Page 77 of Forget Me Not
We dropped Liam off an hour ago, my mom and I watching from the car as he walked inside. I have no idea how long this will take, how a person even proves a story like his, so we settled into a restaurant a few blocks away, the two of us sitting on opposite sides of a booth as my mother nervously peels at a napkin, my own hands wrapped in rolled gauze. The place feels suspended in time, like we’ve stepped into some scene ripped from a page in the past. There’s a defunct jukebox sitting ignored in the corner, checkerboard tile scuffed on the floor—and then I notice a theater marquee blinking through the glass in the background, red bulbs flashing as I imagine a young Marcia sneaking inside, losing herself in fantasies of some faraway life.
Would it be better to die,she wondered,than not be allowed to live at all?
“Claire,” my mom says, and I jerk my head up as she cracks the silence between us, brittle and thin. She looks exhausted, two heavy bags the hue of bruises hammocked beneath her bloodshot eyes. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see your message until this morning, but when you said you were still here, staying at Galloway—”
She stops, her eyes filling with tears as she looks down at the table, and I know exactly how she feels. It’s the same way I felt when my father first called. That flash of regret, all the things left unsaid, when I thought my mother might actually be gone.
“Should we get started?” I ask, watching as she nods before I tap at my phone. It’s been charging in the outlet on the wall beside us and I push it to the center of the table now, red sphere pulsing as our conversation records. “Tell me about Katherine Prichard.”
My mother sighs, her eyes slowly morphing to glass.
“She didn’t deserve what happened to her,” says at last. “None of us did.”
“And what happened?” I ask.
“Mitchell happened,” she says simply. “Lily happened.”
Another tear appears before she wipes it silently, rubbing the moisture onto a napkin scrap.
“You have to understand, Claire, that I was so lost after your grandparents died.”
I swallow my response, once again familiar with the feeling, because even though my parents are still alive, there were so many years when they both felt like ghosts.
“I was barely eighteen,” she continues. “Way too young to be all on my own. And I had your father, of course, but when your life gets suddenly rocked like that, when the rug gets pulled out beneath you, it’s like there’s this temptation to tear the rest of it down, too.”
She looks up at me now, a real pain in her eyes. A pain I had always brushed off as disinterest, too busy blaming her for all that went wrong.
“So, you broke up with him,” I say as she nods her head.
“My first mistake. And then I met Mitchell, my second mistake.”
Our waitress appears with two cups of coffee, sliding them both across the table as my mother stares down at her lap. I reach for mine first, a warm pinch on my palms as I imagine Mitchell meeting my mother the same way as the others, sniffing her out as something defenseless and weak.
“Technically, Eric introduced us,” she continues once we’re alone again. “He was fairly new at school, didn’t have many friends, and that made it feel safe, I guess. Recognizing another person out there. Besides, he talked about becoming a cop after graduation and I guess that made me think:how bad could this be?”
She grabs a pack of sugar from the caddy between us, fingers shaking as she tears at the slit.
“The whole thing felt like an escape,” she adds, a sigh erupting as she dips a spoon in her coffee. “From my life, from the reality of what happened.”
“The escapebeing Galloway,” I clarify, picturing her blond hair blowing as she rode in that camper, those joints blissfully blunting her sharp edges of pain. It had felt like an escape for me, too. A distraction from all the things in my life that went wrong: my family, my job. Mitchell stocking that guesthouse and speaking as if he understood me so intimately, welcoming me in more than my own mother had.
“Back then,” she says, nodding, “they just called it the Farm.”
I look up at her now, a new confusion starting to sink in.
“But if you had been there already, then how did you not know Natalie was working for Mitchell?”
My mom twists her head, not understanding.
“We all went there together,” I say, remembering how Liam had said our surprise visit that summer was what made my mother realize where Natalie was going; the reason she ultimately forcedher to quit. “Even if you never knew his last name, how did you not know that property was Mitchell’s if you used to go there when you were young, too?”
“Because the place they live now isn’t the Farm,” she says. “Not the one that I knew, at least.”
I stay silent, the timer beneath us ticking dutifully forward as I think back to the diary again, Marcia describing the first time Mitchell drove her out to his home—a place, I now realize, that was only thirty minutes from her house in Draper, from where my mother and I are sitting right now. Not the three hours away of Galloway today.
“Do you remember how to get there?” I ask, watching as the blood drains from her face. She stares at me for a second, trying to decide how to respond, until her eyes divert back to the table. Fingers grabbing the napkin and continuing to tear.
“There are some things you never forget.”
