Young Lies (Young Series)

by Kimble, W. R.

  And there was the offer his father had once presented me, the one that, if I’m honest with myself, had a small part in ending my marriage. I might have declined the offer, but that never stopped me thinking about the things my father-in-law had said to me, the things he made me believe.

  A ringing phone pulls me out of my ever-increasing depressing thoughts. Claire sighs in annoyance, apparently only moments from taking a nap in her chair, and heads inside to answer it.

  Claire and her mother were the only members of Matthew’s family who accepted me and treated me like one of their own. They never believed I was with Matthew for any other reason than I was madly in love with him and I know they jumped to my defense every time someone said differently. About a year after we were married, I asked Claire why her father believed the very worst of me. She’d rolled her eyes and told me it was because of Matthew’s college girlfriend Lucy, a woman his entire family had believed to be a perfect match for him, and a woman Matthew cut loose a few months after his graduation. From what I understand about the situation, Lucy was caught in bed with a friend of Matthew’s and Matthew hadn’t hesitated to dump her right then and there. Claire and Matthew’s mother were behind him one hundred percent, telling him he deserved better and that he would find the right person for him when the time was right. The rest of his family tried to convince him it was all a big misunderstanding and he and Lucy would work it out in the end. So when I came along and Matthew’s focus turned from being the brokenhearted playboy he’d become after the break-up to the besotted Matthew he’d been before it, I was the one bearing the brunt of the bitterness they felt.

  “Here, it’s for you.” A telephone taps my shoulder and I look up to find Claire wiggling it in front of me so I’ll take it, which I do, cautiously. Anyone who would call me would call my cell phone and most people don’t know where I am right now. “It’s Leo,” Claire explains, sitting back down.

  Doesn’t exactly alleviate my confusion, but I put the phone to my ear anyway. “Hi, Leo,” I say.

  “Sam,” he replies with what sounds like relief. “Good. I thought Claire was going to hang up on me.”

  I glance over to my friend to find her smirking proudly over something as she watches the kids play. “No, I’m here. What’s up? How’s the business trip going?”

  “Oh, uh, it’s great,” Leo says hurriedly, sounding very distracted. “Listen, I need to ask you something and I need you to think about it real hard before you answer, all right?”

  Dread is making its return to my insides. “Okay,” I say slowly, drawing out the word.

  I hear a bit of rustling on the other end of the line and a few muttered voices. “Did Matt give you anything before we left?” he asks, pronouncing each word carefully.

  “What do you mean?” The question was not what I expected to hear him ask me and the dread lessens, replaced by confusion.

  “Anything. Probably something small. A piece of jewelry or just a box or something? Did he give you anything like that, Sam? I really need you to think about it. It’s important.”

  “Leo, is something wrong?” I ask. “Is Matt okay?”

  He sighs impatiently on the other end of the phone. “Matt’s fine, Sam,” he snaps. “I need an answer. Please.”

  I think, immediately picturing the wrapped box Matthew asked me to save until his return to open. I suppose that could be what Leo’s talking about and I open my mouth to say so before snapping it shut. I’m watching my son trying to walk up the slide attached to the jungle gym, my eyes lock on his left wrist where the broken Batman watch is wrapped. Trying to control my halting breathing as realization hits, I think about what’s happening right now, or what I think is happening right now. Every instinct I possess is telling me to lie lie lie and I have no idea why, only that Leo’s tone of voice sounds... off. Almost as though he’s under some sort of duress, even though I can’t possibly imagine why this would be, since supposedly he is with Matthew at some business meeting. If he’s not under duress, then something seriously wrong is happening and anything I say will only make the situation worse. Watching Tyler triumphantly reaching the top of the slide, I know what I have to say.

  “No, Leo, Matt never gave me anything,” I lie, impressed with the evenness in my voice.

  I can almost visualize Leo fisting a hand in his short hair and gripping the phone painfully tight. “You’re sure?” he asks mildly and for a moment I forget we’re talking on the phone, not in person, and that he can’t see the lie written clear as day on my face. “It might have been something that looks completely innocuous, something he would have told you to take care of until he got back.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I tell him, putting as much certainty into my words as I can without it sounding forced.

  Leo curses. “Okay.” He sounds annoyed and defeated. “Thanks, Sam.”

  “Is everything okay, Leo?” I ask again, my bad feelings returning.

  “Yeah, of course,” he replies, reverting to his normal carefree tone of voice.

  “Will you ask Matt to call me later?” I ask anxiously.

  “What? Yeah. Yeah, of course I will, Sam.” There’s more rustling around him. “I gotta go. Take care, alright?”

  Before I can respond, the line goes dead. I look over at Claire who has probably been watching me this whole time and knows the signs of when something goes wrong. “What the hell was that?” she asks, taking the phone from me again.

  I shake my head, bemused. “I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “But he sounded weird.”

  “Who, Leo?” she asks. I nod. “Weirder than usual, you mean?”

  “Yes. Much weirder than usual,” I confirm. “He sounded worried about something.”

  Claire turns to face me better. “What did he want?”

  Shrugging, I sit back in my chair. “He asked whether Matt gave me anything before he left that he asked me to take care of.”

  Blinking rapidly and looking taken aback, Claire frowns. “Like what?”

  “He said jewelry or something innocuous.” My voice is brooding as I try to work out what just happened in my conversation with Matthew’s best friend. For a brief second, I felt guilty lying to Leo. He’s always been supportive of me and Matthew, despite his belief that Matthew had lost his mind the moment he started making excuses to come back to Iowa to see me. He was Matthew’s best man in our wedding, the first person to congratulate us when we got pregnant, and he was even made Tyler’s Godfather. But it occurs to me that if Matthew had left something for me to keep safe and he’d wanted Leo to know about it, he would have told Leo himself and there would have been no need for Leo to call me. Whatever is going on right now, Leo is slightly out of the loop and I won’t be the one to make it worse.

  “Did he?” Claire asks me. I look at her questioningly. “Matt. Did he leave something for you?”

  Of all the people in my life, I have never been less hesitant to confide in a person than I am with Claire. I trust her. Matthew trusts her—that’s probably part of the reason he sent Tyler and me here. “He left something in his jacket,” I tell her quietly, “and asked me not to open it until he got back, but I don’t think that’s what Leo is looking for. For one thing, it’s wrapped and from what I can tell, he’s had it for a while. It’s been handled quite a bit and he would have had to unwrap it to hide something in there.”

  Claire sighs heavily and I know she wants to ask more, but Danny’s arrival home from work puts a stop to her curiosity.

  -------------o-------------

  Last night I waited for hours to hear my phone ring and to see Matthew’s name on the caller id. I didn’t fall asleep until around four in the morning and even then it was a restless sleep. There was nothing, though; not a call, not a text message, not even an email. I checked with Danny and Claire to see if they’d heard anything from Matthew—they hadn’t—and I’m starting to get worried. Even if Leo had failed to pass along my request for a phone call, it’s not like Matthew to not attempt
some sort of contact, especially when he knows how concerned I am about this business trip of his.

  By the middle of the morning when Claire and I head out for our day of self-spoiling, I’ve mostly put my mind at ease by reminding myself that for the last five years, he hasn’t had to check-in with anybody and he probably just let it slip his mind with how busy he is. Claire is fully determined to max out her brother’s credit card and as such, I think we’re hitting every store in the area, buying whatever catches our eye. She doesn’t give me the opportunity to argue or talk her out of buying everything I half-glance at and I finally just roll my eyes and let her have her way. That doesn’t stop me from making certain anything I take an interest in is for Tyler’s use—clothes, toys, books, even a new wristwatch that I’m sure he’ll toss aside in favor of the one Matthew promised to fix.

  When we break for lunch in mid-afternoon, the back of Claire’s minivan is full of shopping bags and I’m exhausted. Not sleeping is starting to catch up with me and I know Claire is aware of my energy level, even if she hasn’t called me out on it.

  Halfway through our salads, Claire sits back in her chair, her eyes narrowed on me. “Can I ask you something?” she asks suddenly.

  I raise an eyebrow at her, setting down my fork. “Maybe,” I respond. “Depends on what you want to ask.”

  She rolls her eyes at me. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but this is something I’ve been trying to figure out for five years and neither you nor Matt can give me any suitable answers.” I brace myself for a verbal onslaught. “What the hell really happened with you two?”

  I sigh. This is exactly what I expected her to ask. She’s only asked one other time in the last five years and I’d been such a wreck she’d dropped the question and hasn’t brought it up again until now. I’ve never told anyone the full story and there are still things I’d rather Claire didn’t hear from me, but this might be what I need to figure out what the future will hold for me and Matthew.

  “He gave me a choice,” I say quietly, pushing away my half-empty plate. “After the explosion, when he got out of the hospital, he gave me a choice. Stay or go. The attack swiftly put our concerns about the safety of our son right at the top of the pile of shit we’d already been dealing with. He was afraid he couldn’t protect us from whatever threat was still out there, especially since they never caught the bastards who tried to kill him, and I was afraid of the same thing. When he came home and started to recover, we had some very serious conversations all of which led to his offer of letting me and Ty go back home to Iowa where we could be safe. He was further afraid that even if we did split up, Ty and I would still be targets, so he came up with a plan, should that be my choice. At first I called him a jackass for even suggesting we leave him. He argued back as though he wanted us to leave and couldn’t wait to be rid of us. I knew that wasn’t what he was thinking and the last thing he wanted was to lose us. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. The job Matt does is not exactly child-friendly and there were still so many threats that involved kidnapping Tyler or hurting me, and I realized my son wouldn’t be safe if I stayed. So I told Matt I wanted to head back to Iowa. It killed him, but he agreed and the next thing I knew, we were on a plane heading home and within a few weeks, Matt and I were divorced. That was the last I heard from him until very recently.”

  Claire remains silent as she processes what I’ve told her. Part of me expects her to be disgusted for coming to the decision I did in terms of leaving Matthew. “I would have done the same,” she tells me sadly. “If it was a choice of the safety of my children, I would have done exactly what you did, Sammy, and yeah, it would have killed me to leave Danny behind and never look back, but I would have done it.”

  I’m so relieved I think I might actually cry at her words. “He didn’t even tell me goodbye,” I say weakly. “He locked himself away in his office until Tyler and I were gone, and he didn’t even attempt to make contact with me.”

  “He was hurting,” Claire tells me, reaching over to take my hand. “He knew your decision was the right one at the time, but that didn’t make it easy to let you go. You were everything to him, you and Tyler, and he would have cut off his left arm to keep you safe.” The irony of the statement, knowing just how close Matthew had been to losing his left arm after the attack, doesn’t escape me. “And he was a fucking mess, Sam, for months. None of us knew what the hell was really going on; all we knew was that you’d taken Tyler and left. Which was exactly what my dad and sisters expected would happen.” The disgust in her voice is evident and though I know it’s not directed at me, I still flinch. “I knew there had to be something more to it than the bullshit muttered excuses from Matt about it being mutual and how the two of you just needed a break. My dad had lawyers crawling all over Matt trying to protect his assets, even though I knew damn well you weren’t about to clean him out.”

  “I never wanted his money,” I say more harshly than I intended. “It was the last thing on my mind and even then I was prepared to send anything he tried to give me back to him.”

  “I know you were and I also know he wouldn’t have let up that easily. He told me he set up some sort of trust fund for Ty that you have access to, but you’ve never even touched. That says a lot about your character, Sam, and I’ve tried convincing my dad he was an idiot to think you would have done any differently, but that stubborn bastard wouldn’t budge. Especially when he saw the effect your leaving had on Matt.”

  I sigh heavily. “How bad was it?” I ask reluctantly.

  “Bad,” she says bluntly. “Didn’t work for a few weeks, refused to talk to anyone, stopped going to his physical therapy sessions...”

  “Drinking?”

  She nods. “Not as bad as before, but I think Leo had a big part in keeping him from drinking himself to death. Eventually he managed to snap out of whatever daze he was in, though he wasn’t ever quite the same, at least not before he dragged you back into everything.”

  I smile half-heartedly. Of all the things I’d hoped he wouldn’t have resorted to after I left, drinking was at the very top of the list. When I met him, he wasn’t a heavy drinker, at least not when things were going well. If stress came into the equation that was his coping mechanism, just has it had been before me, after he’d caught Lucy with someone else. Claire had been the one who’d told me about that period of his life, how he’d lost interest in everything and set himself on a self-destructive path that would have landed him in the ground if his business hadn’t come to fruition. She always gave me partial credit for bringing Matthew back from that dark time, even though I’ve always doubted my contribution.

  Now, knowing what my leaving did to him, I don’t doubt it so much anymore. I wonder how bad it got for him, whether he’d fallen into old patterns with women like he had before me. Given the conversation Claire, Danny, and I had a few days back, I’m going to assume he did. I don’t know what snapped him out of it, maybe it was as simple as Leo smacking some sense into him, but I’m determined to not let him fall into that again.

  “Hello?”

  My head jerks up at the word and I see Claire on the phone. At first she seems annoyed that our shopping excursion has been interrupted by who I assume to be Danny, then I watch her face pale, her eyes widen, her jaw tighten. Something’s wrong.

  “No,” she says quietly. “We’re on our way. We can be back in twenty minutes. Have you talked to my dad?” She listens intently, her eyes darting everywhere. “Okay. I’m sure they’ll be contacting us soon once they’ve seen it too. Yeah, we’re leaving now.” Holding the phone between her shoulder and ear, she’s digging in her purse for cash to pay for our lunch so we don’t have to wait on our server and I reach into my own wallet pulling out a twenty dollar bill. In the end we leave far too much, which I’m sure our server will appreciate, and we bolt for the car. Claire’s phone is stuffed in her back pocket again and she’s focusing on finding her keys. I don’t dare ask what’s going on unt
il we’ve got the doors shut and we’re on the road again.

  “What the hell was that?” I demand once she’s taken several very deep breaths and some of her shaking stops.

  She swallows hard, her eyes darting at me and I know it’s something bad that she is dreading sharing. “That was Danny,” she says quietly. I nod, having already figured that out. “He caught a news broadcast while the kids were napping that said a plane went down overseas.”

  I feel my blood run cold through my veins and I don’t need her to tell me whose plane it was. “Is he alive?” I ask weakly, unable to do anything but stare straight ahead.

  “I don’t know,” she responds. “That’s why we need to get back.”

  This cannot be happening again. I’ve gone through this scenario once before and it was very nearly the end of me. I thought I was going to lose him altogether, but he’d managed to pull through in the end. Those were some very long weeks and I don’t think I slept or ate voluntarily once the entire time. But at least then I knew where he was, that he was getting the best help possible, and the prognosis was looking better with every day that passed.

  We drive in tense silence unless Claire is cursing the slow drivers on the road and somehow arrive back at the house in one piece. Hardly waiting for the ignition to be shut off, we’re both running up the sidewalk and throwing the door open. Danny is sitting in the living room on the couch, his chin resting in his hands as his eyes remain glued on the television.

  “Fuck,” Claire whispers, sitting beside her husband. I’m frozen in place as I look at the scene on the screen. It’s an overhead shot probably from a helicopter of a meadow where an airplane has crashed. The wreckage is on fire and there are several emergency crews on scene that are attempting to quarantine the blaze. Without a doubt, I know it’s Matthew’s plane. There are no markings to blatantly identify it as such, but I’ve seen it a hundred times over the years.