Tattooed (8 page)

“No.”

Eddie turned to look at her. “Why not?”

A flush heated Kate’s cheeks. “I’m not a lobbyist, Eddie. I have no desire to become one. I would be terrible at it, anyway.”

He said nothing.

“Besides, I’m not sure what I think about the whole thing.”

“You mean about helping someone kill herself?”

Kate bit the inside of her cheek. “I killed my sister, Eddie.”

He shot her an admonishing look. “Kate, it was an accident—”

“I’ve had enough of death and destruction.”

“But the philosophy behind assisted suicide is to allow people to die with dignity. Peacefully.” Light was fading fast. Eddie tapped the glowing ember on the end of his cigarette, the ashes reminding Kate of a dying star. “You’ve seen your share of violent deaths. Perhaps this an opportunity to change that.”

“Eddie, I don’t want to screw this up for Frances Sloane. This is too important. I don’t know the first thing about lobbying. She told me that she thinks I’ll be successful because I’m ‘famous,’ but I don’t think that’s true.” She watched the mist drape itself along a branch, the water globules suspended from its underside. Eventually they would crash to the ground or evaporate.

What would it be? Crash? Or fade away?

“Why don’t you think it’s true?” The question drifted through the twilight.

“I don’t think my fame will change people’s minds. And besides, I really don’t want to dredge that all up again. It was one of the worst periods of my life.” Kate clipped the leashes on the dogs. They lumbered to their feet. Alaska nosed Kate’s thigh. “Nietzsche sums it up pretty well—
Battle not with monsters lest ye become a monster…
.”

“So you think if you become an activist for assisted suicide you will become the Angel of Death?”

“Of course not.” Kate pushed a wisp of mist-curled hair off her face. “I agree in principle with assisted suicide. I just don’t want to be the one fighting the fight.”

Eddie pushed himself to his feet. He stood next to her, feet planted wide as if the wooden planks of the porch were a ship’s deck, gazing at the mist that shrouded Randall’s front garden. “I shouldn’t have pushed you. I was playing devil’s advocate. I obviously touched a nerve.” He gave her shoulders a squeeze. The cigarette came perilously close to her sleeve. “I don’t think you should do this. You’ve been through too much. You need time to heal.” His voice sank. “And…you need to forgive yourself.”

For what? Killing two people? Not saving someone else?

“Gotta run,” she said. “Thanks for dinner. It’s my turn next.”

He nodded. “I’m expecting you to use that new pasta maker.”

“First I’ve got to baptize my new roasting pan,” she said, tugging on the dogs’ leashes.

The mist had become heavy, on the verge of drizzle. The therapeutic effects of her earlier run had disintegrated with the cigarette ash on the porch. She sprinted up the hill, desperate to reclaim some equanimity. A full stomach and two tired dogs made for a long slog home.

Her feet pounded on the wet pavement. Her mind pounded on her conscience. She did not want another stain on her soul, no matter the reason. Eddie thought it would bring peace, but she wasn’t so sure. She thought it was more likely to bring nightmares of the Body Butcher variety.

She was no Angel of Death.

7

T
he headlights of Kenzie Sloane’s rental car swooped over the curve of the long driveway to what was once her family home. The family had dispersed years ago, and had disintegrated long before that. Now, the lone occupant of the stunning architectural structure was her mother. And for how much longer, nobody knew.

Tall, spindly evergreens flashed into view, receding as the headlights found new targets. Kenzie’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. Foo Dog, her black pug, was barely visible in the dark, but she was grateful for his solid presence. She hadn’t been home in seventeen years. She had never wanted to return.

Still didn’t.

But here she was.

Why?

Was it her brother’s email? The years spent inking memorial tattoos on grieving clients?

No. It had been the sound of her mother’s voice on the phone. Her voice but not her voice. Maybe that was why she had been so disarmed: she hadn’t recognized it. That shocking, slurring, nasal voice. “Kenzie. Please come home.” A pause. An audible swallow. Then the plea that sealed the deal: “I want to see you once before I die.”

Guilt came crashing out of nowhere.

Years ago, when Kenzie had made her escape, her mother had written her. Angry and hurt, Kenzie had never opened the letters. But instead of tossing them in the trash, she’d scribbled, “Return to Sender” on them. Her mother had gotten the message.

Kenzie hadn’t heard from her in seventeen years.

Although she had heard from her brother three times. Once to inform her that their parents had split. There had been no avoiding the accusation that lay behind those words. The second time was to tell her that her father had remarried. There had been no mistaking her brother’s glee. And the last missive had come via email. He had contacted her through her online blog site KOI to inform her that, “Mom has ALS and will die in the next year. She doesn’t know I’m contacting you. And God knows you are the last person I want my children to meet, but out of respect for her I am asking that you come home to say your goodbyes.”

The email had been caught in her spam filter for three months. She had been traveling all over the U.S. doing guest stints and hadn’t found it until three weeks ago. She called her mother.

And here she was.

Out of any disease to afflict her mother, the general consensus was that Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS, was a terrible way to go. As Kenzie learned, it was a disease that strangled the body and left the mind to suffocate within its confines.

The irony had not escaped her. She had felt strangled within the confines of the award-winning home her mother designed. It had been both lauded as “cutting edge and forward thinking” and panned as “unrealistic and unlivable.” Perched near Chebucto Head, it stuck out on the cliff as if it, too, had been carved by a glacier, its surfaces layered with glass and melded with curved steel. The ocean’s turbulence reflected in its window-like walls as if it were a mood ring.

It was the “unlivable” criticism that had gotten to her mother. “What do they mean, ‘unlivable’?” she’d asked, throwing the magazine on the table. She swept her arm in a fierce gesture, as if drawing to her chest the elements of her house that had both astounded her admirers and provoked her critics. “Do you find it unlivable?” she had demanded of her son, Cameron.

But she hadn’t asked Kenzie. She was too afraid of what her unpredictable daughter would say. And Kenzie knew that if her seventeen-year-old self had been asked, she would have gladly thrown the critics’ words in her mother’s face and stomped out of the room with the knowledge she had succeeded beautifully in wounding her mother.

“Be on your best behavior, Foo,” Kenzie said as she parked the car in front of her mother’s house. Kenzie unclipped his seat belt, enjoying the visual contrast of the sensible blue polyester harness against Foo’s spiked-silver leather collar. She knew that most people might find it surprisingly against type for a tattoo artist to buckle her dog into a car seat—they probably found it surprising she had a pug instead of a Rottweiler—but she would never risk Foo.

He leapt out of the car behind her, his nose at her calf, his walk jaunty. He was unfazed by the otherworldly quality of the house. Kenzie had always thought it unnatural, the antithesis of the kind of home she wanted. She had yearned for a traditional house like those of her friends, with rugs scattered on the floor and overstuffed sofas. Instead, her mother had created an irregular glass rectangle that was accented with steel. There was no corner in that house in which Kenzie could lose herself. Everything was too exposed. Her father, Gus, had seemed displaced, too. He built a covered porch in the back, one with traditional wood posts and patio furniture. Kenzie and her father often retreated there, she with her sketchpad, he with a crossword puzzle.

Lately, though, the house appeared to have hunkered itself down to the ground. Bracing itself for death’s appearance.

The Japanese maples by the front entrance had barely begun to leaf. Their spindly branches reminded her all too vividly of decimated limbs. Kenzie scooped up Foo and held him against her chest as she rang the doorbell. A light chime echoed within the house.

A woman appeared at the door. She peered through the glass. Kenzie straightened to her full height, which was a decent five foot ten. With her hair bunched up on the back of her head and the two-inch heel on her Doc Martens white-leather boots, she topped six feet easily.

“Kenzie?” the woman said, pulling open the door. “I’m Phyllis. Your mother’s caregiver.”

“Hi.”

Foo squirmed in her arms. She put him on the floor, keeping a tight hold on the leash while she glanced around. It was home. And yet she didn’t feel at home, she didn’t feel she could let her dog go or run upstairs to see her mother unless she was invited to do so.

Phyllis must have seen her glance upstairs, because she said, “Your mother does not use the rooms on the upper floor anymore. She’s moved into the living room.”

“Oh. Of course.” It made total sense, and it gave Kenzie her first glimpse of how radically her mother’s life had changed. Seventeen years ago, her mother would never have allowed a living room to be used as a bedroom.

It was sacrilege.

Kenzie followed Phyllis to the back of the house. Their footsteps were lost in the open space. “She’s in here,” Phyllis said, gesturing to the living area.

Kenzie paused on the threshold, bracing herself for the bombardment of family memories, but there was no room for those as her brain took in the implications of the scene before her.

Her mother, whom she had not seen for half of her life, was unrecognizable. Kenzie would have walked right by her if she’d been on the street. She might have glanced at her—yes, she would have—for it would be hard to miss the motorized wheelchair, although it was the awkwardness of the body that would have made Kenzie give a second look. Her profession demanded the ability to create a picture on a curved canvas—the skin covering a limb—and she was intimately familiar with how limbs were angled. Any irregular form always caught her eye.

Her mother leaned to one side of her wheelchair, her head resting against a curved headrest, hands lying in her lap.

“Kenzie. You came.” Her mother’s eyes scanned her face. Kenzie had remembered her mother’s eyes as bright and sharp. Always assessing, calculating, ready to find the flaw. “Lives depend on it,” she had once told a five-year-old Kenzie when she had asked her mother why she was always pointing out the “mistakes” on her blueprints.

The tables had been turned most cruelly on her mother. The structural integrity of her body now depended on others to keep it functioning.

“Hi, Frances,” Kenzie said, trying to sound casual. For the past three weeks, she had flip-flopped over how to address her mother. “Mom” seemed too intimate given the distance between them; “mother” was too formal and made her sound like an ass. So she had decided to call her mother by her first name.

Her mother blinked. Kenzie inwardly squirmed. “Frances” had sounded pretentious.

“How are you?” Kenzie asked. That wasn’t much better. Anyone could see her mother was a train wreck.

“I’m dying.”

She swallowed. “I heard.”

Her mother’s eyes traveled over her face, lingering on the multiple piercings curving up Kenzie’s ear, then headed downward, skimming her long-sleeved distressed leather jacket and low-slung skinny jeans. The weather had been damp—and the chill had really gotten under Kenzie’s skin after being in Texas last week. It was only natural for her to cover up. And yet, if she was being honest with herself, she knew that she wasn’t ready to expose her tattoos, her art—her life’s journey—to this woman who was now at the end of her own.

Her mother’s gaze fell to Kenzie’s hands, which were unadorned with the exception of a small black tattoo in Asian script on the back of each thumb.

“This means strength. In Kanji.” Kenzie held out her right hand. “And this one means tranquility,” she said, holding out the other so her hands were extended symmetrically. “Strength” was just two bold strokes, fluid and curved, with forward movement. “Tranquility,” on the other hand, was smaller, with many strokes working together to appear balanced.

“With strength comes tranquility,” her mother said. “And with tranquility comes strength.”

Had either of them achieved that? “That was the idea.”

The quiet of the room was broken by a loud, uncontrolled laugh that burst from her mother’s throat. Frances began to cough. Within seconds, she was choking.

Kenzie turned and sprinted to the door. “Help!”

Her mother’s caregiver ran into the room. She thrust a suction tube down her mother’s throat and cleared the airway. Frances leaned her head back against the headrest and closed her eyes. Tear tracks marked her cheeks, her breathing hoarse and rapid.

“God, Mom,” Kenzie said, and realized she’d forgotten to call her mother by her first name. She sat in the armchair by her mother’s wheelchair, her legs shaking, her pulse racing.

That choking sound…

It had taunted her in dreams for years. She had never thought she would ever hear it again.

Foo sat by her feet, leaning against her shin.

Her mother opened her eyes. They were watery from tears, washed in defeat. “I can’t believe I’m seeing you again.” The words were so painful, and so painfully slow, that Kenzie couldn’t bear it.

“Foo. Come here, buddy.” Kenzie scooped up the pug from where he sat by her feet, observing these follies of human nature with his usual
je ne sais quoi.
Her shoulders lost some of their tension at the feel of his solid, velvety body in her arms. Kenzie stepped toward her mother. “You want to hold him?”

Frances glanced down at her hands. “Please put him on my lap. Help me move my hands first.”

Kenzie bent over and clasped one of her mother’s hands. The coldness of her skin, the laxness of her muscles, made Kenzie’s throat constrict. She averted her face from her mother’s too-observant gaze. “Right here?” Kenzie asked, placing her mother’s hand on the armrest.

“Yes.”

Kenzie gripped her mother’s other hand with the lightest, briefest of touches and placed it onto the arm-
rest. “There,” she said. She lowered Foo onto her mother’s lap. Her pug met her mother’s gaze with his own, and then sniffed her face. “Hello, Foo,” her mother said. She looked at Kenzie. “Could you put my hand on his back?”

Kenzie guided her mother’s hand onto Foo’s fur. “He’s soft,” her mother said.

Foo curled his body and lowered his head onto Frances’ lap. “He’s a lug,” Kenzie said. Foo gave a long, gentle sigh and closed his eyes.

“Such peace,” her mother said.

Silence descended on them.

Shit.

Kenzie didn’t know what to say. The distance, fuelled by hurt and lengthened by years, was not going to be breached in one visit. Or ever.