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At first she thought he did not hear her. There was no reaction, nothing. He stared at her, scrutinizing her. But then his shoulders drooped and his head fell to his hands. His body shook as silent sobs tore threw him.
A coldness settled in her core. She should feel something. Her arms should want to encircle him. His body was representing every emotion Beth had felt in the last thirty days, shock and anguish…despair. But she felt nothing now, except maybe jealousy that he still had tears left in him.
Beth had not cried in over a week. They were gone, her tears all used up. Maybe people were given a finite amount and she had gone through her ration. Or maybe her pain had hardened her. That is what she wanted to think. That her grief had fortified her, given her strength she never knew.
But what it was, what she feared, was that the bitterness had consumed her compassion. It was gone, her empathy, her compassion, maybe even her morality. It was gone now, burned away like flesh scorched by acid.
She watched as his body shook. She counted the seconds between sobs and noted how his skin went from ruddy to near purple and he struggled to get enough air into his body.
And the whole time she felt nothing.
Minutes past. She had nothing left to say. She stood up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to hear from a guard.” She handed him the funeral program she had brought. On the cover was Paige smiling, holding Alejandra on a trip to the beach. It was her favorite picture of her sister. She had tried to find one of Paige on her own, but none of them captured Paige, her goofy smile and her carefree spirit. This was Paige, the Paige she remembered.
Beth pointed to the photo. “That is my daughter. Paige was helping me raise her. She was a good mom. She was the fun one who gave Ally sugar like she was trying to put her into a diabetic coma and I was the one who worried and nagged. We were a good team.” And now it was just Beth.
Beth handed her dad the rest of the photos. Prison policy meant that she could only bring in ten so she had had to be merciless in her cull, picking only the ten that most perfectly captured her sister. She shuffled through until she found the one of Paige at her graduation. “She was top of her class at UC Davis.” Her sister would not have mentioned it. It was Beth’s turn to be proud. She had paid for Paige to go to vet school, made it possible for her to live her dream. And she had…for a while… “And here is Paige with Morningside Mac. He is a Grand Champion. He had paralysis of the larynx or something. Paige could have explained it better. But basically she saved his life. He would have had to be put down. That operation paid her mortgage.” Beth smiled again as she remembered her sister. Every night, without fail, she waited for Paige to come in, say something outrageous and then plop herself in front of Beth’s television to watch mind-numbing reality TV. But she never came, and every night Beth went to bed with a boulder in her stomach that wouldn’t shift. She would give anything to speak to her again, to hug her and hear her laugh.
Beth pulled out another picture. “Here is one of us at Disney World. That was a fun trip. I like Florida. Shame it doesn’t have a border with Mexico or I could have been transferred there.” Her job with the task force meant she needed to be in Texas.
She handed the rest of the photos to her dad and watched silently as he made his way through them. He smiled a few times and then cried again. This time Beth placed her hand on his arm. She felt nothing but it seemed the humane thing to do.
“Do you have a picture of your husband?” he asked.
Beth’s eyes widened. “Torres?” she asked as if there was another husband her father could be asking about. She patted her pockets. She had left her phone in the rental car. “Umm…Torres is…I told you he is Mexican. And we worked together. Not a lot else to say.”
“Is he a good man?”
The question took her aback. Was Torres a good man? Depends on who you were asking and if your definition of good precluded murder. “Umm…yeah…he is a good man. He has always had my back.” That much was true. With Torres she always had someone on her side. That is why she married him. She probably shouldn’t have, he had only asked her out of a misplaced sense of loyalty. It wasn’t particularly fair to him, to saddle him with her and her daughter. If she was a better person, she would have said no, for his sake, but she wasn’t, and she wasn’t proud. She would take whatever he offered because he was all she had left, the only person on her side.
And he would take care of Alejandra. Beth wouldn’t let her be orphaned again. When things went downhill with Torres, when he finally realized who she was, he would still be there for Alejandra, and that was all that really mattered. She might be a shitty person but she was a devoted mom.
Her dad nodded. “You said he worked with you. What does he do now?”
Beth sighed. The truth was too complicated to contemplate retelling. “He is a carpenter.” Again that much wasn’t a lie. He was also a soldier and a special agent and a drug runner and the head of a hit man squad, but she left those details out.
“Does he earn a good living?”
Joe Cummings was acting the part of a father, making sure his daughter was well looked after.
Surreal: this attempt at family normality. He didn’t have the right to know about her life. Why would he even care? He hadn’t even seen her in over twenty-five years. They were strangers. “We do OK.” The truth was they were more than comfortable now. The Department of Justice had offered Torres a settlement. They were more than happy to throw money at him in return for him keeping his mouth shut about Patterson setting him up. He would never need to work again if he didn’t want to. Torres couldn’t not work; it went against everything he was. He had returned to carpentry, starting with a playhouse for Alejandra that was about the size of the apartment Beth had grown up in. The playhouse had polished wooden floors and granite worktops. News of the tiny garden mansion spread through the neighbourhood and in a week, Torres had orders for three more. One person even requested a house with running water. As Paige always said, “Thank God for people with more money than sense.”
He wiped at his face. “Thank you for coming, Beth, for telling me in person. I can’t believe she’s gone.” He squeezed his eyes together.
“I know. I pick up the phone to call her at least once a day. Every time I hear something funny I want to call her and tell her. She liked to laugh.” It was a stupid thing to say. Who didn’t like to laugh? Paige laughed a lot, that is what she meant. She laughed at everything. She could make a joke out of anything. Even when Torres was gone and their mom’s disease was getting worse, Paige found things to laugh about. She missed that, the levity that Paige brought to her life. Would she laugh again the way she did with Paige? She hoped she could, for Alejandra.
Beth sat down again. She could spare a few more minutes with him, it was after all the last time he would spend with his only family. That is what she was; begrudgingly she admitted it to herself, she was his family. For this one moment she would be that for him.
She spent another hour talking with her father, answering questions and talking about her mom and sister. They both knew this would be the last time Beth came to see him. She didn’t say it, but they both knew. They would go back to being strangers again. Eventually he would die and Beth would think about him for a few minutes or a few days and then he would be gone again like he never existed. She should be sad about that, but it would be like missing something she never had.
Eventually she stood up. “Take care…Dad.” She reached out and embraced him. It wasn’t for her, or even for him, it was for Paige and her mom. They loved him, and Beth loved them.
Her dad began to cry again. His arms tightened around her. He didn’t want to let her go. She understood that feeling better than most. This was the moment, the one before he lost everything in his life. She closed her eyes and willed it to last a little longer because she knew the sting that would follow…and the darkness. God she wished she could go back to the moments before she lost Paige.
“I’m sorry,” he managed to say between sobs.
Beth’s legs went slack; muscles that she didn’t know were tight, loosened. They were words she didn’t know she needed to hear. “Thank you.”
With those two words, the pain and bitterness she had carried for thirty years, washed away.
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