Part 23 (1/2)

I could tear her house down to its very foundations and not find it. I do not know my mother well enough to know her hiding places.

”Stay,” I tell Gretel again.

I open the front door and stare out into the blackness beyond Parker's porch light. I can't sit here and wait like my good dog for her return. I step out onto the porch and close the door behind me.

I slip through the front gate and close and latch it behind me. My mother can't be that far, but I have no idea what direction she may have taken. Perhaps she is only wandering her neighborhood, walking to clear her head. I head up the street, going from streetlight to streetlight at a fast walk. I have the sidewalk to myself at this hour.

”Mirabelle,” I call, walking. Then louder, ”Mirabelle?” My pace picks up. ”Mirabelle!”

Somewhere a window bangs open and a man yells, ”Shut up!” I do not care. I call her name again and again, louder and louder. I am running now. I run all the way up one street, then turn and tear back down another. Somehow without noticing, I have changed words. Now I am yelling for my momma.

I have made this pilgrimage before. The first night she was gone, my daddy came home to find me at the kitchen table, waiting for my snack. We waited there for dinner, which never came.

I said, ”Should we call the police?”

”She ain't missing,” he said, ”She's just gone.”

Then my daddy quit waiting and started drinking instead. I waited, though, hours more, sitting in that ladder-back chair, waiting for my mother to come and put me to bed. I believed that if I got up and put myself to bed, then she would not come to do it, but if I waited, she would have to. The chair was hard, and I got so tired, and my daddy pa.s.sed out on the sofa. I left the house and went looking for her, wandering up and down our street, calling her quietly so as not to wake my daddy. I called until I was crying so desperately that I could only call by vowel, and ”Momma” became long, shuddering o's and a's that sounded more like mourning than hope.

It was close to dawn when I finally made my way home, hoa.r.s.e and all wept out. I closed the front door softly behind me, and the click that latch made as it caught was an awful noise, final and heartless and mechanical. My daddy snored on the sofa; he'd never stirred or noticed I was gone.

I am calling her now, much louder. But I have left the houses behind me, and no one tells me to shut up or phones the cops. I am pa.s.sing closed stores and offices, and I realize I have made my way to the library.

My mother is here. I see her across the street with her back to me. She is standing in the glow of the security light that hangs over the library's front entrance. She is talking on one of the pay phones that hangs in a bank of three near the door.

”Momma,” I yell, and I run toward her. ”Momma.”

She turns to me, still talking into the phone. She holds up one finger in a ”just a second” gesture as I sprint toward her. She turns and sets down the receiver as I come up the library's front steps. She nods at me, as if in pleasant greeting, and says, ”I was on the phone, Rose Mae. Hush now. It's the middle of the night, and you really shouldn't be outside.”

In the harshness of the security light, her bloodshot eyes look crimson and blind, but astonis.h.i.+ngly calm. Not even the sight of me tearing down the street, hollering for her with my nose running and my cheeks striped black with wept-away mascara, has disturbed her.

I clutch her by the arms and say, ”I have to get ahead of Thom. I have to go somewhere he won't expect, and then I have to lure him there. I have to set a trap somewhere and lure him there and kill him.”

”Because that's gone so well for you already,” my mother says with sarcasm so heavy that her mouth literally twists up with it.

”I let him kill my daddy,” I say.

My mother puts her hands over my hands on her arms, deliberate and calm, and says, ”You're going to rip yourself in half, Rose Mae. Calm down.” She takes my hands off her and turns me toward the road. She puts one arm over my shoulder and starts walking, towing me with her out of the pool of the library's security light. ”Done's done. I'm sorry about your father if you are, but his liver would have killed him in another fifteen minutes anyway.” She shrugs, cold and pragmatic, as she walks me across the street.

”Where's my gun?” I say as she tows me along. ”I need my gun.”

My mother shakes her head, a decisive no. She uses her free hand to pull the thin sheaf of tarot cards out of her pocket. The hanged man is at the top of the stack, faceup.

”I was wrong, Rose Mae.” She shakes the image of the hanged man. ”This is a tricky card, and I read it wrong.”

I stop dead. ”Where is my got-d.a.m.n gun?” I yell at her, invoking Daddy's favorite cuss.

”Shhhhh,” she says, calm as a corpse. She starts dragging me forward again. ”Look at you, crying for your father. You think you don't have at least that much mercy for your husband? You can have your gun if you want it. Go lay your trap, but you'll pause too long, and he'll kill you. If by some miracle you manage it? You won't come back from it. Believe me.” I realize she is navigating back toward her house, the last place on earth I ever want to see. But my dog and my bag are there, and my gun is there, too, tucked away in some hidey-hole of hers. She turns her head to look at me directly. ”I know what it is to do a thing you can't ever undo.” She lets that sink into me. I look at her b.l.o.o.d.y eyes and see again what a broken thing she is.

I do not want to be her. I do not even want to be me.

”I don't know what to do,” I say in a small voice.

She nods, turning to face forward again and picking up the pace. ”Well, you can't run-not on your own. You'll leave a trail. And you cannot kill him. It'll ruin you. I think it will make you a woman you do not want to be.”

”So what's left? I don't want to die,” I tell her. ”Thom is coming. I don't know what to do.”

”You don't have to do anything,” she says. We are turning back on Belgria Street, and she offers me a small, encouraging smile. ”I finally fixed it. I did what I meant to do years ago, what I should have done the first time I came to Amarillo and saw what you'd married.”

I sniffle, and my head is starting to ache. ”I need my gun.”

”You don't have to kill him, honey,” my mother says, like she is soothing an overwrought toddler. As we pa.s.s under a streetlight, I see her face has gone smooth, and in spite of her bloodied eyes she looks at peace, a good ten years younger. ”I came to the pay phone to call the Saint Cecilias. I couldn't call from the house-they have very strict rules about leaving a trail.”

We are back at the house. She closes the front gate behind me, and it clangs like a prison gate. Even so, I let her tug me up the stairs, back inside to where my anxious dog is waiting by her leash.

Instantly, all the f.u.c.king blue closes in on me. This whole house. Blue kitchen, blue bathroom, blue parlor, her blue-green bedroom. Even my room is infested with it. I want to be someplace that is restful and painted white.

Even so, the sound of her voice, her firm hand on my arm, these things pull me up the stairs.

”It's all set, Rose Mae. The Saint Cecilias will come tomorrow night, around midnight. They will take you someplace safe. They will move you town to town by car, no public transportation. No trace. You can start fresh, and not even I will know where you are.” Her voice quavers on that last sentence, and I see that it is costing her to give me up. Her calm face is so sad.

Perhaps this is justice, for her to give me up now, just when she has finally filled that gaping wound of a room she keeps upstairs. Her shrine has held its proper saint, and when I'm gone, it will be only a hole again. That is the word on the fourth card I laid out, the word written in curlicue letters below the gypsy-haired lady in the lace blindfold, clutching her sword and scales. Her word is ”Justice.”

”But what if Thom comes here?” I say. ”He will find you and kill you, like he killed Daddy.” We are back in my room again, and she presses one hand firmly on my shoulder, pus.h.i.+ng me down to sit on the bed.

”No, he won't,” she says. She sits beside me. Pats my hand. ”Stop worrying, Rose. I am fixing this, I told you. Once you are safe away, I'll call the police. The ones in Fruiton, and in Amarillo, and here. I'll call the FBI and anyone else I can think of. I'll tell them about what your husband did to Eugene. At the very least, Thom will be questioned. I'll make sure he knows that I called, that you were already here, and are gone now. He won't be able to hurt me, because it will prove everything I've said. He'll probably get away with killing your daddy, but he won't be able to come after me.”

I nod, my head aching. I say, ”You called Saint Cecilia for me.”

”Yes,” she says. ”Tough it out until midnight tomorrow, and Rose Mae Lolley will truly be gone. You will never have to worry about him finding you. You can live. You can live, and be made into someone new.”

That sounds so beautiful to me. I want that. I want just that, so badly.

I let her put her arm around me. I am weak and suddenly so tired. I let her pull my head down on her shoulder and hold me. I am clay in her hands, ready to do whatever she says, to smash into whatever shape she makes of me.

CHAPTER 17.

IT'S PAST LUNCHTIME when I finally wake up. My gut is churning with anxiety, but the house feels empty. It is so quiet, I wonder if my mother has gone out again. Her bedroom door is firmly closed.

In the kitchen I find coffee prepped and a note that says, ”I have a migraine. Canceled readings for today. Do not turn the sign on. Your ride comes tonight-Stay inside.”

She's underlined the last two words. I nod as if she is present and expecting an answer. Under twelve hours, and I'll be out of Thom's reach. It feels like a race, but one in which I am my mother's pa.s.senger. It is a race that she is winning. Sherlock Holmes himself could not take make and model, maybe even a license plate, on a car that's parked legally all the way across the country and find me in three days. Especially since Daddy would have pointed Thom toward Vegas, where he believes his Claire is ”playing cards.”

I shy away from that path of thought. I do not want to think about the circ.u.mstances under which my father would have given Thom this information. I do not want to think about my part in it. I can't right now. I have to get through the next twelve hours, and at midnight everything will change. I don't know enough about what will happen to even imagine it. All I know is, I won't be here, I won't be me, and in almost every way, I'm fine with that.

In the front room, I hear Gret's one-footed sc.r.a.ping at the front door, asking to go out. I open it for her. Parker's dogs are out, too, but I call her firmly back to me as soon as she has done her business. I can't have her running the yard, perfectly visible, a three-legged beacon announcing to Thom that his Ro is in this house. As she swishes past my legs and comes inside, I see Parker opening the gate. His dogs surround him as he enters, leaping and wagging, so happy to see him. If Parker had been gone only five minutes, his three would still be palm fronding him through the front gate like he was Christ entering Jerusalem. Dogs are like that.