Part 10
Priya paused the next file.
“Do you want to continue?”
Clara’s face felt numb. “Yes.”
The final audio recording was from the year Henry died. Julia and Martin were inside a car near the Mercer house.
Through the windshield, faintly, came the sounds of traffic and distant voices.
Julia said, I can walk across the street.
Martin answered, There are cameras everywhere.
I don’t care.
You have Nora in the back seat.
I know where my daughter is.
Clara is speaking to reporters in twenty minutes.
Then I’ll wait.
You cannot appear at your father’s funeral with a baby and thirty years of accusations.
Twenty-one years.
This is not the time.
You’ve said that my entire life.
Julia, please.
Tell her I’m here.
Martin was silent.
Tell her.
The audio continued for forty-one seconds.
Then a baby began crying.
Julia whispered, I hate you.
Martin replied, I know.
The file ended.
Clara stood and walked to the bathroom. She closed the door but did not lock it.
The room was small enough that her knees nearly touched the sink when she sat on the toilet lid. A child’s purple toothbrush stood in a cup. The shower curtain had yellow fish on it. On the back of the door hung a robe with a torn belt loop.
Clara pressed both hands against her face.
She did not cry loudly. She had learned too young that people entered rooms when they heard crying. Her breath caught and stopped. Tears ran between her fingers.
Someone knocked once.
“Nora?” she asked.
“Elena.”
Clara lowered her hands.
“I brought tissues.”
The door opened only wide enough for Elena’s hand to pass through with the box.
“Thank you.”
Elena did not leave immediately.
Through the gap she said, “Anna was furious with you sometimes.”
Clara stared at the fish on the curtain.
“She would see you in a magazine and say you had become him. Then she would read the whole article. She kept every picture where you looked tired.”
A laugh broke through Clara’s crying.
“She said that meant you might still be yourself.”
Clara took a tissue.
“Why didn’t you contact me?”
“I asked her that.”
“What did she say?”
“That Martin had taught her one useful thing.”
Clara waited.
“People with power call secrecy protection when it protects them.”
The words hurt because they sounded like Julia and because they could now apply to Clara.
Elena continued, “She wanted to contact you after she got sick. Then she saw an interview where you defended the company’s decision to close the Rockford plant.”
Clara remembered. Three hundred layoffs. A restructuring plan she had approved after six months of declining orders. She had said the decision was necessary to protect the larger workforce.
“She thought I was like him.”
“She thought you might be.”
“That is worse.”
“Yes.”
Elena closed the door.
Clara washed her face with cold water and returned.
Priya had not opened the hospital video.
Nora sat on the couch now, wrapped in a blanket though the apartment was warm. Clara sat at the opposite end, leaving space between them.
“Did you watch it?” she asked.
Nora nodded.
“Do you want to watch again?”
“No.”
“Do you want to leave the room?”
Nora shook her head.
Priya opened the file.
Julia appeared propped against hospital pillows. Her hair had grown back thin and gray-blonde after treatment. Oxygen tubing rested beneath her nose. She looked directly at the phone camera, then away.
For several seconds, she adjusted the blanket.
“This is difficult,” she said. “Not because I don’t know what to say. Because I know too many versions.”
Her voice was lower than Clara remembered from the recordings.
“If Clara sees this, Martin finally failed at something useful.”
Nora looked down.
Julia breathed slowly.
“Cece, I tried to imagine you accurately. That was harder than missing you. Missing you allowed me to keep you seven years old, following me into the lake even though you couldn’t swim. Imagining you meant accepting that you grew up with him. That you loved him. That you may have become someone I would not know how to love.”
Clara’s hands tightened in her lap.
“I watched from a distance. That was cruel. I told myself it was caution. Sometimes it was cowardice. Martin lied to us, but he did not control every year. I made choices too.”
She paused to catch her breath.
“I had Nora. I made a life. It was not a false life. Anna was not a mask. She was the person I became when Julia Mercer could not safely exist. I loved being her. I hated needing her. Both are true.”
Nora pulled the blanket higher.
Julia looked toward someone off camera, probably Elena.
“I am not asking you to forgive me. I am asking you not to turn Nora into evidence. She is not proof of what happened to me. She is not compensation for what we lost. She is herself.”
Clara glanced at Nora.
The girl stared at her mother’s image.
“If you meet her, she will test you,” Julia said. “She tests chairs before sitting and people before trusting. Do not reward the testing by failing.”
Nora wiped her nose with the blanket. Elena handed her a tissue.
Julia smiled faintly.
“You will want to fix things with money. That is how our family apologizes without kneeling. Money may be needed. Use it honestly.”
Clara closed her eyes briefly.
“I kept records because I wanted the truth to survive us. But truth is not the same as public destruction. Henry is dead. Mother is dead. Martin is old and frightened and still believes he can file human beings into safe categories. Decide what exposure will protect people and what exposure will only make pain entertaining.”
Priya stopped writing.
May you like
Julia leaned closer to the camera.
“I loved you the whole time. I resented you for being loved where I was not. I was proud of you when I should have been angry and angry when I should have called. I do not know whether that is a good sister’s love. It is the love I had.”
