Chapter 5 #2
I stay up until Kai falls asleep, because I want to see what’s in his gym bag. Eventually, I slip out of bed and look in his closet, under the bed, everywhere he usually leaves it—-but it is not here.
Then I notice a bag from CVS. Inside is aerosol deodorant. Except the deodorant isn’t the kind that Kai usually uses, and that’s when I realize it’s a secret weapon. Pepper spray, but a higher concentration, available only to law enforcement. I slip it into my pocket.
If Kai is hiding something from me, it won’t be in a sock drawer or a safe.
Suddenly I know where I need to go. With Kai still snoring lightly, I slip outside and get into my car.
I am wearing pajamas underneath my jacket, and felt clogs that I keep as house shoes, but I can’t risk Kai waking up as I’m changing my clothes.
Since it’s after midnight, the police station is relatively quiet. The dispatcher, who sits behind a plate--glass window, smiles quizzically. “Georgia, right?” she asks, her voice tinny through the speaker. “You’re Kai’s partner?”
I don’t remember this woman’s name, but she looks vaguely familiar from a holiday party. I pin on my brightest smile. “That’s me!”
“He’s not on duty—-”
“Oh, I know. He isn’t feeling well, and he asked me to get something from his locker. Medication. I know where the locker room is. It’s not a problem if I just pop back there . . . ?”
“I can’t let you in unaccompanied,” the dispatcher says. “Is it something I can get for you?”
Dammit.
“I won’t be more than two minutes, promise.”
I can see her faltering. Please please please please—-
“Tell you what,” she says. “Why don’t you wait here, and I’ll see if there’s an officer free to walk you back.”
I nod, but I’m thinking: No. An officer will tell Kai I was there.
Just then, the secure door buzzes, and a woman in a dress that barely covers her butt totters out on sky--high heels. A plainclothes cop leans against the open doorway. “I mean it, Sugar. No soliciting in front of the Turner Building.”
This is my chance.
From my pocket I pull the ultra–-pepper spray, disguised in the deodorant can, and spray it in the face of the woman and the detective behind her. They both cover their eyes, reeling. “What the f—-” the detective roars, but I am already halfway down the hall leading to the locker room.
A call goes out over a loudspeaker, but I do not pay attention.
Kai’s locker is the last one on the left in the second row.
I slam my palms against it, groaning to see the combination lock.
Furiously, I try the numbers of his birth date, of mine, digits of his phone number, anything that comes to mind, but every time I yank on the lock it stays intact.
Strong arms grab my shoulders from behind. “Ma’am. Ma’am!”
I throw back my elbow. “I just need to get—-”
My hands are wrenched behind me, and I’m pushed forward against the wall. The aerosol can falls from my pocket. “You need to stop,” the voice says.
I start screaming. “You can’t do this to me. I’m here for Kai!”
The detective I sprayed in the eyes turns me so that I can meet his red, rheumy gaze. “Great,” he says. “Let’s call him.”
By the time Kai arrives, I am sitting in a holding cell, warily watching everyone who passes.
The detective, I’ve deduced, was in on the whole operation—-Kai used him to get the records he needed to expose me as a woman who went missing in 2001.
For all I know, the detective has already put a call in to the NYPD to say Eloise Ambrose, presumed dead, has resurfaced in Atlanta.
“Jesus, Kenny, are you shitting me?” Kai’s voice fills the space before he does.
The detective—-Kenny, I guess?—-shrugs. “I left the cell door open.”
Kai gives him a dirty look and then crouches in front of me. He is wearing pajama bottoms and a T--shirt that says crazy frankie’s fish fry. “K’aalógii,” he says, cupping my knees with his warm hands. “You okay?”
I shake my head. “I know you’re investigating me.”
Kai wraps me in his arms. “You’re not yourself, sweetheart,” he says softly. “Let’s get that fixed.”
Kai does not leave my side at the ER. The psychiatrist says it’s completely normal to need a medication tweak, especially with the onset of perimenopause.
I haven’t really thought about the irregular periods until she says that word.
But even though I am forty--seven, and I had no plans to have another baby, there is something about the close of this chapter that casts into stark relief what I so blithely left behind.
By the time we get home, it’s after five in the morning and the stars are dissolving in the dawn. Kai runs a bath. He washes my back, scrubs my scalp. The medication has not entirely kicked in yet, but the Ativan is making my eyes droop. I need sleep. It is the first step to healing.
Kai wraps me in a thick robe, sits me down on the edge of the bed, and combs through my hair to detangle it. “I’d understand, you know,” I murmur. “If you’re done.”
“Done?”
“With me. If you want to leave.” My breath rattles. “I have a lot of baggage.”
Kai sets down the comb and kneels in front of me. “Who doesn’t?”
I think his kindness may break me. My hands flutter in my lap like small, restless birds. “But this isn’t a onetime thing,” I tell Kai. “It could happen again.”
He catches my hand and kisses the palm. “Then I’ll be ready, k’aalógii,” he says.
My breakdown ushers in an era of honesty.
Although I do not tell Kai my biggest secret, I tell him the truth about my childhood—-details I have never shared with anyone.
I describe what it felt like to be whipped in front of the congregation.
I tell him about the mysterious bottle of pills my mother kept.
I paint the moment I saw Adie on her knees in front of my father.
I tell him how I found her, after she killed herself. How I decided to save myself.
It feels as if long strips of guilt have peeled away from me, like old wallpaper ripped off in ribbons to reveal a bright fresco beneath.
It is talking about my childhood that leads me to search for my mother on the internet.
To my great surprise, she has a Facebook page.
There are a few photos of her with church ladies.
The most recent post has a picture of her in some kind of facility, holding a ball on her lap.
The geotag reads Christian Horizons, and a quick Google search reveals it is a faith--based dementia facility.
“You should go,” Kai tells me. “Visit her. Make your peace.”
Eloise Ambrose would never have set foot back in Alabama. But Georgia Gilligan has the confidence to do just that.
The air in Alabama is cloying. Honeysuckle, clover, swamp, steel.
When I tell the receptionist at Christian Horizons that I’m here to visit Euphemia Owens, she lights up. “Oh, how lovely,” she says. “Effie doesn’t get many visitors.”
As she leads me to the garden, where my mother likes to pass her time, she asks how I know Effie. “I grew up with her,” I say after a moment. “I haven’t seen her for a very long time.”
She stops walking. “She has Alzheimer’s, and she’s in the later stages. So she may look a lot different than you remember. You also shouldn’t be surprised if she can’t remember you.”
In the walled garden, patients in wheelchairs are dotted around. I’m led to a far corner, where a woman sits staring at a fountain.
“Effie,” the receptionist says. “I’ve brought you a visitor!”
My mother’s hair is snow white, tangled. Her skin is stretched over the bones of her folded arms, too tight and translucent.
I sit on the stone lip of the fountain. I am dimly aware of the receptionist leaving us. My mother smells faintly of urine. I have no idea what to say to her.
“This was a stupid idea,” I mutter under my breath, and she turns.
“You came back,” she says, and everything in me goes still.
She tilts her head, her eyes darting to a bird that has landed on the stone Cupid atop the fountain.
“Darling,” she says, and a small moan rises in my throat.
To hear a term of endearment from my mother, after so long—-and when they had been so few and far between during my childhood—-is both gutting and grounding.
The bird chitters, and takes off into the sky. “Goodbye, starling,” my mother murmurs.
Starling, not darling.
Embarrassed by my own neediness, I look away. My gaze falls to the Bible sitting in her lap. Her face lights up. “Are you a Christian?”
While I’m struggling to think of a response, she keeps speaking.
“We have so much to do this week. Vacation Bible School starts, and we haven’t even got all the art supplies . . .”
I feel my eyes fill with tears.
“. . . and Adie’s promised to do a puppet show but—-”
“Adie?” I say sharply.
Suddenly her hand grips mine. “Would you like to pray?”
My mouth goes dry. “Why don’t you start?”
She fishes down her smock for a pair of glasses, then she opens the Bible to a well--worn spot and starts to read.
It’s from John, or maybe Luke. I let the syllables of my mother’s voice rush over me.
In those passages of praise and redemption, I hear instead a lullaby on a night the sky fired with electrical storms; I hear her sobs when she was too sick to leave her room; I hear the wonder in her words as we watched birds fly from a nest.
While my mother continues to read, I move behind her wheelchair.
She hesitates when I rest my hand on the crown of her head.
Her pink scalp seems childlike as I weave a braid just like she used to wear.
I don’t have a white ribbon, but I tie it off with a plain hair elastic I happen to have around my wrist.
My mother sighs. “That’s so much better. Thank you, Eloise.”
My hands are still on the tail of her braid. It has been so long since anyone called me that.
I look around, panicked, but no one is paying attention. Plus, it wouldn’t be extraordinary for a patient with dementia to call someone by the wrong name. More important, once I leave this garden, she will not even remember I was here.