Annie’s mouth opened in shock. “I don’t understand how a mother can just leave her child like that.” The lights flickered as if in reaction, and they both looked up. When the lights stayed on, Annie breathed out a sigh of relief. “Let me dig out flashlights and candles just in case. But keep going.”
Serena shook her head as Annie stood. “She disappeared. For all I know, she’s dead. Or she has a new family and is torturing them like she did us. I don’t know.” She narrowed her eyes and stiffened her spine. “I don’t know and I don’t care. She’s dead to me.”
Annie placed a hand on Serena’s shoulder briefly before going to the closet by the bathroom. She had no words to comfort Serena, who was staring off in space, lost in her thoughts.
“I think she blamed me for everything bad that ever happened to her. She didn’t want a child. She didn’t want me. She told me over and over again: if her birth control hadn’t failed, she’d never have had me.” Serena’s eyes glittered. “The way she used to look at me when I was little—I still remember the hatred in her eyes and the way she’d stare at me as if she wished I’d disappear.” Serena’s voice dropped, and her tone froze Annie’s blood. “You’d think a mother would love her child, even a little. Well, she didn’t.”
She turned to Annie, her eyes finally focusing. Annie held still in front of the closet, wanting to hear more, yet at the same time, her heart hurt for ten-year-old Serena, who’d had to grow up knowing her own mother hated her.
“My father told me they thought she had postpartum depression when I was born, but looking back, I know it was more than that. While some mothers fall in love with their children at first sight, she fell in loathe with me.” Serena let out a dry laugh and pushed her blanket aside. “I never knew mothers were supposed to be loving until I was in kindergarten and would watch the other mommies come into class to volunteer for parties and events. I didn’t understand what was happening when I saw the way those other mommies hugged and kissed their kids, and helped them with tasks and making sure they got their cupcakes and drinks.”
“Oh, Serena.” Annie’s voice was soft.
Serena swallowed hard and stood, walking to Annie’s side. “In my experience, mommies hit you if you annoyed them. Mommies locked you in small closets if they thought you were being too loud. Mommies left you home alone if they needed a drink and there was not a drop of alcohol in the house. Mommies stayed in bed for days, leaving you to find food for yourself. Those mommies I saw at school were so strange to me. I thought they were acting in a movie or something.”
“Your mother hit you?” Annie whispered, holding in her hand two flashlights that she’d found in the closet.
“Yes.” Serena was matter-of-fact, as if they were discussing the weather. “But I had my father, and he more than made up for her.”
“But how could he let her do those things to you?” Annie couldn’t stop her mouth from dropping open, imagining all that Serena had gone through.
“He didn’t know. My mother scared me into not saying a word to him. She told me she would take me away from him if I ever told him any of the things she did.”
“Oh my god.”
“I lived.” Serena shrugged. “The good times with my father more than made up for anything my mother did to me.” She paused, her face softening at the thought of her father. “Him I miss so much. I would give anything if he was still here on Earth with me.”
“He sounds wonderful. You two must have been so close.” Annie thought of her own relationship with her parents. She knew they loved her, but she wasn’t especially close to either parent, not the way her mom had been with Jeannie and her father was with Sam.
“We were.” Serena’s voice grew thick. “But he died when I was only a sophomore in college. And suddenly I was an orphan.” She looked up and let out a short laugh. “I mean, technically I wasn’t since everyone presumed my mother was still alive, but I might as well have been. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mother had pissed someone off and they’d killed her.” Her face twisted. “For all intents and purposes, I was alone in the world.”
Annie wanted to reach out again to offer her sympathy, but something in the tilt of Serena’s head stopped her. Serena was staring off in space, and Annie could tell her mind was in the past. How do you console someone who’s been through something like that? Annie suddenly understood why people had a hard time talking to her the year everything happened. It was so hard to find the right words to express sympathy without sounding trite.
Instead, she handed a flashlight to Serena. “Let’s see if these work.” She pressed the button on hers, but nothing happened. Serena did the same. Nothing. “Shoot. We need batteries.” She focused on Serena’s face. “I’m so, so sorry for what you went through.”
Serena flashed her a look of thanks. “My father left me well off. I had money, but no family. I was over eighteen so technically considered an adult, but I was still such a child.”
Annie shut the closet door and made her way to the kitchen to look for batteries. “I can’t imagine what that must have been like, to be alone in this world at that age.”
Serena still stood by the closet, her gaze far off. “I had a breakdown that year.” She stopped and her mouth quirked. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you that. Might scare you away, and I don’t want to do that. I feel as if we’re friends already, you know?”
“I do know. And that’s not going to scare me away,” Annie said, stopping in the middle of the kitchen.
“Thanks.”
Annie nodded and watched Serena walk back to the couch. She sat and pulled the blanket over her lap. “I fell apart when my father died. I didn’t leave the house . . . I wallowed for months.” Her eyes got that faraway look again.
“Months?” Annie couldn’t look away from those forlorn eyes.
“No one cared. I had no family. My friends were all at college.” Serena drew her feet up on the couch and wrapped her arms around her legs. Her voice broke.
“Oh . . .” Annie walked to the junk drawer to give Serena a moment. She opened it, rummaging around, but there wasn’t a single battery to be found.
“I wanted to die like my father.”
Annie looked up at those words, her breath catching. She closed the drawer and made her way back to the couch, sitting down next to Serena.
Serena waved a hand in the air. “I just . . . wanted to disappear, you know? I didn’t want to live my life anymore.” She gave a little laugh. “That’s why I understand how you felt the year your life fell apart.”
“Yeah.” Annie nodded, picking up her wineglass from the coffee table.
Serena’s face suddenly lit up. “We both seem to have diarrhea of the mouth tonight, don’t we?”
Annie had just taken a sip of the wine and snorted. Some of it shot up her nose. She clapped a hand over her mouth before it could spew out of her mouth. When she could talk again, she said, “Don’t say things like that when I just swallowed a mouthful of wine.”