He hit me. It wasn’t a slap out of impulse. It was a calculated strike to disorient me. I tasted blood. The folder fell to the floor, open. The pages got wet in the rain. “I don’t need you to sign it awake,” he said.
Then a voice spoke from the garage door. “That’s why you never should have studied neurology, Marcus. You learned how to turn off brains, but not how to understand souls.”The woman from the screen was there. Standing. Soaking wet. With a face marked by scars crossing her cheek and neck. She was leaning on a cane, but there was nothing weak about her eyes.My mother. I didn’t remember her name yet. But upon seeing her, my chest knew it. “Mom,” I said.She cried, but she didn’t take a step forward. “Lucy.”Marcus grabbed me by the neck and pulled me against him. The gun pressed into my side. “One more step and I kill her.” My mother raised her hands. “You’ve already killed her so many nights. I won’t let you do it one more time.” “You don’t understand. She was going to lose everything. I gave her stability.” “You gave her a prison with clean sheets.”
He laughed. “And what did you give her? A dangerous last name? An inheritance full of enemies? Her father left too much land, too many clinics, too many accounts. Someone was going to take it from her.” “And that someone was you.” “I was smarter.”
My mother looked at me. “Lucy, the blue backpack.”
The world stopped. Blue backpack. I saw a highway at night. Me driving. My mother in the passenger seat, bleeding from her forehead. A blue backpack between my legs. “Don’t let go of it, honey. Everything is in there.” A semi-truck. Headlights. The impact.
I woke up in a hospital with Marcus saying: “Relax, Valerie. Your husband is here.”
I screamed. Not because of the memory. Because of the rage.
I dug my heel into his foot. Marcus fired the gun into the air. My mother raised her cane and smashed the garage light switch. Everything went dark. I ducked. Another gunshot echoed very close. I felt the heat pass right by my ear.
Then flashlights. Yelling. “Drop the weapon!” Marcus tried to run, but an officer tackled him onto the concrete. The gun slid far away. I ran to my mother.
She was on the floor. “No, no, no…” I knelt next to her. The bullet had grazed her shoulder. She was bleeding, but breathing. “Don’t show up just to leave again,” I begged her.
She tried to smile. “So bossy… just like when you were a little girl.”
Paramedics rushed in. I didn’t want to let go of her. I was afraid that if I removed my hands, Marcus would win anyway and she would disappear like in my memories. “My name,” I told her. “Tell me my full name.”
She touched my face with a trembling hand. “Lucy Archer Sanders. Daughter of Renee Sanders and granddaughter of Julian Archer. You were born on April twelfth. You were afraid of clowns, you hated beets, and you used to say that when you grew up you were going to defend people who couldn’t afford lawyers.”
I doubled over her and cried. “I don’t remember everything.” “It doesn’t matter. I do. I’ll lend it to you until it comes back.”
They led Marcus away in handcuffs. He walked past me with a face full of blood and hatred. “Without me, you don’t know who you are.” I looked up at him from the floor. “That’s why I’m going to live. To find out without you.”
Eleanor gave her statement early that morning. Not out of the goodness of her heart. She didn’t have enough goodness for that. She testified because Marcus, seeing he was caught, tried to say it had all been her idea. Fear among criminals sings too.
