Page 23
“You’ve always been such a disappointment.”
I resist the urge to laugh. My mother’s viciousness used to bother me, but now it only seems pathetic. I kneel on the bed and offer her the medication. As always, she swipes at it, trying to knock it from my hand. “I don’t want it!” she snarls.
“I know, but you have to take it,” I explain gently. “It’ll make you feel better.”
“Nothing will make me feel better. Unless you want to throw yourself headfirst out of that window.”
“Lovely, Mother,” I say drily. “Take your medicine.”
“I don’t want it!”
“I don’t give a fuck!”
We both recoil at that. I am not a vulgar person and can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve used that word in anger.
And it seems my mother’s viciousness can still hurt me. That’s not an encouraging realization.
I take a deep breath and look sternly at her to hide my discomfiture. “Mother, take your medicine willingly, or I’ll grind it into powder and mix it with your painkillers.”
“You can’t do that,” she says in a thready voice. “You don’t know how the drugs will interact. And dosages are different for pills than IV.”
“Then take them. I’m not joking.”
She turns almost red-faced with hate. But her rage is impotent. She is an elderly invalid trapped in bed, doomed to slowly decline for the rest of her life. I am not young anymore, but I’m not yet old, and if need be, I can and will carry out my threat. She can do nothing to stop me. I am completely in control.
And God help me, but it feels so good.
She takes the pills and swallows them. She refuses to look at me, instead staring stoically ahead at the mirror. Her face reddens further when she sees her wasted form, and I feel another thrill. A tinge of guilt colors that thrill, but it’s easy to brush away considering what she did to me and Annie when we were children.
I get to my feet, but before I can walk away, she says, “I hate you. Both of you.”
I actually do laugh at that. “What an unkind thing to say, Mother,” I reply drily. “Especially since Annie is dead.”
“You don’t know that she’s dead. Knowing her, she probably just ran off somewhere so she could whore around and party and act like a child without you trying to talk sense into her or me to remind her that she’s not nearly so precious as she thinks she is.”
“Maybe so. Anyway, thank you for the sentiment. I’ll leave you alone now.”
“It’s true, though,” she says. “I hate you both. And I’m not sorry.”
I’m not sure what possesses me to listen to this, but I turn around and sit on the edge of the bed. I smile tenderly down at her and say, “All right, Mother. Tell me. Tell me all about it. Your muscle relaxants and sleep aids won’t kick in for another half hour or so. That should be long enough. Tell me how much you hate me and my dead or possibly missing sister.”
She shakes her head. Her expression grows wistful, and oddly, I can almost see her as she was when she was younger. When she speaks again, the viciousness is gone. In its place is melancholy.
“It wasn’t just you. Your father too. I couldn’t handle being… trapped.”
“You could have left at any time,” I tell her. “You could have abandoned us and gone anywhere you wanted.”
“I should have,” she agrees. “But I didn’t. I stayed because it was the right thing to do. Then I stayed because I thought that maybe I would like being a mom after all. Maybe I would fall in love with you two as I watched you get older. Then I stayed because I had nowhere to go and didn’t want to struggle. Your father at least had the decency to be rich. Of course, he left his money to you, so it didn’t do me any good.”
“Except, of course, for your round-the-clock medical care,” I remind her.
She laughs bitterly. “Yes. Except that it facilitates your mission to watch me suffer for as long as you possibly can.”
I don’t reply to that. She’s right. And for that, I am not sorry.
“Then I stayed because I hated myself,” she continues. “I woke up one morning when I was forty-six and realized that it was too late for me. I remember it distinctly because it was the week before Annie went missing. You two had left the house three years before, and I thought I was free.
“But I didn’t leave. I stayed with a man I didn’t love, and it wasn’t because I couldn’t start over. I could have done all right. But I didn’t. I… had gotten so used to giving up, that I just allowed myself to stay that way.”
“I can see how that’s our fault,” I tell her.
“Oh, you self-righteous, self-important, smug little smartypants bitch,” she hisses. “You… always act like you’re better than everyone. Sensible Mary. Smart Mary. If only everyone would listen to Mary.”
I sigh and get to my feet. “Good night, Mother.”
“I hated you two because you two stole my chance to be myself, and you didn’t care!”
I turn back around. I’m rarely shocked by anything my mother says, but that shocks me. “You could have left,” I repeat. “You could have done and been whatever you wanted at any time.”
“Oh, you know how I would have been seen if I did that. I would have been the cruel mother who abandoned her children. No one would have paid attention to anything else. As soon as your father pumped you inside of me, I became nothing more than a mother. I died that day.”
“You poor woman.”
“Oh, go to Hell. You two turned out all right. Especially you. You have a nice little life here. Meanwhile, I wasted my life, and I’m rotting away.”
I sigh and rub the bridge of my nose. “What are you looking for, Mother? What do you expect me to say?”
“I don’t expect you to say anything. It doesn’t matter. What can I do now but say hurtful things? Even those don’t hurt you. I just…” She lifts her hands and lets them drop. “I thought that I was going to travel the world. I wanted to be a travel writer.” She laughs. “God, that sounds so foolish now. I thought I was going to visit exotic places, love exotic men, eat exotic foods, be an exotic woman. And your father promised to give me all of that. Not the exotic men part, of course, but it would have been easy enough to cheat on him.”
A memory flashes through my mind of a man I knew when I was younger, but I can’t quite place it before the memory fades.
“And… None of that happened.” Tears well in her eyes. “I got pregnant, and all of a sudden, you were the entire world. Then I had Annie, and she was the entire world. Your father didn’t care about me or his promises to me. He just wanted to be a good father. That’s all he cared about was being a papa.”
“Well, you’ll be happy to know that he wasn’t a very good one,” I reply. “But you already knew that.”
She nods. “Yes. I ruined him eventually. It was my only real victory. I tried to ruin you and Annie, but the two of you were too strong. You two insisted on having the lives you dreamed of while I had… nothing.”
I can’t listen to any more of this. “You tried to kill Annie twice and me once,” I tell her. “You were cruel, vindictive and vicious. You brought nothing but pain to those you should have loved. What do you want from me? Sympathy?”
She smiles slightly. “I want to go back to before you were born and leave your father the moment he mentioned the word marriage. But it doesn’t matter what I want. It’s too late.”
She sips some water, then says, “I hate Annie more than you, if that helps.”
I roll my eyes. “If it helps you to tell me, then I’m happy for you. Annie’s dead.”
"No, she isn't. She's out there traveling to exotic places, sleeping with exotic men, and living an exotic life as an exotic woman. She's doing everything I should have done. She's living the life I wanted, and I hate her so much for it."
I shake my head. “Okay, Mother.”
I walk toward the door. I’m not sure what I was hoping for from this conversation, but it turned out to be just as pointless as I should have expected.
“She sent me a letter, you know. After she left.”
I stop in my tracks and spin around. “What?”
“Annie. She sent me a letter.”
I storm back to the bed. Mother’s eyelids are drooping now, and her speech is slurred. The medicine hit her faster than I expected.
I grab her shoulders and shake her. “What letter? Tell me! When?”
Her eyes flutter. “Said she was… sleeping with an artist.” She chuckles. “Little bitch.”
“You’re lying!” I hiss. “You’re lying!”
She smiles. She’s nearly out, but she can hear the tone of my voice, and she knows she’s gotten to me. She laughs softly and shrugs. “Sure. I probably am.”
I reach back and slap her hard. Her eyes fly open, and she gasps. But then they droop again. My handprint stands out on her cheek, but she grins and says, “She hates you too.”
“Fuck you!” I shriek. “You old bitch! You’re lying! You…”
She's asleep now. I let her fall to the bed and stumble backwards, trembling from head to toe. Then I run from the room. I go to my room and collapse on the bed, sobbing bitterly.
It can’t be true. She’s only a mean old woman trying to hurt me the only way she can anymore. It’s not true. Annie loved me. She would never hurt me like that.
But in the back of my mind, a part of me knows that Annie inherited the same vicious streak that Mother has. And I know that there’s at least a small chance that Mother is telling the truth.