Chapter 23
I could have used a different word, but I hadn’t. Maybe it was time the kid knew who her mother really was.
The idea that Marisa might have meant to disappear and leave her behind was too much for Sicily, though. She hurried off to cry somewhere more private.
While I had Marisa’s financial life at my fingertips, I clicked around a bit more, feeling a little guilty but also like an archaeologist sifting through the fragments of a strange culture.
Who lived like this? The amount in their checking and savings accounts made my eyes water.
Holy Emmylou Harris! People just had thousands and thousands of dollars sitting around in their bank accounts?
I went back to the credit card statement.
They had an autopayment set up on the credit card that cleared the balance to zero every month.
Without worrying it wouldn’t clear? What black magic was this?
I clicked back to the checking account, and found a cash withdrawal from the morning Marisa came to see me. Not absconding-to-Costa Rica big, but a few hundred bucks, anyway, probably as much as she’d be allowed to take in a single transaction.
Her bank was a national chain, though. She could have found a branch office and pulled out tons more, if she’d been leaving for good.
“Interesting,” I mumbled into the screen.
There was a noise, but when I looked up, no one was there.
“Sicily?”
The house was quiet around me. This house, this home. My mother’s home, where I was not welcome. Where my name had never been spoken.
What was I doing here?
I stood up. But I couldn’t just ditch the kid without saying something. Not again.
“Who the hell are you?” a voice said.
A small-framed woman stood at the open doorway to the kitchen, chin turned askance at me. She wore an unbuttoned cardigan, and her thin chest was rising and falling with quick breaths, like a cornered bunny. I might have answered her, except I couldn’t speak.
She held a small gun in her hands, pointed directly at me. “Put your hands where I can see them,” she said.
I raised my hands. I was the bunny.
“I said, who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I can … If you just…” I couldn’t see anything but the gun.
Alex had been held up plenty of times over the years, but he hadn’t prepared me for it. I couldn’t think a single coherent thought, only—
Joey’s marbled gray skin, dead.
“Why are you here?” the woman demanded. “What have you done with her? Where’s Marisa?”
I licked my lips. Where did I start?
“Where’s my daughter?” she said.
“Your daughter,” I managed. “Is your daughter … Sicily?”
The woman blinked uncertainly at me behind her glasses. “You know Sis?”
“Sicily,” I called loudly. “Sis?”
“You’re friends with Sis?” The gun wobbled in the woman’s hands, lowered. “I’m so … When I saw you there … You scared me. We’ve been so—I would never—”
“Did you yell something?” Sicily said, thumping down the stairs, her voice just ahead of her arrival. She entered the kitchen and froze at the sight of the gun. “Umma?”
“Can you please come tell your, ah, this woman? That I’m not a villain?” I sounded jollier than I felt. I felt sick. A gun in the closed room was a black hole, pulling everything toward it.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said, but to Sicily.
“Just a misunderstanding,” I said. “And now your … your mother? Is going to return the weapon to the secure lockbox where it’s kept at all times, right? Right now?”
“Do we have a lockbox?” Sicily asked.
The woman wasn’t done stumbling over herself to Sicily. “I didn’t realize—and with everything going on with Mom—”
“Go put the gun away?” My voice was a higher register than I meant it to be.
“Right,” the woman said. “Right.”
We listened to her footsteps down the hall until Sicily took a shaky breath. “I didn’t know we had a…”
I turned on her. “If that’s your mother, then what am I doing here?”
“I have, uh, two mothers?” she said.
Such riches. “So when you said your parents … okay. You could have said so.”
“I wasn’t sure what you would think,” Sicily said.
“I’m not a homophobe, come on.”
“Well, I didn’t know!” Sicily cried. “You do sing country music.”
“Now who’s jumping to conclusions?”
I was still shaken by the gun. Even with all the times Alex had been held up, he wouldn’t keep a firearm in the bar.
Gun on the mantel, he’d say with foreboding, without finishing the thought.
I didn’t know quite what he meant by it.
But my personal theory was that a gun introduced was a gun that could hurt someone. Him. Me.
And here, that gun. That gun was a danger to—
Sicily.
I sat down heavily at the counter.
Oh boy. It was a gut punch to find that I cared what happened to Sicily, not in some general humane, Sarah McLachlan singing-for-the-animals way but in a very specific—sisterly, I guess?
—way. God, it was all such a racket, feelings.
Having to care for people, to put so much effort and concern out into the world without any of it necessarily coming back to you.
Knowing, actually, that it had never come your way and if it did, you weren’t equipped to accept it.
Years ago I’d seen a reference to a 1960s medical experiment on baby monkeys and made the mistake of clicking to read more.
In the experiments, the infant monkeys were taken from their mothers and given to a wire-monkey mother with spikes poking out so that the babies were punished for clinging to it.
The poor things never learned that foundational, original trust.
The baby monkeys never got over the spikes. Would you?
I hadn’t, had I? What had Marisa been but wire-monkey mother, with spikes?
Maybe I wasn’t as dead-eyed as all that. Maybe I’d been swept up by Alex in time—given hope in time—not to turn full clown-school sociopath.
But if Alex had no spikes, he was still a bit of twisted wire. Protective of me, sure, but also of himself, holding everyone out at fingertip’s distance. I’d always known, had been taught at every turn, that if you let people in, they could wreck your heart.
So excuse me for never letting many people close. If I was honest, I’d meant to keep it that way.
“So that was— What did you call her? Umma. What’s that?”
“My umma,” Sicily said, glowering at me. “Not yours. And she’s not…”
“Like she just was?” I said. “Waving a gun around?”
Sicily chewed on her bottom lip. “Umma is Korean,” she said, finally. “For mom.”
I reached for the laptop to close the tab on the family bank accounts.
Way in the back, I suddenly noticed, the screen’s wallpaper was a happy family photo: Marisa, Sicily, Second Mom.
I clicked the bank window closed without disturbing any of Marisa’s holiday shopping and snapped the laptop cover down.
Footfalls in the hallway heralded Pistol Annie’s return to the party. I tensed up, but when she appeared in the doorway this time, she looked painfully embarrassed.
“Not a great way to introduce myself,” she said. “I’m Bonnie. I am so sorry. We’re a little high-strung right now—I assume Sis told you about her mom?”
Sicily’s eyes shifted toward me.
“She did,” I said. “She’s been gone since…” At the last second I realized I probably shouldn’t know all that much about it. “Since?”
“Wednesday night,” Bonnie said. “She went into the city on some errand. I assumed Christmas shopping. She always makes the season nice for everyone, you know, all the gifts and sparkle and everything. And getting us all into the true spirit, too, volunteering at the women’s shelters, serving at the soup kitchen… ”
Her voice broke a bit. Sicily moved quickly to her side and sank against her. Sicily, taller, rested her head on Bonnie’s shoulder and looked pleadingly at me. Asking for what?
I thought it might be a different kind of help this time, the kind where I protected this family from its own darkness. From who I was. From who Marisa might turn out to be.
Women’s shelters? Soup kitchens?
“Well, Sicily,” I said through gritted teeth. “Your mom certainly sounds like a heck of a lady.”