Page 73 of Gone Tonight
I’m being paranoid, I tell myself, and I walk directly to the shower.
I pull back the curtain and step in, relishing the feel of warm water beating down on me. I reach for the fancy shampoo my mother buys for a fraction of the retail price at a discount store and lather and rinse my hair. While my conditioner soaks in, I shave my legs.
I don’t exactly feel like a new woman after I turban a towel aroundmy hair and step out into the steamy air to rub lotion on my skin, but at least I’m ready to tackle the day.
I’ve got a good stretch of alone time in front of me, and I intend to make the most of it.
I pull on a T-shirt dress and decide to let my hair air-dry. The apartment feels stuffy, so I crack open the windows in my bedroom and the living room. Then I head to the kitchen to grab breakfast. Other than gin and the bag of tortilla chips Ethan offered me, I haven’t eaten since the popcorn I made yesterday afternoon, and I’m starving.
There’s a plate on the kitchen counter, covered in tin foil, with a sticky note atop it.
The sticky note has a simple heart on it, drawn in blue ink. I pull back the crinkly foil and see scrambled eggs, two of the vegetarian sausage links I like, and a toasted everything bagel. The Mr. Coffee pot is half full and set to the warming function. A bottle of ketchup is next to my plate because I love it on my eggs.
I thought we were out of those veggie links, but my mother must have made a special trip to the store to pick them up. The pan she used for the eggs is drying on the drainboard, so she must have taken the time to scrub it.
My mother doesn’t eat breakfast. She got up with the sun to do all this for me, then she walked to the bus stop.
I look down at the heart she drew for me and burst into tears.
I didn’t know it was possible to be so deeply angry with someone and simultaneously love them so much that you wanted to hug them until it hurt you both.
I cry until my throat feels raw, then I blow my nose on the paper napkin my mother left folded next to my plate.
I don’t know what’s going to happen between me and my mother, or whether our relationship will ever be the same. I can’t know where we will go from here until I find out the truth about her.
I microwave my plate to warm everything, then I sit down at the little wooden table where we’ve shared so many meals. I eat alone, finishing every last morsel.
I wash and dry my plate and fork and pour a second cup of coffee, then retrieve my legal pad and open my laptop and begin to search again. I’m itching to phone Diane Brown, but I want to wait a few more hours to space out my calls. I can use the *67 trick to block my number, but if she doesn’t answer and sees more hang-ups coming in, she may be suspicious when I do finally reach her using a blocked number.
I spent a lot of time yesterday morning searching for Ruth Sterling. It was like looking for a particular grain of sand when I didn’t even know if I was on the right beach. Some of the hits I got were obituaries, while others didn’t pan out because the women were all wrong in some fundamental way—their ages, photos, occupations, or marital status ruled them out. Today I try narrowing down possibilities by mixing in different details like my mother’s birth month, Virginia, and even the word “waitress.”
I find a few leads, but they lead me down rabbit holes.
I finally close my laptop a little too roughly and reach around with one hand to massage the back of my neck.
I’m grumpy and feel the threat of a headache, probably because I’ve been staring at a screen for so long and haven’t hydrated adequately since last night’s gin. I grab a glass out of the cabinet and reach into the refrigerator for the Brita pitcher. I chug down eight ounces of water, then refill my glass.
The water level in the pitcher is getting low, so I pop off the lid and hold it under the sink tap. Someday, I’m going to live in a place where pure, filtered water will be on tap, but right now that’s a luxury I can only dream about.
My gaze drifts just beyond the stream of running water to the little china ring holder my mother has had for as long as I can remember.
On the pointy peak is her topaz ring, where it often sits when she is at work or doing dishes. When I was younger, I used to beg my mom to let me wear the ring. She never once said yes. She even used to yank away her hand when I touched the rectangular stone, telling me the setting was delicate.
She acts like that ring is worth a million bucks, which is silly because as jewels go, topaz is relatively inexpensive. I know because my old friend Aliyah got a pair of topaz earrings for her birthday when we were in tenth grade, shortly before we moved, and her parents could not have afforded anything extravagant.
The water overflows in the pitcher, running down my hand. But I can’t move.
I was there when Aliyah’s parents handed her the small square box, wrapped in shiny silver paper. We’d all eaten dinner at Aliyah’s apartment and cheered as she had blown out the candles on her cake.
Aliyah put the earrings in right after she opened the box and beamed while her father snapped a picture.
Happy birthday, sweetheart,her mother had said. Aliyah had turned fifteen that day. It was early November.
I look at my mother’s ring again. It’s like I’m seeing it for the first time.
Sometimes the thing we’ve been searching for has been staring us in the face all along. Perhaps we miss the clue because subconsciously we don’t want to acknowledge it.
Maybe my mother did bring along a talisman from her past, after all. The ring.
