Until Death Read online

  Maria tapped her pale pink manicured fingernails against her water glass before she could stop herself. If she'd learned one thing growing up with her mother, and even more from visiting after she'd moved out, it was that such an obvious sign of nervousness would never be overlooked.

  True to form, Elena Inesceu glanced over her rimless glasses at her daughter. Not a glare for being interrupted, nor a demand for answers right this minute. Maria knew the look from four decades of experience.

  Her mother was saying yes, I see you're nervous about something. I'm going to give you time to think about it. As soon as the party's over and we get back home, though, you will tell me. Don't worry. I'll remember.

  Maria smiled at her mother, more reassured by that easy read than she'd been as a teenager, and excused herself from the table. She'd been taking long drinks of mineral water as everyone else shared many toasts with pălincă, the brandy she remembered drinking from a very young age in Romania and frequently in the US.

  Even a decade into hard-won sobriety, she still knew exactly how it would burn in her nose and on her tongue. How its heat would spread throughout her body before making it to her belly. The only thing she missed more was gin and tonic. Drinking enough water to need the restroom frequently was as good a distraction as any.

  By the time she came back out, the three-tiered multi-colored cake was indeed front and center, but hardly anyone had touched it. Maria took half a puff pastry filled with apples and walnuts and sat down to wait out the party.

  Even the cake was missing a respectable portion over two hours later when Maria took her accustomed role as designated driver in her parents' minivan full of giggling mothers and children her own age. Once everyone else was dropped off and they were nearly back to the expressway headed to Brooklyn, she decided to ask her difficult questions before her own mother had a chance to bring it up. And before they got back to her childhood home, where Elena had Maria's father to distract both of them.

  "Mama, I need to ask you about some things."

  Maria stopped to take a deep breath when she saw red lights in front of them. Traffic was backed up getting onto the bigger road and beyond, so she might have a lot more time than she wanted.

  "You're nervous over something," her mother said. "What's wrong?" She turned her body to face Maria. Too late to put it off now.

  "Nothing's wrong, don't worry," Maria said. "I have a doctor's appointment when I get back to Los Angeles, and she needs to know some of our family history."

  "What business is that of a doctor? What kind of doctor?"

  Maria glanced at her mother, surprised at the sharp tone in her voice. The older woman's pale, round cheeks were flushed, her forehead drawn down in what Leo called thunderbrow.

  "It's nothing bad, nothing to be upset about. It's just...Leo and I have been trying..." Maria shook her head, wondering at how hard she had to work to get the words out. She must be the only daughter on the planet who had trouble saying she wanted to turn her mother into a grandmother. "We're trying to have a baby. I knew it would be hard, but even with help from a fertility doctor, it's not working. We need to know what to try next."

  When the tall delivery truck ahead of them stopped long enough to shift into park, the backup lights flashing briefly before the brake lights went dim, Maria looked at her mother again. Elena stared at her for several seconds, lips pursed, then turned to look out the opposite window. The heat needle on the van was already edging up toward the red, but the shimmering waves of exhaust kept Maria from turning the air off and rolling down the windows.

  When the silence stretched on long enough to feel like a solid thing, Maria turned away and rolled her eyes. She hoped she didn't have a thunderbrow of her own. Neither of her parents had ever talked about sex or health problems in their family, leaving her to learn on her own.

  She'd guessed it was being shy or conservative Eastern Orthodox believers, and she'd gladly taken advantage of every educational opportunity she got in school and in a big American city. Right now her mother was acting more angry than hesitant.

  "Fertility doctor," her mother said in a low voice. "Why didn't you talk to me about this before?"

  "Talk to you about it?" Maria said. "You haven't been the most open about things like this. I'm not asking you to explain where babies come from. I just need to know if anyone else in the family has had trouble getting pregnant. What we're trying isn't working, even going around my problems. The doctor needs to know if something else might be wrong."

  "Such things are private, Maria. Between a husband and wife. I never knew you wanted children."

  "They're private, sure," Maria said. She gripped the wheel to keep from gritting her teeth. "I just need your help. I know you don't like to talk about stuff like that. I learned what I do know on my own. That's why you didn't know we wanted kids. We need your help, Mama."

  "Your cousins, the ones on my side," her mother said. "They adopted babies. So many babies need families, all over the world. You and Leo, you could give such a good home."

  "Well, sure, maybe we'll do that someday. But all I want is to find out why I'm not getting pregnant even with help. Maybe I want to have a baby of my own."

  "You don't even have to tell anyone, Maria. Now you can find parents who look like you, and no one will ever know."

  Maria stared into Elena's blue eyes, her head as overheated as the van, edging into the red. Her mother's voice wasn't so much angry now as it was desperate. Pleading.

  "Is there some reason you don't want us to have a baby?" she said, dismayed at how shaky her own voice was.

  "I had no warning, you never mentioned it before. Not even when you were a girl. Not after you knew about that awful infection you had and the surgery. You never even wanted to play with dolls. I thought that meant—"

  "Why does it matter whether I played with dolls or not, Mama?" Maria said. "What the hell are you trying to say to me?"

  "Just don't go to that doctor, please," her mother whispered, more tears spilling over, cutting through the fresh powder on her cheeks. "Some things are better left alone."

  Chapter 5

  Maria jumped and nearly screamed when a horn sounded from behind her. The truck had moved several car lengths ahead and merged onto the slow moving expressway. When she tried to put the van into gear, her hands shook so badly she had to try twice.

  "What are you saying to me, Mama? I'm not playing; this isn't something to joke about. You're scaring me half to death."

  "You should be scared," her mother said, switching to Romanian. She hadn't done that for years, and it only drove the trembling deeper into Maria's gut. "I'd hoped to never go through this with you."

  "Well, you are. Right now, no more games. I have an appointment with a genetic specialist the day after I get back to LA, and I damned well intend to keep it."

  "My sweet Maria, no," her mother said, crossing herself repeatedly. "No, don't do this."

  "Stop that! It never helps anything. Just tell me whatever it is!"

  "You can't have babies," she said, her voice fast and airy. "Not just because of the scars. Not you or any of your cousins."

  Maria was shaking so badly she was afraid of her foot slipping off the brake right onto the gas, sending them crashing into the high bumper of the delivery truck. All the lanes were jammed, and a row of concrete construction barricades stretching further than she could see took away even the breakdown lane.

  She didn't want to hear this, she had to hear this, and she couldn't get away no matter what it turned out to be.

  "What makes you think that?" Maria said. "Why would you say such a thing? It's not funny."

  "I could never be more serious," she said. "May God help me, there's nothing more serious than this."

  The traffic inched forward, and Maria wished the minivan would just overheat and get it over with. If steam boiled out from under the hood, she'd have an excuse to get out and walk away. Let someone else deal with all this mess.

  "Ok
ay then," she said. "You're serious. Explain it to me. Why can't any of us have babies?"

  "There were such terrible things then," her mother said. She stared at the stopped traffic. "Such terrible times, under Communism. We all had to do things we didn't want to. And sometimes we didn't even know what we were doing. So many lies."

  Maria waited, pushing her whole leg against the brake pedal, knuckles showing white where she gripped the wheel. Her memories of life in Romania were faint, almost like a dream she'd had before she started first grade in the US. No matter how soft and idyllic the dream, she knew it hadn't been an easy time.

  "They forced many of us to have more children than we could afford to care for. I could only have one, no matter how much we tried, and we suffered for that. And people who managed to have several had even less food or medicine. We never had enough. No one did." Her mother glanced at her, then looked back out the window and took a shuddering breath. "We had a terrible outbreak of mumps in our village when you were very small. The doctors, the Communist doctors, they sent medicine that was supposed to keep the little ones healthy. Things that were supposed to make you strong, make sure you grew up and didn't catch that awful sickness."

  "I am strong, Mama," Maria said, touching her mother's shoulder. "I don't understand."

  "That medicine was bad," her mother said, crying again. "What they sent to the villages in the mountains, the poorest places, was poison. None of you got sick, not that we could see. But the older girls and boys, the ones who had children not long after..." She stopped, breathing deeply for several seconds. Maria squeezed her shoulder.

  "Those babies had terrible problems. They had...parts in the wrong places. Missing things. Broken bodies. The lucky ones, they died before they could suffer. The awful orphanages in the cities took the ones who lived too long."

  "I never heard about that before," Maria said, swallowing to keep the too-rich meal from rising into her throat. "So many things came out after the Wall fell, after Ceaușescu. How could something like that stay a secret?"

  "Because we had to make a horrible choice for all of you," her mother said, grasping Maria's hand in both of hers. "We couldn't do anything with a doctor, the ones who caused all that trouble. They refused to do anything to stop it or help us. All of us were supposed to keep getting pregnant no matter how sick the babies were. Over and over again. We had to turn to something older, something more true that we could trust."

  Both women jolted forward when Maria realized she was about to slowly collide with a small blue car that darted between the van and the delivery truck. Her mother let go of her hand and the seatbelt dug into Maria's neck, giving her a painful anchor back into a world that was feeling increasingly surreal. When her mother looked back into her eyes, Maria was dismayed to see that the older woman believed the insane things she was saying.

  "Magic?" she said. "Even the church had to go underground then. What kind of magic?"

  "We were so far away from the cities, so far away from even a twisted modern time. Magic older than the church, older than the priests, managed to survive. Such things were hard to find then like they are now, but we had nowhere else to turn. The Communist doctors, they didn't care what was happening to us, to those poor babies. We had to do something to keep from passing those terrible deformities on."

  Maria's body alternated between boiling heat and freezing cold, her mind struggling to process her mother's words. If it was nothing more than some kind of crazy old spell, her doctor in Los Angeles, back in the reality she knew and understood, would find the mysteries in her DNA and Leo's and help them merge together at last.

  But some part of her, steeped in those ancient mountains and stories and legends of her birth, knew it was something more.

  "What did you do, Mama?"

  "We all went together, all the mothers from the village, and we took our children with us. All the ones who'd had that awful medicine, from teenagers down to babies only a few months old. And we went up into the mountains where nothing could kill the old powers. A woman blessed the girls, and a man blessed the boys. That's why none of you, none of the children who'd had that poisonous medicine, had any children of your own."

  "Blessed us?" Maria said, her voice a harsh gasp. "You call that blessing us, even if it was true? You can't believe that nonsense. It's the scars, the damage from the infection. That's all."

  Maria's muscles were painful and frozen, no longer trembling in response to her mother's upset. Her heart pounded in her ears, but all of her insides felt like solid ice. She knew. Asking wouldn't make any difference now, but she had to anyway.

  "I never had appendicitis, did I?" she said, her voice much too high in her own ears. "No infection. You got some butcher to sterilize me before I was six years old."

  "My sweet Maria, you can't believe such a thing of me!"

  Elena was nearly shouting, but Maria knew it was the truth. She put the van in park and turned off the engine. The tiny car in front of her barely moved five inches before the ones behind started honking.

  "Please don't do that," her mother said, looking behind them with her eyes wide. "We'll talk when we get home."

  She reached for the keys, but Maria yanked them out and held them in her left hand.

  "Tell me the truth, Mama. Tell me what you did."

  Cars on both sides started honking as people behind the van tried to edge out into those lanes. A couple of cars cut in front of them, and the horns behind only got louder.

  "Someone will shoot us!" Elena cried, fumbling for the door locks. More space opened up in front of them.

  "Just tell me the truth then. Thirty years of lies is more than enough. Did you get me sterilized?"

  Motion in the rear view mirror caught Maria's eye as someone stepped out of a huge gray SUV and walked toward them. Her mother turned to stare at the man, her eyes wide and her face pale. She finally sat forward with her face in her hands, shaking her head.

  "Yes! You were sick with pain in your belly, but I don't know what it was. I went to the same doctor who helped me, the same way. We could not feed so many in our village, so he helped me after you were born. And with that poison...all those poor babies...we had to!"

  Maria's hand was no longer trembling, but her numb fingers had a difficult time finding a grip on the key. She was more tempted than she cared to admit to leave it in park, walk away from her mother's harsh sobs. Deal with whatever happened rather than what her mother had just told her. She started the car and jerked the gearshift into drive instead.

  Neither woman spoke as the traffic finally broke up or on the painfully long drive. Not until Maria put the van in park again and dropped the keys into her mother's hand.

  "I don't have anything else to say to you," Maria said, wiping traitorous tears from her cheeks. "I hope it was worth it."

  "You won't go to that doctor, will you? Please, if you promise me that, I'll know it was all worth it."

  "That's none of your damned business. Whether I manage to get pregnant or not, you'll never know about it. My children will never even know your name."

  Chapter 6

  Eight years ago

  The open-air cafe sat high on the cliff over the Pacific Ocean, with nothing in sight but deep blue water and landscaping carefully designed to look natural. The best-looking valets Maria had ever seen made expensive cars disappear, along with any thoughts of worrying about the cost in such an exclusive setting. The noise and madness of LA seemed years away rather than barely two hours.

  The tasteful white awnings, tile, and tablecloths showcased the sparkling waves more effectively than any art museum could have. Food and drink as good as anything further south in the city brought Maria here with friends or visiting family members. She led her more paranoid clients to believe this was the most private location outside of one of the national parks. She was delighted to take any opportunity she could to escape to fundamental peace and quiet.

  Maria sipped her raspberry tea, breathing in the scent of
her childhood friend's coffee. That would have suited her so much better, but she was trying to be good. Ana's blue eyes were bloodshot and dark smudges gave away how tired she still was. She'd barely started the eight-hour adjustment to New York time when she added three more hours onto the burden by flying to California. A leisurely brunch by the sea was the best jetlag cure either of them could imagine.

  "Is the coffee helping?" Maria said.

  "Not yet." Ana hid a yawn behind her hand before taking another long drink. "Tastes good, though. When did you start drinking tea? Some kind of California thing?"

  "Hardly," Maria said. "Neither of us would have lasted long out here if it had been. The house came with a built-in espresso machine."

  "Then you should stop trying to inhale my coffee and get your own," Ana said, smiling.

  Maria smiled back. She hadn't planned on telling Ana about seeing a new fertility specialist, but she was getting tired of keeping the secret.

  "My doctor said it's a good idea to switch," she said. "Just to be safe."

  "Safe?" Ana rubbed her eyes and blinked at Maria. "What, are you trying to get pregnant or something?"

  "Well, yeah, we have been for a while now. Didn't my mother mention it? She's not exactly on board with the whole idea."

  "No, she wouldn't be," Ana said. "She didn't mention a word. Too busy quizzing me about everything else in your life to get around to that. When did you last talk to her, Mar?"

  Maria shook her head and looked out at the ocean. The Pacific was calm from so high up, the early sunlight tracing level, regular waves. She wished she felt the same. With Leo or even with her girlhood friend, she was terribly on edge lately from all the new hormones.

  She frowned. "I don't know, around the time we started going to fertility doctors. Two years, I guess."