Page 142 of The Secrets We Hide
“Emmy Lou.” Jude spoke to her like she was a child. “You need to breathe.”
“I’m not having a panic attack!” Emmy yelled. “I’m outraged.Youshould be outraged. Look at this house. Look at this neighborhood. Mandy was part of this town. There’s a teacher living across the street. She had friends and a community all around her. Cops on her doorstep and at her dinner table. Everyone saw her pain. No one tried to save her. She was completely alone. She didn’t have a father. Her own mother didn’t even see her!”
“If you look at this through the lens of—”
“There’s no fucking lens!” Emmy yelled. “Allison chose Bill. She always chose Bill. She abandoned her own fucking daughter. How can you justify any of this?”
“I’m not justifying it.”
“Yeah, you are. Of course you are. You know all about abandoning people.”
Jude’s face went ashen. Emmy had finally landed a blow. She should’ve felt ashamed, but she was suddenly, inexplicably exhilarated.
“‘Followed a bad man to a good city,’” Emmy quoted. “Living the rock ’n’ roll dream. Drinking yourself into oblivion. Screwing every guy in the band. Then you got tired of it, and you turned it all around, right? Cleaned yourself up. Got all your fancy degrees. Became a model citizen. Jude the obscure becomes Jude the renowned. That’s your story, right?”
Jude looked down at the floor.
“You could’ve come back here any time. You could’ve been here for Tommy. For me. For Mom and Dad.” Emmy was infuriated to find herself crying. “You were too busy being a hot-shit FBI agent tracking down pedophiles and child murderers. Hunting a serial killer in your free time. Writing textbooks and papers. Lecturing at Quantico. Earning accolades. Do you want to know what I was doing? Do you?”
Jude finally looked at her.
“I was taking care of my parents.Ourparents.” Emmy pounded her fist into her chest. “Ourmother.Ourfather.”
Jude drew in a shaky breath.
“I was standing right beside him when he was killed. Hisblood sprayed into my eyes. Pieces of his skull went into my mouth. I can’t get the grit out of my teeth. I taste it every time I try to eat. I close my eyes and I see him on the ground over and over again.”
Tears spilled from Jude’s eyes.
“Don’t you dare start crying,” Emmy warned. “You haven’t earned the right to cry. I’m the one who changed our mother’s diapers. I bathed her. I fed her. Held her while she sobbed. Ran to her when she started screaming in the middle of the night. Fought her off when she attacked me. Took all her hate when she called me vile names. Cleaned up her shit when she smeared it on the walls.”
Jude’s lips started to tremble. “I hated her.”
Emmy couldn’t take back the awful truth. That’s why she was mad at Allison and couldn’t find any rage for Mandy. She knew what it felt like to want to put a gun to your head. There had been times when Emmy had been so exhausted, so pushed to her limit, that she had looked at the shell of the woman who had once been her beautiful, brilliant, complicated mother and been consumed by loathing.
“Do you know what kind of monster you have to be to wish that your own mother would die?” Emmy waited, but Jude didn’t answer. “Of course you do. That’s the only reason you came back, right? To watch her die.”
Jude started to shake her head.
“She begged for you,Martha. She called me by your name. She wantedyouand all she had was me, and I was completely alone. Dad was useless. Tommy checked out. Celia turned everything into a joke. I couldn’t let Cole see what was happening. I left the only man I ever loved. Turned away my best friend. There’s your lean horse, Dr. Archer. I couldn’t carry the load. You want to lecture me and psychoanalyze me when the only reason I’m breaking apart right now is because there was nobody to hold me together back then.”
Jude wiped her eyes.
“You could’ve held me together.” Emmy jabbed her finger in Jude’s face. “All this time, I never even knew you existed. Butyouknew. You’ve always known exactly who you are to me. And you wanna know something insane? My body knew it, too. I’ve been feeling this wrongness ever since you walked into my life. My blood remembers your blood. I feel your absence to my marrow. Your selfishness is woven into my DNA. I needed you, and you abandoned me.”
Emmy turned and walked away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Jude sat in Celia’s hunter green Alfa Romeo outside her childhood home. She’d been sobbing so hard when Emmy had left that she could barely think. Every personal contact in her phone had a San Francisco area code. She had called the number she’d memorized as a child and fallen into Celia’s arms when she’d gotten there. Jude had gone through an entire pack of tissues on the drive over. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried so openly. Her chest felt hollowed out, as if Emmy had reached inside her body and twisted out her heart.
Celia said, “It’s not like her to be cruel. She’s hurting. You’re an easy target.”
“She was right. I abandoned her.”
“You weren’t given much of a choice.”
Jude said the terrible part out loud. “I took my last drink when Emmy was three years old. I was shaky in the beginning, but when it started to stick, when I felt like I could really do it, I could’ve come back for her.”
