Forgotten (51 page)

A slow,
steady burn warmed some small place inside of me. And I welcomed
the fact that I could still feel. “Yet here we are, at The Local,
drinking cold champagne while Papa lays weak in a hospital
bed.”

“
I
don
’t understand.
You
wanted this
meeting.”

“
One that I
hoped you wouldn’t attend.” My mother’s uncharacteristic presence
only confirmed what Saul and Ethan already believed. “It was
you.”

She looked
up with vividly
innocent eyes.

“
It
was
you
who killed Alice Polinski.”

Time
froze.

Vacant, emotionless and so unbearably
silent.

I think my
heart stopped. My mother’s sudden blanched expression made me
believe hers had too.

I waited.

So did my mother.

If I could read your mind
, Mama, just about now.

Contours
continued to crumple her brow in places. Her
burgundy-
colored lips fell. “Are you
insane?”

At that
moment, I believed myself to be the most rational, sanest person in
our family.
“It explains so much.” I
said. “It explains why, since Alice’s death, you’ve struggled to
talk to me, show any concern for me, even to look me in the face. I
thought it weird at the time, but I consoled myself with the fact
that it was a rather challenging time for us and, well… we all deal
with stress in different ways. Never once did I expect that your
detached behavior was due to anything else.”

“You really think I could kill someone?”

I could’ve
believed her, wanted to; the portrayal of the falsely accused, so
seamless in her well manicured gestures, so authentic in her
feigned shock deliverance. But there was no escaping what I now
knew to be fact.

“
There
existed a time I
’d have thought it
impossible that you could kill anyone, let alone in cold
blood.”

“
And you
believe this of me, because I am here, not by your father’s
side?”

“
I think
this because of many reasons. For one, there was the bullet, the
bullet from Papa’s Magnum.”

I was
bluffing.
Ballistics had determined the
bullet could have come from
any
thirty-two caliber
revolver.

What
remaining façade Mama tried to maintain, fractured. One of her
hands fastened the base of her throat. It was as colorless as her
fast, deteriorating pallor.

I sipped my
champagne, held the thin stem of the glass with remarkably steady
fingers. “Now, I guess we could all kill with the right motivation,
with the right ingredients in play. So what was your motivation?
What were the ingredients that compelled you to execute such an
act?”

My mother
swayed her sights to the bay. Her large, dark eyes appeared sullen,
as they looked upon the bay’s picturesque splendor, the water’s
pure, seamless beauty, so incongruous to the tragic figure she now
painted. Eventually, those same eyes stared back at me.

“Alice came to see me.”

And there it began.

“
She wanted
to see your father but she thought
I
would be a more sympathetic partner to her cause.”

Alice Polinski
’s
first mistake.

“Said she had something important to tell
you.”

“Do you know what that was?”

“
She
wouldn
’t say. But, honestly, Claudia, it
was nothing more than an over-dramatic attempt to be with you
again.”

“
Didn’t you
think the entire thing odd after she spent twenty years
following
your
rules?”

A brief,
startled look and I realized she hadn’t even considered it. She
gave a one-sided shoulder shrug and said, “Didn’t matter, anyway.
Turns out, Alice had only asked permission out of mere courtesy, to
prepare us for any unpleasant aftermath. In the end, I had no other
choice but agree to help her.”

“Why would you do that? You hated the
woman.”

Mama’s lips
pulled back in a definite sneer.

And as much
as I originally didn’t want to believe it, Saul and Ethan’s theory
about Mama began falling into place. “You agreed to help her, so
you’d know the exact time and place Alice planned to see me. And
that way get to her first.”

Mama didn’t
yay or nay it. She didn’t need to. “It was just two days before you
finished work for the year,” she said. “Alice wanted to wait until
your last day of school. That way you’d have lots of free time to
adjust, said she’d linger outside of Zephyr until you returned
home.”

“
You
ha
d the code to Zephyr; you could’ve let
her in.”

“
I
didn’t
want
to let her in.”

It was a
remorseless admission; a blind person could
’ve sensed that. I captured my breath and held onto
it.
Reality was melting me fast, flushing
my skin from the inside out. I didn’t much care for it. I glanced
away, back to Mama, away again.

Was this
woman really my mother? Our closely similar facial appearances said
she was. I scanned the surrounding, bustling crowds and swallowed
hard. I rummaged through my beaded bag, pulled out my large,
tortoiseshell sunglasses and slipped them on. And it
wasn
’t to protect my eyes from the
sun.

I needed readjustment time, piecing bits
together time. When I felt I had enough, I returned to my mother.
She was fiddling with her gold-hooped earring, staring at me.

“You had it all planned out.”

Mama said nothing.

“
You first
disguised yourself as some young hoodlum.” Normally the idea of a
middle-aged woman doing so would’ve been implausible. But not my
mother. Not with her small, slight figure and genetically unlined
face. And certainly not combined with the right hooded jacket, dark
sunglasses and one of Uncle Al’s outdated bombs from his demolition
car yard. “You took Papa’s gun intending on shooting Alice while
she waited outside of Zephyr; make it look like some warped,
motiveless drive by shooting.”

I could
barely believe what I was saying. Not only did it suggest that my
mother knew how to use a gun but with a certain degree of accuracy.
“But Alice wasn’t outside Zephyr, was she Mama? And when you drove
by, saw she wasn’t there you panicked. Was she then waiting for me
elsewhere?”

My mother
sipped her champagne, faultlessly, emotionlessly.

I trembled.

Felt ill.
The strong smells of a neighboring tuna salad didn’t help. “Let me
know, at any time, if my over-active imagination gets out of
control.”

Mama still
didn’t respond.

“
You drove
to my school, studied me from the car park. Decided if Alice had
already spoken to me, I would’ve appeared… hmmm… upset. When I
looked at you, you sped off. From that point on, you weren’t
letting me out of your sight. Alice was waiting for
me
…
somewhere.”

Sharp pain
stabbed my lungs. I heaved in a gush of air. “That now brings us
here to The Local. I’m guessing you thought I’d have gone home from
school instead.”

“
It’s what
you normally do.”

“
Not that
day.
Your whole car park spectacle
freaked me out and I didn’t want to be alone. So you followed me
here into The Local. How you must’ve hated putting yourself in the
open like that? Just because there was a small chance, a very small
chance that Alice could show up. What were you going to do if she
did? Shoot her in front of all those people?”

Her face
colored and she avoided my eyes.

“
You also
didn
’t account for some stranger taking a
curious interest in you. Someone who would coincidently turn up at
our home a few weeks later.”

Ethan.

He had
always believed that the person watching me at
The Local was male, someone young. He was actually
impressed with my mother’s disguise. When he first saw her at my
parent’s home, it was her eyes, identical to mine that made him
stop, relook and put the horrific pieces together.

I sat mute for a while gazing at some
boaties in the distance. How uncomplicated their lives suddenly
appeared, sailing in zigzag fashions across the blue waters.

“
Some family
secrets need to stay exactly that. Secrets,”
my mother whispered.

My mother the cold-blooded murderer.

“
You have to
understand, Claudia, Alice could
’ve
destroyed everything your father and I worked for.
When you were in that horrible condition in the
hospital after Araneya, your father cautioned me then that someone,
someday, may come, someone not in your best interest, someone who
may want to do you harm.”

Carlos Macanetti/Macey.

“
It was why
your
father taught me how to use a
gun.”

No surprises there.

“
I thought
Alice to be that person.” I watched Mama
’s facial movements with some interest, tried to read the
unspoken versions of the tale, but in the end, I could decipher
very little.

“
Papa never
would’ve condoned such a ruthless act. He cared about
Alice.”

I believed
that strongly. I believed the only reason Papa was so harsh
about Alice seeing me, was because of my
mother.

“
You
didn’t want Alice in your
precious life. And Papa sadly complied. He loved you Mama, he loved
our family and he had to do whatever was necessary to keep it
together, even if it meant hurting Alice.
It’s the Cabriati blood
.”

My mother swung from me, pulled out her
pristinely folded handkerchief from her pristinely poised handbag.
She dabbed and wiped, wiped and dabbed.

But I remained scarily detached from
her.

And I prayed for my own soul.

Mama glanced
at me, twisting her handkerchief. “You’ve changed,
Claudia.”

I could’ve
laughed had the situation not been so grim. “The truth will do that
to you.” But not for one minute, did I believe
all
those changes were
necessarily good ones.

I took a
deep breath, allowing my mother time to formulate her next
explanation, false or otherwise. Allowing myself time to prepare
for my
own
painful tirade. When Mama said no more, I questioned
why.

“
There’s
nothing more to say.”

“
That’s not
true, is it?” I raised and lowered my shoulders and looked squarely
into my mother’s eyes. I was relieved to sense some of my original
coldness return. I needed it. “Twenty-eight years ago, you made a
choice. I’m not going to pretend to understand the difficult times
you suffered with Papa. However, you didn’t just decide to
disappear with Milo, leaving me with Papa as everyone in the family
believed.”

Blood eased
out of my mother’s arrogant face.

“
You
left me at birth, abandoned at some
hospital.
Papa didn’t even
know I was born
.”

I didn’t
wait for a reaction. “I can’t imagine what it was like for Papa to
scour the many Sydney hospitals in search of you, only to
eventually discover me among a bunch of frantic nurses. I can’t
imagine what it was like for him to return to a cold, barren home,
to missing clothing and you and Milo gone.”

I took one
small breath. “It wasn
’t enough that you
chose to discard me, that you chose to vanish with Milo, or even
that you chose to leave me with a man that you didn’t think fit
enough to live with yourself. But that for seven whole years you
carried on as if I didn’t exist, not ever once checking to see if I
was okay.”

Mama’s
large, unblinking eyes stared from beneath a now unreadable
expression. “Claudia, I always wanted you….”

“
Wanted me?
You aren’t serious, because I know about
that
too.” My voice had now
reached new depths, somewhere amidst the dark voids of hell. “I
know about your attempt to abort me.”

“
Claudia, it
wasn
’t like that.”

Somewhere in
my aching, bubbling brain, I recalled the countless times
psychologists allotted my childhood difficulties to my maternal
relationship. I had ridiculed them. Now I could only shake my head
at how close to the mark they
’d
been.

“
I guess, in
due course you were shocked that you could
’ve done such a thing. The fact that I never knew just
helped in relieving any guilt on your part. As for Papa, he hid
your secret from everyone, a secret far worse than his
own.”

“He was protecting you, Claudia.”

“
Yes, he
was, but he was also protecting you.”

Mama pulled
at her earring again, fast, agitated pulls, enough to make me think
it’d soon fall off. “How?”