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Maree knows very well just how possible it is to hate something you created, someone of your own blood. She’s had more examples of the near promise of this idea than most.
She could've been anything else. Anyone else. But the choice was made for her.
Are you really choosing what route to take when someone else planned the roads hundreds of years ago? All the choices, the big ones, the real ones, had been made long before Dr. and Mr. Everett even knew she existed. Before she was even a twinkle in her father's eye.
Even if she hadn't chosen money over her own happiness, a part of her is sure that she would've ended up right where she is.
Perhaps, for all the fighting and fit-pitching of her youth, Maree is far more like her mother than she'd ever care to admit. She too sold her children's future for her own gain. At least Mama had a good goddamned reason.
Peggy Reynard's eldest daughter was responsible for the deaths of nearly 200 people. 200 good - innocent - people died because poor little stupid Maree Reynard couldn't keep her emotions in check. Peggy lost her community, her home, her husband. One daughter died of suffocation in an air pocket in the ruins of the family barn, One daughter the cause of the very worst day in her entire life.
Why would you ever want to see a person like that again? How could you face someone responsible for so much suffering? Never mind if they were your child. That stopped being relevant the moment Maree kept breathing and Wanda didn’t.
For Peggy Reynard, the only way out was through.
She can’t remember who first told her that. The only way out is though. She thinks it was Mona.
Mona Lisa, the beautiful girl with eyes like Liz Taylor, with a voice you couldn't help but listen to. With one look in her kaleidoscope eyes, the words she said, the demands she gave, became an endless whispering in your ears. Mona wasn't afraid of her abilities, like Bronwell. Mona simply didn't want to have to use them for anything or anyone other than herself.
She had cared, deeply, for Mona.
Maree can admit to herself, after all this time, that she had cared for her as Redmond cared for Mona’s brother. She can admit now, that she had loved her. But Mona, who was smarter than all of them, smarter than her brother, smarter than the Everett’s - far, far smarter than Maree herself - fled.
Perhaps, if she had told her as much, if she had responded to the letter she sent not long after she left - postmarked from East Texas, with Maris written in her looping cursive script. She wondered if Mona had known how close she was, when she sent that letter, to the heart of Maree’s biggest regret.
Maree had long thought of Mona’s departure as a harbinger for what came after.
Peregrinans' death - Emil. His name was Emil Lee Goodhope. She’d only heard his name once, at his funeral, names, real names, were tantamount to scripture, in their holiness to the surviving Cuckoos. Especially in the wake of Toshiro's coma, the exorcism of Jane’s potential. Bronwell’s suicide.
It’s foolish to think that if Mona had stayed, that the grief of the years which tumbled after would evaporate like so much ill kept liquor.
This is a Hell of her own making, here amongst the ruins of the life she never could’ve had.
Maree Reynard, the drowning girl, who was sold down the river by her own mother as penitence for her massacre.
Maree Goldhirsch, the trophy wife, who sold her children’s futures for her own safety, for even a chance at an out.
Just another cog in an endless machine.