“What was I going to do with this gruesome painting of the smashed corpse of my friend, and her blood dripping down all over the frame? . . . I would not have requested such a gory picture of my worst enemy, much less of my unfortunate friend.” – Clare Boothe Luce

 

Toby and I were in my old Ford Taurus out front of the billboard on Bright Road again. I was looking down at his brown curls nodding between my thighs, thinking about his mother and The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.

We’d come to the billboard because Toby wanted to see it, but I couldn’t remember what we had been talking about before he got on his knees. Something about his mom and what she did. “She was their leader,” he said, resting his cheek on my naked thigh.

“Yeah,” I said, because what was I supposed to say? It was the truth.

His mom did lead twelve women to their deaths by jumping Dorothy Hale-style.

Since she died, Toby always seemed to be looking for my reassurance that his mom was not a bad person. As if I would know what a good mother looked like.

My mom had been religious in that Baptist, speaking-in-tongues way. She was responsible for all sorts of anti-abortion signs around town, had organized protests at the Planned Parenthood in Toledo and at pride parades, but her coup de grâce had been the Bright Road billboard in front of us: REPENT, it said in letters taller than me, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.

Toby sighed, and I shivered as his breath hit me just right. I didn’t know what he expected me to say. No one had ever accused me of being comforting. I tried to direct his face back between my legs, but he said, “You don’t get it.”

I didn’t need to. I’d liked his mom. She was everything my mom wasn’t.

“She was a good person,” Toby said, as if he was trying to convince himself. He nuzzled his temple against my knee.

People always said that about my mom, too. But if his mom led women to their deaths, mine antagonized them into killing themselves.

◆

My mom died a month ago of ovarian cancer, two weeks after Toby’s mom killed herself. She’d been sick a while before being diagnosed. By then, it was too late. When she called me for the first time in eleven years, she said she wanted to mend things before she died—and could I take care of her when her church friends weren’t around?

I moved back into my childhood bedroom but refused to break my lease. She wasn’t sorry about what caused the rift all those years ago. I hadn’t expected her to apologize. Still, when I walked back in that house after so long, I didn’t think she’d take one look at me from the couch where she lay shriveled like a corpse and say, “You’ve really let yourself go.” I should have known it’d be like that, should have turned right around and left.

◆

It was a weekday in late September when Toby’s mom and the Findlay Twelve leapt from a cliff onto the rocks of Lake Erie. The town paper read: LOCAL CULT COMMITS MASS SUICIDE ON THE SHORES OF ERIE.

When my mom died, her death was featured among six others in the obituaries section. Next to a quarter-sized picture of her, it said, “Martha Morrison, 64, died Sunday, October 9, 2022, at her home in Findlay after a short battle with cancer. She is preceded in death by her husband, John.” It mentioned nothing of me, her only daughter.

◆

Toby and I met when we were in seventh grade. We’d gone to different schools—him to the city’s, me to the county’s. He was a skinny kid in a ratty t-shirt, standing in front of the card table my school used for a concession stand during school events. He was notable because I didn’t recognize him, and everyone knew everyone at my school. We were there for Othello in Space, a play put on by the high schoolers.

I spotted him gnawing on a Twizzler during intermission. “Who are you?” I said, marching up to him.

“Who are you?” he said.

“I asked first.”

“I asked second.”

“Tabitha,” I said. “Tabby for short.”

“Toby,” he said. “Toby for short.”

“Not Tobias?”

He took another bite of his Twizzler.

“It’s not a weird question,” I said.

He shrugged.

“What are you doing here?”

“Watching whatever this is.” He gestured with the Twizzler toward the stage. The lights overhead blinked to signal the end of intermission.

“Yeah, but why?”

“My mom wanted to.”

My mom was at a church committee and didn’t know I was there.

Toby’s t-shirt had a hole in the collar. I poked his skin through it. “Do you always do what your mom wants?” I couldn’t remember the last time I actively did what mine said.

“She’s cool,” he said. He pointed toward the stage at a woman four rows back in an aisle seat. Even then, Geneva had colorfully streaked gray hair. It was staticky as if someone had rubbed a balloon against it. She seemed rather ostrich-like, long-necked, nose sharp, even though the rest of her face was soft. I’d never seen a woman in such ill-fitting clothes. I dug my finger deeper into Toby’s t-shirt’s hole, curled it around the fabric, and pulled.

His hand came around my wrist and held me still. Before I could turn to look at him, her face turned to me, a smooth movement as if it could rotate on an inhuman axis.

We made eye contact. Hers were brown, nearly black, like the stage when the lights dimmed.

“That’s her,” Toby said, as she slowly grinned. “That’s my mom.”

◆

Early in our friendship, I learned from Toby that his mom was a real weirdo who loved art. He wouldn’t let me come to his house because his mom was always having “secret” meetings, though I wouldn’t understand what that meant for several years. Plus, there was yarn and thread everywhere, he said. His mom had a hobby of weaving textile likenesses of famous paintings and selling them at local craft shows. The first time I officially met Toby’s mom was at one in Lima. I was in college by then, around 21, and was supposed to pick up Toby for lunch. We’d gotten into the habit of meeting up once or twice a semester while I was in school at Bowling Green. He hadn’t gone to college, but he was still around Findlay, stocking produce and helping his mom with her textiles.

I found Toby’s mom’s booth near the middle of the room. The two of them sat in fold-out chairs at a card table with tapestries piled on top.

“Welcome,” she said, standing. Her hand swept out. “I’m Geneva. What kind of art are you searching for, dear?”

“Uh,” I said. “Toby.”

“And what kind of art do you enjoy?”

“Um,” I said, looking at Toby to save me. He smiled and spread his hands over the textile in front of him. “That,” I said, pointing to the one Toby handled. It had clouds on it.

“Oh,” Geneva said with the kind of delight my mom only showed when putting a particularly hefty pile of bills in the tithe envelope at church, a moment of hesitation followed by sheer smugness. “What taste,” she said. “My, what taste. And you know my Toby?”

I didn’t say anything because Toby was already nodding his head so fast his bangs bounced. I’d never seen someone talk so theatrically and affectionately to a stranger. Later, I’d come to understand it as part of Geneva’s way, a measured performance of what she gauged whoever she spoke to needed.

“This is my masterpiece,” she said, resting her hand over her heart. “A replica of Frida Kahlo’s greatest work, The Suicide of Dorothy Hale. Do you know it?”

“The clouds are nice,” I said. “I like the dead lady.”

“My dear,” she said, pausing for a second as if she was too aghast to continue. “What about the romance? Don’t you feel her pain? Look at her graceful arm and corsage, her sightless eyes. Do you know her story?”

If eyes could project sentences, mine would have said you could’ve warned me to Toby.

“Well, she died,” I guessed. “Of suicide.” The lady in the textile was on the sidewalk in front of a building, bleeding out. She wore a black dress. A skyscraper shrouded in clouds loomed over her.

“It was quite tragic. She was an actress who jumped from her apartment in New York City after her husband died. Her friend commissioned this recuerdo, a memory.”

“Cool,” I said, stepping backwards and staring impatiently at Toby.

“You must take it,” she said, picking up the textile reverently. The sticker on it read $200.

“I’m good.”

“A gift,” she said. “From me to Toby’s girlfriend.”

“We’re not,” I said, and if I had it my way, we never would be. He seemed to think otherwise, inching closer to me whenever we went out, offering me his coat when it was cold. I didn’t see Toby that way then. He was nice and all, my friend, but he was kind of short, and his hair was ridiculous.

“Let’s go,” Toby said before I could finish. He snapped up the textile, bunching Dorothy’s face with his fist.

◆

At 36, I should have been more prepared to deal with my mother’s illness than I was.

The sicker my mom got, the more fervent her prayers grew. With the chemo and other treatments, she couldn’t make it to church in person, so it was my job to pull up the streaming service on her old Dell. Two and a half months before she died, I had just settled her on the couch with the laptop when I overheard her pastor talk about the “witch” in town.

“Lord Jesus,” he said, the fourth or fifth time since Mom’s eyes closed in prayer. “We ask that you protect this town from the machinations of Satan. We lift up in prayer those who would lead us down a path of sin.”

I sat at the kitchen table behind my mother and pulled out my cellphone to record. Sometimes, when the pastor got going, he’d lapse into tongues. Toby and I’d text about it—the video, a snake emoji, a laughing smiley.

“We know, Lord Jesus, that there are those who would turn us toward evil,” the pastor said. “There are those who work to end innocent lives. We ask that you bring wisdom into their hearts, that you guide them toward your light.”

I held back a snort. I couldn’t believe anyone actually believed this shit in the twenty-first century. We lived in the country just outside of the town of Findlay, about forty-five minutes south of Toledo, but that didn’t mean we were isolated or even that everyone was religious. Plenty thought my mom’s church was bananas. They simply didn’t circle my mom’s orbit.

“Lord Jesus,” the pastor said, the video lagging so that the audio did not sync to his lips. “We lift up Geneva Michaelson. We ask that you enter her heart.”

Geneva? Toby’s mother? I paused the recording on my phone. “Mom?”

“Shh,” she said, waving her hand back at me. She lay prone on her back, arm stretched out over her head, the way Kahlo had portrayed Hale on the sidewalk.

“Mom,” I said, “that’s Toby’s mom.”

“I know,” she said. In the background, the pastor still praying.

“We know her.”

“I know that.”

“She’s not a witch.”

“Do not speak to me that way, Tabitha.”

“She’s not a witch.” My voice rose as the pastor’s voice grew fervent. “You have to tell him to stop. It’s not true.”

She slammed the laptop closed. It was the most animated I’d seen her in days. “What’s she doing with all those babies then?” she shouted.

“What are you talking about?” I stood and took the laptop off her lap before she could drop it.

“The babies. What is she doing with them?”

“She’s not doing anything with them. She runs a support group.” I put the laptop down on the kitchen table and walked away.

“I know what I know,” she called after me. When I didn’t turn around, she added, “Where are you going? I need you. Bring me my checkbook.”

Hadn’t she given those people enough money? She’d been active in the church her whole life, organizing bake sales, attending bible studies, heading up all sorts of reach-out committees. Growing up, I’d found it deeply embarrassing. As an adult, it was a nuisance and dangerous.

I rounded the hallway corner and heard: “I know what you two did together.”

I didn’t turn back.

I didn’t tell her that Geneva had been more of a mother to me in the last eleven years than she’d ever been.

Anyway, I knew Geneva didn’t do back-alley or basement abortions like my mom was suggesting. I knew because when I was pregnant all those years ago, that wasn’t how she helped me.

◆

When the doctor told me I was pregnant, she delivered the worst news of my life as if it was the best. Congratulations, she’d said, as if it was wonderful that I was nearly five months along.

At 25, I should have had the wherewithal and resources to deal with a baby, but I was neck-deep in student loans, and my job as a secretary at the dentist’s office paid little. So, when my period was late, I denied it until I couldn’t any longer, which was how I found myself sitting on the curb outside my gynecologist’s office, head cradled in my hands, deep breathing on my tennis shoes, wishing to turn back time, so I could tell my boss hell no when he asked if I wanted to grab a margarita.

Then, in what felt like a hallucination due to heat stroke, I heard a quiet voice asking if I was all right. “No,” I muttered, shrinking further into myself, nose almost touching laces.

“There are resources for dealing with unwanted pregnancies,” she said. “You’re not too far along to do something, but you can’t wait much longer in the state of Ohio.”

I sniffled and lifted my head when I felt her attempt to slip pamphlets and flyers in the space between my elbow and knees. It was the gynecologist’s assistant speaking to me. I took the papers.

“She would have given these to you had you waited,” the woman said. “We thought you stormed out and left, didn’t know you were sitting here all this time until another patient told us there was a woman who looked like she needed help on the curb.”

“I’m fine,” I said. I had to be.

Her eyebrows creased. “When I got pregnant with my first, I was still in high school.” She took the flyers she’d slid to me and began shuffling them around. “This woman leads a support group for mothers. All kinds. Those that give birth and those that don’t, no matter the way. She helped me. Give her a call.”

I looked down at the flyer, and there was Geneva beneath the words “Mothers in Art: A Support Group,” standing proudly in front of her tapestries, a gaudy homemade pin on her sweater that said “doula.” The picture had been printed on construction paper and unevenly folded. Even though it was during one of those spells where Toby and I had lost touch because of how busy life was, I still called her, and that decision, too, changed everything.

It led me to moving in with Geneva a week later. It led me to confiding in somebody else’s mother about my terror that I had made a critical mistake I’d pay for with the rest of my life. It led me to ghosting my own mother.

But Geneva was Geneva, holding me together with her Dorothy Hale stories and green bean casserole. She worried my mom worried, so she wrote to her to let her know. That was Geneva’s worst quality, thinking that love could triumph anything.

She was gravely disappointed when my mother responded asking to never be contacted again.

◆

A week after the sermon, the church came for Geneva’s reputation. They started with flyers, shoving them in the fists of anyone too polite to say no. Initially, Geneva laughed it off. They were just kooks she told me when I apologized on their behalf. They’d seen her give an interview on the news about access to birth control and prenatal care and the importance of healing through art. Then, they organized boycotts of any business seen hosting her support group meetings, and she found it less funny. It got so bad that Geneva stopped publicly announcing where she’d be, so they started marching outside of her house. They’d block the support-group women from coming and going, follow them to and from her door, harassing them about their “babies.”

Women came to Geneva for all sorts of counseling. They were grieving their miscarriages. They couldn’t get pregnant. They were pregnant and considering their options—adoptions and, yes, even abortions. Geneva was not a doctor, and although she was what some might call odd, she was smart enough to know that she was not medically trained. Her group existed mostly for support through talking while making art.

Then the church released the list.

It contained the name of every woman Geneva was known to be helping and some who she’d helped in the past. How they got hold of it, Toby and I couldn’t figure out, but the damage was done. Suddenly, her safe space was no longer safe. Some of these women were abused and hiding from exes, or their pregnancies were a secret. It became dangerous to associate with Geneva for fear you’d be named.

I begged my mother to stop and even went so far as to hide her laptop. It didn’t matter that she was sick. She could organize from the couch, fund them with her last dollars. I hated her, but I couldn’t take her cellphone in case she had an emergency. My one relief was that I knew her involvement in terrorizing Geneva would end soon because there was no way she was going to live much longer. She was dying, the hospice worker insisted when I expressed my disbelief. It was only a matter of days, maybe weeks, they said.

But it was enough time for her to achieve her crowning glory, that billboard, and it wasn’t the worst thing they did to Geneva, but it was the last.

◆

Geneva was not a witch, but she was magical in the way she touched the women she helped, in her dedication to the community she cultivated. My own mother could not inspire that kind of loyalty. Her church friends were part of her world because of her tithing. Though, to hear her tell it, you’d think they were family.

Where were they, then, in her final days?

As the weeks grew colder, the last leaves of the year seemed to be waiting for a strong gust to relieve them of the burden of hanging on. It was a Wednesday, the last day I saw her. I wore a purple zip-up hoodie, my hair draped down my back like a cape. Her room was cold, poorly lit because the blinds were drawn.

I was folding a blanket when she said, “You went, didn’t you?”

I looked down at the black button-down I wore under the hoodie, the black jeans that were slightly too loose but all I had. I should have known my mother would know it was Geneva’s visitation that afternoon. I put the blanket in the dresser, closing the drawer slowly as if I, too, could slide away into darkness, be tucked away neatly.

“You know I always knew,” she said to my back when I didn’t turn around. “I always knew that woman helped you murder that baby.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I saw you after you left, you know. You were getting gas at the Sunoco across town, and I thought, There’s my baby, pregnant with her baby, but then you turned, and I saw your flat stomach. You would’ve been close to eight months along then if her letter to me was honest.”

I breathed in the way Geneva taught me. Felt the air in my chest, blew out slowly. “I lost it, Mom. I didn’t want it, but I didn’t get rid of it. I just started bleeding one day while eating popcorn at Geneva’s house. She took me to the E.R. where they told us I was having a miscarriage.”

“Why didn’t you come back then?”

“Because you wouldn’t have understood.” Because I’m lying. The day had already been too long, too exhausting, to fight her, and I already felt guilty for wishing it was her in that coffin instead of Geneva.

She scoffed, and it turned into a cough. I imagined her bucking upward as her muscles spasmed, but I still faced the dresser, the wall where her print of Jesus praying hung. “You didn’t come home,” she said between wheezes, “because that woman brainwashed you.”

That woman, I thought, drove me across state lines when we realized it was already too late in Ohio. That woman held my hand and helped me when others couldn’t, when my own mother wouldn’t. It had been a choice, and it hadn’t been. There was no room in my life for a child. I did not regret it. “She didn’t brainwash me,” I said quietly, still facing Jesus. His lifeless eyes looked heavenward. Geneva would have been distraught at the sloppiness of the print just as she’d been distraught when I told her my mother wouldn’t understand.

Mom was still coughing, but she managed a clear, “Murderer.” An even clearer: “She killed all those women.” She coughed again, a strangled, “You’re lucky.”

I turned slightly, caught her wrinkled fist moving from her mouth to her sheet. “Lucky?”

“Lucky I saved you,” she said. How she could be so loud while dying made little sense.

I turned back to Jesus and curled my fingers over the top of the dresser, standing still so as not to lash out, and took a big breath. Geneva would want me to respond with grace, but lucky kept flashing before my eyes as if someone tagged it there. There was no escaping it. Like how there was no escape when I was a kid when my mom would make me pray for forgiveness for not cleaning my room, for kissing Toby on the front porch, for forgetting to tell her that I had something going on after school. Like how she wasn’t there for me when I was pregnant. How she didn’t care even after Geneva’s letter. How Geneva had sat with me while we constructed this lie in case anyone asked: It was the couch, the popcorn, the bleeding, nothing anyone could do, a miscarriage.

“No,” I said. “You’ve done nothing for me.”

There was a pause. Another wheeze. “Nothing?”

“Nothing,” I said to Jesus before turning to find her frail form prone on the bed. One hand clutched at her chest, the other thrown over her head Dorothy Hale-style. “Geneva was more of a mother to me than you.”

She squinted her eyes like she always did whenever she was going to start ranting, then she sighed, deflating as if her body was releasing all its breath. Her eyes glistened.

“Repent,” she said. “You must repent, Tabitha, for speaking to your mother like that. For treating your mother like that.”

I started to say no, when she added, “Say sorry for abandoning me and hope that God forgives you.”

I held still, thinking if I let her tire herself out, she’d eventually believe she won and stop, thinking if Geneva had just waited her out, she might still be alive.

“You apologize,” my mom wheezed, as I began to turn. “Or you leave right now and know you killed your mother.”

My back tightened, pole straight, and snapped. If strangling her might put us both out of our misery, I’d do it, but she did not deserve the same quick release Geneva had chosen for herself.

So I left. Glancing once more at Jesus and the corner of the quilt sticking out of the dresser, I placed one foot in front of the other.

“Tabitha,” she called, as I reached the bedroom entrance. “Don’t you dare,” she said when I stepped out. “You come back right now, you hear?” she yelled. I slowly made my way down the hall. “Tabitha,” she called. I reached the front entryway. “Come back here,” she said, her coughing following me like a choir. “I need you.” With each wheezing cough, each word, I felt my muscles begin to loosen. With one hand, I wiped my face and found it dry. With the other, I turned the doorknob. I walked out into the daylight.

Nine days later, my mother would die. Alone, as far as I knew.

◆

This is not a love story if that’s what you’ve been hoping for. I learned a long time ago that love rarely exists however you need or desire it. Take what you want and don’t give much in return. So, when Toby told me he loved me not long after our mothers died, I didn’t accept it out of kindness. I accepted it because it was offered, and he didn’t seem to mind when I didn’t say it back.

We were in my car out front of the billboard on Bright Road again. We weren’t having sex or talking. We’d come out here on a Thursday at midnight because it was quiet and we needed to get away from Geneva’s house, where we both lived because we couldn’t bear to be alone. I didn’t know how it came to be a habit, relaxing in front of what felt like a crime scene, or at least the weapon that killed Geneva and twelve other women.

I was dicking around on my phone when Toby blurted, “It’s like that baby Hitler question.”

I’d been enjoying the silence, but because I’d already decided to be nicer to Toby, who was both now my landlord and my boyfriend, I made myself respond. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, resting his hand on my knee. “You know the one.”

“No,” I said, dropping my head back to the headrest.

“If you could kill him when he was a baby, would you do it to save all those people?”

“Your mom didn’t kill those women.” That morning, the local paper had come out with another hit piece describing Geneva as the ringleader who orchestrated the suicide, going into detail about the cliff where the women jumped. How investigators found wine glasses and bottles strewn about. Streamers dampened with dew. Yellow roses scattered from their cars to the cliff. Shoes next to the quilt the women allegedly sat atop before finishing their drinks and leaping onto the rocks of Lake Erie. Sometimes, I pictured them jumping one-by-one. Sometimes, I imagined them holding hands and counting to three. The news had all sorts of theories for how they did it and why. They called them the Findlay Twelve even though there were thirteen total.

To the town, Geneva was the villain, not the victim.

“They were grieving,” I said. “The rumors made everything worse.” I thought of the last time I’d seen Geneva, how pale she’d been when she’d graciously accepted the flowers I’d brought her along with my whole-hearted apology for my mother. “Some of them were victims of abuse and probably afraid,” I told Toby. I wondered what it was like to love someone or something that hard. “Your mom loved them.”

Toby kissed my shoulder. “She called them ‘her women.’ They wouldn’t have done it without her.”

I absently rubbed my chest over my heart. Before she jumped from her high-rise, Dorothy Hale had thrown a party, too. “I was one of her women,” I said, but she hadn’t taken me or told me what she was going to do. My name had been absent from the church’s list.

“I’m glad you didn’t go,” he said. He had brown eyes like his mother. “I’m glad I didn’t lose you, too.”

I gave him a closed-lip smile and looked at the billboard. It was fading slowly. Who knew how much longer it would be up before it was replaced with an ad for a car dealership or a politician or something. Most people probably didn’t connect the two: the suicide of the Findlay Twelve and the abuse they’d suffered from the church. Same as the paint in The Suicide of Dorothy Hale bleeding over the canvas to cover the frame, the suicide of the Findlay Twelve reached beyond their deaths to touch the entirety of a town that wouldn’t remember them beyond the caricatures it made of them.

“Is it okay if I still love her?” Toby asked. It was when he said shit like that that I felt the most inclined toward cruelty. Vulnerability, once recognized, could not be unrecognized. That’s why Geneva jumped, I thought. That’s why her women went with her. Hold a match to a candle long enough, and the wick is bound to catch fire.

Toby never could stand silence, so when I didn’t answer, he said, “Sometimes good people do bad things. That doesn’t make them bad.”

“Sometimes,” I said, sliding off the seat to my knees, crawling toward him, “bad people do good things.”

He ran his fingers through my hair, brushing it from my cheek. “I love you, you know?”

“I know.” I’d recognized it long ago, and I couldn’t unrecognize it.

Dorothy Hale was known for the corsage she’d fastened to her dress before she killed herself. Geneva for her group suicide. My mother for supporting her church. No one opening an old paper years from now would think twice about Martha Morrison’s obituary, but they might consider the article titled FINDLAY TWELVE: OFFICIALS INVESTIGATING OCCULT CONNECTIONS, ABORTION. They might read about Geneva’s love of art, how The Suicide of Dorothy Hale was likely an inspiration for how she chose to die, and they might wonder about this woman and her women.

I placed my fingers on the inside of Toby’s thighs. He put each knee on either side of my hips. To serve, Geneva told me when I thanked her for driving me across state lines, for letting me stay with her for months after my abortion, is my life’s mission.

What would it have been like to stand with her on the precipice of that cliff—water frothing, waves punishing, each moment passing with condensation billowing from our lips?

I knelt forward, pushing my palms toward Toby’s zipper, as if he were a pew at which I worshipped.

Devotion—that’s what I’d been craving all these months.

I took a breath and held it in my throat.

Well, this would be the end of that.