“Because it makes perfect sense” was his nonsensical reply.
“What makes sense?” Charlie asked. “That we buried an empty casket? Is that even legal?”
Charlie glared at the portly man who had taken $5,000 of Mom’s money to put the empty velvet-lined vessel into the ground, then $1,000 of ours to dig it back up.
“We’ll bury anything,” he said simply. “Bodies, body parts, belongings, clothes, shoes, spirits—”
“Hold on,” Charlie interrupted. “Spirits?”
“I buried three spirits this month alone: one belonging to a serviceman who never returned from combat, another of a woman who disappeared on a cruise, poor thing, and—perhaps most tragically—the nebulous spirit of a baby who died before he—or she—was conceived.”
“How can you bury a baby who doesn’t even exist yet?” Charlie asked, which I thought was a very fair question.
“Technically we buried the idea of the baby,” Weeble-Wobble answered. “The parents had been trying for years and wanted to put the painful ordeal behind them. So we buried it. It was quite a moving ceremony.”
“So you knew my mother’s casket was empty?” I asked. Not that it mattered—this wasn’t about him—but I was curious if we could have avoided this late-night creepfest by having asked one simple question: namely, “Is she in there?”
“Of course I knew it was empty!” he said pridefully. “I’m not an idiot!” He practically spat the word “idiot” right at Charlie and me. We hadn’t thought to ask if Mom was actually in her coffin when they lowered it into the ground—how idiotic can you get?
“You guys,” Nathan interrupted. “I think we need to get back to the bigger question here.”
“Yeah, like where the fuck is our mom?” Charlie said.
“Good God,” I said as the ramifications of Mom not being in her grave hit me like a rear-end collision. “Do you think she’s . . . I mean, is it possible she’s still . . . ?” I couldn’t get the word out. I had barely processed that she was dead; I wasn’t ready for her resurrection.
“Still alive?” Nathan said. And I just stared at him with a mouth open so wide you could have stuck a pair of socks in it.
“I don’t think she’s still alive,” he said, eyes all dark and beady like a werewolf. “I’m sure of it.”
The panic attack started as a thousand tiny prickles on my arms and legs. A moment later I was in an elevator shaft, falling five floors a second. I flailed my arms for something to grab on to—a tree branch, a gravestone, a family member, my sanity. Hell, I’d have even accepted a hand from the spirit of the resident unborn baby, so desperate was I for something to hold on to.
“Win?” I heard a male voice say. “Winnie?”
The voice was close by and far away, both at the same time. My vision became a pinhole. I was aware of cold, wet earth seeping into my pants, and it occurred to me I must be on the ground, but I had no idea how I’d gotten there.
“Let’s get her out of here,” I heard my brother say, and a moment later I felt hands under my armpits lifting me onto spaghetti legs.
I don’t know how I got to the car, but I remember the chirp of car doors unlocking and the sensation of smooth leather under my butt. If I could have used my mouth to form words, I would have begged for whiskey, vodka, tequila, anything malted, fermented, distilled—hell, even microbrewed—that could obliterate the torrent of fear and sadness that was cascading down on me like buckets of icy cold water.
But instead of forming words, my lips wilted open like a dying fish, and the world’s most pathetic sound came out—something between a sheep’s bleat and a sob.
I gasped for air as decades of rage and shame tore at my lungs like a furious eagle clawing at its prey. I’d thought I was finally free from the wrecking ball of a woman who had crushed me into a useless pile of rubble. I couldn’t go back to being the field mouse in her talons. Not after I had finally glimpsed my chance at freedom.
I left my body to escape the pain and gazed down at myself from the infinite starlit sky.
From my perch high up in black space, I could see everything and nothing.
And that’s when I realized I was an addict.
CHAPTER 55
* * *
CHARLIE
It was after two by the time I got Winnie out of her dirty, damp clothes and safely in her bed. I had thought about rifling through Mom’s medicine cabinet to find a sedative, but I didn’t know how much booze my sister had drunk, and I didn’t want an actual death on my hands.