“Okay,” he’d responded after a moment, and they’d never spoken of it again.
Lisa’s first plan had been violence. Lance had a gun — Lisa would use it to kill David. She’d stare him in the face and pull the trigger. She knew how to handle one; it was Texas. She’d grown up among men who hunted. She’d be arrested and spend the rest of her life in prison. Or maybe not. Maybe a good lawyer could prove self-defense, on her daughter’s behalf.
But the risk of leaving Victoria — abandoning her — was too great. Victoria hadn’t needed her mother in such a long time.
Her daughter had arranged an enviable life for herself. Talked about having children soon. Liked to cook elaborate meals from old French cookbooks. Was developing an interest in wine. Was — Lisa had thought — happy. She loved her mother, but didn’t seem to need her, not as she had when she was a child. But perhaps that was what it meant to be a parent: your child needed you until she did not. That’s what Lisa told herself.
But then the bruise. And then the photographs. After seeing them, Lisa had left her daughter’s home and vomited into a camellia bush.
She didn’t know which part she found more alarming: that Victoria was being beaten, or that she hadn’t told her mother.
A few days before they were to leave, Victoria dropped by the house with a book. Lisa was on the patio — she would miss this patio — drinking a glass of wine.
Victoria rested the book on the table, raised her eyes at the wine. “Cocktail hour somewhere?”
Lisa nodded.
“In that case... ” Victoria went to the kitchen and returned a moment later with her own glass.
Lisa was so grateful her daughter wasn’t pregnant, she nearly cried.
“The stuff you drink is shit,” Victoria said. “All tannin.” She wrinkled her nose. “But whatever,” she said, and took another sip.
Lisa studied her daughter. She had a solid look about her: firm cheekbones and big hazel eyes. Her eyes had always been her best feature. “You look pretty today.”
Victoria seemed startled. “Is something wrong?”
Lisa shook her head. Victoria picked up the book, flipped through it idly.
“Is it good?” Lisa asked, her voice fraught. She was near tears.
Victoria shrugged. “I hope so.” She knew something was amiss. She did not know what.
They were going to run away. To a little town in Mexico where Lisa and Gary had vacationed once, years ago. They would come back once the dust had settled. Lisa had been to see her lawyer — a man with an underbite and a thick head of silver hair who’d come highly recommended — four times in the last week.
They would each — Victoria and Lisa — file for divorce in Mexico. Victoria had a prenup, of course (everyone did these days), but the attorney was certain they could void it, as long as Lisa got the pictures.
Victoria would sign the papers in Mexico, Lisa knew. In Houston, she had no interest in leaving David, but things would be different once they were elsewhere. Once they weren’t in Tanglewood. Victoria thought, like Lance, that she and her mother were going to Austin, to a spa. Mexico would be a surprise. Victoria loved surprises, had since she was a little girl.
In Mexico, Lisa would take Victoria’s phone so David couldn’t reach her, and she’d explain their future to her daughter. She could imagine the words, what exactly she would say: You’re fooling yourself. He will never stop. You’re too young to throw away your life like this.
Platitudes, all of them. And all of them true.
Lisa knew Victoria would listen, once they were away from all this. It would be easier, for both her and her daughter, to be gone. To absent themselves from the lives they were going to destroy.
“Mom,” Victoria said, “stop looking at me like that.”
But she, too, seemed close to tears.
Her love for Victoria was the purest thing she’d ever felt, even now, thirty years later. Or especially now. She’d never loved another person so deeply, so obsessively. With anyone else she’d loved — her mother, a boy before her first husband whom she’d loved an unreasonable amount — there was a desire underpinning it all. There would have been no love without it. She wanted to touch, she wanted to be touched. She wanted to be made to feel a certain way. That want made her feel like an animal.
But there was none of that with Victoria, of course. Lisa’s attachment to her drew from some well that had previously been unknown to her. She wondered, when Victoria was tiny, more a collection of scents and sounds than a human, if all parents, all mothers, felt this way. It didn’t seem possible.
Victoria asked Lisa about her own mother once, when she was a child: “Did she love you like you love me?”
The pronouns confused Lisa for a moment. “Yes,” she’d said, but not because she believed it.
They were leaving tomorrow, and it felt too easy. Victoria had come over that morning and talked about what she’d packed. Swimsuits. Sundresses, for dinner. She described a new one so vividly — striped, off the shoulder — Lisa could almost see it. And then she could almost see Victoria in their house on the beach, standing ankle-deep in the water. And a surge of something — happiness, excitement, some combination thereof — threaded itself through her brain.
Victoria seemed worried. Lisa thought she understood why. Her daughter had found herself trapped. She didn’t know how to escape. Lisa would help her.
Lance didn’t suspect a thing. Lisa had rented a storage unit and put clothes into it and a few small pieces of furniture Lance wouldn’t miss. Things she didn’t want him to have.
Her jewelry and important papers went into a deposit box at the bank. One last trip to the lawyer’s office.
She went into what had once been Victoria’s room and lay on the bed. But no, that didn’t feel like enough and, though she wasn’t a woman given to melodramatic gestures, she took off her shirt and pants and lay on the floor. The wood was old heart pine. It bore many years of tiny, almost invisible scratches. A map of scratches.
She could feel her bones through the floor. The wood was cool, solid.
She would miss this house.
Lance was at the hospital. Victoria was at the gym. She was of the younger generation, which considered working out, beating the body into submission, as natural as brushing one’s teeth.
Lisa went to the stone turtle, then let herself in Victoria’s front door. David wasn’t home. He worked insane hours, but she could feel his presence as she walked quietly through his home. It still felt like his, even though Victoria had added her own touches: paintings, antique furniture. But still, David’s masculine leather furniture dominated.
She took the Polaroids without looking at them. And yet, the feel of them in her hand was a comfort. Thick and sturdy like an object, not a stack of flimsy photographs.
The pictures gave her hope. The past would be the past. The future, theirs for the taking.
She felt excited, despite the circumstances.
As she passed the guest room door, she heard a knock within. Then another. Some part of her thought it was David beating Victoria, though she knew that was impossible. David was at work. Victoria was at the gym.
She opened the door out of some sort of maternal instinct, her other hand clutching the square of pictures.
Lance looked at her first. For all his indiscretions, she had never seen him with another woman. Certainly not on top of one, as he was now, a look of pleasure slowly morphing into pain upon his face.
“Mama,” a voice said from underneath Lance. The pictures slid from Lisa’s hand.
Victoria had not called her Mama in so long.