Chapter 18
Olivia
The best memory I have of my mother is on a home movie.
It was taken the day we moved into our new house.
I was two years old, and my parents had saved enough to move from their apartment into a four-bedroom house with a wraparound porch.
The tape was so old, the picture was grainy, and the colors were so washed out.
In the footage, my mother is laughing behind the camera as I stumble around the living room, climbing over moving boxes.
She then appears in the frame, wrapping her arms around me.
I can hear my father calling to us; he’s the one holding the camera.
She places me on the ground again and walks toward the camera, telling my father the last boxes are too heavy for her to carry.
They exchange the camera between them, the room momentarily turning upside down.
I am still babbling, words that don’t make sense but still make my mother laugh.
The camera pans to my face, bright red and puffy.
I am still babbling away, digging my fingers into the carpet beneath me.
“Where are your dreams, Livvy?” she asks. “Tell Mama your dreams.”
My face breaks into a wide smile and I laugh over something she is doing behind the camera.
“My dream was always you,” she says, and the camera shuts off.
The whole video only lasts six minutes, but I have always wondered why, five years later, my father left, and my mother changed her dream.
There was one silver lining to being my mother’s daughter: she had a sister, my Aunt Nell.
For as selfish and absent as my mother was, Nell was the direct opposite.
Everston was once a mining town, but since the early 1990s the mines had all permanently closed.
There was still the old railroad that traveled between Everston and Norvale, usually transporting passengers through the remote wilderness of the San Juan National Forest. Nell used to work on the railroad and now did volunteer shifts at the rail depot museum, which she lived next to.
When I arrived at my aunt’s house, she was bent over her succulents humming a song.
“Darling,” she said, as she noticed me in the doorway. “What a surprise.”
“Free afternoon,” I said, crossing the lounge room and stepping into her arms.
“It’s good to see you,” she replied.
“New plants?”
“The nursery was having a sale.”
“Well, this might just inspire your next purchase,” I said, handing her the gift-wrapped book. “This one won’t need watering.”
“Oh,” she replied happily. “You know me well, thanks, Livvy.”
She turned her attention back to the plants, placing the book on the table next to them, and continuing to repot a succulent into a bright-blue jeweled pot.
For being the complete opposite of my mother, my aunt resembled her in ways that were sometimes a little unnerving.
When my parents divorced, my mother was fragile, like she had aged ten years too soon.
She slipped so far into herself I didn’t think she would return.
She did, eventually, but she was never the same.
Instead, she became the woman the rest of Everston knew: intimidating.
I like to think I became a reporter to help others share their stories, but it’s only partly true.
I wanted to understand how grief could trigger someone into chaos. That someone being my own mother.
“How’s work?” Nell asked, dusting her hands of soil and gliding into the kitchen.
I followed, watching as she began to brew us a pot of coffee.
“Difficult,” I replied truthfully. “I’m a little lost.”
She looked up curiously. “How so?”
“I’m still on desk duty.”
She scowled. “Oh, Colin is a spindly jerk, isn’t he?”
I laughed. “He’s just protecting the reputation of the station,” I replied.
“And that grief group,” she said. “How’s that going?”
I thought of Wren.
“It’s going well, actually.”
Her face lit up. “Oh, that’s wonderful,” she replied. “Meditation saved my life.”
I smiled, as she extended the mug to me. “It’s not exactly meditation.” I paused, thinking about the poem Wren had read the night before, how the words just seemed to flow from her. “But it is something.”
“Why don’t you do a story about that?” she suggested. “About your grief group?”
“Well, Colin doesn’t think there’s any story there,” I said.
She scoffed. “What would Colin know.”
“I mean, how could he?” I replied. “He hasn’t seen how far these people have come, or the way they’ve leaned on each other.”
“You mean the way you’ve also leaned on them?”
I smiled. “Maybe. Even so, trying to convince Colin there is a story amid a bunch of random strangers all dealing with their own grief journeys is like trying to convince Riot to go back to using a car.”
My aunt met Riot at a speed dating event downtown, two years ago. He was divorced, had three grown sons I’d never met, owned a Harley he was obsessed with, and made my aunt the happiest I’d seen her in years.
“Maybe you should just ask Riot to take you for a spin.” She grinned. “The freedom on the back of that bike.”
I scrunched up my nose, imagining my seventy-year-old aunt flying down the streets of Everston with her big, bulky, bearded boyfriend.
“There’s also a woman I’ve met,” I said. “Her name is Wren.” Even though I knew her real name now, I couldn’t imagine calling her anything else.
Nell turned to me. “Oh?” she asked, her eyes bright.
“Her fiancée, Lucy, died in a car accident, and she wound up in Everston, joining our grief group.” I left out the part about Wren being famous author B.W. Paisley. That wasn’t my story to tell.
“But there’s something about the accident,” I continued, the thought burning at the edges of my mind.
“The police and press blamed Lucy. They said she caused it. But the details don’t add up.
There was a child involved but also another victim, a John Doe.
Who is he? He was never identified in the media.
How does an accident get so much press, and yet one of the victims stays nameless? ”
Nell shrugged, her hands busy arranging pots as she listened. “Maybe his family didn’t want him identified,” she suggested lightly.
“Maybe,” I admitted, pacing slightly, “but it still feels…off. If it were that simple, why not just say so? Instead, it’s like someone buried it. There’s something not right.”
Nell gave me a sharp look, one that said she’d heard this tone before. She picked up her spray bottle and began misting her plants. “Perhaps that’s the story you need to tell,” she said evenly.
“Better yet,” Nell added, glancing at me over her shoulder, “maybe it’s the kind of story Colin would be interested in?”
Her words hit like a challenge, and I felt my pulse quicken.
In a perfect world, reporters could keep their emotions at arm’s length, but this world wasn’t perfect.
We’re human. And sometimes, someone else’s pain seeps into your skin, becomes part of you, and refuses to let go.
I thought of Wren, everything she’d lost, everything she’d endured.
There was something inside me, fierce and unrelenting, that wanted to fight for her.
Not just because she deserved it, but because it felt as though I needed to.
The feeling settled heavily in my chest, and alongside it was something else—a fire.
This wasn’t just about Wren anymore. This was about finding the truth.
On my mother’s fiftieth birthday, she became so intoxicated that by seven p.m. she was already vomiting.
I found myself in her suite, holding back her hair as she leaned over the toilet.
In a moment of drunken honesty, she confessed to me that she had slept with the host of Good Morning America last year while on assignment, and she had been the mistress of the front man of a famous band, and the reason the band dissolved.
In so many of our interactions, I felt more like her friend than her daughter.
Yet, during the same evening, she told me how proud she was of me, that she couldn’t imagine having anyone else for a daughter.
I’m not sure how one person can feel like two.
One moment, she was trying to control every aspect of my life, molding me into something that I wasn’t.
But then, in moments of vulnerability, she showed me a softness that weakened my guard.
We repeated the same cycle over and over again.
Even now, after her death, I still found myself simultaneously trying to please her and piss her off at the same time.
There was an old saying: “like mother, like daughter.” I hoped I was nothing like my mother in many ways.
However, there was one trait I did possess that I was proud of, and that was the ability to ask the right questions.
In life, if you ask questions, you might get answers.
But if you ask the right questions, you will always uncover the truth.