Chapter Nineteen
“The Fort Worth Live interview?” I say.
“We’ll start there,” Rita says in a soft voice. “What happened?”
I exhale a long breath. Cross my arms over my chest. “You know what happened.”
“I mean, why did it happen? What triggered you to come unwound enough to rip off your shirt on live television?”
The heat in the front room feels suddenly unbearable. I rub the back of my neck.
“One minute you were fine,” Rita continues.
“Then that caller came on, and”—she snaps her fingers—“a switch flipped. I’ve watched it several times.
” I cringe, and she keeps going. “Was it the caller’s voice?
Was it what you thought she was saying? There’s obviously something there.
And I have a feeling I know what, or rather who, it pertains to.
I live for stories, Dr. Watters. I live for research.
And Emily Arceneaux isn’t the only person I’ve been researching lately.
I know you’ve suffered. And I have a great respect for people who turn their suffering into success. ”
I let out a sharp laugh. “Success? I’m not sure I know what that is anymore.” I look down. I don’t feel strong enough to go where Rita is leading.
I look up, sigh. “The caller. She sounded like my sister.”
Rita gives me the slightest nod. “I thought so. Do you want to talk about your sister?”
I weigh the question. My knee-jerk response is hell no.
But I remind myself I’ve done it before, talked about her before.
Rarely, but I have done it. And these questions are bound to come up again.
I’ve made sure of that by my stunt on live television.
Maybe if I lay it all out for Rita, I can somehow control the narrative.
I glance out the front windows at the large knotty oaks.
Birds flit through the limbs. Squirrels scamper up their thick trunks.
Everything is as it should be. And yet, in this room, everything feels completely off kilter.
But I can’t keep running from the topic of Mabry. It’s too exhausting.
I meet Rita’s gaze. “Where do you want to start?”
Rita’s hand lights on my arm. “The day you found her.”
I turn from the window and face Rita and say out loud what I’ve thought every day for the last five years. Since I discovered Mabry, lifeless and floating in my mother’s tub. “I couldn’t save her.”
The house is warm and still when I shut the front door behind Rita.
I’m alone again with my heavy heart in a place where every wooden slat holds a memory of my sister.
I press my back against the door and slide down to the floor.
My eyes sting as tears course down my cheeks.
I managed to tell the story to Rita without a tear falling. Now that she’s gone, they won’t stop.
Sweet Mabry. Saying it all out loud to Rita has weakened the wall I constructed to protect myself from that day five years ago.
Now, the images break through, and I can’t look away.
Mabry’s doe eyes frozen open. Her wet hair.
The weight of her body in my arms as I grabbed her and tried to force life back into her mouth.
The last thing she said to me was to leave her alone.
She was angry at me for getting married, deserting her, leaving her to fend for herself with Mama.
I tried to reconnect so many times. When my marriage failed, I thought I could win her back, convince her to come live with me.
I left her pleading messages, promising I’d take care of her again.
And she took every last prescription pill in Mama’s bathroom, crawled into the tub, and left forever. No note. No closure. Nothing.
I push off the floor and make my way to the kitchen. A fresh bottle of wine awaits. I open it, pour a glass. Drink it standing. It was so hard to accept what Mabry had done. To accept my part in it. I failed her. I help children every day, but I couldn’t help my own sister.
I fumble through my tote on the counter and pull out my cell.
Here I am at the top of my game, a successful podcast, a new self-help book, and a phone full of calls to my dead sister’s voicemail.
I even kept her phone. It has become some sort of talisman.
Another unhealthy thing I’m not ready to let go of.
Every year I swear I’m going to throw away her phone and quit paying the bill.
But then her angel voice would be gone, too, her laugh. Something else I’m clinging to.
I gulp another sip of wine. Of course, that caller on the show wasn’t my sister.
I knew it wasn’t. But she sounded so young, so helpless.
When I watched the clip, the voice sounded nothing like Mabry’s.
But that morning, in that moment, I heard her.
I heard the silly safe word I gave Mabry.
Like how a crack of sound can trigger an avalanche, that word triggered me.
My eyes fall on the thermos next to the metal dolls from Eddie.
I didn’t tell Rita all my secrets. The saddest one still exists.
Hidden in plain sight. A hard knot forms in my throat.
The tears build again. I lock my jaw to try to stop them, but again they fall.
This time for me. For my foolishness. My toxic fucking foolishness.
The high-rise condo, the podcast, the kitten heels. Those are the things I’ve presented to the world. But becoming a therapist, helping others, lecturing the masses, writing a book called Honest Healing hasn’t snapped me out of my delusion. If anything, it’s made me justify it.
I grab my cell, the wine, Mabry’s sketchbook . . . and the thermos and plod upstairs.
After Mabry’s memorial, a man in a nice suit handed an urn to Mama.
She said it was too heavy for her to carry, so I carried it, feeling like all my important parts had been sliced off and incinerated alongside Mabry.
And as Mama drove us back to her house, I promised Mabry I’d protect her, keep her safe.
She’d always be with me. That night, Mama and I climbed into the same bed, and she held me tight and kissed my head and sang in my ear until I finally fell asleep.
I promised Mama I’d find the perfect spot for Mabry’s ashes. A place she could always be free and happy. Bright light filters through the old windowpanes in the front bedroom. I haven’t found that place yet.
But then again, maybe I haven’t been looking.
My duffel and the stack of attic boxes sit by the door in the bedroom. The old television and VCR are turned off. Trash bags of VHS tapes piled next to them.
I wanted Mabry with me. She should have always been with me. If she had, maybe she wouldn’t have . . . I swore to myself it was temporary. A way to keep her close until Mama and I could decide where to put her. A container no one would question.
No vase. No urn. Just a simple thermos, sitting on my kitchen counter.
I drop everything I’ve brought upstairs onto the bed and walk into the bathroom.
My travel kit is open, and among the face lotions and toothpaste sits the sharp reminder of my pain.
I pull the straight razor out, and before my breathing can even change, I deliver a quick surgical slice to my left arm.
The sting is immediate, but it’s just a nick.
I wait. Nothing happens. No relief. Of course there’s not.
Once you confront and understand the reasoning behind your toxic actions, they lose their power.
I grab a towel from the side of the sink and press it onto my new wound.
Stupid, stupid, desperate woman.
I climb into the twin bed with the wine and sad array of items. I pull the thin sheet up to my chin and rewind to the day I broke into the attic to get to those boxes, the tapes.
I think back to the letter on my kitchen counter in Fort Worth, back to the show and Harper and ripping my shirt off on live television.
Then I think back to the week before all that, when absolutely nothing had happened.
What I wouldn’t give to go back to that week.
A fresh shudder rolls through my body. Mabry. She will never know she didn’t kill a man.
I pull my phone from under the covers and press Mabry’s number.
A laugh. Leave a message. I end the call and punch the number again and again and again until tears blur my vision.
I throw the phone across the room and cover my head with the sheet.
My back heaves as a flood of pent-up sadness bursts through the crack in my dam.
Tears for Mama and Mabry. Tears for a little girl named Emily.
Tears for my failed marriage. Tears for all the people who thought I actually helped them. I can’t even help myself.
The Aunts’ ghosts whisper in my ear about salvation.
Mama returned that morning I told her to get us a car, smeared red lipstick on her face and the keys to our old station wagon in her hand.
Mabry and I hugged the Aunts goodbye as Mama leaned through the passenger window and shoved something in the glove box.
I slid behind the wheel. Mabry climbed in the front seat and Mama lay across the back. I glanced in the open glove box. A stack of cash sat inside. I slammed it shut, telling myself it was the insurance money, even though a part of me knew better.
As much as I wanted to get away from the bayou and what I’d done there, I still had an urge to fling open my door and run for Travis’s house, but the precious cargo next to me kept me put.
Pearl yelled, “I pray for y’all’s salvation.”
No Hank Williams Jr. or Loretta Lynn songs blared as we pulled away from Broken Bayou.
Only cicadas and whip-poor-wills and the golden sun on the bayou.
Mama passed out with her cigarette still between her lips before we even made it to the Atchafalaya Basin.
I motioned for Mabry to get it. She reached over the front seat and plucked it from Mama’s mouth.
Then she brought it to her own lips and inhaled.
Coughing and scowling at Mama, she lowered the window and flicked it out with her little twelve-year-old hand.
I held my right arm out over the back of the seat, and she scooted across to my side, placed her small head on my shoulder.
“Love you, sissy,” she whispered.
I stroked her hair with my hand. “I love you too.”
Then I slammed down on the gas and got us the hell out of Dodge.