The Mall (52 page)

Cora looked up at them in confusion then began to smile as well, blinking aside the so-recently shed tears and taking a deep hearty breath, letting it hitch out slowly from her chest, the tension loosening.

They were a family again.
 
Here, even in this dark, abandoned place, they were home again because they were together.

As she watched the three of them having a grand laugh at her expense, Charlene felt the re-igniting of the enormous furnace of hate she had always harbored for the woman—the bitch her son had embraced and who had ultimate murdered him--and like a sharp whistle to a faithful hound dog, she felt her old friend rush back to her side.
 
The one with the strength that rivaled her own.
 
The one with the motivation and the plan.
 
It flooded through her brain with the bright white shock of a hard slap.
 
A sensation so ice cold that it burned like a flame.

Just as she began to feel her identity began to fade into the background, she fought back, grappling with the guest-turned-invader.
 
No, she barked in her mind.
 
No one manhandles Charlene Myers-Cartwright!
 
We want the same thing but you cannot accomplish it without me.
 
You need me.
 
You need my cooperation. You will not stifle my voice.

She felt her friend settle into position somewhere within and its grip tightened on the shoebox held snugly under one arm, a well-manicured hand resting across one end.

No, not yet, she replied.
 
Soon.
 
First, I need to settle a few things with the woman.

As the laughter tapered off, Lara guided her two children back in the direction of the dealership, Chance taking it upon himself to lead.

“Just what do you think you’re doing?”

The three stopped and slowly turned to look back with expressions of good humor sobering into concern.

“I can’t let you take those children knowing what you did to their father.”

Sparing a glance at Owen and Cora, Lara leveled her eyes at the other.
 
“Whatever happened between Ben and me is in the past and will stay that way.”

“Have you ever told them the truth?” she asked, drawing closer.
 
“Have you ever told Coraline about the accident?”

For the first time, Lara appeared uncomfortable.
 
“No, I’ve spared her the
details, until she was old enough to understand and I think now is
not the time to…”

“Oh, I think now is the perfect time,” Charlene snapped, her voice rising.
 
“After all, I think your children deserve to know that the same woman who got them here was also the same woman who was responsible for the death of their father,” she said tilting her smiling face up at the ceiling, the red sky reflecting off her eyes and teeth in a way that made her look uncannily like one of the deactivated Bots that stood like a small frozen army of Terracotta Warriors at her back.

Owen glanced at Lara uncertainly.
 
“I got us here,” he murmured in a low tone.
 
“It’s
all my
fault.”

“No dear, don’t you understand?
 
It was your mother who created the perfect storm that blew your ship off course.
 
It was her selfishness.
 
Her hatred that…”

“Enough!” Lara snapped.
 
“Owen
take
your sister and have her show you back to the dealership.”

“I can take them..,” Chance began in a low voice.

“But don’t you want to know how your daddy died?” Charlene continued, stepping up to Owen and cradling his chin in her hand.

Chance grabbed Owen by the wrist and attempted to pull him away, but he snatched his arm back.
 
He glanced over at his mother who had lowered her head, bringing a hand up to her quivering lips.
 
Was she crying, he wondered?

“Please don’t,” Lara whispered, her dim voice wavering.
 
“Not here.
 
Not in this place.”

The smile on Charlene’s face remained steady.
 
“Your father…”

“Cora.
 
Owen,” Lara said pulling them in close and going slowly to one knee.
 
She swallowed awkwardly, then in a stronger voice than before, she managed to say, “Your father committed suicide.”

Charlene’s eyes hardened slightly.
 
“Tell them the rest.”

Lara closed her eyes for a moment, seemed to gather her last reserves, and continued.
 
“He had been drinking and you were in bed, Owen.
 
I was…”

“Yes, where were you?” Charlene prompted, turning her back on Lara and gazing up into sky through the glass ceiling above.
 
Outside, a reddish-orange worm cut through the darkening dusk sky like a tailor’s scissors dipped in blood.
 
She brought the shoebox down from beneath her arm and held it protectively against her belly.

“I was with friends,” Lara said to Cora and Owen.
 
“It was sort of a mommy’s night out.
 
Y’see, I was having a bit of a rough time of it, and your father was the kind of man who lent a hand when his wife asked for help.”

Owen listened with a stolid expression, but tears began to roll down Cora’s face, which Lara reached out and wiped away with her thumb.

“You were six months old and your father had an accident while giving you a bath, Cora.
 
He started washing you then left the room to put Owen to bed,” her words dragging, like a man putting all his strength into moving a particularly heavy piece of furniture. “After he finished reading him his story and tucking him in… he never went back to get you.”

She paused for a moment and seemed to will the threatening tears in her eyes away as she remembered that night at the ER, talking to the doctor.
 
Looking him straight in the eye and lying about the accident.
 
Lying so they wouldn’t take her children away from her.

But knowing that Child Protective Services would be obligated by law to investigate.

“But I was okay, wasn’t I, Mommy?
 
I was okay,” Cora demanded, tears streaming down her face.

Lara stroked her hair with both hands, feeling the tiny skull beneath, reassuring herself.
 
“Yes, everything was fine.
 
You were perfect.”

“But your mommy was very angry.”

Owen turned to stare at Charlene’s back, as she was still turned away from them.
 
His blank expression slowly hardened.

 
“Your mommy was so angry that your father started to think that he had done something unforgivable.”

Lara lay in bed, facing the window.
 
Eyes open.
 
Listening to each creak as he moved from the living room up the hallway to their room.

It was three in the morning.
 
The first few days he would wait until she was asleep before he came to bed.
 
By mid-week, he had begun to sleep on the couch in front of the TV and by the end of that first
week,
he had taken up residence in the guest room.
 
As they grew apart emotionally, he moved physically further from their marriage bed.
 
The bed where they had conceived their children.
 
Where they had comforted Owen during thunderstorms and bouts of the flu.

“I think your instinct was right about not having them.”

Lara started at the words and turned to look over her shoulder.

His dark silhouette stood in the doorway framed by the dim green night light in the hall.

“Maybe I never should have convinced you to have them.
 
Maybe they were a mistake.”

Lara rose abruptly to one arm.
 
“What are you saying?” she demanded.

“I think I forgot she was there in that tub.”
 
He shook his head then, as if embroiled in an intense mental struggle with his own memories.
 
“That’s not quite right.
 
I think I forgot she
existed
, because she should never have been born to begin with.”

Lara felt her mouth hanging open.
 
She was at a loss and while she waited for the equilibrium to return, the next words he spoke drove her even farther off balance.

“Wasn’t Kennedy shot?”
 
When she gave him nothing but silence, he continued.
 
“I was just watching some documentary on PBS and it was about the sixties.
 
They were talking about the election of Nixon and I was confused because I thought Kennedy was elected in 1960.”

The words were familiar and it took her a moment to realize why.
 
When she discovered the connection, all the heat fled from her body.
 
Her heart fluttering in her chest, Lara realized that the night before they took the old lady

THE WITCH

away
to the hospital, the woman had asked Lara the
same
confused question.

“They shot Jack!” she screamed from where she was retrained on the stretcher--for her own protection they had assured young Lara.

But the Witch had continued, even as they started to shut the ambulance doors on her: “They murdered Kennedy!
Blew his brains right out of his head!”

Was it possible, Lara wondered then?
 
Was it remotely possible that insanity might be a contagion, and that once she had been infected by the Witch, she had passed it on to her husband?
 
The man she loved?

Then she thought something that shocked her even more than the previous thought.

Was this the same man she married?
 
Was this the same person she had fallen in love with?
 
Or had he changed into something else just as her aunt had?
 
Something she no longer recognized?

She listened as her husband continued: “And I was watching this program and waiting for the part on Watergate but they never mentioned it and
I
… I…”
 
Lara could hear him start to sob like a child.
 
Like a little lost boy.
 
“Lara, something’s gone wrong in me and I think I need help.”

She knew she should go to him.
 
Hold him and let him cry at her breast.
 
It would be the right thing to do.
 
But it was just too much to handle.

Lara could not muster the pity she knew she should feel for him, for the man which might or might not still be her husband.
 
There was no anger.
 
Just confusion and exhaustion.

So, Lara simply turned away from him to face the wall again.

That was the night she decided that she would tell CPS everything during the interview that she had scheduled for the next morning.
 
She would tell them the whole truth and sell him out if she had to.