Just Like Mother

by Anne Heltzel

Genres: Gothic

Synopsis

The last time Maeve saw her cousin was the night she escaped the cult they were raised in. For two decades, Maeve has worked hard to build a normal life in New York City, where she keeps everything - and everyone - at a safe distance. When Andrea suddenly reappears, Maeve regains the only true friend she's ever had. Soon she's spending more and more time at Andrea's remote Catskills estate, not minding that her cousin's wealthy work friends clearly disapprove of her single lifestyle. After all, Andrea has made her fortune in the fertility industry - baby fever comes with the territory. What worries Maeve is that the more she immerses herself in Andrea's world, the more her long-buried memories flood to the surface. But confronting the terrors of her childhood may be the only way for Maeve to transcend the nightmare still to come. . .

Release date: May 17, 2022

Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

Print pages: 336

Sample

PROLOGUE

Mother with the lazy eye spoons soup into our bowls. “Eat up,” she says. She smiles, and the eye rolls outward, landing on the crow on the windowsill before it rolls back in. My cousin and I lift our spoons to our mouths and swallow. The other girls—Susie and Beth and Frances and Gloria—are still too little for meals with us. They nurse of the Mothers’ milk in the bedrooms. I dip a crust of bread into my soup until it softens enough to chew. Mother doesn’t like it when Andrea and I don’t finish our lunch.

There is a thud, thud, thud from the room next door and wild grunts like pigs at the trough. Our spoons pause midair and our heads, nearly identical, pivot at the neck. Three sets of eyes fix on the locked door. Mother rises from the table to stand behind us, placing one hand on top of each of our heads. “Finish,” she says. She begins to hum, and the words take shape in my head.

A sailor went to sea sea sea

To see what she could see see see.

But all that she could see see see

Was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea.

By the time we are done, the sounds have turned to whimpers. We push back from the wooden table and carry our bowls to the sink. Andrea takes mine and washes it, while I linger at her elbow and Mother observes with her good eye. My cousin is taller than I am. They say it doesn’t matter what we are, we’re all family regardless, but she and I may as well be twins.

Boy has crept in unnoticed. He is just walking and always underfoot. I slip him the heel of the bread that’s been abandoned on the counter. He latches on greedily. I keep an eye on him while he eats; as long as he’s out of the way and quiet, he’ll be okay.

The locked door comes unlocked, opens. We freeze. The water is still running. Mother with the red hair and chipped tooth comes out of the room. Her face is red. Her freckles stand out against the cast of her skin. Her hair is straggly and damp and she smells like sweat.

“Good morning,” she says, her voice even. She locks the door from the outside with a key. The whine continues behind her.

“Good morning, Mother,” we reply in tandem, while Mother with the lazy eye observes. Mother exits the room, her musk trailing her, and Mother scrubs the kitchen table until I’m sure she’ll bore a hole straight through. None of them seem to notice Boy; it’s as if he’s invisible.

“Let’s go weed the garden,” I whisper to Andrea. Mother always says “No idle hands.” When we weed the garden, we can talk and sing and make up stories. Andrea looks at Mother.

“May we weed the garden, Mother?” she asks. Mother nods without looking up. Andrea is the favorite. Mother can never say no to her. Boy looks panicked when we move toward the door, so at the last minute I sling him over my hip and take him with me. Andrea rolls her eyes.

“You’re too soft with him,” she says, her voice crisp.

“Just keeping him out of the way.” My heart twitches when Boy buries his face in my neck and wraps his chubby arms around my shoulders.

In the yard the sun is hot against my back, but the chill in the air makes me wrap my sweater tighter around my frame. The garden is far enough from the house that we won’t be heard. It is our project: a patch of order amid acres of wild brush and water and woods. Mother with the blond hair to her waist—one of the two who looks most like us, the one who sometimes slips us sweets or gives us hugs—is removing sun-dried sheets from the line on the other side of the yard. Just beyond her is the swimming hole where Andrea and I pretend to be minnows on the hottest days, and beyond that are the trees. We don’t know how far they stretch, with their bright green leaves that look like jewels against the blue sky. We have never seen the other side of the woods.

I settle Boy in the grass next to me and hand him a worm-eaten apple to play with. He amuses himself while I crouch low.

“What do you think is in there?” I keep my voice soft, and tug not hard enough at a weed, which breaks above the root. “A puppy?”

“In the locked room? A new baby, maybe,” Andrea says, shrugging. She’s dragging her finger through the dirt, drawing patterns instead of weeding. “A girl, hopefully.” She shoots Boy a look of disdain. She hates when I coddle him.

“No,” I shake my head hard. “Not behind a locked door. I think for sure a puppy. It must be a surprise they don’t want us to see yet.” My birthday is approaching. I have wanted an animal to love as long as I can remember.

Andrea looks at me, her eyes wide. “You think so?” She must be remembering the time we found a dog and tried to keep it in our room in secret, but the owner came to get it, and afterward we stood in separate corners of the kitchen for two hours. It had a chip in it, Mother told us later. The owner could track it. We could have gotten into big, big trouble if people came here and saw things they didn’t want to see. We’ve wanted a dog forever.

“Maybe,” I tell her. I’m already exhausted from the heat and crouching in the dirt. Andrea’s feet are flat on the ground, her bum resting on her heels, while the weight of my body balances on the balls of my feet, my torso angled forward and heels hovering inches from the soil. I am awkward and unwieldy where Andrea is graceful and composed.

“Let’s look,” Andrea suggests.

“Mother would never let us.”

Andrea pushes a strand of hair from her cheek, and her eyes sparkle green with mischief. “I know where they keep the key,” she confides, then bites her bottom lip as she tugs halfheartedly at a stubborn root. My pulse accelerates, causing my fingers to turn cold. We never disobey. But I think of the puppy. Alone in the room. Scared. Making those noises.

“Maybe tonight,” I concede. I am equal parts afraid and alive with the urgency of need. We both know it could be tonight or some other night, that we are not the ones who will choose when. It’ll be chosen for us, when things line up just so, during the narrow glimmers of our days when all eyes are elsewhere. And Andrea will not be satisfied until her curiosity is sated. The promise is, we do everything together. Never alone, never apart, no matter what.

Mother at the wash line has bundled all the sheets into her wicker basket and begins making her way back toward the house, her ankles red and raw where unruly brush scrapes them above her sandals. Even so, she is elegant like Andrea. Now we are alone outside, and the sun is high in the late afternoon sky. The trees shift gently in the light breeze. Their shade looks cool, inviting.

Andrea sees me staring into the woods and juts her chin in that direction. Her mouth is quirked, the remnants of mischief seeking a place to land. I glance back toward the house. There is no movement from behind the curtains. It is late afternoon, the time when they take their naps. I stand, dusting filthy palms against my thick wool sweater. I nod. She leaps up and throws her arms around me.

“Shh.” I clap a palm over her mouth, stifling her squeal. But I laugh, too; there is nothing better than making Andrea smile. First, I take Boy back to the house. I drop him in the kitchen and leave a pinch of sugar in his palm so he won’t cry. And then we are off toward the trees, hand in hand.

As we pass the swimming hole and approach the division between the backyard and the woods, I stop. Our palms separate, and I feel a physical ache at their parting. The sun is setting earlier than ever now, since winter is near. “Maybe we shouldn’t go,” I suggest, stopping to catch my breath.

The house looks small from where we stand, and I’m starting to feel afraid. But Andrea has already crossed the border and disappeared into the thicket, fearless as always. I hear her laughter and the sound of branches crunching beneath her feet. I can barely make out the flash of her red ribbon against her blond hair as the distance between us increases. I glance at the house, at the empty kitchen illuminated in the waning light through its narrow window. Then I look back into the trees, where the invisible string between me and Andrea is pulling taut, until surely it will snap. Before I can think about it anymore, I’m running after her, eager to relieve the awful anxiety of separation. The woods at night are terrifying, but the thought of Andrea leaving me behind is worse.

I’m sweating and thorn-bitten when I find her. She’s sitting on an upended log in a clearing, drawing in the dirt at her feet with a stick. She doesn’t look at me as I ease down next to her on the fallen tree.

Until she does.

She turns to me slowly, her neck moving stiffy—unnaturally—as if on a wire. Her expression is blank, her eyes empty. I can’t make out their green in the fading light.

“Andrea?”

“I am not Andrea,” she says, and the voice that always brings me comfort is gone. It has been replaced by something low and gravelly, the sound of sandpaper on a wooden door.

“Stop.” I giggle nervously to show her I’m not mad. “Come on, Andrea. Let’s go back in the yard.”

“I’m not Andrea,” she says, her voice still guttural. She seizes my forearm. “I am Bloody Mary.”

“Ow!” I exclaim, trying to pry her fingers from my arm. With every struggle, her nails dig deeper. “Stop! You’re hurting me. Andrea, stop. Please.”

She removes her hand from my arm and slaps me across the face.

It’s so sudden that I don’t fully register what’s happened until it’s over.

“I am Bloody Mary,” she repeats. “Say it.”

I stand and back away. I won’t say it. “You’re Andrea,” I tell her, more firmly now, certain I can talk sense into her. “You’re my cousin who loves me. You’re playing a mean game.”

“I am Bloody Mary,” she snarls, reaching for me, pulling out a clump of my hair, scratching my face with her hands until I’m running, breathless, and thrashing through the woods in what I hope is the direction of the house.

After what feels like hours of twisting among the trees in waning light—but is probably only minutes—I break the border and find myself in the calf-high wild of our yard. By now my heart is threatening to crack through my ribs. I cross the grass; it’s crisp and deadened from the summer sun. I stumble—nearly falling once—until finally I hurl myself up the back steps to the kitchen, banging on the door.

“What is it?” Mother with the lazy eye looms large against the light of the kitchen. She doesn’t let me in right away, and I wonder suddenly if I’ve made a mistake. “Where’s Andrea?”

Mother with the long blond hair walks into the room and stands with her arms folded, waiting for my reply. I touch a pain on my head, and my hand comes back red. Boy isn’t anywhere, and I’m glad for it. I don’t want him to be scared.

“In the woods,” I tell them, my cheeks wet. “She said she was Bloody Mary.”

Mother with the blond hair glares at Mother with the lazy eye. “I told you not to speak of such things around the girls. They’re still too young. They don’t know what they’re hearing.”

“They need to learn.”

Mother with the blond hair grabs my shoulders. Shakes me. Her eyes skitter past my bloody temple. “What’s happened to Andrea? You left her in the woods? Where? What were you thinking, you willful girl?”

Without waiting for my reply, she runs into the backyard, screaming Andrea’s name over and over. When Andrea emerges—almost as if she was right there, lying in wait for this moment—Mother grabs her, crying. She holds her tight. Together at the edge of the lawn in the dusk, with their honey-colored hair blending together, they look like one being.

Before Mother can bring Andrea back in, Mother with the lazy eye grabs me by my collar and hauls me toward the closet. “You’ll stay in here until you repent. One hour.”

“No,” I protest. “It’s dark.”

“Well, now you’ll know how Andrea felt when you abandoned her to the woods. Lucky she didn’t go missing out there in the dark. ‘If you’re born to be hanged, you’ll never be drowned,’ you know. That child was born under a good sign.” She pushes me roughly to the ground and stares at me with her good eye, the other lolling.

“What did Mother mean?” My voice is small. Mother doesn’t like questions. “About not speaking of certain things?”

There’s a heavy silence, as if the air around us has condensed.

“You will know someday. Oh, you will.” I shift backward on the closet floor, frightened, as she points down at me with a trembling finger. “You were born under a bad sign. Rotten through and through. A bad apple, that’s what I always say. Boy-loving and difficult. Not one of us. No loyalty. She’s a bad, rotten fruit, that Maeve. She’ll be a Bloody Mary one day, mark my words. She’ll abandon us all.”

She’s still muttering when she locks the door with a key.

Abandon. I abandoned Andrea. I broke my promise.

The space is too small for me to stretch my legs. Long, threadbare coats hang over my face, tickling my cheeks. Each one smells faintly of the Mothers. Amber and tobacco and sweat and something earthier. My shivers have given way to a warmth so oppressive I can’t breathe. I draw thick, ragged breaths until I am light-headed.

I wrap my arms around my knees and lean against the wall.

A sailor went to sea sea sea

To see what she could see see see.

I murmur it to myself. It is our song. If we’re singing it, nothing can hurt us. That’s what Andrea says. But will it work when we are apart? I imagine the words wrapping themselves around me like an impenetrable cloak. I squeeze my eyes shut. It feels as if the walls of the closet are drawing closer.

But all that she could see see see

Was the bottom of the deep blue sea sea sea.

I sing myself to sleep. When I wake up, the space feels tighter than ever. It’s as if the closet is shrinking, until I’m certain I’m not in a closet at all but a small coffin built exactly for me. I don’t realize I’m whimpering until I hear Andrea’s voice. It brings me back to myself.

“Maeve.” She’s whispering from right outside the door. I feel a dampness in my tights and realize I’ve peed myself. I’m seven—too old to pee myself. “Listen to me, Maeve,” Andrea says. “I’m right here.” She knocks three times on the door. “I won’t leave you.”

“Why did you do it?” I say, sniffling. Even as I ask, I find my anger ebbing.

“I’m sorry,” she tells me. I hear her hand shift against the wood of the door. “It was only a dumb game. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how scary it would be.”

“What dumb game? How did you even know it?” I ask. For as long as I remember, we know the same things. We share the same thoughts. There are no secrets. Now Andrea is silent. “I thought you’d left me,” I explain, starting to hiccup. “I thought you’d become her.”

“I’m just me,” Andrea replies. “I can’t open the door, Mae. Mother has the key. But I’m going to sit here with you.”

“Okay,” I say. “Please don’t go.”

“I will never, ever leave you,” my cousin tells me. “I am here always, no matter what. I won’t leave you like you left me.”

Like you left me.

“I wasn’t going to say this, Maeve. But it wasn’t just a game. I was testing you. I wanted to see how much it would take for you to betray me.”

“I’m sorry,” I whisper quietly, tears streaming down my cheeks.

Andrea slips a finger under the door and wiggles it around until I find it with my own.

“Who is Bloody Mary?” I ask. In her silence, I forget to breathe.

“Something bad,” she says finally. “It’s what the Mothers call a very bad woman. Forget it. That isn’t the point.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

“Now I know,” she says. “There are holes in our promise.” Her voice sounds sad.

“No! I will never, ever leave you,” I whisper back to her, honoring our pact. “I am always here, no matter what.”

“But you did, Maeve. You did leave. At the slightest scare. When we promise to stay together no matter what, it needs to mean as much to you as it means to me.”

Distantly, I begin to recognize faint sounds of unrest from the other side of the closet wall. The locked room.

“Never again,” I swear, distracted. I bend my fingertip as far as it will go around hers. I mean it. I failed this test, but never again.

The sounds beyond the wall turn to strained grunts, then heavy thuds. The closet wall shudders slightly, and I move closer to the door.

“Okay,” she agrees. “We’ll start from scratch. People make mistakes.” At her words, I am awash with relief and gratitude.

“A sailor went to sea sea sea.” She starts the old, familiar rhyme. The thing behind the wall grows louder and more furious. There’s a clanging sound that threatens to override Andrea’s voice. I raise my own, trying to drown out the sounds in the room. But the louder I get, the louder it gets, as if our song is stirring the thing’s unrest. It isn’t a puppy, I know now. Or if it is, it’s large and feral.

I curl against the door as the thing grows louder, its noises joining with our own rising voices to create a strange melody. We match its pitch. Its exertions match ours in turn. Then there’s a terrific thud, the clanging of metal, the sound of something breaking, and more thuds against the closet wall so powerful I worry it’ll splinter inward, crushing me dead. I huddle against the door, willing it to open, and clutch Andrea’s finger more tightly in my own. The banging grows louder, the closet’s flimsy wooden beams bending against the weight of the thing I’m now certain is a monster, not a dog at all. I hear the Mothers’ voices, the patter of their feet as they move toward the locked room. I try not to cry out as the creature’s efforts threaten to break down the wall and swallow me whole. Andrea’s voice, louder now, grounds me.

I repeat the words—all that she could see see see—even as I hear the Mothers enter the room, hear the beast grow wild. Even as I lose control of my bowels and a dank, putrid odor fills the air and makes me gag through my words. Even as I hear sounds of chaos through the thin slats and the tremble apparent in Andrea’s chanting. Our voices blend together until I can no longer tell hers from mine. Until it feels, again, like our promise is true.

1

It had been years since I’d searched for my cousin. In the early days, I entered fringe-style message boards with a feverish enthusiasm, hoping to find lost girls but more often than not finding derelicts who hoped I was a lost girl, who asked things like whether I was tight or loose long before I knew how those words might apply to my anatomy. Sometimes I’d ask to be dropped at the mall, where I’d comb the shops I thought she’d like, lingering for hours over scents at Bath & Body Works, debating whether she’d like peach or raspberry, before stalking the aisles of Hot Topic.

It plagued me constantly, then, that I didn’t know what she’d become. I imagined all sorts of variations on Andrea: Goth Andrea with pink and green hair and fishnets and a deep love for Joy Division; Andrea who snuck out to kiss older boys on the middle school jungle gym after dark; Andrea who mastered a fouetté and went on to perform at the Palais Garnier. It drove me mad, not knowing. More so than not having her in my life, maybe. It was the lack of connection to who she was, the absence of noise where I’d once been able to read her thoughts almost as easily as my own.

Patty and Tom—my adoptive parents—might have known what I was up to or might not have. Patty had a strict rule: No dwelling in the past. What’s done is done. Put one foot in front of the other. Et cetera. To her, that meant no talking about anything that happened before I came into their home. She was desperately afraid I’d be perceived as abnormal, and in the way she fretted, I knew I must be. But Tom was the one who most often drove me to those solo outings, and sometimes the look he gave me when he dropped me off was so nakedly pitying and sweet that I’d have to jump quickly out of the car with hardly a good-bye in order not to cry.

When Facebook finally went wide, I scanned endless pages of anonymous profiles. Every time I saw a girl who looked like me, I clicked, leading to a string of dead ends. Same with Google. My late teens and early twenties were spent skipping parties to stay in and search “Andrea Indiana” and “Andrea Mother Collective” and “cult bust 1990s kid survivors” and a million other iterations of the same damn things. My college roommates would stumble in at five a.m., lipstick smeared, eyes glazed, limbs weak and trembling from dancing, and I’d still be sitting there at my desk. Searching obsessively.

My whole life revolved around Andrea, and Andrea wasn’t even there.

One day I spit in a cup and mailed it in to one of those DNA websites. When that didn’t yield results, it occurred to me to ask the social worker who had been on my case. It seemed so obvious a solution that when I thought of it, I laughed aloud. After that didn’t turn up any results, I gave up. Andrea had disappeared altogether, lost to the foster care system. With no last name or birth certificate, she may as well have ceased to exist the night I tossed a metaphorical grenade into the center of our childhoods.

It wasn’t what I’d intended, of course. As an adult, I have realized that the biggest mistakes usually aren’t intentional so much as idiotic and tragically avoidable. One little error. A misguided tweet, a rogue email, a forgetful, harried disposition and your reputation is ruined, you’ve lost your job, you’ve left your child in the back of the car on a hot day.

It was the start of summer, a Saturday. I had my window open and a soft breeze was filtering through the screen. The piece of tape I’d used to patch it had come dislodged and was flapping around. A mosquito had found its way in and drunk heavily from my left shoulder before I noticed and squashed it, spreading a fine streak of blood across my palm. I’d been editing a manuscript and fighting off drowsiness with Skittles and Diet Coke. I intermittently scrolled through Twitter, following a viral debate over whether Taylor Swift, at thirty, ought to consider having babies before her looks faded and all her eggs turned to dust.

Working well into the weekend evenings, when everyone else was presumably out living their full, rich lives, had become typical for me aside from an occasional happy hour invitation from my supervisor, Elena. Ryan—the guy I’d been hooking up with—worked weekends at a bar, and most other people I knew disappeared at five p.m. Friday, receding into the glow of their relationships and family lives just as I receded into the glow of my computer screen. On the plus side, weekend hibernation saved me money—or rather, prevented me from sinking further into debt. The negative side, of course, was that it made me acutely aware of having nowhere to go.

I’d once been one of the kids Ryan catered to at the bar. I knew the game too well—was intimately familiar with the thin border between adolescence and adulthood. It was how I’d met him myself—drinking to casual oblivion as I began to cross that very threshold. Mine was a neighborhood for youths, artists, and leftovers. As one of the thirtysomethings who still lived there, I fell into the “leftover” category, though it could have been worse. It could have been a neighborhood populated by pregnant women, nannies, and strollers. I’d graduated from a vibrant, hopeful twentysomething with an alluringly blank future to what I was now—an adult with little to show for it other than a job and a cramped, dingy studio apartment.

The radiator in said apartment was inconsistent, and when it worked it was so hot to the touch it had actually given me a scar once. The second-floor light outside my unit turned off and on at a whim, and more often than not I had to fumble my way home in the dark. The refrigerator worked—kind of—except for the condensation that gathered up top, never falling, like hundreds of small stalactites. I slept on a mattress a former roommate had handed down when she moved in with her boyfriend; all other décor consisted mostly of street finds. The only thing I ever splurged on—my one concession to vanity—was the set of hair extensions I replaced each month to cover the alopecia I’d had since I was a kid.

Even the large canvas that graced the wall above the patio set I’d repurposed as a dining table had been confiscated from a garbage bin outside an artist’s loft during Open Studios. It was a painting of an empty boat, drifting away from its intended occupant, a woman trapped on an island. It was unsigned, and clearly someone hadn’t thought it was very good, but I liked its mood: it had a relentless, lonely sort of beauty to it. I was glad to have saved it. I was proud of all my motley treasures. It was squalor of a kind, but I was comfortable in it. It was my own very small footprint in an oversaturated, overpriced city. Moreover, it was the only proof of progress I could point to.

I toggled fluidly between news headlines, email, and edits on nights like these, when time seemed infinite, so when I saw an email announcing “New DNA Relatives, ...