25. Martha
Martha
Nicola should be thanking her lucky stars right about now, or thanking me, more like it. Instead, she’s silently cursing me, even as I drive her away and pick up the phone. I’m sorry, Nicola. Right now, you are making this very, very difficult for the both of us.
I hold the phone to my ear, and I position my voice, our voice, where it needs to be. In my register, not Nic’s people-pleasing high-pitched tone.
“Mrs. Redfern?”
“Yes, I’m still here.”
“Sorry about all of that. This is Martha speaking.”
“Martha! Oh great.” A pause, maybe mistrusting me.
“That was my sister you were talking to before,” I interject. “She isn’t well and gets confused sometimes.”
“Oh … I. I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. So you got my letter?”
Papers shuffle in the background as I hear her switch the phone to speaker. “Yes. I’d like you to come in for an interview.”
“Great. I can be there anytime.”
“How about tomorrow? Can you be here at eleven?”
“Yes, of course. Thank you for the opportunity.”
“You’re welcome.” A pause.
“Yes?”
“Don’t be late.”
I hang up the phone and throw it back onto the sofa. Scotch glares at me and stands up. I offer my hand and let him sniff, but he yaps at me and growls. I never did like dogs much.
Upstairs, I dive into Nicola’s closet and find that it houses two kinds of clothes: pre-accident and post-accident. The pre-accident clothes are two sizes larger, all brand names, and hung up in a specific way, all the way in the back of her closet.
The post-accident clothes are another story.
Jumbles of tiny items, cheap workout gear, hotel uniform shirts, and black tee shirts galore.
I’m trying things on when I hear the front door close and Emmy humming to herself, opening and closing the fridge.
I listen quietly as she makes her way up to her bedroom and switches on YouTube.
I feel Nicola itching to get out, but I’ve barely been here long enough to take a shower, eat, and figure out what the next twelve hours are going to look like.
In moments, I hear her shuffling down the hall toward me.
“Mom?”
Instinctively, my throat tightens. “In here!”
She pauses at the bedroom door. “What are you doing?”
My eyes take her in. Old sweats, her hair a little unruly, the same eyeliner back under her eyes, thick and misplaced. “Getting ready for an interview. Why?”
“I think the stuff we ordered online came. There are a ton of boxes outside.”
“Well, bring them in!”
Emmy leaves and returns with a few packages and an oversized box. She drops them in the middle of the bedroom floor and starts opening everything.
“I’m so excited,” she says. “I hope everything fits.”
I pull off a pair of oversized slacks and hang them back up. “Tell me about it.”
Emmy eyeballs me as she starts unwrapping items. “What’s this job interview, anyway?”
“It’s with someone very important.” From the closet, I take out a black cardigan and a skirt that look two sizes too big. “I wonder if I can belt this …”
“Probably,” Emmy answers me. “So, who is this very important person?”
“Don’t worry about who it is.”
Emmy sighs. “That’s a little shady, don’t you think?”
“No, I don’t think.”
“Well, can I know what you’re going to interview for?”
“I told you. I’m helping someone as a personal assistant.”
“Sounds like a step down from the Whitmore.”
Cool and calm, I turn to her. “Yeah, well, when you have as much debt as we do, you take what you can get, toots.”
Emmy stares at me for a moment, her brow furrowed. “You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what? I’m not doing anything.”
Emmy steps slightly toward the door, holding the one dress she has yet to try on. “Yeah … Okay then.” She pauses for a moment, then drops the dress. “I’ll be in my room.”
“Suit yourself,” I call after her.
Scouring the closet for something decent to wear, I notice an upper rack still full of Ben’s clothes.
Suits in various dark shades, a tie rack, overcoats, and next to them, jeans and shirts untouched, like he still lives here.
Moving closer, I smell him in the fabric, a subtle waft of musk and pine.
Maybe that’s why Nicola keeps them. The “don’t talk about Ben” rule is becoming stifling.
I liked Ben. Everyone did. Under a canopy of red and white flowers, they’d married by the sea on the lawn of an expensive hotel, white chairs spread across the green, the sun setting, Nicola in her white fitted dress.
And then it was the honeymoon right there in the same hotel by the sea, making love many times over while I watched and waited.
All that watching makes you remember things. The way money came and went but never stuck around. The nights of listening to them argue, hearing the same story over and over again. And slowly, I felt the burden on Nicola growing as the sole provider.
When they bought the house—the two-story Cape Cod home with that green lawn—I thought it would be my turn, but it wasn’t.
I’ve been here a long, long time. Way before the car accident.
Do you want to remember, Nicola, or do you want to just keep living this way, hurting like you do?
Silence. I know she’s bitter. I can feel her as she can me in this worn-out body of ours.
From Emmy’s new stash on the floor, I unwrap a little black tee shirt that’s more my size and pair it with the skirt that’s too big.
In the closet, I dig out a belt and wrap it round, then find a cardigan with brown edges on the sleeves, which I roll up to look more presentable.
My midsection squirms, Nicola vying for control. Don’t do this, she begs.
A memory surges at the thought, sudden for both of us.
The cold glass of the kitchen table. The cheap plastic chairs her mother and father had long since forgotten to replace. The mellow lighting from one overhead bulb in their ceiling. Janice was already asleep, but Nicola stayed up to help her mother clean the house before her father returned.
When he did, her mother would serve dinner, and they’d eat in silence, Nicola hoping to be sent up to bed sometime soon.
But this one particular night, something was off, a mood of malcontent brewing from her father so palpable Nicola could almost taste it.
She was carrying the lasagna from the stove, the large, glass pan hot and slippery in her gloved hands.
Steadily, she carried it to him, watching her steps—one, two, three—across the stained linoleum floor.
But as she approached him to set the lasagna on the table, her foot caught a bulge in the floor, and she tripped, the hot pan catching her father’s arm.
He lunged at her, his hand raised, his nostrils flared, and his breath sour on her face. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
It happened so fast—the blow to her cheek—I had little time to react.
She landed hard against the linoleum and fell back, her head thumping against the oven door.
I heard the crack as she hit it, the back of her head splitting open—a hairline fracture.
The trickle of blood ran down her forehead into her mouth, the taste iron-y.
Her father raged. She had made him do it.
It was all her fault. Did she like him now when he was this angry? Was this what she wanted?
But Nicola couldn’t hear him. Her ears were ringing with my voice, a lullaby I sang to her sometimes when she needed to be somewhere else.
Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.
Mama’s gonna find you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird don’t sing,
She’ll snap its neck and drown it in the bathroom sink.
She rocked back and forth, humming my song in her head, as if at any moment she might drift away and never return.
Her father yelled, and she clutched her body. This is what you get, you stupid girl. This is what you get get get, she thought.
She thought she had made him this way, brought it out of him. So maybe she could make him better again. Maybe it was her fault. Her fault. Her fault fault fault.
I did this, Nicola said to me. Help me. Please help me.
And so I did. Not because I couldn’t do it before but because she asked me to, there and then. Shhhh, quiet, I told her. You didn’t do this. This isn’t your fault. This could never be your fault. Now get up.
I felt her body resist, her bones frozen solid. Her head was shaking “no” ever so slightly. No no no.
Get up. Go to him, I insisted.
But she wouldn’t move. She just sat there on the floor rocking. Bleeding. Crying.
So, I did what I had to do.
The rocking stopped. The bleeding slowed. I pushed back the tears.
Tilting my head up, I locked onto her father, my eyes boring into him. “If you ever touch me again, I will kill you,” I said, letting my voice get quiet.
Her father stepped back, startled. Then his expression turned stony, and he lunged at me and smacked me hard across the mouth. A fresh trickle of blood ran from my lips down my chin, and I smiled—a blood-filled grin—knowing that I wouldn’t let him go on much longer.