My brother Freddy always told people that our mother disappeared – and probably died – by falling off of a yacht one night after drinking with two actor friends. Both were apparently competing for her affections. I tried to explain to him a million times that he was confusing our mother with Natalie Wood. They both shared similar appearances, but one was an actual movie star while the other only appeared in a handful of B grade horror films. Freddy had always been a little slow and highly suspectable to media influence, so I could never convince him that he had conflated two different tragedies that had occurred around the same time in 1981 – though Natalie Wood’s death received far more media attention than our mother’s – which is probably why he remembered the details of her death more vividly.

The “official” story is that our mother actually disappeared in Florida while scouting locations for a horror film she was co-producing. I eventually learned this after reaching the age where I could do some research on my own at the library. She apparently went skinny dipping in the ocean late one night with a boy she met at her hotel. He said that she playfully dove under the moonlit waters right before they were attacked by what he suspected was a great white shark. “Like from that Spielberg movie Jaws,” he said in one interview. He showed the police investigating the case the bite marks this shark left on his leg. The pictures looked gruesome. Unfortunately, his story could never be corroborated because our mother’s body was never recovered. Some speculated that the notoriously strong undertow in the waters off that beach carried what remained of her body off to sea.

I personally don’t believe any of that drivel. Now that it has been forty years since she supposedly vanished and my brother has passed away, it’s time to share what I’ve pieced together about what really happened to my mother – the great 1970s scream queen legend Bridgette O’Neill. As her magazine pictures and film footage constantly remind me, she was a beautiful doe eyed woman with a sweet, girl nextdoor look that made her an ideal victim for the slasher genre – a wholesome all-American girl ripe for the slaughter in films like The Vampire Morticians and The Tennessee Machete Man. But behind her seemingly innocent smile and full-throated horror movie scream lurked something that always struck me as mysterious and unnerving.

My memory of my mother is elusive. She darts in and out of the shadows and fog in my mind, her form sometimes appearing as translucent as the morning mist and other times as concrete and vivid as a marble statue. One of my most vivid memories involves sitting next to her while she put on make-up at the vanity in her bedroom. Round lights framed the mirror and the reflections of our faces. Her red hair fell in ringlets around her long, angular face. Mine was oval shaped with black bangs – traits I thought I must have inherited from my father – a man I only knew through stories because he died before I could form any memories of him.

I recall asking her why she textured the make-up on her face to make herself look older when most women did it to make themselves look younger – at least based on the television advertisements I’d watched. She patted my head lovingly and said that our family was cursed with a youthful appearance. She explained that it was hard enough for a woman to be taken seriously as an aspiring movie producer in Hollywood, but the perception of youth and inexperience only made it more difficult to convince the old men with the million-dollar bank accounts to fund her projects.

There’s certainly truth to what she said, but like a master liar, she expertly used slivers of truth to obfuscate the aspects of reality she didn’t want others to see. She did the same thing when she brought home young men late at night. She would tell us they were friends from her acting class coming over to rehearse scenes from plays like Hedda Gabbler or The Crucible. But the sounds I heard coming from her bedroom on those nights didn’t sound like actors rehearsing scenes from plays to me. They sounded bestial and violent and unnatural. I had to cover my ears with pillows to drown out all the horrible sounds.

Freddy’s psychologist made me promise not to share this story with the public until after he passed. She’s a nice woman with freckles named Molly. She said Freddy’s mind was too fragile to handle my version of events. I understood. He had been impaired after a fall damaged his brain when he was only an infant. I think the neediness that resulted from his brain damage made him form a closer bond with our mother than I did. Molly agrees with me about this. We’ve chatted about this observation when I’ve visited her office at the hospital where Freddy lived the majority of his life. I shared with her how he loved to be cradled in our mother’s arms while she sang lullabies, but I always kept my distance – skeptical of the legitimacy of her affection for us. Molly once asked me what made me feel this way about our mother. I told her, some things you just feel in your gut.

I told her that sometimes I would have dreams about a young man with a black beard who said he was my father. Freddy and I lived on a boat with him and he would sit on the deck with us at night and play old sea shanties with his guitar. “Oh, Missy Riley had a lovely daughter,” his baritone voice would thunder. Despite the vividness of my dream, my mother said the man I described was not based on a memory of my father. She said our father was slight with sandy blond hair. He died in an automobile accident shortly after Freddy was born. She almost convinced me, too. She was a skilled storyteller, weaving a reality for us that was held together with more fiction than fact, but I could see through the illusions she tried to erect for us.

There’s another vivid memory I once shared with Molly to help with Freddy’s therapy. One-night Freddy woke up feeling sick. It was during one of those evenings when our mother brought one of her fellow acting students to the house to rehearse. I heard Freddy knock on her bedroom door, calling for her, so I slipped out of bed to help him. He was already wandering into her bedroom when I arrived. Moonlight bathed the empty and rumpled covers on her bed. Freddy went to the bathroom door. We could hear water running. We could see light around the doorframe. Freddy knocked and our mother asked him to hold on a minute. I could hear the stress and alarm in her voice. She sounded like she was in a hurry to finish something. Freddy begged her to come help him. He said his stomach hurt really bad. She said that she would only be a minute more. He said he couldn’t – and leaned over – and retched up his dinner all over the carpet.

When our mother opened the door, her hair was dripping wet and her body was wrapped in a white robe. She ushered Freddy into the bathroom and started giving him a bath. I ran to the kitchen to get some paper towels to clean up Freddy’s mess. When I returned, I knelt on the floor and started wiping up the remnants of his dinner and listened as our mother cleaned him up. I heard him ask why there were fish scales in the bathtub, but she deflected his question – asking him if his stomach felt any better. He said it did. I wondered where the young man she had brought home went but concluded he must have slipped out earlier in the evening once they were finished with their rehearsal.

Freddy later told me that he could have sworn that the fish scales he saw in the bathtub were covered with something red like ketchup or hot sauce. His mind was too innocent to speculate about darker associations. He said that he had picked one up to examine it more closely, but our mother had grabbed it from his hand and flushed it down the toilet. He also noticed that the streak of white he had seen starting to form our mother’s hair had disappeared and that she looked much younger than usual – almost as young as the teenage girl who sometimes babysat us. He asked her if she had dyed her hair. She smiled and told him it was impolite to ask a woman about her beauty secrets. I asked Molly if Freddy had ever talked to her about that strange night. She shook her head. He never mentioned it.

I call Bridgette O’Neill our mother, but I now know that she wasn’t – not spiritually or biologically. After she disappeared, I saved her silver hairbrush as a memento. I’d always admired it. It featured the engraving of a mermaid emerging from an ocean wave on the back of its handle. Several years ago, I took some strands of her hair from the brush and paid for a DNA test. The lab reached out to me a few weeks later by phone, asking where I found the hair that I had sent them. They said it couldn’t possibly belong to my mother. Not only was it not a match to my DNA, but some of the chromosomes in the hair looked more similar to a fish than a human. They concluded the sample must have somehow been contaminated.

I never told Freddy about the test. His health was already in decline. And Molly would have been furious with me. But it did comfort me to know that our DNA tests were a match – and that we were indeed brother and sister. The tests also helped me identify some of our close relatives. They predominantly lived around a small coastal town in Oregon. And I also discovered a story about a family in that DNA network who disappeared only a few months after Freddy was born. The husband was a fisherman named Geoff and his wife a good churchgoing woman named Nancy. They lived with their two infant children on his fishing boat while the family saved money for a down payment on a house. When I located pictures of the fisherman and his wife, it was like looking at photographs of me and Freddy from twenty years ago. Freddy’s black beard looked just like the one in Geoff’s portrait and I shared Nancy’s oval face and black bangs.

Sometimes I stare at the ocean at night and imagine Bridgette O’Neill emerging from the waves as young and beautiful as the day she disappeared. I’d love to ask her questions to confirm my suspicions. I’d picture her climbing on board my parent’s boat from the dark ocean and devouring them in the night – only to realize to her horror that they had two infant children sleeping in the next room. I can imagine her looking down at us in our cribs as vividly as if it was a memory, contemplating whether we were going to suffer the same fate as our parents. I wonder if she grabbed Freddy first and attempted to do away with him, but only decided against going further once the damage had already been done to him. I see her on a movie set, surrounded by the cameras and other illusion making machines, performing the role of the victim in a vampire movie – a role she played pitch perfectly having had thousands of opportunities to observe them up close when she came to feed on her own prey. I shudder at the thought of how many young boys she lured into our house – and what she was doing to produce all the horrible sounds that came from her bedroom. And it still sends chills down my spine to think about the boy from the hotel in Florida who probably just barely escaped her, thinking that he had been attacked by a shark when the razor-sharp teeth that had actually sunk into his leg – and tore his flesh to ribbons – had actually belonged to my mother and her innocent smile.

Molly always nods like she believes me when I tell her this part of the story. But she is a master illusionist like my mother. She knows how to create a reality that makes people feel comfortable enough to share their darkest secrets with her. Tonight, when she drove me to the beach to scatter Freddy’s ashes in the ocean, she asked me what I thought became of my mother after the attack in Florida. I sat down on the shore and set Freddy’s urn in the sand. I told Molly it was obvious. Once the boy from the hotel escaped, Bridgette knew she could never return. How would she explain it? I opened the urn and removed the bag of ashes. Molly knelt down beside me. The sun was setting in the horizon, coloring the tranquil waves with hues of orange and red. She asked me what I would think if I learned that my mother had really been killed by a shark. I opened the plastic bag and began pouring some of Freddy’s ashes into the waves as they receded back into the ocean. I told Molly she was silly. I’ve already explained what happened to my mother. We’ve kept it a secret to protect Freddy’s mind. But now I can finally embrace the truth about what happened to my mother. Molly nodded. I’m not sure if she really believes me. I looked out at the ocean as the tide came in, collecting the last of Freddy’s remains. And I could almost see Bridgette in the distance, her red hair shimmering in the sunlight before she dove into the waves, her tail emerging from the water to wave good-bye.