Don't Tell Mom About This

By Eric Serrell

— ORPHAN • AGENT • DAUGHTER • PAWN —

Elise feels like she’s always getting things wrong — from a murderous psychopath as a best friend, to a big sister who’s four years younger, twice as smart, and a real bitch sometimes.

She was the mixed-race child of an unmarried white

• Language: English
• Publisher: Winding Road Press
• Release date: Feb 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781733312400

Eric Serrell

Eric Serrell is the bestselling, award-winning writer no one knows. After years of ghostwriting the novels for some great storytellers, Eric found the time to produce a work of his own. His debut novel, Fall Rotten, is an homage to his favorites-the fast-talking, sharp-witted screwball comedies of the 1930s. A native-born Foreign Service brat, former immunobiologist and software engineer, Eric now spends his days putting visions into words, traveling with his autistic son on The World Disney Tour (as opposed to the Disney World tour, which is much more limited), obsessively jumping rope, and trying to perfect the Brazilian pãozinho, the little French breads of his childhood.

Book preview

1

Cambridge — Terminal E, Logan Airport, Boston

Professional advice from a psychopath.

Or maybe it’s a sociopath—I can never remember which one’s which.

Anyway, a friend one time told me that to get along in our business, I needed to learn to see things from the other person’s point of view, understand what it was that drove them—their ambitions, their desires, what they wanted to achieve out of life. Once I was able to empathize, or at least give the appearance of it, I’d be able to deal with these people in a manner that would put them at ease. They’d be more receptive to doing as I asked because they’d believe that we were both working towards the same goal, even if we weren’t.

We looked down when some guy whose name I can’t remember—I think it was Squirrelnuts or something stupid like that—anyway, he said something. That is, I think he said something. It was hard to tell because his voice was somewhat muffled by my friend’s boot pushing down on his neck and jaw, pressing the side of his face into what I think was once a bean burrito, though I might be wrong about that too.

I raised my brow to peer back up at Kel, conveying, I’m pretty sure, what was going through my mind at that moment. I guess it was clear enough, because when he looked up as well all he did was give me that shit-eating grin of his.

Yeah. He understood the irony of the moment.

Tonya tells me that the game is bullshit, the one where you compare your life now to the life you imagined you would have some number of years ago. She says she hates the game, meaning really that she hates her life. But that’s the entire point, isn’t it? Eventually, she’ll play it again and look back on how far she’s come, from misery to a life she’s pretty happy with. Well, at least one she can deal with, I hope. The problem is that we’re playing it when we really shouldn’t, when the past ten years have been something of a downhill slide for both of us. You’d think that little Rama and Mariame would more than make up for that, and I mention this, but she tells me Shut up. What do you know about marriage? Or of the pain it causes?

No one, she says, will ever want to marry me.

She used to tell me this when we were growing up—that no one would want to go steady with me or date me, have sex with me, or marry me—put up with me in any way really. It changed as the years passed but the intent was always the same.

She’s not really being mean. Well, she is, but only in the way sisters are mean. What she’s telling me is that she considers me somewhat strange, different from her, as though I or anyone thinks that she’s the epitome of normality. It was Mom who provided us with that definition, but it’s not what anyone else would call normal. We have our own variation of normal in our family.

This time, though, she knows immediately that she’s said the wrong thing, because as soon as the words are out, her mouth clamps shut and the bitterness and belligerence vanishes from her face. But it’s not replaced by regret, because that’s never been Tonya’s way. She’s never regretted anything before, in her actions or her words, and that’s why she’s so angry and bitter now. She’s having to learn the meaning of the word.

I glare back at her for a moment, then stand up and walk away, furiously combing the hair on the left side of my face forward with my fingers. It’s become something of an unconscious action with me, as though my hair is now my security blanket, hiding me from the rest of the world so it can’t see what I’ve become.

I find myself outside—I walked right through the house and out the front door. Rama comes running to the porch and is stopped by the bang of the screen door. Ibrahima had promised that he would fix the closing bar, so that it would close more slowly, quietly, and no longer wake the babies, but it went the way of the other promises he had made. The sudden slap surprises little Rama and she immediately calls out for me to come back, that I had promised to play with her. I’m not sure if it’s her sister’s cries or the door itself that wakes Mariame from her nap, but she’s now howling as well. Not for me, but against the general chaos of the situation, I think. It’s hard to figure out what’s going on when you first wake up. Especially when you’re only two years old.

I look back in time to see Rama being yanked away from the screen door by her mother, and then the heavy inside door closes with such force that the knocker claps like a gunshot, echoing along the otherwise placid tree-lined street of the Avon Hill neighborhood.

It’s a stupid game anyway.

---

Three and a half decades ago…

A tiny, homeless nine-year old with all her possessions in a canvas floral-print bag. And a note pinned inside the pocket of her dress.

Now…

A small, homeless forty-five-year old without enough possessions to fill a canvas bag, floral-print or otherwise. And no note this time, but a name. A very thin connection.

I play this stupid game all wrong.

The woman sitting on the other side of the small table is regarding me in much the same way Dad did when I stood before him somewhere in this very same terminal. Like him, she’s trying to figure out what to make of me. This time, however, I have the confidence that allows me to hold her gaze, instead of staring at a pair of shoes. At the same time, half of my face is hidden from her view behind a veil of my hair.

So, Keilani’s getting married. Again.

The woman, Mia, smiles faintly. She has a broad mouth, lips shaded an understated pink, but even the most restrained of smiles causes her cheeks to flush and the natural richness of her golden skin blooms into copper, causing her brown eyes to become warm coffee. Coffee with a bit of milk. More than a splash but, you know, not like latte. Okay, I’m getting sidetracked here. Anyway, she smiles because she’s amused, but I’m not sure if it’s the news about Keilani that she finds so amusing, or me. She fiddles with the cup of tea before her, the spoon, the glass of water that leaves a ring on the white-going-grey tablecloth. She has to be a smoker. Or a heroin addict.

I can only guess how I must appear to her, sitting with my arms tight at my sides, my hands clenching the edges of the seat. I was never one to talk with my hands, not like my little sister Naddie, but I do like to play with my fingers when I speak. That’s why it looks as though I’m trying to hang on to that chair, as if were I to let go, I’d be flung off towards the ceiling and probably ricochet off of a couple of the other tables in the process.

I’m wearing a blue—I think they actually call the color Moroccan Haze, but to me it’s just blue—long-sleeved crewneck that has shrunk some in the sleeves. With the rest of my shirts, I have cut a small thumbhole in the one cuff to keep the sleeve in place, but that makes them look somewhat tatty so this is the best one I have to wear, my dressy top, the only one without self-inflicted alterations. Problem is, when I put my hands up onto the tabletop, the sleeves pull back and expose the horrible, jagged tear that comes over my wrist and runs up along the thumb of my left hand. I’m self-conscious enough as it is; I don’t want to be looking down at that. Or have her staring at it.

I tell her that Keilani believes that, this time, it’ll stick; that this time, her husband-to-be is a haole and that marrying the native boys was the problem with her first three marriages, because they didn’t treat her as a princess as she thinks she deserves. Yes, Keilani, who’s just left or right of fifty, still saw herself as a princess, and despite that, despite myself, I liked her. She always seemed to be quite thrilled with life. Exuberant. It was infectious, and whenever I was in her presence, my life seemed pretty damned good as well, even as miserable as it is.

Mia asks me how Keilani and her fiancé, Bink (yes, Bink, though his actual name is Henry) met. That was at the Danbury FCI—the federal prison where I spent the first couple of years of my sentence—when Keilani was visiting her sister, Pookie, and Bink was visiting his wife. Mia’s reaction leads me to explain that Bink’s wife, in for another fifteen years at least, signed off on divorce papers because as far as anyone’s concerned, they will all be dead before she’s getting out. So now he’s free to marry Keilani. But what Missus Bink didn’t know was that, whenever she came to Connecticut to visit, Keilani was already staying at her home, in her bed, with her husband, so it really didn’t matter to Bink one way or the other if she granted him the divorce or not. Keilani, however, wants to make the whole thing less messy.

What Mia doesn’t know, and I don’t tell her, is that Keilani has sold her out. She’s working for Bouchard, needing the money for her next elaborate wedding. That is, she’s screwing over a childhood friend so she can act like a princess one more time.

I ask Mia about the one thing I really want to know, which is how Pookie became known as Pookie. I can remember seeing the large, intimidating Hawaiian in Danbury a couple of times and Pookie is not the name that I think would pop into anyone’s mind. Mia laughs, suddenly flashed back to her childhood on the Islands.

She’d collect puka, she tells me. Make necklaces out of them and sell them to the tourists. Girls, mostly. Girls in love with David Cassidy. There were a lot of them back then, the girls. Her Uncle Kei had this little business where he’d fake photos of tourists with famous celebrities. Pookie had one of herself with David Cassidy and she used it to convince the girls that the ones he wore, she made.

The only photo I had seen of Mia was an old Polaroid Keilani had shown me of four girls standing on a beach, a roiling slate-blue ocean in the background, their arms over one another’s shoulders. They were wearing the ugly swimsuits pre-teens wore back in the early ’70s except for the one with ragged cut-offs, sleeveless t-shirt, and this delicate-looking choker of shells, which was Pookie. She was standing between Mia, who, even at twelve, looked somewhat aloof, and another girl, a sun-speckled strawberry blonde, their friend Jules. On the other side of Mia was the seven-year old Keilani who told me that, of the group, Mia was the first to leave the Islands, when she left to attend UW in Seattle. Pookie was the first to go to prison, for cashing checks while posing as the Chinese wife of a well-known Thai businessman, which didn’t seem like a smart thing to do on Hawaii, where most people can tell the difference between an Asian and a Polynesian. Jules was the first to die when, at seventeen, she was swept off the back of a pickup by an extension cord strung across the road by a family stealing electricity from neighbors while they were gone on holiday. Keilani, as far as she was concerned, was the one who had been left behind.

Though born on the Islands, Mia is one hundred percent Cuban by descent. Her full name is Maria Sofia Catalina Marianna Garcia, but went by Mia with everyone but her family, Keilani had told me. Her mother was also a Maria, but a Maria Luisa, brought to the Islands by Mia’s father when he flew to Cuba to find a wife. It was the only time he had ever left Hawaii since he was brought there himself as a child. She was a distant cousin, and since it looked like things were going badly on her own island, moving to his island seemed to be a good idea at the time. She eventually decided, though, that Hawaii wasn’t the paradise that Cuba was, but by that time, it was too late. She gave birth to Mia a couple of months before statehood and the world she once knew, the one she grew up in, had been wiped away.

I know how she must’ve felt. People have asked me if I ever plan to return to South Africa, seeing I was born there. They don’t understand that the South Africa where I was born no longer exists. Yes, it’s probably much nicer now, but it’s not home. Back then, it was a different world, and I was a whole different person.

Anyway, it was Mia’s mother who went by Maria, so Mia was Niña to her mother, Little Sofie to her Americanized father, and Maria Sofia to her Tutu, her grandmother, abandoned on O’ahu along with her son by Mia’s grandfather, the one who dragged them there in the first place. Not that he meant to abandon them according to Mia. He was a wealthy landowner on Cuba and came to Hawaii to expand his fortune in the nascent field of resort development right after the war, but lost everything to unscrupulous haole developers. He flew to Acapulco to come up with more funding and was then unceremoniously—and quite literally—run over by a bus. The story, according to her Tutu, was that Kuku was dragged three blocks down the road before anyone realized that there was a problem. It sounds like Mia’s grandmother found her husband’s behavior somewhat unforgivable.

Mia, on the other hand, still does not forgive the haole developers.

Her mother died when Mia was in her thirties and it was the last time Keilani had seen her, when she came back for the funeral. Keilani said that Mia had changed, looked like a totally different person. Rumors were that she could speak six different languages and had come into large sums of money, but no one could figure out how she had done any of it. Keilani was jealous, and now she’s willing to screw over her one-time friend because of it.

Boy, when you tell them aloud, our family stories are strange.

How am I supposed to react to the image of a stately Cuban gentleman rolling down the road under a rattling bus anyway? Shock? Or laugh out loud?

In any event, when she finishes her tea, Mia signals the waiter that she’s ready to leave. She’s traveling somewhere—she has a carry-on and a purse set at her feet, like almost everyone else in the restaurant. She then asks me what I’m wanting from her. We had been sitting there, talking for nearly an hour, but what I wanted never really came up. Until that moment, it was all about rapport.

I tell her that I’m hoping to be of some use to her—assistant, drawer of baths, spank me if she wants, I don’t care. Anything. My situation, after all, doesn’t leave me in a sustainable position. She understands what I mean and asks if I’m still in contact with Pookie. I tell her I haven’t seen her since I left Danbury, kind of lost track of her after we were all shipped off to a new FCI down in Alabama. In truth, I don’t think even one word passed between Pookie and me—the only reason I remember her is because Pacific Islanders are not a common sight in east coast prisons. But even if Mia were to try to check out my story, even if she could find Pookie, what could she possibly ask? Hey, Pookie, do you remember talking to a scarred black woman back in Danbury?

Sadly, that demographic is overrepresented in the federal prison system.

So she takes her credit card out and taps it on the table between her long fingers, turning it edge-over-edge as she regards me. There’s a faint smile, but there’s also this…. Emotionlessness? Indifference? Something. I don’t know the word, but it gives me the impression that she would quickly forget all about me the moment she leaves. I try to smile but it’s hard to look anything but pathetic when you’re sitting like a small girl on a chair, clutching the seat, with hair in front of your eyes. Hopefully, she likes pathetic. I master in woefulness.

I’ll tell you what. Her eyes narrow. She’s now carefully gauging my response. I’m going over to Dublin for a few days. Why don’t you come along.

Bouchard told me to do everything conceivable (and not necessarily legal) to connect with her, to stay with her, but did he mean this? There’s supposed to be a couple of days for us to formulate a plan.

I tell her I can’t and that smile slips away. Obviously, I no longer hold her interest. I quickly add that they had taken away my passport.

Well, it’s been very nice meeting you, she says as she immediately hands her card to the server when he brings the bill. She doesn’t even look at the paper; she’s ready to wrap this up and things are now going fast. I hope you find something that works out. You seem very sweet, but I have a flight I need to catch.

I become frantic. I really need to calm down, to slow down, to think. I start to say something—a comment, a plea, I don’t know what—but the server returns with the receipt and she promptly signs it away. She moves to collect her bags.

I ask her to hold on, putting a hand up, but it offends her. She pauses only because she’s looking for the words to say in return.

I glance around to make sure no one’s listening and then lean over the table to tell her that I have another passport—a South African passport. This isn’t entirely true. Actually, at that very moment, it’s not true at all. Still, it causes her to sit back and smile again, though she’s not smiling out of kindness.

She’s intrigued.

Mia takes a phone from her purse and after a moment tells me that a South African passport can get me into the Republic of Ireland without a visa.

Heilige kak, I hadn’t even thought about that.

(I have this tendency to swear in Afrikaans, which is sort of strange given that I never used these words when I lived over there because I was a child. Heilige kak was something Mnr. Kuiper, the owner of the liquor store over which me and my Ma were living, would say and while I didn’t understand its exact meaning, Mev. Kuiper would always smack him for saying it, so I quickly figured out that they were naughty words. Basically, it means Holy shit! Swearing in Afrikaans has kept me out of trouble with Mom.)

She then asks me how far away I live, how long it will take for me to get home, pack a small bag, and return, and I tell her that I live less than a mile away, there in East Boston, pointing needlessly over my shoulder as if I know where the dump is relative to where we’re sitting. She goes back into her purse and pulls out several twenties, telling me to take a cab there and back, have it wait for me as I pack. While I’m gone, she’ll see about getting me onto her flight.

Okay, there’s no way for any of this to possibly go wrong.

When we’re back out on the main floor of the terminal, in front of the long line of airline counters, she stops me before I head down to the cab stand. She appears amused with me again, smiling. How does it look, the both of us with our dark skin? Even though she’s of Cuban blood and my Dad is black, almost everyone else around us at that moment is either white or Asian, so they probably can’t tell the difference. She’s wearing jeans, a pair of white walking shoes, and a pink peasant top with ruffles around the collar. Her hair’s pulled behind her ears, held back by one of those bands that I can never use in my own hair because I would need scissors to get it back out. She’s also a good half-foot taller than me, because I am that small, so even though there’s only a ten-year difference in our ages, I probably look much younger with my clunks, my skirt, my leggings, my oversized top, with my hair all in my face.

She tells me to hurry back, to call if I’m held up, sounding very much like the mother. I try to present myself as the dutiful child, but I’m pretty sure I simply look pitiful—pitiful and scared. What the hell am I doing to myself?

I then give a small start when Mia pushes the hair back on my left side. She reacts when she sees it—the terrible rip that comes out from under my collar, follows my jaw, and then spreads out behind my ear, over the side of my face, and around my eye.

A little skittish there, she says.

She’s embarrassed herself and now she’s trying to appear unfazed. She leans down and kisses my other cheek.

"Don’t be too long, bokkie."

Little doe. It’s what Ma used to call me, before I came to this country.

2

East Boston — Terminal E, Logan Airport, Boston

There’s been a hum inside my head since the attack. Not an actual humming—not one I can go and have checked out by a doctor—but a sensation that I will notice when my thoughts are otherwise calm. I don’t know when it really started, but I first became aware of it while lying in the hospital bed shortly after I came off the heavy pain meds. It doesn’t drive me crazy, like a ringing in the ears would, but it does get in the way sometimes, when I’m trying to think my way through something from beginning to end. It wasn’t helpful during the trial, as you can imagine.

Usually, when I’m active, I don’t notice it at all, but it’s made quiet contemplation difficult. It’s become common to feel muddled and uncertain about things. People have commented that I will often appear preoccupied and thoughtful, but the reality is, I’m trying to maintain a coherent sense of awareness. I will often lose things, lose myself, inside my head, and it has made me feel somewhat unwelcomed there.

I call Bouchard as soon as the terminal’s no longer visible out the back window of the cab. The cabbie’s muttering to someone on his own phone, maybe in English, maybe not. Probably letting someone know where he’s going, in case he’s not heard from again. He was hesitant to even drive me, seeing the way I’m dressed, and then outright refused when I told him the address on the dumpy end of Border. I had to show him that I had the money before he would start the engine, and even now, I’m pretty sure he’s worried that he’s being set up to be robbed.

Bouchard answers immediately. Usually I leave a voice message and he’ll call back, but he knows that things might be happening today, so he’s ready. I tell him that I need the new passport, at my place, within fifteen minutes. He tells me that he has it going out the door as we speak, that it’ll be there in ten. He has me go over the meeting in as much detail as possible during the remainder of the ride. It’s more than he had hoped for, he tells me, being invited to go along with Mia. He praises my abilities. The fact that I’m about to break early release doesn’t seem to bother him at all.

It bothers me, though, because I’ll be the one going back to prison. You see, there’s a wiki category: FBI Agents with Criminal Convictions, and you’ll find me listed there under the name Elise McNeil, alongside Hanssen, Liddy, and hometown favorite John Connolly. (I attended the same college as Connolly: BC, where Mom was a professor of minority and gender studies, though I don’t think that’s an actual major there.) So anyone in the world could know about my convictions.

In any case, Bouchard had originally reached me through Al—Alfonso, my PO, the best any woman can possibly hope for. I had heard all the horror stories when my time drew short from the repeats who had lousy POs who would demand money, or sex, or both. Some were so bad that the repeat went ahead and broke release as a way to escape. Prison, they said, was far preferable to the feeling of isolation and entrapment they were experiencing on the outside. Those feelings are usually linked directly to the quality of your PO.

Al’s a man overworked, over-stressed, over-worried, and over-loved by his five daughters, one son (poor thing), and wife of forty-something years. He has a soft spot for us female charges because he sees in each one of us the potential for a better life for his own girls. He believes he’s collecting up karma points or something with every act of kindness he provides. He sometimes practices on us—adult women, some older than fifty—the words and speeches he will use with his daughters, asking us for feedback as to how we think his girls will respond. He told me that he has difficulty understanding the female psyche, something he’s trying to fix, but personally, I think he’s a great father already.

Not that my own Dad