Chapter 78 Laurie
Laurie
Laurie secretly resented the fact that she fell in love with a man named MacDonald. She’d spent most of her life looking forward to walking up the aisle a McDonnell and walking back down with a name like Simpson or Goldfield or Finch—free of any family stain.
Ever since she could remember, Laurie couldn’t wait to be someone else.
But here she was, at the same table in the same godforsaken cottage by the sea, and nothing had changed at all.
She watched as her sister helped lower their mom into a kitchen chair before settling opposite her. Their mother had sat briefly in a shallow bath of warm water to stop her shivering. It felt ridiculous that they were about to have this conversation in pajamas.
Mo spoke. “Okay, Mom. How bad is it?”
“It’s cancer, darling. It’s bad.”
“Did the doctor tell you what type? What stage?”
“She may have mentioned it. I wasn’t listening.”
Laurie slapped the table with both hands and slumped backward. Mo held up a palm. It was infuriating and comforting, all at once.
“Mom, please. This is serious.”
“I crawled into a tin can and hurled my crumbling body to my ex-husband’s glorified tent on the other side of the world to be here, Maureen. I know it’s serious.”
Mo’s cat, Lord Peas or something, jumped into their mom’s lap and began purring. Laurie watched a chipped red fingernail rake a path through the cat’s calico fur.
“Okay. Alright.” Mo pinched the bridge of her nose. “How did you picture this conversation going?”
“Well,” Rosemary mused, “I pictured a single glistening tear, perhaps a group hug. No blubbering. Lorraine gets snotty when she cries.” Laurie felt the haphazard bandage she’d slapped into place around her heart start to give. “And I expect you’ll come home while we put my affairs in order.”
Mo’s breath escaped her in a rush.
Laurie’s mouth popped open with a sound loud enough to startle the cat. “Maureen come home? And stay with who?”
“Us, of course.”
“Us?”
Her mother kept on like she couldn’t hear the escalation in Laurie’s voice. “Obviously, Lorraine. Or do you think I should stay in my home alone while this disease eats up enough of me that I can’t stand? Die of thirst and starvation?”
“Mom, please—”
“I’m sure the housekeeper would find me eventually,” she said with a thoughtful expression. “On account of the smell.”
Laurie flinched and slid her hands into her lap, rubbing the pink grooves in her palms where she’d pressed in the contour of the wood.
The last time she’d felt so small, she’d been in the exact same place.
It was the day Laurie first realized that she felt more than other people. She never understood why she seemed to be the only one who simply couldn’t take it—why she could feel everybody’s bad feelings, all of the time.
She and her sister lay in their Scotland house room, honey and cinnamon ringlets tangled together on the same pillow.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Momo,” Lorraine whispered.
“If Mom and Dad are getting a divorce, we have to talk about it, Lolo.”
She rolled to face the wall. “No.”
“Don’t be a baby.”
The disgust in her little sister’s voice peppered Lorraine’s face like hot oil.
“I’m not being a baby. I just don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it hurts.”
Lorraine felt her sister’s annoyance before she heard it—a thrumming pulse of pain in her muscles like when their dad tuned a guitar string.
“Everybody hurts about this stuff, Lolo. We still have to face it.”
“It’s not going to happen!” Lorraine bit, drowning out the pain for a moment.
“It is, Lolo.” Maureen’s sudden wave of grief rushed her so cold it burned. “Trust me . . . it is.”
Lorraine tried to fight the tears that threatened to betray her. She was not a baby. “Stop. My skin hurts.”
“What do you mean your skin hurts? From what?”
Laurie rubbed at one of the massive welts on her forearms no one could actually see. “I told you. From this. And from when they . . . from earlier.”
She gasped as a thrash of Maureen’s anger landed right on top of the sore spot she’d just tried to press away. The old welt and the new rose, hot and stinging.
“Grow up, Lorraine! It hurts me, too, okay? But if we have to choose between them, we have to stick together. I’m trying to figure that out right now. But you are being dramatic, like always! Aren’t you supposed to be the big sister?”
Every new word felt like a thing Maureen shot at her out of a gun, ripping holes through her skin no doctor would ever see.
Her sister didn’t understand. She didn’t know that disgust was like burning oil; annoyance, a bad chord; anger, a whip.
Disbelief, a bullet. Of all the ways she hurt, not being believed was the worst one.
That, and the way disappointment ruptured in her head like a volcano.
Disappointment was like her brain popped.
She pressed her fingers to her temples, trying to breathe.
“Sometimes you have to just suck it up, Lorraine. Like Mom says.”
Lorraine snapped, “Oh yeah? At least Mom actually loves me, Maureen! At least she doesn’t have to keep punishing me and forcing me to be good!”
Maureen’s bad feelings after Lorraine’s outburst should have flooded her, but Lorraine’s own anger rose up like a cleansing fire first. It burned, keeping her sister’s feelings at bay, and when it finally died, all the other wounds from the day were barely there.
They were so dull she could actually fall asleep.
When she woke, she could hardly remember them at all.
She’d found the secret to surviving.
It wasn’t until it all came true, just like Maureen had said it would, that Lorraine met a pain she couldn’t forget.
She’d wailed and pressed her small hands against the rear window of the car, clawing at the glass as her father turned his back and closed the door to his cottage before she was even out of sight.
The day he abandoned her, an animal moved into the place where her heart used to be and ate it all up, but it was always hungry, even while it slept.
The best she could do after that was try to stop other people from rattling her bones, breaking her skin.
The best she could do was to try to keep it sleeping.
Over four decades later, Laurie had never spent a day without worrying about someone else’s feelings being too loud.
She still hated this cottage. Every time she was here, everything hurt more. It was like the soil itself wanted to watch her suffer. It was like the ground was cursed.
Laurie noticed for the first time how much older her sister looked as she watched fault lines appear in Mo’s lips as she spoke. “I can’t just move to California, Mom.”
“You ‘just moved’ to Scotland.”
“I have a life here. A business. A cat.”
“None of which stopped you before.”
“That was different. I was younger.”
Their mom looked at Mo seriously. “So was I.”
The cocktail of Mo’s grief, fear, and sadness exploded at Laurie’s feet like a dropped bottle. She yanked her slippered toes off the ground on instinct, but it didn’t help. The feeling, like bits of invisible glass and lemon juice, found her skin anyway.
Laurie had never been sure if Mo knew about what had happened with Beth.
It wasn’t like Laurie wanted to hurt her—she just wanted to stop hurting, and it had been getting so loud.
She had hoped her mom would be quiet if Laurie just gave her a secret.
The second Mo decided to say it all out loud in that pub, the beast in her chest roared awake.
Maw snapping and spittle flying, it gnawed through the cage of her ribs and started eating everything else. She felt like she was being erased from the inside out.
Laurie had only carried the best of her intentions with her.
But pain could drive a person to do things they never thought they could.
She didn’t really remember what she’d done at the wedding to stop it.
She only knew that by the time she’d slammed a lock on the thing’s cage and backed away slowly, she’d looked up to see her mother collapse in the doorway.
It didn’t matter that Laurie had been good. It didn’t matter that she’d spent her entire life trying to placate her mother’s disappointment before it could leave marks.
She’d done everything right, but her dad left. Her sister left. Her daughter might be leaving, too.
And now her mother was dying.
As Laurie sat at the table where she’d first learned the word divorce, she felt like she’d been skinned alive.
Then Deli stepped through the door and stood in the last spot Lolo McDonnell had ever hugged her dad.
She thought to herself how very much Deli looked like the thirty-year-old sister she remembered, how very much she would love to rest her daughter’s head in her lap until she fell asleep—anything to take away the heartbreak that racked her baby’s face. Laurie wanted to apologize.
Then she recognized her father’s jacket.
The last thing Laurie would remember from that night was the way the beast roared back to life as the first lick of Delilah’s grief found her broken skin—and the invisible breaking of her bones as the beast ate Laurie up and took over.