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“It wasn’t there when they arrived.”
This time, no elaboration is necessary. I understand exactly what she means—rather than try to help her sister, Lenora moved the chair so the police wouldn’t know Virginia killed herself.
That realization causes me to recoil. I take several backward steps, wanting to put as much distance between us as possible. Until now, I could almost summon some grudging sympathy for Lenora. But this? This was monstrous.
“I did it to protect her,” she says, no doubt knowing what I’m thinking because I make no attempt to hide it.
“How was that protecting her?” I say. “She tried to kill herself and you did nothing but cover it up.”
“If I hadn’t, then the police would have known the truth,” Lenora says, her voice ice cold. “They, like me, would have realized the reason Virginia tried to commit suicide.”
I take another backward step, this one driven purely by shock. “You think Virginia murdered your parents.”
“Iknowshe murdered them.” Lenora’s tone shifts from steely to tremulous, as if it’s being chipped away with a chisel. “Honestly, I’m not surprised, considering what we did to her.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Me,” Lenora says, punctuating the word with a sip of wine and a hard swallow. “My father. The real Miss Baker. After what we did, the only surprise is that she didn’t kill us all.”
I gave birth on the floor of my bedroom.
It’s one of the few things I remember.
The baby coming so quickly that there wasn’t time to get onto the bed. So I was forced to lay in the puddle I’d created on the floor, my head knocking against the wall as I writhed in pain.
Another thing I’ll never forget--the sweaty agony of it all. Like I was splitting in half, shedding my skin, being reborn through the fire of pure pain.
I had only my sister and Miss Baker, who rushed in to help after hearing my cries. Neither of them knew what they were doing. So I pushed. I screamed. I hurt.
At some point, exhausted and delirious from pain, I blacked out. My body was still pushing, crying, screaming, and hurting, but my mind was elsewhere. I pictured me and Ricky on a hillside studded with wildflowers and white-capped mountains in the distance. We stood in the sunlight, our child in my arms, as birds in the surrounding pines sang a song meant just for us.
Only when the birdsong turned to crying did I snap back to reality. Mother’s instinct. I knew my child had been born.
And that it needed me.
He needed me.
I saw my child was a boy when my sister returned from the kitchen with a butcher knife she used to cut the umbilical cord. He was so tiny. So fragile. But when I looked at him, I felt a love so fierce it startled me. Nothing else in the world mattered but him. I was his mother, and I knew I would do anything to protect him.
At last, my life had a purpose, which was to love my child more than anything else. That realization was the happiest moment of my life.
That happiness left me the second I saw that my father was also in the room. He’d spent the labor pacing Miss Baker’s room next door, not emerging until he heard my baby crying. As my sister was about to put my son into my arms, he said, “Lenora, take the baby into the other room.”
My sister froze. My child in her arms did not. He wriggled, kicked, and cried. One of his tiny hands reached out for me, as if he already knew I was his mother and that he belonged in my empty arms. I reached out, too, stretching my hand until our fingers touched.
A single second of contact.
That’s all I was allowed.
“Lenora,” my father said, more sternly this time. “Take the child.”
“Can’t she at least hold him?”
My father shook his head. “It’ll only make it worse.”
“But she’s his mother,” my sister said.
“She’s not,” my father replied. “She never had a child. And that baby is not a Hope. None of this happened. Now you’ll either take that bastard into the other room or I’ll take it from you and throw it off the terrace. Then I’ll disown both you and your sister.”