Soaring (Magdalene #2)(6)
Author: Kristen Ashley

* * * * *

I stayed up but I did it in my room with the door open.

I heard them both come home, safe and sound.

Even though the light was on in my room and down the hallway, neither of them came to say goodnight to me.

* * * * *

The next morning, late, I stood in the kitchen sipping coffee out of a twenty dollar mug that I would soon be replacing, when my daughter came out.

I did not take it as a good sign that she was dressed to face the day.

“Hey, sweetheart, you want some breakfast?” I called.

She skirted the living room toward the door.

And the first words my daughter said to me in our new home were, “Polly’s here with her mom. We’re going to the mall and to a movie. Then pizza tonight. I’ll be home by curfew.”

She was out the door before I could say another word.

I hurried to the door, opened it and looked out just in time to see a Chevy SUV, the woman in the front seat looking my way, smiling, giving me a wave, but reversing out of my drive then rolling away.

I endured that and decided on what was next, knowing from experience that Auden was not an early riser on weekends.

So I chanced a shower.

It was a bad decision.

I came out to a note on the kitchen counter that simply said, “Out. Be back later.”

Even though I knew I had no right, the mother in me boiled inside that my teenage son (and incidentally, daughter) felt they could take off giving me very limited information as to where they were going and who they were with. Heck, Pippa’s friend’s mother should have gotten out, walked up to my house and introduced herself to me.

But I had to suffer the boil. Let it cool. Give them what they needed. Take it and move on.

So I did.

Through that day.

And through the next, where they didn’t leave their rooms except to go and raid the fridge with nary a word to me.

Until it was five o’clock. Time to leave and go back to their father’s.

Auden said, “Later,” on his way out the door.

Pippa said nothing.

I died inside and hoped to God I had the strength to revive myself because I had long weeks yawning ahead of me of nothing. They wouldn’t return calls. They wouldn’t return texts. They wouldn’t do anything.

And I determined I’d use those weeks to show them things were different.

I would not go to their father’s and stepmother’s work and cause a scene. I would not go to their home and get into it with Martine. I would not go to their school activities and embarrass them, aiming my acid publically at their dad and stepmom (though it was summer, but when they had school activities, I wouldn’t do this).

I would be what I promised them I would be when I emailed them to tell them I was moving to Maine and things would change.

Yes, that and only that was what I’d be.

They’d see.

God, I hoped they’d see.

Chapter Two

They Didn’t Reply

I was driving down Cross Street, the main street of Magdalene, that next day on an errand of going nowhere and doing nothing, just getting the lay of the land of my new home.

I’d been born in California, and although Conrad had moved to a practice in Boston and we’d lived there for two years (and then to Lexington, Kentucky for two more), I’d never been to Maine.

From what I could see, I liked it. It was pretty. Quiet. Sparsely populated. Restful.

There was a chill in the air even though it was early June, which I wasn’t used to, and I worried that the bloom would go off the rose of not having everything you could possibly want in the form of shopping, restaurants and movies within easy driving distance. But I liked the change.

And the fact there was practically no traffic was a major plus.

For a woman who needed to reinvent herself, a relatively sleepy coastal Maine town seemed the perfect place to focus inwards without any distractions.

These were my thoughts when my phone in my purse rang.

My children had not phoned me of their own volition in over a year.

I still held hope. I was there. Close. Not in California when they were in Maine like it had been for the last ten months.

Maybe they felt badly about ignoring me all weekend.

Maybe they liked the new house (because who wouldn’t? it was fabulous) and wanted to ask if they could show their friends around.

And maybe I was insane to hope.

But the idea of losing hope terrified me to extremes.

So I hoped.

I saw a road with a sign that said Haver Way, turned off and turned right into a parking lot. I pulled into a space, put my car in park and grabbed my purse.

I yanked out my phone and stared at it.

It was unsurprisingly not my children.

It was my mother.

Since I’d left California, this wasn’t the first time she’d called. She’d called once a day starting the day I got in my car with my suitcases to drive across the country.

And this was only once per day, regardless if I didn’t return her calls. She would not be so ill-bred as to phone more than once, even if her only daughter, who had been ravaged by divorce then took that out on her family, was driving across a continent for the first time in her life to launch an all-out effort to save her family…and herself.

Even if only once a day, I had not taken a single call.

This, I knew, was not going over well. I also knew she’d call the next day. And perhaps the next. She would not get angry at me. Her voicemails would not become heated.

No.

The day after that, my father would call.

He would bring the heat but he’d do it using a chill.

I wondered if I’d have the courage not to take his call.

The truth was I was surprised I hadn’t caved and taken one of my mother’s.

But I hadn’t and I hadn’t because, during my long drive across country, I’d figured out at least one thing about me: she was a trigger. So was my father. They were triggers that sent me down a path of feeling entitled at the same time feeling small. A path where, for some reason, I had no control of my actions. I did what was ingrained in me. I did what was expected of me. They flipped the switch and anything that could have been me disappeared and all that was bred in me turned on and took over.

Because of this, for the past three years I’d done all I could to be certain that any person involved in putting a blight on the Hathaway name paid, to extremes.

Divorce was a blight. My brother had been living with the coldest bitch the west coast had ever seen for the last twenty years. In that time, she’d drained every ounce of joy out of my once fun-loving, teasing, sweet older brother, leaving him a zombie without the decaying flesh but with a working-way-too-much habit. All this, and he would no sooner leave her than cut off his own arm.