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The last Ballard heard about her mother, she was living somewhere in Maui, the Hawaiian island where Renée had been abandoned at age fourteen—until Tutu had found her and taken her to California.
Maui had been ravaged by wildfires six months ago. The town of Lahaina was destroyed and the remains of nearly a hundred people had been recovered so far in the ash. Many were unidentified. Makani Ballard was believed to have lived on the east side of the island, away from the fires, but she likely frequented Lahaina to shop and seek work. At the moment, she was listed among the missing.
“I called Dan, my contact in Maui, last week but they don’t have anything new,” Ballard said. “They still have so many UBs that it’s going to go on for months.”
“UBs?”
“Unidentified bodies.”
“Oh.”
“We shorten everything in the cop world. My guy over there works for something called the MINT.”
“Which means what?”
“Morgue Identification and Notification Task Force. That’s a horrible name so we shorten it, give it a catchy acronym.”
“Understandable. This not knowing about your mother, whether she’s even alive—has it softened your feelings about her at all?”
There were shelves lining the wall behind Elingburg’s couch that were filled with books and small statues and other knickknacks. There was also a framed mirror on a stand that Elingburg had previously told Ballard was used in therapy sessions with clients who had body-image problems. Ballard could see herself in the mirror now as she considered Elingburg’s question. She saw the stress in her dark eyes and realized that she had been so preoccupied with the theft of her badge and gun that morning that she had forgotten to pull her sun-streaked hair into a ponytail for work. It fell, unbrushed and straggly, to her shoulders.
“Softened my feelings…” Ballard said. “No, not really. I feel like if she’s gone, I’ve missed my chance to get an answer from her.”
“Answer to what?” Elingburg asked.
“You know, why she fucking went off into the hills and left me like that.”
“Abandoned you, you mean.”
Ballard nodded. “I guess it’s kind of hard to say that when it’s your own mother,” she said.
“That’s the self-blame we’ve been talking about since you came to me,” Elingburg said. “It’s not on you, Renée. Your mother did this to you. And you did nothing to deserve it.”
“But I don’t get why she didn’t see enough in me to stick around. I mean, we had a home, we had the water, we had a horse. She had me, but somehow… it wasn’t enough for her.”
Elingburg kept a notebook and pen on the coffee table. For the first time during the session, she picked them up and wrote something down.
“What did you write?”
“‘Vicarious trauma.’”
“Which means what?”
“It’s when you share someone else’s trauma. People with jobs where they see tragedy and trauma all the time—police, firefighters, ER workers, soldiers—it has a second-tier effect on them.”
“What about therapists? Do they get it?”
“They can, yes.”
“What’s it got to do with my mother?”
“Well… I think maybe subconsciously you have masked the trauma of losing your father and being abandoned by your mother with vicarious trauma from your work. Taking on the pain of others camouflages your own. And that was your shield for many years, until the death of your grandmother left you with no one but your lost mother somewhere out there. It’s bubbling up to the surface, and that’s what causes your insomnia. It’s all coming to the conscious mind.”
Ballard thought about this. It was true that she had felt the need to talk to someone shortly after Tutu passed. It was ironic that shehad been telling Elingburg about her mother in weekly installments when the fires swept through Maui and possibly took her life. It was almost as if the anger and hurt she’d spewed out in the sessions had ignited the flames.
“So,” Ballard finally said, “what do I do about it?”
“Well, as I’ve been saying all along, you have to stop blaming yourself for your mother’s choices,” Elingburg said. “You have to remember that both of you were abandoned by your father. His—”
