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My mother.
No doubt summoned by my sister.
Although I was surprised to see her out of bed and walking around on her own, my mother barely seemed fazed by the sight of me holding a knife. Alert for the first time in weeks, she knew exactly what was transpiring in that billiard room.
“Don’t, my darling,” she said, her hands disconcertingly strong as she wrested the knife from my grip. “They’re not worth destroying your young life over.”
I let her take the knife from my hand and collapsed against her, weeping. With the knife in one hand and stroking my hair with the other, she addressed my father.
“Fifty thousand dollars, Winston? Your price has gone up. If I recall, you only offered twenty-five thousand to make the man I loved go away.”
“That didn’t stop him from taking it,” my father said with not an ounce of softness in his voice. “You can judge me for it all you want--and you certainly have--but it was the best thing to happen to you. It allowed you to get married, pretend that Lenora was my child, and keep your precious reputation intact.”
His words caused something inside my mother to break. I watched it happen. Her eyes went dark and her body still. Standing silent and motionless, she reminded me of a clock unnervingly stopped at midnight.
Yet one small part of her continued to tick. I saw that, too. Something coiled around the gears of her mind, ready to spring.
And spring she did.
Toward my father.
Knife in hand.
Not stopping until the blade was deep in his side.
My father didn’t scream when the knife plunged into him. I did that for him, letting out a sharp cry that pinged around the room in an infernal echo. I could still hear it when my mother yanked the knife from my father’s gut.
He clutched at the wound, blood seeping between his fingers as he stumbled against the pool table.
“Please take my daughter out of the room,” my mother said to Ricky in a voice as calm as a spring morn. “Now.”
Ricky leapt from the chair and took me by the hand, although the last thing I wanted was to feel his touch. Yet I was too stunned and horrified to do anything but let him pull me from the room, into the hallway, and toward the foyer.
“It’s a dream, right?” I said, more to myself than to Ricky. “Just a terrible dream.”
Yet the waking nightmare continued as a grunt and a gurgle sounded from the billiard room. My mother emerged a few moments later, still holding the now-crimson knife. Blood covered her nightgown and dripped from her hands in large dollops that fell across the foyer floor.
I pulled myself from Ricky’s grasp and ran up the Grand Stairs, wanting nothing more than to be upstairs in bed, fast asleep, waking up to a new day in which none of this had happened. My mother took a few shuffling steps, moving as if in a daze. Perhaps she thought it was a dream as well. A horrible, terrible, blood-drenched dream.
But as my mother climbed the steps to join Ricky on the landing, I saw it was all too real--and that the blood covering her wasn’t just my father’s.
It was also her own.
A tear in the fabric of her nightgown revealed a gushing wound in her stomach. The moment I saw it, I knew my mother had also used the knife on herself.
“Mother!” I cried as I started to run back down the stairs.
Ricky, still on the landing, halted me with a gruff “Don’t come any closer, Ginny!”
I stopped halfway to the landing, frozen by confusion and fear. I watched as Ricky approached my mother and took the blood-soaked knife from her hands.
“Please,” my mother whispered to him. “Please put an end to my misery.”
Ricky shook his head. “You don’t mean that.”
“Don’t tell me what I mean,” my mother snapped. “You don’t know me. You don’t know how much I’ve suffered. You wouldn’t, of course. You’re just a shiftless, worthless cad who will amount to nothing.”
My mother’s eyes contained a determined spark that worried me. I knew what she was trying to do--and that Ricky was falling for it.