That’s when Callen had kissed her, enthusiastically.
“Mom made them,” she’d told him, and he’d turned straight to Maureen and kissed her, enthusiastically.
It was the first time in three days she’d heard her mother laugh.
Yes, he had her gratitude.
The fabric of their lives woven over the past twenty-five years had been torn. Their routines of home and work and family shattered.
Their world became the hospital, the being there, the going to and from, the constant juggling on snatches of sleep and rushed meals between. The demands of work, the people and animals depending on them, the low simmer of worry for Cora.
If Alice’s return created such tears and breakage, Bodine thought, how much had her careless departure caused so long ago?
“Is it harder?” Bodine asked.
Maureen stopped frowning at an e-mail, looked up over her cheaters. “Is what harder, honey?”
“Having her come back like this, than it was having her leave. I’m not asking that the right way.”
“No, it’s right enough. It’s right enough. I’ve asked myself the same.” To answer them both, Maureen set her tablet aside, folded her cheaters on top of it. “I was so mad, wasn’t worried a bit at first. Here I was about to go on my honeymoon, and Alice pulls a stunt to get attention. We didn’t want to leave Ma in the middle of that mess, but she wouldn’t have us staying. She said it would upset her a lot more. I so wanted to go, too. Here I was, a married woman, flying off to Hawaii with my husband. So exotic, so romantic, so exciting. It wasn’t just the sex part. I didn’t save myself for marriage.”
“Why, I’m just shocked. I’m just shocked to hear that.”
Maureen laughed a little, leaned back. “I was just so smug—the married part—so crazy in love, so excited to be going off with my husband to what was the same as a foreign country for me back then. And Alice had one of her famous snits, put a cloud over it all.”
Reaching down, Bodine gave her mother’s hand a squeeze. “I’d’ve been mad, too.”
“I was spitting mad,” Maureen replied. “I wasn’t really worried until toward the end of our honeymoon week. Every day I was sure she’d come back. And every day, I heard a little more strain in Ma’s voice when we called. So we came back a day early, and then I could see that strain. In Ma, in Grammy and Grandpa.
“We were going to build a house.”
As she’d been imagining the strain, the stress, the face, Bodine missed the postscript. “Sorry, what?”
“Your dad and I, we were going to build a house of our own. Had the land picked out for it. Close enough he could ride over to work, and I could do the same. We were just doing the first expansions on the dude ranch, just starting to make real plans for what we have now. And we’d build our own house. We never did.”
This time, Bodine took her mother’s hand and held it. “Because Alice left.”
“I couldn’t leave my mother. At first we thought we’d just put it off until Alice got back and everything settled again. The first year was the worst, every day of that first year. When they found the truck—the battery dead. She’d just left it—that was Alice. Don’t fix it, just walk away. The postcards, all bright and braggy. The detective Ma hired following some lead and losing it again. It was Grammy who made Ma stop throwing money there, and breaking her heart over it. And I was pregnant and having Chase, all in that first year. So, it was the happiest and the hardest year of my life. Of our lives. Alice wasn’t there, but she was everywhere.”
Maureen reached over, rubbed Bodine’s leg. “And now here we are, with our world spinning around her again. Now it’s my children spinning, too, and I don’t like knowing it. I don’t like when we can get my mother out of that room for ten minutes, how tired she looks, how worn. She’s pale, Bodine.”
“I know it,” Bodine agreed.
“I don’t like the ugly resentment I have inside me. It’s there even though I know terrible things happened to her, things she couldn’t stop, things she didn’t deserve. Somebody hurt my sister, stole her life from her, and I want to make him pay for it. But I still resent that selfish girl who couldn’t celebrate my happiness, who didn’t think of her mother and only thought of herself.”
Bodine set her laptop aside, draped an arm around Maureen’s shoulders.
“I have to forgive her.” Giving in, Maureen pressed her face into the curve of her daughter’s throat. “I have to find a way to forgive her. Not just for her sake, but for Ma’s, for my own.”
“Not once have I heard you or Dad say you’d planned to build a house. Part of you must have forgiven part of her a long time ago.”
Straightening again, Maureen tried to brush it off. “Well, I was going to be a country-western singing sensation at one time, too.”
“You’ve got such a good voice.”
“I don’t regret not heading off to Nashville, and I sure don’t regret raising my children in the house where I was raised. Things fall into place, Bodine, if you work at it and make your choices with some care.”
Bodine heard footsteps—heels not crepe soles—and when they turned into the waiting room, her mother’s body shifted.
“Celia.”
“Maureen. And this must be your Bodine.” The woman, sharp-looking with glossy brown hair waving to her shoulders, stepped up, offered Bodine a hand. “I’m Celia Minnow.”
“It’s nice to meet you. You’re one of Alice’s doctors.”
“I am.” She looked back at Maureen. “Could we talk?”
“I’ll take a walk,” Bodine began, but Celia waved her down.
“You’re welcome to stay. Your grandmother speaks so highly of you.” Celia sat, smoothed her dark skirt. “I’ve had three sessions with Alice, in addition to my initial evaluation. I can give you the broad strokes.”
“Please.”
“I know you’ve spoken extensively with Dr. Grove on her physical condition, and you’re aware of his evaluation of her mental and emotional state.”
“Celia, I hope you know me well enough not to feel obliged to dance and cushion.”
“I do.” And crossing her legs, Celia stopped dancing. “Alice has suffered extreme physical, mental, and emotional trauma over a period of years. We can’t yet determine how long. She doesn’t remember, and may, in fact, have no true gauge of how long. It may be her memory will come back, it may not. More likely it will come in pieces and patches. It’s my opinion that over this undetermined period of years she was indoctrinated by methods of force, physical assaults, praise, and punishment. Your mother tells me Alice was never particularly religious.”
“No.”
“She quotes scripture—Old Testament—some verbatim, some bastardized. Vengeful God, a man’s superiority and dominion over women. The sin of Eve. Again, it’s my opinion these views were part of her indoctrination. Physical assaults, religious fanaticism, imprisonment, and as she speaks of no one but the man she calls Sir, probably isolation.”