Catch up:
“You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
-Harvey Dent (The Dark Knight)
Angelica did everything she could to locate the house Frank told her about: The one where wealthy patrons paid handsomely for a curated escape from reality. At the helm of the operation was a woman he called “Mother.”
Through Angelica, Social Services was on the scent like a bloodhound chasing down a fugitive. If there really was some sort of upscale drug house offering affluent clientele an escape from their responsibilities, she was determined to put an end to it.
More that that, she wanted to make sure that Mother faced the justice she so righteously deserved. In her eyes, the operation’s ringleader was responsible for all the pain she felt in her own life.
Though she was a model case worker in every other regard, Angelica lied in her findings report when she claimed that there could be children living in the house. It was believable enough…
Hence, her superiors didn’t hesitate to sent her along on the raid. Someone would need to be there to take custody of the kids. Lines, it turns out, are easy to blur when we we believe that we’re serving a greater purpose hiding on the other side.
So. Angelica polished off the last swallow of her bitter, luke-warm office coffee before tossing the styrofoam cup in the trash and running out the door. She was already jittery enough.
She hopped into the back of an unmarked police car, and the convoy quickly squealed away.
There were no sirens. No lights flashing. They wanted the element of surprise as they quietly descended on the house.
Angelica stayed outside while burly, well-armed, highly trained men snuck toward the front door like ants on a hill. With speed and stealth, they were each anticipating a smooth apprehension of the druglord they knew as “Mother”.
But Frank wasn’t the only person with deep loyalties to the mysterious woman.
As the police swept in, guns raised high, every person in the house refused to step aside on their own accord. Some were simply too high to understand what was going on. Others had enough of their wits about them to realize that it was a police raid.
They were all dressed in expensive clothes, laying round on fluffy pillows encased with Egyptian cotton. The décor inside the house looked like a chic yoga studio, and smelled like the soft breeze of a lotus flower.
Then, as a stark reminder of the ugliness for which the house stood, one patron pulled a gun. He was standing right outside the Mother’s bedroom.
Angelica listened in horror from the street as a short-lived volley of gunfire rang out.
When the police started trickling out the front door a few minutes later, she ran to find out what happened.
“She didn’t make it,” one of them said. “Bullet went through the door… got her in the chest. Mother’s dead.”
Now, sometimes fate is cruel and sometimes it’s sweet. Most often, however, it’s both. Wrapped together in a single package, it leaves each of us spending our lives peeling it apart, searching for meaning amid the tiny slivers of whatever truths we can find.
All the while, we struggle to see the bigger picture…
For Angelica, the bigger picture was just as tattered, faded and worn as the one in her book. It had been developing for years in a darkroom full of demons.
But, whose?
When the police brought the body bag out, and Angelica asked to see her, the sound of the zipper told the truth–
The “Mother” everyone was talking about was her own mother.
The people in the house were arrested, of course and Frank lost his daughter to the system. Yet, he was still among the most fortunate of the house’s patrons. At least they had the benefit of accountability.
Rehab. Public apologies. Community service.
They all faced a reckoning that at least gave them a shot at redemption. Sometimes the best thing to happen in someone’s life is to fall.
The ones who weren’t there that day, faced a different kind of damnation. For, they were left to their own devices. Without Mother there to regulate them, each of them descended into a hell of their own creation.
Some of their implosions took place in the public eye. Some were far quieter. A few went by way of suicide. But make no mistake, all of them danced with the devil.
For Angelica’s part, she just went home. It had been so long since she’d last opened her book–
She took it down from the shelf, and glanced at the title: A Wrinkle in Time, by Medleine L’Engle. It easily fell open to page 87… right where her mother’s picture had lived for so long.
Angelica took the picture out, and held it up as tears started gathering in her eyes.
Just before losing her composure, she noticed something she’d never seen before; the faint underline of faded graphite beneath one of the passages—
“If you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t know how to be happy.”
In the end, Angelica adopted Lily.
With that, she dedicated her new purpose to healing scars rather than creating them.
Though she never knew what a proper mother would do or say, nor did Lily know how a proper daughter should behave.
Indeed, by a twist of fate, they both made the perfect shields with which to fight their demons.
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