I’ll have to change clothes as well, as I’m still covered in paint.
For the moment, my attention is caught by my laptop, still open on the table where Cole left it.
I don’t care that he was reading my emails. I would have been incensed if anyone had done it a few weeks ago, but we’re well past that now.
I walk over to the laptop, intending to close the screen.
Right as my fingers make contact, I hear the soft chime of another email arriving.
Usually, my mother’s emails are shunted over to a folder where I don’t have to see them. Because that folder is already open, I’m hit with her name and the heading: Your Mother’s Day Card.
I stare, confused, forced to parse that sentence.
I obviously do not receive Mother’s Day cards myself, and I certainly haven’t sent one to her.
My index finger moves without my consent, floating over to the trackpad and clicking once.
The email leaps up before my eyes.
For once, there’s no rambling diatribe.
Just an image, which appears to be an open card, scanned and copied.
I recognize the childish handwriting:
Happy Mothers Day Mommy
I love you so so so so so so so much. I made you cinnimin tost.
Im sorry I make so many misstaks. Your the best mom. Im not very good. I will try so hard. I will be beter.
I love you. I hope you never leeve. Please dont leeve even if Im bad. I wont be bad.
You are so pritty. I want to be pritty like you.
I love you Mommy. I love you.
Mara
Each word is a slap across my cheek. I can hear my own voice, my own thoughts, immature and desperate, crying in my ear:
I love you, Mommy, I love you.
I’m sorry.
Please don’t leave.
I won’t be bad.
Even my name signed at the bottom makes my stomach clench, the bile rising in my throat.
Little Mara. Desperate, pathetic, begging.
Every word of it is true—I wrote it. I felt it, at the time.
My deepest fear was that she would leave like my father did. She used to threaten me with it when I fucked up. When I forgot something or broke something of hers.
Later, it was me who wanted to leave. Who dreamed of doing it.
She’s throwing it in my face, the intense connection I had to her. The love to which I clung no matter what she said to me, no matter what she did. It took years longer for that love to wither and die. Even now, some perverse remnant endures, lodged deep in my guts.
I still think about her. I still yearn for what I wanted her to be.
I hate that about myself.
I hate my weakness.
I hate that she wields it against me as a weapon. Shaming me because I loved her. Guilting me because I want to stop.
Cole comes into the kitchen, dressed as I expected in a dark brocade jacket.
“What is it?” he demands, seeing the look on my face.
Without waiting for an answer, he grabs the laptop and turns the screen toward him.
He reads the email in a glance. The look that falls over his face would make a grown man stagger.
“When did she send this?” he barks.
“Just now.”
I’m shaking. I feel like she walked into the room and spat in my face.
She still has so much power over me.
I’ll never be free of her. She’ll never allow it.
Cole slams the windows shut and strips off his jacket, wrapping it around my shoulders.
“I’m covered in paint,” I tell him.
“I don’t give a fuck.”
I feel him shaking too, with anger.
“Where does she get the fucking nerve,” he hisses.
“She has no shame.”
“The fact that she thinks that proves anything except how fucking brainwashed you were—” he cuts himself off, seeing that talking about it is only making me more upset. “Never mind. Come on—I’ve got an idea.”
Numbly, I follow him.
I thought Cole would take me upstairs to the bedroom, or maybe into the main living room.
Instead, he leads me down to the lower level, to a parlor we’ve never visited before.
Like all the rooms, its doors are thrown open. I’ve only seen one locked room in this house: the one leading down to the basement.
As in much of Cole’s house, the original purpose of this space has been altered to suit his eccentric preferences. While the far wall is a large stone hearth, and the usual sofas and chaises are present, the bulk of the room is given over to a potter’s wheel.
Cole lights a fire in the grate. The pale applewood logs give off a sweet scent reminiscent of their fruit. The flames leap up, bringing alive the figures in the many paintings on the walls.