Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [40]
But my body refused to be rushed, and my mind rebelled against the thought of leaving Woodland Dunes, so I leaned against the tiled wall, letting the water envelop me, letting my mind wake and sift through my dinner with the Mannings last night.
Chief Manning had said that he had interviewed me personally after my mom died. He’d interviewed all of my family, in fact, and both Caroline and I said that we had been talking to my mom by the stairs when she tripped and fell. Afterward, my mother said she was fine but that she wanted to lie down, so we helped her to bed. And it was in that bed, with her daughters in the same room, that she died.
I listened to Chief Manning talk, trying to remain impassive, to pretend he was just a witness at one of my many depositions. And all along I was willing more of my memories to spring into my mind. Yet as hard as I tried, I couldn’t recall my mother falling down the stairs. Was I not able to remember because it hadn’t happened, because Caroline and I had been covering for someone, maybe our father? Or could I have been lying to save my big sister, the one who needed lengthy psychiatric attention years later?
The thought that I’d been there that night had jolted me. I was seeking answers, when all along they might simply be hibernating in my mind, waiting to be awakened.
As the water pelted me, I kept thinking about that morning when I awoke with my mother next to me—dead, I now knew—and Dan calling from the other side of the door, Caroline curled in the corner. I had been wearing the same clothes I had on when I saw my mother stumbling to the door, her hand on her head, talking to someone. That scene with my mother at the door must have happened the night before I’d woken up in her bed, which meant it must have happened after she fell, and that was why she was clutching her head.
I squeezed my eyes shut in frustration. If only I could fill in the details of the fall, then I could be sure it was an accident, not murder as the letter had suggested.
I turned off the taps and dried myself with a fluffy white bath sheet, thinking that the only person who could help me remember, the only one who was there that night, was Caroline, and Caroline had disappeared. I wrapped the towel around me and looked in the mirror, combing my hair with a brush. My eyes, a muddy green, were unlike my mother’s or my siblings’, but my long, wet hair reminded me of my mom, of those nights she would run in the rain and come home with her hair soaked flat. Was that all she was doing on those nights? Or was she meeting a lover, that man on the beach, that man at the door that night?
I stopped brushing my hair. That man at the door. He might be able to help me, too. He might have seen something, heard something. My mother might have told him something.
I gripped the cool porcelain of the sink and squeezed my eyes shut once more, trying to bring back any details of him that would make him easier to find. But I could only see his hand, brown from the sun, resting on my mother’s blue shoulder, then gripping it, and I could hear the low rumble of his voice. I could feel myself holding on to the banister, peering around it. And then I remembered something new. I became my younger self, watching my mother at the door, watching that hand clutch her shoulder, and I saw that the man had worn a ring, because something glittered, catching the porch light through the open doorway. A gold ring with a large black diamond shape on the face. And then my mother swayed, pitched sideways, but the man caught her. I could see the back of his dark hair bending over her.
A knock interrupted me. I jumped, dropping the towel. The knock sounded again. I slipped into a hotel robe, glancing at the clock on my way to the door: 5:30 a.m. Who else was up this early? I had said goodbye to