“I told you, I haven’t seen her in ten years,” I repeat. “I need to see her. Just this once. Then I’ll leave you alone, and I’ll never bother you again. Can you just get her to come to the door for one minute? Please?”
The woman sighs and steps back from the door, yelling that this isn’t her business, and she doesn’t want to deal with it. A minute later, another face appears for just a second, and then the door closes, and I hear the chain lock rattle, and then it opens fully. For the first time in ten years, I stand face to face with my mother.
I wish I could say I hate her, or that when I see her, I feel nothing. That I could take out my gun and shoot her and walk away.
Instead, I stare at her, and I feel sad and sick and shocked.
“Come on,” she says quietly. “Your bodyguard can wait out here. There’s just a bunch of women in here, and most of them’s asleep.”
I nod to my guard, but he insists on checking the apartment before he’ll agree to stand outside and let me go in with her. When we step inside, it’s so dim I can barely make out the two figures lying on the floor in the living room, the carpet around them threadbare and stained, with holes from cigarette burns and who knows what else. One more woman lies sprawled on a sagging couch with the springs exposed, matted blonde hair covering her face.
Mom gestures for me to follow her into the kitchen. A cracked, plastic dish rack holds clean dishes, and the room itself is clean, though it’s literally falling apart. Strips of linoleum are missing, as well as half the ceiling, so you can see up to the floor of the next apartment and bits of insulation hanging down. The counters are burned and stained and missing chunks of the Formica or whatever they used for the counters when this place was built.
My mother sits down at the table, which is in similar condition to the rest of the place.
“Mom, what are you doing here?” I ask, trying to keep the horror out of my voice.
“What areyoudoing here?” she asks.
When I pictured this meeting, I thought I’d come in guns blazing. I thought I’d be so angry, that I’d punch her teeth out and put a bullet in her head for ruining me for the one person who should have been able to love me. But I can’t imagine anything I could do that would punish her more than this.
Once, Mom was a mafia princess like me. She grew up rich, and she married a mafia king.
Or maybe she never grew up at all. Maybe that’s why she thought she could do whatever she wanted, and it would never come back on her. That she could run off and become an actress and everything would go her way, the way it always had. Just like me.
But now, as we sit across a wobbly table from each other, I look at her full in the face for the first time. I have to admit that as bad as this place looks, it’s just a place. Just as they keep it clean even though it’s a shithole, good people can come out of the worst circumstances. People can come from nothing.
The opposite is also true. Bad people can come from every opportunity, every privilege. Someone can grow up rich, with everything handed to them, getting away with everything, and then marry a rich man who doesn’t watch them in the bathroom with their own kids. And they can end up like this. Her once lustrous chestnut hair hangs in thin strings from her scalp. Her clothes droop off her body, her shoulders so thin I can see knobs of bone sticking up against her shirt. Her cheeks are sunken, her teeth stained and broken, her eyes lifeless.
“Mom, what happened? I thought you went off to become an actress.”
“I did,” she says. “Just—give me a minute. I can’t believe this is real. Am I dreaming?”
“Not dreaming,” I say. “I came to talk about what happened when I was a kid.”
“Let me get a smoke,” she says, getting up and pulling open one drawer and then the next, muttering curses. At last, she comes back with a pack of cigarettes and sits down, lighting up with a shaking hand. She immediately coughs, a deep, wet, rattling cough. “You want one?”
“No, thanks,” I say, making a face before I can help it.
“That’s right,” she says. “Don’t want to stain those pretty teeth. Looks is all a woman’s got at your age. Gotta keep up appearances until you can be auctioned off to the highest bidder.”
“Mom,” I say, my voice hardening. “I’m already married.”
She coughs again, waving smoke away with one hand as she stares at me in the dim lighting of the kitchen. I can see track marks on her arms from whatever she’s shooting up. “Is that why you came?” she asks, her voice bitter, like I’m selfish for not coming to see how she is.
“Yes,” I say, anger building into a hard knot in my chest. She didn’t even ask about him, about the wedding that she didn’t attend.
“Well,” she says. “Congratulations.”
“I didn’t come for congratulations,” I say, my voice hard. “I don’t need anything from you, not even your best wishes.”
She snorts, then holds in a cough. “Don’t tell me you need money.”
“No,” I say. “I came to kill you. You ruined me, Mom. How could you do that to your own daughter? What kind of sick fuck does that?”
Her fingers tremble as she holds her cigarette, staring at me like she’s shocked that I’d bring it up, that I’d dare speak those things aloud. After all this time, she probably thought she’d never have to answer for what she did in the bathtub.
“I never wanted to marry your father,” she says, her voice trembling. “I wanted out, but he wouldn’t let me. My father wouldn’t, either. Women are just pawns to them, pretty playthings to use and sell off when they tire of them.”