Chapter Eighteen

Monday passed in a blur. I broke into my mom’s apartment again and cleaned out her fridge. I did a small grocery shop and restocked her kitchen for when she’d be home later in the week.

I called Mr. Gupta, explained that my mother was dealing with a medical situation and begged for her to be allowed to come back to work next week. Of course the poor man agreed. I suspected he knew more than he let on about our little family struggle. She’d been working for him for almost fourteen years now. She started at his firm about the same time I started college.

As I did a load of laundry and put fresh sheets on her bed, I took a lot of deep, calming breaths. If only I’d done more of that at the end of the Bad Time.

For much of high school I was too afraid to leave Kat alone with my mother at night. What if Kat got sick or scared while I was gone? My mother was usually in no condition to provide help or comfort. What if there were a fire in the apartment building while they were both asleep? What if one of the neighbors dropped by unexpectedly and discovered our family’s dirty little secret?

My anxiety meant that I was always home and desperate for a distraction. I haunted the local branch of the Chicago Public Library, stocking up on books and tearing through their outdated inventory of rental DVDs. Except for the one blessed month where I figured out how to steal our neighbor’s HBO, we couldn’t afford cable. So, studying became my default evening activity. Everything else in my life felt so out of control—but my grades weren’t. They were the one thing I could control completely. I’d always been competitive. And with no opportunity to play sports, beating my classmates’ test scores became the one way I could shine.

My high GPA and SAT scores got me into several name-brand universities across the country, but there was no way in hell I was leaving my twelve-year-old sister alone with my mother to go to school in some other state.

It was actually the arrival of college that forced the confrontation between my mother and myself, the one that finally changed things.

I’d gotten a scholarship to esaul University in the city, and though it was far from ideal, I knew I could manage the trains to take classes on campus and live at home in our apartment in Glenview. But no matter how I squeezed my schedule, I couldn’t make it mesh with Kat’s. I couldn’t be there to drop her off and pick her up. I couldn’t make her volleyball games. I certainly couldn’t make both breakfast and dinner.

I knew in my ancient-feeling eighteen-year-old bones that I’d hit an end. I wasn’t going to give up college, but there was no way to keep going on as I was. I was so tired.

On an unusually warm day in June, two weeks after my high school graduation, I took Kat out of the city to a week-long sleep away camp. As soon as I left her in good hands with the camp counselors, I drove to a tattoo parlor and handed over the picture of the anchor. It was agony to get that thing carved into my back, but I already knew it would hurt less than what was coming.

When I returned to the apartment in the evening, I entered my mom’s bedroom without knocking. She’d recently added drinking to her repertoire, and that night she looked up at me with a glass of vodka in her hand. “What?”

No niceties, no preamble. “If you do not seek medical treatment immediately, I am taking Kat and moving out.”

A sneer formed on her lips, but it quickly disappeared when I said, “You are an unfit parent, and I will not leave her in this house with you when I start college. I will begin proceedings to become her legal guardian.” Then I fibbed a little. “I’ve consulted a family lawyer, who assures me I have a solid case.”

“How could you do that?” She stared at me. Her eyes were so dark I couldn’t separate her pupils from the irises. Her voice was like a croak, and it seemed to take great effort for her to speak at all. “Tess, you have no idea what I’m going through. If you did, you’d never threaten me by taking my one joy, my baby, away from me.”

I wondered when it was exactly that I stopped being a joy, when I stopped being her baby too.

I ignored everything: her words, her tears, her obvious wall of pain. “Tonight. You commit yourself to the hospital tonight. Otherwise, I’ll pick Kat up from camp next week and we’ll take a nice summer road trip before I move us into an apartment in the city near my school.”

“Kat would never agree to that,” my mother said, taking a shaking sip of her drink. “She loves me. She’d hate living away from me.”

She was right. Kat loved her beyond reason, more than anyone or anything in the world. She thought my mother was the kindest, funniest, most beautiful person in existence. She would have forgiven her absolutely anything.

But I knew my mother’s illness wouldn’t let her believe that. If I’d learned anything from the dozens of articles I’d read on depression by then, I’d learned that it was a big fat liar. So I used that to my advantage and twisted the knife.

I laughed loudly. “Really? Even after I tell her the truth about your ‘migraines’? You think she’s going to forgive you for these years? Where you’ve chosen—you’ve made the choice—to lock yourself in here? You’ve never even gone to one of her volleyball games. Did you know she’s had her first kiss and that the guy was a total dips hit after? She got her period six months ago, by the way. She has terrible cramps every month, but she didn’t want to worry you. For Christ’s sake, Mother, you slept through her last birthday!”

I’d meant to be calm, but suddenly I was screaming. “Do you think she will forgive you?”

My mother was sobbing so hard she’d dropped the drink on the bed and it was seeping through the sheets.

I got control of myself and cleared my burning throat. “She doesn’t need to know,” I whispered. “If you come with me tonight and let me check you in for psychiatric inpatient treatment, if you do whatever the doctors say for as long as they say…I’ll never tell her. We’ll stay here. I won’t take her away.”

Faced with losing Kat, she caved. She went to the hospital with me.

We’ve never talked about that night. I know part of her, a large part, is grateful I forced her to get the help she needed. But another part of her will always be angry about how I did it, at how I used what she loved most against her. What she doesn’t know is how angry I was—and will always be—with myself for doing it that way too.

Talking about this night with my therapist was the most painful session in my treatment. “Caregiver burnout is a real thing, Tess,” she’d explained softly. “In fact, it’s its own trauma.”

I wasn’t sure about that, but I did know that getting my mother and me to the point where we walked through the hospital doors that night took the temper out of me for a long time. Tess, the bossy, cheeky fighter, disappeared for years.

Now, after I carried my mother’s trash to the garbage cans behind the apartment building, I pulled out my phone and called her doctor.

Dr. Gelhorn reassured me that my mother was doing very well at the hospital. She’d be doing two group therapy sessions and one private session with Dr. G every day she was there. Dr. G planned to see her three times a week after she was released as well. “I’ve also temporarily increased the dosage on her medication,” she informed me. “That’s worked well in the past when she’s had less severe episodes.”

That piqued my interest a little; when had she relapsed before? But I knew Dr. G wouldn’t be able to tell me. And God knew my mother had never seen fit to confide in me when she needed help. “Should I come to the hospital to see her?” I crossed my fingers, hoping Dr. G would say no.

She hesitated. “That’s your choice, Tess.”

Aha. “She doesn’t want to see me,” I stated flatly. I didn’t want to see her either—at all—but it stung anyway.

“You know she’s intensely private about her illness,” she conceded.

Fine. I’d just check on her via phone in a day or two. It wasn’t like I didn’t have things to do.

On Tuesday, I was at the office by 7:00 a.m. I absolutely hated unplanned days out, and I wanted a few quiet hours to catch up on emails and get settled. After an hour or so, my cell rang. When I answered, it was to my lawyer’s no-nonsense voice. “Tess? It’s Natasha Long. Thought you might want a brief update on your case.”

“Oh. Yes, please,” I said, surprised. I’d been so focused on Max and our plan to hack the Sex Ghost’s site this upcoming Friday night that I’d almost forgotten I was also pursuing legal options.

“No luck on identifying him from the hotel,” she said briskly. “We’ve also tried to communicate with the hosting sites overseas, but no one has responded.”

I inhaled deeply through my nose. “No progress then. Kind of what we anticipated.”

“Pretty much,” she admitted. “However, we did find one other piece of interesting information. One of his video subjects, the one he called his San Francisco Treat? She was using a fake ID the night she met him at a bar. She was only sixteen. Like the other case I mentioned, someone linked to her video from Facebook. When she found out about the sex tape being posted and went to the cops, a John Doe warrant was issued. In that situation, it was not only NCP, it was statutory rape.”

I didn’t understand the legal terminology. “What’s a John Doe warrant?”

“It’s an arrest warrant for an individual whose name is not known. The warrant can be issued by a judge when a person is known by sight but not by name.”

OK, that made sense. And I was happy to hear there was a warrant out for his ass, but I couldn’t see how this related to my case. “Is that helpful?”

“Only if we found him in person,” she admitted. “If we did, he could be arrested ASAP without any other immediate steps from us. And if he were arrested, I’m sure his lawyer would advise him to immediately take his site down. It’s a long shot though, since we have no way of anticipating where he’ll be.”

At that moment, Max paused in the entrance to my office. He was wearing the navy suit he wore the first night we met, which meant that his interview must be today. When he saw I was on the phone, he grinned and waved. Flustered, I broke eye contact and swiveled my chair so my back was turned until I heard his footsteps move down the hall.

I’d managed to push our Sunday night interlude out of my mind for a whole day, but the memories were coming back now with a vengeance. I couldn’t believe I’d been so open and broken in front of him. No one had seen me like that in my entire adult life. I felt like an insect that had been kicked on its back to flail around, unable to right myself, and with my weak and squishy parts exposed to the world.

I forced my concentration back to Natasha’s last words. “Is there any sort of, um, alert that we should do? Some sort of heads-up we could send out to police departments in major cities?” Even as the words left my lips, I cringed. He was a criminal, a complete raving asshole, but he wasn’t Ted Bundy. I doubted a national team of crack cops would assemble because a good-looking jerk was able to convince girls to sleep with him.

“I’ll think about that, but I doubt it,” she said, a wisp of apology in her voice. “I wish there was more we could do for you, Tess.”

I appreciated her words, but there was a note of resignation in them I didn’t like. I sure hadn’t given up yet. Max better be as good a hacker as advertised.

Later that morning, I was finishing up a quick status meeting with Abigail in her cube when Max and our HR director exited a nearby conference room. That would have been the first leg of his interview. This afternoon he’d meet with another senior project manager and then with Paul and Jack Sorenson for the tougher questions.

“Max is smiling,” Abigail whispered. “It must have gone well. He’s the last one to interview, you know. I saw two other people wearing suits in that room with Paul and the others yesterday.”

Paul popped out of his office and called my name. “Can we meet in five minutes?” We had a lot to catch up on, including the Away-Ho meeting from Friday afternoon. I’d been both amused and annoyed to find an email from sales this morning, letting me know that Zack Morris would be onsite this afternoon to begin contract discussions. In terms of my possible promotion, it would look good to Jack that Morris wasn’t wasting any time signing with us, but I was definitely not looking forward to spending more time with him.

I gave Paul a thumbs-up, and he wandered into the break room for his daily 10:00 a.m. cup of coffee. Max sat down in the next cube, his temp office space. I felt a sudden need to look down at my phone and scroll through Twitter instead of making eye contact.

“Well?” Abigail demanded.

“One down, two to go,” he said easily. Oh man, I could feel his eyes on my face. Or maybe that was the sensory memory of how he’d stroked my cheek on Sunday night. “How are you, Tess? We missed you yesterday.”

I stood quickly, my face growing hot. “Fine, thanks, see you later. Got to meet with Paul.” Without looking at him at all, I fled down the hall.

Paul and I met for more than an hour. When I left his office, I avoided walking by the programmers’ area even though that meant I had to loop around the entire floor to get back to my office another way. My phone buzzed as soon as I sat down. A text from Max read: Are you being weird because I’ve seen you naked or because I’ve seen you upset?

I had to laugh. And, frankly, I would prefer to have this conversation while not looking at his face. Because you’ve seen me upset, obviously. Half the office has seen me naked. Completely false. Until Max, I’d never hooked up with someone at work. At the holiday party last year, I’d slapped a drunk guy from the help desk who’d tried to kiss me while holding up his personal, portable mistletoe. This company, this job, was the most stable thing I had. Long ago, I’d decided to never risk my comfort here for a quick bang with a coworker.

I refused to think about what it meant that I’d known Max would be a possible coworker when I slept with him.

How long will your freak-out last, do you think? Can you get over it by lunch time? Potbelly’s? Meet you there at 12:30?

Oh, fine. Might as well. I was going to need to get used to him again by Friday night anyway.