Page 28 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Maybe that was the answer. There were all kinds of stories about mothers lifting cars off their trapped babies or performing other tremendous physical feats in order to protect their children. Sure, it wasn’t common, but it happened.

But that still didn’t explain the look on Laura’s face when she pulled the knife through. Blank. Almost workman-like. Not panicked. Not afraid. She could’ve just as easily been sitting at her desk reviewing a patient’s chart.

Andy shivered.

Thunder rumbled in the distance. The sun would not go down for another hour, but the clouds were dark and heavy with the promise of rain. Andy could hear waves throwing themselves onto the beach. Seagulls hashing out dinner plans. She looked down at her mother’s tidy bungalow. Most of the lights were on. Gordon was pacing back and forth in front of the kitchen window. Her mother was seated at the table, but all that Andy could make out was her hand, the one that wasn’t strapped to her waist, resting on a placemat. Laura’s fingers occasionally tapped, but otherwise she was still.

Andy saw Gordon throw his hands into the air. He walked toward the kitchen door.

Andy stepped back into the shadows. She heard the door slam closed. She chanced another look outside the window.

Gordon walked down the porch stairs. The motion detector flipped on the floodlights. He looked up at them, shielding his eyes with his hand. Instead of heading toward her apartment, he stopped on the bottom riser and sat down. He rested his forehead on the heels of his hands.

Her first thought was that he was crying, but then she realized that he was probably trying to regain his composure so that Andy wouldn’t be even more worried when she saw him.

She had seen Gordon cry once, and only once, before. It was at the beginning of her parents’ divorce. He hadn’t let go and sobbed or anything. What he had done was so much worse. Tears had rolled down his cheeks, one long drip after another, like condensation on the side of a glass. He’d kept sniffing, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He had left for work one morning assuming his fourteen-year marriage was solid, then before lunchtime had been served with divorce papers.

“I don’t understand,” he had told Andy between sniffles. “I just don’t understand.”

Andy couldn’t remember the man who was her real father, and even thinking the words real father felt like a betrayal to Gordon. Sperm donor felt too overtly feminist. Not that Andy wasn’t a feminist, but she didn’t want to be the kind of feminist that men hated.

Her birth father—which sounded strange but kind of made sense because adopted kids said birth mother—was an optometrist whom Laura had met at a Sandals resort. Which was weird, because her mother hated to travel anywhere. Andy thought they’d met in the Bahamas, but she was told the story so long ago that a lot of details were lost.

These were the things she knew: That her birth parents had never married. That Andy was born the first year they were together. That her birth father, Jerry Randall, had died in a car accident while on a trip home to Chicago when Andy was eighteen months old.

Unlike Laura’s parents, who had both died before Andy was born, Andy still had grandparents on her birth father’s side—Laverne and Phil Randall. She had an old photo somewhere of herself, no more than two, sitting in their laps, balanced between each of their knees. There was a painting of the beach on the wood-paneled wall behind them. The couch looked scruffy. They seemed like kind people, and maybe they were in some ways, but they had completely cut off both Laura and Andy when Gordon had entered their lives.

Gordon—of all people. A Phi Beta Sigma who had graduated Georgetown Law while working as a volunteer coordinator at Habitat for Humanity. A man who played golf, loved classical music, was the president of his local wine-tasting society and had chosen for his vocation one of the most boring areas of the law, helping wealthy people figure out how their money would be spent after they died.

That Andy’s birth grandparents had balked at the dorkiest, most uptight black man walking the planet simply because of the color of his skin was enough to make Andy glad she didn’t have any contact with them.

The kitchen door opened. Andy watched Gordon stand up. He tripped the floodlights again. Laura handed him a plate of food. Gordon said something Andy could not hear. Laura slammed the door in lieu of response.

Through the kitchen window, she saw her mother making her way back to the table, gripping the counter, the doorjamb, the back of a chair—anything she could find to take the pressure off of her leg.

Andy could’ve helped her. She could’ve been down there making her mother tea or helping her wash off the hospital smell the way she’d done so many times before.

I’ve earned the right to be alone.

The TV by Andy’s bed caught her attention. The set was small, formerly taking up space on her mother’s kitchen counter. By habit, Andy had turned it on when she walked through the door. The sound was muted. CNN was showing the diner video again.

Andy closed her eyes, because she knew what the video showed.

She breathed in.

Out.

The air-conditioner hummed in her ears. The ceiling fan wah-wahed overhead. She felt cold air curl around her neck and face. She was so tired. Her brain was filled with slow-rolling marbles. She wanted to sleep, but she knew she could not sleep here. She would have to stay at Gordon’s tonight and then, first thing tomorrow morning, her father would require she make some kind of a plan. Gordon always wanted a plan.

A car door opened and closed. Andy knew it was her father because the McMansions along her mother’s street, all of them so huge that they literally blocked out the sun, were always vacant during the most extreme heat of the summer.

She heard scuffling feet across the driveway. Then Gordon’s heavy footsteps were on the metal stairs to the apartment.

Andy grabbed a trashbag out of the box. She was supposed to be packing. She opened the top drawer of her dresser and dumped her underwear into the bag.

“Andrea?” Gordon knocked on the door, then opened it.

He glanced around the room. It was hard to tell whether Andy had been robbed or a tornado had hit. Dirty clothes carpeted the floor. Shoes were piled on top of a flat box that contained two unassembled Ikea shoe racks. The bathroom door hung open. Her period panties from a week ago hung stiffly from the towel rod.