He grips the arms of the chair and jerks back and forth, as if the chair is holding a secret from him. “Where’s my calendar, Colby Diane?”
I open my mouth, but no sound comes out. I’ve never been so scared in my life.
Mom steps forward, puts her hand on Dad’s shoulder, and says firmly, “Reese. Enough!” She places her other hand on his cheek and presses his face up until he is forced to look at her. “E-nough.” They have a bit of a staring contest, and she wins.
He growls, gives my chair one more good shake, then straightens and moves to stand in front of his own.
She slides into the small space between me and Dad’s desk. It’s as if she thinks she’s protecting me, but she’s so tiny that it’s like a fence post trying to block out the sun. In the flat voice she uses with unreasonable people, she says, “It’s just a calendar. It’s not worth getting so upset over.”
Dad sits down hard in his chair, and his lips curl into a sneer. “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Mar—” His eyes widen. “—I mean, Sonya.” He sighs heavily, lowers his head into his hands, and it sounds like he’s starting to cry. “Oh, my God. Oh. My. God.”
Mom’s still wearing her You’re Being Unreasonable voice. “Think about it, Reese. Why would Colby take your calendar? You’re just being silly.”
It feels like the photo’s burning into my skin. I swallow hard, glance at the floor, and my eye catches on a Ding Dong wrapper under Dad’s desk. Guess I missed one when I was cleaning up.
Dad jerks upright and exclaims, “I know where it is!” He rolls back his chair, pulls his center desk drawer all the way out, and paws through it, in the process throwing out pens, paper clips, and scraps of paper until there’s nothing else to remove. He runs his hands over the inside, then slams the drawer closed—open—closed, again and again.
Mom tries her soothing voice. “Let’s go home, honey. We’ll call a meeting of the campaign committee for tomorrow afternoon. I’m sure Al Nantz will get this all straightened out.” She waits a beat, but he doesn’t answer. She crosses around the desk to Dad and places her hand on his arm, but he jerks away like it’s on fire.
His shoulders slump. “Everything’s ruined,” he whispers. “Everything’s ruined now.” He shakes his head sadly. “So much…information on it…if I can’t find that calendar…” He shakes his head sadly.
Seeing him like this is killing me. I take a deep breath and exhale, “Dad. It—it was me. I took your calendar. I spilled coffee on it, and—See, well, Rachel and I were fighting, and—”
It doesn’t seem possible, but his eyes get even bigger. “You? You took it? You have it?” He nearly knocks Mom over when he bolts out of his chair and starts toward me, his face bright red with rage. “How could you do that to me?”
I shrink back in the chair. I’m afraid that he’s going to stand over me and scare the bejeezus out of me again, and I talk fast. “I—just let me explain, okay? I threw it away because—”
He freezes and gasps, “Did you see anything? Did you?”
I hold up my hands and shake my head slowly.
My father throws a temper tantrum. He pounds the bookshelf to his left and sends its contents tumbling to the floor, sweeps his arm across the top shelf, and starts to pull the entire bookcase down, but Mom shrieks, “Reese! Don’t!”
His shoulders rise and fall with his hard breathing. At last he lowers his head and says softly, “What did you see, Colby?” When I don’t answer, he whirls on me, his face contorted. “Tell me!”
Mom’s voice is quiet but steady. “Colby Diane, answer your father.”
“I—I didn’t see anybody’s name but Rachel’s on your calendar—you know—about moving her to school next Saturday. The whole month of July was ruined and I tore it off—I mean, the month’s almost over anyway—then I tried to get the rest of the year dry, and…and…” My voice cracks, and my voice is squeaky-high. “Don’t you even care that the picture of us is gone?”
Dad frowns, looks confused. “What picture?”
I inhale shakily and exhale, “The one on the corner of your desk. From our spring break trip.”
He sneers, “Why the hell would I worry about a fucking picture right now, Colby? I need to know where my calend—”
“Wh—Who’s that lady you’re kissing in the photo under ours, Dad?” It sounds like someone else said it, even though I know it was me.
My words seem to have the effect of slowing time and space, because my father’s feet form roots to the floor halfway between my mother and me. Her eyebrows melt into a soft V, and her mouth droops open.
The spell is broken when Mom demands, “What picture?…What’s she talking about, Reese?”
Chocolaty acid springs into my mouth and I nearly throw up. I’m not sure if it’s because I just blabbed about the lady or that I can barely breathe because I’m so full of cream-filled cupcakes. “May I be excused?” I ask from behind my hand.
“No!” my mother snaps. “What picture did you see?”
I can’t tell her. I can’t.
She narrows her eyes at me, then at my dad. He finally uproots his feet, stumbles back to his chair, and pretty much falls into it.
Mom sways slightly and grabs the edge of Dad’s desk to steady herself. Her voice high, she asks, “Reese? What’s Colby talking about?”
He bends forward and starts rocking himself, his face contorted.
She moves unsteadily to him, gets on her knees, and tries to make him look at her, but he keeps turning away. She grips his biceps, tries to still his rocking.
He finally chokes out, “I…I didn’t want you to find out like this. I’m so sorry, Sonya…so sorry.”
It feels like I’m watching all of us from the ceiling, as if this is happening to someone else. This can’t be my parents. It can’t. Honesty is everything to us…right?
Mom’s face forms an ugly grimace. She shakes her head, runs her hand up and down Dad’s arm. Her voice choked, she pleads, “Reese, tell me that Colby is wrong about what she thinks she saw.” Mom narrows her eyes, tilts her head, and whisper-sobs, “You would never do that to me. It’s not who you are…Tell me that, Reese.”
I want to be anywhere else. I can’t be here. I shouldn’t be seeing this moment between my parents. I rise from the chair and bolt for the door, but I’m not fast enough, because I hear my father say the words that change our lives forever:
“Sonya, I’m sorry. But…I don’t love you anymore. I’m in love with someone else.”
Chapter Three
Ever since I found that photo, my insides have felt like I’m on a roller coaster that’s about to take its first heart-stopping plunge. I’m stretched out on my bed with my ear buds in, and my music’s blasting way louder than Mom ever lets me listen to it. She’s locked in her bedroom. I keep hoping that if I hold my pillow over my mouth and nose just right, I’ll suffocate myself. If that doesn’t work, I’ll find some other way to die. I have destroyed my family. I can’t go on living.
Can I?
In the hot blackness of my pillow, I replay the afternoon in my head.
As we left Dad’s campaign office, the three black SUVs and two police cars were turning into the parking lot. They parked beside the stage that my parents were dancing on a few hours ago.
When we arrived home, our house was a wreck. All of my dresser drawers were dumped out on my bed, including my personal snack stash, which occupies the bottom right drawer. Ding Dongs, Pop Tarts, and candy bars covered my bedspread; it looked like a vending machine had exploded. All that was left of my laptop was my iPod cord. In fact, the agents took all of our laptops and the hard drive of the desktop computer in the family room.
Mom kept herself together long enough to use her bright, happy voice when she phoned her best friend, Brenda, who she used to teach with before being a Senate candidate’s wife was her full-time job. She asked if Drew could spend the night at Brenda’s house with her daughter, Charlotte.
Mom can
do that with Brenda—tell her that she’s got stuff to do and Drew’s driving her crazy being bored—because Mom says Brenda lets her be a regular person instead of a politician’s wife, which is like being on display 24/7. Mom complains sometimes, but I know she secretly enjoys being in the spotlight.
Drew was super upset about her room being invaded. She thought we’d been robbed, and she only calmed down when she realized that the “robbers” didn’t steal her boy band CDs. I really hope she has no idea that Dad doesn’t love Mom anymore. I wish I didn’t know.
I don’t know how Mom faked everything being normal, but she did for Drew’s sake. She told her that Dad had a headache and was taking a nap, and she convinced Drew that the people who came into our house and turned it upside down had lost something and accidentally looked in the wrong place for it.
Drew put her hands on her hips and announced, “Well, they should have cleaned up their mess and left an ‘I’m sorry’ note!”
My little sister is so naive.
If Drew asked once, she asked a hundred times: “Is this about Colby and the calendar?”
Mom ignored her and rushed around gathering up Drew’s clothes and toothbrush, shoving them into her backpack.
“No, honey, Daddy and I just have some meetings at the office, and I thought you’d have more fun at Charlotte’s house.”
Not that she tried to anyway, but Mom couldn’t ship me off to a friend’s house; I don’t exactly have anyone I’m close to. I have friends, of course, but there’s no one special. Mom says Rachel and Drew are “social butterflies,” but she uses words like “quirky” and “bookworm” to describe me. She says I take after Dad in that way, too.
Speaking of The Man of the Hour, he disappeared into their bedroom shortly after we arrived home. It’s amazing that he even came home with us, because he sure didn’t want to. Mom had to badger him into leaving the campaign headquarters.
My mom is a lot of things, but more than anything else, she’s one tough bitch when she’s hurt, and it’s easy for her to cut off anyone she feels wronged by. Dad told me that it’s because she grew up in a girls’ home and always had to look out for herself. Mom’s public image is like she’s this warm, friendly, You’d Love to Have Me as Your Best Friend person. But she doesn’t trust people further than she can throw them, and once that trust is violated, the violator might as well be dead.
When they finally came out of Dad’s office after he told Mom that he doesn’t love her anymore, he headed for the media center sofa and curled up on it. She stomped right in there after him and didn’t even bother with the You’re Being Unreasonable voice or the soothing one, either. Nope; Mom went straight to Bitch: “Oh, no. No, you don’t. I am not going to face what’s at home by myself, so you get your ass off that couch and get in the car. Now.”
When he didn’t move, she threatened to take pictures of him with her phone and text them to the news stations. That got him up.
The moment Brenda pulled up and honked, Mom rushed Drew outside, then stood in the front yard and waved until the car was out of sight.
I went to my room, changed clothes, and lay face-down on the floor between my bed and the wall. I wanted to hide under my bed like I did when I was younger, but my bed’s not on stilts. I sensed Mom in my doorway before she spoke. “Do you have the photograph, Colby?”
I nodded into my carpet.
She sounded choked. “Why…did you take it from your dad’s office?”
I sat up and tried to look at her, but I couldn’t. “I…didn’t want anyone else to know about it.”
Her voice was sharp. “You were going to keep it from me?”
I tried to swallow but my throat was so tight that I choked on my spit. “Uh—no, Mom. I had to think. I mean, it just happened a little while ago. I didn’t know what to—”
She cut me off. “I’d like to see it, please.”
I reached into my shirt and withdrew the photo from my bra. I glanced at it, hoping that, by some miracle, I was wrong about what I’d seen before.
I wasn’t.
Mom met me where I was and took the photo from my hand. The look on her face nearly killed me. I babbled, “I’m sorry. I…didn’t know what to do with it. I—”
She held up her hand to silence me. I followed her to the family room and watched as she sat on the sofa beneath the framed news clipping of Dad receiving the Father of the Year award from the City of Northside. She stared at the photo of him making out with that woman, then closed her eyes, lowered her head, and her tough bitch self melted away as she slid onto the floor, curled into herself, and sobbed.
I knelt beside her with my hand on her arm. She pulled into herself even tighter and turned her face into the carpet. Every once in a while I whispered, “It’ll be okay, Mom,” even though I didn’t believe myself.
I sat up when I heard my parents’ bedroom door open. Dad carried two suitcases and a duffle bag into the family room, stepping carefully around a messy pile of board games that the F.B.I. agents pulled out of the hall closet and left on the floor.
“You okay, Colby?” he whispered. Did he think Mom couldn’t hear him?
I didn’t whisper. “Dad…why? How could you tell Mom that you don’t love her anymore? What about my sisters and me? Do you still love us?”
His voice was flat, and he was no longer the freaked-out person he was in his campaign office. Instead, he was hyper-controlled and seemed to be wearing his Debate Self: the one he uses when he’s facing off with an opponent and doesn’t want to give anything away. He seemed to be looking at me, but it felt as if he was looking through me. “Of course I still love you girls, and I do still love your mother, Colby; just not in the same way. We will always have a very special connection, because of you and your sisters.”
Mom wailed into the carpet and her shoulders shook with a new round of sobs.
Dad bit his lower lip and stared at his feet until Mom quieted down. When he spoke again, his voice was a little tighter. “Your mom and I have had our problems, but they have nothing to do with you. This…situation…is about me and my need for something more.”
I rose up on my knees and tried to stand, but I was shaking too hard. I choked out, “Please, Dad, don’t go. Don’t leave us. Wh-who is that lady? How can you love her?”
Dad squared his shoulders and stood up straighter. “Colby, you’re a child, and you can’t understand what it’s like for me to have feelings for another person that I never thought I would have again. Your mother is a wonderful person, and you and your sisters are everything to me. But none of you know what I have been through in the last year. You have no idea what it’s like to be in my position. There’s just so much pressure to be all things to all people.”
I started to cry. “I’m not a child! You’re just making excuses! Why did you hide that photo behind ours? Is everything a big lie?”
He fished his keys out of the bowl by the front door. “Sweetheart, I never planned on you finding out this way, but my relationship with Marcy is the real thing. My only regret is the way I’ve hurt you all, and for that, I am truly sorry.” He shook his head and shrugged. “This is about me, not you.”
He said it in the same tone of voice he’d use to tell a telemarketer that he’s not interested in what she’s selling.
“Well, how were we supposed to find out?”
He stared at his keys. “I hadn’t figured that out yet.”
“B-but what about—all that stuff you say in your speeches about how much you love Mom and how when you met her, you won the ‘Wife Lottery’?”
He looked up as if the answer was written on the ceiling. “This feeling is not about our family. What I have found with Marcy has nothing to do with any of you. She understands that people expect me to be a certain way, and I…have to be that person. But not with her. I don’t have to pretend to be anyone else when I’m with her.” He set the luggage down but immediately retrieved it, then started to leave but looked back at me.
I
wanted to ask him if we’re still “a package deal,” but I knew what the answer would be. “Where are you going, Dad?”
“I’ve got some thinking to do, and I need to be somewhere else to do it.”
I went to the bathroom after Dad left and when I came out, Mom had gone to their bedroom and locked the door.
Rachel ripped the ear buds from my ears and yanked the pillow from my face.
“What the hell happened; did somebody break in? Why is Mom and Dad’s bedroom door locked? Where’s Drew? I got this weird voicemail from Mom, so I made Chris leave the movie early to bring me home.” Rachel is completely freaked out.
Where do I even begin?
I sit cross-legged on my bed and tell my sister everything that’s happened from the time she walked out of Dad’s office—except for me eating a whole box of Ding Dongs—until Dad left to do his thinking about an hour ago. She doesn’t believe me, and when she turns to leave my room, I jump up and grab her arm. I repeat it all, and she shoves me to the floor.
“This is all your fault! If you hadn’t spilled that coffee, none of this would be happening! I hate you!” She slams my door on her way out.
I crawl onto my bed, place the pillow over my face, and try again to suffocate myself.
Chapter Four
Later that evening, Rachel and I are watching a reality show about wives who kill their husbands but always get caught. Mom’s phone is on the kitchen counter, and it keeps ringing and buzzing with text messages. The landline rings constantly, too, as one reporter after another asks to speak to her.
Rachel and I tell them that Mom’s unavailable, so they start grilling us about what the F.B.I. guys took out of our house. We break our parents’ rule of never conversing with the press and ask them questions right back. We find out that Dad called an emergency meeting of his campaign committee and told them that he’s left our mother for a woman he met at the big conference in April. He resigned from the campaign, effective immediately, and walked out of the meeting. Nobody knows where he is, and the rumor is that he’s a danger to himself. Rachel turns off the TV, and we sit side by side on the sofa.
Big Fat Disaster Page 3