The Things We Didn't Say

by Kristina Riggle

  “It wasn’t fake,” I protest, but she is partly right. I stepped up my attention to her after I moved in. I wanted to make it better because I sensed a shift in her demeanor that day. I sensed her growing suspicion.

  “And you’re so young you want to have another baby, and there I’ll be, a babysitter. Again. Like I practically raised Jewel.”

  “I’m not like your mother.”

  “No, you’re not. Because she loves me.”

  “You just said yourself that you practically had to raise Jewel, and I’m telling you, I’m different, isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Right, you’re so much better than my mother, tell me that again how she sucks. Please, I love hearing that.”

  This conversation is speeding out from under me.

  “Angel. I’m really sorry about what I wrote. I’m really sorry I got carried away last night. I’m sorry that I tried too hard and I’m sorry that I have hid things about my past I’m not proud of. I’m asking you a favor.”

  “What.” Her arms are crossed, her ankles crossed. She couldn’t be more closed if she were behind a steel door.

  “Just let me be the one to tell him.”

  “Fine.” She stands up roughly, so that the chair clatters to the floor. “It won’t matter. It’ll all work out the same in the end.”

  Footsteps on the stairs. Her parents coming down. Angel announces, ‘I’m going to study my lines,” and sweeps past us all grandly, taking the stairs two at a time.

  I look at Michael. “What did he say?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t feel like repeating it all now. You better go upstairs and rest.”

  Thus dismissed, I drag myself back up the stairs.

  Dylan’s door is open. I can see him stretched out on his bed, staring at the ceiling.

  I haven’t properly greeted him. Whatever else happens, I want him to know I’m happy he’s okay.

  I knock softly, though the door is open.

  He shrugs, so I take this as assent and come in. There’s nowhere to sit really. He shifts his legs on the bed, making room for me at the edge.

  “I’m really glad you’re okay.”

  He stares up at the ceiling. “Y-y-you read my e-mail.”

  “Sorry. But we had to.” I try for some lightheartedness, but I’m also curious. “You made it pretty tough to track you down. We never did find your laptop. Are you in training for the CIA?”

  He shakes his head. “Embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be. Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  He sits up on his elbows and looks at me, his face saying, You’ve got to be kidding me.

  I can’t help but smile sadly. “You’re fourteen. You’re allowed some embarrassing stuff.”

  I put my hand on his ankle. Awkward gesture, but it’s a part of him I can reach without being invasive, intruding. “I wish you’d talked to me. About whatever it was.”

  He shakes his head.

  “You know I love you kids, right?”

  He squints at me.

  “Really. I do. If you hadn’t come home . . . It’s not just because I love your father. I want you to know that.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I know.”

  I take my hand off his ankle, the moment gone. I should have told Angel I loved her, but it would have been harder to say. She would have noticed, and it would have made everything worse, though that hardly seems possible.

  “You gonna practice at all today?”

  He smiles now, a real one. Nods. “Got time?”

  “You bet.”

  He hops off his bed and gets his saxophone case from the corner of the room. I scoot back on his bed so I’m propped against the wall as he tunes up.

  The sax is going to destroy my throbbing head. But I’ll take it. For this kind of moment, it’s worth it.

  Chapter 38

  Dylan

  I totally should have talked to Casey.

  She’s sitting against the wall in my room, obviously hung-over, but volunteering for me to play my sax in here.

  I’m all tuned up, and then, from memory, I start playing the solo for last year’s band concert, when I was in the school I liked.

  All my muscles start uncurling. Over the top of my sax I can see she’s got her eyes closed, and she’s holding her temples, but she’s also smiling.

  It never occurred to me to talk to her about stuff. I thought about my mom, and realized she’d flip out, and my dad wouldn’t listen, he’d just say, “Excalibur Academy is a wonderful program,” repeating exactly what Grandpa Turner said. Like test scores and college placement rates are the only things that matter in a school.

  I don’t care if there was a gun at my old school. It’s not like anyone was gonna shoot me at lunch. That’s a whole other crowd I have nothing to do with, but I loved the band, and I had friends there.

  At this new school they all make these, like, wide circles around me like I’m invisible. Not to be mean, really, but they were all friends before I got there. And then my best friend from my old school quit talking to me and told me, “Dude, you’re trying too hard,” when I sent him some messages. I still don’t know what that was about.

  I could have handled all of it if there had been a real band, instead of this musty old music teacher who plays cello and doesn’t even know where the reed goes in a sax. And there are only, like, two other kids who play brass in the whole school. Both of them trumpets.

  Whenever I thought of years left in that school, years left in my house with Angel and Casey fighting all the time, and Dad all worn out, and Jewel and stomachaches, I sometimes felt like my heart would explode out of my chest and I wanted to scream. Or other days it would just feel totally black, and endless.

  I should have given Casey a chance, though. She might have helped.

  Because now my parents are reacting exactly as I’d expected. Except my dad is keeping my mom calmer than I would have thought.

  They were in here, and Dad was all, “Son, this is very serious, I wish you’d come to me.”

  And Mom started crying and cussing.

  So I’m grounded until they decide I’m not, which is no big deal because I have no life to be grounded from. And my dad is going to monitor everything I do online, which is no big deal because without Tiffany—and she’s got it worse than me, she’ll probably never be allowed to touch a computer again—I don’t care about that, either.

  The worst part is, my dad wants to drag me to a shrink again. They got in a fight about that, right here in my room, my mom saying that’s an awful idea and my dad hinting that maybe I’m screwed up in the same way she is.

  “Dad!” I shouted.

  “I’m just concerned about you,” he said with his serious reporter-face.

  Too many words to get out what I wanted to say then. Maybe later I’ll write him a note.

  I close my eyes for the tricky part of my solo. It tumbles out like it was just waiting there for me to turn it loose. And I was thinking I wouldn’t remember it right.

  I hear something over the sax, and pause, the last notes vibrating in the air.

  It’s my dad, hollering for Casey.

  She looks at me and sighs. She looks like she knows something coming. Something bad, but can’t be helped. She heads out the door like she’s walking the plank.

  Chapter 39

  Michael

  Sometimes, the only order in my house comes from laundry.

  It’s not exactly a manly thing to enjoy, folded laundry. Not something I discuss over beers at happy hour, not that I ever get to do that, anyway. When Mallory was in charge of laundry, we were forever having to tiptoe among hillocks of clothing, giving socks the sniff test to decide if they were wearable. I tried to keep up on it myself, but I was so tired after work, and when I did run it through the machines, it never did get folded but remained in a heap next to the machine, rendering our dressers and closets pointless.

  Then Mallory moved out, and I realized, tired or not, it was my job
to do. And I found time to do it, and I insisted Angel and Dylan help me, and we made it work.

  Now, laundry heaped in baskets or scattered around makes me jumpy.

  So I fold.

  And as I fold, I suffer a pang of guilt in realizing that if I have time to do laundry now, I also had time to do it when Mallory lived here. I could have helped, at least.

  I snap out a pair of my work pants and match the seams, as if to snap myself back to reality. It wouldn’t have helped. Whatever was wrong—is wrong—was far too complicated to be solved with a little laundry help.

  Casey normally does this job, these days. She says it’s no trouble, she can do it while waiting for her program to compile, or whatever, or while talking to a client on the phone.

  If I marry her, will she slide down the same rabbit hole Mallory did? Will I be tiptoeing through laundry piles because Casey is too “tired” to do it?

  I ball up some socks and ponder the facts as I know them. She got drunk one time since I’ve known her. Once.

  But it was at the worst time. And that bottle was half empty. That’s a helluva lot of booze for someone who doesn’t drink. Normally I’d blame that on Mallory, but she seemed so solid last night. Impossible if she’d been dipping into the whiskey with any seriousness.

  I ponder what Angel told me about wondering what’s “up” with Casey. The fact that she’s home alone for hours all day, takes walks every morning, slips outside often to smoke. What if the smoking is just an excuse to nip from a flask?

  I cringe to realize I rarely get close enough to her anymore during the day to tell if her breath smells like booze.

  I knew Casey was weird about her first name, and private about her past. I could live with that, but now that she’s done something that seems so out of character, I wonder if I’ve been naive.

  There’s a saying in the news business, that you ruin a good story by checking it out too much. Despite what the movies show, nine times out of ten when a local crank calls with some tale of scandal and vice, once you dig in and find all the perspective and context and actual facts, it turns out to be small potatoes indeed.

  Maybe I was afraid to dig too far into Casey’s past because she’d turn out not to be what she seemed, either.

  I did run her name through the court system, though. I can’t be foolish about who spends time around my kids. To do so I had to sneak a peek at her driver’s license so I also know her full, real name: Edna Leigh Casey. Edna on a twenty-six-year-old sits weird these days, so I don’t blame her for not using it.

  I searched her name online, and found her among survivors of a crash victim. So I know about her brother, too. I assumed she’d tell me fairly soon after we got engaged, but as the months have gone by, she’s never revealed the presence of a sibling, much less a dead one.

  She doesn’t trust me. Obviously.

  And have I ever given her reason not to?

  I start hanging shirts up in my closet and remember one of the good days with Casey, out at the park. The kids had eaten ice cream, Jewel was swinging from the monkey bars. I’d let Angel bring a boyfriend along, so even she was gracing us with her smile. Dylan was quiet as ever, but contentedly pushed Jewel on the swings.

  We’d brought a softball and a bat, thinking it might be fun to improvise a game. The kids couldn’t be roused to the challenge in the end, preferring boyfriend and playground to playing with me and Casey.

  But we played anyway. Playing! Imagine that. I hadn’t played since maybe grade school, always so damn serious, and even my fun times with Mallory were serious in the sense of passionate and dangerous, so I always had to keep one eye on her.

  I felt ten years younger, ten pounds lighter, as I pitched over and over again to Casey, who laughed harder every time she missed, especially when she would swing so hard she’d swing herself in a complete circle.

  Then she said, “Okay, I’m serious now. Just watch me. I’m gonna get this one.” Then she imitated Babe Ruth, and pointed toward a water tower, and got herself in a parody of a batting stance, making a face something between a scowl and constipation.

  I had a camera in my back pocket, and before I pitched, I snapped a shot.

  I bring the socks over to my dresser and lay them inside my top drawer. There’s the picture, in fact. She’s trying hard to hold on to the serious face, but it isn’t working, I can see the laughter in her eyes. I never even managed to pitch the ball. I ran over and kissed her, and for those brief moments we were just kids and we loved each other and it was all so clean and simple. Like a freshly washed shirt.

  Something white on the top of the dresser draws my eye. It’s an envelope, with my name written on the front, in Casey’s hand.

  Chapter 40

  Casey

  I walk into our room, and Michael’s holding a letter.

  Oh, God. The letter.

  “Mike . . . ,” I begin.

  “You were going to walk out on me in the middle of this?”

  “No, I wasn’t. I—”

  “Then what the hell is this?”

  “Let me . . .” I put my hand to my still throbbing head. I sink down to the edge of the bed. “Let me explain.”

  “Try me.”

  I can’t see him from here, but I bet he’s folding his arms. He always does that when he’s mad. He looks like an angry school principal in that stance.

  “I wrote that Thursday morning. Before we got the call that Dylan didn’t go to school.”

  “So why are you still here?”

  “Because I was worried.”

  I dare to face him. His beard stubble makes his face look dirty. He’s frowning deeply, but there’s something in the softness of his eyes that tells me he’s more hurt than angry, and that does me in worse than any insults he could hurl.

  “But I changed my mind. I don’t want to go.”

  “You sound pretty convinced, here.” He shakes the paper, then begins to read aloud. “Don’t,” I say, but he raises his voice to speak over mine. My own words boomerang back at me, overly loud and deep, Michael’s voice projecting like he’s onstage.

  “ ‘Dear Michael, I know I’m a coward for doing this in writing. Something’s been wrong for a long time now. I don’t feel like you really see me anymore, except when I screw something up.’ ”

  Michael emphasizes the “see” and carries on, oblivious to the fact that I’m curling up on the bed, trying to shrink down and vanish.

  “ ‘And instead of getting closer to the kids, my moving in has only driven them further away. Even Jewel treats me like a funny aunt, but still wants her mom home. This kills me to leave. I wanted a life with you, with them. But this is not my house, my bed, my family. I’m in someone else’s space and I don’t fit right. This is probably because you don’t know everything about me, and for that I’m sorry. I thought not saying certain things out loud would make my past extinct, but it doesn’t work that way. It’s all still there, and I’m still me, no matter how much I try otherwise. Tell the kids I’m sorry and I love them, whether they believe it or not. I wish I could have been the girl you thought I was. I’m sorry. A thousand times.’ ”

  At this he lets the letter flutter down to the bed.

  What am I supposed to say now? I’ve said it all.

  “But you’ve changed your mind,” Michael says, sounding like a reporter now. “What exactly has changed in forty-eight hours? Did I suddenly start seeing you enough? Did you suddenly become the girl I thought you could be?”

  “I was having a weak moment.”

  “No. A weak moment is feeling bad for fifteen minutes. Walking out the door without a word is . . .” He drops his arms from their locked and folded position, drooping at the shoulders. “I can’t afford weak moments that result in you taking off. Did you know I lost my job yesterday?”

  “What?”

  “You know it’s bad when losing your job isn’t the headline of the day.”

  I start to stand up and go to him, but he stiffens at my
approach. He holds up a hand.

  “I can’t do it. Not knowing if one day you’ll get fed up and leave. Or get drunk. Or reveal some dire secret.”

  “That was—”

  “Just once. You were stressed. Guess what? Parenting is stressful every single goddamn day.”

  “So what, then?”

  “Can I count on you?”

  “Of course.”

  “No. Not ‘of course’ without thinking. Not the answer you are supposed to give. The truth.”

  His cold logic freezes me. How do I know I won’t want to leave tomorrow? How do I know I can stay off the booze? He still doesn’t know all there is to know about me.

  And then there’s this: the shouting, and the lecturing, and his rigid unforgiving face. Where is the kind, tender father who stroked his daughter’s back that day we met at the clinic? He used to share some of that tenderness with me.

  I wish he would again, but that seems past hope, now.

  Michael shakes his head. He walks around the bed, back to the bedroom door. I lunge across the bed and reach for his hand, but only manage to brush his limp fingers before he disappears from my view.

  Chapter 41

  Jewel

  I’m so happy I’m jumping on my bed! Just for fun! I’m going to see how close to the ceiling I can get. Oooh! That was close!

  My mom was back in my dad’s bed, her bed, right where she belongs. And it’s all because Dylan left, so she came home because of the problem, so it worked out okay. Maybe Dylan knew that would happen, and that’s why he took off. Ooh, he’s smart.

  Casey probably knows it, too, that’s why she has a hangover. Maybe my mom told her she was moving back for good and it made her sad.

  I stop jumping while I think about this. I’m sad Casey is sad. I like her. Maybe she can be dad’s friend, like before, and we can see her sometimes.