The Offering (38 page)

“Hello?”

“Mom?” I tried on a smile. “Sorry, did I wake you?”

“Mandy?” Her voice, which had been thick with sleepiness, sharpened immediately. “Has something happened to Marilee?”

“Marilee and I are both fine.” I closed my eyes and released a slow breath. “I know this sounds silly, but I had a terrible dream. I couldn't go back to sleep, so I thought I might give you a call.” I forced a weak laugh. “You've always had a gift for making my nightmares seem stupid.”

“What on earth”—she cleared her throat—“what on earth did you dream? If you saw me being run over by a semi in the Publix parking lot, maybe I won't go to the grocery store tomorrow.”

“Don't worry—there wasn't a semi in sight.” I sank to the edge of my bed. “It was the old nightmare about the car wreck. But this time I knew I was dreaming, so I tried to change the script. But when Daddy promised to meet me at the river, he said something about Gideon being there, and that was different from what he usually says. And then he said I needed to stop worrying, that everything was settled and I was going to do the right thing. Trouble is, I don't have any idea what he was talking about.”

I expected her to chuckle, sigh, or tell me to pull on my big-girl panties and go back to sleep. What I didn't expect was silence. And in that unearthly quiet, a sudden and inexplicable uneasiness chilled my bones.

“Amanda,” she finally said, her voice soft with compassion. “I think we need to talk about the accident. If you're dreaming about it again, something important must be weighing on your mind. I don't know what it is, but maybe you do.”

“I don't want to talk about ancient history.”

“But apparently you
need
to talk about it. You always have that dream when something heavy is occupying your thoughts—I think it's because you're wishing you could talk to your father.”

I grimaced as her words struck home—grateful that she couldn't see my face. “Mom, that's crazy.”

“Anyone would struggle with a major loss in a lifetime,” she said, going on as if she hadn't heard me, “yet you've had to deal with two.”

I turned out the bedside lamp. “Good night, Mom.”

“You're probably having nightmares because something is stirring up your feelings of grief and abandonment. And you know what they say—a buried hurt doesn't go away, it festers beneath the surface. The only way to take care of the problem is to open the wound and let it all pour out.”

I grimaced as my mind filled with images of scabs and scalpels and oozing goop. “That's disgusting.” I switched the phone to my other hand and crawled back beneath my comforter. “Well, sorry to wake you. I'm fine, and ready to go back to sleep.”

“Wait, Mandy—I'll let you go back to bed if you will answer one question.”

I sighed. “What?”

“Don't you think I know that you felt closer to your dad than to me? I saw how his death devastated you. And I'm sure there were times when you found yourself wishing that I'd been the one to die in that accident.”

Staring into the gloom-shrouded room, I lay perfectly still, the phone glued to my ear. How did she know?

M
om, I didn't—”

The lie that sprang automatically to my lips was swiftly swatted down. “You don't have to deny it, honey,” she said. “You were pretty transparent as a kid, and I knew you and your daddy were extra close. The light went out of your eyes when he died, and it didn't come back for a long, long time.”

For a long moment I lay in the thick silence of concentration, then I pushed myself up. Mom had been a lot more aware than I realized, but just because I grieved over my father didn't mean I hated her.

“Losing Dad hurt a lot,” I admitted, shrugging in the darkness. “And as a kid I probably felt and said some things I'm not proud of. But I was just a child when all that happened.”

Mom hesitated, then spoke more slowly. “I know how profoundly your dad's death affected you, and I think I know why you and I haven't been closer over the years.”

“We've been fine—”

“Amanda.” A gentle rebuke underlined my name.

“We've been okay,” I finally said. “We've gotten along better than some mothers and daughters.”

“But not as well as we could have. I regret that—I was always trying to break through your shell, but you were a tough little nut.
You didn't want to let me in. The more I tried to reach you, the more you resisted. So finally I stopped trying.”

“Mom, I—” I paused, having run out of excuses. “I never meant to hurt you.”

A humorless, tired laugh filled my ear. “I know, honey, but that doesn't mean that you didn't. You wanted your dad, and compared to him, I must have seemed like a sorry substitute. I tried not to take it personally—after all, Wayne was an amazing man. But sometimes I wanted to reach out and knock some sense into your head so you'd look around and see that someone else adored you, too. That the parent left behind was trying her hardest to be mother, father, and best friend. But I don't think I ever got through to you. No one did, until Gideon.”

My throat tightened as an unexpected surge of grief rose up from my chest. Why was I having this morose conversation? I did not want to be lying in the dark and talking to my mother at 2:00 a.m.; we both ought to be asleep. I had a full day ahead, and she probably did, too. Plus I had Marilee to think about, and Julien to prepare for. . . .

I felt a surge of adrenaline, an instant of déjá vu. Something was on the tip of my tongue, and then it wasn't. Something important.

Or maybe not.

“I have to be up early,” I said. “And I have to get Marilee to school. Can we do this some other time?”

“You called
me,
remember? You're the one who wanted to talk about your nightmare.” A heavy sigh filled my ear, followed by the sound of movement, as if Mom were making herself comfortable for an extended conversation. “How much do you remember about the accident? You and your dad were on the way home from a restaurant when he braked to avoid hitting a deer. The roads were slick and somehow he flipped the vehicle. You'd taken off your seat belt to lie down in the backseat, so you were thrown out.”

I frowned as a pulse of irritation murmured in my ear. “I don't want to talk about this anymore.”

“I know you're still struggling with loss, honey. Losing your father was terrible, but losing Gideon traumatized you all over again—”

“Now you sound like my therapist.”

She released a soft chuckle. “I knew you remembered. Two years of weekly appointments—that's a lot of therapy, especially for a kid.”

Outside, a car turned around in Mama Isa's driveway, sending shadows to dance on the bedroom wall. Mom and I had both had a hard time dealing with Dad's death, but she hadn't had much time to mourn. As a suddenly single woman, she'd had to increase her hours at the pet store and shoulder all the responsibilities for our little family.

A glimmer of realization seeped through my irritation. “Why didn't you ever remarry?”

She laughed. “Somehow it never felt like the right thing to do. None of the men I met could ever measure up to Wayne, so I didn't want to marry again. And, truthfully, I didn't get asked out very often—in those days, men weren't as quick to show interest when a woman came with a kid attached. Especially a kid who spent a lot of time at a psychologist's office.”

I brought my hand to my temple as spectral visions played on the backs of my eyelids, colliding and cracking like rolling marbles. I had successfully bagged up the most disturbing memories of my past, but this conversation had loosened the string. Now I recalled afternoons spent in a waiting area reading tattered copies of
Highlights
and a receptionist who set out chocolate-chip cookies on a brightly colored platter.

“I've worried about my daughter,” I said absently, still studying the sepia memories that had opened in the darkness. “I loved my husband, but I always wanted Gid to stay safe for Marilee's sake.”

“Because . . . you didn't want her to lose her father?”

“Because I didn't want her to think he hated her.”

The confession rolled out of me like syllables on a string, hooked by the bait Mom had clumsily tossed at my psyche. As my words
hung there in the silence, slick and greasy and unexpected, I don't know which of us was more surprised.

“You didn't . . .” Mom's voice faltered. “Honey, Marilee knows Gideon adored her. His feelings were obvious to everyone.”

A flash of memory caught me by surprise, like a white-hot sword thrust through my chest and belly. I gasped, staggering under the pain, and gripped the phone so tightly my fingers went bone white.

“I . . . didn't . . . take off . . . my seat belt.” I bit off each word and spat it at the phone. “I never had it on. Daddy was listening to a baseball game on the radio, so he didn't check on me. I tried to buckle it, but I couldn't fasten the thing by myself.”

“Mandy?” Concern seeped from Mom's voice. “Are you all right?”

Tears streamed down my face, hot spurts of fury and despair, but I couldn't stop. “I was mad and jealous because he'd rather listen to baseball than take care of me. And then we had the wreck, and I found myself outside on the grass. I crawled over and called to him, but he wouldn't come out of the car. He kept saying he'd meet me at the river, but then the fire started and he started screaming.”

“Mandy, you don't have to go through all this—”

“He told me to get away! He shrieked at me, telling me to go away and leave him alone, and sometimes in my dreams I can still hear him telling me to go away. And I'm terrified that Marilee will begin to think Gideon left us because he didn't love her. Death is hard on a family, but it's especially hard on a child.”

“Oh, Mandy,” Mom whispered, in an aching, husky voice I barely recognized. “I'm so sorry—I never knew you felt that way. Now that you're an adult, surely you understand that he was frantic to get you away from the car? He wanted you to be safe.”

I drew a ragged breath, wiped my runny nose on a tissue, and struggled to regain control of my emotions. “Logically, I get it,” I finally answered. “But the heart doesn't always feel what the mind knows. Especially when the heart is young.”

My head fell into my hand as more memories washed over me
in a cold flood, shivering my flesh. Because I lost my father, I spent two years visiting a nice therapist who urged me to play with her paper dolls and insisted that the dolls talk about the accident. The dolls hadn't wanted to talk, but finally they cooperated, or I would have been visiting the psychologist forever. So I told the woman about what Daddy said, about how I was thrown free of the car because he forgot to fasten my seat belt. I told her I loved Daddy best, so why didn't he love me enough to take me to heaven with him?

Like an electric tingle, an epiphany lit up my nerve endings: no wonder the therapist insisted that I keep visiting her office. With all my talk of going to heaven, she must have thought I had some kind of death wish.

But I never wanted to die. I wanted to know why my dad forgot about my seat belt, and why he died and left me. Most of all, I wanted to know what was wrong with me, why he'd found it so easy to leave me behind.

So many confusing feelings had baffled me then . . . and confused me now.

“Sweetheart.” My mom, rarely given to endearments or sentimental sayings, spoke to me with tears in her voice. “Mandy, I know your father loved you every bit as much as you love Marilee. You shouldn't for one minute think that you weren't cherished.”

“Sure.” I choked back a sob. “I know. I'm a mother, and I understand. But when you're a kid . . . everything is one thing or the other. You don't know what to do with your feelings, and those feelings aren't always logical. That's why I worry about Marilee.”

“And that's why you'll tell her over and over that her daddy adored her. And that he's waiting for her by the river.”

“I know.” I sniffed and wiped my nose again. “I know you're right.”

Fresh tears began to flow as another picture sharpened—the woman at the other end of this phone line had sacrificed her life for me. I rarely thought of her as anything but Mom, but when my
father died she had been young and beautiful, with her entire life ahead of her. But during the time of her greatest loss, she focused on working hard to support me. She spent years loving and caring for me, a heartbroken and traumatized child.

And I had been ungrateful, because instead of appreciating her, I had chosen to cherish my wounds.

I did not sleep again that night.

After saying good-bye to Mom, I turned on my lamp and went to my closet, where one box held important family documents—canceled checks, previous years' tax returns, my life insurance policy, and our birth certificates. And, in a separate yellowed envelope, copies of two death certificates. My father's and Gideon's.

I sat in the small cone of lamplight and considered the way my world had shifted with each loss. I had been a grief-stricken child who fitfully emerged from therapy, but I had never fully dealt with the stew of anger and perceived rejection simmering in my subconscious. How can anyone deal with a problem unless they know it exists?

I almost laughed as the pieces of my life clicked together like a kaleidoscope, a pattern emerging from the blurred and broken glass. No wonder I chose to major in psychology. I don't know how long I visited therapists as a child, but in college I studied the effects of trauma upon children. Children who experienced a grief-inducing loss were often fearful of being separated from their loved ones, they lacked self-confidence, and they avoided situations that reminded them of the distressing event. They could also have intrusive memories about their loss, often in the form of nightmares. . . .