She doesn’t respond. I sit on the edge of the bed next to her, noting the empty bottle of rum on the bedside table. I have to get her to talk. “Did something happen?” I ask. Her shoulders shake as she cries, and I gently lay a hand on her arm. “It would help if you’d tell me what’s going on.”
She sits up, her eyes feral. “It’s all his fault,” she cries, pointing at the sketches. “He got her addicted, and now she’s gone.”
This is it, the moment I’ve been waiting for. Every nerve in my body stands at attention; the room pulses with hyperreality. I swallow, doing my best impression of calm. “Who is she?” I coax, not wanting to push too far and scare her off. But she’s so insulated by the rum that she’s not afraid of anything.
“Iris.” She breaks into a fresh round of tears.
Yes, that’s how I feel too! I want to scream. But I never expected to see Stella so upset over her death. “Who was she to you?” I ask.
“Everything,” she sobs. “I loved her. We were going to start a family.”
My mind snags. She loved her?
Stella collapses into a fresh round of tears, and I hug her to me like a child while my brain tries to grasp what she’s saying.
Stella loved Iris? They were going to start a family? Her revelation is so opposite of everything I expected that I’m having trouble processing it. “You were in love?” I ask.
“We were in love.” I can hear the pain in her voice as she whispers through her tears.
My world flips like a carnival ride, all my preconceived notions falling out. It’s all I can do to stop myself from smiling.
Stella was Iris’s lover, not Cole. Stella was the one who had her glowing, humming in the shower, thinking of a brighter future. Not Cole. My mother had said she was in love with a movie star, and my ten-year-old brain had unthinkingly assumed it was Cole. It never even crossed my mind that it could be Stella. How stupid I was! It made so much sense. The money had dried up and the holes in Iris’s arms had healed, but she’d continued to go to Cole’s house—to see Stella. She was planning to make a family for us—with Stella, not Cole. It was Stella who was telling Cole she was leaving him, not the other way around. All this time I’ve been thinking Stella hated my mother, when in fact she loved her.
A wave of relief rolls over me, consolation that my mother wasn’t in love with a monster but with this poor woman who’s mourned her all these years. No wonder Stella went crazy after Iris’s death. She’d lost her lover and couldn’t tell a soul.
I’m flooded with compassion for Stella, overcome by the urge to confess everything to her, but I remember the empty bottle on the bedside table and the coming hurricane and bite my tongue. If I give her that information now, I don’t know what she’ll do with it.
I swipe a tissue from the box next to the bed and hand it to her. “What happened to her?” I ask.
She wipes her bloodshot eyes and takes a ragged breath. “She overdosed.”
“Was she an addict?”
She shrugs. “She’d done drugs before, but it had been a while. She was at my house—I was late to meet her. I’d had a stupid hair appointment that ran over. She got into Cole’s supply while she was waiting and…” A sob escapes her lips.
“You found her?”
She shakes her head. “Cole did. He was supposed to be out of town, but he came back early.”
The order of events match what I remember, but I find it hard to believe that the contented Iris I’d seen through the window that night left a pot on the burner and went upstairs to get into Cole’s heroin supply. “What happened when you got there?”
“He was trying to revive her, but he couldn’t. I wanted to call 911, but he said it would be faster for him to drive her to the hospital. She was gone by the time they got there.”
So Cole had lied to Stella; she had no idea about the car wreck he’d staged. “How did the press never find out about this?” I ask.
She dabs at her tears with a tissue. “I don’t know. Cole took care of it. He was really great about the whole thing actually. I was pretty messed up.”
I’m walking a tightrope trying not to give away what I know. “Did the cops ever come around?”
She nods. “I didn’t talk to them—he did. He said he told them he’d seen her slumped over the wheel of her car in a parking lot, and when he tried to check on her, saw she was in bad shape, so he pushed her aside and drove her to the hospital. He convinced me no one could know she’d OD’d on our property. It would’ve been a career-ending media circus. So I went along with his lie. I figured what did it matter. She was gone anyway.”
“Did he know about you and Iris?”
She shakes her head. “We were planning on telling him the following week. But he knew her, from before. She was one of his sleeping beauties.”
“So what did he think she was doing at your house?”
“He thought she’d come to see him, maybe to score some heroin. She knew where he kept it.”
I wrinkle my brow, trying to understand how she couldn’t see Cole’s story was thin as gossamer, full of holes and happenstance. So many parts of her account—or rather, the narrative Cole told her—don’t add up with what I know, and yet it’s clear she’s accepted his version of events as fact. But then, if she’s spent the last thirteen years trying to forget, I guess
