Concrete Savior (10 page)

T
he visions had driven
her mother insane.

They absolutely had. This was real life, not a mystery movie where some poor schmuck or pitiful woman was wrongly locked away so a conniving relative could get his or her hands on a sizable trust fund or become heir to a wealthy and magnificent throne. There was no money or power to be had. There was just her cold, hard father and the complete and utter loathing with which he had been filled when the doors at Lakeshore Hospital had closed behind his wife for the first and last time. She was still there now, diagnosed as an advanced schizophrenic as she rambled nonstop about the things she saw on a daily basis. The problem was that no one else could see them and nothing—no amount of therapy or drugs or anything else the doctors used as treatment—could make her mother stop talking about them.

She went to the window and stared outside again. This seemed to be
the
spot for her lately, although from one moment to the next she couldn’t have said what transpired on the street below. She stood here, she thought about . . .
things
, and she waited.

Perhaps this was her punishment. Because what had she done for all these years but lie? To her friends, to her employers, to herself.

My mother passed away.

That had been the first lie, the one she’d started using when she was only ten years old, not long after her mother was institutionalized and her father had packed up her and the house and moved away from everyone who’d known them. He stayed at the same job and now, as an adult, she knew that it was because of the medical insurance. He was trapped there until his wife died or the coverage ran out. Well, her mother didn’t die, and by the time the insurance maxed out and the state had to step in, fifteen years later, he was too close to a pension to leave and as set in his ways as old concrete anyway.

That lie had continued into adulthood, long past the point where she should have been able to face her genetics and think things through, decide for herself if she was going to empower herself over her own life or if that control would be relinquished to some elusive DNA coding. But she hadn’t taken control. She was a coward, a weakling, and she lied to
everyone
, friends—although she had damned few of those—coworkers, even Vance.

Yes, even him.

How is it right, she wondered now, to lie to the same man you say you will love for eternity? To look him in the eye when he asks and say, without blinking or worrying about it or hesitating—

“My mother’s dead.”

If you lied about the one thing, could you truly be trusted to have told the truth about the other? He might have been a coward in his own way, but even her father hadn’t done that. He’d just run.

And one lie apparently begot another, somehow propagating and spreading, popping up all over her life like the ugly, unwanted weed that you couldn’t get out of your garden, the one that sent out runners of itself just below the surface of the soil. Even at her job, where a coworker, one of the few people she could perhaps consider a friend of her own rather than Vance’s, had asked “So where are you going on vacation?”

“Oh, just to Phoenix to spend time with some friends.”

How easily and quickly even that lie had come out of her mouth, yet in retrospect it was almost as if it had been carefully orchestrated to cover everything—the length of her absence from work, a far enough distance to become unreachable, even explain any sunburn or tan she might get from being not in Arizona, but in Las Vegas, where she and Vance had gone specifically to elope. But the difference between her and her new husband was fundamental: he had told everyone at work, put her on his benefit plans, and even put a picture on his desk of them after their Chapel of the Bells wedding. More important, he had called his parents on the East Coast and told them the grand news, accepted his mother’s tearful congratulations, and told her that the two of them would come out for Thanksgiving.

She, on the other hand, had told no one. Not the people at work, not the few people she counted as vague friends, and most certainly not her father.

She’d done enough self-analysis to know that part of e reason she was so secretive was because she was ashamed. Not because her mother had visions—after all, her own visions had started the day she’d gotten her first menstrual period. She’d finally understood how her mother must’ve felt, as though self-control had been wrenched away and her own body had somehow betrayed her.

The problem, as far as she could figure, was that her mother had gotten
caught
. Her mother had confessed the pictures in her head and been condemned outright for it, exposed like a shoplifter or a naughty schoolboy rummaging through the girls’ gym lockers or the disgusting pedophile with his rumpled stash of dirty pictures. Her punishment had been the worst thing that could happen, not only to her but to her family—what ten-year-old child could tell anyone that her mother was locked away in a mental institution?

And her father . . . God. She could just imagine his reaction when he found out she’d gotten married. He would eventually, of course. She wasn’t foolish enough to think she could hide this forever. His expression would twist in disgust when he looked at her until it became actually frightening—she knew this because she’d seen it happen before. Too many years of bitterness and hatred had destroyed whatever good looks he’d had when he’d been younger; now he was hard and sallow-cheeked, thin to the point of emaciation simply because he didn’t enjoy eating—he didn’t enjoy
anything
. He would push his face close to hers and remind her the same way he’d done many times, his anger so deep-seated that he would literally speak between clenched teeth—

Don’t you
dare
have children! If you do, you’ll pass your mother’s crazy genes on to them and they’ll end up just like her—locked away in a state asylum and drugged out of their demented little minds. Bad shit like that always jumps a generation, you know. It’ll skip you but go from a grandmother to a granddaughter.

And who was to say he was wrong? Her mother was an only child and she remembered being told by her mother early on that her maternal grandparents had been killed in an auto accident before she herself had been born. There was a sizable age difference between her mother and her father, a dozen years, and his parents had passed away before she’d even been born. Her father had a younger brother who was married and had a couple of kids her age, but she barely knew her cousins. For the last half decade she’d been making excuses not to be included in the yearly holiday dinners. The last thing in the world she found Christmasy was sitting across a table from her father while he scowled at her and everyone else struggled to keep him, and her, from destroying their holiday spirit. No thanks—she’d rather go to a restaurant or stay at home, even if it meant eating a damned microwave dinner. And really, was that much different than what her mother did every holiday?

She blinked, realizing that she was seein the street below through a wavering layer of tears. What was it like for her, the woman who had given birth to her then been essentially abandoned by everyone? Holidays that passed without visitors, underpaid staff people, harried nurses, uncaring doctors. An almost barren room and clothes from the general “pile” because hers had long ago been assimilated by the facility’s laundry.

Her father made two obligatory trips per year to the hospital, one on his wife’s birthday, and one on their wedding anniversary. She could swear the first was just to look at his insane wife and wonder why she was still alive after yet another year, and the second to infer
See, I’ve stuck it out with you all these years, and what has it gotten me?
Mr. Martyr himself, but if that was true, what was she herself? The absent daughter, consumed by guilt but unwilling to do anything about it.

Somehow she wasn’t a bit surprised when the telephone rang.