After His Mistress Poisoned My Mother, He Still Chose Her

My phone rang while Diane's pen was still in my hand.

I looked at the screen. St. Luke's. I set the pen down on the signature line and picked up.

The voice on the other end was careful. Practiced. The kind of careful that means they've done this before and they know there's no good way to do it.

I don't remember driving to the hospital. I remember the pen on the desk. I remember the gray carpet. I remember the elevator doors opening onto the parking garage and the smell of concrete and exhaust. Then I was in the car, and then I was on the bridge, and at some point I ran a red light on Amsterdam Avenue and didn't know it until the horn behind me faded into distance.

The nurse at the station was young. She had kind eyes and she didn't know what to do with them when she looked at me.

"She passed about an hour ago," she said. "We did everything we could."

"There was a visitor," I said. "This morning."

She hesitated. "A young woman. Dark hair. She said she was family."

I nodded.

"Ms. Cooper — "

"Can I go in?"

She stepped aside.

The room was quiet in the way that rooms are quiet after something has happened in them. The monitor was unplugged, the cord coiled neatly on the cart. The bed was made. Someone had smoothed the sheets and folded the top edge down with the particular tidiness of people who do this for a living, who have learned that tidiness is the only thing left to offer.

The flowers were still on the windowsill. Yellow and orange tulips, the ones she'd called too cheerful. They were still open. They didn't know yet.

I stood in the doorway for a long time.

I didn't need the footage. I didn't need the detective or the timestamp or the audio. I had known Melina Jimenez for two weeks and I already knew exactly what she was capable of, exactly how she moved through a room, exactly what she would have said and how she would have said it. Soft voice. Crossed legs. The particular cruelty of someone who has nothing to lose because they never had anything to begin with.

My mother had died listening to a woman tell her that her daughter was never enough.

I looked at the empty bed for another minute. Then I picked up the tulips, still in their vase, and I carried them out with me.

I was not going to leave them there.

***

She was on the couch when I got home.

Curled up with a paperback, her bandaged hand resting on the armrest, her feet tucked under her. She was wearing my cardigan again. The one with the stretched sleeves. She looked like a woman spending a quiet afternoon at home.

She looked up when I came in. Her face arranged itself into something soft and questioning.

I set the vase down on the entryway table. I walked across the living room.

I slapped her.

Once. Hard. The sound of it was flat and sharp and it filled the room completely.

Her head snapped to the side. The book fell. She made a small sound — not a scream, not a word — and then she was crying. Softly. Perfectly. Her hand came up to her cheek and her shoulders curved inward and the tears came down in a way that looked like it had been practiced, because it had been.

I stood over her and I felt nothing. That was the strange part. I had expected rage, the hot consuming kind, the kind that burns your throat on the way out. But there was nothing. Just a flat, cold clarity, like standing at the edge of something very high and looking down.

Cillian's footsteps hit the stairs fast.

He came around the corner and stopped. He took in the room in one second — Melina on the couch, her hand on her cheek, her tears, her trembling — and his face did the thing it always did. The softening. The parting of the lips. The man watching a hurt animal he'd promised to feed.

He crossed to her. He put himself between us.

"Esme." His voice was cold in a way I hadn't heard before. Not angry. Colder than angry. "What is wrong with you?"

I looked at him.

I looked at the man my mother had pulled from the wreckage of a burning house when he was fourteen years old. The man who had slept in the room down the hall from mine and eaten at our table and learned what it felt like to be loved by someone who didn't have to love him. The man who had bled for me outside a subway station and spent three days in a hospital bed and never once asked for anything in return.

I looked at him standing in front of the woman who had walked into my mother's hospital room this morning and talked her to death.

He didn't know. I understood that. He didn't know yet.

But he also hadn't asked.

He hadn't looked at my face — not really looked, not the way you look at someone you love — and asked why. He had walked into the room and seen what he always saw when Melina was crying, and he had moved his body between us without a single question.

"She's been through enough," he said. "You know what she's been through. This is — Esme, this is cruel. This is irrational."

Melina made a small sound against his shoulder. Her eyes, over his arm, found mine for just a moment.

There it was. The corner of her mouth. Just for a fraction of a second.

Then she pressed her face into his sleeve and shook.

I felt the last living thing inside me go quiet.

It didn't hurt. That was what I hadn't expected. After three years of it hurting — the slow, grinding, daily hurt of a woman who keeps choosing to stay — this felt like nothing. Like a light going out in a room you'd already left.

I didn't tell him.

I didn't say: your mother is dead. I didn't say: she died this morning in a room that smelled like antiseptic while the woman you're holding whispered poison into her ear. I didn't say: I was in Diane Lau's office signing the papers when my phone rang, and I ran two red lights getting to the hospital, and she was already gone.

I didn't say any of it.

I turned and walked to the stairs. My hand found the banister. I went up slowly, one step at a time, the way I had gone up after she'd put the bruise on my cheek. The way I had gone up every night for three years.

Behind me, I heard Cillian's voice, low and soothing. I heard Melina's soft, practiced crying.

I went into the bedroom and closed the door.

I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark.

The tulips were still downstairs on the entryway table. Too cheerful. Still open. Still not knowing.

I sat there for a long time and I did not make a sound.