Page 59 of The Family Plot
“I’m sorry,what?” he says. “Is this a joke? Have you been slipping something into your cookies I don’t know about?”
I snap my head from him to Mom, waiting for her to make some sense. She’s hugging herself, her lips moving without sound. After a few seconds, her breath solidifies into words.
“… within months of each other,” she’s saying. “They’d been smokers for decades. For my father, it was just—something everyone did. His father, his grandfather, everyone at the company. It was part of the culture. Cigarettes were passed around like cups of coffee.”
I lean closer, unused to hearing her speak of their business. It was irrelevant, she always said. Whatever harm the guns they made might have caused, it didn’t mean their murders were karma. But now—there weren’t any murders at all? My head swims as I try to catch up.
“… and my mother picked up the habit, once she started working with them. Our walls were yellow with smoke. My clothes always smelled. And they got sick around the same time, when I was twenty. I remember thinking how unfair that was.Bothof them? Not one but both?” Her eyes shift back and forth, pacing the floor like feet. “It was a terrible disease. Stage four. Spread to their liver, their bones. Went to my mother’s brain.”
Tears drip down her cheeks, and there is nothing in me that wants to comfort her, nothing that wants to reach out and wipe her sorrow from her face. All of me—every cell and atom and breath—is fighting to understand.
“She went first,” she continues. “And then my father, not far behind.”
Tate slumps against the wall, crushing some drawings with her shoulder. “So, wait,” she says. “There were no gunmen? No home invasion?”
Mom shakes her head. “Only cancer.” She looks at us now, spearing us with her stare. “But that ‘only’ was the problem. Nobody saw my parents as victims, or their deaths as tragic, because they’d smoked themselves straight into that cancer. People came to their funerals and said, ‘Well.’ That’s all they had to say. ‘Well.’ And I knew what that meant. It meant ‘Well, what did they expect?’ Meant ‘Well, they did this to themselves.’?”
As I watch her scowl at the memory, a realization clicks into place. “Is that what you really meant,” I ask, “whenever you said you didn’t want anyone to think of their deaths as karma?”
Except she didn’t saydeaths. She saidmurders. She specifically said they were killed by the very guns their company made—a detail so dark I never questioned its veracity, never would have believed that someone could invent it from thin air.
Mom nods, hugging herself tighter. “However they may have… contributed to their illness, I still lost them. Both of them. And their loss felt as raw and unfair and—and violent to me as if they’d been killed unexpectedly, as if someone had arbitrarily chosen to murder them because they walked down a dark street too late at night, or they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Her last sentence hums in the air, made resonant by its familiarity. How many murder docs did we watch that spouted that same line?The wrong place at the wrong time.
“I mourned and I mourned and I mourned,” Mom says, her palms open in front of her, as if she’s remembering the weight of her grief, trying to hold it in her hands. “And do you want to know the only thing that comforted me?” She closes her eyes, breathes in deeply, then opens them again. “Murder.”
Tate grips my arm. I look at her, but she’s focused on Mom. Charlie’s glaring at the floor.
“Not the committing of it. But the stories. Stories of gruesome, real-life murders. Stories where people are left behind to grieve someone who was torn away from them. Stories where the… the terrible cruelty of life was so absolute.” Fresh tears dampen her lashes. “Undeniable.”
Even in the shadows, I see her gaze drift from us, distant and hazy.
“So I invented a story like that of my own. I sold my parents’ house in Connecticut, sold their whole company, and I moved here, to their summer home, the place where I’d spent every July and August of my life. And when people here, who had known my parents, asked what had happened to them, I didn’t tell them about the cancer. I couldn’t bear to see it again, the doses of sympathy, so uniform and measured, followed too often by that ‘Well.’ I wanted to see horror on their faces. I wanted them to feel even a sliver of what I felt about what had happened.”
She releases a cold, airy chuckle. “They stayed away from me after that. Didn’t want the tragedy that had touched my life to creep over into their own. And that was fine. I didn’t need them. I had newspapers and books and films and endless,endlessstories of people like me. People who existed in the interviews. People who said, ‘She was so full of life, I don’t understand how she’s gone.’ Or ‘I’ll never be over it.’?” She pauses, her expression now blank. “I think of those lines all the time.”
“Mom…” Tate says, but either she doesn’t hear her, or she can’t be stopped.
“Living inside those stories,” Mom continues, “gave me something I hadn’t had before: validation for my grief.”
She takes another deep breath. “And when I met your father”—Charlie’s head snaps up—“and he asked me for my story, I told him the one I’d been telling everyone on the island. Then I took him here,to my family’s home, and I showed him the papers I’d been collecting. I showed him the true crime books. The films. And he didn’t even flinch.”
Her face changes, briefly awash with admiration. “He accepted the darkness I wanted to surround myself with. He understood what it meant to me: solace and protection. I wanted my children to be better prepared for the world than I had been. I wanted to warn you all, as early as I could, about how life can just”—she grits her teeth, forcing words between them—“tear you apart.”
Teeth bared, shaking her head, she resembles an animal ripping meat off a bone.
“And I wanted you to have those stories to fall back on, if you ever did lose something in a way you couldn’t make sense of, even as others tried to explain it away.”
Mom shudders, a quick burst of anger before the sorrow, the shame, sweeps over her again, dragging her shoulders down.
“I thought I was giving you tools to survive. But then”—she hesitates, and when I tilt my light toward her face, I see her swallow—“after Andy left, I thought maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe the darkness I exposed him to had actually sent him running, instead of keeping him safe. I thought of him, all alone out there, no money, no access to a bank account, and I couldn’t stop seeing everything that might happen to him. And then I couldn’t stop drawing what I saw, trying to… to pull those possibilities from the universe. And then…”
Her hands shake as she runs them through her hair, disturbing her lopsided ponytail, pulling it from its elastic band without seeming to notice.
“When we learned Andy was murdered,” she continues, “I knew, without a doubt, that I was to blame. I’d made the wrong choice, been the wrong kind of mother.” Her voice narrows to a whisper. “It waskarma, Andy’s death. I lied about my parents being murdered, and then my child was murdered in return.”
She sobs once, so loud I jump. Then she buries her head in her hands and cries like nothing I’ve ever heard. The passageway thunders with the sound. The walls could come crashing down.
