The One I Left Behind Read Free Page A

Lorraine said, voice calm and matter-of-fact. “Apparently she’s been in and out of a homeless shelter there for the past two years.”
    “But how can . . . How do they know?”
    “She told them. She’s missing her right hand. Finally the police took her fingerprints—they’re a match.”
    Reggie’s heart did a slow, cold drop into her stomach. She closed her eyes and saw it so clearly this time: her mother out on Ricker’s Pond, moving across the ice, doing a perfect figure eight. Then she held out her hand to Reggie and they skated together in the middle of the pond, laughing, cheeks red, their breath making little clouds as the ice shifted and groaned beneath them like a living thing.
    “There’s something else,” Lorraine said, her voice crisp and businesslike as ever. “Your mother’s in the hospital. She’s had a cough for some time and finally consented to a chest X-ray. They suspected pneumonia or TB. They found a large mass. Cancer. She may not have much time.”
    Now Reggie was speechless, trying to digest one insane piece of news after the next. It all felt like a cruel trick. Your mother’s alive. But she’s dying.
    She sank down onto the floor, sitting in spilled coffee.
    “I want you to drive down to Massachusetts and get her, Regina. I want you to bring her back to Monique’s Wish.”
    “Me?”
    “I don’t drive much these days. Cataracts.”
    “But I—” Reggie stammered.
    “I need you to do this,” Lorraine said. Then as if sensing Reggie’s hesitation, she added, “Your mother needs you.”
    Reggie pushed her hair back, fingers finding the scars. “Okay,” she said.
    Home. She was going back home.

Chapter 2
    1976
    Brighton Falls, Connecticut
    R EGGIE’S EARLIEST MEMORY OF her mother began with her mother balancing an egg on its end and ended with Reggie losing her left ear.
    She was five years old and her mother had taken her to a bar on Airport Road. Reggie spun herself on a red vinyl stool, pleased to be working her own trick while Vera performed hers for some newcomer who’d promised to buy her a drink if she could pull it off. Reggie pushed herself round and round, banging her legs gently against her mother’s with each pass, carefully avoiding eye contact with the fellow to her left, with whom her mother had made the bet. He was a swarthy man with bulging eyes who wore oil in his hair and a thin leather jacket that didn’t quite button. His nose had a bump, a slight twist to it, as if it had been broken one too many times. The Boxer, Reggie named him, not saying the words out loud, but in her head.
    The Boxer called Reggie “Champ” and winked one of his froggy eyes at the girl behind her mother’s back while Vera was busy sprinkling salt on the bar.
    The key to the trick was to give the egg something to cling to, to rest in.
     
    R EGGIE’S MOTHER , V ERA D UFRANE , who had perfected the egg trick, bore a striking resemblance to Jayne Mansfield—full busted with a head of thick platinum blond hair spilling over graceful shoulders. She had been homecoming queen and had gone off to New York City after high school in 1969 to pursue a career in acting. To help pay the bills while she got bit parts in off-Broadway plays, she took up modeling. Almost immediately, she became the Aphrodite Cold Cream girl. Her picture was in magazines and department stores across the country. Treat Yourself Like a Goddess, the tagline said. Her sudden fame brought more acting work, including her first leading role since her days as star of the Brighton Falls High Drama Club.
    But just when her career was getting off the ground, Vera abruptly returned to Brighton Falls in the early spring of 1971, moving back into her large and strange childhood home, Monique’s Wish, with her sister, Lorraine (six years her senior), and their father, Andre Dufrane. Andre had been diagnosed with ALS while Vera was in New York, and by the time she moved back into the house, he was in a state of steady