Page 110 of Gone Tonight
The man in the coveralls began to gesture frantically. It took me a beat to understand he wanted me to get up, to follow him. I climbed out of the beanbag chair, with you still sleeping in my arms. The puppy you’d named Brownie fell to the floor.
The man scooped up the stuffed animal and rushed toward a cornerof the store where the fitting rooms were located. He used a key on his chain to unlock one of them and gestured for us to get inside.
I could hear a woman calling for him in the background.
The man closed the door and locked us safely inside until the end of the shift. The woman called his name again and he replied, Estoy aquí, which means I’m here.
I sat on the floor of the dressing room, you still asleep in my arms, unable to believe my ears.
The name of the cleaner, the one I’d heard the woman calling out, was very familiar to me.
Mateo. It was also my father’s name.
It felt like another sign that my dad was somehow still protecting me.
I close the journal and look toward the front door of Sunrise. Catherine is coming out, holding a cardboard tray with two white Styrofoam cups nestled in its holders and, in her other hand, a brown paper bag.
I check my phone again. A police reporter should hear the news about James’s capture soon. The cops won’t want to keep this quiet. They’ll be proud of the arrest.
Any moment now, I’ll be able to breathe easy.
But there’s no update on my phone.
Catherine offers me the tray and I pull out a cup of coffee, gratefully breathing in the rich aroma.
All that’s left to do is wait.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINECATHERINE
There is so much I need to untangle with my mother.
After we sip our coffee and devour the hummus and veggie wraps a cook in the kitchen slipped me, we begin to talk. Hours later, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I want to know.
For the first time, my mother is opening up to me.
I can tell it’s excruciating for her to dismantle the walls she spent more than two decades fortifying, the ones she wanted to keep me contained within.
But she clearly understands the only way we can go forward is for her to invite me into her past.
We’ve been sitting on Adirondack chairs beneath the shade of a big, sprawling tree, but even though it has grown uncomfortably warm, I don’t want to move and rupture this strange new intimacy.
The stories my mom is weaving—of how vicious her mother was to her and Timmy, and how James plotted to punish the Poms coach for his sexual abuse, and how she hid in a Target until a month before I was born, saving every penny she’d earned as a waitress until she had enough to rent a tiny room for us—are jaw-dropping.
It’s hard to reconcile those tales with the image I have of my mother as a hardworking woman with a vanilla sort of life.
I guess I’ve never really looked at my mother as an individual. She has always felt more like a planet that orbits around me. Maybe that’s true for most daughters, at least until we reach a certain point in adulthood. We define our mothers through the lens of how they relate to us.
By now, my mother has explained how she lured James to their old meeting spot and alerted the police. As soon as we confirm his arrest, she tells me, we can go back to our apartment.
My mother sighs and leans back in her chair, looking drained. Her skin has a yellowish tint, and she is so thin her cheekbones are even more prominent than usual. She runs the back of her hand across her brow, wiping away the light perspiration that has accumulated.
“I’ll help you figure everything out,” she says. “You can still move to Baltimore. We can pack up the car and drive you there next week.”
I crumple the thin Styrofoam coffee cup in my hand.
“I think I should figure things out for myself,” I finally say.
Hurt briefly flashes across her face. “Fair enough.”
