Switching Mommies
After a tragic loss, eleven-year-old Honor is sent across the world to live with a father she barely knows – and a stepmother she doesn’t trust. Surrounded by cold strangers, Honor retreats into silence, carrying more grief than any child should. But one desperate moment forces a shift neither she nor her stepmother saw coming. Switching Mommies is a quiet, powerful story about loss, longing, and the unexpected places where love takes root.
NICOLE JEFFORDS FICTION
Honor Flynn’s mother committed suicide by jumping beneath a train. Or perhaps she was pushed — it was rush hour and the platform was crowded. “She was there one minute and gone the next,” reported a witness. “But it all happened so quickly it’s hard to know what actually occurred.”
Another witness claimed that out of the corner of her eye she saw a man right behind Marcelle (Honor’s mother) who gave her a push, and boom, she went down. This took place at Victoria Station and instantly the whole tube system was thrown out of whack. Victoria Station was shut down for a few hours, which, of course, led to a big sprawling mess.
Honor was eleven years old at the time. It was hard to keep her from the truth, and what she was told was that there had been an accident and her mother had been thrown to the tracks.
What was known about Marcelle was that she worked as an admin for an American company and that she had been depressed because of her own mother’s recent death from ovarian cancer. She also had had money problems – investments gone wrong, cash misspent, nothing in the bank. Her death had been marked as a suicide, but no one really knew for sure. The assailant – if there was one – had never been found, and eventually the case was closed.
Honor was sent to live with her father in Austin, Texas. She didn’t know him very well. He was a big, tall, rough-looking guy who did something vague and unspecified in IT. His wife, Flora, was the one with money. The day she arrived, Honor was given stiff hugs and shown to a small upstairs bedroom that didn’t get much light due to a huge oak tree outside its window. The room was cramped and barren of any kind of decoration. “I’ll help you fix it up,” said Flora. “We can order all sorts of stuff online and we can go to Elm Street where they have pretty nice furniture.”
“Okay,” said Honor, who didn’t really have much interest. Poor girl didn’t care.
After the horror of her mother’s death, she had pulled deeply into herself and made her mind a total blank, as barren of thought as her new bedroom was of furniture. To her, right now, the world was a wasteland. And she was alone in it.
Perhaps because of her father’s looks, she was a little in awe of him. His big, strong body gave her something to hang onto, although he spent his days locked in his office and she didn’t get to see him till dinnertime. Still, she needed some kind of hero, and he was it.
She avoided Flora who seemed somewhat scary to her. First, she was tall and bony with sleek black hair that looked as if it had been shellacked to her head. Her eyes were black too, and she would stare questioningly at Honor as if through slits. Second… well, with all that happened to her, Honor couldn’t help but think of Flora as an evil witch. The woman was cold by nature, not sweet and accommodating as her own mother had been. And there was something hard and mean in her face that made Honor instinctively want to stay as far away from her as possible.
Honor’s parents hadn’t been married. On her birth certificate, Jack Flynn was listed as Honor’s father and so, legally, he was responsible for her. (Her mother’s name had been Marcelle Clovis.) He and Marcelle had lived together in London for two years or so, and then Jack had returned to the States where eventually he had been introduced to Flora Atkinson, his now wife, at a party. Flora was a striking woman and Jack had immediately been smitten by her. But she was also very wealthy, so perhaps it was that fact that had really attracted him. By the time Honor arrived in their lives, the couple had had two children, a girl named Beatrice, aged five, and a three-year-old boy named Derrick. The children were brats, Honor thought, always whining and complaining. (She later learned there had been several nannies, all of whom had quit, ostensibly because of the children’s bad behavior.)
But Honor adored her two half-siblings. She invented games for them, and the more noise they made, the happier she felt, as if their howling and careening were a sign of accomplishment. If, however, Flora was around, Honor would quickly withdraw from her antics and become quiet and standoffish. “Hey, aren’t you gonna play with us?” one of the kids would yell, and Honor would say she had to do her homework.
In school Honor wasn’t well-liked. She was a curly-haired girl with a Raggedy Ann face, wide and freckled, a face that didn’t hide much. If she was in a bad mood, the mouth would tighten up and the eyes would glare and sizzle. The other kids stayed away from her, which was exactly what she wanted. To be alone with her grief.
Her biggest source of sorrow was that her father didn’t have much time for her. He was sweet with his other kids, but treated Honor in a distant manner that made her feel like a stranger – unwanted.
Pretty soon Honor incorporated that feeling of unwantedness deeply into her psyche. What’s the point of being here, she would ask herself. The happiness of her life with her mother seemed like a far off memory, a dream she had once had. Now there was nothing to sustain her. She spent her days dragging her feet, a sense of emptiness and loss growing within her.
Flora, thin-skinned and irritable, took a lot of pills to shore up her daily life – antidepressants, anxiety medication, sleeping pills. One day Honor looted her step-mother’s medicine cabinet and grabbed a bunch of sleeping pills. She hid these in the back of her closet, in a little box of trinkets. She didn’t really mean to do anything with them, considering the pills a safety valve in case things got bad enough for her to want to take herself out of this world. Disappear for good.
Not long after Honor hid the pills, she heard Flora shrieking and moaning. “Where are my pills?” she screamed. “WHERE ARE THEY?”
Honor played completely dumb. There was no reason to think an eleven-year-old girl, like her, would have taken the pills. And yet Flora came to her with mascara smudged eyes, and asked if she had seen the pills.
“No,” said Honor.
“Well, where are they then?”
Honor shrugged. “How would I know?” she said.
It gave her immense pleasure to see Flora all riled up and so, with quiet resolve, she began to steal things from Flora: face cream, lipstick, eye shadow, a favorite hat (which Honor cut up and hid in a neighbor’s trash can), even birth control pills because, in Honor’s mind, this would keep Flora from sleeping with Jack. One day early in September, when Honor was in school, Flora took her bedroom apart, searching for the pills. Of course she found them along with all her makeup and a beloved scarf. When Honor came home, Flora was waiting.
“So you’re the one who took my pills,” she said.
“No, I didn’t,” Honor replied in a surly voice.
“Yes, you did. I found them in your room.”
“You have no right to search my room,” Honor snarled.
“As long as you live in this house I do,” retorted Flora.
“I’m going to talk to my dad,” Honor said.
Other than birth control meds, Jack knew nothing about Flora’s pill habit. “If you dare do that,” Flora said, “things will become extremely rough for you.”
“Yeah, like how?”
“You’ll see,” said Flora.
Honor didn’t think things could become rougher than they already were. Yes, she lived in a nice house and her bedroom was now filled with puzzles and toys and posters and furniture Flora had helped her pick out. But her mother was gone, which meant Honor fundamentally didn’t give a shit about anything. And now she had nowhere to live but here.
That was a horrible set of circumstances. But Honor, so utterly emptied out, didn’t want to be in this world anymore. Little voices in her head told her to take Flora’s pills and be done with it. She had no friends, not even a dog because Flora didn’t approve. And she didn’t have a loving parent she could share all her thoughts and desires with. There was nothing, no one. Even her father was too busy to spend time with her.
She planned it all out carefully. One afternoon when Flora was out with the kids, she crushed the pills and swallowed them down with applesauce.
It was her mistake, she realized later, not to take them after everyone was asleep in bed.
When Flora came home, she found her stepdaughter on the floor of her bedroom, inert and drooling. “Oh no, oh no!” Flora cried as she ran her hands over the girl, trying to revive her. She was scared to call 911 because of the information that would be revealed. “I can deal with this myself,” she thought, slapping Honor’s face and pulling at her body. To no avail. Jack was away on a business trip, so there was no one there to help her. In the end, she threw a bucket of cold water over Honor, whose eyes opened briefly and met with Flora’s. There was so much love and concern in her stepmother’s eyes that when Honor sank back into unconsciousness, that was the image that stuck with her.
Later, when Honor was in a hospital bed with tubes in her arms, Flora was in the chair beside her. “Mommy, mommy,” Honor cried. Flora thought she meant her, that she was the mommy, and began softly to caress Honor’s face. “I’m here, baby. I’m right here. Don’t you worry about a thing. It’s all going to be okay.”
There was something so genuine in Flora’s voice that Honor believed her. An ache shifted inside her, a feeling of lost love and hopelessness that suddenly attached itself to Flora. “Are you going to tell Dad?” she whispered. “Please don’t tell him.”
“I have to, baby. But he’ll understand how sad you are and we’ll make sure things are better.”
“I don’t want him to know about the pills.”
“I don’t either, baby. But we have no choice.” She reached over the bed for Honor and hugged her so hard and so desperately that for a minute Honor thought she was in her own mother’s arms. That was the moment that changed everything. From then on, Honor became Flora’s shadow, consulting her on her lack of friends, her desire for a new bicycle, her unruly hair that she wanted to grow out long to her shoulders.
“You’ve been so good, baby. I’d like to give you a nice gift as long as it’s within reason.”
“A horse?” Honor queried.
“Yes, even a horse. We’d have to board it in the country.”
“And you’ll come watch me ride?”
“Of course I will. I’ll be with you every minute.”
She stayed true to her word. When Honor rode her new bay gelding, a sweet horse who enjoyed the carrots Honor brought him every time she visited the stable, Flora was there to watch. They never talked about the sleeping pills and what had happened. Honor grew into a strong young woman with a head of curly red hair and a friendly, open face that smiled often. There was no hint of the sorrow she had once endured. And yet, every so often, a look of wistfulness and longing entered her round blue eyes, and Flora would squeeze her hand and say, “You’re okay, baby, you’re okay.”
Eventually, Honor realized her stepmother, whom she now called Mom, was right. Her life was good and everything was okay. When, years later, she visited London and purposefully fought her way through the crowd at Victoria Station to stand on the platform where she imagined her mother had stood just before falling to the tracks, Honor’s throat constricted and tears began to swim in her eyes. She had very little memory of Marcelle – just the feeling of warmth and happiness one might experience opening the oven to fresh-baked cookies. But she stared down at the tracks and murmured, “Here I am, Mama, and everything is fine.”
And it was.