Bittersweet Wreckage Read online

  Remains. The word refused to wither in my mind. Bodily remains to be exact. Something had happened to Dad. What? Confusion tore at my intestines. Had I dreamed the early morning wake-up call? Why hadn’t Mom awakened me to tell me if he was hurt or, dare I say, dead? Surely, she would’ve awoken me if it was bad and not waited until seven. Tears welled up again, loosening the dried gunk. I rubbed my eyes, trying to hide the evidence of my mini-breakdown. From the gritty, sandpaper feel, I knew red lines mapped the whites of my eyes. Maybe Mom would believe the red stemmed from staying up too late. I certainly didn’t plan to tell her how much my relief had trampled my grief after returning to bed earlier that morning. She might understand how I felt due to her own circumstances. Or she might find me a callous twit who needed a heart transplant.

  “Ivy,” Mom called outside my door. “Come to the kitchen. I need to talk to you.”

  Something more than drugs had captured her slow, succinct voice. Finding her awake so early was another omen that our lives walked a path of change.

  “Be right there.” My breathy tone sounded too alert, too hopeful. “Argh.” I scratched my scalp, stifling my frustration. What was my problem?

  Bunching the covers in my fist, I hesitated to commence a day that may signify the beginning of a new book of my life. A sudden bout of fright skipped my heartbeat. Maybe I’d heard wrong? What if something had happened to Kristen, not my father? I flung the covers off and stretched my sore toes, rubbing my right side. I ran down the stairs, nearly tumbling the last four steps. Every step I took, I dreaded bumping into my father, standing alive and well, taunting me for my lack of grace, or riding my butt for breaking the vase, or some other slight his bulldog mind had conjured up. Mornings never launched with “Good morning, loving daughter.” They usually started with “Get me another cup of coffee,” or “go get the newspaper,” or “watch what you’re doing.” On Saturdays, he’d hand me a list of a gazillion chores, first and foremost to wash his pride-and-joy car. He’d probably already tacked the list to the bulletin board in the kitchen.

  The hallway’s cool tiles were like ice on my soles. Mom hadn’t opened the kitchen blinds yet and only the under-cabinet lights lit the darkened room. She hunched over the table, her hands hugging a cup of coffee, which was cool judging by the appearance of the cream congealing on top.

  I touched her arm and she jumped. Her head whipped up and her pale face met mine. No red lines mapped her vacant eyes. Tiny crow’s feet bracketed them, her face scrubbed of all makeup. “Is Kristen okay?”

  “She’s fine. I called her. She’ll be here later today. I think. I don’t remember what she said.” Listlessly, she waved at a chair. “Sit.”

  I sat across from her, my back rigid against the hard wood of the dining chair. “Was someone at the door earlier this morning?” My childlike tone was unable to dampen the wreck of emotions I had a hard time naming. “Is Dad still sleeping?” I folded my arms over my chest, bracing for the answer, mentally punching down that relief toying with my subconscious.

  A tear skidded down Mom’s right cheek and dripped onto the table. I waited for another, but a second tear didn’t spill.

  She held my gaze. “It was the police. There’s been an accident, a fire on your father’s sailboat outside the harbor. The boat was destroyed.”

  My breath hitched, threatened to close off my air supply. “Oh.” I gulped. “Dad’s gonna be pissed.” Shudders rocketed up from my toes and spread to my fingers. No one messes with his prized belongings. Crap was going to hit the fan and splatter all over me. The Ivy Spitini may not help either of us. Well, it might help me brush off Dad’s ranting easier if I drank one.

  “Ivy.” Mom gloved my hand, her palm cold and dry. “Are you listening to me?”

  I winced at the pain stabbing my bruised side. “What did you say? Does he know yet? What can we do to smooth it over?”

  “Honey, your father… was on the boat,” she said. I narrowed my eyes, tilted my head. She whispered so low I had to strain to catch her words, “He didn’t make it off the boat.” She buried her face in her hands.

  “What?” I breathed in and out slowly. I understood what I’d heard earlier, but I needed to hear the news from her mouth, needed to grasp that I hadn’t dreamed it. “What does that mean?”

  She drew her head out of her hands, not a tear in sight, not an ounce of sorrow, just pale passivity, her doormat mask. She rose and shuffled toward me, hanging onto the table edge until she fell into my clinging embrace. “So sorry. He’s… he’s… dead. By the time the coast guard reached the boat, flames engulfed it. He didn’t make it off.” She blubbered and sniffed, her words barely decipherable. Her day drugs must’ve kicked in. “They found his… body in the remains of the fire.”

  There was that word again. Remains. “That doesn’t make sense,” I yelled. Neither his death, nor my grief had sunk in. Even my relief paced the sidelines of my tangled thoughts. “If he awoke to flames, he jumped off the boat!” I swiveled to the bulletin board to refute her absurd claims. No chore list in sight.

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Mom leaned on me, and I pushed against her to keep her from smashing me into roadkill onto the floor. She stumbled against the table, knocking the mug over. Coffee puddled on the wood tabletop, dripped off the edge, and splashed onto the floor. With all my strength, I heaved her up into the side chair. She did a face-plant onto the tabletop.

  “You still with me?” I pinched her arm, trying to raise life out of the dregs of her drugs.

  “He’s gone, Ivy. Dead. The coast guard believes they passed out from drinking or drugs. They don’t know for sure. They’ll have to investigate.”

  “They?” I pinched my hand repeatedly.

  “They found him… his body… in the arms of a woman.” Mom’s eyes closed and her soft snores filled the deafening silence of our doom, no, our salvation. I smelled the taboo alcohol on her breath, in her coffee. Celebrating or grieving? Or had she reached DEFCON 10 and self-medicated to kill her anger?

  Numb, I slid back in my chair. I think I’d cried all the tears my father had ever earned earlier that morning. Now I had to suck it up and deal with the aftermath—not only of his death, but the fact that my father wasn’t who he’d appeared to be. I’d never sensed him lying to my mother. A mistress? He never had time for hookups in his rocket ride up the corporate ladder. None of it made sense. Unless he’d lied about everything.

  I shook her shoulders. “Mom, Mom. Wake up!”

  She moaned, and my rise of panic settled into a temporary cache. She appeared okay from mixing her drugs and the bit of alcohol in her coffee, most of which pooled on the floor.

  “Did you know about this woman?” How long had he betrayed her? Us? “Did you know about her? Who was the bitch?”

  “Don’t know.” She slurred her words. “She wasn’t the first.”

  In that moment, pure hatred for my father journeyed to a throbbing in my temples.

  That relief pacing the sidelines strutted onto the waiting field of my heart. Did I just experience a crumb of freedom for the first time in my life? My head cleared as my reality turned a twisted, bittersweet corner.

  Chapter 4

  The phone rang, startling me out of my bizarre trance. Mom snored on, the sound of reality in my world of confusion. I sprang up from the dinette chair and grabbed the cordless off the wall unit.

  “Hello?” I heaved out a cough, trying to clear my thick throat.

  “Ivy?” Kristen’s shaky voice untied a knot in my neck.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she echoed.

  A long pause ensued. I itched to plug in a quarter to give Kristen a boost.

  “How’s Mom?” she finally asked.

  “Drugged, sleeping in la-la land.” I exhaled a bitter sigh. “Are you coming home? I can’t deal with her like this… with everything. I need you here.” I propped my shoulder against the pantry cabinets, suddenly feeling small and insignificant, a bug on a dragon’s
back.

  “That’s why I’m calling. Mom wanted my flight information. I texted flight times to you both and you haven’t replied.”

  I dug Mom’s phone out of the junk drawer. “Got it here. Do you need a ride?”

  “I’ll snag a car.” Another weird beat of silence slapped me upside the head. “Ivy? You okay?”

  “I don’t know.” I squeezed down more tears. “He’s dead, Kristen. Gone. It’s over.”

  Kristen’s sniffling echoed through the speakerphone. “I know. Now what?” Airport speakers in the background drowned out her voice.

  “Just come home.” I hung up, the cabinets the single support holding me up, and Mom’s cell the only thing giving me perspective.

  Where had Mom run off to last night? Did she have something to do with the boat fire? What was the significance of the marina? I banged my forehead against the pantry door. What new purgatory promised to dominate and wreck our lives?

  Staring at her phone, my relief over erasing the text and calendar entry swamped me. I still needed a CSI checklist to investigate her phone further. First, we needed to deal with the day, make calls and arrangements. In all my wildest dreams of escaping the Lynwood House of Horrors, my father’s death had never triggered my freedom. I joked about The Burning Bed, but I never expected in a million years he’d die by fire. Goosebumps skittered up from my toes, ending in my brain’s hazy guilt receptors.

  I lifted my dragon pendant to my face, stared at it and the dandelion etching. “Did we do this?” I sank to the floor and tucked my knees under my chin. The phone clunked onto the tiles. My morning’s vivid dream rushed back and I became that bird again, sitting on top of the cage in a field of dandelions. Not quite ready to fly away. Free at last, but at what price?

  Eons later, Mom’s panicked voice joggled my numb mind. “Ivy? Did you wash your father’s car? You know you have to wash it before the sun gets too high and the water spots.” She lurched off the wooden chair and slid through the puddle of congealing coffee, landing hard on her butt, a cry of pain elevating to the high ceiling.

  Sun seeped in slants through the blinds, painting bright shimmery lines on the tiles. We collapsed together on the floor, idiot savants minus the savant part.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” She rubbed her butt. “What did I slip in?”

  “Coffee and whatever kicker you added.” I thrust her phone in my nightshirt pocket. Far as I knew, she’d lost her phone on the marina somewhere, or at her fake canasta party. Drugs will never tell.

  I opened the blinds. Sunlight beamed morning brilliance inside the room, lighting the immaculate kitchen, glinting off the sparkling crystals in the granite counter. Somehow, the sun felt wrong and I expected bleak gray skies. “I thought you didn’t mix alcohol and pills?”

  She rinsed out the coffee pot, sloshing water over the counters. “Just this once.” Her mollified voice gave me no small amount of disgust. “I needed something stronger.” She slammed down the coffee pot and the glass cracked on the granite. “I need to lie down. I didn’t sleep last night.”

  “Someone needs to make phone calls and… arrangements. What about Dad’s party tomorrow night? I’m not serving a bunch of corporate brownnosers while they trip around the house sniffing at you like a bitch in heat. A widowed bitch now.”

  “Watch your tongue, Ivy. Just because he’s not in the room doesn’t mean you can use language like that.”

  “He’s dead, Mom. Roadkill. Never coming back.”

  Wide-eyed and snarling, she lurched at me, freezing in limbo as I held up my hands to block her, knowing she’d never touch me. Not like him. “I know. I get it.” Spit flew onto my face, and her arms dangled at her sides, rubber doormat lifeless.

  Our seething became tangible in the air, a stop-payment stamp on our reality. Death did weird crap to people, to the living and to the barely living. It created monsters in us when his death should’ve created joy and relief, sad as it sounded. We’d left unsaid the circumstances of his death, his dead whore, and years of lies, manipulations, and abuse. Part of me hated her for knowing he’d been screwing around. The other part wrapped arms around my grieving mother, knowing how badly the walking devil had hurt her when all she’d wanted was his love, affection, and respect.

  I broke the silence. “Who do we call?” Ghostbusters? “Do you have to identify him or something?” I kept clutching my necklace, begging my dragon to slip a quarter into my clue jar. Mom had no capacity to pony it up in the fragility of her drug-addled, grief-stricken self.

  Sobbing, she dropped her face in her hands, shoulders shaking uncontrollably. “I… I can’t deal with it,” she blubbered. “I need a nap. Please, call Melody and tell her to cancel the party.”

  Oh, yes. Let’s get his admin on the hook. Time for her to step up and plug in for a change. “Great idea.” I wrapped my arm around her waist and steered her out of the kitchen. “We’ll figure out what to do in a few hours.” Hopefully sober. Someday you’ll find yourself and wish you hadn’t.

  She held me fiercely, giving my hollowness small comfort. “Thank you, honey.”

  Without bashing her head into the wrought iron banister or toppling down the stairs in a heap of limbs and sorrow, she tripped up the stairs to her bedroom. The gut feeling that I’d end up doing everything washed over me, sending me to the kitchen to finish making the coffee, cracked pot notwithstanding. My liquid fuel, doctored with half a cup of cream, sugar, and chocolate syrup.

  Just as I sat in front of the TV with my cup of energy nestled in my hands, the phone rang again.

  “Hello?” I squeaked out, fighting the urge to hang up and bury my head in the sand.

  “Hello, who am I speaking with?” I recognized the voice of my dad’s boss, Nicholas Legends, the CEO of the Praise Be to Jesus Tech Corporation that had spawned my father into Jerkville. I tapped my forehead against the wall. Aspirin might be on my menu later.

  “Hello?” Mr. Legends said again, unsure and gruff. Did he mourn my father, or hate the position my father had left him in? One vice-president down, how many more to go?

  “This is Ivy, Leo’s daughter.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I’ve heard some disturbing news… about a boat fire?”

  Why, me too! What a coincidence. I bet your disturbance is quite different than mine. I set my cup aside before I flung it into oblivion. What is wrong with me? “Yes.”

  He paused, coughed. “Were your parents on board?”

  How did I answer his question without instigating a mega rumor mill? I let the phone slip into the crook between my ear and shoulder.

  “Ivy?”

  “I’m here,” I said softly. “It was my father. He was killed in the fire.” No sense in sugarcoating it or mentioning the mystery woman. Maybe Mr. Legends of no legends knew her identity. Maybe she wasn’t a secret from my father’s co-workers. Maybe she worked at the company too.

  “My sincerest condolences. How are you coping? I hate to ask, but what about your mother?”

  Whoa, dude. Take a breather. “Thank you, Mr. Legends. I’m okay. Do you mean to ask if my mother was on the boat?” That evil thread my father had nurtured inside me lashed out.

  He hemmed and hawed. I imagined his fake-baked tanned face mottling into various shades of red, sweat forming beneath his ego-stroking rug and dripping off the end of his nose.

  I saved him from me. “My mother’s resting. She’s had a hard night.”

  “I see.” Another fumbling hesitation grew, and I let it play out until he asked, “Can I do anything for you or your mother? I’ll have a basket sent over.”

  I had an inkling he wanted to ask about the Other Woman. I gave no quarter. “Yes, please. Can you contact Melody and call off his corporate wine and dine party tomorrow?”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll move it to another location. Important clients from London. Very big deal. We mustn’t miss this opportunity.”

  My mouth hung agape. “Seriously? My dad
just died and you’re moving his party to another location?” My scorn refused to be caged. “Do you want my mother and me to play hostess to the very important London clients too?” I clicked off the phone and tossed it on the coffee table. Stupid insensitive bastard. If ignorance and disrespect are bliss, you must be the happiest person alive.

  Had I become a hypocrite? Wanting my father gone, not wanting the mourning process overshadowed by corporate shindigs, mega-deals, and protocol?

  Tears came fast and furious. The phone rang and rang as the news went viral, people calling to offer their condolences, to extend a helping hand, or to offer a plate of pity for my mother, left alone for the first time in her life. Numb, I slid sideways on the couch in the family room and let our voicemail pick up the messages. High-pitched cartoon voices from the TV became my white noise, drowning out the summer birds chirping and singing from the trees in our meticulously groomed backyard, tweeting their hellos to the new reign.

  After an hour dodging calls and listing in the void, I went through the motions of cleaning the kitchen again, not that it needed it after my housekeeping stint last night. Halfway through mopping the floor, I glanced at the bulletin board, hunting for Dad’s chore list again. When the kitchen sparkled more than a diamond-encrusted tiara, I plodded upstairs, changed into shorts and an oversized T-shirt, and went into the garage to wash his new car. The absence of the convertible tugged on something deep inside me. Tears filled my eyes and I forced my sight away from the empty slot in the four-car garage and plowed onward. Nothing seemed right except following my Saturday routine.

  Chapter 5

  I was slicking tire dressing on the tires of Dad’s black Porsche when Mom’s cell buzzed against my butt. The neighbor’s yellow tabby head-butted my ankle. Normally, he’d be risking his life by being in the garage. Rex—his real name was Rutherford, but I replaced his snooty name with Rex from Rachel Morgan’s world in my fantasy books—knew something was up. Were cats psychic? He usually bolted at every sound, fearing Dad’s whip-cracking rants, but he’d kept me company since I started cleaning the car two hours ago. I honestly thought the cat crapped in our yard just to tick my dad off, a little cat and mouse game, wherein Rex played the crazy mouse.