Notes from Ghost Town (30 page)

That is freedom. The choices you get to make, to move forward, to live.

I let both of their arms encircle me, pull me tight between their hearts, the smells of dinner rising, settling over our heads. “We’re going to get her out.”

B
ut Mom doesn’t come home.

It takes the police a week to verify that the remains buried in Ghost Town did, in fact, belong to Tanya Leavin and to arrest Ted.

At Mom’s sentencing, eight days later—more of a formality now than a necessity—the single most beautiful word in the history of language leaves the prosecution’s lips:
innocent
. And then, three more impossibly perfect words:
All charges dropped
.

We all cry. Dad, and Heather, and Raina, who has come, and sits beside me, and holds my hand on her lap on that smooth wooden bench, so much like a church pew. And we throw our arms around each other’s necks and stay clung to each other for what feels like hours.

Innocent
.

All charges dropped
.

Free.

But, still, she doesn’t come home.

She cannot wind time backward and erase what happened, and what she’d been through.

Ted Oakley, arrested first for arson and then released on ridiculously high bail that, of course he was able to cover, no problem, is re-arrested—not only for murder, but for his involvement in drug trafficking. Cocaine. After he was arrested the first time, Miami PD got a warrant to search his house and found a whole slew of shit with which to indict him—a shoddily concealed paper trail connecting every financial turn of Ghost Town to the drug money he was raking in.

Turned out to be some big-deal case for the Miami PD—the reason he met Tanya in the first place, the reason she died—an unlikely college-student looking to pay her way through eighty thousand dollars of tuition. So he hired her on not only as a mistress, but as a dealer, helping spread his wares like wildfire through the U of Miami campus—a regular cash cow. But then her demands for Ted’s time and for his money increased. She got angry—he got desperate—the reason he had to bury her body beneath his new apartment complex, only half constructed. The reason Stern had to die, as witness.

A domino effect.

In too deep, he freaked. His whole life would have been fucked—so he fucked everyone else’s instead. I doubt he ever saw himself as a killer, as someone who’d done something truly wrong.

Ted Oakley was not
that
to the world. He was wealthy, and powerful, and generous. Mom was sick, going through a divorce, and lived on the salary of a piano teacher and
sometimes-composer. It was easier for everyone to believe that line of logic. Easier to believe she could snap.

But I also know that anyone can snap.

And not one of us is immutable, or predictable, or immune to the chaos out of which the entire universe spun out. Chaos is what we are made of, and we will return to it, again, and again, and again. Our hearts will beat for it while our brains will search for order, and find that, almost always, it is elusive.

“Take a right here,” I tell Raina. “End of Collins Street—there should be signs.” I stare at the window, searching for them—
Calyer House
. The sunlight pours in through the windshield, makes Raina’s skin glow, her long dark braid shine like obsidian.

“Look. See?” I point to the building on Raina’s side of the street—not a building, even, but an old Victorian-looking house with painted shutters. Big, wide lawn. Clusters of palm trees, crinum lily, a zen rock garden right, its black rake leaned up against the porch. More resort than psychiatric clinic. Mom’s reward: leaving jail to deal with a different kind of incarceration—the one in her head.

Raina turns sharply into the parking lot. I lurch forward, clutching my stomach.

“You okay, girl?” Raina puts the car in park, glances over at me. I take a deep breath, nod. “Close your eyes for a second,” she orders. I do, and then I feel her thumbs come
to my forehead, pressing lightly in. “It’s your third eye,” she tells me. “Mom’s new yoga-teacher boyfriend just taught me about it. It awakens your intuition or some shit.”

Her hands smell like the packet of Drum tobacco she’s got stashed in the little compartment beneath the radio and like her jasmine hand lotion. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know,” she admits. “Dude does that to my face pretty much every time I see him.” I open my eyes and look at her and then we both start cracking up. The knot in my belly starts to unwind. “Damn,” she says, softly. “I wish Stern was here.”

He flashes through me, huge, as I realize: there’s so much she doesn’t know—so much I need to tell her.

“I—I loved him.” I stare at my hands in my lap. “I never told you. We kissed, the week before he died. We loved each other.” I meet her eyes, feel tears rim my own.

“Well—
duh
.” she reaches out and swipes the wet from my eyes. “That much was obvious from, like, day one. He always had it so bad for you, man,” she says, pressing her back into her seat and turning her head to look at me. “It used to make me a little jealous, even, what you guys had.” Her almond eyes grow shiny, her voice soft. “I’m glad you figured it out. And I’m glad you finally told me.”

I nod, and swallow down the lump in my throat. For a second we sit in silence.

“So …” she starts, breaking the quiet of the hot car, “what’s the deal with you and Morse? You guys doin’ it yet or what?” She raises her eyebrows, grinning.

I whack her thigh with the back of my hand.

“Well …?” she persists.

“I don’t know Rain. He’s actually … really cool, and cute, and I
like
being around him, but after everything that’s happened …” I trail off.

“But he’s not his stepdad, Liv.”

“I know he’s not. But I feel like I’d be an idiot to really trust anyone, ever again.” I run my fingers loosely over the dashboard, lift off a sun-sparkled line of dust. “I never felt that way about Stern. Ever. I never wondered whether or not he was a good guy, he just was. And there’s no one that can top that. Stern was the best guy I’ll ever know.”

She reaches out for my hand, sandwiches it between hers in her lap. “Liv, maybe it’s not about finding another person who lives up to what Stern was to you. You’re right, that’s probably never gonna happen.” Her hands are warm around mine; there’s a thin, cool film of sweat forming between our fingers. “Maybe you just have to let people love you. You have to give them a chance.”

“It’s really hard for me to do that right now.”

“I know, babygirl.”

We sit in that hot car a few more seconds, just being quiet, our fingers entwined.

“I guess I should go in there,” I say finally.

Raina hugs me hard, and I keep the feeling of her arms around me even as I pull away.

“Take your time with her, okay?” she tells me. “I’ll be here.”

*   *   *

“She’s right at the end of the hall. Number thirty-six,” the nurse says, pointing me in the direction of Mom’s room. Her own room. No creepy guards standing vigilant watch.

I hug the clay-potted jade plant I’ve brought Mom to my chest and thank the nurse, walking down the wide-windowed hallway, light pouring in, soaking the wood floors—spider plants lining the windowsills drinking it up to grow greener and greener. My forehead is sweaty; my hands are shaking.

Thirty-six. The silver numbers glint against the door. I knock softly. Inside: the sound of things being moved, furniture scraping against the floor. I put my face in the jade, seeking its smell. I want something to latch onto right now, something concrete.

The door opens—more sunlight, backlighting Mom’s face so she glows there before me. She glows—my mom.

“Livie!” She pulls me right to her and hugs me in tight—I clutch the plant in one hand behind her back. I expected the greasy sweatsuit she wore at Broadwaithe, but she’s in nice black pants, a white silk button-up with round pearlescent buttons she used to wear all the time, at recitals.

Pressing my face into her neck, I’m flooded with relief: she smells like herself—plumeria, even though there’s none of the stuff in sight, and even in the faintest, smallest way like the ocean—like she’s somehow soaked it back into her skin in the past week. “My sweet girl,” she says
into my hair, and I let my nose fall into her shoulder and take even more of her in. “I love that green dress,” she says, stepping back, looking me over. “You’re too skinny, Liv, but the dress is so nice. With your red hair.” She touches her fingers lightly to my bandaged shoulder, to the scratch above my eye. “These bandages don’t go at all with your outfit, though,” she jokes, pulling me close one more time to plant a firm kiss on my forehead.

“I brought this for you,” I say, shyly, stepping back and handing her the jade. “I thought—I thought it would make you feel more at home.”

She smiles, big. She takes the jade and places it on the windowsill. “Look at that,” she says—her eyes are clear, her voice is clear. She seems normal, she seems like
her
. “Looks just like my old studio in here, now, Liv. I love it. I really love it.”

Her room isn’t big, or fancy, but it’s all hers. A twin bed in the corner, a knit rug beside it, soft-looking curtains with little flowers all over them tied back at each corner of her giant window—sans prison bars—that overlooks the back garden, a small wooden desk, and …“Your piano! Mom! How did you get this here?”

I walk to it—only a few steps—and run my fingers over the little bench, the lid, the smooth rectangular top.

“Your father,” she says, smiling softly. “He spoke to Meredith Calyer—she’s the owner—about finding me a room that could fit this old thing. And, she did.” She gives the piano a shaky little pat.

My heart surges a little bit—hopeful. “Dad did that?”

“He sure did.”

I try to read her eyes—to piece together some kind of conclusion that matches mine: they are still in love. They are meant to be. They both know it now, more than ever, but they’re too afraid to say it out loud.

“Mom—do you think … maybe …” I trail off, worried I might set her off. Even though she’s on new meds now, meds that seem to be working, you never know what might do it, when she might crack again.
She’s not a murderer, but that doesn’t make her
well—is what Norma, Mom’s doctor, said when I cried to her over the phone last week, begging for her to release Mom back to us, back to life.

She’s not ready
, she’d told us.
She needs time to heal, to come back to herself on her own terms, to be cared for, by professionals. Just come visit
, she’d said.
All she wants is to see you here, to see her getting better
.

I want to say it to her now, as she takes both my hands into hers:
come home
. Her fine-boned fingers wrap around mine and her skin is soft. My mother’s skin. “We’re not going to be together again, Livie,” she says gently, as my heart dips. “Your father and I will always love each other, but we will never be married to each other again.”

“But—if you love each other, then why? Why not?” I know it’s a desperate, childish kind of logic, but I can’t help it.

“Because,” she sighs, moving a stray curl back behind my ear. “It’s not enough. Not in the long run. We—we’d been
going in our own direction, separate from each other, for a long time. We both wanted this, even if it was very painful at the time. It was the right thing to do, for your father, and for me. I mean that, Liv. I really do.”

I stare at her. “I just don’t get when it all changed, Mom. I mean—you guys used to be solid. You were everything to each other. How does that just go away?”

“Liv, trust me, we tried our best to make it work. We wanted it to work, for a while; we didn’t want
you
to suffer at all.” She pauses, eyebrows furrowed, deep lines set into her forehead. “But there was a rift, and it was getting bigger, and I wasn’t happy. My meds were just awful—you remember, I couldn’t even get out of bed, I couldn’t compose, I couldn’t do anything—so, instead of going to the doctor, as I should have, I just stopped taking them, and that turned out to be even worse. You father went through a lot. We both went through a lot. That’s what our relationship started to revolve around—the mess inside my head. It wasn’t good anymore. It wasn’t right.”

“But he still loves you, Mom.”

“I know that, Liv,” she says, taking my hands, her eyes shining, clear. “And because of all the love I had, and still have, for your father, I had to let him go. Let him live his life. I know it doesn’t seem to make any sense when I say it out loud, but it was the only way I could start healing, too.”

“But, don’t you think that Heather—”

“I know all about Heather,” she interrupts, sensing my instinct to say something nasty, “and everything she went
through in her past. She seems like a good woman, Liv. And she seems good for your dad, and I’m happy for him. I really, truly am, because if I chose bitterness, about all of this … that would be the easy option. The default. Really, Liv. I get to choose, here, and I choose happiness. Okay? I choose to focus on what’s good, on what I have.” She squeezes my hand. “This place is good for me, where I am, the people taking care of me while I figure out how to really take care of myself again. I’m finally starting to heal, to learn how to really do that, Liv. Trust me.”

“Mom.” I start, turning to face the piano, lifting the lid from where I sit. “I need to know …”

“What’s that, sweetheart?”

“Stern.” Her face draws downward when I say it, and she looks haggard for a moment, freshly ashamed. But, I keep on, because I have to, I have to know. “Mom—why did you confess?”

Tears ridge up in her eyes. “I—I thought I must have done it,” she says. “There was blood on my hands … and I’d been thinking … I’d been wanting—” She chokes back a little cry of pain. “I’d been off my meds for too long, and everything in my head had gone strange, Liv,” she says. She inhales deep. “I didn’t want to tell you this, Liv, but the truth is, I’d been thinking of killing myself. More than thinking it. At the time, I wasn’t thinking about anything clearly at all. It was so dark inside my head, and I was so confused—I just thought I must have killed him. I didn’t
remember—anything. Just my hands. Just the blood on my hands. His head, in my lap.”