Page 79 of Forget Me Not
She turns toward me now, her skin splotchy and damp, and I watch as she wipes her fingers under her eyes, two black crescents smudging onto her cheeks before her gaze lifts to the sky.
“There was this mound of dirt beneath one of the trees like a hole had been dug and filled back in, and that’s when I knew,” she says. “I knew what they did and I knew I had to leave, too.”
“How did you do it?” I ask, taking a step closer as I imagine the first day Marcia showed up, my mom lying in the grass outside this same barn. Smiling vaguely, keeping her distance. Biding her time as she planned her next move. “How did you leave?”
“We used to go into town for supplies,” she says. “None of ushad any money so we stole what we needed. Then one day, when we were close to home, I slipped out the back door of one of the houses.”
I chew on my cheek, trying to envision my own mother climbing through windows or jimmying front doors. Fingers flipping through closets until she looked around and finally found herself alone.
“I ran back to your father,” she adds, drawing my attention back to her. “Of course, he took me right back. He was always too good for me.”
“What did he say when you showed up?”
“Nothing,” she says. “He was just happy I was okay, then a few weeks later, I found out I was pregnant.”
She looks at me, finally, eyes red and wet and begging for forgiveness.
“I knew it wasn’t his,” she says, and I bow my head, my own eyes drilling into a spot on the floor, because even though Liam told me already, hearing it straight from my mother’s lips feels like I’m learning it all over again. “And honestly, I think he did, too, but he was never going to make me face it alone. So, he proposed. Bought us a house. Did all the things you were supposed to do back then.”
I think back to the bar, my father’s voice on the phone. That desperate desire to keep taking care of my mother even after two decades of being apart.
“I’m so sorry,” she says as I remember him asking me to keep our call to myself, that small kindness muddled with shame like he didn’t want her to know how much he still cared. “I never wanted you or Natalie to know.”
“But I thought she was the one who told him,” I say, bunching my brows as I attempt to work it all out. “I thought that was the whole reason why he left.”
“She did.” My mom nods. “It was. But once Natalie knew, onceit was out in the open like that, I think it just became a lot harder for him to pretend.”
I fall silent, my mother’s dysfunction finally making more sense as I think of how she never wants to accept any help, eternally burdened with the guilt of what she had done.
How she still keeps my dad’s picture hanging up on the wall, beholden to the man who gave her another chance—a chance she knew she didn’t deserve.
“He loved your sister like she was his own,” she says to me now, reaching out to grab my hand, fingers warm as they weave through mine. “Him leaving, it was never about her, but he spent eighteen years staring straight into the face of my lie. It was time he moved on from that.”
“So, you knew all along,” I say, thinking about how Eric DiNello showed up the morning Natalie vanished, looked my mother square in the eye.
You know how girls can be.
“When Natalie went missing,” I continue, realizing that moment between them held so much more weight than I ever could have known. That his words were never meant to be a comfort, an encouragement that her daughter would turn up all right; instead, they were an intimidation, a threat. A warning to stay silent about all the things that she knew. “You knew there was more to the story than what he was saying.”
“Not exactly,” she says. “All the evidence pointed to Jeffrey. I couldn’t prove anything other than that. Besides, I had another daughter I had to protect.”
I look down at our hands, our slack clasp, and feel my squeeze tighten as I think about all the things my mother has done. The lies she’s told and the secrets she’s kept, all of it an attempt to take care of her daughters.
To give us a better, safer life.
“They found me,” she continues. “A few months after I left, I came home and I could tell Lily had been there.”
I look up at her again, imagining a chewed-up core dropped in the sink. A picture missing from the face of the fridge and those phantom words reemerging on the mirror as soon as the room filled up with steam.
“It was like she was tapping on my shoulder,” she says. “Always reminding me that they were there, what they were capable of.”
I stare at my mother, trying to process the weight of her secrets. The fear she’s been carrying for twenty-two years keeping her cornered, holding her down.
“Why didn’t you tell me any of this?” I ask at last. “Why did you keep it all to yourself?”
“Because you were a child,” she says. “Then you grew up and left and never came back. I love you, Claire, but it always felt like you were safer when you weren’t here.”
I stare at my mother, realizing, now, that in the same way Natalie pushed me away in an attempt to protect me, my mother has been keeping me at a distance to help me stay safe.
