Page 86 of The Eleventh Hour
“What home, then?”
“My mother’s.”
***
The apartment is smaller than I remember. Cleaner, too. The old woman who lives here was more than happy to let us in. I think she must be really lonely because she hasn’t stopped moving once, bustling around from spot to spot, offering drinks and double choc chip cookies that are delicious.
She’s thin, painfully so, and her wispy hair is long and tied up in a bun. She reminds me of one of the ghosts. Maybe she already has one foot in the grave like us.
Everything about the apartment is wrong. There’s carpet where there used to be floorboards, the tables round when it should be square. My vision blurs as the past doubles over the present, and I try to see what my mother whispered about.
Rafael distracts the woman, and I wander around, absently touching the walls, the windowsills. So much of my life was here, the important things. Laughter. The moment it ended was so abrupt. We were poor, I can see that now, really poor, but I was happy. I had no notion of what poverty meant.
Dane hovers just behind me.
“What did she say?”
“She said that I need to remember the past.”
“Was there anything strange in the dream?”
I shake my head and freeze. “Wait, yes, there was a dark spot on the bedroom door.”
I turn towards the door and get a shiver, even though it’s painted a glossy white and has dried flowers hanging from it. I can still feel that shadow from the dream.
“What did she do in there?” Dane asks.
I don’t answer him, wracking my brain for the answer. “She had people come and go at night.”
“Prostitution?”
I shrug. “I don’t know, maybe. Maybe just boyfriends. Maybe they were doing drugs.”
“Did you know anyone who went in there?”
I shake my head. “They were all strangers, adults, and she kept me hidden.”
But there’s something that’s teasing the edges of my mind. I try to reach for it and turn slightly, and it’s like I can see her again. I’m caught in that moment of when I found her. She’s laying on the floor with her dress up around her waist. I crawl over to her, too scared to walk, and shake her shoulders. She doesn’t move or respond, so I push her dress down. There’s material tied around her upper arm. White, crusty saliva has dried down one side of her cheek, where her head lolled. But her neck is purple.
“Why is her neck purple?” Dane whispers.
I jolt, not realising I was talking out loud. “I think they must be hand prints. There’s a cut on her cheekbone, and her lip is split. It wasn’t there when she put me to bed.”
I look through the memory with the eyes of an adult, sifting through and coming up with a conclusion that makes me wheeze.
“I think someone murdered my mother,” I whisper.
Dane rests a hand against my lower spine. It’s comforting and grounding. I shuffle closer to him.
“Let’s go. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Dane leads us straight to the door and effectively, politely, cuts the poor woman off before she can protest. Rafe gives her a kiss on the cheek and promises to come back with some recipes for her.
I hold it until we get outside, and then I can’t anymore. I get the giggles. I know it’s not normal, but I just can’t seem to stop myself from laughing. There’s this frantic feeling inside me, but the more I focus on Rafe and that lady, the more I float away from the fear. Sparrow would say this is a PTSD avoidance response. He would ply me with medications and therapy. That thought makes me laugh harder.
“What?” Dane asks slowly.
“He’s like a ninety-year-old woman inside a thirty-five-year-old man.” I wipe a tear from my eye, but Rafe’s outraged expression sets me off again, and I laugh until I wheeze.