They (8 page)

“No,” Lillian said. “Not right then. He just told us that Maggie had been found dead, and that he didn’t want us to jump to any conclusions. John cut right in and said ‘Jesus, Tom, come off it! I
found
her! You can’t tell me some deranged pervert killed her after what we found.’ Well, that piqued my interest, and when Tom left John told us everything. He’d been the one to find her that way. He’d gone into the house when she failed to come to the door when he stopped by to pick her up and he went in and found her.”

Vincent nodded. “Tom told me yesterday.”

“He told you about…what they did to her?” Lillian asked, breathlessly.

“Yes.” Vince took another sip of iced tea. “But how do you know it’s ‘they’? Suppose it’s just one killer?”

Lillian looked toward the closed front door of the house, then her eyes darted toward the windows, as if checking to see if unwanted ears were eavesdropping on their conversation. She looked back at Vince almost fearfully. “Did I say ‘they’? I guess that was just a slip of the tongue. It could be ‘they,’ or ‘he,’ or ‘she.’ Anybody, I guess.”

Vince opened his mouth to pursue the matter, but decided better. Lillian drained the rest of her iced tea and rose, heading toward the kitchen. “I need a refill,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”

“No,” Vince said, puzzled now. “I’m fine.” He waited while Lillian refilled her iced tea.
What the hell was
that
all about? She got really spooked when I asked her about
they.
Almost as if she knows something more than she’s letting on
.

When Lillian returned to the living room her features were more composed. She looked as if nothing had ever happened. She sat back down in the easy chair next to Vince and took a quick sip of her iced tea as Vince tried to steer the conversation back to his mother. “You know,” Vince began, choosing his words carefully. “I really dreaded coming back here when I heard the news. Especially after all that I went through with mom. We…didn’t really see eye-to-eye on a lot of things in the end.”

Lillian reached her hand out and touched his knee lightly. Her blue eyes locked with his. “I know things were hard for you. Especially the last few years you were here.”

“It was worse when I left,” he murmured.

Lillian’s hand rubbed his knee lovingly, bringing the warm touch his mother never would have bestowed. “Your mother was…very upset with you in the end.”

“But why?” He turned to her, his drink forgotten on the table. “I never thought leaving for college or getting
married
would make my mother hate me.”

Lillian sighed heavily, as if contemplating the delivering of bad news. “At first I didn’t understand it, Vincent. Your mother’s always been…set in her ways, I guess you could say. And I know that you had it harder than most teenagers when you were growing up. I know your mother wasn’t the most understanding person. But there was one thing she was strong in, and that was her faith in the Lord. Your mother walked the closest walk with the Lord than anybody I’ve known in my life. That’s something to be admired about the woman.”

Fuck my mother’s walk with the Lord
, Vince thought, his jaw set in a hard grimace.
If abandoning your child’s emotional needs when they’re growing up is part of walking with God, then I want no part of Him
. He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. “So she never spoke about me after I left, right?”

“Far from it,” Lillian said. She picked up her glass of iced tea. “She spoke of you often. Prayed for you all the time.”

“Prayed for me?”

“Yes.” Lillian took a sip of iced tea.

“Why?”

Lillian hesitated. “Are you sure you—”

“Yes,” he almost snapped. “Just tell me!”

Lillian blinked in surprise, as if taken aback by Vince’s sudden outburst. Vince closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. He exhaled and opened his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I…I didn’t mean to snap at you like that.”

“It’s okay,” Lillian said. “You’ve been through a lot lately.”

More than you’d care to imagine
, Vince thought. He ran a hand through his hair, took a sip of his iced tea, and leaned forward on the couch, ready to go head-to-head with whatever revelation Lillian had. “Why did she pray for me all the time?”

Lillian sighed. “She believed you were walking with Satan.”

The tension that had been building up in Vince’s limbs evaporated. He let out a breath.
Was that all
? According to the way his mother interpreted the Bible, he pretty much expected her to believe he was one of Satan’s minions. Lillian’s confession wasn’t a big surprise. “Why did she think that?” he asked.

“Because according to her, you’d abandoned the Christian faith she raised you in.” Lillian’s eyes were open, gentle. “You didn’t believe. You chose to cloak yourself in worldly things, which the Bible says is aligning yourself with Satan. Are you familiar with the Gospels, Vincent?”

“Yes,” Vince said. He took another sip of his iced tea.

“Then you know what Jesus said about choosing to live in the world, by the ways of the world. That Satan rules this world and its ways are his.”

“That’s all I heard when I was growing up,” Vince said. He set the glass of iced tea down on the table. “I suppose that despite the fact that I didn’t share my mother’s religious beliefs, she assumed I was a sinner and was doomed to Hell. And that because I was, she couldn’t associate with me because I would taint her somehow. Right?”

Lillian reached out again and caressed Vince’s arm. It felt comforting, soothing. “Vincent…I know you’re troubled by all that’s happened. Your mother’s death…your estrangement from her and all. But…she had a good heart. Really, she did. You may think she was crazy, but she really cared about you.”

“I wish she would have showed it,” Vince said. He drained the rest of his iced tea and stood up. “I’ve got to get going.”

Lillian stood up and walked with him to the front door. He had to get out of this house now; he felt his throat locking up. He felt like he was going to cry again. He felt that a little part of him was dying; the part that had never known the joy and love of his mother. The love that a mother can bestow on her son.

He was almost at the front door when he felt Lillian’s hand lightly gripping his arm. “Vincent.”

He stopped and turned. “Yes?”

She looked at him, her eyes brimming again with tears, and then moved forward, taking him in her embrace. He held her, her voice low and crackling. “I’m so sorry, Vincent. I’m so sorry.”

They stood there for a moment, silhouetted in the doorway of Lillian Withers’ comfortable little cottage set off a narrow farm road in rural Pennsylvania as the mid-morning sun peaked high overhead. Vince could feel the day warming up outside. The scent of lilacs wafting through the doorway was fresh in the air. The crisp, clean country air felt good. Vince closed his eyes and held Lillian, feeling a familiar sense of home, of a childhood he’d never had.

When Lillian finally stepped back she looked up at him, her eyes misty. “You’re a good man, Vincent. I think if your mother were here now she’d be proud of you.”

“Lillian—” Vince protested.

Lillian stopped him by tapping her finger on his chest. “Only the Lord knows your heart, Vincent. In the end your mother was too wrapped up in her own—Lord, dare I say—
righteousness
, to be concerned with the goodness of other’s hearts. It blinded her. She either didn’t see, or refused to see you for the good person you are.”

“Despite the fact I’m a non-believer?” Vince said. He mustered a smile. He’d said it. He was a non-believing atheist.

“Despite the fact that you’re a non-believer,” Lillian said, without missing a beat. Her features were serious. She looked more composed, more in control of herself. “You’re a good man, no matter what you believe. Don’t let the memory of what your mother used to say to you, or how she treated you, change the way I know you feel about her. Deep down she really loved you, Vincent. She loved you from the bottom of her heart.”

Vince looked out at the road and the thick grove of trees that spanned the property across from Lillian’s. “You know, I’d really like to believe you, Lillian. But so much of the last few memories of my mother is her screaming at me over the phone, telling me I’m the spawn of the Devil, or that I’m going to burn in hell for leaving her and choosing what she called the Left Hand path.” He turned back to her. “Maybe you’ve forgotten about all that happened. When I won that scholarship to UCI. I thought she would be happy for me. She wasn’t. She told me that if I went off to college I would burn in hell.”

Lillian’s features collapsed, as if in shame.

“I went to college and, as you know, the relationship quickly went downhill. She sent me tracts in the mail, she called me on the phone telling me she was organizing a prayer session in the hopes I’d be saved.”

Lillian nodded, closing her eyes. “I remember…”

“It got so that every year at Christmas I dreaded coming home because all she would do was insist I pray with her every day at Reverend Powell’s, for hours straight. You remember?”

Lillian nodded.

“When I started dating Laura, it got worse. By then I was working at Corporate Financial. She saw that as really…being something bad and evil. I’m sorry, but I still don’t see what is so evil about having a career in a financial planning firm. It got so bad that I stopped calling her altogether. I even stopped with the Christmas and birthday cards. All the cards I ever got from her were religious ones. But the final straw was when I broke down and called her after Laura and I got engaged. Know what she told me?”

Lillian shook her head. She looked saddened. “No. Vincent you don’t have to tell me—”

“I think I do,” Vince said. He struggled to keep his voice even, to keep from breaking into tears himself. He could feel his chest grow heavy, his throat constricting. “She all but damned me to Hell. She did not want to hear about what I thought was something every mother would want to hear from her son, that I was engaged. Instead she told me I was doomed, and that she did not want to hear from me ever again. And then she hung up on me.” His breathing was growing heavy. He struggled to hold back the flood of tears that threatened to pour forth. “I expected this, but…I thought she would have been
happy
for me. You know?” And then he
did
start to cry, just a little bit, because it wasn’t just the memory of his mother’s rejection of him that he was crying over. It was the memory of Laura taking him into his arms that day after his mother hung up on him and he’d turned to her, teary eyed just as he was now and said, “Sh-sh-sh-she..h-h-hates me!” He’d broken down then, and Laura had been there to comfort him.

Lillian tried to offer comfort as best she could. Her warmth brought a sense of security to him, one that he’d never felt with his mother. But then he’d always felt pretty secure with Lillian. Growing up, Lillian had been the only member of the church group to tell him jokes, or to trade gossip in the latest chapters of the soap operas they both watched (Vince had been a fanatical follower of
General Hospital
in the Luke and Laura days). In short, she’d been more of a mother to him than his birth mother. And she was filling the role now as well.

He wiped the beginning of tears away. He turned away from her, slightly embarrassed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that…”

“You don’t have to explain,” Lillian said. Surprisingly, she remained strong for him when he was at his most vulnerable. Her features were composed, strong and confident. “It’s all right to cry every now and then.”

Vince managed a smile. “I wasn’t expecting to cry like a baby in your home.”

Lillian playfully slapped his arm. “I’ve seen you cry more than once, young man! My Lord, I’ve seen you at almost every point in your life except for when you were really little. I’ve seen you cry over everything from scraped knees to broken hearts.”

This broke the ice and they laughed. For Vince, the laughter helped ease the tension. He’d always liked Lillian, but deep down never really knew whether Lillian thought of him as a sinner the way his mother had. Part of that tension was his fear that Lillian, who he saw as his only hope in regaining some sort of foothold in Lititz, would have succumbed to his mother’s view of him.

He felt better now. He looked outside at the warm blue sky, his rental car parked in Lillian’s driveway. He turned back to her, gratitude welling forth. “Thank you, Lillian,” he said.

“Don’t mention it,” she said, rubbing his arm and smiling at him. “That’s what families are for, right?”

“Are you my family, Lillian?”

“I’ve always felt I was.”

“Good. I always felt you were too.” And he did. And now he suddenly felt a void that he never thought he would; a sense of loss in that he never fully knew how much Lillian Withers meant to him as a friend, as
family
, until twenty years later.

“Lillian,” he began, not knowing how to approach this question. He decided to take the plunge and ask, even if she became shifty about it the way she had when she inadvertently referred to his mother’s killers as ‘they.’ “There’s something that’s been bothering me for awhile now. It’s recently started bugging me since…well, since yesterday when I was on the plane flying out here.”

“Yes, Vincent?”

“Did…did my mother ever mention her family to you? Do you know what ever happened to them?”

Lillian sighed, and much to Vince’s relief she didn’t appear shifty. “Your mother never spoke much about her family and I never asked. All I know is what she told me when I met her, when you moved to Carlisle Street in Toronto. That the two of you had lived outside of Buffalo, New York for a year and that you were originally from California. Your mother was divorced and she had custody of you. That was it.”

“Divorced,” Vince muttered. He’d tried dredging up memories of his life before New York, but it all came in images. He remembered living somewhere other than New York, he remembered a man that he presumed to be his father. The man had been nice, had seemed like a father to him, although he was gone a lot. Vince just assumed he’d been out working. He remembered other people that had been in their lives, but he had no recollection of who they were, or what their relation to him and his mother had been. One of them, a distinguished looking older man, could have been an uncle. A younger couple close to his mother’s age could have been aunts and uncles, friends of the family. Others floated to the surface of his memory only to dissipate. He shook his head. “I don’t remember him hardly at all. I don’t remember his name, where we lived—”