When I get back home again, I am exhausted. You would think that riding a bicycle all over town or walking everywhere would make my legs strong and capable, but they just feel weak and wobbly now. I guess physical exercise doesn't do much for the body when your very soul is dying inside.
All I have is gone. My family is gone, and my prince is gone. I am starting to sound like a song on repeat. I am whining so bad in my brain, I can't stand myself. I am one big pity party, but I can't stop. The worst is that my mother, the same mother who was a good mother to me - until she abandoned me - is by all the evidence, a mass murderer.
I throw myself onto the couch. How could I not see? Was I blind? All the evidence was there. My mother traveled all over the country. She spent late nights on her computer and phone. She was paranoid and watchful and while she never talked about the government in negative terms like my dad, I can not think of one incident where she expressed an opinion one way or the other about any political topic. She seemed neutral. Or, maybe she was just being careful. Now that I am thinking about it, she never offered an opinion on the terror that was taking place before the EMP. She didn't seem to be all that worried about the school shootings in a time when even Nana thought about home schooling her boy. Did she pretend to be concerned by telling me to be careful that last day? Did she know I was safe because she knew where the next attack was coming? Did she even care?
She didn't even let me know she was alive. Maybe, she knows there will be no convincing me that she is right. She always said I was very stubborn, but she also said I was tenderhearted. And, now that I think about her saying this, I remember when she said it to my dad, when she called me tenderhearted. Maybe, she meant it like I was a hopeless case. Too weak and tenderhearted to be a survivor. She always said I was not really like her or dad. My dad had to have known what was coming too. Otherwise, why is he hiding? Why has he not come for me?
I go into my mother's room to look for clues. I ransack the room, pull out the drawers, look under the bed, in the closet, but there is nothing. No clues whatsoever that my mother is a maniacal, scheming follower of a madman who was apparently hellbent on Armageddon. It just looks like a mama's room - all flowery and sweet smelling and cozy. There is nothing in this room to suggest a monster.
I plop down on the comfy bed where I spent many a late night talking to my mother before I would go to bed. We were especially close after my mom left my dad. It was almost a ritual when she was home that we would have what she called a "girl chat" before I went to bed. She knew everything about me. I hid nothing, and I asked her questions most teenage girls do not ask their mother. She always answered me without judging me. She was cool that way. But, now that I think about it, the conversations were one-sided. I guess I was a typical, self-centered teenage girl who never thought it was odd that we did not talk about her or her day or her problems at all. I was as selfish then as I am now. So selfish. I guess one thing has not changed in this crazy world.
I am thinking about my mother and, I won't lie, a beautiful prince when I notice something I have noticed before but never gave much thought to. There is a door on the ceiling. A door that I know leads to a pull down set of steps to an attic. I have never been up there, and I have never seen my mother up there either. Spiders. That was her explanation for never going up there. "Spiders and cobwebs" she would say and shiver. That was enough for me to not want to explore the attic either.
As I look at the ceiling, I am thinking that the attic is a great place to hide secrets. I find a chair that is conveniently at a desk in the room. I pull it over and stand on it to reach up and pull the stairs down. The first thing I notice is that the steps pull down silently, no squeaks, no sticky hinges. They come down with little effort on my part. I barely have to tug on them at all. There is no musky smell or thick dust on the steps. I climb. There is a light switch at the top, but of course no power, so I cut on the flashlight I have on my side.
I scan the room before I enter. I can see with one scan that this is where my mother has been hiding her secrets. I do not enter the room. I don't need to. The light from my flashlight tells me all I need to know. Besides the computers and radio set-up that looks like a command central station from a spy movie, there is a wall covered with pinned up papers. One of the papers is a map of the United States. I can see from where I am standing that the push pins in the map are in cities where school shootings occurred. There are stars pinned on Dallas and Albuquerque where the two senators were assassinated.
My flashlight is by now shaking so hard that I almost don't notice the most damning evidence of all. Beside the map there is a picture. It is a picture of a prince - Prince Torin Henry James Albert of Wales and his bodyguard, Jack Taylor. I have seen this picture before. It is a picture of the prince in his younger days. Steven put it on my refrigerator when I joined his club in high school. He told my mom all about the prince and his bodyguard. I remembered that Steven told my mom they were the best of friends, and my mother looked at the picture and said that they were handsome boys. I was so embarrassed about being in the club that I threw the photo in the trash after Steven left that day.
My mom must have pulled the picture out of the trash. Has she been planning on taking Prince Torin this long? Was it her idea? Has she been a part of all of this evil for that long? She had plenty of time to change her mind or notify authorities about the professor. My mama is not innocent and certainly not the manipulated follower of a madman. My mama is a conniving, sneaky conspirator to the end of the world. She is responsible for mothers jumping off of bridges to save their babies, and for Ned not seeing his son, and little Nana dying in a hail of bullets.
My mother is evil.
I practically fall down the stairs and back onto the bed. I scream into the pillows.