Page 52 of The Last Letter of Rachel Ellsworth

Chapter Forty-Four

Mariah had been dreading Christmas for months. As they toured the Jardin Majorelle gardens, she felt something inside let go, and her entire body felt more at ease.

“I’m surprised it’s so busy,” she said as they made their way around the paths thick with tourists.

“The weather is good, and Muslims don’t celebrate Christmas, so it’s just a normal day here.”

“True.” The crowd did seem to be mainly made of up non-Europeans in many different modes of dress, jeans and Western dresses, hijabs and tunics and loose trousers.

A young blond woman sashayed through the crowds in a sundress that was almost nothing, her hair braided in cornrows, a big African necklace around her throat.

Mariah raised a brow toward Henry. “Can you spell clueless ?”

He shrugged. “People do their thing.”

Veronica swooned over one plant and then another, naming them by their Latin names, cacti and palms and the odd trailing vine.

She was lost in it, her fingers brushing over the leaves of a flowering tree, raising her head to look at the weavings of plants overhead, and bending over to examine some in pots.

She exclaimed over the lily pond and the pools with fountains.

“You really like plants, don’t you?” Mariah said.

“I really do,” she said. “When I was a girl, plants were something my mom used to beautify our world. Petunias and geraniums brightened things up inside, and all the potted plants made our trailer seem like a place where happy people lived.”

Mariah almost said A trailer? but stopped herself in time. Rude, even for her. “Did you have a garden in the house your kids grew up in?”

“Yeah.” She took a breath. “It was the worst part of leaving, honestly. It was beautiful, and my ex is never going to take care of it.” She shook her head, then physically shook her shoulders. “Not a thing I can control, but yeah—I look forward to planting a new one someday.”

It was probably right then that Mariah started hatching her plan, but she said, “Maybe that’s your job going forward, plants or something.”

Veronica looked up, her fingers lightly cupping a tender pink flower. Henry clicked his shutter, and she smiled. “Maybe it is. Thanks for the idea.”

“Sure.”

“Show me how to take a picture of a flower, Henry.”

“Of course.” He looped the camera strap over her neck, and said, “Look through the viewfinder.”

She did. Unlike looking through her phone camera, the world narrowed to a square of color.

Peering through the viewfinder was like seeing everything through a magic door, all distractions chopped away.

The vivid orange flower with a long red tongue, the curve of its petal downward, the blur of the background.

“Turn the focus to see how it works,” he said, placing her finger on the right spot. “Now shoot some pictures, just to see what you have.”

She did, feeling something tilt a bit with each snatched moment. Just this one, only that. Here, then gone. Again.

“Good. Keep moving the focus and your body, and shoot experimentally.”

Mariah became aware of a sense of ... quiet ... in her body as she followed instructions. She shot several photos, raised her head, focused in the distance on a blue wall, a yellow pot, the alternating pattern of checkerboard tiles. Quiet, quiet, quiet.

Testing it, she raised her head and looked at the scene, just holding the camera. She still liked looking at the vividly blue wall, the pots placed just so against it, but the sense of quiet bled away. She ducked back into the camera, and there it was.

“Wow,” she said aloud, shaking her head. “I didn’t know it would feel so different to use a real camera.”

Henry smiled. “Now I want you to see how the depth of field works. Turn this and look at the difference in the background. It goes from being totally in focus to blurring out.”

“That is cool,” Mariah said, and shot several photos at different depths, then moved to a cactus against a tiled wall.

She shot it in clear focus, the spines crisp, the background of the garden bed behind it blurring out.

She turned the dial, made the background clear, changed it back to soft.

Raised her head at different levels, and then found herself focusing on the square wall with the round edge of the pots.

“Good one,” Henry said.

She raised the camera to his face, his long chin, his thick eyebrows.

He waited for her to click the shutter a few times, and then nudged her gently to focus on Veronica, who was kneeling with a tiger-striped cat beside a trio of giant cacti.

She hadn’t bothered to do anything with her hair, and it was wavy, loose, shining.

She held her hand out to the cat, who arched against her palm. Mariah took the photo.

And suddenly, she had a sense of herself now, shooting the photo, and sometime in the future, looking at the photo she’d just taken.

She had a sense of time weaving over itself, both of those moments standing side by side, connected only by Mariah’s part in both.

It made her a little dizzy, and she straightened.

If all of time folded over itself, the past and the future and the present touching at certain places, that meant her mother still existed somewhere, and in some places, Mariah wasn’t even born, and in some threads, the unhappy boy who’d marched into the store that day was also somewhere before he did that terrible thing, and—

Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. Hand to her throat, she found herself suspended in a flashback of that moment, that singular moment when she knew but didn’t know what was happening, what that noise was.

Hanging there, that moment, seeing her mom, standing beside her with an avocado in her hand, then not standing there and Mariah was eye level with her on the floor, the cool tile floor and there was so much blood—

“Ugh.” She reached for Henry, and he caught her arm.

“You’re okay,” he said. “Take a breath. In, out.”

She gripped his arm hard, but the scene didn’t leave her, and it was so loud, so present, that she squeezed her eyes closed, smelling oranges and something disgusting, coppery, so awful. Blood, which was under her face and there was something wrong with—

She slammed her hands over her ears, trying to get away from the roar in her head, curled her body protectively, feeling her shoulder bang against something hard.

Time stopped, got lost, became something else, not minutes lining up in a row, but circling, folding, flashing memories, a blue box of macaroni and cheese on the floor, changing color as the cardboard soaked up blood, a visual of her foot at an impossible angle, the sudden recognition that her leg was exploding with pain, the hands of a person—what person?

—tying a tourniquet made of a belt around her thigh.

Twisting, flashing, noise.

She came back to herself twisted up against the wall, the camera caught between her legs and belly, Mariah and Henry creating a human curtain to guard her from prying eyes.

“I’m okay,” she said.

They turned, each reaching out a hand to help her, but neither hand belonged to her mother, who had been holding an avocado, round and green.

A blistering sense of anger rose through her.

She slapped their hands away and stood, yanking Henry’s camera off her neck.

“Leave me alone,” she growled, and stalked away.

The blond woman with her braids had a selfie stick and was filming herself against the blue wall.

“You’re a fucking idiot,” she said. “Put some clothes on, brush your hair.”

The woman lowered her phone and smirked. “Jealous much?”

Mariah started toward her, filled with a kind of violent lust that wanted to knock the woman down, break her phone, end her fatuousness spilling out into the world, distracting from all the things that were genuinely wrong, like—

A body caught her from behind, hard, and brought her up short. “Leave her,” Henry said. “Let’s go.” She tried to shake out of his grip, but he held her unmercifully hard, and he was a big man, a strong man.

“She’s a fucking idiot!” Mariah repeated.

Of course the woman turned the camera and filmed it, the tempest in the courtyard of the Jardin Majorelle, and Mariah roared with impotent rage. An official in a uniform approached them and spoke in quiet French, “Please come with me, mademoiselle.”

She would have broken free of Henry, gone back for the girl, since she was in trouble, anyway, but he didn’t ease up at all until they were outside the gates. “Sit down,” he said. “I’ll get a cab.”

The fight went out of her, and she sank down on a bench, trembling with the aftermath of her blinding rage. She bent her head into her hands. “Oh my God, what’s wrong with me?”

Veronica sat down beside her and offered a bottle of water.

She said nothing. Mariah grabbed the bottle and chugged it, and the water cooled her throat, then her belly, and it radiated outward.

After a minute, she raised her eyes. Veronica simply waited, her expression calm.

“What’s wrong with me?” she asked again.

“You’re angry. With good reason.”

Mariah collapsed backward against the wall, a sense of helplessness welling in her eyes, her throat.

Veronica said, “I once had such a bout of rage that I ended up getting arrested.”

“You? Were you a teenager?”

“Nope.” She laughed a little. “It was less than two years ago.”

“Tell me.”

“When I was in the middle of my divorce, I was trying to find a place to rent that would let me bring my dog, Sophie. She wasn’t that big, but she was a husky mixed with chow, and apartments don’t like those dogs, so I was having a hard time.

She was very old, and I felt anxious about leaving her at the house—I just wasn’t sure anyone would give her the love I did. ”

Something about the tone of her voice settled Mariah a little.

“She had a cold or something, coughing, and I took her to the vet, and they gave her some antibiotics, which had to be administered every four hours. She didn’t really like pills.

Dogs don’t.” She shook her hair out of her face, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses.

“A slice of cheese always did it, so I bought some American slices and gave my ex instructions. I called him regularly. I went over there every afternoon when Fiona—the girlfriend—wasn’t around.

” She sucked her upper lip into her mouth.

“And then I had training for a job in a call center, which—don’t laugh—I was desperate to land, and I had to work two days in a row, past the afternoon hour I was ‘allowed’ to visit my own dog. ”

Mariah felt where it was going, this story, and she wanted to tell her to stop, but she wanted to hear, too.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve guessed. They didn’t give her the antibiotics regularly, and they weren’t paying attention well enough, and Sophie ...” Her voice cracked. “Died. Of something that shouldn’t have been fatal. They just neglected her and she died.

“So I went over there, and Fiona said it wasn’t the right time of day, so I took a brick out of my garden, and I started breaking windows.”

“What?” Mariah gasped.

“Yep.” She shook her head. “They were really great windows, too, leaded glass, some of them.” She brushed a tear away, turned her hand over and took Mariah’s. “I managed to shatter most of the windows along the front porch and around one side before the police arrived.”

Henry sat beside Veronica on the other side. “And they arrested you?”

“Domestic violence. And I had to pay damages, too,” she said, a laugh escaping and turning into a painful sob she caught and swallowed, as if she wasn’t allowed even that moment of grief. “I had to take classes, and I’m still not allowed to come within a hundred feet of the house.”

“He deserved it,” Mariah said fiercely. “What a dick.”

“Yes.” She was quiet, looking into the distance.

“The thing is, it didn’t bring Sophie back.

And I’m still suffering the consequences of losing my temper.

I know a dog is not the same as a mother, but I don’t think there’s a lot of difference in the violence you were feeling just now and the violence I felt that day. ”

Mariah imagined Veronica, so proper and hungry for approval, in handcuffs. She still felt restless, the noise popping in her head every so often, but something about Veronica’s tone of voice centered her. Maybe the violence stemmed from helplessness.

Which made her think of the boy with the gun, the one she wanted to punish, and his violence. Had that come from helplessness, too?

She thought of Veronica, breaking windows methodically, being dragged away by the police. She raised her head. “I hate that that happened to you.”

“Thanks. The point is, I don’t want you to give yourself more trouble. You’ve had plenty, right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. Thank you.”

On the way back to the riad , Mariah asked, “Did it feel good to break things?”

“It was very satisfying.”

Henry chuckled. The low, warm sound made all of them smile.