Chapter 15 Rachel #2
“Yeah, got it,” Rachel says, unable to soften the barbs in her voice. “Also, we don’t know if the Jane Doe is a murder yet. Or Stacy Cooper, despite what Green says. So watch your presumptions.”
He drops his gaze, clearly embarrassed. As he should be. But at the same time, she can’t entirely blame him for his curiosity. She’s used to the infamy, the judgment.
That’s what happens to a family when a daughter pushes her own mother off a cliff.
BAYFIELD, ONTARIO—JULY, 1981
“Who was that woman with you at Two Scoops last Saturday?” Kimberly asked, squinting at Rachel in the baking overhead sun. They were down at the beach along with two other girls from their class, Lori and Tammy.
Rachel had gotten a part-time summer job scooping ice cream for four bucks an hour.
She left each shift smelling like vanilla and sweat and had more pocket money than she’d ever been given by Dora for doing chores around the house.
But Dora hadn’t objected in the least, saying it was never too early to learn the value of a dollar and hard, honest work.
She’d been a nurse when she was younger, but hadn’t worked as long as Rachel had lived with her.
Rachel supposed there must be income from her grandfather Walter’s war pension and life insurance that allowed Dora to keep the house and buy groceries.
But Mary had dropped in during her shift on Saturday night.
Rachel was scrubbing hot fudge off the counter that opened onto the Main Street sidewalk when Mary appeared in the window, shocking Rachel so much that her mouth fell open.
She stared at her mother and waited, a series of questions racing through her mind as the cash register dinged and shut with a crash behind her.
With a couple of exceptions, Mary always came back to Bayfield during the summer months, and Rachel wondered whether it was something about the heat that drove her home, longing for the cool darkness of the old house and the breeze that blew in over the cliff edge from the peacock-blue lake beyond.
It was serene enough to calm almost anyone—even a cyclone like her mother.
“Hey there,” Mary had said with a half-smile. “Dora said I’d find you here.”
“She told you to come?” Rachel asked, her incredulity tinged with a sense of betrayal.
Mary had swallowed, and in the neon lights above their heads, Rachel spied dark spots, bruises, along one side of her mother’s face and beneath her eye.
Some teenage boys a bit older than Rachel laughed raucously at a picnic table to the right, something about someone’s dick.
“No. But I asked where you were, and she said you got a job.”
Mary had waited another fifteen minutes for the store to close up for the night, then walked with Rachel back to the house as crickets and spring peepers filled the humid evening air with their song.
Rachel could hardly believe Mary had been willing to wait for her shift to end.
She couldn’t seem to live in one place for very long, let alone stand still for any length of time.
Rachel longed to ask what had happened to her face, but she was a little afraid of her, too, and the fear was silencing.
Since Mary had been home, she hadn’t done much besides lurk around the house drinking Cokes and smoking, and going to Millgate Methodist nearly every day.
She was always talking about a conversation she’d just had with Reverend Holland, who Rachel thought must be one of the dullest people on the planet.
So Rachel didn’t know, now, how to answer Kimberly’s question.
She didn’t know Kim had even spotted her and Mary together, but she wasn’t really surprised.
It was a small town. Everyone knew Rachel lived with her grandmother because her mother was—as she’d heard Tammy’s mom whisper once when the girls were twelve—“unfit.” She’d looked up the word in the dictionary that time, and found it to be true.
Rachel was too embarrassed by Mary to want her around in any way.
She seemed crazy sometimes, or at least what Rachel assumed a crazy person must be like, with emotional outbursts and mood swings that could range from despair to elation to rage in the course of an hour.
It wasn’t normal. There weren’t many crazy people in their small town, as far as Rachel knew.
Which made it even worse to be the daughter of one.
Every time Mary came back, all it did was remind Rachel that she wasn’t truly like her girlfriends, and never could be.
Because of Mary. Of all that she was and all that she wasn’t.
She never forgot that night in the shower with the blood, Mary’s whispered oath that Dora was a witch.
But normal people didn’t believe in witches, didn’t accuse their own mothers of being one.
She knew Tammy had never been pulled into a shower with her naked mother to wash off more blood than she’d ever seen before.
Rachel had her period now, and it didn’t look anything like that.
She still had no idea what had happened that night.
All Dora had said, as she scrubbed the blood from between the bathroom tiles with baking soda and an old toothbrush after the screen door slammed the next day, was that Mary was sick.
She’s always sick, little one.
And now, at fourteen, Rachel still didn’t know how to articulate the questions to get the answers she was looking for. She didn’t know anyone else who had a crazy mother. No one—other than Dora—could possibly understand.
“Yeah, that was my mom,” she said to Kim, waving away the question as though Mary’s return were of no consequence.
It was, and it wasn’t, really. It was always disruptive, but also short-lived.
Mary would probably be gone by Labour Day, if not next week.
“She lives in Toronto but comes back to visit sometimes,” Rachel said, repeating the script she’d come up with years ago to deflect the conversation should the topic of her mother ever arise.
Like how she’d told her girlfriends her dad was dead.
Because they’d never know otherwise. It’s not as though the man who’d drunkenly screwed her mother in the bathroom of some coke dealer’s house in Scarborough was about to show up on Dora’s doorstep in Bayfield.
She was safe with that lie. Death was an honourable absence, an inarguable excuse.
Mary had only lived in downtown Toronto once, as far as Rachel knew, but it sounded glamorous, and maybe Kimberly might even believe Mary was doing something cool or interesting in the big city; that she was too busy with her “modern woman” job to be a parent.
In reality, Mary had lived everywhere from Windsor to Toronto and up to Owen Sound, always moving on to follow a man or because “things got dull there” or “there was too much heat,” as Rachel heard Mary tell her grandmother once.
But she would always retreat back to the lake, like a tide rushing in and out with the pull of the moon. Fickle, yet somehow predictable.
“But isn’t she like…” Lori began, trailing off with a look that was both mischievous and apologetic. “My mom said she’s kind of a mess, isn’t she? They were in the same grade. But your mom dropped out of high school in, like, grade ten or something?”
Rachel swallowed. She knew that grade ten was the first time her mother had run away from home, after some big fight. Dora had told her that much. Mary’d had to be dragged back home by the Goderich police.
“Yeah. She’s a bit of a spaz. But like, in an artist sort of way, you know?
She’s a free spirit. She does her own thing.
” Rachel did her best to conjure the ghost of some leftover hippie, to cast her mother as a mysterious, intriguingly romantic soul that simply preferred movement to stagnation.
She hoped Lori and Tammy wouldn’t guess that Mary was actually just unemployable, unhinged, unfocused.
“Free spirit” was a gentler label for the harsh reality.
The girls watched Rachel for a moment, and she crafted her expression into one of polite disinterest, hoping the sunburn that had begun to tingle on her skin would suffice to mask the redness rising in her cheeks. She took a large swig of her warm Coke.
Suddenly, Lori gasped and they all looked up.
“Check it out,” she said, biting her lip.
“Eric Tomlin. With Mike and Julie Jamieson.” They watched the trio trudge onto the beach, swimsuit-clad with neon-patterned towels slung over their shoulders.
Rachel had always had a bit of a crush on Eric Tomlin, but knew she never stood a chance.
He was tall and lean and likeable and looked like he was pulled straight from the sand-crusted pages of the Seventeen magazine she had open on her striped beach towel.
It wasn’t that she thought she wasn’t good enough for him. It was more that the whole idea of a boyfriend still frightened her a little. It was boyfriends that always seemed to have gotten her mother into trouble.
Lori stood and waved over Mike, Julie, and Eric, who joined them a moment later.
After a half-hour of chatter, the boys decided to go for a swim, and the girls followed, Lori whining about not wanting to get her hair wet as Julie stopped to slather on some Coppertone.
Rachel, who tended to follow the crowd so that she’d blend in as much as possible, adjusted her bikini and strode out into the water, trailing the other girls.
She exhaled as the coolness of the water crept up her legs, to her knees, her thighs.
She gasped as it hit her hips, heard the other girls scream—playfully, flirtatiously—then lowered her hands and swept them through the water, enjoying the resistance against her palms. The others laughed and shouted and splashed as Lori and Kim convinced the boys to let them sit on their shoulders.
The sun beat down, and suddenly Rachel wanted to be beneath the water.
She waded out a little farther until the sand dropped off steeper and she was submerged up to her chin.
She pressed the balls of her feet into the bottom to cast off, breast-stroking out into the lake, which felt warmer now.
She ducked her head under and the water coursed through her hair and over her skin.
She rose then, sucked in a deep breath and squinted into the sunlight as she treaded, getting her bearings.
She’d gone out farther than usual, but that was all right. She was a strong swimmer.
Lake Huron was so vast you couldn’t even see the other side.
If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was an ocean.
But she could still see her friends, who didn’t seem to have noticed she’d disappeared.
She breathed heavily, enjoying the feeling of being alive that swimming in the lake always brought—the awareness of her body, her limbs and skin, the sun reflecting back up at her from the surface of the shimmering water.
She looked down the beach and up onto the bluffs in the distance, searching for her house. She found it, and her tread faltered as she spotted Mary.
Her mother was sitting on the cliff’s edge, feet dangling down just above the mess of weeds and shrubs that populated the bluff.
It was truly high up, Rachel realized with a start.
It looked different from the water, and the height surprised her.
Her grandmother had always told her to stay away from the edge, not go within five feet of it.
Just for a moment, she worried for Mary.
And then something inside Rachel erupted, and all the disappointment and confusion and shame she’d felt over the years reared up, sore and angry, with tears in its black eyes.
“Jump,” she whispered into the wind, half hoping the sound would carry up onto the cliffs and into her mother’s ears.
But those ears had never heard Rachel’s pleas before. Not when she was a baby screaming in her crib to be fed and held and loved.
Not when she was ten and begging Mary to tell her where all the blood came from.
Not ever.
Not once.
“Please, Mom,” she said. “Just jump.”