Author's Notes: I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. If this is the last chapter of this story in 2006, I wish everyone very happy and safe New Year's tidings. I have to give massive, massive thanks to mingsmommy, who stepped in at the last moment and played beta for this chapter. You rock, hon;) As do all of you who've read and reviewed this past year, making it a very special 365 days! See you in 2007!
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The Last Embrace
by Kristen Elizabeth
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October 1984
"Oh no! No, no, no!!"
Sara looked up from her math homework. Something was burning, and the smoke drifting into the den made her eyes water. Placing her half-finished worksheet inside her textbook, Sara went to investigate.
"Mom?" In the kitchen, her mother was waving an oven mitt over the roasting pan, but it wasn't doing anything to help matters. "What happened?"
There was panic in her mother's eyes when she faced her daughter. "Your father's going to be home in ten minutes."
Sara's first instinct was to grab her books and run upstairs, but she was thirteen now. It was time to start acting like an adult. "I'll open some windows," she said. "And we'll figure out something else for dinner."
Laura shook her head as Sara went around, cracking the kitchen windows. "He'll smell the smoke. He'll know."
"We've got some macaroni," Sara said, determined to stay calm. "And there's cheese and milk. I could make mac and cheese."
"He wanted pot roast tonight," her mother said, ignoring her. "He told me this morning. He'll be expecting it."
"He likes macaroni and cheese." She opened the fridge and started pulling out ingredients. "Mom?" Sara looked over her shoulder. "Mom!" Finally, Laura blinked and focused on her daughter. "I need help."
Laura nodded, slightly at first, then with more confidence. "He does like macaroni and cheese," she said almost to herself. "We can have roast tomorrow."
They worked together for ten minutes, Sara grating the cheese, and Laura mixing milk, sour cream and eggs.
But no sooner had they put the casserole dish into the oven then they both heard the familiar sound of a rambling pick-up truck pulling up to the house. The engine shut off, the door slammed shut and gravel crunched under a pair of boots.
Sara licked the corner of her lip nervously. If they ended up at the hospital that night, she'd at least have a quiet place to finish her homework.
Her father entered the house. He wasn't a big man, but his presence filled every corner, overwhelmed every inch of space. It was almost harder to breathe when he was there, like he used up all of the oxygen.
So Sara held her breath when he strode into the kitchen, and consequently couldn't smell familiar scent of alcohol. He stopped, looked around suspiciously, and sniffed the air.
"Did you burn something, Laura?" he asked, unnaturally calm.
The lull before the storm.
Laura twisted the wedding band around her finger. "The roast. Sweetie, I'm sorry. I…"
She never got to finish her sentence. The back of his hand connected with her cheek, and the sharp sound of the blow, and her mother's gasp as her head twisted to the side, echoed in Sara's ears.
Her father loomed over her mother, and Sara found that she couldn't move. "How hard is it to cook a fucking pan of meat?" he roared. "Are you so stupid that you can't even manage that?"
Blood trickled from the corner of her mother's mouth. "I'm sorry! There's macaroni and cheese, and…"
The second blow was less forceful, but just as accurate. Sara heard the crunch of cartilage as her mother's nose broke. There were tears streaming down her own face as her father continued to scream obscenities. But when he raised his fist for a third blow, she sprung to life.
"It was my fault!" Sara yelled. Stopping just in time, her father turned his head and looked at her. "It was my fault," she repeated. "I burned the roast."
"Sara…no," Laura whispered.
But she plunged ahead. "Mom told me to take it out of the oven when the timer went off, but I…I was doing my homework and I didn't hear it and…" She swallowed. "It was an accident, Daddy." Her hands trembled; she clenched them into tight fists against her sides. "Don't hit Mom anymore."
Sara kept her eyes trained on her father as he advanced on her. She searched his face for some sign of the man she still loved, but found nothing there but the stuff of nightmares.
She didn't even feel the first slap, but she heard the curses he hurled at her. "Got your head so far in your fucking books." He slapped her again on the other cheek. "Like to think you're smarter than everyone else." He pushed her hard, slamming her against the wall. "You still got one lesson to learn." He grabbed her under the chin, and suddenly, she really couldn't breathe. "This is my house, little bitch. And in my house, you…"
He froze with his fingers wrapped around her throat. His eyes grew wide; his mouth slackened. His grip relaxed and Sara slid out of his grasp, coughing wildly, desperate to get air into her lungs. When she finally looked up, she saw a glint of silver as her mother pulled the knife she'd used to cut up the roast out of her husband's back.
Her father crumpled to the ground, but something had taken hold of Laura. She brought the knife down once, twice, three times.
And then there was blood. Great spurts at first, then just spatter flying off the knife. A hot spray of it caught Sara across her throbbing cheek. Her mother was painted with it, but still she kept on.
She only stopped when Sara uttered a quiet, "Mommy."
Laura sat back, gripping the slippery knife. Her chest rose and fell with exertion. There was nothing in the kitchen that wasn't touched by blood. And the source of it all lay in the middle of a great puddle, barely recognizable as a human being anymore, much less something to fear.
They sat in silence until the timer on the oven went off. Laura got up, turned it off and took the macaroni and cheese out. The counter she set it on was sticky with blood.
It sat there, untouched, as her mother called the police. In the thirty minutes it took them to reach the house, it grew stone cold. One of the first cops on the scene took one look at it sitting in the middle of a slaughter, and threw up all over the living room rug.
The social worker arrived before the cops put the handcuffs on her mother. In those last few moments, Laura embraced her, drawing her close and holding her tight. Sara closed her eyes, and breathed her mother's scent.
They were broken apart by the social worker, who gently, but firmly pulled Sara away. Unable to do anything else, Sara gripped the woman's hand for dear life.
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Laura came out of Cassie's room after tucking her in for the night and bumped into Sara as she came down the hallway.
"Oh!" Laura laughed at her own jittery nerves. "You startled me. I thought you were…" She stopped before she named the place her daughter usually was, or the man who lived there. "…out."
Sara's hand rested on the mound of her stomach. "Not tonight."
"Are you feeling all right?" Frowning, she asked, "More nausea?"
"Some today," Sara admitted.
"That's something you must have inherited from me. I was sick with both you and Adam, almost every day until you two were born."
"I don't know if morning sickness is genetic," Sara sighed wearily. "But if it is…thanks for nothing."
"You should be lying down," Laura said. "You spend too much time on your feet."
"I'm fine." Moving past her, Sara opened the door to the nursery and peeked inside. "She's asleep," she reported with a tired smile. She approached Cassie's crib and looked down at the wonder that lay on her back, her thumb plugging up her sweet mouth. "Everything else can fall apart, but this is one thing I did right."
"What's falling apart, Sara?"
Her daughter shook her head. "Maybe nothing." She was quiet for a long moment. "I need to know something. Why did you fall in love with my father?" Glancing over her shoulder, she continued, "You were in love with him, right?"
Years of counseling enabled Laura to answer honestly. "In an entirely unhealthy way, yes."
"What made it unhealthy?"
"Sara, what good does it do to…"
"Mom." Laura set her hand against her chest. Hearing that one word coming from her daughter after so many months, so many years, was a shot of pure joy straight to her heart. "I really need to know."
Sinking into the nursery rocking chair, Laura rubbed her temple for a few moments as she collected her thoughts. "I fell in love with him before I really knew him. And when I found out what it was I'd fallen for, it was too late." She hesitated. "I let him convince me that my life was worthless without him. Or maybe I convinced myself. Either way…I made him my whole world."
She heard Sara sniff softly. "But you had us."
"And I should have realized that a long time before that night." Her hands were trembling now, almost as much as they had when she'd reached for the knife lying in the dish drainer. "I wish I could say I regretted killing him. But I can't. My only regret…absolutely my only regret, Sara, was that you saw it all."
"I didn't go crazy," Sara said as nonchalantly as possible. "I didn't turn into a sociopath."
"Through the grace of God," Laura said, pressing her finger to her lips. "You have no idea how proud I am of you. Sometimes I just stop and look at you…and I can't believe I had any part at all in bringing you into this world."
"I know the feeling." Sara reached into the crib and brushed her daughter's curls back from her face. There was silence in the room for several painfully long minutes. Finally, she spoke. "I almost had an abortion." Laura's mouth fell open in a silent gasp, but she let her daughter go on. "When I found out I was pregnant with her, everything was such a mess. I thought I'd just…simplify things. And there was also…" Sara stopped.
"Also what?"
"What I was afraid I'd pass on to her."
Swallowing heavily, Laura quietly asked, "So what stopped you?"
"I remembered something about that night. His hands around my throat." She paused. "You killed him to protect me." Laura looked down at her lap as Sara went on. "You never told the police or the lawyers…why?" She shook her head. "You were defending me. You probably wouldn't have gone to jail, and we would have stayed together. Adam might not have slipped away from us." She shook her head. "Why didn't you tell them?"
"Whatever it was that pushed me over the edge, Sara, I still killed him. And I deserved to be punished for it. And you deserved a second chance at a real childhood. Which you got." Tears flooded Laura's eyes. "Adam was gone a long time before that night. Don't think I don't carry that scar on my heart. No mother who loses a child ever stops mourning for them. But you…you grew up to be the woman I wish I could have been, the mother I wish I'd been to you." She shook her head back and forth. "And I'm sorry, Sara. I'm so sorry that I missed most of your life because of what I did…or didn't do until it was too late. Nothing I do from now until the day I die could make up for any of it." She took a calming breath. "But I'm going to try, Sara. I am going to try."
When her daughter turned around, moisture had gathered in the corners of her own eyes. "You came here when I needed you. You stayed when I told you I didn't need you." She lifted her shoulders. "You're the reason why I have Cassie in my life." At Laura's puzzled look, Sara continued, "I didn't have the abortion because I remembered that when it came down to my life or my father's…you chose me. That took strength." She paused. "Something I hope you passed to me. And that I can pass to her."
Laura stood up and crossed to her daughter. This time she didn't stop herself from taking Sara's hands in hers.
Holding her daughter's hands after so many years would have been more than enough for Laura. So when Sara put her arms around her, she froze for a moment. The hug was a bit awkward with Sara's protruding belly, but Laura wouldn't have pulled away for all of the money in the world.
She brought one hand up to cradle the back of Sara's neck, stroking her hair like she had when she was a little girl. The gentle movement caused her daughter to cling to her; Laura felt the warmth of her daughter's frustrated tears soaking through her shirt.
It didn't take long for Sara to put her anxiety into words. As she poured out her heart, talking about Nick and Gil and the mix of emotions and memories, both good and bad, and her fears about the future, Laura took it all in quietly. The fact that Sara was drawing parallels between her relationship with Gil and Laura's own marriage had her worried. When she finally spoke, she only had two questions for her daughter.
"Would you leave if he hit you?"
"In a heartbeat," she replied without hesitation.
"Can you live without him?"
Sara lifted her head from her mother's shoulder. "Yes." She bit her lip for a second. "But I don't want to anymore."
Laura brushed leftover tears off her daughter's cheeks with her thumb. "Then…you'll never become me. And thank God for it."
"But what if things go wrong again?" For a second, she was thirteen again. Scared and in need of her mother.
"Whatever happens, I'll be here," she said. "I made a promise to you a long time ago. It's time I started keeping it."
As it turned out, Laura had the opportunity to make good on her new pledge two weeks later when the phone rang one afternoon. Sara was upstairs, napping with Cassie, so she answered with a polite, "Hello?"
"Is Sara Sidle there?" a young woman on the other end immediately asked. Laura recognized the slur in the caller's words; it still sent a chill down her spine.
"May I ask who's calling?"
"I'm…she doesn't know me. But we both know someone else." The girl blew out a breath that Laura instinctively knew was probably gin-soaked. "Look, I'd really like to talk to her if she's there."
Laura had gleaned enough details over the months to have a fairly good idea who was calling her daughter. And Sara had been right. The Southern accent was overkill. "Reese?" she asked.
There was a pause. "How do you know my name?"
"How do you know my daughter's?" Laura countered.
"He…he used to talk about her all the time." Reese paused again. "You're not going to let me talk to her, are you?"
"The odds aren't good."
"I have things to say to her."
"I have no doubt," Laura said as she took a seat on the couch. "But here's the thing. Whatever it is that you're dying to tell my daughter, I absolutely guarantee you that it's not going to change anything."
She could almost feel the girl's eyes narrowing. "What do you mean?"
"Nothing you could tell Sara could possibly be worse than what she's come up with her in her own mind. And if she can live with her imagination, and still love the man you think you have in common, then she doesn't need to know your truth, whatever it might be."
"But I…"
Laura crossed her legs and switched the phone to her other ear. "From what I understand, you're very, very young. You'll get over it. Go find yourself a nice boy your own age. Leave the older men to women who are grown up enough to handle them."
There was a spark of anger in Reese's reply. "You can't just brush me off like I'm nothing!"
"Sweetheart." Laura lowered her voice. "I spent six years in the California Women's Correctional Center for stabbing someone to death. Don't tick me off."
There was a click on the other end, then silence. Smiling, Laura hung up the phone and headed for the stairs. She lingered at the open door into her daughter's room. Sara was curled up on the bed with Cassie. She rested peacefully, a rare occurrence now that her due date was so close. But with her daughter snuggled up against her huge belly, Sara slept with a smile.
Instead of joining them, Laura got a book from her room, came back, and sat in the recliner, keeping watch over the most precious things in her life.
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To Be Continued