Page 82 of An Immaculate Deception

She stares at me. “Where…where is my baby?”

My baby. She remains imprisoned in 1877, but I will free her. When I rise, I hear blood drip from the axe onto the floor.

Mother attempts to get out of bed but the ropes hold. She panics, pulls, and twists. She manages to cry and howl, even sedated. She rolls off the bed and gets tangled in the ropes.

I hold the axe in my right hand, feel the weight of it pulling downward. Each step feels like effort. It was easy with Doctor Lobo. I wanted to slice him open, to shred him to bits. But with Mother, it’s different. The act carries more weight.

She screams my name, as though she thinks I’m elsewhere. Maybe she thinks I am Lobo. She collapses by the bed frame and notices that she’s sitting in a pool of blood—Doctor Lobo’s blood—and then notices his arm peeking from the bed frame. She finally stops struggling as I hover over her, as if accepting her fate.

Her eyes go blank.

I raise the axe high over my head.

Light comes into her eyes.

“Leandro,” she says, clear-eyed. Fear replaced with awe. In the way she says my name, I recognize the profound shift that has taken place.

There it is, at last: the glimmer of recognition.

I drop the axe.

50

The first rays of dawn slip through the narrow crack in the curtains.

Mother tilts her head as she regards me, as though I am a work of art, an idol hanging above an altar. She reaches out a hand toward my cheek, lips slightly parted.

She stares at the air, eyes distant, processing. Like a motion picture is playing in her mind. She then touches her own cheeks, furrowing her brows. Her mouth tilts downward into a slight frown.

“Mother?” I say.

“It was a brook,” she says, gaze turned inward, but in her own voice. “The utmost deep, the darkest place…”

“What…?”

My heart is on the edge of a knife. If her mind is still broken, I do not think I have the courage to pick up the axe again.

“Our carriage fell into a brook,” she says haltingly. “A shallow swamp. There was a stench of a marsh. Your father was caked in the mud, partly sunk in the black ooze. It was so dark. I waded through murky waters, freed the horse. I went to him and held his hand. He couldn’t lift himself up. But he laid his hand on my belly and said: ‘Our baby.’ And he smiled. Those were his last words: ‘Our baby.’ ”

She smiles weakly, eyes glistening. Even now, so many years later, this memory brings her emotion.

Perhaps this is what her mind did not want to remember—his loss.

She continues: “The wind brought gushing rain and I trudged up to the road and waited. I don’t remember much after that, but I remember that when a carriage finally came by and picked us up, I was barefoot. And my hands were cold.”

She waves her hand at the air. “Then nobody cared if he was going to propose or not. Nobody believed me. But he was going to propose. He loved us.”

“I believe you.”

She smiles. She looks tired.

She looks down at Lobo’s body, face down behind the bed. I stiffen, afraid of how she will respond. Now she knows all the things I have done: my affair with Joaquina, my use of black magic to bring her back, and the murder of Doctor Lobo.

“I wish you hadn’t done that,” she says, looking at Doctor Lobo. But it’s almost as if she is speaking to herself. I don’t quite know what she means.

I untie all the knots. She gets to her feet, steps around Doctor Lobo’s mangled body, and stops before the antique brass mirror. She removes the cover I had placed on it.

She faces the mirror, regarding her own image. Her face is placid, reflective. Her fingers touch her cheek. Even in this tired state, there is a fierceness to her gaze that was absent in Strange Madalena. She gives a half laugh, almost a snort.