Chapter Seventeen Black River Falls, Wisconsin Present Day #2
“It’s not fair,” Kat wailed. “You’ll ruin everything. You’ll take him in and mother him and smother him. And when he can’t take it another second, he’ll disappear just like my dad and my grandparents and everyone else.”
Chrissie didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to ask.
She did anyway.
“And that’s not enough for you? I’m not enough?”
Kat seemed to age a hundred years in the silence that followed.
“You know what?” she said. “I hope you and Coach do get married. I hope things are so good between you that he formally adopts me. Then, when things fall apart, I can live with him instead. I’ll cut you out of my life, the same way you did with your own parents, and you’ll finally see what it’s like. ”
Chrissie didn’t want to ask the next part, either, but she was in too far to stop now. “What what is like?”
Kat was almost triumphant as she shot her parting words. “To be alone. To have no one in your life but you. To know that if I had a thousand different lives in a thousand different bodies, I wouldn’t pick you to be my mom in a single one.”
By the time Kat hung up the phone, Chrissie felt as though she’d been slapped so hard that her ears would never stop ringing.
She could see Scarlett’s mouth moving and feel her phone being lifted from her fingers, but no sound registered other than a strange, eerie whistling like wind through the Grand Canyon.
Which, now that she thought about it, was a sound she’d never heard before and probably never would. The Grand Canyon was just one of the several hundred places she hadn’t visited. She’d been too busy trying to be the best mom in the world to the only person who mattered.
And too busy failing every step of the way.
* * *
Scarlett and River tried to cheer her up in a dozen different ways.
When highlighting their own teenage temper tantrums didn’t work—Don’t you remember that time I told my grandma that if she fed me one more piece of kale I’d go on a hunger strike for the rest of my life?
You wouldn’t believe some of the things I threatened to do to my dad after he got remarried.
At one point, I even considered framing him for murder.
—they moved on to dangling enticing pit stops in front of her.
“Look! This one is called Cave of the Mounds. That sounds almost as dirty as Knob Lick, Kentucky.”
“Oooh, or what about the Museum of Historic Torture Devices? That’ll help put things in perspective.”
With each new attempt, Chrissie managed a smile, but each one seemed to cost her more and more.
“I’m sorry, you guys. I appreciate you trying, but all I want right now is to get to Chicago before nightfall.
” Her smile got even more strained at that, pulling at her scalp like a too-tight ponytail.
“It would be nice if I manage to help at least one person in this lifetime. If Kat’s out, I might as well do what I can for River. ”
Since Chrissie was in the back seat—ostensibly to nap but really just to lick her wounds in peace—she could see the very obvious look that Scarlett and River shared.
“I know, I know.” She slumped down in her seat, rendering her seat belt ineffective. “I’m being more dramatic than Kat. Just let me sit in my misery for a few hours, okay? It’s been a long time since I’ve thrown myself a truly rocking pity party. I’d hate to leave this one early.”
With that, she slapped on a pair of headphones and turned up the volume on her phone.
As this was set to an audiobook narrated by Juliet Stevenson, whose lilting upper-crust voice could soothe all the world’s ills, and not the overly emotional lyrics favored by girls of Kat’s and River’s ilk, the end result wasn’t the same, but Chrissie didn’t care.
The more distracted she was, the less likely she was to hear the memory of Kat’s voice echoing around inside her head.
If I had a thousand lives in a thousand bodies, I wouldn’t pick you to be my mom.
It was painfully similar to what she used to think back when she was a girl.
On the rare occasions when she’d find herself at the dinner table with her mom, or her mom would pass through the music room where Chrissie sat tickling the ivories in an attempt to draw her out, she’d indulge in that very same fantasy—a world where she had literally any other parent on earth.
Someone forthright but gentle like Scarlett’s grandmother.
Someone who screamed and stomped all over the floor like the people who lived in the apartment above them.
Maybe even someone who was a combination of the two—loud and loving and alive.
As much as she’d enjoyed those thoughts, however, she’d never actually said them out loud. It would have been a cruel thing to do—and no matter how much she resented the way her parents protected themselves after the loss of Malcolm, she couldn’t find it in her to hurt them.
Not when life—and death—had already done it for her.
She brushed at a wayward tear with the back of her hand and hoped that no one in the front seat had seen it. If they had, they were discreet enough not to mention it because the car continued flying down the highway at Scarlett’s usual breakneck pace.
Despite Chrissie’s reservations about letting Scarlett take the wheel when her health was in flux, she was glad for the reprieve.
She wouldn’t say she regretted the decision to take River to her great-aunt’s house, but she’d be glad to shut the door on this part of the trip.
She and Scarlett still had a lot of talking left to do, and it would be much easier once they were on their own again.
Thanks to Scarlett’s lead foot and the fact that no one felt much like eating, they made it to Chicago well before darkness started to fall.
Despite Chrissie’s mood and the fact that Ms. Stevenson’s voice was making her long for the rough moors of England instead of midwestern urban sprawl, she found herself growing interested in her surroundings.
Large cities had never been a favorite of hers, as evidenced by the fact that she’d moved to Medford from Portland as soon as Kat was born, but there was something to be said for the bustling evidence of activity all around them.
People honked and swerved as if they were on the way to the most important meeting of their lives, and she found herself getting caught up in anticipation as they wound closer to the neighborhoods near the south end of the lake.
She also managed to pull her head out of the clouds enough to realize that the car had become almost as tense as it had been during the phone call with Kat.
“What if she’s not home?” River asked as they waited at a stoplight underneath the freeway. She chewed nervously on her fingernails. “What if she, like, moved and didn’t tell me? Or she only offered to let me live with her because she knew I’d never take her up on it?”
The mom in Chrissie immediately pushed her own problems aside. She knew Scarlett would hate it—that this call to action was the only thing able to pull her out of her slump—but there was no stopping that particular train once it left the station.
To her surprise, Scarlett beat her to the punch.
“If she’s not home, we’ll go have a nice dinner somewhere and try again in a few hours,” Scarlett said in a short, matter-of-fact voice that reminded Chrissie so much of Nan that her heart squeezed.
“If she moved and didn’t tell you, we’ll get a hotel nearby and hunt down a forwarding address.
And if she shuts the door in your face, we’ll go in through a window and make her see reason. It’s as easy as that.”
River rallied under this approach. “Yeah. Okay. Thanks. I don’t know why I’m getting so freaked out over this.”
“I do,” Scarlett said, and then she surprised Chrissie even more. “A similar loss happened to me when I was your age. I went from having a home and a family to being entirely on my own overnight. Believe me when I say that you’re handling it a hell of a lot better than I did.”
The speech, Chrissie knew, wasn’t meant for River. But River was the one who spoke first.
“What did you do?” she asked. “When your world fell apart?”
Scarlett glanced at Chrissie then, but it was only a brief flicker in the rearview mirror as she pulled the car up in front of a two-story apartment building of dark red brick.
“I can’t tell you that,” she said as she turned the car off and plunged them all into silence. “I made a promise a long time ago to take that secret to my grave.”
* * *
Chrissie liked Great-Aunt Rose on sight.
“Oh, finally. Finally!”
Those had been her only words when the door swung open to reveal three women standing on the landing—one of whom she recognized and two of whom could have been saleswomen peddling Avon through the portals of time, for all she knew.
She hadn’t hugged River or burst into tears—two things Chrissie felt sure she would have done in the same situation—but she did usher them inside without a moment’s hesitation.
The house smelled strongly of cat and turpentine, but not in an unpleasant way, especially to one who had long since become inured to the power of ammonia-scented urine.
Equally strange, but not necessarily in a bad way, were the stacks of half-finished canvases resting against every available wall.
“I wasn’t expecting company, and I wouldn’t have bothered cleaning if I had, so you’ll just have to excuse the mess,” Great-Aunt Rose said as she led them through a narrow, cluttered hallway to the kitchen.
Three cats lay curled up on the table, each one taking a woven placemat for itself.
“I don’t have anything to drink but tea that went stale a good three years ago, and you’ll have to drink it black.
Alecto, Tisiphone, and Megaera got the last of the milk this morning. ”
Chrissie smiled at the names of the cats—the three Furies, if she wasn’t mistaken—but politely accepted the offer of a beverage.