Neri unzipped the top part of the coveralls, revealing a white tee. “We found a bottle of whiskey in the car. Empty, cap off.”
The laughter after the drinks, the weaving steps, the need for her son to put her to bed, her breath heavy with an overpowering sweetness—memories as much a part of my childhood as the shouts and the screams and the expensive cakes my mother would bring home on impulse simply because they were my favorite.
There was just one problem. “My mother drank, often to excess, but she never touched whiskey. She said she’d rather drink horse piss.”
No flinch from Constable Neri. “People who drink to excess have a tendency to take what’s available.”
“My father’s bar was always stocked with plenty of vodka.” A standing order placed by my mother. “Some of the bottles from ten years ago are probably still there. He’s the one who drinks whiskey. Can’t stand vodka.”
A stillness to her now, the watchfulness even more intense. I thought of Paige again, how she’d sit in her favorite balcony armchair and look at me, as if trying to see through my skin, through my skull.
“What exactly are you saying?” Neri asked.
I shrugged. “Only that if she wanted to drink, it didn’t have to be whiskey.”
The SOCOs carrying the bones of my mother had reached the roadside. They placed those bones in a dark gray vehicle I hadn’t even realized was a hearse, it was so discreet and ordinary-looking.
Soon, I would send those bones into a crematorium fire.
“Scatter my ashes in the mountains of home,” she’d said to me once, while we’d been sitting outside a holiday cottage with a view of the soaring snow-kissed Southern Alps. As the sky blazed with the rage of sunset, she’d laid her head on my shoulder and her hand on my thigh, her voice slurring from the alcohol as she said, “When I’m dead, take me back to India. If I was ever happy, it was in my glorious Hindustan.”
Maybe I would. Or maybe I’d leave her in a small box hidden in the attic. Forgotten. All she’d done erased from existence.
I turned away from the bones just as the crane groaned.
It had settled into position, the hanging hook now so deep inside the trees that it had disappeared from sight. Neither of us spoke as we waited for it to reemerge. It took time. The sling being attached securely, then tested. The various straps being double-checked. Even though I knew my mother’s remains were no longer in the Jaguar, my brain visualized a macabre scene in which the sling broke, bones scattering all over the forest floor.
“You didn’t find the vehicle today, did you?” The forensic process would never be this quick for a body discovered buried in the bush.
“No,” Neri admitted. “We were alerted to it yesterday. Getting to the site took a while as it’s untouched native bush, not part of any trail. Then we had to trace the vehicle. There was no point in doing the notification until we were fairly certain the remains had to be your mother’s.”
All that must’ve been done quietly, by walking into the bush via another route. No cars and hearses and cranes to tip off the public.
“Did you find a smaller ring? It would’ve been on her left pinky finger. Plain silver stamped with the image of a butterfly.”
A slight pursing of her lips, but she seemed to rethink the automatic refusal, and went over to talk to one of the forensic techs. He pulled out what looked like a tablet, and they bent their heads over it.
When she returned, she shook her head. “The car windows weren’t fully closed.”
Animal activity.
It was something I’d researched for my moribund second novel.
A small ring could’ve been easily lost . . . especially if a scavenger had decided to feed on my mother’s long, slender fingers.
My stomach roiled.
“The SOCOs, did, however, recover a third ring.”
Taking out my phone, I scrolled through the pictures I kept in a special folder. I’d transferred them from phone to phone over the years. Photos of her. For memory. For identification. Because I heard a scream that night. Because my father is a bastard who was banging his secretary back then.
“One of these?” I zoomed in on an image of her hand holding a flute of champagne.
Diamonds glittered under the light of that long-ago charity gala, my mother’s skintight dress a shock of red sequins that covered her with perfect wifely sweetness. She’d saved the plunging vee for the back, the styled tumble of her soft black curls sliding cross the smooth canvas of her skin as she twirled in my room prior to heading out.
“Your father’s going to lose his shit,” she’d said with a wicked grin before leaning down to kiss me where I sat sprawled in bed, my headphones around my neck. “Eat your dinner, Ari. I made it just for you—and I don’t want to see burger wrappers in the trash when I get back. Suna?”
Her scent had hung thick in the air of my room, ripe in my lungs, until I’d gotten up to push open the sliding doors to the balcony. Sometimes, I hadn’t been able to breathe around my mother, her love a snake that crushed me. But I’d eaten the dinner she’d made, and I’d grinned when she’d asked someone to take this photograph, then sent it to me.
See? she’d written.
The black of my father’s tuxedo was just visible in the background of the shot, and even though the photographer had been focused on my mother, they’d nonetheless caught the edge of his thunderous expression.
Neri looked carefully at the image before nodding, the movement wafting over a scent that wasn’t all forest and death. I’d smelled that scent in the hair of a girl I’d dated at university. Coconut oil infused with frangipani.
“The square sapphire,” Neri said.
“Birthday gift.” I had no idea how many rings she was wearing that rainy night ten years ago; my mother had been a woman who liked her fingers to sparkle. But the unfashionable pinky ring . . . She’d never taken that off. Not since the day I gave it to her when I was fourteen.
Happy Mother’s Day, Mum. I love you.
Her face had crumpled at the card and the sight of the ring. I’d mowed lawns all summer to buy it. She’d put on that ring—such a cheap thing in comparison to the other rocks on her fingers—and never taken it off. Not even when she’d mumbled drunkenly about how she wished she could live her life all over again, start anew.
Without a child—and definitely without a husband.
She’d never remembered those conversations in the morning, never recalled that she’d wished me out of existence. I remembered each and every poisonous word, each and every verbal blow. But I also remembered the handmade meals and the butterfly ring she’d worn proudly to galas and political dinners and champagne brunches.