A Mother's Secret

Chapter 1

I wrapped my blonde hair up into a bun and secured it with the black hairband that had been around my wrist since yesterday evening, rubbing my thumb over the red indentation it had left behind. I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. I'd tried to conceal the dark circles around my eyes but they were still visible, and the piercing blue of my irises were overshadowed by the redness that covered the whites of my eyes. This was called waking up at 6am for school on a Monday morning after having two weeks leave. I tucked the loose strands of hair behind my ears and picked up my school file from my desk.

The bold black letters on the front of my file read 'Danielle Thomas'. That was my name. My use of past tense isn't a mistake. Although sometimes I think, am I still Danielle Thomas? Or more so, was I ever Danielle Thomas. You'll understand as I get into the rest of my story.

The date was 24th March 2014. I remember it being one of the warmer days in March - that was a sign that a hot and dry summer was coming. We lived in a small town in Northern California called Dunsmuir - located in the Trinity Mountains with a population that had barely hit 1,500. It was a beautiful place to live, but once you've seen it all, it can also be  quite an isolating place to live. And when I say 'we', I mean myself and Stella Thomas. She was my mom. Again, there is no error in my use of past tense.

I dragged myself down the stairs of our two bedroomed house, planting myself in front of a ready made plate of pancakes that sat beside an opened jar of nutella with the knife free-standing in the chocolate. She would always get up before me on school mornings to make sure I ate before I left the house. I started shoveling the food into my mouth, when I heard Stella's footprints echo from the lounge. Her dark curled hair bounced at her shoulders as she walked across the kitchen until she stood by my side.

"Good morning, love," she spoke softly as she ran a hand over my arm.

"Pancakes were a shout, mom. Thanks." She knew they were my favorite, and smiled at my comment. "I don't suppose I've any chance of a ride this morning? Chris has gone in early to get ahead with his science project and Vick-"

Stella relaxed her folded arms and picked her car keys up off the kitchen counter, cutting me off mid-sentence, "If you can have your butt in the car within the next 5 minutes I will." Her brown eyes stared into my own, a smirk on her face, as I finished off the rest of my breakfast in approximately two and a half minutes, much to her amusement.

I wouldn't have said it was any different to any other school morning, just the only thing out of the ordinary being that Stella was casually dressed instead of being in her normal work clothes.

"Aren't you working today?"

She pushed her cellphone into the back pocket of her jeans and shook her head, "I've got, uh, a couple of errands to run out of town so Jack's give me the morning off." Jack was her boss and the owner of De'Vito Diner, which Stella managed for him and had done for the past 14 years. He took a chance on her when she moved to Dunsmuir as a 23 year old single parent with a three year old daughter, and always told me it was one of the best decisions he ever made. Jack became like family to us. Probably the closest thing to a father figure I ever had.

"You're going out of town? To do what?"

Stella covered her mouth with her hand to yawn, something I could tell she was doing to buy herself some more time to think of an answer that wasn't the truth. She was shifty this particular morning, and her eyes kept diverting to the watch on her wrist every couple of minutes as though she was running late for something. I frowned.

"Well it's for Jack really," she says, ushering me out of the house and pulling her leather jacket off of the coat hook. "He needs a couple of bits for the restaurant."

"What bits could he possibly need that he can't get in town?"

"Dani," Stella huffed, "what's with the 20 questions this morning?"

"I was just curious, that's all."

We both closed shut the doors behind us to her black 2010 Honda Accord.

"When have you ever been this curious about my work, huh?" Stella peered at me in the corner of her eye, and I shrugged in response. "Are you not happy about me going out of town or something?"

"Of course," I rested my chin upon the palm of my hand as I stared out of the passenger window at the familiar sights of my town as Stella drove me to school. "I just wish I was coming with you." My eyes diverted back to her as she focused on the road ahead of her, and this time, I felt like she was purposely trying not to look in my direction and give me eye contact. Mainly because we''d had this conversation plenty of times before, and she knew it was going to be brought up again. "You always say we will go out of town but we never do. Well, you do," my voice trails off, "I've never been allowed to see anything other than this place."

"And I've told you, one day-"

Already knowing what she's going to say I jump in to finish her predictable response in an almost deflated tone, "one day we will take a trip for the weekend and you'll show me some of your favorite places in California."

"Exactly."

I had been given that exact response since I was eight years old, when one of my friends at school brought in a brochure to show our class where her parents were taking her for summer vacation - a beautiful, coastal city called Santa Barbara. Since then, I pondered on what was outside of Dunsmuir and pleaded with Stella to show me the rest of California.

"Yeah, one day, huh." 

We come to a stop at the lights and I see one of my friends, Vicky, walking along the sidewalk on her way into school. I undo my seat-belt, causing the sensor alarms in the car to beep continuously as I climb out of the passenger seat. Stella lifts her hand off of the steering wheel in question. 

"Vicky's over there I'll go walk the rest of the way with her. That way you can get on with the errands you need to run." She knew that I had suspicions that she was lying to me, but she just nodded anyway. "I'll see you at home, mom."

For the entire fifteen years of my existence, the only place I had known or had ever been was Dunsmuir. I had heard stories from Stella about us living in Santa Monica for the first three years of my life, but after the death of Stella's mom and my grandmother, Laura, she told me she packed everything up and moved us both to a place that she said 'was more secluded and quiet.' I often dreamt of the sun shining down on the golden sand of Santa Monica beach and the majestic blue ocean calmly sweeping up to shore. I pictured the children making sandcastles with their siblings and the moms calling out that they are too close to the water. I would imagine myself lying on that beach in the midst of all of that, but complaining after a few hours that it was too hot for me, so I'd seek shade beneath a palm tree and read. I wanted to be able to fall in love with life in the place I had only seen in pictures.

I was never sure why Stella moved us from a place like Santa Monica to live somewhere so out of the way of everything she had ever known and loved; somewhere where we were almost invisible to the rest of the world. That was until I realised that Stella needed us to be invisible to the rest of the world.