Chapter 20 #3
At least until Blackwood Manor came along.
When I learned about the lore and the mystery surrounding the supposed hidden menagerie of rare plants at work one day, I couldn’t stop thinking about it; it consumed me.
Pinehurst Botanical Gardens had always been a grand, beautiful place, but more than just the prospect of saving Pinehurst was the idea of doing something exciting on my own, away from her reach.
As if on cue, my phone rang, and her name popped up in bold letters. I moved the dress from the corner of my bed and sat down.
“Hey,” I said, hoping my nonchalant voice would derail any harsh words from her.
“Oh, Jesus Christ, Eliza. Are you still there? At the manor? You gotta get away from there; our name is already in all the papers. This is not the kind of thing you should be getting messed up in; you should be in the papers for helping save fauna and flora, not for fucking a seller of mass weapons. I’m finishing up something for work, and then I’ll be over to pick you up.
You better—all the emissions I’m using to go up there—”
“Mom.” I tried to cut her off. That familiar ebb of adrenaline rushed through my body as it did every single time she was like this. My body prepared for a fight, but my mind would tamp it down eventually, keeping it buried where it wouldn’t bother anybody but me.
“Eliza Nicole Arnold, don’t Mom me. What type of soil have you been using? Is it on our safe list? I saw everything at your apartment that was on the red list. You will have to be punished, Eliza. You can’t do that to Mother Earth and not expect to be punished.”
Her words crawled across my skin like tiny blades.
I could feel the blood rushing to my face, making my cheeks red and splotchy.
“I won’t be able to take any days off after being at the manor for three months.
I know you’re upset with me, but it’s not really that big of a deal, Mom.
People use plastic all the time; I didn’t have anything that bad. ”
I sat on the edge of my bed, the sexy black dress in hand, wondering how I was staying as calm as I was.
That had been the wrong thing to say. I had known it before I said it, but still, I’d said it. It was like the mechanism that warned me, told me when to shut up and stop talking, had been broken.
“This is exactly what I was afraid of with you staying there without me. Your father and I are counting on you, Eliza. Who is going to care for this planet once we’re gone? You ungrateful child. It’s a good thing you’re moving back in with Dad and me. You’ll have five days in the cabin.”
My body jolted involuntarily. Bile rose up before I swallowed it back down.
“No, Mom, I don’t need to go to the cabin. I’m an adult; we don’t need that anymore.” A shiver latched on to my bones, and I shook for a second.
There was a shed-like hut in the back half of my parents’ wooded property.
It was small and made entirely of trees from our forest, using no nails or man-made substances—and it was used for only one thing.
When I was particularly forgetful or made a bad decision about something, I had to go to the cabin to learn how to reconnect with nature.
My dad did, too, occasionally and my sister as well, until she moved.
We sat alone in pitch black with nothing to do and no one to talk to.
You could have small amounts of water, and she would bring you a small vegan dinner, usually just a can of beans or a bowl of rice, but that was the only thing you got to eat for the day.
You weren’t allowed to leave to go to the bathroom, as that was part of the lesson.
As a small child, it had been horrifying, as an adult only slightly less.
It had been a long time since I’d been in there—and I wasn’t ever going to go back in if I could help it.
“What…type of soil have I been using…in the conservatory?” I asked, my brows pinching together almost painfully as I struggled to calculate the best responses—the ones that would keep me safe. Of all the things for her to demand to know…
“Yes, Eliza! What do you think I’m talking about? Sometimes, you can be so stupid for such an intelligent girl. You’re using the kind with synthetic fertilizers, aren’t you? You are, aren’t you? If I get there and see that you’re using peat moss, I will lose it, Eliza. I’m serious.”
“I—I’m using good soil,” I mumbled. Already, my anger had gone away to the familiar space to hide, and the appeasing, easy-to-manage Eliza had taken the reins, doing her best to navigate the conversation to a safe place.
Hearing how she talked to me after not being around her the last month or so had felt different.
Her impact was worse, somehow, after not feeling it for a while.
“Peat bogs are sensitive ecosystems that provide unique habitats for wildlife. You know the extraction of peat destroys the habitats and disrupts biodiversity. Do you want that on your hands? I don’t believe you; you’ve never cared about anything but yourself.
Send me a picture of the bags—and you better be recycling those,” she snapped in her tone that made me shrink to about an inch tall.
“Yeah, I know, Mom. You’ve told me,” I said, hearing my soft voice as if I were listening to it outside my body.
I regretted answering the phone. I wished I weren’t so afraid of my balcony so that I could hurl it over the large stone railing and never see it again.
“You don’t need to come get me; I have my car.
Everything is fine, and I still have a lot of work to do.
Besides, it’s not like I have an apartment to go home to now anyway.
” I flinched, immediately pinching my fists together, wishing I hadn’t said my last words.
My tongue was looser with the small taste of independence, something that would be hard and painful to tamp down later, I feared.
“You ought to be thanking me for that! Thank god you don’t have anyone over at your house ever, and you’re just poisoning yourself while you destroy all of your father’s and my life’s work.
Palm oil, Eliza, fucking palm oil. Have you forgotten everything you learned from us?
You told me your clothes were all sustainably sourced.
That’s a move I would expect from your lying sister, but not from you.
Sometimes, I wish I’d never had either of you, knowing how you both are.
I would be so much happier if I didn’t have to spend my days following you around like you were a baby.
For god’s sake, Eliza, you are a grown woman. Act like it.”
Warmth bloomed in my eyes, blurring them with tears.
Yeah, the words hit different parts of me after not having heard their harshness for a while. Somewhere over the course of my stay at Blackwood Manor, my numbness about life had faded. Enough so that I felt armorless and soft now. Her strikes hit harder, more painfully.
Something had to change. I couldn’t do this anymore. It wasn’t normal to treat people this way, especially not the ones you loved. I bristled even though warning bells sounded in my head.
“I’m not a baby. I’m a twenty-five-year-old woman. Why do you say stuff like that? That you wish you’d never had me? That really hurts, Mom.” My voice cracked with the unfamiliarity of speaking up.
“Excuse me for being a terrible mother and caring about you. God forbid I mention how much you hurt me, Eliza. I forgot I can’t have any feelings. Everything is about you,” she snapped.
“I gotta go, Mom,” I said, struggling to keep myself still as my legs trembled. I needed her off the phone before she got really into her rants about how horrible I was. I wasn’t equipped to handle it right now.
“I’m coming now to get you. You’ll move back in with Dad and me where I can watch you.
The three of us could use another trip to the Congo Basin.
You need to remember what it is you’re doing when you use palm oil and aluminum cans.
A few days without anything will remind you how much you should thank Mother Earth,” she muttered. I heard a car door close.
My eyes shut, little stars of dizzying glitter dancing on the backs of my eyelids. She couldn’t come here. If she did, I would leave with her. “I’m not leaving, so please do not waste a trip coming up here.” My voice trembled with anger and sadness.
She let out an abrasive laugh. “Who do you think you are? If I have to, I will come up there and tear you out of that house. I birthed you. You don’t get to tell me no. That’s not how this works.”
I tucked in on myself. Growing up, that was the number-one rule for my sister and me. It had been drilled loudly into our heads from the moment we were born, above all else. It was the foundation upon which I lived and breathed. We were never, ever allowed to utter the word no to her.
I wanted to ask if she had talked to Lucy, but now was the worst imaginable time to bring up my rebellious sister, and it wasn’t like they talked very often anyway. I wasn’t missing anything by not asking.
“I have a dinner I need to go to. I’ll talk to you later,” I said with a trained voice that held nothing but polite respect.
“A dinner? With who? Blackwood? Oh, great, so you’ll be murdered next, then?” she snarked.
My tongue refused to hold. She was just like everybody else that didn’t really know him.
“Jasper didn’t murder anybody. You don’t even know what happened—” I tried to explain.
“Don’t be such an idiot. I’ve been in this town longer than you’ve been alive.
That man killed his mother, and his father was probably in on it with him.
I’ve seen his interviews; I get it; he’s handsome as the devil, but do you think Ted Bundy wasn’t a charmer?
How do you think they get their victims to trust them? Idiot girl.”
“Bye, Mom, I need to go,” I said and hung up to the sound of her yelling.