A Wild Affair by Gemma Townley Page A

and started to walk, pushing past Helen and inadvertently kicking a teacup into the wall. I could hear Esther calling me, but I wasn't listening—I refused to. She was a liar. She was a scheming, man-stealing, evil, nasty …
    “It was your grandma's idea. The car crash, I mean. She said you'd be better off without me. She threatened to call Social Services.”
    I spun around; Esther was right behind me. Her eyes were now swimming in tears and I felt a huge lump appear in my throat. I stared at her for a few seconds, not trusting myself to speak.
    “She made up the car crash?”
    Esther nodded. “We both did. I didn't mean to leave you … She said she'd look after you. And I wanted to come back, so many times, but …”
    “But what?” My voice was barely audible.
    “But I couldn't. It was too late.” She was crumpling in front of me, like the Wicked Witch in
The Wizard of Oz
when a bucket of water is thrown over her. Her makeup was running, her hair pulled out of place by her nervous hands. She was leaning against the wall in Helen's narrow corridor, looking at me with tears in her eyes, with a mixture of hope and despair on her face. I knew that expression. I'd seen it so many times, staring back at me from mirrors. And that's when I knew. That's when I realized it was her. That's when I met my mother.
    It turned out that tea wasn't really going to cut it anyway and so Helen made two mugs of her special alcoholic tea (a blend of honey, whiskey, tea, and a few other things I decided I didn't need to know about) for herself and me; my mother, who looked sorely tempted by the concoction but said that she was “AA” and hadn't touched a drop for several years, requested mint tea instead. Then, drinks duly made, Helen made her excuses and wandered off to her bedroom, leaving my mother and me to make our way back to the sitting room where we sat, silently, on a chair and the sofa respectively, each of us waiting for the other to start. At least that's what I did. It's not that I didn't have a million questions—I had more than that, a lifetime of them. It's just that I wasn't sure which one to ask first. It wasn't every day you discovered your dead mother was alive and well and sporting a chignon. It wasn't every day you realized that your entire life was a lie.
    “Why didn't you come back?” I blurted it out suddenly when Irealized she wasn't going to be the first to speak—it turned out I did know which question to ask first, after all.
    My mother sniffed quietly and picked up her cup from the table. She opened her mouth to finally talk, but I didn't let her.
    “Why did you go?” I asked, not able to stop myself. “Where have you been all this time? I thought you were dead. Did you know Grandma died? How can you be here? How can you exist and I didn't know? How could you let that happen?”
    “Darling. Jess. I … I …” My mother looked taken aback, her lips were trembling; carefully, she put her mug down. “I know this is a shock to you. But it's been very hard for me, too.”
    “Hard for you? You're the one who left.”
    She nodded sadly. “I was so worried, so nervous about coming back after all this time. I thought … I thought you might not want to see me.”
    “You did?” My lips were trembling now, too. “Well, maybe I don't. Maybe I'm okay without you.”
    “I'm sure you are,” she said, standing up, her voice fragile. “Perhaps this was a bad idea. Perhaps …”
    “Perhaps you should sit down,” Helen said, appearing at the door suddenly. My gratitude for her intervention was tempered only slightly by the realization that she'd been eavesdropping all along. “Jess doesn't really want you to go, do you, Jess?” She stared at me meaningfully. I sighed.
    “No.” I relented. “No, I don't.”
    “Good,” Helen said. “And you don't want to leave again, Esther. Right?”
    She shook her head. “No, of course not. No …”
    “So then.” Helen folded her arms and looked at me