What Tears Us Apart

Chapter 36



January 11, 2008, Malibu, CA—Leda

IT’S JUST AFTER midnight. The clock in Estella’s dining room is ticking. It’s telling Leda, Time does not erase your sins.

The nurses put Estella to bed tonight, her breath dragging in and out of her body like the sea over jagged rocks.

Now that they’ve gone, Leda is alone in the kitchen. She puts her hand on her stomach. Not entirely alone.

Too late. Too late to go back. Too late to escape what happened.

Leda jumps at a sound overhead, a thud that landed directly above where she sits at the kitchen table.

“Mother?” Leda calls, the chair scraping the floor as she finds her feet, heads for the stairs. “Mother,” she calls again at Estella’s door. “I’m coming in.” As she opens the door to the pitch-black room, light from the hallway filters in. The bed is empty.

She runs in to find Estella facedown, sprawled at an odd angle, a few feet away. She crouches beside her, rolls over her mother’s limp body. Her eyes flutter. She’s conscious.

“I’m calling 911.”

Estella tries to speak, but her voice is slippery, bubbling.

“Shhh, it’s okay. You’re okay. Don’t talk.” Leda’s hand fumbles across the nightstand for her mother’s cell.

She dials 911 and returns to Estella’s side. As Leda recites the address for the ambulance, Estella groans, a distorted rumble of agony that makes Leda’s blood run cold.

She studies her mother’s face. One side of her lip is curled down, the other limp. A stroke? “Please hurry,” Leda says and hangs up the phone. She pulls Estella into her lap and remembers how she did the same with Ita, how her hair draped over his broken face as she pleaded with God not to make him suffer for what she had done. Not to make him suffer for her sins.