Mothers and Other Strangers Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE

  “Whom do we really belong to and why? This dark, gorgeous jewel of a novel probes the secrets we keep and the complex ties of family, love, and loss. Shattering and brilliant, this marks the debut of an astonishing talent.”

  — CAROLINE LEAVITT,

  New York Times–bestselling author of Cruel Beautiful World and Pictures of You

  “Mothers and Other Strangers is a memorable first novel, a delightfully twisty gothic with the strange and eerie urgency of a fable or a dream.”

  — DAN CHAON,

  author of Ill Will and You Remind Me of Me

  “A young woman’s investigation of her mother’s mysterious past uncovers disturbing revelations about love, family and the fragile bonds that both connect us and tear us apart. An absorbing, sensitive novel that confirms the troubling reality that it’s often the people closest to us who do the most harm.”

  — ELIZABETH BRUNDAGE,

  author of All Things Cease to Appear

  “From the first shocking sentence of Gina Sorell’s Mothers and Other Strangers, I was hooked on the twisting ride of a woman who receives an inheritance of secrets, debt, and the mess left behind. With stunning prose and the danger of a thriller, Sorell reaches deep into a broken heart and finds what’s still beating. I am a fan!”

  — SUSAN HENDERSON,

  author of Up from the Blue

  “This compelling debut reveals the astronomical cost of harboring family secrets. Somehow Gina Sorell has managed to craft both a meditation on the messiness of mother-daughter bonds and a mystery that will keep you turning pages until the wee hours of the morning.”

  — MICHELLE BRAFMAN,

  author of Bertrand Court and Washing the Dead

  “A stunning debut, Mothers and Other Strangers grips from page one. It’s a perfect weave of suspense and of insight about how people love and hurt one another, and sometimes heal, and sometimes cannot. I highly recommend this novel and look forward—impatiently—to Gina Sorell’s future work.”

  — ROBIN BLACK,

  author of Life Drawing

  “Gina Sorell has written a complex mystery of the human heart in her poignant debut novel, exploring how the emotional riddle of our parents shapes our lives well into adulthood. To paraphrase Philip Larkin, they screw you up, your mom and dad. Sometimes they intend to hurt you as deeply as they’ve been hurt. The quest in this wise novel is to realize that the path to healing a childhood wound passes through understanding the strangeness of one’s parents, and accepting it, or not. This book is a must read for anyone who has struggled to understand their own parents.”

  — ROBERT EVERSZ,

  author of Shooting Elvis

  Copyright © 2017 by Gina Sorell

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. With a few exceptions, all names and places are also products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Published by Prospect Park Books

  2359 Lincoln Avenue

  Altadena, CA 91001

  www.prospectparkbooks.com

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

  www.cbsd.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sorell, Gina, author.

  Title: Mothers and other strangers / by Gina Sorell.

  Description: Altadena, California: Prospect Park Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016031392 (print) | LCCN 2016039800 (ebook) | ISBN 9781938849909 ()

  Subjects: LCSH: Mothers and daughters--Fiction. | Mothers--Death--Fiction. | Family secrets--Fiction. | Canada--Fiction. | South Africa--Fiction. | Psychological fiction. | Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9199.4.S6987 M68 2017 (print) | LCC PR9199.4.S6987 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031392

  Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan

  Book layout and design by Amy Inouye, Future Studio

  For my parents, Denny and Leonie,

  never strangers, always friends.

  And my loves Jeff and Grady,

  home is where you are.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  My father proposed to my mother at gunpoint when she was nineteen, and knowing that she was already pregnant with a dead man’s child, she accepted.

  The dead man was actually my real father, Leo, a handsome young playboy my mother had managed to tame. She had loved him since she was a girl, their family farms neighboring each another. She had watched as he had grown from a boy to a man and had felt her heart breaking when he began to play the field with older and more sophisticated girls. For a time, her worship of Leo seemed hopeless. Until one day, he no longer looked at her like a kid sister, but as a woman he wanted to take. She had waited for him without him ever knowing, and when he had fallen hard for her and professed his love and desire to make her his wife, she knew the wait had been worth it.

  And then everything changed.

  In a second, all that she had longed for was taken from her, and with it any chance of true happiness. On a starless night, a silver Jaguar crossed the two-lane road that wound through the mountains and met my parents’ car head on. And in a spectacular explosion of metal and glass, all lives were taken. All except my mother’s and, as it would turn out, mine. Sometimes I wondered if I was the only real survivor that night, my mother forever altered and hardened by her loss.

  It was Howard, Leo’s older brother, the man I called Papa and the one who raised me as if I was his own, who nursed my mother back to life after the crash, healing all of her but the hand that had clutched Leo’s fingers as he lay dying on the side of the road. She had tried to keep him alive, tried to breathe life into his failing body, but it was useless. As she cried and waited for help, she gripped Leo’s hand, her grief so intense that she claimed she was unable to uncurl her fingers properly ever again. For as long as I could remember, her left hand lay at her side, a withered little fist with crinkly skin that she often kept tucked behind her dress or curled at her waist. I had never understood how a hand could be deformed by grief, but my mother insisted it was so.

  Howard had adored my mother since she was a child. He was ten years older and crippled by polio, and he used to enjoy watching her run and play with his younger brother. And as she matured, so did his affection. After his brother died, Howard’s love was a secret he no longer needed to keep. And so one night, he took my mother for a ride in his new car, and as they came to the end of their dirt road he pulled out his revolver and held it to his head. In exchange for my mother’s hand in marriage, he promised her wealth and fidelity. He also promised that he would kill himself if she refused. He loved her with all his heart, and any love that she could give in return would be enough.

  He must’ve hoped that she would learn to
love him eventually, that she would forget his brother, and that in time he could slowly take Leo’s place in her heart. But my mother didn’t care about her heart; it was broken, and now she needed something more than the fantasies of an idyllic future with a dead fiancé: she needed security. And she knew that this was the best offer she would get. Having a child out of wedlock wasn’t an option in those days, not with the Dutch Afrikaners around blaming women for their problems. Every time there was a drought or a bad bunch of crops, the local newspaper would report that it was because women wore skirts that were too short, ran around without their husbands, and drank liquor. She could only imagine what her neighbors would say about an illegitimate child. The last thing she needed were those militants knocking on her door to curse her. And so she agreed, and when my mother announced to Howard a month after they were married that she had gotten pregnant with his child on their wedding night, Howard never suspected for a moment that she was lying and I wasn’t his. Together, they moved to the new life he had been building for them in Johannesburg. A life where they could start fresh.

  This is how the story goes, at least according to my mother. And now, thirty-nine years old and returning to Toronto to bury her, I still didn’t know if it was true. Like the cancer that had claimed her a week earlier, my mother had been like an illness to me, and eventually I’d had to cut her out. We had been estranged for years, and still I hadn’t stopped yearning for the relationship we never had. There would be no deathbed reconciliation like in the movies for us. It’s hard to reconcile with a stranger. Not only did I not know that my own mother was dying, I had no idea she was sick.

  The story of my paternity was just one of many secrets and half-truths my mother burdened me with as a child, repeated enough times that eventually it became true, even if it wasn’t. I had no way of knowing, no proof, and my mother wasn’t about to give me any. I wondered if my real father would have swung me in the air until I was dizzy, held me in his arms when I was scared, and loved me the way my mother never had, understanding all the things I longed to know, before I even said them. When Howard was still around, I had asked him once about his brother, but he said he didn’t have one. For years I had looked for evidence of my real father’s existence, but I never found any, and eventually I gave up trying.

  I don’t know why I had held out hopes of finding proof that my father existed among my mother’s things in her little one-bedroom apartment in Toronto when she died, but I did. I sent up a prayer to anyone who might listen, that there would be a photograph, a love letter, some souvenir of his life. I wanted to know if I did in fact inherit his long legs, straight nose, and sad eyes, like my mother said I had. Of all the things she had told me over the years, the story of my real father’s existence was the one thing that I hoped was true. That my true roots lay not with my mother, but in a man who at one time really did exist, to whom she had given the best parts of herself. I found my heart beating a little faster with every piece of yellowed paper I found in the shoeboxes that contained evidence of my mother’s complicated existence, an existence that began long before I was born, in Africa.

  Africa. It seemed like some distant memory, a story that belonged to someone else. We left Africa when I was six and moved to Canada, and even though I’d spent the last decade living in LA, I guess I still thought of Africa as home. In truth, I’d never really felt at home anywhere, except with Ted, and now we were divorced. One more branch removed from my ever-shrinking family tree.

  I longed to fill in all the missing pieces that made me feel unrooted, floating through time and space, the wind whistling through the holes history had left in me, threatening to carry me away and toss me aside for good.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1987

  I slowly pulled the car into the driveway of Dalewood, my mother’s apartment building, and rested my head on the steering wheel, my whole body aching from fatigue. The dreams of fire that used to haunt me as a child were back, and I hadn’t slept more than a few hours since my mother had passed away. Days spent sorting out her affairs had left me dazed, my skin sensitive to everything it touched. I took a deep breath. Soon this would all be over and I could move on.

  My mother had willed her apartment to me, but it made more sense to sell it. For the first time in a long time, I had a plan. A plan that involved actually living again, rather than sleepwalking with the disappointments that somewhere along the way I decided were my destiny to carry with me. My mother’s death had changed all of that. It had shaken me awake and out of the depression that I had fought on and off since adolescence. Happiness had always been hard won for me, but I’d won it once, and I was determined to do so again. She was gone now. And it was time to send all my heartache with her.

  In the mirrored walls of the elevator car, I noticed for the first time how exhausted I looked. My long, wavy brown hair hung in a mess around my shoulders, and I scooped it up and twisted it into a knot at the back of my neck. My brown eyes seemed even sadder now, fatigue and age dragging the corners of them down. I sighed and took it all in: the lines around my eyes, the soft freckles on my pale skin, the lips that were always slightly red from my licking them. I had examined myself a million times in this elevator on the way to see my mother, and the conclusion had always been the same. She was the beautiful one, not me. No matter how many times I’d been told otherwise, I had always felt plain in comparison to her. It was a belief that my mother had done little to change. I took a deep breath and exhaled. I needed to stop worrying about what my mother did or didn’t think of me. I would pack up her things, sell her place, and use what little money was left to open my own dance studio. The thought of it made me smile. My name on the door, and a room full of bright-eyed children, all nimble limbs and easy smiles, bursting with the same joy that I’d known as a dancer. Teaching was an idea I had abandoned long ago in pursuit of other things. But now I longed for a life full of purpose and passion, and I hoped that if I planted enough bits of happiness in my heart, they would grow into a love of life again.

  As the elevator opened I saw Vincent and some of my mother’s neighbors clustered around the door of her apartment.

  “Elsie, I am so sorry,” he said, running his big hands over his wiry white hair, his eyes wide.

  “What happened?”

  “A real estate agent came by to take a look at the apartment. He left his card at the desk and got the key from the lockbox.”

  “But I spoke to Diane this morning, and she didn’t say anything about anyone coming by.” Diane was the agent who handled all the sales in the building.

  “I don’t think she knew. Mrs. David came home and heard the noise in your mother’s apartment. She knocked on the door, and he bolted past her.”

  I started down the hall and locked eyes with Mrs. David. She was clutching her arm and talking to a man in uniform. I quickened my steps and felt Vincent right behind me trying to hold me back.

  “Elsie, wait.…”

  “Oh my God.” The apartment looked like it had been hit by an earthquake. Except that this wasn’t Los Angeles, and the only earthquakes here were of the human kind. The couch had been torn open, the stuffing pulled apart and thrown around the living room. Broken picture frames littered the floor, along with the contents of every cupboard. Her red lacquered jewelry box had also been destroyed, presumably smashed to pieces when the intruder discovered it had only costume jewelry inside. I heard myself gasp as I noticed that even the pages of her beloved books had been ripped from their bindings and tossed aside. I bent down to pick them up.

  “Ma’am, please don’t touch anything.”

  “This is my mother’s apartment.”

  “And your mother is?”

  “Dead.” I took no pleasure in saying it, and I felt a huge lump in my throat that made it almost impossible to swallow. “She left me the apartment. I was getting ready to sell it.”

  “I see. I’ll need you to tell me if you notice anything missing. Jewelry, art, anything valuable.”<
br />
  “She didn’t have anything like that,” I said, looking around me. “She made me executor of her will, and I can tell you this is it.” I wasn’t being entirely honest; there were also debts, and secrets, and questions that I would never have answered. My knees started to buckle, and he grabbed me before I could fall.

  “Here, take a seat.” He picked up the small painting stool that my mother used as a side table and sat me down on it, and it was then that I read his nametag: Officer Dixon.

  “What happened?” I looked over at Mrs. David.

  “It didn’t sound like you,” said Mrs. David. “I know the difference between packing things in boxes and throwing them around the living room. I kept knocking, and then he opened the door and pushed me down as he ran away.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “Not very well.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ll be fine.” She paused and looked me straight in the eye. “What was he looking for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have any idea who would want to do this? Did your mother have any enemies?” asked Officer Dixon.

  I could feel Mrs. David and Vincent’s eyes on me as they waited for an answer. My mouth was dry and my head was buzzing. It was one thing for me to go through my mother’s things looking for clues to her past, but this was something horrible. This wasn’t looking, this was ransacking. The fact that someone was able to tear through her apartment with such violence hit me square in the gut and I heard myself start to cry.

  “I wouldn’t know.” Once the tears came I couldn’t stop them. There hadn’t been many since she passed, only an overwhelming fatigue and numbness. I may have been angry with my mother, but I didn’t want to deface her, trash anything and everything that had held meaning for her. It may not look like much, but it was all she had, it was all I had, and it had fit into these five hundred square feet. I was sobbing now and having trouble catching my breath. It wasn’t just the shock of the break-in, or the exhaustion that I’d felt since coming back to Toronto to deal with my mother’s affairs, that made me weep—it was admitting that any hidden hope I’d had of us having an actual relationship had now died along with her.