Slide

by Jill Hathaway

  Zane’s scream is still ringing in my ears. I feel like I’m going to vomit.

  I try to stand, but all the strength has left my legs. Rollins helps me to my feet. My hands are all rubbery, but I shove them into my pocket, searching for my cell phone. Fumbling, I pull it out, scroll down to my sister’s number, and hit the Call button. The phone rings once, twice, three times . . . but no one picks up. I quickly dial our home phone number.

  My dad picks up on the second ring, his voice breathless. “Dad. Is Mattie there?”

  “Where are you, Vee? I’ve been worried. I was afraid you were stuck in that house—”

  “I’m fine. Mattie’s there?” I interrupt. “Yes. One of her friends drove her home. She’s three sheets to the wind, but she’s alive. Thank god. Are you on your way home?”

  “Yes,” I say, holding on to Rollins’s sleeves for support. “I’m coming home right now.”

  I hang up and put the phone away.

  “She’s okay?” Rollins asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “Can you give me a ride? I just want to go home.”

  “Of course,” he says, sounding bewildered.

  I take a step toward the doorway and stumble, but Rollins stabilizes me.

  “Easy,” he says. “Vee, you’re going to tell me what this is all about, right?”

  I grab his hand and squeeze. “Yes. I promise.”

  He hooks an arm under my armpit. He helps me down the stairs, guides me past the broken glass, and tucks me into his car. Inside, it’s warm and safe. I’m reminded of the night of the homecoming dance last year, when he rescued me from Scotch’s probing hands. Just like that night, Rollins drives me home.

  I lie on my bed, watching headlights from passing cars shine on my ceiling. No matter how hard I try, I can’t get the sound of the crash out of my head. Zane’s and his mother’s shrieks, laced together for all eternity.

  I called 911 to report the crash as soon as I got home, as soon as it occurred to me. The operator said an ambulance was already on the scene. I asked if everyone was okay, but she couldn’t give me any details. She suggested I call the hospital, but when I did, they said they couldn’t give out information.

  My alarm clock blinks away the minutes, stretching them out into forever. For the first time since my mother died, I pray. I pray for Zane’s life. I pray for justice— whether that means his mother’s death or consecutive lifetime prison sentences, I don’t know. I’ll leave that up to the powers that be.

  I pray for morning.

  When the doorbell rings, my father is in the kitchen flipping chocolate-chip pancakes. Mattie’s still asleep. Only I am left to see who it is. I pad to the front entryway in my slippers and peek through the curtain. Officer Teahen is standing there, hands thrust in his pockets, head tilted up toward the sky. I pull open the door.

  “Officer Teahen,” I say. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Uh, Mattie?” He squints his eyes at me, like my name might be etched into my forehead somewhere.

  “No, I’m Sylvia,” I say. “Is your father around?”

  I nod, staring at him with wide eyes. After taking a few deep breaths, I call for my dad. He appears, wiping his hands on a dish towel.

  “Officer Teahen.” My father’s voice is hard. “What can I do for you?”

  Melting into the background, I sit on the stairs. I read a hundred different intentions in the officer’s eyes. Zane and his mother are dead. The police found my fingerprints in their house and want to question me about what happened. Or they traced the 911 call and want to know how I knew about the crash. Or Zane and his mother are alive and Zane’s mother wants my father arrested for “killing her baby” so many years ago.

  The officer nods at my father and says, “Mr. Bell. I have some questions for you regarding a woman named Evelyn Morrow.”

  My father glances in my direction, then steps onto the front porch and closes the door. He doesn’t return for a long time. When he does, his eyes are bloodshot and weepy-looking. He never looks like this. Never. He comes toward me, his arms stretched out like a zombie’s. I don’t understand what he’s doing until he reaches me and hugs me until I can’t breathe. But I don’t want him to stop. I don’t want him to let go.

  “I’m so sorry, Vee,” he says, stroking my hair, and that’s when I know it’s over. Zane is dead. I was stupid to ever think differently. Stupid to hope. I am stupid. So stupid.

  My father pulls back and looks me in the face. “Zane has been in a car accident. Honey, I’m so sorry. Zane is dead.”

  That’s when I collapse.

  I awake to my father’s voice.

  “Vee. Wake up. Sylvia.”

  I open an eye and realize I’m lying on the wooden floor. For a moment, I think this must be what it feels like to lie in a coffin, everything cold and hard.

  Wrenching my head to the right, I throw up. My father holds my hair.

  “That’s okay, VeeVee. Let’s go upstairs and get you cleaned up. Do you think you can stand?” my father asks when I’m done puking. I don’t think I can. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll never stand again. But I plant my feet on the floor and wrap my arms around his neck and—lo and behold—I’m standing. Upstairs we go, one foot in front of the other, and then down the hall to the bathroom.

  My father holds his hand under the faucet until the water is just right and then helps me to undress. He looks away the whole time. And I think about Rollins and his mother and how this is just what you do for someone you love when they can’t do it for themselves.

  After my bath, my father helps me into my room. I let him pile the covers on top of me. He pulls the blinds tight and leaves. My eyes are wide open.

  Hours pass.

  I do not sleep.

  Late that night, I give up on sleep and turn on my light. My bookshelf glows like it’s beckoning to me. I kneel before it, looking for the book he spoke of, the one he made me promise to read again—under a tree, at dusk. My fingertips find it before my eyes do.

  The Great Gatsby.

  I steal down the stairs, grab my jacket from its hook and a flashlight from the junk drawer. Careful not to make too much noise, I ease the back door open ever so carefully until the gap is just wide enough for me to slip through.

  The night is cold, but I welcome it. I need to feel something other than loss, something other than pain. There is only one tree in our backyard, a great big oak tree, but it’s perfect. I settle down beneath it and crack the spine on my book. It’s not dusk, but it will have to do.

  Just like Zane said, the experience is totally different. I’m not reading to pass a stupid English quiz. I’m reading for my life, for what Zane’s life was. I’m reading to see the book through his eyes. At first, the pages move slowly, but before I know it I’m halfway through the book.

  Soon, it is light, and the book is done. It swallowed me whole and then released me, a different person than I was before. I lie back and watch the sun inching its way upward. Maybe I didn’t ever really know Zane, but on the other hand—maybe the part he showed to me was the only part of him that was real. I lie there until the sun stings my eyes, and then I pick myself up off the lawn.

  My father stands in the kitchen, layering noodles on top of Italian sausage, mozzarella, and spinach. Mattie is sitting at the dining room table in front of her laptop. It is a familiar scene, but nothing about it feels right. Now that I know my father has been lying to us all these years—not only about having an affair, but also about having another daughter, I’ve been careful around him. Polite, but not overly warm.

  I’ve decided I can’t let us go on like this, living a lie. It would have been better if this was his idea, but I’m tired of waiting. I need to get things out in the open, set everything straight. So I slide onto a stool across from him. The framed picture of my mother is heavy in my lap.

  “Dad? I need to talk to you about something.”

  He must see the seriousness in my eyes because he puts down the bag of che
ese and leans forward. “What is it, Vee?”

  I hold up the picture. I remove the back, retrieve the key, and lay it gently on the counter. “What’s this?”

  His voice is calm, and he looks me right in the eyes.

  “The key to my desk. I hide it because there are important documents in there, things like your birth certificate.”

  “Is that all that’s in there?”

  My sister has stopped goofing around on the computer and is staring at us.

  My dad’s eyes drop, can’t sustain the gaze. When he looks back up at me, his eyes are full of tears. “I know it’s time to tell you. I just got used to being the hero, though, you know? The man who saves babies and comes home to his beautiful daughters. Because after I tell you this, I don’t know if you’ll feel the same way about me.”

  “What are you talking about, Dad?” Mattie leaves her place at the dining room table and moves to sit next to me on one of the stools.

  I steel myself. “Go on.”

  “I’m guessing you already looked in the drawer. You saw the medical records.” He directs his words to me.

  I nod.

  “What’s going on? What drawer?” Mattie asks.

  My father takes a deep breath. “I had an affair, Mattie. Years ago, when your mother was still alive. Vee was just a toddler. Your mother was pregnant with you.”

  Mattie looks stricken. “You slept with someone? When Mom was pregnant?”

  He looks at his hands, covered in marinara. He’s clearly miserable. I almost feel sorry for him. But we need to get this over with.

  “Yes. We had a fight. She was angry that I was working such long hours. She accused me of having an affair. I thought . . . I thought maybe I should just have one, since she thought that anyway.”

  Mattie covers her mouth with her hand. I reach over and gently rub her back. I know how shocked I was when I found out. It must be even worse for her, on top of everything she’s been through lately.

  “It was just the one time. But it was enough. Those medical records that you saw, Vee. The ones for Allison Morrow? She was my daughter. Your sister. She was born prematurely with a severe malformation. I was the only one who could help her. I tried. . .”

  When he breaks up into sobs, I feel horrible. No matter what he did, he’s my father, and he lost someone he loved, just like I lost Mom. Seeing him so emotional tears me up inside.

  “I did everything I could do,” he whispers, wiping away tears with fingers that leave tomato sauce on his cheeks. “I tried to save her.”

  I don’t say anything for a moment. The only sound is my father and sister crying. It’s almost finished. I just need to know one more thing.

  “Zane,” I say quietly. “Yes,” he says, grabbing a paper towel and wiping his face. “Zane was her son.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Especially when you found out we were together?”

  “I—I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready. Evelyn started calling me, and I froze. Didn’t know what to do.” I try to digest this news, that Evelyn was stalking my father. He continues on. “You can’t know the guilt I’ve felt for these last fourteen years, Vee.

  It’s what I think about when I get up in the morning, when I look in the mirror. I think about it every time I scrub in to operate on another baby, someone else’s baby.”

  I can’t even fathom it, not being able to save your own daughter. Some things are too horrific to imagine, and coming from me, that’s huge.

  Tracing my fingers over my mother’s portrait, I try to picture my dad snuggled in bed next to me and my mother, Mattie in her belly. Does the fact that my father slept with another woman take away the fact that he loved us so much? That he would have done anything for my mother? Does it take away the years he’s spent taking care of us?

  I look back at him, and I see my father for what he is.

  A man.

  He is just a man. One night, he drank a little too much and did something stupid. He made a mistake. But he is more than that mistake. He is the man who makes us lasagna, the man who holds my mother’s picture and cries when he thinks no one is looking, the man who makes broken babies whole.

  He is just a man. But he is a good man. “Can you girls ever forgive me?” he asks, not daring to look up.

  I climb off the stool, walk around the counter, and put my arm around him.

  “Yes,” I say simply.

  Mattie follows my lead and tucks herself beneath his other arm. “Yes,” she says.

  We stand there, together, the three of us.

  A family.

  Marty’s Diner is dead for a Sunday morning. A couple of waitresses lean against the counter, talking about the woman and boy who died in a car crash a week ago. It’s been all over the news, how the cops went to the lady’s house and found evidence in the basement—guns, rope, gasoline. There was also a diary filled with her mad ravings about how Jared Bell killed her baby and how she was going to get back at our family and also pretty much every kid in Mattie’s grade. It was her intention to kill everyone at Samantha’s party, a chubby waitress says. The tall one shakes her head, unbelieving.

  Rollins sits across from me in the booth, watching me play with sugar packets.

  “Vee. I’m really sorry about Zane.”

  I am silent.

  He tries again. “I mean, I wasn’t his biggest fan, but the important thing was that he made you happy. I’m sure he was a good guy. You know, despite the fact his mom was crazy.”

  I try to make a little house with the packets, but it keeps falling down. I give up.

  “I do want you to be happy,” he says, putting his hand over mine and the scattered sugar packets.

  “I know you do,” I say, finally meeting his eyes. “I’ve been awful the last couple of weeks. There’s been so much crap going on . . . but I’m sorry for being a bitch.”

  He taps my hand with his forefinger. “I’ll forgive you if you explain to me what happened that night in Zane’s room.”

  I sigh. I’ve been dreading this moment, knowing it was just around the corner but hoping I could put it off for a few more days. Today is as good as any, though.

  “Okay.”

  I think for a minute, search for the right words. “I’m going to tell you something about me, and it’s going to sound freaking insane.”

  He bobs his head encouragingly. “Go on.”

  “Well, you know how I’m really careful about touching stuff that’s not mine?”

  Rollins laughs. “You mean your OCD? Yeah, I know.”

  “It’s not OCD, Rollins. It’s not narcolepsy, either. It’s something else. Something I don’t understand. What happens to me when I pass out—it’s not right. I told my father about it when it startd, and he sent me to a psychiatrist. So I don’t tell people about it anymore, even though it still happens to me.”

  “What happens?” he asks gently.

  I take the leap. “I leave my body. I slide into other people’s heads. I see what they see.”

  Stopping for a moment, I search his eyes for that look, the one my father gave me when I told him, the mixture of fear and disbelief. But there’s a different look on Rollins’s face entirely. He looks concerned.

  “What do you see?”

  “It depends. I’ll slide into Mr. Nast and see him sneaking drinks of vodka out of a flask. I’ll slide into my father and witness an operation. I’ll slide into Mattie and see her crying at night. It’s different with every person. Mostly I see things I don’t want to see.”

  “Like what?” he prods. There’s no mocking in his tone. He honestly wants to know.

  So I tell him. I tell him about Amber and the naked picture of Sophie she sent to all the football players. I tell him about Mr. Golden’s affair with Amber’s mom. I tell him about witnessing Sophie’s death. I tell him about finding out Zane’s mother was responsible for everything. I tell him about my last moments with Zane.

  Rollins slips out of his side of the booth and scoots in next to me. He pu
ts his arm around me, and I can smell soap under the muskiness of his leather jacket.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispers to me.

  “I’m okay,” I reply. “I’m okay.”

  It becomes apparent that the waitresses, bored, are staring at us. I nod in their direction. “Rollins, why don’t you go back to your side of the table. We’re turning into their entertainment.”

  He gives me one last squeeze and returns to his side. Ripping open a sugar packet, he says, “So. Did you ever slide into me?” He dumps the contents in his mouth.

  Shit.

  The one part I left out. I know how he’ll feel if he learns I saw his home life. His mother. The things he has to do to take care of her.

  The fact that I don’t respond tips him off. He’d been joking before, but now he’s somber. “You did. Didn’t you? When did you slide into me?”

  “Last week,” I say, squirming. It’s suddenly very hot in here.

  “Last week? What did you see?”

  I shrug off my jacket. I don’t know how to tell him I saw his mother naked, how I saw him giving her a bath. I’m boiling with embarrassment.

  “Vee. Answer me.”

  “I saw your house and your uncle and your mother. And I know that you have to help your mom do things, like take baths.”

  His face is white. “You saw me . . . bathing her?”

  “It’s okay, Rollins. I know what it’s like to take care of someone.”

  “Stop,” he says. “You don’t know. You’ve never had to give your sister or your father a bath. You can’t possibly know what it’s like. Every day. To be responsible for her well-being every single day. I have to feed her. I have to dress her. There’s no one else. Just me.”

  I don’t know what to say. “I’m . . . sorry, Rollins.”

  He puts his head in his hands. “I can’t believe you saw me giving her a bath. I feel like . . . I feel like you violated me.”

  I reach for his hand. “Rollins . . .”

  He pulls away. “No. Just leave me alone.”

  He rises and heads for the door. As I watch him leave, I can’t help but feel guilty. He’s right. I did violate him. I didn’t mean to, but I did. People have a right to their secrets. The fact that I can’t help sliding is no excuse.