Splinter (Fiction — Young Adult)

by Sasha Dawn

  “That was something I’d hoped to ask her this afternoon.”

  Ominous shadows of the past dart in and out of my memories. Running through the sunflowers. Chasing me. But I’m lost, and when I come out from the flower bed, I can’t find her. She’s gone.

  “I know you can’t tell me everything, but Jane Doe Georgia . . .” I lower my voice. “Was there a locket found with her body?”

  He narrows his eyes at me. “Why would you ask that?”

  “My drawings. I think I drew a locket, not a heart. My mom never took it off.” I scoot closer the box of pictures Ryan brought over earlier. “See for yourself. It would’ve been buried with her body. If there’s a locket with the remains, we don’t have to wait for the DNA results. We’ll know.”

  But all Escherman says is that he can’t tell me anything about the investigation while it’s still ongoing. So it’s yet another thing I can’t get closure on. But do I want closure so badly that I’ll risk hearing my mother is dead?

  Kismet lies in a big golden ball at my feet the moment I take a seat at the kitchen table.

  “You need to eat.” Gram places a medium-rare burger—it’s bleeding into the bun—in front of Cassidy and a plate of sautéed vegetables in front of me.

  It’s a peace offering.

  “I’m not hungry.” Cassidy glances up at me, even though she must be talking to Gram.

  “I know this is hard.” Gram brings a basket of biscuits to the table. “But I’m sure those two are fine. They’re at a hospital—they must be—and the police will find which one. When we know, we’ll go to see them. I don’t care if it’s three in the morning, we’ll go.”

  “Wouldn’t we know by now?” Cassidy asks. “How long would it take for the cops to call all the area hospitals to see if they’d been admitted?”

  I have to agree with her.

  “Well, Heather’s purse was thrown from the car. She didn’t have her identification with her.” Gram takes a seat at the table with us. “And for all we know, C.J.’s wallet got lost in the chaos too. It’s possible they’re unconscious and haven’t been identified.”

  I barely register what she’s saying. I get stuck on two syllables.

  C.J. It’s Gram’s nickname for Dad.

  Whoever rented the box where the passport was delivered did so under the name C. J. Lang. I know Eschermann doesn’t think Dad could’ve done it, but who, if not him? He couldn’t have applied for the passport, that’s true. But he could’ve rented the box.

  Could Heather have applied for the passport? She has the same coloring as Mom, and after ten years, she could probably pass herself off as Delilah Lang. Could they be working together to cover up whatever unfortunate accident took place an eon ago? Maybe they know my mother is gone. Maybe Heather sends postcards to me out of guilt.

  But neither of them has had time to go to Georgia, to apply for a passport, or to retrieve it from a box.

  Say they did somehow get the passport. Could Heather travel as Mom? Officially get “Delilah Lang” out of the country? To Canada, maybe? Or Mexico? The authorities would then be looking elsewhere, not here. Heather could return by train, or bus, as Heather Solomon-Lang. Would she do that for Dad? To take the heat off him?

  Gram continues. “Without identification, I’m sure they can’t identify them right away. Especially if they’re unconscious, and that’s a possibility. The air bags deployed.”

  I ignore my grandmother, look at Cassidy.

  “Dad is hiding my mom somewhere,” Cassidy says. “He doesn’t want her to tell what she knows.”

  “That’s enough.” Gram points a finger at Cassidy. “My son would never do such a thing. And you know that.”

  Now Cassidy’s treating Gram to her stare of death. “I think he’s already done it—and gotten away with it.” She pushes her plate, with burger untouched, to the middle of the table. “And I’m not going to sit here and pretend it didn’t happen. I’m going to bed.”

  “Maybe a little sleep will cool that attitude of yours,” Gram snips. “Take a Tylenol PM.”

  Cassidy leaves the kitchen. I listen as she climbs seventeen stairs. Hear the creaking of the plank at the top of the stairs. One, two, three, four, five, six steps down the hallway. And the slam of her door.

  “Your dad is fine.” Gram does her best to smile at me, and clears Cassidy’s plate. “Now eat something. You need strength.”

  “Gram?”

  “What, honey?”

  Honey. That’s a new one from my grandmother, who mostly doesn’t call me anything.

  “You think Dad’s innocent.”

  “I know he is.”

  I used to know, too.

  “He’s made mistakes, Samantha, but for the most part, he’s just a man looking to be loved.”

  I push the vegetables around on my plate with my fork. “Do you think he was drinking today?”

  “Absolutely not. He’s survived some of the harshest accusations this world can throw at a man, and he’s managed to do it without turning back to the bottle. That says something about his resolve.”

  “But if he’s at the end of his rope . . .” I shrug a shoulder, leaving my accusation hanging in the air.

  “Let me tell you something about the end of the rope. Do you remember the summer after your mother left? That detective was all over your father. Money was tight. Your father hired a lawyer and a private investigator, and he was hitting it pretty hard. Drinking a lot. So I came to stay for the summer.”

  The infamous summer in my memories, when I’d waited out a storm alone in Dad’s basement den.

  “One night we were watching television in the basement, and I followed your dad upstairs. He was in despair over not knowing what happened to your mother, over being the prime suspect in her disappearance. He was on the verge of ending it all.”

  I drop my fork. “What?”

  “He had his keys in his hand. He was ready to drive into Echo Lake. And if I’d gone upstairs thirty seconds after I had, I would’ve been too late.”

  “He was going to . . .” I can’t say the words, but they haunt me, all the same. Dad was going to commit suicide. “And you stopped him?”

  She nods. “I watched him all night long.”

  All this time, I’ve been resenting Gram for abandoning me that night, and she was saving my dad from making an irreversible, a devastating, decision.

  “Heather and I got him into a program the next day. And now, whenever things heat up, I come. Just in case it gets to be too much for him.” So that’s why she’s here. She comes in case she has to stop something unthinkable from happening.

  But now that Dad and Heather are missing . . .

  Now that there’s evidence of their driving off the road . . .

  “But Samantha, I’ve never seen him that bad since then. And I would know if he was at that point again.”

  I wish I could take her word on that.

  Gram won’t admit it, but I know she must be wondering:

  Is there a chance Dad hit the end of his rope today? That he aimed to finish what he couldn’t finish when I was a little girl?

  It’s after midnight.

  Cassidy must have taken the Tylenol PM, or she’s working hard at not making any noise. I desperately want to talk with her about what Gram told me. Who else could possibly understand what I’m going through more than the girl who’s going through it with me? But she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks she’s going through this because of me. Or at least because of Dad, and I’m an extension of Dad. And if I suspect Dad might’ve attempted to kill himself, Cassidy will only see it as Dad’s bringing Heather down with him.

  I texted Brooke a while back, but she hasn’t replied. I sort of remember her parents coming home early before, and maybe they did it again. Maybe they came home when they caught wind of the turmoil in Echo Lake—old missing persons case, police exploring new leads—and realized she was at my house, when she should’ve been home. She’s grounded, after all.
/>   I text Dad. I text Heather. Of course, they don’t reply.

  I look out my window into the dark backyard. The window of the room Ryan was in last night is dark. But maybe he’s up reading in one of the other twenty rooms in the place.

  I text Ryan: Awake?

  After a minute or two, he replies: Sort of.

  I woke him up. Sorry, go back to sleep.

  Ryan: Want some company?

  Me: My gram is downstairs. Probably shouldn’t risk leaving the house.

  Across the way, a light illuminates one of the second-story windows in Schmidt’s house, and Ryan’s silhouette passes behind the blinds. A moment later, my phone buzzes with a FaceTime invitation. He wants to talk. Face to face.

  My eyes are swollen from hours of crying, and I’m sure I look like death. Still, I answer the call. Ryan materializes on the screen, rubbing knuckles over unruly spikes of hair. Shirtless, yawning.

  “Hello, Sami.”

  I sit on my window seat and trade glances at the screen in my hand and the glowing window in the nearby house. So close, but yet so far.

  I turn my phone toward Schmidt’s house—“I can see you”—and turn it back.

  On screen, he looks to the left, maybe out the window to see if he can see me. “This is so much more effective than tin cans on strings.”

  “Does anyone really do that? Tins cans on strings?”

  “I had tin cans on strings in my tree house, growing up.”

  “You had a tree house. That explains a few things.”

  “What does it explain?”

  “I don’t know . . . how you can climb all the way to the top of a hickory with a chainsaw at your belt, maybe?”

  “Oh.” He grins. “That.”

  “Wasn’t I supposed to visit your place when we were kids?”

  “We talked about it, about your coming home with me for a visit. Before.”

  Before. My life is divided into before and after.

  “You still can, if you’d like,” he says. “Do you ride?”

  “Motorcycles? No.”

  “Horses, fool.”

  I shake my head. “Just a pony when I was little. Once.”

  “Would you like to ride a horse sometime, Sam?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think I would.”

  “We’ll have to do that, then. We’ll take you down to Kentucky while you’re on break from school, and we’ll teach you to ride.”

  “I’d like that.”

  “Any news on your dad?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “Sorry.”

  A dull silence consumes us. I know he’s tired. I should let him sleep.

  Instead I blurt out, “Tell me about the day you found me in the passageway.”

  “You sure you want to talk about that?”

  “No, but I have to stop pretending this isn’t happening. I want to know as much as I can.”

  He clears his throat. “The week before it happened—I remember I was supposed to be heading home. I was visiting Uncle Henry for Halloween, I think. And we did the whole bonfire thing, the hot dogs, the s’mores, and trick-or-treating. You were dressed as . . .”

  I join in: “. . . a ladybug.”

  “That’s right.” He scratches his bicep. “And I think I was some sort of superhero or something.”

  “Yeah. You were wearing tights.”

  “They might’ve been yours.”

  “Might’ve been.”

  “It was a good week, and a lot of it we spent together, you and me. I begged a few extra days out of the deal.”

  It’s a warm memory. I glad we share it.

  “And it’s something that still eats at me sometimes . . .” He presses his lips together and gives his head a minute shake. “If I hadn’t done that—if I’d been on my way back home with Uncle Henry that day, like I should’ve been—what would’ve happened to you? How would your life have been different? Would your mom not have found a moment to sneak away without you? Some nights, I kick myself for asking to stay. Maybe you’d be with your mom right now. Happy. And none of this would be happening.”

  “I think, lately, that it’s more likely the opposite is true,” I say. “If I hadn’t had somewhere to run, somewhere I was safe, maybe I’d be with her, but I’m not sure she’s anywhere right now. And Ryan . . .”

  He finds my eyes in the FaceTime screen.

  “My life is different because you’ve been part of it. I remember you now, remember my childhood with you. It’s come back to me.”

  “Ditto.” He smiles a little. “You were crying when I found you in the passageway. Bleeding from your knee.”

  So I must have fallen. I must have been running. “I just don’t understand how it could’ve happened. One minute she was there—and the memory is so vivid—and the next, she’s gone, and I can’t remember a thing.”

  He pauses. “I’m like that with my dad. I remember the last great conversation we had—the last conversation he was really Dad, you know—but in the end, the details are fuzzy. The last words he said before he went, how he looked at the end when he’d been losing weight every day . . . Everybody says he wasn’t more than skin and bones when he died, and this was a big man we’re talking about. I don’t have any recollection of him being thin and weak, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t there. I held his hand until he took his last breath.” He rubs a knuckle over his right eyebrow. “I just don’t remember him like that.”

  Neither of us says anything for what feels like forever. I’m just staring at him, and he’s staring at me. His dad’s dead. Here I’ve been carrying on about everything I’ve lost, and he never said a word about his father.

  Something he said yesterday: I was needed at home. Lots of land . . . Was he needed at home because his dad got sick?

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

  “How could you have known? They don’t put you on the news when your dad dies of cancer, you know.”

  I give him a sort-of smile. “Yeah.”

  “My point is I think it’s okay that you don’t remember whatever happened at the end because it sounds like it was probably bad, whether or not Delilah survived. It’s okay to remember what you remember.”

  My last memory of her is pretty lovely.

  “You know what?” He stands—I see it on my phone and in the window across the lawn. “I’m hungry.”

  “Me too, come to think of it.” I hardly touched my vegetables, so I haven’t eaten much since Brooke brought me a burrito, which I didn’t finish. I don’t think I’ll be able to eat very much, but maybe I should try.

  “Come have a snack with me. One thing I hate about being here when my uncle’s gone: eating alone.”

  “I don’t think I can get past my grandmother.” I don’t know where she’s sleeping, or if she’s sleeping at all.

  “So go down to your kitchen for a snack, and we’ll pretend we’re together.”

  I open my bedroom door, and from where I’m standing, I see Cassidy’s closed door, a barricade between us. There was a time we’d sneak into the same room, just so we could be together as we fell asleep.

  With breath held, as if even breathing will stir her, I tiptoe down the hallway and turn left to get to the stairs.

  Creak.

  I freeze.

  Wait.

  No one awakens.

  I carefully step down the stairs.

  Kismet, who’s been sleeping on the sofa, groans and stretches awake. Instantly, she’s at my side, tail wagging.

  Gram isn’t anywhere. I peek out the kitchen window; lights are on in the RV. I wonder why she’d sleep in her motor home when we have extra beds in the house. But I guess I don’t understand why she’s living on wheels, either.

  “So what’s it going to be?” Ryan asks.

  “Apples.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  While he finds an apple in his uncle’s kitchen, I take one from the bowl on the counter. So my voice doesn’t carry up the stairs a
nd wake Cassidy, I tiptoe down the stairs and into Dad’s office to continue my conversation with Ryan.

  “I just don’t understand why, if they’re at a hospital, we haven’t heard from them. I mean, the police have to have heard, one way or another, whether they’re at a hospital or not.”

  “You ever try to get information out of a busy hospital staff?” Ryan crunches on his apple. “It takes forever, even if you know for sure where your father is, what room he’s in. I looked it up: there are four hospitals in the immediate vicinity. If the car was down Cuba Road, the ambulance could’ve taken them to any of the hospitals in the northwestern suburbs, too, which adds three hospitals to the mix. Plus it’s the weekend. The busiest times for ERs are weekends and holidays, and it’s been warm outside, which means more people are on the road. You’ll get the call. It’ll just take time.”

  I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I can’t talk about anything else, but I don’t want to dwell on the what-ifs anymore tonight. Or ever. I just want to know. Once and for all. “So.” I take a seat at Dad’s desk, prop my phone against the desk lamp, and open one of his file drawers. “Tell me about Kentucky.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Everything.” I leaf through the files. Is Dad keeping other secrets?

  “Well. That could take a while.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I pull out a file at random and look through its contents. Appliance manuals.

  “There’s a lot of land.”

  “So you said.” I try another file. This one’s full of information about Cassidy’s Jeep.

  “There’s a stream at the rear of the acreage, and . . . the stables. We can house up to six horses.”

  “How many horses do you have?”

  “The stables are full.”

  “So six.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But only two are ours.”

  As he tells me about paint horses and roan horses and Appaloosas, I continue to look through the records my father has kept.

  I pull out the file labeled with our address. Inside is a plat of survey, which details the dimensions and location of our house, the carriage house, and the underground walkway to Schmidt’s house . . . all the way to the property line.