Her Motive
Chapter Four – Between the Cracks
My mother has nightmares where she cannot find me.
The kind of nightmares that wake her from a deep sleep in the middle of the night, tugging her towards reality drenched in sweat and reaching for the bedside lamp to drive away the darkness.
Her dreams are the worst kind there is because when consciousness has claimed her again the reality is just as bad. Maybe worse. Just like in her dreams she cannot find me. I'll never be found again.
They found me once. Face down beside a lake that had once been a favorite place my mother and I swam during the summer. The FBI cavalry came rushing in with the hope that somehow I had survived that which befell me.
They were wrong and my mother wished with everything in her heart that they would put me back where I had been and find me somewhere else.
Alive.
Her wishes however were not to be heard by anyone that mattered enough and all the wishes in the world could not change the circumstances surrounding my disappearance nor my state of being when a young FBI agent stumbled upon my body.
"You are too good for this world," my mother had reassured me in a whisper at my funeral.
She stood on the freshly cut green grass in her new black shoes and cursed the heavens for a day too bright and optimistic to bury her only child. She needed the rain. A storm would have suited her fine, so they could huddle together in their best black clothes, under their black umbrellas and farewell me the way it was supposed to be done.
The dreams are never as prominent as when a case ends badly. When Samantha Spade is forced to get up close and personal with death in ways she swears black and blue each time she cannot cope with again.
There's a realization that comes with a meeting with death, and it overwhelms her at each chance encounter, again and again. There is nothing she can do to stop it taking someone else.
Today Samantha Spade lost a piece of her heart.
It fell standing in that morgue beside Mrs. Radowski. Fell right out of her, in the middle of a breath that hitched somewhere in the back of her throat.
Somehow it was all too frighteningly reminiscent of that opaque past that seemed to make a haunting appearance far too frequently in her daily life.
Seven years ago my mother had stood in a cold sterile morgue alongside a solemn young FBI agent in much the same fashion to ID her own daughter.
She knew the feelings. The overwhelming urge to not believe what is right in front of you begging you to recognize it for all it is balanced precariously with a forlorn sense of relief for a hellish resolution to a living nightmare.
After all, resolution is better than never knowing at all. A human mind can go crazy when the possibilities are endless.
It was all my mother could do in that morgue not to cry herself. But the tough FBI agent overpowered the always suffering mother and the tears remained unshed, at least for the time being.
"I couldn't help feeling like it was a little familiar to you," Martin had commented on their earlier return from Indiana.
My mother was elusive in her usual way. Not offering anything substantial at all. "Could be."
No agreement, no denial.
A smile shared and for a second I saw the stars shine brighter.
If only Martin knew more. If only my mother realized what was right in front of her, maybe there wouldn't be any nightmares tonight.
We could both rest easy.
If only Martin knew just how familiar it all was.