I stand on the opposite side of the kitchen from her, staring at her from behind, watching her lithe movements.
I mutter, “I know.” I feel physically ill. I go to the sink. I turn the water to cold. I let it run, and then I gather a handful of cold water and splash it on my face. I rinse my mouth out, spitting water into the sink. My mother turns around to see what I’m doing. “How did you know?” I ask, standing upright, my face wet.
She hands me a towel. “A mother always knows these things. I did you a favor, Nina. You’re better off without him.”
“What exactly did you do?”
“I followed him to the woods. It wasn’t the first time I followed him. I needed to know what he was up to, for your sake. Someone had to hold him accountable for his actions. That afternoon, I watched what happened between him and that woman. After she went running away, I told him to get up. I pointed the gun at him and I told him to walk, deeper into the woods and that’s where I killed him. You remember how your father cheated on me, Nina? He took everything from us when he left. You know that, don’t you? You remember that?” I nod, the bile rising up inside of me so that I think I might be sick again. I hunch over the sink as she says, “I couldn’t afford the house after that. We had to move here to this little house that I hate, and even then I worried all the time that I wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage and the bank would foreclose on our home. I thought all the time that we’d lose it, that we’d become homeless. Your father should have paid child support, but he never did. He should have paid alimony. I had to work the night shift. I had to take extra shifts whenever I could, to make ends meet. I didn’t want the same thing to happen to you.”
I push myself upright, aghast. I wipe at my mouth with the back of a hand. My mother reaches out for my arms. I bristle, and then back away from her, going for my phone. “Don’t touch me,” I say.
“What do you think you’re going to do?” she asks as I snatch my phone from the countertop.
“I have to call the police. I have to tell them what you did.”
She looks saddened, hurt. “You wouldn’t really do that, would you? I’m your mother, Nina.”
“Wouldn’t I?” I ask. “You killed my husband, Mom.”
“I was doing you a favor, Nina. You’re far better off without Jake. Think about it,” she says. “You have that big house all to yourself and soon you’ll have the money from Jake’s life insurance policy. You won’t want for anything, ever. And besides, Nina honey, that woman was having an affair with your husband. Aren’t you mad? Aren’t you angry? Don’t you think she deserves to be punished for what she did? If it wasn’t for her, none of this would have happened.”
I am mad. I am angry. More than anything, I want Lily to hurt like I hurt. I want Lily to suffer. I want Lily to sit alone in prison, separated from the people she loves.
But Lily didn’t kill Jake.
“Did you lie about your vision, Mom? So that I would have to take care of you? So that we could spend more time together?”
“I didn’t lie,” she insists. “You heard the doctor, Nina. You were there.”
“But your vision isn’t as bad as you’d like us to think. You can still drive and go to the grocery store all on your own.” My grandmother had macular degeneration. My mother used to take her to her doctor’s appointments. She would have known exactly what to say to make the doctor and me believe her vision was worse than it was.
“The doctor said I may go blind one day.”
“Yes, one day. But not now.”
“It’s always just been you and me, Nina,” she croons. “Our time together these last few months has been so special to me, honey. I didn’t realize how much I missed you.”
“What do you mean, Mom? I’ve always been right here.”
“No, you haven’t honey. You’ve been with Jake. Once you married him, you forgot all about me.”
“I didn’t,” I say. “That’s not true.”
“Oh yes it is. Maybe you didn’t mean to do it, but you did. Do you have any idea how lonely I’ve been? How many times did I ask you to have dinner with me or to go shopping with me but you couldn’t because you were too busy spending time with your husband?”
“Why didn’t you just talk to me? Why didn’t you tell me how you were feeling? Why did you lie?”
“Would you have listened to me?” she asks and I say yes, though I wonder if I would have, if her loneliness would have had the same impact as going blind. As it was, I didn’t have a choice but to spend so much time with her. “Would you have? Or would you have let your husband keep you from me?” she asks knowingly. I say nothing because she’s right, because, if not for her going blind, I wouldn’t have felt compelled to be with her as much as I have.
She says, “Put the phone down, Nina.”
I hold the phone in my hand. I look down at it. I’ve already swiped up to unlock the phone and I stare down at the keypad, paralyzed by indecision. I could call Officer Boone and turn my mother in. But I don’t know that my mother could survive prison. The biopsy results came back. Her doctor called me three days ago. I haven’t even told her yet, because of everything that’s been going on and because I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to talk to her about it. The cells were malignant. She has breast cancer. There is a chance the cancer has already metastasized to her lymph nodes or the liver or the bones. We don’t know. She’ll need more imaging tests to determine if the cancer has spread and how far, like a bone scan and a CT scan. She needs surgery soon and radiation and, even with surgery and radiation, she may die. The prognosis for stage four breast cancer is grim, if that’s what she has. The five-year survival rate is something like 20 percent meaning there is a measly one in five chance she’ll still be alive in five years. I don’t want her spending them in jail. I’ve read things about sick inmates, how they don’t get the best treatment if any treatment at all, and how they die in solitary confinement, and spend their last years on earth without ever seeing the sun.
This is happening too fast. I can’t catch up. I can’t process this.
I look up at her. She comes forward to cradle my face in her hands. She softens, saying, “There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you, Nina. I hope you know that. I’ve only ever wanted what’s best for you.”
I pull away from her hands. I take myself somewhere out of reach. I look again at the phone, seeing Officer Boone’s name in the recent call log. My thumb hovers above his name.
My mother says, “I only did what I did to Jake to protect you. He would have left you, Nina. If not for this woman, then for another. He would have taken everything from you and left you with nothing.”
I’ll never know if that’s true. Would Jake have left me? Would he have taken everything from me when he left?
My mother isn’t a monster. What she did is monstrous, but she herself is not a monster. I’m not a mother myself and so I don’t know, but I’ve heard there is no limit to a mother’s love.