Chapter 47
Now
Mama sat at the table with a steaming cup of tea in front of her.
It was only the three of us: her and me and Frances.
Mama had searched for pain medicine while Frances and I worked with Bunny to maneuver my aunts into Bunny’s vehicle. Ruth had woken up, and though she was a long way from okay, we’d been able to get her curled into the tight back seat of the Camaro. Hattie-May lay in the front.
Mama wept openly as she leaned into the car and said her goodbyes before they left. She reached through the car window with her good arm and clasped Aunt Ruth’s hand in a way that felt desperate and unfair. They’d gotten to be sisters again for less than a day.
She buried her face in Aunt Hattie-May’s shoulder, hugging her the same way I had as a little girl when my life was falling apart. When it was time, she’d wordlessly let go and walked into the house without looking back.
Frances and I had watched the powder blue Camaro disappear down the drive, then turned and followed Mama’s footsteps into the house. It killed me a little not to go with my aunts when they were hurting, but right now Mama needed me more.
Mama would be the only one here whenever she called the cops and explained how her son-in-law picked her up from the halfway house and forced her over state lines.
How he was crazy with anger over his wife leaving him and thought Mama was lying about knowing where she was.
She’d claim she shot him in self-defense after he broke her arm, but we had no delusions of that mattering, especially since Burt was shot in the face multiple times.
Frances had already wiped the voicemails from Burt’s phone.
Now, the three of us sat around the table as Mama set her intentions, then she threw back the tea, knocked on the counter three times, and turned her cup upside down onto a saucer to drain the excess liquid.
Of course I’d never properly read for her before.
The closest had been that morning so long ago, when the internal door had opened and bathed me in fear and coldness and I’d begged to stay home from school.
I’d spent my childhood feeling sick with guilt over something I now knew was beyond of my control.
I closed my eyes and coaxed open the door, letting fate flow out as I dipped my fingers into that place inside, funneling intuition into the conduit.
Show me something useful. Ebb and flow through me.
Show me something for Mama. The Sight felt different.
The place inside me was almost languid. Hesitant but sure.
Confinement stealing my breath. Sadness. Anger. Eyes everywhere all the time. Loneliness. Intense. Bitter. Loneliness.
I opened my eyes and sucked in a breath. Mama’s gaze was trained on my face, but neither she nor Frances spoke as I flipped over the cup. We all stared at the fortune in front of us.
Frances could see nothing but a nest of leaves, but I wondered what Mama saw. I hoped it was something different. For the second time in so many days, I hoped I was wrong.
“Well?” Mama said after a moment. The weight held in that one word told me she saw it for herself. “What do you see, baby?”
The shape was obvious, the future set. My words come out in barely a whisper. “A cage.”
Mama inhaled sharply through her nose and nodded. “Yes. That’s what I thought. Makes sense, I suppose. It’s always been a cage my whole life. Why would it change now?”
I blinked but didn’t trust myself to speak, not when the sorrow in the room was heavy enough to drown.
It was a problem my sister didn’t share. She asked, “Your fate’s always been a cage, Mama?”
Mama nodded. “My whole damn life. It’d change shape and size, but a cage is a cage is a cage. I waited my entire childhood to see what it meant, always worried. Always a little sick over it.
“When I married your father, and his true colors made their appearance, I’d thought, ‘So this is it.’ My cage was being shackled to a man who beat on me.
Of course then I landed in a literal cage.
And now…” In her weathered face, lit by the golden light filtering through the kitchen blinds, I glimpsed the mama she’d been when I’d known her.
The soft woman was there, buried beneath a world of troubles.
“And now here we are, sending you back,” I said.
“No. No you’re not.” She grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. “You’re not sending me anywhere. If you have to blame somebody, blame Burt. He was dead the moment he showed up here, the moment he hurt Frances.”
Her words echoed what Hattie-May had said so long ago in that clearing. He was dead the moment he touched your sister.
“Can you tell us about what happened?” I asked. “That morning with Daddy. If you don’t want to, I understand,” I asked.
She pulled her arm close and breathed deep. I regretted asking her to revisit such a dark place.
“Your daddy started getting rough with y’all. Especially you, Milly. Let him hit me, but I couldn’t abide him putting his hands on you girls. I was going to get us away from him. We were going to be free. I planned it all out. I was going to use foxglove.
When I was young, I’d overheard Aunt Hattie tell one of her clients about it.
” As she spoke, she looked at the wall across from us, covered in Hattie-May’s drawings.
Pencil sketches of belladonna, daffodils, oleander, wolfsbane, and lily of the valley overlapped in a paper patchwork quilt.
There was rosary pea and of course the mourning willow with its weeping branches and gnarled roots.
A darker incarnation of the tree behind the greenhouse, which wasn’t scary at all.
Mama continued. “I worked for months, growing the pretty flowers from seeds in our back flowerbeds.” She smiled.
“I do not have Aunt Hattie’s green thumb, but I tended to it and it thrived.
Like nature herself wanted me to succeed.
Then when it was ready, I followed instructions I found online, blending it to a pulp. ”
“We were going to poison Burt, originally,” I said.
“Poison’s how most women do it.” Mama’s gaze drifted from Hattie-May’s artwork into the past. “Can you believe I hung all my hopes on a teenage memory? But that’s what desperation will do to you.
Foxglove can trigger a heart attack, and I convinced myself with your daddy’s drinking and smoking and carrying on, no one would suspect a thing, that I was like Aunt Hattie getting rid of pests.
I’m not ashamed to say I was excited when I stirred it into his coffee.
I remember thinking, ‘This is it. Today I’ll get my life back.
Today I’ll save my girls.’ I don’t know if you remember, but I made y’all a special breakfast. It was going to be the first day of the rest of our lives. ”
My breathing hitched. The pancakes were blueberry and shaped like hearts.
My chair squeaked as I shifted my weight and stole a look at my sister, who watched Mama reverently.
“But…I don’t know how he knew, or even if he really did.
Your daddy didn’t drink his coffee that morning.
Three cups a day with breakfast the entire time we’d been married, and that morning he didn’t drink a drop.
He loaded you girls up for school, and I was so scared that I could barely breathe.
Milly, I think you could sense something was wrong because you tried your darndest to stay home, but I couldn’t let you.
” She shook her head. “When he kissed me goodbye there was pure hate in his eyes.”
She paused, taking a deep breath, and I remembered that feeling: the coldness. The metal in my palm. The explosion. Death foretold before I was old enough to understand.
“Once he was gone, I took his revolver from where he kept it locked in our nightstand. He dropped you at school then came right back, eager to waste no time. So, when he opened the door, I pulled the pistol from my dress pocket and shot him.”