The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [68]
“Stop it.”
“You claim to want to know all my secrets, but you keep your own.”
“My mother died when I was fifteen. End of story.”
“Heart attack,” he stated, repeating my previous assertions.
“It happens.” I turned away.
After a moment, Jason’s fingertips brushed my cheek, whispering across my lowered eyelashes.
“It will always be like this between us,” he said quietly. “But it won’t be this way for Ree.”
“There are things you lose you can’t get back,” I whispered.
“I know.”
“Even if you want them. Even if you search and pray and start completely over. It doesn’t matter. There are things you lose you can’t get back again. Things that once you know, you can never unknow.”
“I understand.”
I got off the sofa. Agitated now. I swear I could smell roses and I hated that smell. Why wouldn’t it leave me alone? I had fled my parents’ house, I had fled my parents’ town. The damn roses ought to leave me alone.
“She was mentally ill,” I blurted out. “A raging alcoholic. She did … crazy, crazy things and we covered for her. That’s what my father and I did. We let her torture us every single day and we never said a word. Life in a small town, right? Gotta keep up appearances.”
“She beat you.”
I laughed but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “She fed me rat poison so she could watch the doctors pump my stomach. I was a tool for her. A beautiful little doll she could break every time she wanted attention.”
“Münchhausen.”
“Probably. I’ve never sought an expert opinion.”
“Why not?”
“She’s dead. What’s the point?”
He gave me a look, but I refused to take the bait.
“Your father?” he asked at last.
“Successful lawyer with a reputation to uphold. Can’t really be admitting that his wife bashes gin bottles over his head every other night. Wouldn’t be good for business.”
“He put up with it?”
“Isn’t that how these things work?”
“Sadly, yes. Tell me again, Sandy, how did she die?”
I thinned my lips, refused him.
“Carbon monoxide poisoning,” he said at last, a statement, not a question. “Found in her car in the garage. Suicide, I would guess. Or maybe she drank too much and passed out behind the wheel? What I don’t understand is why the authorities let it go. Especially given that it was a small town, and someone, somewhere, had to know how she treated you.”
I stared at him. I couldn’t help myself. I stared and I stared and I stared. “You knew?”
“Of course. I wouldn’t have married you otherwise.”
“You investigated me?”
“It’s a prudent thing to do, before asking a girl to become your wife.” He touched my hand. This time, I jerked away. “You think I married you for Ree. You have always believed I married you for Ree. But I didn’t. Or at least, not for her alone. I married you because of your mother, Sandy. Because you and I are alike that way. We know monsters are real, and they don’t all live under the bed.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” I heard myself say.
He was silent.
“She was mentally unstable. Suicide was probably only a matter of time. Last way to screw with us and all that.” I was babbling. Couldn’t shut up. Couldn’t stop myself. “I was getting a little too big to keep dragging to the emergency room, so she upped and killed herself instead. After planning the biggest funeral the town had ever seen, of course. Oh, the roses she demanded for the event. The mounds and mounds of fucking roses …”
My hands fisted at my sides. I stared at my husband. Dared him to call me a freak, an ungrateful daughter, a white trash piece of shit. Look at me, I wanted to cry. My mother lived and I hated her. She died and I hated her more. I am not normal.
“I understand,” he said.
“Afterward, I thought I would be happy. I thought, finally, my father and I could live in peace.”
Jason was studying me intently now. “When you first met me, you said you wanted to get away, never look back. You weren’t kidding, were you? All these years later, you’ve never called your father, never told him where we live, never let him know about Ree.”
“No.”
“You hate him that much?”
“All that and more.”
“You think he loved your mother more than