That little smile on her lips, and her eyes glassy and gray, filling with tears.
“Why?” I ask, remembering how Margaret had stepped forward while I hung back, watching—seeing, but not really seeing. How she had trusted me. How I had let her go. “Why would you do that? Why Margaret?”
“It wasn’t about Margaret,” she shakes her head. “It was about us. All of us.”
“I don’t understand—”
But then I see my mother’s hand resting on Margaret’s cheek in the kitchen, staring at us like we weren’t even real.
“I wish you could stay my babies forever.”
“I tried one other time,” she continues, taking a step forward. “I left the gas on the stove overnight. I remember hoping it would be quick. Thinking it was the right thing to do, even. That we would just go to sleep and wake up together—all of us, somewhere else, and everything would be okay.”
She’s quiet, her eyes somewhere far away, remembering.
“Something caught fire before the carbon monoxide could spread.”
I remember rousing awake in the front yard, the sight of those flames licking up the walls as I blinked my bleary eyes. The heat on my skin as my father squeezed my hand and led me back to bed.
“He knew,” I say now, not a question but a statement—because suddenly, it all makes perfect sense. “Dad knew.”
“I can’t blame him,” my mother says. “Things were different back then. People didn’t like to talk about it.”
My mother had come to him, and he hadn’t listened. She had lost a child—held her dead baby in her arms, singing to it softly as if it could somehow hear—and still, week after week, he left her alone, vulnerable and afraid.
“Maybe if we could get some help,” she had asked, that desperate voice traveling beneath the office door. “If I could get some help.”
And then my father, his voice tough, like a callus on your palm: “No.”
“Yes, you can,” I say now, my eyes on hers in the dark. The fear I had just felt seconds earlier is quickly being replaced with something new, something different. “You can blame him, Mom. You asked him for help. You set our house on fire, and he didn’t do anything. He didn’t listen.”
She shakes her head, her gaze cast down to the floor like she’s still so ashamed. It’s always so easy to blame the mother.
A bad mother. A neglectful mother.
“He kept saying it was an accident,” she says. “That I didn’t do it on purpose.”
“An accident,” I repeat, remembering the way he kept reiterating it after Margaret, too, almost like he needed to believe it himself.
“He didn’t want to believe that things had gotten that bad,” she continues. “It was hard for him, too, honey. And he was a congressman, Isabelle. The whole family line … they have a reputation. He was afraid of how it might look.”
I don’t know how to process this. I don’t know what to think: my father, valuing his job, his reputation, above the safety of his family—but at the same time, it doesn’t surprise me, either. Not really. Everything in our lives had always been for show: The way Margaret and I were dressed in matching outfits and the expensive furniture arranged just so. The giant house and the manicured lawn and the way strangers would ogle at us through the gate as if we, too, were on display. As if we existed for their consumption alone, satiating their curiosity as we played the part: children in the yard, mother tending to the garden.
Our life like a picture, too perfect to be real.
“It was hard,” she continues. “He was gone all the time, working, and I was always alone with you girls. Alone in my head.”
I think about my mother and those stories she told: the feelings on the back of her neck, prickling at her skin, like being watched. The meaning she had assigned in an attempt to make sense of what was happening in her own head: someone trying to send her a message, maybe. Someone telling her to do things, terrible things, she never would have done on her own.
Suddenly, I remember all those moments with Mason, too: letting my mind wander to that dusty corner of the brain where mothers are never supposed to go. The late nights, the shrieking, the overwhelming urge to make it stop by any means necessary. Those dirty little thoughts that would worm their way into my awareness in the dark, and the way I would let myself indulge in them, like sneaking into the pantry and gorging myself sick: a vile, frenzied feeding.
And then the fear that crept in like a slow injection. The way I would force myself to put him down, back away slowly. Convince myself that it was normal. Because it is normal, isn’t it? Feeling that way? But how could you possibly know? How do you know if it’s something more? Something dangerous?