A/N: Hi, guys. Thanks so much for the reviews of chapter 1! I'm glad you're enjoying the story so far and looking forward to more. I forgot how heavily "Saving Grace" was referenced here too, so add that to the list of previous fics you'll find sprinkled throughout this one. Again, TW for past sexual and physical abuse. Sounds weird to say "happy reading" after that, but... happy reading. And since I won't be updating again until after it's over: Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!
2. Full of Grace
. . .
No matter how hard Olivia tried, she couldn't keep from trembling. She didn't know which was worse to have no control over, the crying or the shaking. Both made her feel weak and overdramatic. As a mother and as a cop, it was important for her to keep her feelings in check. If she lost that ability, she wouldn't be able to do either job well. She had already begun to slip—bursting into tears while reading Charlotte's Web to the kids, and at work the other day she'd been so triggered by the trial of a father who had raped his teenage daughter from the ages of eight to sixteen, she had to excuse herself from the courtroom to go shake and breathe in the stairwell.
Now she was being drawn into her wife's arms, hands under her armpits, like a small child being lifted by her parent, to weep against Amanda's shoulder. "Hush, now," Amanda soothed, warming her back with long, loving strokes of the palm. "You're right, I should have asked you to go with me, not Daphne. But in my defense, baby, you were running a temperature of a hundred and two, and you could barely sit up to eat or drink." She glanced down to check Olivia's cheeks for more tears, to kiss the closest eyelid.
"Didn't wanna drag you out in the freezin' cold to listen to me ranting like a dang fool at thin air. It was Hanover's idea, and I felt kinda . . . I don't know, embarrassed, I guess? I think that's some of why I went with Daph. Not because she's funner'n you, but because I felt like an idiot standing in the snow, telling off a dead woman."
Amanda rested a hand on the back of Olivia's head, kissed the top. She had always been gentle with Olivia, but since the birth of their youngest daughter, her affection had taken on a maternal warmth that satisfied a deep craving within Olivia that she hadn't even known she possessed. She wrapped her arms around her wife's waist, holding on tight. "I'm sure that was something to see," she murmured into a tumble of blond hair that tickled her cheeks and lips. "You and that great big belly."
"Yeah. I proly looked like a walrus throwing a temper tantrum on an ice floe. Real cute." Amanda chuckled softly and nuzzled into the part in Olivia's hair. She took a deep breath, as if inhaling a lovely fragrance, then sighed it back out. "Liv, you gotta know it means something different when I call Daphne my best friend, right? She's my best friend who's just a friend. Or maybe like a sister, although taking my real sister into account, that's probably not a compliment. But you . . . you're so much more to me than any of that. You're my best friend on a whole other level. No one's gonna take that away. Not Daph." She pressed her lips to Olivia's forehead. "And not Serena."
After a few more whispered exchanges and tears dried with kisses, Olivia settled back in Amanda's arms and asked, "Did it work?"
"Hm?"
"Confronting her?" It shouldn't have been difficult to say the name Serena, or at least "my mother," but it was. In some ways talking about Joseph Hollister was much easier. He had only abused her the once—her one-time monster. Serena was her monster for as long as she lived. "Your graveyard tirade."
"Oh, um, yeah. Yeah, I think it did." Amanda sounded a little abashed to admit it, but she cleared her throat and nodded solemnly, finding her resolve. "I mean, obviously it didn't fix everything, and I still hate her for hurting you so bad—sorry, darlin', I do—but it gave me a way to vent my frustration, instead of taking it out on any innocent bystanders."
Olivia got the distinct impression she was one of the referred-to innocent bystanders. She knew her love for Serena, her lack of disdain for the person who was arguably the worst of her abusers, at least in terms of duration, was a particularly bitter pill for Amanda to swallow. It wasn't her intent to excuse Serena's behavior, despite Amanda's insistence that was exactly what she did by not getting angry; she'd actually started to accept the fact that her mother had mistreated her throughout her entire childhood and well into adulthood.
But how could she blame Serena for being a victim and reacting out of trauma? Olivia couldn't punish the woman for an affliction she herself helped create. She had brought as much suffering into Serena's life as she endured at her hand. Couldn't they just call it even and move on?
Amanda didn't seem to think so.
"I'm bettin' it would do you some real good too," she said, nudging her chin into Olivia's temple, as if she were trying to nudge the idea into place there. She sealed it with a kiss. "Give you a chance to hash some things out with her that you maybe didn't get to before, yeah? Idn't that what you did with what's-her-face, the girl with dissociative fugue disorder? She found out her rapist was dead, so you took her to his grave to have her say and get some closure. She started getting her life back on track after that, didn't she?"
What's-her-face was Sophie Simmons, who had renamed herself Grace Walker following a fugue that resulted from being raped by her college professor. Olivia had indeed accompanied Sophie and her parents to the man's headstone, bearing witness as the girl poured her feelings out to faceless, heartless stone. It was heartbreaking to listen to, knowing she couldn't offer Sophie any more justice beyond that cold and one-sided tête-à-tête. Amanda was right, though; Olivia still heard from Sophie once in a while, and she was doing well. Working on a master's in psychology.
Was that how Amanda thought of Olivia, as psychologically damaged as a young woman who had dropped out of school, become homeless, and forgotten who she was? True, Olivia had the occasional flashback, some dissociation here or there, and nightmares were a common occurrence, despite largely overcoming the night terrors that had plagued her after the Mangler, but she was far from going off the deep end.
In fact, the past year or so had been almost perfect. So perfect, she'd caught herself waiting for disaster to strike—finding out she had a terminal illness, Amanda deciding she was too much and leaving her for someone more stable, one of the kids showing signs of a behavioral disorder or developmental delays. She knew it was the catastrophic thinking that Lindstrom warned her against, and yet she couldn't turn it off. Except when she looked into the eyes of her newborn, her other children's eyes, Amanda's. And breathed. It was always better when she breathed.
Maybe she and Sophie weren't that different after all.
And so she had conceded to visiting Serena's grave on Mother's Day. Now that they were nearly there—Amanda was turning onto Horace Harding Expressway, and up on the right Olivia could see the gates to Cedar Grove Cemetery—she regretted the decision. She always got butterflies coming here, the way she had while creeping down the hall to Serena's bedroom whenever she felt ill, needed help with her homework, or just wanted her mother's attention, but today her stomach was in knots. Intricate, impossible to unravel.
It might have been the breakfast. She had choked down as much of the soupy yellow stuff (scrambled eggs, according to Jesse, who boasted cracking the shells herself; Matilda helped stir, and big boy Noah manned the stove) as she possibly could, wondering how eggs could be both runny and overdone at the same time. The shards of eggshell, sharp as glass, added that extra crunch you wanted in a good cooked egg. She left the charred toast, black as a hockey puck and probably just as hard, for Amanda, who giggled at her pained expression after every dripping forkful.
When their three oldest children scampered from the room, delighted that their surprise breakfast in bed for Mommy and Mama's Day had been a smashing success—literally, according to Olivia's tentative peek into the kitchen afterward—dark flecks sputtered from Amanda's lips like flakes of charcoal. She sounded and looked like a black lung patient as she hacked. "Dear Lord, that's heinous. Tastes like Satan's asshole. At least the OJ is good, right?"
She took a swig and grimaced at the warm, pulpy liquid that had obviously been left sitting out while the kids banged around in the kitchen. Olivia had surreptitiously emptied hers back into the glass when no one was looking. "Uh, yeah, not so much," she said, as Amanda wiped her tongue off with the wad of paper towels Jesse had thrust at them when the meal was delivered. "Sorry. Leave it to our kids to have such poor kitchen skills that they ruin orange juice."
"True. You did manage to desecrate that DiGiorno pizza the other night. And those are hard to screw up."
"Ha ha. Didn't stop you from eating most of it." Olivia had rescued a few paper towels from the wad and used them to cover the yolky chunks on her plate. She couldn't look at them anymore, no matter how sweet the effort put into them. "I think we're going to have to have another talk with the kids about using the kitchen by themselves, though. They could've gotten burnt on the stove or toaster. They know those are off limits, I can't imagine what put it in their heads to do all this."
Amanda got strangely quiet after that, and Olivia had begun to wonder if her wife was missing someone. Her own mother or sister—technically eligible to celebrate the day if she could be bothered to return home to her son—perhaps. Olivia tried to suggest that Amanda should call Beth Anne, but only received short, surly replies, and therefore didn't harp. Who was she to pressure Amanda into at least returning to speaking terms with Beth Anne, when Olivia could barely bring herself to step down from Amanda's Jeep to walk through the grassy cemetery and locate Serena's headstone?
She always forgot where the plot was precisely. And that filled her with a guilt so acute her knotted belly ached. It definitely wasn't the eggs this time, and not even the thick, fuzzy orange juice. The feeling in the pit of her stomach, squatting like a malignant toad, was one she recognized as none other than cold hard dread. After twenty years, it was easy to forget how much she'd feared her mother, but now it came rushing back all at once, freezing her.
"How 'bout I come with you?" Amanda asked when the hand on Olivia's back failed to guide her forward. She switched the bouquet of wine-colored dahlias, so dark they were almost black, and white anemones, with the single black eye in the center, to her other arm, offering the free side to Olivia. "I can be your buffer. She gives you any lip, I'll introduce her to the old Rollins smackdown." She lifted her boot in a half-kick, hand poised for a karate chop, flowers and all. The sound she made was straight out of a kung fu movie.
Failing to earn a smile or much of a reaction either way, Amanda straightened, both feet back on the ground. She hooked her arm around Olivia's, securing in place the hand that fell naturally into the crook of her elbow. "Come on, darlin'," she said softly, urging Olivia to follow her footsteps. "There's nothing to be afraid of. She can't hurt you anymore."
Oh, but she could. Olivia was quite certain that, if anyone had the ability to reach out from beyond the grave to wreak havoc and torment, it was Serena Grace Benson. She'd done it at the start of last year, with all that damn drama surrounding the Breitling watch she had given Olivia, the shiny, expensive thing she knew her daughter couldn't afford on a cop's salary; ultimately, it had contributed to Amanda's gambling relapse and the near destruction of her and Olivia's relationship. Then there was the argument about honoring Serena by bestowing her middle name on their youngest child. And now she was haunting Olivia with fresh and horrific childhood memories that felt as if they had happened yesterday.
In some ways, Olivia was still that terrified little eight-year-old girl, begging her mother to stop, screaming for someone to help her, but no one ever comes. And that hurt a lot.
"I should probably do this myself." Olivia balked at Amanda's gentle goading, lagging back a step instead of moving forward. And wasn't that the metaphor of her whole damned life right there, when you really thought about it? Try as she might not to be controlled by her trauma, her mother, the truth of it was, she had devoted herself to those very causes the minute she put up her hand and swore to serve and protect. She sought out a job where she was retraumatized, whether personally or by proxy, on an almost daily basis, and chained herself to it, vowing to right a wrong she could never erase.
She couldn't unrape her mother, bring back the man who fathered her so justice could be served for Serena (and the fifteen-year-old Olivia had been when Hollister victimized her as well), nor make up for all the pain she had caused just by existing. No amount of cases solved or families restored would change that.
Sighing, she squared her shoulders and told herself to suck it up. She couldn't go on being a victim of her past any longer, either. If not for her own sake, then for that of Amanda and their children. "Really, love, I'll be fine. Maybe go get comfy on that bench over there?" She pointed the seat out to Amanda, whose sharp little chin was tilted at a stubborn angle. Jesse did the same thing when it was suggested she excuse herself from grownup talk. "You shouldn't have to suffer through another confrontation with my mother. She's not much of a conversationalist these days, anyway."
As lame as the joke was, Amanda cracked a faint smile and shook her head, ponytail swishing over her shoulder. Despite a chill in the air, the sun streamed down on her pale hair, catching the yellow highlights and brightening her face. For a moment, she appeared lit from within, and Olivia had the sudden urge to snap her picture, preserving those few golden seconds in time before something bad came along and snatched them away.
But that was her catastrophic thinking again, kicking into high gear the closer she got to Serena's headstone—and besides, the moment had already passed. The sun disappeared behind a cloud.
"A'ight," Amanda drawled, reluctantly handing over the bouquet. Once they were free, she shoved both hands in her pockets and regarded the bench like she was sizing up someone in a rumble. Sometimes Olivia was convinced she'd married James Dean reincarnate. Or maybe someone a bit more timeline appropriate, like River Phoenix. "If you're sure. But I'll be right over there if you need me. Freezing my buns off on that mighty comfy-looking bench. What is that, you reckon, granite? Leftover mausoleum rock?"
With a light sweep of the bouquet, Olivia swatted the pert little backside as it passed, tucked into its snug little jeans, accentuating that sassy little strut. "Go on, sugar buns. I'll warm you up in a few minutes."
"Ohh, Captain."
"I meant by turning on the heated seats in the car. Now, get." Olivia pointed the flowers at the bench, giving her snickering imp of a wife her marching orders, all the while suppressing a grin of her own.
Leave it to Amanda Jo to turn a graveyard into a playground. Her irreverence should have been exasperating, but it just made Olivia laugh. The detective had nearly gotten them kicked out of the opera recently by announcing—loud enough for the entire audience to hear—that she had to pee like a Russian racehorse. Peals of laughter filled the back of their cab on the ride home, Amanda singing made-up lyrics in a booming operatic voice ("Asshole-o mio, oh sodomia!"), Olivia clutching her sides and gasping for air. It had been their first night out since Samantha was born, and they were a tad slaphappy, but Olivia didn't regret a minute of it.
None of that good humor remained when she stepped up to Serena's grave, standing silently in front of it, head slightly bowed, the way she had stood before Serena so many times in life. Waiting for whatever might come. For some reason, she expected the epitaph to read differently than it did when she was last there, and it surprised her to see it unchanged. Why had she, at thirty-two years old, still been covering for Serena so thoroughly that she gave her the title Beloved Mother?
True, it had been the simplest and least expensive choice, the one Olivia was able to point at in the catalogue and say, "There," without thinking about all the implications, all the beatings, the name-calling, the neglect, and yes, the sexual abuse too. But she recalled basing her decision on the desire not to tarnish her mother's name in death, as well. Serena had students and colleagues who remembered her fondly, who had no idea that she'd simulated rape on her eight-year-old daughter or allowed strange men access to Olivia's bedroom (it had occurred to Olivia only recently that Serena's failure to close her door all the way at night had far more ominous connotations than mere forgetfulness).
Beloved Mother was a covenant Olivia had entered into with Serena at birth, promising not to tell—never to tell. It was so strong it had been etched in stone; so binding it had been carried to the grave. If asked at the time of Serena's death, those twenty-two long years ago, Olivia would have sworn she'd never come here to dredge up the past and all those secrets she had fought and bled and cried to keep, from the time she could talk.
"Never say never," she whispered to herself, then remembered Serena hated it when she mumbled. Don't talk to the floor, talk to me, young lady. She cleared her throat and lifted her chin, but nixed the urge to smooth her hair, her jacket. Amanda was pretending not to watch from the bench, nose buried in her phone, but her surveillance skills weren't as subtle as she believed. "Hello . . . "
Neither Mother nor Mom sounded right, and calling her by name made Olivia feel like a rebellious teenager, so she left off any form of address. After an awkward silence, she realized she was waiting for a reply, as if she had Serena on the line of some divine call from the beyond. Embarrassed by her own foolishness, she stepped forward hastily and placed the dahlias on top of the stone marker.
"I brought you these," she said stiffly, overanalyzing every word as it left her mouth. No wonder she had never been able, as an adult, to speak to her mother unless she was having a glass of red wine. (Or several, preferably.) Stone sober, her inner editor was criticizing everything from sentence structure to pronunciation. Funny how like Serena that voice sounded. "Dahlias. Your favorite. Because of the Elizabeth Short murder, remember? They called her the Black Dahlia because she wore black all the time and there was that movie The Blue Dahlia the year before. I remember the first time you told me that story, how your eyes lit up when you described the way they found her body . . . bisected at the waist, Glasgow smile, breasts and thighs mutilated, posed spread-eagle, the top and bottom halves of her a foot apart."
Hearing her own voice repeating the details of the infamous unsolved murder in the same soft, bedtime story tone Serena had told it to her in made Olivia shudder. For weeks after that first telling, she had nightmares about the Black Dahlia's corpse coming to life, its mouth cut from from the corners of the lips to the ears in a macabre grin, its disjointed limbs flailing as it chased her. They said the woman who found the body thought it was a mannequin at first. The dream-corpse in Olivia's nightmares rattled and clacked as it ran her down.
"I was five years old, Mother, what the hell were you thinking? I was younger than Jesse." Olivia threw out a gesture, as if her oldest daughter was nearby for comparison, only then realizing Serena had no idea who Jesse was. Good, she decided, that was a good thing. She didn't want a woman who could sexually assault her eight-year-old child anywhere near Jesse or the other kids. Olivia felt sick to think that, before the memory of that abuse had resurfaced, she might have let the kids spend time with their grandmother, were she still alive.
"Even back then, I remember knowing that spark in you—how you were so captivated by the fact that you were about the same age as Dahlia on 'the worst day of your life' too—meant that something truly awful had happened to you. I just didn't understand that it was me." Olivia clapped a hand to her chest, holding the me close for a little longer. It had often been necessary to shield her heart when Serena was alive as well. "That the moment of my conception was, for you, equivalent to being dismembered and discarded in a field like trash. Did you know they tucked her intestines under her buttocks, neat as you please? Probably not, since you left that part out of your . . . narration."
Sighing heavily, Olivia checked her watch, purely out of habit. She had no place to be, other than here, now. And she was already doing this. Might as well keep the ball rolling. "You remember what I said to you when you first told me that story, how they never found that poor girl's killer, and they sensationalized the whole thing? Even made movies and TV shows about it, lots of them portraying Short as some two-bit hussy who tempted fate? She was twenty-two years old, for Christ sake, what could she have done to deserve—" She waved the rest away with a sweep of her hand, then pinched the bridge of her nose, hard. A migraine was quickening deep inside her brain like an angry microscopic fetus.
"I told you I'd grow up and solve her murder for you. Become a police officer, never mind whatever talent or aspirations I had for anything else—I'd find a way to make it right. For you. I think on some level I knew, even then, that I had something to make up to you. A debt to repay." Suddenly struck by the sensation that she might fly apart, like a flock of birds bursting into the air, moths dispersing from a lightbulb, she put both hands to either side of her head and dragged her hair back roughly from her face. "And I've spent my whole life trying to repay it, but that's never going to be good enough for you, is it? I was never going to be good enough for you."
Olivia let her shoulders slump, her hair falling back into place like heavy curtains in her peripheral vision. It would be so easy to hide behind them. She was the little girl who hid behind the stacks in libraries; in her bedroom closet, feet braced against the door so Serena couldn't get in; under the covers while a large hand crept up her thigh, a man's voice whispering in the dark; behind boxes in a musty basement, a man's voice taunting her in the light.
No. Not that little girl anymore. Not even that woman in her thirties who fought and screamed with all her might and had been violated anyway. One good thing about the pseudo-therapy she'd endured under Giacomo was that it had reminded her those experiences were in the past, and she needed to leave them there if she wanted to move forward. So she moved.
"You know, you had no right to blame me for what Hollister did to you. I never asked to be born. I didn't have any more say in the matter than you did, and believe me, if I could've . . . " It was on the tip of her tongue: If I could take it all back, I would. But that wasn't true, she realized, glancing over at the bench where Amanda sat. The detective had given up pretending to be engrossed by texts and social media, neither of which she was particularly fond of anyway, and watched Olivia carefully, as if she might be called into battle at any minute and have to spring from her seat. Olivia forced an anemic smile, a half wave.
She couldn't wish herself away, not when she had found the love of her life and finally had the family she'd always wanted. To change the experiences of her childhood, no matter how awful, might alter all the good she had now, and that was not a trade she was willing to make—not even a little bit. But make no mistake, that resignation didn't mean total forgiveness, either. In fact, the longer Olivia stood there gazing at her pretty wife, so ready to defend her in all things, at all times, the more she pictured her children's faces, looking to her with love and total acceptance, the angrier she got.
And just like that, it hit her: after fifty-four years, she finally felt loved enough, safe enough, to be angry with her mother. To call her out on all her bullshit. It flooded her with such an overwhelming sense of relief and freedom, tears filled her eyes.
. . .