Chapter 18 - THE WEIGHT OF A NAME
Evelyn Sterling did not look at her daughter when the state troopers brought Chloe into the interrogation room at the county seat the following morning.
I was there because Sarah had insisted on my presence for the formal execution of the waiver of parental interference.
The room smelled of stale coffee from an electric urn in the corner, floor wax, and wet overcoats.
Evelyn was seated at the far end of the laminate table. Her grey suit was rumpled—she had spent the night in an administrative holding cell after the district attorney discovered she had attempted to wire forty thousand dollars to an offshore account in Grand Cayman from a computer in the public library.
Her hair was unpinned on the right side, a single grey lock hanging against her cheek like a dry cobweb.
When Chloe was led in, handcuffed to the belt of a female trooper, Chloe looked at her mother with the desperate, starving look of a dog that had been beaten with a rolled newspaper and still expected to be fed.
"Mother?" Chloe croaked.
Evelyn did not blink. She looked at the female trooper. "Officer, could you please ask this person not to address me? She is an estranged relation whose legal representation is entirely separate from my own."
Chloe stopped.
A strange, terrible sound came out of Chloe’s chest—not a sob, but a dry, rattling intake of air, as if someone had driven a wooden wedge under her ribs.
"Mother," Chloe said again, louder this time. "I went to the house. I had the fuel. Like you said."
The state attorney, a young woman with sharp eyes named Miller, looked up from her legal pad. "What was that, Ms. Sterling?"
"She’s raving," Evelyn said, her voice dropping into that smooth, cold velvet that had once kept three generations of family members trembling at Thanksgiving dinners. "The girl has been mentally unstable since her second year at Sarah Lawrence. I have repeatedly urged her to seek clinical supervision. Her actions last night were entirely her own, the result of a long-standing narcissistic resentment toward her sister’s domestic stability."
I sat in the chair across from them.
I didn't speak. I didn't hold up a document. I didn't reach for my neck where the bruises had long since turned into the memory of breathing.
I took the small, green Starbucks paper cup that the desk sergeant had handed me on the way into the precinct—a courtesy from the state troopers who had seen my name on the farm deed—and I set it down in the exact center of the table between Evelyn and her daughter.
The green mermaid logo faced Evelyn.
Evelyn looked at the cup.
Her nostrils flared once, the skin around her mouth tightening until her lips disappeared into a thin, bloodless slit.
"You always were vulgar, Claire," she whispered. "A vulgar little girl who couldn't appreciate the sacrifices required to keep a great name from being dragged through the gutter."
"There is no great name, Evelyn," I said. "There’s just three hundred acres of hemlock trees that don't belong to you, and two daughters who know exactly what you smell like when the silver is gone."
"I gave you life," she hissed.
"No," I said, standing up and sliding the paper cup three inches closer to her alligator bag. "You gave me an address. My father gave me the trees. And I gave myself the air."
I looked at Chloe.
Chloe was staring at the cup as if it were an unexploded mortar shell. For the first time in twenty-eight years, Chloe saw what I saw: not a mother offering comfort after a tragedy, but an assassin checking to see if the poison had taken long enough to let the estate clear probate.
"Sign the quitclaim, Chloe," I said.
Chloe didn't look at her mother. She didn't look at the state attorney. She reached across the table with her handcuffed hands, took the cheap ballpoint pen from the trooper’s clipboard, and scratched her name on the bottom line of the settlement agreement.
The signature was shaky, ugly, and crooked.
May you like
It was the first honest thing she had ever written.
***
