Page 62 of Lucy Undying

“My mother was obsessed with progeny,” I say, using her word for it. Not “children.” Not “families.” Progeny. “She was always bitter she only had one child, angry with me for taking so long and ‘ruining her’ on my way out. Her phrase, not mine. I’m aware neither is my fault. But she didn’t feel that way. She made it clear she was owed more than she had been given, and it was my responsibility to pay that debt. I didn’t think too much of it growing up, because it felt nebulous and far away.”

I don’t turn on my side, don’t look at Elle. I need to say this part without watching her reaction, because it might break me. “When I was sixteen, she had me visit a special doctor. Even though I felt fine and had hit puberty like a lineman tackling an opponent—”

“What?” Elle asks.

“Sorry, American football reference. Hard. I hit it hard,” I say, laughing. I squeeze my boobs. “These heavy babies were already D-cups by the time I was fourteen. Anyway, this special doctor told me I had a hormone imbalance that needed to be corrected. My mother gave me shots every day. Which was weird for many reasons, but mostly because she was doing it herself. Taking care of me with her own two hands, not via a nanny or tutor or any of the various employees she’d paid to raise me. Then my stomach got tender and swollen. I told her something was wrong. Like usual, I expected her to dismiss my pain. But she was gentle and attentive. And I gobbled it up. I reveled in it. At last, I’d cracked through her ice. She loved me. Appendicitis, she said. She took me to a private medical center. Held my hand as I was wheeled into an operating room.

“When I woke up in recovery, she was gone. She wasn’t even waiting for me at home. No one would tell me how the surgery went, whether my appendix had burst, anything. So, I researched appendicitis. The symptoms didn’t match up. I’d been lied to, and I didn’t understand why, or what they were lying about.

“But my mother had made two very big mistakes in raising me. The first was assuming I wasn’t paying attention when she entered passcodes into locks. And the second was giving me elocution, public speaking, and acting lessons so I could become charismatic and commanding like her. I broke into my mother’s office and used her phone to call the doctor.”

I hitch my voice up so it’s higher, smoother, colder. I flatten my affect, every sentence delivered without life or inflection. “ ‘I’m calling to follow up about my daughter’s procedure. She’s complaining of pain in her shoulder. Are we concerned?’ The doctor reassured me that referred pain from the swelling was to be expected. And then he informed me that he had been correct—the procedure was a success. Six viable eggs retrieved.”

“What the fuck?” Elle says.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought, too. But this was my one chance. I stayed calm and told him, still in my mother’s voice, that I had changed my mind. A surrogate couldn’t be trusted. I wanted the eggs destroyed. He protested, but my mother never allowed anyone to question her decisions, so neither did I. I told him to call me back as soon as it was done. Then I sat in my mother’s chair in her pristine office and waited until I had confirmation that what had been stolen was out of my mother’s reach forever.

“They’d lied to me, drugged me, operated on me, and literally taken part of me away. That was when I knew: Everything I’d thought I’d seen and overheard over the years—the nightmare glimpses, the creeping suspicions? They were all correct. My mom was a monster, and so was everyone who worked for her.

“I ran to my dad. He’d been my ally sometimes, or at least a place where I could retreat for ice cream and movies and a few hours where nothing was expected of me. But when I told him what she’d done, he wasn’t surprised. He told me it was best not to fight her. He wouldn’t even—” My voice at last breaks.

Elle moves closer, draping an arm around my waist, holding me tight.

I clear my throat. “He wouldn’t fight for me. He was old and tired and broken by her. That was the first time I ran away for more than just the night. It wouldn’t be the last. It was an ongoing war where I lost every skirmish. I tried to tell the police what Goldaming Life was up to. She had me committed to an involuntary psychiatric hold. I tried to live on my own. She paid landlords to evict me, friends to throw me out, girlfriends to dump me. She even donated a new library building to my college so they’d disenroll me and all my student loans would come due at once. I did what I could to carve out independence, but it was impossible. She was inevitable. I knew one day she’d break me.”

I sigh, running Elle’s soft hair between my fingers, marveling at the shades of red. Elle is like light. Subtle and changeable depending on what she’s filtered through. Right now, it’s a bedroom haze of satisfaction and vulnerability, so she’s all glowing gold.

“And then my mother died.” I don’t try to hide the smile in my voice. The truth of this next part I keep to myself, though. As much as I trust Elle, there are still some things I should never admit. Like how I knew that my mother used Ambien every night and slept like the dead. Like how I used her passwords to hack her home automation controls and set the middle-of-the-night thermostat as low as it would go. Like how I attacked her with cold, triggering her autoimmune reaction over and over again until her body couldn’t make enough blood cells to replace what she was losing. I can’t know for certain if it was what killed her, but I do believe it sped up the process, and I’m glad.

When she died, I flew with her body on the private jet. I threw a fit and demanded Dickie and the other Goldaming Life ghouls take a different one. For once I got my way. When the flight attendant was preparing my meal, I had a few precious moments alone. I lifted the lid of Mother’s casket. There she was. As cold and lifeless in death as she had been in life. It was easy to imagine she might open her eyes. Easy to picture a red gleam in them.

I had a present for her. A piece I’d made in the metalworking class I’d taken before she got me expelled. I had to pick up so many extra shifts to buy that much silver, but it was worth it. It was surprisingly hard to drive my clumsy knife between her bones, and alarmingly loud. But it was worth it. She left permanent marks on me. I left one on her, too.

My mom is dead, and she’s staying dead. I worked hard to create this shot at freedom, and I can’t blow it.

“Anyway,” I say, turning on my side to face Elle. “That’s my mother. Who she was and what she represents. This is my one chance to get away forever.” It’s apology and explanation. I want to stay with Elle and get to know her better. To see if we have a chance. I hope she gets that in any reasonable world, she’d be enough to hold me here.

“Iris,” Elle says. “Do you get seasick?”

It’s so far from anything I expected her to say in response to all my trauma that I laugh, shocked out of my morose self-pity. “No, I don’t get seasick.”

“How would you feel about being on a boat for a long time? I mean a long time. A month and a half, maybe two months. Not a nice ship, either. A cargo ship.”

“Am I in a box in this scenario?”

She smiles, dimples dipping into existence and then disappearing just as quickly, like a mirage of happiness. Then Elle gets serious. I don’t think I’ve seen her deadly serious before. As petite and delicately beautiful as she is, there’s something threatening in her narrowed eyes. Her voice lowers as she says, “Give me three days to arrange things, and I’ll get you somewhere they can never touch you again.”

I should ask how. Instead, the question that comes out of my mouth is, “Why?”

Why is she helping me? No one else ever has. Even when they believed me, they didn’t dare go against the power of my mother and Goldaming Life.

Elle doesn’t blink. She holds my gaze with her lightless ocean eyes. I could sink to the bottom of them and be secret and safe forever. “Because,” she says, “so many girls deserve help, but I can’t help them all. I can save you, though. Ask me to save you. Please.”

I kiss the tip of her nose, then her forehead, then her chin. Her lips I merely brush, a promise. She takes it as me accepting her offer and buries her face in the curve of my neck.

I don’t believe she can actually save me. It’s cruel of me to let her think it’s possible. But for today, in this precious, dreamy now, we can live in that fantasy.

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