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A/N: So I'm having a myriad of computer-internet issues, and there's no way to guarantee that I can update tomorrow. However, this is another one of those chapters I spent what felt like forever trying to perfect, so I would appreciate reviews, when my lovely readers get a chance. It's taken a ridiculous amount of effort just to get this one up, so I have a feeling I'm going to need the motivation until the computer is fixed. But! I can check reviews on my phone, so please still do...

Thanks! Enjoy!


Chapter 24: Mother

She had been in a mental facility in San Francisco the last time I'd seen her—almost every foster home I'd lived in until I was ten made me visit, once and a while. The good ones took me during Christmas, the bad ones just before a social services rep. came over, so that they could have something to talk about on a personal level—otherwise they didn't know me from any of the other children who lived there.

Perhaps because I'd so often seen her during Christmas, and it was after spending another holiday alone—Kelly and Eric invited me to spend it with them, but I knew I'd feel intrusive, so I'd turned them down—that I remembered my vow from the previous summer to visit my mother.

I couldn't work up the nerve to do it until close to the end of February—but I did. I drove myself along the path I'd remembered taking from the last foster home that had made me see her (the only time I can remember the actual route we drove), and found a building that was all too familiar to me. I wrote down the name, and left—needing to do a bit of supplemental research.

It was apparently a facility specifically for those who had committed crimes while deemed legally insane—the most severe cases, and those whose crimes had caused debilitating mental consequences. I remember social workers and foster parents, thinking I was too little to understand, talking about my mother in front of me while I waited to go see her… the words "psychotic break" and "post-traumatic stress disorder" hadn't meant much to me at the time, but they did now. Another word that had come up more and more as I got older was "relapse."

I filled in the blanks—she had killed my father when he… when it became too much… and upon realizing what she'd done, her mind couldn't handle it… she separated herself from reality, because reality was too much to endure. And every time she started to get better… something had happened to send her back to the beginning. I suppose it didn't help that my mother had never been particularly stable in the first place, but chances are it had very little to do with it.

I didn't know for certain whether they would just allow me in to see her, but… as a child, I had been allowed. So I took a chance—I went to the front entrance, through several metal detectors, and found a front desk.

"Hello. May I help you?"

"I, uh… I'm Sara Sidle. I was… wondering… My… mother, Laura Sidle, was here, uh… when I was younger. I… I haven't been here in years, but… I wanted to see her. If she's still here."

There. That wasn't so hard. But the woman is looking at me with a strange expression. "There's no Laura Sidle here, ma'am… I'm very sorry."

I draw in a deep breath. "The… the last time I was here was… 1981, I think. She was here, then."

The lady looked baffled. "I… we don't have computer records dating that far back, but, uh… I guess I could talk to someone about looking in the storage room."

I bite my lip. "Yeah… if you could. That'd be great."

She smiles at me sort of awkwardly, which makes me feel angry and ashamed all at once, though I can't necessarily explain that to myself, and I take a seat, waiting.

She returns with an older woman whose face stirs something like déjà vu in me. In the next moment, I understand why.

"Miss Sidle?" I nod, standing, and she moves over to me. She smiles sort of sadly. "I remember you—you still look like the scared little girl who would come in on the arm of a different foster parent almost every time… I'm very sorry that we can't be of more help, but due to doctor-patient confidentiality, we can't reveal anything that would be in your mother's files or documentation."

She's genuinely sorry, I can see that, but her answer just isn't good enough. I shake my head. "No, I… can you at least… tell me why she left. When she left. Give me… something to go on."

The woman bites her bottom lip. "Well, it's uh… a matter of public record that she went to trial in 1984. She was charged with first degree murder. She pleaded guilty. Refused an attorney."

I'm shaking my head, my shaking hands balling into fists to keep control on my disbelief and that ever-troubling temper of mine. "No. She… she was acting in… self-defense. She… Was she in her right mind?" I question indignantly, remembering how she had hardly been aware of my presence during some of my visits.

The woman glances side to side, feeling uncomfortable with my questions, and how much she can tell me. "The state chose not to try her until she had been released from this facility, and determined to be high-functioning and aware…"

"Why… why would she do that? I… don't understand."

She shakes her head, sadly. "I don't know, honey. She… she felt awful guilty, about what happened… with your father." My eyes lift to hers in alarm. She knows. Of course she knows. Oh god. I tremble. Her voice is coming soft, and I can tell she feels like she isn't supposed to tell me this. "From what I knew of your mother, honey, she probably felt like she deserved it…"

I can't handle it. I run, without even thanking the woman, with tears burning my eyes, but I refuse to let them fall. I didn't want them to fall. I didn't want to cry over my broken family anymore. I didn't want to take my mother's side, even if it hadn't been her fault. I had wanted to see her… not feel sorry for her. I didn't want to think about the demons she'd faced in the twenty one years since she had finally had enough and taken a butcher knife to my father.

I was concerned with my own demons.

I don't know how I made it back to my apartment, or how I didn't call Gil that night, begging him to jump on a plane as he had the last time, to come save me.

He had asked me to stop calling.

He had said we could be friends… and though he hadn't called me and I hadn't spoken to him in over a year now, I had to keep believing that it would be possible, if only I committed to the one request he made of me, after all my indiscretions. Please don't call anymore.

So I took a burning shower, I put on my Harvard pants and the UCLA sweatshirt that no longer smelled like him, and I curled up in bed and cried. When I couldn't cry anymore, I pulled out a tattered old notebook—the notebook I'd brought to the conference… the notebook I had taken notes of his lectures in.

Interspersed between paragraphs of my messy short hand account of what he'd been teaching were hastily scrawled quotes. Sometimes they were someone else's words, that he'd borrowed with as much ease in his lecture as he did in real life, and sometimes they were his own statements, like "We are the victim's last voice" and "The room was talking to us."

I cried more, reading them, as I had nearly a thousand times since he'd left me, until I fell into a fitful sleep. The nightmare I had that night was strange—not a reenactment of my worst memories, like usual, but rather what I imagine most people's bad dreams are like—it included aspects of real life and real pain, but it was different… strange… unreal…and infinitely worse than the reality, though I hadn't previously thought that was possible.

I was sitting under the kitchen table, in my parents' home. I had crawled here after my mother had come into the room, and stayed there while they fought… and screamed… while my dad hit my mom. I hear the tell-tale sound of the cutlery drawer, and hear my mother pull out a large knife. But I was an adult.

I was an adult, curled up in a tattered nightgown, tucked under a small table, and listening to my parents fight. A morbid curiosity grips me, and I peer out, wanting to see what's going to happen. Even though I know—know the sound of my mother's angry screams and my father's pain-filled cries… know that after those come, he'll fall to the floor, but she won't stop…

But that isn't what happens. My mother waves the knife wildly and my father turns toward me, and though I can't grasp how this is possible, his face is simultaneously several faces. His face is Tyler's, and Michael's, and Ken's, and Gil's. I don't know why I have the cognition to realize that Greg's face is missing—otherwise these are all the men I've slept with—but maybe that makes sense too. I can't really be certain.

And then my mother stabs him in the back, and he screams and falls, and I'm screaming in agony too, because he screams with Michael's voice, and Michael doesn't deserve this… doesn't deserve to even be in this room, for anything. Fresh yet familiar guilt washes over me, and I rush out from under the table.

Yet once I stand, my mother is gone. My father is face down, so I don't know whose face he has, but then Gil comes into the kitchen from the back door. He has plastic sheaths over his shoes and he's wearing a forensics vest, his kit in hand. He looks at me, intently, and I suddenly realize I'm in a ratty pink nightgown, the style more fitting for a child than my adult self. My legs and feet are bare.

"Well, we better start processing. The room is talking to us."

I stare at him in disbelief, as he sets down his kit and pulls out red fingerprinting dust.

"I only use this for the really elusive cases…" he tells me. And then he begins to spread the dust over me, instead of the surfaces in the room. Before I can protest, the red dust reveals fingerprints up and down my arms and legs, and bruises which had previously been absent are rising to the surface of my skin.

And then the room is actually talking—a booming god-like voice coming from the walls, but which also sounds strangely like my brother's voice. And it tells me that you can't hide from your past, because there's always evidence… the truth will always rise to the surface, like the bruises and the tears and the blood spattered across almost every surface in the kitchen.

The back door opens again, and a faceless social worker comes in, taking my hand and pulling me towards the door. I tug away from her, looking frantically for Gil, but he doesn't notice my distress—he's looking at my father, who is now completely covered in maggots, and muttering something about 'Pupa, stage 3,' but even I know that my father hasn't been dead long enough for that.

When I turn around to see where I'm being led, I see the distantly familiar walls of the mental facility my mother had been in, cold and white and bleak, smelling of lies, and the social worker's voice is intoning softly, "You won't need an attorney… you'll be safe here… don't worry your pretty little head…"

I struggle to free myself from her grip, but I can't, and then I'm gripping the sides of the doorway, screaming, begging them to let me go, shouting that I'm not crazy…

I sit straight up in bed, drenched in a cold sweat and panting like I've been running. My throat hurts, so I know I've been screaming. And after a beat, I realize that my face is wetter than the rest of me, and my pants are being interrupted by sobs I can't control. I fall out of bed, in an effort to get up, not realizing that my legs are tangled in my sheets, and crawl instead to the bathroom with a desperate frenzy, turning on the hot water and crawling into the tub still fully clothed, letting the water shower around me.

It doesn't help me forget like it usually does, and I replay the scenes of the dream over and over until I'm rocking back and forth under water that is now icy, just trying to sooth the stabbing pain in my breast.

I didn't sleep longer than a half hour at a time for the next several weeks, and that, at least, seemed to keep the nightmare away. I just wasn't sure how long I could keep it up... I didn't know how long I could keep going.