeing all those familiar things turned her body to stone.
“Are you having second thoughts, Jude? Would you rather I just run and check?” Clayton asked.
Tempting, but she shook her head. She had to go to the house. For ten years she believed Gram had sold it, their things given away, the happiest part of her life a memory.
“No, I have to do it. There have been so many lies. I have to see for myself.”
Clayton nodded and got out, walking around to open her door. He offered his hand, but she brushed it aside. She pulled her bag out of the car and slung it over her shoulder. It contained her camera and her gun. This time she wouldn’t be caught without it.
They walked down the weeded drive. Jude looked at the flowers and could almost see her mother with her dress bunched around her waist, squatting with Hattie who had to smell and touch every blossom.
“So, this is where the great Jude Porter was reared,” Clayton chuckled, but Jude gave him a dry look that silenced him.
She should have been nicer to Clayton, but suddenly she wished he hadn’t come. What if she felt the urge to cry? What if her mother was in the house, but the Doctor at the asylum had ruined her? They might find her hunched in a corner eating cardboard and babbling. She inwardly chastised herself for even having the thought.