Are you fucked up? Is that it? You’re fucked up again, aren’t you, while our daughter’s lying in an emergency room.
Jeff’s words, his accusation, made an endless loop in her brain, caustic, wearing. But he yelled when he was scared. She’d yell at him, too, if he were responsible. God, how she hated this. She felt as if she were trapped in a fun house, full of eerie sounds, warped mirrors, and dead ends. She wondered if Jeff would believe her assuming he gave her a chance to tell him the truth, that she’d lost track of time.
That was Annie’s excuse made on Lauren’s behalf. She’d blamed herself. “It’s because of me; you forgot because you were helping me. I’m so sorry.”
She’d looked so worried, on the verge of tears, when Lauren drove off alone. Annie had said she would call JT, that he would come and get search teams organized. He would watch out for her, Lauren thought, and be sure she got home safely. At least that much was a relief.
She found a parking space at the hospital near the emergency-room entrance and switched off the ignition, but then she could only sit staring at the building. Its gray hulk loomed over her like a nightmare. The weather had changed, and the sky peered down, a cloudy eye. Moody, judging. How could she go inside? She gripped the steering wheel and lowered her head to her hands. But then after a moment, she was out of the car like a shot and through the double doors. Her half-running steps rang in the empty corridor. A nurse looked up at her approach.
“My daughter’s here,” Lauren said. “Mackenzie Wilder? She was in a car accident—”
“Lauren?”
She wheeled at the sound of Jeff’s voice. “How is she? Where is she? I need to see her.”
Jeff took her elbow, steering her away from the nurses’ station, and he was calm now, and Lauren was grateful for that.
“She’s going to be fine,” he said. “She has a cut across her forehead.” With the tip of his finger, Jeff drew a line that bisected his eyebrow, coming way too near the outside corner of his eye. “It took fifteen stitches to close it.”
“Her head—what about her head?”
“It’s fine, nothing like what happened to you.” Jeff knew the source for Lauren’s anxiety immediately. “There’s not a sign of a concussion, much less the brain trauma you went through.”
“Thank God.” Lauren felt suddenly weak, as if her legs might give way. She stiffened her knees.
“They want to keep her overnight, though, in case.”
“I’ll stay with her.”
“She doesn’t want to see you.”
“What? Of course she does.” But no. She could see Jeff wasn’t being cruel. The truth was in his eyes, in a shadow that lay deeper than his anger. Deeper even than his affront, his disbelief, his conviction that, as a mother, she was unfit. What Lauren saw in his eyes was pity. Jeff pitied her. He was sorry for her that her own daughter was rejecting her.
She couldn’t speak for the longest moment, and when she found her voice, she said, “But I would never hurt her. I love her. You know that.”
“She’s mad as hell at you, Lauren.”
Lauren lifted her chin. She had seen the cubicle Jeff had come out of, and she went past him, heading toward it. She heard him say her name and “Don’t. Don’t hurt yourself this way.” But she had to see her daughter, to know Kenzie’s rejection for herself.
She pulled aside the curtain screening Kenzie from her view, and even as she locked eyes with her daughter, Lauren confronted the terrible damage to Kenzie’s face, the slim red seam that cleaved her sweet brow—that missed her left eye by the merest fraction. Lauren’s knees weakened again even as she stepped toward the bed. She wanted Kenzie in her arms, wanted, desperately, to hold her and offer comfort, to murmur a thousand apologies into the silken fall of her hair.
But Kenzie raised her hands, warding Lauren off. “Go away,” she said. “I don’t want you here.”
“Honey, I’m so sorry.”
“That’s what you always say. You’re always sorry, but then you drug yourself and you’re back to stupid. Back to not remembering anything. Not even your own family. You like your damn pills better. Everybody knows it. All the kids at school. Sarah Jane Farmer’s parents say she can’t be friends with me anymore because you’re a druggie. Did you know that?”
“No!” Lauren was horrified. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“There’s this girl Drew likes? But her folks won’t let her go near him because of you. You embarrass me, Mommy. You make me sick. I told the nurse you were dead; that’s why she called Daddy instead of you.” Kenzie turned her face away, her small chest heaving, jaw trembling.
Lauren’s heart broke. She was aware of Jeff, drawing her away, tugging her out of the cubicle, and she turned to him, needing his arms around her, his strength to hold her up, but he kept his distance. Guiding her to a waiting area, he sat her down, put a cup of coffee into her hands, and stood looking down at her. “Give her some time,” he said.
“I’m not taking drugs,” Lauren said. “You saw—I flushed them.”
No response.
“I was with Annie. We found the woman Bo was last seen with. She lives near Cedar Cliff. I drove Annie there to talk to her, then we went to the sheriff—”
“Jesus Christ, Lauren.” He backed off a step.
“Annie had no other way to get there, Jeff. Her car isn’t reliable.”
“I don’t understand you—this obsession you have with these people, some guy that’s missing, some fucking stranger.” He paused. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean that. I feel bad for the family, too. But you and our kids are my family. You come first with me no matter what.”
“I know—”
“I’m working my ass off . . . trying to keep us together. What is going on with you?”
She bowed her head, picking at her thumbnail.
“The contract and permits for Waller-Land? They aren’t in my briefcase.”
She jerked her glance to Jeff’s. “They are. I put the folder in there. You said you saw it.”
“It’s there, but it’s empty.”
“Did the inspector come by?”
“No, we got lucky. I can’t risk it, though, working without the permit. I was on my way home to look for the paperwork when the hospital called.”
“I don’t know what happened.” Lauren was truly at sea. She clearly recalled gathering the pages and slotting them into a folder—she wasn’t quite sure when—Wednesday before she’d gone into town? She didn’t know, but she had put the file in Jeff’s briefcase. She could still feel the heft of it as she’d lifted it onto the desk in the study. He was wrong, she thought, and when she got her hands on the briefcase, she’d prove it.
Wiping her face, she asked about Amanda and her mom, assuming the girls had called Suzanne when Lauren didn’t show up. Lauren thought Suzanne had been driving, but Jeff said no, that the driver was a kid named Steve.
“He’s a friend of Drew’s, according to Kenzie. I talked to his parents a while ago when they came to pick him up. He wasn’t hurt, but the paramedics transported him anyway just to be safe. His folks weren’t too happy. He was driving his mom’s car, and they’re saying it’s totaled. His dad said the kid just got his license a week ago. He wasn’t supposed to be driving anywhere except to school and back home.”
“But where was Suzanne?”
Jeff’s eyes widened. Where were you? That was the question, and it sat between them, no less radiant in its condemnation for remaining unspoken.
Lauren was surprised when he sat down, but he was careful to take the chair on the other side of a small built-in table, not that he’d have offered to comfort her. But then, she didn’t deserve his concern, his tenderness.
“I don’t know where Suzanne was. Kenzie said Amanda tried calling her, but she must have been out of pocket. Meanwhile, Steve showed up. Amanda wouldn’t
get in the car with him, but Kenzie thought it was all right because she’d seen him hanging out with Drew. She was pissed at you, Lauren. You know how she hates being late for ballet.”
Lauren set down the paper cup filled with machine-dispensed coffee, sharply enough that some slopped over the rim, burning her knuckles. She was angry, suddenly, unreasonably, at all the wrong people: Kenzie and Jeff, Suzanne. It made no sense to her when she knew she alone was responsible.
If Jeff was aware of her emotional upheaval, he gave no sign. He was always so calm and self-contained. Grounded in a way that she envied and resented. How was it that relationships—love—could be so twisted with contradiction?
“Kenzie’s had it, Lauren.” Jeff looked at her.
She looked at the floor.
“She’s sick of making excuses to all her friends for the craziness.” Jeff twirled the tips of his index fingers near his ears. “Sick of trying to play it off that her mom isn’t a junkie. I can’t blame her. Can you? After everything she’s gone through on your account?”
Lauren was afraid to move. Her heart was beating too fast, and she was dizzy. Too dizzy and weak. She opened her mouth, intending to ask Jeff for help, a nurse, a doctor. “I haven’t taken anything, Jeff,” she heard herself say instead. “I don’t know how Oxy keeps ending up in the house, in my possession when I have no recollection . . .” Lauren could see he wasn’t going to brainstorm possibilities, other than the one that was obvious. To him, at least.
“You saw me flush it.” She repeated the single fact she knew for sure.
“How do I know you don’t have more?”
“I don’t.”
“Show me.”
Grabbing her purse, Lauren upended the contents onto the tabletop between them, passing her hand over her wallet, her car keys, a coin purse, tissues, lip gloss, two pens, a compact mirror—a plastic envelope that contained two yellow tablets. She recoiled, looking openmouthed at Jeff.
He gazed back at her and the mercy in his eyes was tempered with fresh pity.
“I don’t know how these got here,” she said.
“I don’t, either.” He stood up.
She gathered the contents of her purse, shoving them inside it, all but the Oxy tablets. Those, she left on the table. “Kenzie shouldn’t be alone,” she said. “I’m her mother. I should be with her.”
“Go home,” Jeff said, and his voice, his eyes were weary. “Just go home,” he repeated.
But Lauren didn’t go home. She went to Dr. Bettinger’s office. He wasn’t in, but his nurse Shelly was, and Lauren was almost relieved. Shelly was easier to talk to; she didn’t lecture.
“I’m a mess,” Lauren said.
“What’s going on?” Shelly asked.
Lauren didn’t answer; she was afraid if she spoke, she would cry. What if Shelly was like Jeff and didn’t believe her?
As if Shelly could read her distress, she took Lauren’s elbow and drew her into an exam room. “Sit down,” she said, indicating the paper-topped bed. “Now tell me,” she instructed, settling onto a stool.
Somehow Shelly’s air of calm, the sense she gave Lauren that she had all the time in the world, made it easier to talk about it—where Kenzie was and how she’d come to be there. “She thinks I forgot to pick her up because I’m using again. I can’t stand it, her thinking that.” Lauren pressed her knuckled fist to her mouth, willing away the tears.
“Well, a blood test will settle the question,” Shelly said. She left the room, and when she came back with everything she needed to take a sample, Lauren looked at it in dismay.
“I drank a lot of wine last night,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t,” she added, and she felt like a teenager who’d been trapped into admitting she’d raided her parents’ liquor cabinet.
Shelly inserted the needle. “Walking—some kind of exercise or meditation would be better,” she said.
Lauren closed her eyes, and immediately, the vision of her condition this morning when she’d wakened, filthy and aching, seared the backs of her eyelids. Heat rose from her shirt collar, warming her face. She couldn’t speak of it to Shelly, the possibility that more than the wine was involved; it wasn’t as if she needed to know the entire scope of Lauren’s fear to make a proper diagnosis anyway. Humiliation wasn’t relevant to the question.
“It seems as if you’re having a particularly rough time lately.” Shelly removed the needle. Her voice, her motions were efficient, matter-of-fact, and yet Lauren sensed her kindness, too.
“I thought I would be so much better by now,” Lauren said. “It’s been almost two years.”
“You know there’s no timetable, that you may never recover in a way that’s completely familiar. When so much damage is done, the brain is forced to heal in whatever way it can. It makes new connections. It changes things.” Shelly capped the vial that held Lauren’s blood. “It’ll be a few days before we get the results.”
“You’ll call?”
“Yes, of course.”
Lauren rolled down her sleeve. “I know I’m not right, but I know how I feel when I take Oxy, and how I feel now isn’t like that.”
“Well”—Shelly bent to look into Lauren’s eyes—“if it’s any comfort, you don’t exhibit any of the signs. Your reflexes are fine and so are your pupils. You’re lucid; your speech is clear.” She straightened. “You’ll make an appointment to see Dr. Bettinger before you go? He’s out until week after next, but we’ll work you in ASAP after that.”
Lauren said she would. She didn’t mention Tara’s suggestion that maybe, rather than Bettinger, Lauren needed to see a shrink.
She went to Tara’s house after she left the medical center, where Jeff said he had taken Drew earlier when he couldn’t find Lauren.
Tara’s car was in the driveway, and Lauren parked behind it. Her hand shook, reaching to switch off the ignition, and she realized she was afraid to see her own sister, her own son. How had it happened? How had her family members, the ones she loved and trusted most in the world, become her fearful enemies? Or was this another game her brain had invented, another mental trick? Would that stupid accident and her even more stupid drug use cost her everything before they were done with her? She tipped her head to the seatback, closing her eyes.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again . . .
The fragment from the nursery rhyme ran across her brain.
A sharp rapping on the driver’s-side window made her jump. Her gaze jerked toward the sound, and she flinched, for a split second not recognizing the woman whose face loomed at her.
“Tara?”
Their eyes locked through the glass.
“You can’t come inside.” Tara waved her arm, a wild, go-away gesture.
“Tara, for heaven’s sake. Drew’s here. Of course I’m coming inside.” Lauren started to open the door.
“No!” Tara pushed it closed, nearly catching Lauren’s foot.
“What is wrong with you?” Lauren shouted through the glass, and now her glance registered certain details about Tara’s appearance: her hair that normally fell in shiny waves to her shoulders was oily-looking and unkempt and gathered into a messy ponytail. The old T-shirt she wore had stains on the front. Vomit? Was Tara that ill? With Drew in the house, exposed to whatever it was? “Let me out,” Lauren said, putting her shoulder against the door. “Whatever you’ve got, I don’t want Drew coming down with it.”
“I’m not sick. It isn’t that. It’s one hell of a lot worse.”
“Is it Greg, then?” Lauren fumbled with the keys, hunting the one for the ignition. She would get the window down at least. But before she could manage it, Tara yanked open the car door.
“Do you know where he is? Have you heard from him?”
So it was about Greg. “I haven’t, TeeRee, and I’m really sorry if he’s
back on heroin again, but it’s not your fault. It’s not even personal. There’s more to his story than you know.”
“Oh God, Lauren, shut up! Just shut up!” Tara backed away, clapping her hands over her ears, turning in a circle.
Lauren’s stomach twisted in sympathy, but then she heard Tara say something about Jeff, that he’d called. Lauren thought she heard Tara say they’d discussed Lauren. Your latest stunt, Tara said. Lauren was convinced that was how Tara phrased it, that she’d used the word stunt. She was certain, too, of Tara’s judgment, her derision, and her heart was impaled on a spike of rage so hot, she pressed her fist to her chest. She was out of the car nearly before she could register moving, grabbing Tara’s shoulder, spinning her around. “You’re not getting away with it, do you hear me?”
Tara only stared, mute. She looked terrified.
“Don’t play the innocent with me,” Lauren warned. “I’m not that stupid or so far gone that I can’t—” She broke off, and the sense of it, of what was really going on crystallized in her mind. “You’re having an affair with Jeff.”
“Oh, for God’s sake—”
“It won’t work, you know, having me declared unfit, or whatever it is you’re planning.”
“This is nuts, even for you. He barely tolerates me, and you know it.”
Lauren stared at Tara.
“C’mon, Lauren. He thinks I’m the original dumb blonde, the one all the jokes are made about. He thought that about me the first time he met me, and I didn’t think much of him, either. Still don’t.”
Lauren backed up a step. “Really? I’m amazed.” It was only in the smallest corner of her mind that she was aware of how she’d jumped from condemning Jeff to defending him. “I thought you would put all that behind you, especially since he’s the one who got you out of all your financial trouble. You would have lost your house if it weren’t for him. You’d have nothing saved for retirement.”
Crooked Little Lies Page 24