Chapter 81 Mo
Mo
Mo watched her dying mother follow Deli into the dark. The creak of the door as it swung home, slow and determined, rang in Mo’s heart like the tolling bell of something inevitable.
“She shouldn’t be in the rain,” Laurie said quietly. “She’ll get sick.”
“Mom is gonna do whatever she wants, Laurie, just like always.”
Mo’s hands shook. She pressed them to the countertop and leaned her weight against it, closed her eyes, and counted the seconds as she breathed in. Breathed out. She was alone with her sister for the first time in many, many years. “Did you know?”
Laurie’s reply was high and reedy. “How could you even ask that?”
Mo leveled her sister with a look that said all the things Mo couldn’t.
“No, okay, no.” Laurie slumped into her chair. “She’s been more tired and less, I don’t know, sharp? But I figured it was one of her ‘ailments.’”
Old wounds ached, reopened. The vibrant, horrid slash of a wedding turned into a battleground stung fresh. Mo studied the backs of her hands, so much like her mother’s. “How could you act like that tonight, Lorraine?”
“I don’t know what you—”
“If you want to play games, get out of my house.”
Her sister squirmed at the table. “Fine. Maybe I said a few things that went . . . too far. But I wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t pushed me! If you hadn’t taken her in the first place!”
Twenty years. Twenty years between them, and Laurie was the same.
“Whisky?” Mo asked. “It’s good stuff. Lachlan brought it.”
“Ah, Lachlan, the kilted wonder boy.”
Mo stilled long enough to say, “Last warning, Lorraine.”
“Fine.”
She pulled two glasses from the cabinet and blew into each to clear the dust that wasn’t there, but she knew Laurie hated dust. Then she sat and let the chair take the weight of her—of everything. Mo took a long sip. Laurie held her glass between her hands on the table and didn’t lift it.
“Mo,” Laurie said in a small voice, “what are we gonna do?”
Her sister, soft and fragile and so easy to bruise, needing Mo to get her through the loss of a parent. Asking Mo to stop the impact before it happened. Asking her for the impossible.
She wondered, for the thousandth time, if she’d let her sister down—if everything that happened in Laurie’s life could be traced back to that night and two little girls whispering in their beds.
“What we always do, Lolo,” Mo said. At the sound of their childhood nickname, tears traced the grooves of her sister’s face. Her wrinkles, this little girl. Time was a slippery thing.
Time . . . Mo thought, and grief.
“We’re gonna survive.” Mo reached for her sister’s hand. “I’m with you.”
“You’re not with me,” Laurie choked too loud in the subdued space, like a bark. She snatched her hand away. “You left me! And you never came back. You are a person who leaves.”
Mo recoiled as her heart pounded and heat crept up her neck. She was trapped in time, somewhere between being here and being there, and she had to get out. Her eyes darted toward the door.
“See?” Laurie’s laugh was stiff as she gestured toward the exit. “Even now.”
Though she’d never said it aloud to anyone, Mo’s greatest regret was leaving Laurie behind.
She chose to save herself, and she left her sister to find a way to survive.
Soft and sensitive, alone with a woman who didn’t know how to love if she wasn’t squeezing so tightly she left a mark.
And it had cost Laurie dearly. It had cost Deli. It had cost them all.
At her core, Maureen McDonnell wasn’t sure if she was a good person.
“I’m sorry,” Mo rasped. “I’m so sorry, Laurie.”
“For what exactly?”
“For leaving you with her.”
Her sister stared with the burning resentment she’d been nursing for years. “It was awful,” Laurie said, her voice dark. “It was awful, Maureen.”
“I know—”
“Don’t you dare,” Laurie cut in. “You made me choose.” Mo winced.
“Between my only sister and my mother. Because you left, Maureen. You made the great escape to this shitty house that our shitty dad left to his perfect daughter—the one who didn’t remind him at all of the woman he married.
He left you with a home. And he left me with the woman he chose to be our mother. ”
Mo’s hands shook. “I did come back once.”
Laurie’s entire body went stiff. “What?”
“About a year after I left.”
“What do you mean?”
“I came to your house. None of you were home. Mom showed up as I was leaving.”
“She saw you?” Laurie asked.
“She told me nobody wanted me there. That I was dead to her. To you.”
“I never said that!”
“I know that now, but then? It was all still so fresh. I was still heartsick for her love.”
Laurie made a face. “You knew what she was like.”
“I know, but . . . Laurie, my biggest fear was that if I left you behind, you’d hate me. And when she confirmed it, I just . . . Then she said that Deli had seen a photo of me and asked who I was. And I . . .”
“Oh . . .”
“I left.” Mo shrugged, tears running down her face. “Because what if it was all true?”
“I didn’t know, Mo,” Laurie said softly. “She told me you didn’t want to see me.”
“Ha! I suppose we should have seen that one coming.”
“I suppose so.”
Mo took another sip from her glass. Laurie’s was still untouched.
“And now she’s dying,” Laurie said simply.
“Now she’s dying.”
Laurie looked at the ceiling and released a long breath. “I don’t know how to feel about that.”
For a beat, the two looked at each other, all the unsaid and forbidden things on the tips of their tongues.
Twenty years before, Mo McDonnell had seen no way to survive her family other than to escape it, and so she had.
But the Mo that stood in her fraught oasis now, with the sister who had betrayed her, who she had betrayed, too—she knew better.
Love could be a gnarled and knotted thing that would strain and pull until it was handled with deft hands.
Mo had run away, and the love had never released its vise grip on her.
It had snarled and spat and demanded to be known.
All these years later, Mo knew that she could be the person who held hurting things with open palms—who could love something for what it was and what it wanted to be, not for what it should have been if things had been fair and just.
Mo knew now that her sister was scared, and that Mo could learn to love her with proper expectations. She could protect her own heart at the same time.
Love and grief were the same thing, really . . . depending on the light.
And Mo suddenly knew that for this chapter in her life, twilight had come.
She broke into a laugh, deep and long, and felt the tension loosen in her chest as Laurie joined.
The two of them shook with the absurdity of the night—the absurdity of the way there are no hard and fast rules about when you give up on the people you love—the way cruelty and admiration dress the same. Mo raised up her glass.
“To peace: May we find it, may we know it, may we keep it.”
Laurie raised hers, too. “Here’s to hoping.” She took a sip and winced. “God, I don’t know how you and Dad drink this shit. I just can’t stomach it.”
Mo smiled.
“So . . .” Laurie began again. “Did you see her? When you came back?”
“I . . .” Mo could almost hear her heart suffer another crack, like there was a real candy shaped thing in there being broken. “I tried.”
“And?”
“And Beth was with someone else. I saw them getting out of her car—”
“The old Beetle!” Laurie interrupted, beaming, a flash of the sister Mo used to make daisy chains with outside. “I loved that car. The little flower vase was always full!”
Mo smiled even as her memory of Beth turned her eyes misty.
“Beth would pick anything she found. Wildflowers, weeds. She’d steal poppies off the side of the road even though it was illegal to pick the state flower.
She said they were nature’s, and nature could give her flowers if it wanted to.
” It surprised her how well she could still mimic Beth as she added, “‘Plus! I’m a taxpayer!’”
Laurie chuckled. “I remember . . . the poppies matched the paint. All that orange.”
“Her favorite color.”
A silence stretched between them in the wake of the evening’s carnage. The fight, the screaming, the rain, and their mother. Deli—wandering out into the night.
And two sisters, finally saying things that had never been said.
“Laurie?” Mo whispered. “I did the best I could.”
Laurie stared, unblinking.
“I didn’t want to leave you,” she choked out a sob. “I did the best I could.”
“I know,” Laurie said. “It’s okay, Momo. It’s okay.”
Mo began to really cry, and Laurie squeezed her hand once then withdrew.
“I loved those little white flowers,” Laurie said. Mo kept crying, but Laurie acted like she wasn’t. It was a small act of grace. “I think they were in Princess Diana’s wedding bouquet? What were they called again?”
“Lily of the valley,” Mo said. “I got them for her in May. They’re her birth flower.”
“I just thought they were so pretty and delicate. So feminine.”
“Deli told me they mean the return of joy.”
“The return of joy?”
“Yep.”
Mo remembered the first time she’d given them to her love—how tenderly Beth had taken the stem—how reverently she had accepted Mo’s heart in her hands as she professed that Beth had been the return of her joy.
“Huh.” Laurie drew circles on the tabletop with her fingernail. “When Mom dies, let’s order them for her funeral.”
Mo spit out the drink in her mouth, and the sisters laughed together in the little house where they had weathered blow after blow, doing their best to survive.