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The manager of the lawn service calls a welfare check on Carol's mother when she fails to pay him. The police discover that she's been dead for two days. Heart failure, of course.
The day after that, Carol and Helen are in Chantilly standing in front of Carol's childhood home.
It's got that pseudo-colonial red brick facade that's so popular in the suburban sprawl of northern Virginia, multiple blue-gray gables, and evenly spaced white-framed windows. Twin garage doors dominate the lower half of the house, and from them the driveway runs outward in a dark, freshly sealed plane.
To her right, the front door sits recessed beneath an arched entryway, a nod toward ceremony that stops short of warmth. The wreath affixed to the door attempts a seasonal charm.
To her left is Carol. Her mouth is a thin line.
The lawyer who called them here opens the door and welcomes them in. He's oozing with sympathy for the bereaved, which Helen knows is going to set Carol off.
Sure enough, Carol doesn't even take her coat off before starting. "I don't want any of this shit," she says as soon as they're in the foyer. "Can I turn it down? Or does she just get to make me do what she wants one last time?"
They've already talked about this, how they're going to liquidate the estate and donate every cent the government doesn't take to LGBT charities and activist organizations, but Helen senses that she's going to have to rehash the conversation again and again over the next week.
"Of course you can decline the inheritance," the lawyer says, taken aback, "but I was under the impression—"
"Your impression is correct," Helen says, extending her hand. "Hi, I'm Helen. We talked on the phone?"
He grasps her hand like she's extended him a lifeline. "Yes, of course, Ms. Umstead. Uh." He's visibly trying to formulate a polite way of asking if he can deal only with her when Carol's voice explodes from the living room.
"Fuck."
Helen follows her in and doesn't see why she swore. Nothing is out of place as far as she can tell. But maybe that's what's upsetting—maybe nothing has changed since the day Carol turned eighteen and left.
Carol stalks over to the far end of the room and rips a picture frame off the mantlepiece. She throws it into the unlit fireplace. The glass protecting the photo shatters.
She turns to stare back at them. "What?" she says. "It's mine, isn't it?"
"Let's sit," Helen says to the lawyer. "I'm sure we have a lot to talk about."
Carol ricochets around the house for most of the conversation. Half of Helen's attention is devoted to tracking her by sound as she paces in the hallway, goes up and down the stairs, opens and closes cabinets in the kitchen. When she finally stops and sits down next to Helen, it's because she's gotten herself a glass of something that looks like water.
The lawyer looks at Carol with something hovering on distaste. He might be able to smell the tequila. "Uh, for funeral arrangements…"
"Piranhas," Carol says.
"We're hoping for minimalism and efficiency," Helen translates. "She was Episcopal, correct? Something out of her church will work."
Once she's seen the lawyer out, Helen goes to pick up the picture in the fireplace. It's of an unsmiling Carol in an unflattering pastel yellow dress, flanked by her parents.
"Got a lighter?" Carol asks.
"Yeah, but the frame won't burn, Lady Melodrama. What's with the vandalism?"
No answer.
She pulls the photo out of the frame, careful not to cut her fingers, and looks at the back. May 12, 1989 - Carol's 17th Birthday is written on it in neat, faded cursive.
Helen returns the photo to the fireplace and dumps the frame in the kitchen trash can.
"Where do you want to get started?"
"With ten gallons of gasoline and a match."
A few hours later, Helen is sitting on one of the sectionals going through photo albums, looking at pictures she never got to see when they were courting because they'd skipped the whole getting to know each other's families stage.
The final album is only two thirds full and it ends with a picture of Carol in braces at a golf course with her dad. There's a third set of clubs in the cart; her mom must have taken it.
"Dumb kid," Carol says from above her. She's managed to get close without Helen noticing. "She really thought they loved her."
She glances up at Carol's face, but there's no self-pity there. Instead she looks righteously pissed, and Helen connects the expression with the stapled bunch of papers in her hand and the battered, overstuffed manila folder tucked under her arm.
"What's that?"
Carol gives her the folder, which is labeled Carol.
She opens it and goes through it.
At first it's just printouts of articles on Wycaro and generic, fluffy author interviews. After that come Carol's carefully curated (and entirely Carol-free) social media profiles. Then it's more serious, less readily accessible data—mugshots and case information, property valuation records, lists of likely friends and acquaintances. Helen's in there, too, with her limited social media presence and master's degree and handful of publications.
Then there are five photographs, all taken on the same day. Three are of them holding hands on a hike, and two are of them outside a Kelly Liquors. She pauses on the last, which is the only one where her face is clearly in view. This image of her holding the door of a liquor store open for Carol strikes her as a damning indictment of her approach.
She checks Carol's expression for cues on how to handle this.
Carol's anger has crystalized into something definite—and directed at her. She brandishes the papers. "Listen. 'Surveillance was discontinued when Subject's likely sexual partner identified and confronted the investigator.'"
Ah.
(And likely sexual partner her ass. They'd been together twelve years by that point.)
"You knew?"
"I guessed," Helen replies. "His car stuck out like a sore thumb. I told him to leave or I'd call the cops."
It had been more involved than that. The same dented gray sedan showing up at the trailhead, by the store, in her rear-view mirror, and at the bottom of their cul de sac in one day seemed a bit much, especially coming on the heels of one of those letters, and Helen put two and two together.
A very sheepish man in his thirties rolled down the driver's side window when she rapped on it. The stench of pot seeped out along with his excuses.
"Uh," he said. "I'm just—"
Helen smiled. "No bullshit. I know who you are and you know who I am. Two things and I'll let you get back to your job."
He looked flummoxed.
"First off," she said slowly, to match her estimation of his wits, "I have a message for your client. I'd like you to write it down."
He struggled to find his notebook, buried as it was under Rip It cans and bags of Doritos.
She kept her voice even and pleasant, like she was chatting with coworkers or making smalltalk with fans. "Please tell Sandra that she blew it. Permanently. She is never, ever getting Carol back because I am here now and forever and she will hurt her again over my dead body. Read it back, please."
He did.
"Second, I'd prefer it if you left. Your shitty bimmer doesn't belong in this neighborhood and my wife will eventually notice and get upset." She paused. "I'm a lot nicer than she is."
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
She stepped back so he could drive off. When he was gone, she went to weed her garden.
"You didn't tell me," Carol says accusingly. "She was stalking me and you didn't say anything?"
The way through this is to be serene and unapologetic. "I did say something—to him." It's probably a good thing that he hadn't passed along her full message. "Do you tell me every time you take out the trash?"
"Uh, a fucking PI and the garbage are not the same?"
"Under the circumstances, they absolutely were." Before Carol can think of a way to press the argument, she moves on. "Speaking of trash, how do you want to get rid of this?"
Carol wants to burn it.
Carol wants to burn most things they come across, including the albums Helen unearthed, all her mother's clothes, the Grand Cherokee in the garage, and the house itself.
"You can't solve all your problems with arson," Helen says over spaghetti at the end of the first day.
Carol drains another glass of pinot noir. "I can solve this specific suite of them with a flamethrower. Get me one."
The next day, Carol says she'll tackle the office by herself. Helen gauges she has about thirty minutes before Carol comes to ask her for help, and decides to occupy herself by poking through the rest of the house. She figures out which of the guest bedrooms is Carol's old one when she kneels down in front of the bookshelf.
Most of it is old 60s and 70s fantasy that Helen has never read or even heard of, but she finds Edith Hamilton, Homer, and the Metamorphoses almost immediately. There's also practically every book by Mary Stewart, These Old Shades and Sylvester and The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer, all of Austen except Mansfield Park, everything from Charlotte and Emily Bronte, including the more obscure ones, and a bunch of nineteenth century poetry Carol pretends not to have read.
The Shakespeare collection entirely excludes the histories, but includes The Taming of the Shrew. She smiles as she reaches for the worn out copy of Romeo and Juliet. Her hopes are rewarded: it contains all of Carol's highlights and marginalia.
"Why are you reading that?"
She pulls back from Mercutio's death and turns to see Carol hovering just on the other side of the doorway.
"Looking at your notes."
"They were for class," Carol says dismissively.
"Yeah? You told me you never had to read Shakespeare for school."
Carol isn't paying attention. She's looking at the bed, which has a bright purple comforter and pillowcases that Helen suspects have been there since the early 1980s.
"That's where I got caught," she says, inclining her head toward the pillows. Then she jerks her chin at the foot. "And that's where she told me what was going to happen to me."
"And this," Helen said, gesturing grandly at the floor beside her, "is where I am. Come here."
Carol actually draws back.
"Come on. Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds, to right here."
"I'm not the sun. Juliet is."
"I said what I meant. Get over here. Now."
Very reluctantly, Carol steps over the threshold. Her eyes are not on Helen.
Helen would like to take her on that bed and give her something worth remembering, but now is not the time. For now, she'll stick to following along with the teenaged version of her wife falling in love with love.
When Carol finally settles down next to Helen, she rests her head on her shoulder. "Not so deep as a well," she mutters.
Helen looks down at the book again. Actually very deep and very wide! is scribbled in the margin in red ink. Litotes??? is on the other side, written in blue. Two different readthroughs, and she thinks that red came first. "Romeo's kind of a jackass, don't you think?"
"No," Carol says emphatically. "He just needs her help to be a real person."
Helen's in Act IV ("Here's drink, I drink to thee" is circled and marked with Don't do it!! in purple) when Carol speaks again. "She had all the Wycaro books. Found 'em in the office. I autographed them, apparently."
"Personalized?"
"No."
Which meant she ordered them through the publisher's website. Still a violation, but at least she hadn't gotten someone to get them signed for her.
Helen turns another page. Lady Capulet is regretting the loss of her daughter only now that she's gone.
"Pisses me off."
"Look on the bright side," she says encouragingly. "If she actually read them, she had to sit through all that lovemaking."
"If I'd known she was going to read them, I'd have kept Raban the way he was and amped up the porn."
"Excuse me, it's barely erotica."
Silence. Carol's not in the mood.
"Wycaro wasn't for her. Wycaro was in spite of her."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"I guess I should just be fucking grateful she never showed up at any of my readings."
She had, actually, on the Stormshadow tour.
Carol had been the one to raise the possibility of Sandra crashing an event. Her solution was first to whine to Helen about how they should cancel every event in the DC metro area, and then to blast herself with Xanax. Helen told her to relax, it wouldn't happen, and secretly hired security to make sure she wasn't made a liar.
Gaithersburg, Rockville, Washington, and Arlington were all safe. It was about five minutes before their reading in Fairfax that she got a text from one of the guards alerting her to the unwanted presence of Carol's mother.
She didn't want to leave Carol by herself, but the alternative—a world in which her mother made it into the store and Carol actually clapped eyes on her—was unthinkable. Besides, she wanted to see the bitch for herself. Just once.
Gambling that she could trust Carol to make smalltalk with the store manager for two minutes, she slipped away.
The woman at the entrance was older than in the Facebook photo Helen had found and given to the security guard, and she was wearing a deep green cardigan and a weak smile.
"Yes?" Helen asked the guards.
"Oh, hello. There's been some mistake, I think. There's an author doing a reading tonight. Carol Sturka? These gentlemen won't let me in to see her, but I'm her mother, and…" She broke off as she matched Helen with whatever pictures she or her PI had found or taken. "Oh, I know you. You're the—"
"Manager," Helen interrupted. "There's no mistake, Mrs. Sturka. You aren't welcome. I would appreciate it if you left now, thank you."
They faced off, and despite the superficial resemblance to Carol, Helen sensed a definite weakness of will. She'd been expecting more of a fight, but the fifteen seconds that passed between them—and that unfamiliar softness to the set of a familiar jaw—showed her that, wherever Carol got her willingness to throw down in public (and everywhere else) from, it wasn't her mother.
She tugged the sleeve of her suit jacket up and looked at her watch. Carol would be introduced shortly, and she needed to be there for fangirl wrangling. "Do you want to make a scene?"
Tears welled in Sandra's eyes, and Helen wondered who that shit worked on. She'd always thought people who approached life by wielding their emotional vulnerability as a cudgel to be bottomlessly exhausting. "I just want to see my daughter. Is that so wrong?"
There were a lot of things she could have said. There were even more she wanted to say. The fantasy of dragging this old woman out into the parking lot herself and doing more than simply saying things danced at the edges of her mind.
She settled on a bland: "Do you really think you deserve that?"
It turned out that what Carol had inherited from her mother was her pout. Unfortunately for her, Helen had been ignoring, outwaiting, and overriding that pout for a decade and a half.
"Would you like me to call the police?" she asked.
"I can't say anything right," Sandra said with a self-conscious pathos that Helen found contemptible.
"No," she agreed pleasantly. "You can't. Leave us alone."
With that, she turned to the guard who had texted her and asked him to call the police if she didn't leave—or if she returned.
She made it back in time for Carol to start her reading. Later on, Helen checked the parking lot for an ambush before calling the rideshare back to the hotel, where she fucked Carol senseless.
"You ever notice that she didn't start sending letters until after I made it big?"
"Of course," Helen says. The timing was about as subtle as, well, Carol.
"I've been writing since I was six, you know? But she never paid attention except when she yelled at me because I was doing it in geometry. Which I had to retake."
"Because you were using class time to write about pirates?"
"Because shapes make no goddamn sense."
This, Helen feels, goes some way to explaining the cannonball trajectories in Wycaro.
She's weighing whether or not she can tease Carol about this when her eye falls on a passage in act five. The world is not thy friend, nor the world's law is underlined so heavily in black—the only black in the entire book—that the top half of the following line has been crossed out.
"You make no goddamn sense," she lies. "Come on, let's go tackle those filing cabinets."
"Not yet," Carol says. "You're not done reading."
That night, Helen drives to Target to pick up a paper shredder and trash bags and toothpaste and not lighter fluid, Carol, give it a rest.
When she gets back less than half an hour later, Carol is sitting at the kitchen table. An empty rocks glass and a single yellowing sheet of paper sit in front of her. She doesn't turn or otherwise acknowledge Helen when she comes in.
Helen looks over her shoulder down at the paper, though she's already guessed what it is. Sure enough, Carol has gone and found an ancient invoice for twelve thousand dollars. No letterhead, but the address is in Tennessee.
She reflects that twelve grand is an exorbitant price for killing your relationship with your child. Her own parents managed to do it for free.
"She never figured out what she did wrong."
She wishes she could see Carol's face, but she suspects that if she sits down, Carol will turn away. She'll just have to go off of tone and posture and context.
"I read all those stupid letters she sent."
Not all. There were a few times Helen had beaten her to the mail.
"Every single one of them, even the ones I threw away in front of you. I went and got them out of the trash later."
Helen had gathered as much. There had always been an uptick in post-midnight runs on the liquor cabinet after the letters showed up.
"'It was a different time,'" Carol says in a higher pitch with a cadence much slower than her own. She's mimicking a voice Helen only heard the once, but that she grew up with. "'I just wanted you to be able to be happy.'"
That's from the seventh letter. The first three had been breezy and chatty, very let's-pretend-nothing-happened. When Sandra hadn't gotten a response, she'd started in with the guilt-tripping and self-pity before pivoting to excuses.
"Happy. That's what those fuckers were always talking about, too. Did you know that gay is a misnomer because it means happy and homosexuals have unhappy life outcomes?"
Helen's heard that one, yes. It always struck her as one of the stupider canards, coming as it did from people who invariably acted to make sure the outcomes were as bad as possible.
Carol goes on in a monotone. "Friendship corrupted only leads to heartbreak and loneliness. It's just natural for the unnatural to end. All such relationships are made out of tissue paper. You'll be alone at best, dead at worst. You'll be an abuser, a plague rat, an addict, a suicide, a statistic. Statistics don't lie, and they all say that if you don't snap out of it, you'll never be happy. Don't you want to be happy?"
Helen grew up hearing the same things from a different angle. Carol's mother's idea of hell was the neighbors thinking something was off with her daughter; Helen's parents had believed in an eternal hell of fire and brimstone. When they'd found out that all their deprecations against inordinate and sinful affection hadn't worked, Helen had been halfway through college and still dependent on them. Her vulnerability hadn't mattered; and if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee.
Carol's fists tighten and her back stiffens.
"No. Fuck happiness."
It's time to intervene. Helen lays a hand on Carol's shoulder. "I thought we were managing all right," she says.
Carol's head snaps up as she's temporarily shocked out of her self-absorption, and she turns to look up at Helen. She appears guilt-stricken. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean—"
"I know." She waits for relief to clear Carol's face. "I'm hungry. Come sit with me while I order something."
Carol follows her to the living room, but doesn't evince any interest in the delivery app Helen opens, so it's up to her to choose the restaurant (Chinese) and remember Carol's preferred order (moo goo gai pan).
"You know what the fucked up thing is?"
Helen can think of half a dozen off the top of her head, starting with the fact that Carol's brought her glass and a bottle of bourbon with her, but she keeps them to herself.
"I want her back." She points to a La-Z-Boy across the room from where they've settled. "I genuinely, honest-to-God want her sitting in that fucking chair right the fuck now."
"Hell's not good enough? She has to be in Virginia?"
"I want her here so that I can yell at her until she understands."
Helen weighs her words carefully. "I think you made the right call when the first letter showed up," she says. "Ignoring her was the only way you could win."
"I know, I know." They'd talked about it every time a letter had shown up, and Helen always assisted Carol to the same conclusion. "It's the dumbest thing, but I still feel like I should have found the words to make her say sorry and mean it. I'm a fucking writer and she's my fucking mother."
She looks at the ceiling. "The last time we talked, I asked her how she'd feel if a bunch of smiling psychopaths held her down and shoved pills down her throat and made her watch porn and throw up and she told me not to be disgusting."
"I thought the last time you talked was at your father's funeral in 2005," Helen says.
"At the wake, yes." She smiles. "Everyone heard me."
She hasn't heard this version of the story before. All Carol had said when she'd gotten back to New Mexico was that she'd been too drunk to remember anything.
The smile drops. "Everyone thought I was the problem. I looked like a fucking psycho, she looked like some innocent victim. My aunt told me my father would be ashamed of me."
"Was he?"
"No. He was too…"
Drunk, Helen thinks. Carol's never said it, but the way she doesn't talk about her father feels a lot more self-conscious and deliberate than the way she doesn't talk about her mother.
"Out of touch. He thought he paid for nine weeks of normal summer camp, you know? When he picked me up he asked me if I liked all the canoeing." She reaches out—not for Helen, but the bourbon. "I did, actually."
Helen prepares herself for an ugly night.
Carol skips the funeral; Helen doesn't. While she'd like to imagine the sparse attendance is because Sandra wasn't well-liked, it's more likely to be because they deliberately didn't announce it. Word of mouth through church circles almost certainly accounts for the half dozen or so people who do show up.
Exactly one person, a woman who's pushing eighty, approaches her after the graveside service.
"I haven't seen you before. How did you know Sandra?"
"I didn't," Helen says. Or maybe she did since she knows the hollow she left in Carol's life, and ye shall know them by their fruits. "I'm just her daughter-in-law."
And it is law now, even here.
"I thought she had a daughter," she says.
"Yes." She makes it explicit. "We're gay."
"Oh, how nice. One of my daughter's neighbors has a cousin who's like that and she's just the best nurse."
"I'm glad to hear that," Helen says politely. "The world needs good nurses."
"Where is she? Sandra's daughter?"
Probably still unconscious.
"She couldn't make it."
"Why not?"
She considers saying that whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap, but decides not to mouth Bible verses at an innocent bystander. "She's out of state. Couldn't make it back in time."
When everyone else is gone, she lights a cigarette, the first one she's had all day, and wishes hell were real so hard she's practically praying.
She allows the ghosts of a little girl and boy with clear blue eyes and utterly intractable dispositions to surface along with her resentment.
"I'd have kids if it weren't for you," she says.
She flicks her cigarette butt into the hole and leaves.