She rose, leaned down, and kissed her mother’s soft, pale cheek.
She lightly patted her mother’s hair, so very thin now, her scalp
showing here and there. It was the drugs, a nurse had told her. It
happened. Such a beautiful woman, her mother had been, tall and
fair, her hair that unusual pale blond that had no other colors in it.
Her mother was still beautiful, but she was so still now, almost as if
she were already gone. No, Becca wouldn’t leave her. The guy
would have to kill her to make her leave her mother.
She didn’t realize she was crying again until a nurse pressed a
Kleenex into her hand. “Thank you,” she said, not looking away
from her mother.
“Go home and get some sleep, Becca,” the nurse said, her voice
quiet and calm. “I’ll keep watch. Go get some sleep.”
There’s no one else in the world for me, Becca thought, as she walked
away from Lenox Hill Hospital. I’ll be alone when Mom dies.
Her mother died that night. She just drifted away, the doctor
told her, no pain, no awareness of death. An easy passing. Ten minutes
after the call, the phone rang again.
This time she didn’t pick it up. She put her mothers apartment on
the market the following day, spent the night in a hotel under an assumed
name, and made all the funeral arrangements from there. She
called her mother’s friends to invite them to the small, private service.
A day and a half later, Becca threw the first clot of rich, dark
earth over her mother’s coffin. She watched as the black dirt mixed
with the deep red roses on top of the coffin. She didn’t cry, but all
of her mother’s friends were quietly weeping. She accepted a hug
from each of them. It was still very hot in New York, too hot for
the middle of June.
When she returned to her hotel room the phone was ringing.
Without thinking, she picked it up.
“You tried to get away from me, Rebecca. I don’t like that.”
She’d had it. She’d been pushed too hard. Her mother was dead,
there was nothing to stay her hand. “I nearly caught you the other
day, at One Police Plaza, you pathetic coward. You jerk, did you
wonder what I was doing there? I was blowing the whistle on you,
you murderer. Yeah, I saw you, all right. You had on that ridiculous
baseball cap and that dark blue sweatshirt. Next time I’ll get you
and then I’ll shoot you right between your crazy eyes.”
“It’s you the cops think is crazy. I’m not even a blip on their
radar. Hey, I don’t even exist.” His voice grew deeper, harder. “Stop
sleeping with the governor or I’ll kill him just like I did that stupid
old bag lady. I’ve told you that over and over but you haven’t listened
to me. I know he’s visited you in New York. Everyone
knows it. Stop sleeping with him.”
She started laughing and couldn’t seem to stop. She did only
when he began yelling at her, calling her a whore, a stupid bitch,
and more curses, some of them extraordinarily vicious.
She hiccuped. “Sleep with the governor? Are you nuts? He’s
married. He has three children, two of them older than I am.” And
then, because it no longer mattered, because he might not really
exist anyway, she said, “The governor sleeps with every woman he
can talk into that private room off his office. I’d have to take a
number. You want them all to stop sleeping with him? It’ll keep
you busy until the next century and that’s a very long time away.”
“It’s just you, Rebecca. You’ve got to stop sleeping with him.”
“Listen to me, you stupid jerk. I would only sleep with the governor
if world peace were in the balance. Even then it would be a
very close call.”
The creep actually sighed. “Don’t lie, Rebecca. Just stop, do you
hear me?”
“I can’t stop something I’ve never even done.”
“It’s a shame,” he said, and for the first time, he hung up on her.
That night the governor was shot through the neck outside