“Don’t look at me like that, Abigail.” He straightens, leaning his weight on the shovel, and bobs his head at the memo. “That document doesn’t contain all the facts.”
In the car on the way over, the closer I got to confronting my father, the more my rage melted into plain, old-fashioned fear. Not of what I would say, but more of the extent of his involvement in the matter. I’m terrified of finding his fingerprints on more than just the memo, and yet the former journalist in me has to ask.
“But you wrote it.” It’s the first time I’ve actually said the words out loud, and they feel like okra, prickly and slimy on my tongue. “Three weeks after he was killed, you wrote a memo that insinuated not only was Zach Armstrong killed by friendly fire, but that the army was doing everything possible to sweep that little tidbit under the rug.”
Dad picks up a shovelful of dirt and dumps it onto a pile on the bricks. By turning back to his work, he’s not dismissing me per se, but rather taking the importance of our conversation down a notch.
“I wouldn’t be so quick to judge me, darlin’. At least not until you know all the facts.”
“Then tell me the facts.” I sink onto a stone bench at the edge of the terrace. “Please.”
He shakes his head and reaches for a potted mum. “You know I can’t do that.”
“Okay, then. Tell me you didn’t do it. Tell me you didn’t write this memo.”
I know it’s irrational to demand such a thing when I’m holding the evidence in my hand, but I’m desperate. This is the man who taught me about loyalty and integrity and respect, about selfless service and personal courage, and now I’m like Dorothy, peeking behind a curtain at something I don’t want to see. The lasso around my lungs pulls tighter. Did all those lessons mean nothing?
Or did he get so caught up in duty, honor, country that he lost sight of what’s right?
Screw duty. Screw honor and country. I just want him to explain how he could have written the goddamn memo.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he says. “I’m not at liberty to discuss this matter with you.”
At his easy dismissal, my frustration morphs into anger, pulsing and pricking under my skin. My father keeps telling me I don’t understand, asking me to give him the benefit of the doubt. Yet how can I just trust in him blindly, when it’s written here in black and white?
“Okay, then,” I say, “why don’t I tell you what I know instead? Zach Armstrong was killed by one of his own men, but for some reason, the army made a conscious decision not to tell the family. Instead, you painted him as a hero and used his fame to bolster public opinion of a war gone bad.”
“Me, huh?”
I shrug, pointing to his name on the paper, printed there in black and white. “Your name is on the memo. Can you imagine how that poor family felt when they read it?”
“I’m sorry they had to.”
“How else were they supposed to find out about their son? Oh, wait. That’s right. They weren’t.”
“Don’t be sassy with me, young lady. We didn’t want to give the Armstrongs half-baked information, that’s all that memo is saying.”
“And yet the army gave them a contrived story about how he’d been killed by enemy fire. Hell, even the president was bragging about what a hero Zach was to the press. It was utter bullshit!”
“We did what we had to do at the time.”
“What about now? What about doing the right thing now?”
“There are things going on here you don’t understand. Things that are none of your business. You do not have all the facts.”
I groan. “Why don’t you tell me, then?”
“You know me, and you know I can’t do that. You’re going to have to trust me on this one.”
“I don’t...” My voice almost breaks from the sob trying to sneak up my throat, but I swallow it down before it can escape. “I don’t think I can do that.”
The hurt in his face is instant. His cheeks collapse and his jowls sag, and his upper body curls into itself as if I just punched him in the gut. He covers it by reaching for the shovel, but it might as well be made of lead. It takes him forever to haul it upright. “Then maybe you should pay more attention to the word confidential written across the top.”
“And maybe you should pay attention to your own conscience. Because this?” I shake the memo in the air. “This is reprehensible.”
I can see I’ve gone too far. He spikes the shovel into the dirt so hard it stands at attention, even when he lets go to clench his fists at his sides. “What do you want from me, Abigail? Because I’m not going to stand here and discuss this matter with you any longer. This is where the story ends.”
“This is not where it ends. Because it’s about to become everybody’s business. This memo is going public. You know that, right?”
“I do.” He scoops up a mum by its roots and jams it into the ground, thrusting dirt all around it.
Right now, I suppose the best I can hope to hear is that he knows the way the army handled Zach’s death was wrong, that he regrets his involvement in it, that he’s sorry. But my father would clearly rather murder his mums than offer up either an explanation or an apology.
Victoria’s words push up from somewhere dark and depressing. Somebody always gets hurt, but nine times out of ten it’s the bad guy.
“You have to know how it looks, Daddy. You have to know.” By now I’m crying openly, the tears sliding unchecked down my cheeks. “This memo means you’re the bad guy.”
His hands freeze in the dirt, but he doesn’t look up. “I’m sorry you feel that way, darlin’. I’m only doing what I have to do.”
My heart heaves and cracks, but he’s still my father, and even though his actions might not deserve it, at the very least I owe him a warning. “Then so am I.”
* * *
I call Victoria from the car. “Check your email,” I say as soon as she picks up, trying not to flinch at the bitter pill pushing at the back of my throat, an acrid mixture of fury and sorrow and self-reproach. “I just sent you something.”
“My Magic 8 Ball told me you would eventually.” I give her a few moments to click around her computer, then she sucks in a breath. “Holy shit, Abigail.”
“I know. I know. Just promise me no spin. Report the facts, nothing more.”
“I will, but you know others won’t. Once the rumor rags get a hold of it, there’s no telling what will happen.”
“That’s why I’m bringing it to you first. Set the tone, and make sure it’s a fair and impartial one.”
And then I punch the button to end the call, slam my brakes in the middle of Key Bridge and throw up onto the pavement.
* * *
That night, I lie in bed, watching shadows dance on the ceiling. Long after the sky turns black with night, long after the city is dark and quiet and still, sleep refuses me. My body hums with energy.
At some time close to one, I roll over, reach for my phone. Gabe’s voice when he answers is low and gravelly. “Hey.”
“Sorry to wake you, it’s just...” I trail off, suddenly searching for words. When Gabe had called earlier, I didn’t pick up. I was still sorting things through in my own mind, still trying to figure out how the man who had taught me to be good could do something so bad. I wasn’t ready to talk. Now I am, so why can’t I get the words out?
“No. It’s fine. Is... Are you okay?”
“Not really.” I can hear the tears clogging my throat, feel the heartache rising yet again in my chest.
“Do you want to come over?”
“Yeah,” I say, flipping off the covers, trying to pick my clothes out of the shadows on the floor. “I really, really do.”
17
Gabe’s house, I see over the roof of my car, is very much like mine. Same front porch, sa
me low profile, same twin windows on either side of what I know is the living room fireplace. Only, Gabe’s house is mine on steroids. Healthy and robust and bulked up a good two to three sizes, and even in the dark, I can see what looks to be a fresh coat of paint and matching flower boxes spilling over onto a thriving front yard.
I’m winding my way up the brick pathway when the porch light flares, and a barefoot Gabe opens the door. He looks as if he just rolled out of bed, jeans and T-shirt and all. His hair is mussed, his chin and cheeks dark with scruff.
“I’m sorry for what I said about you at your brother’s funeral,” I say, trudging up his front porch stairs. Before I say anything else, I have to get that off my chest. “It was mean and spiteful and unforgivable.”
Gabe shrugs off my apology. “Please. If anyone can understand saying something you later regret, it’s me.”
I want to tell Gabe not to compare my situation to his, since his brother is dead and my father is not, and then I realize that even though my father may still be alive, the man who I thought he was is not. Fresh tears prick at my eyes.
Gabe sees them, and he snags my wrist with a hand, yanks me into him, wraps his arms and his heat around me. It’s only then I notice how icy cold I am, all the way down to the hollowed-out part of my bones. I shiver, and he pulls me tighter. It’s the middle of the night in the freezing cold, and he stands here in his bare feet, holding me as if there’s nowhere else he’d rather be.
“How are you?” he says after a while. “I was worried, especially when you didn’t pick up my call earlier. I thought maybe you were still mad at me.”
I tip my head back, find his gaze in the dim porch light. “For what, telling me the truth about my father?”
He shakes his head. “For being suspicious. I mean, I would have been pissed if I found out you already knew, but I wouldn’t have blamed you. I figured if anything, you were trying to protect your father. How could I fault you for that?”
I hear his words, hear the compliment concealed behind them—Gabe would have understood me lying to him in order to shelter my father from blame—and something unpleasant squeezes me breathless. This situation is just so unbelievably confusing. My father. The memo lighting up the internet sky, thanks to me and Victoria. Gabe, watching me with an expression that makes me want to forget everything but him. It’s as if the universe is pulling me in a million directions.
Gabe must read the misery on my face, because without another word, he guides me into his living room, parks me on his designer couch and hands me a glass of amber liquid. Kentucky bourbon, according to the bottle on the coffee table. I take a huge gulp, and then another. The liquid hits my stomach and eases through my veins, warming me up by a good ten degrees, but it doesn’t melt the aching lump that seems to have lodged itself permanently in my throat.
“If you want to talk about it,” he says, his voice warm and soft and inviting, “I’m a good listener.”
It’s all I needed to hear. The day bubbles up in my throat and boils over in a rush of words I can’t hold back. Gabe deposits my glass on the table and pulls me into him, and I tell him everything. About someone breaking into my house and swiping the transcript, and how after today, I suspect it might be someone sent by my father. About our conversation at Mike’s and in the Oval Room hallway and the most recent one, when I confronted him in his backyard. About sending the memo to Victoria, and how I’m heartbroken my father is one of the bad guys from her ominous premonition. About Ben and Chelsea and Maria and the new videos flooding the internet, the latest from just yesterday with a darker, younger, kinkier man, and how Floyd is clicking away in his mother’s basement as we speak, following in her cyber footsteps. About the guilt and the regret and the heartache.
He holds me the entire time, his chest humming occasionally in sympathy or encouragement, his palm drawing long strokes down my back. When I’m finally empty of tears and words, a wave of exhaustion crashes over me, threatens to suck me under, and I think how nice it would be to fall asleep right here, with Gabe’s arms around me and his heart beating strong and steady against my cheek. Gabe was right, I think, drifting off. He really is a good listener.
“Abigail,” he says, and the rumble in his chest pulls me back. “Do you want my take?”
I push off his chest and straighten, mopping up my face with both sleeves. “Yes.”
“Drop it,” he says, his tone gentle and firm at the same time. “Before it harms your relationship with your father any further.”
For the longest moment, I’m stunned silent. After everything that’s happened to bring us here, to a place where beyond a common goal to find Ricky we seem to have found a...I don’t know, what is this, a special friendship? Regardless, I wasn’t expecting him to try to talk me out of helping him. “I—I thought you wanted the truth.”
“I do, and I still plan to get it. I’m just suggesting you think about whether or not your involvement is worth harming your relationship with your father any further. If there’s one thing I learned from Zach’s death, it’s that family is a precious commodity.” He smiles at me then, a smile so genuine and comforting it makes my heart ache. “You have to cherish them while they’re still here, no matter what they’ve done. It’s called unconditional love.”
“Of course I love him unconditionally. That’s what makes this so hard.” A new wave of tears gathers in the corners of my eyes, and I shake my head. “But even if I stopped now, it’s too late. It’s already harmed. I don’t trust him, not after that memo, and I can’t just blindly trust that the army or my father or maybe even Ricky had a good reason for the way they handled Zach’s death. And because of all that, I won’t let it go. I can’t.”
Gabe reaches over, tucking a stray chunk of hair behind my ear, brushing a tear away with a butterfly finger, watching me not with pity but with tenderness. The gesture undoes me, more than a little, and my throat tightens at the same time something in my chest whispers and stirs.
Maybe it’s the bourbon that makes me bold. Maybe it’s the intimacy I forced by crying into his chest. Maybe it’s the hole my father’s betrayal carved in my heart, the empty spot in my chest, the feeling of missing something so essential I have nothing left to lose. I latch on to the fabric stretched across his torso, fist it into a ball and pull his lips to mine.
The kiss starts out slow and sweet, and I can feel him holding back. He pulls me close but then doesn’t take it any further, not until I wrap my arms around him and urge him on with a long, low moan. It has the intended effect. Gabe leans into me and turns up the heat, pushing me into the couch, covering me with his hard and ready body, pressing down on mine in all the right spots. He deepens the kiss and tugs at my clothes with rapidly building urgency, and I know, just as surely as the earth revolves around the sun, what happens next.
And then he puts on the brakes.
“Abigail,” he whispers against my lips, and my eyes flutter open. “I don’t think...”
Rejection heats my cheeks. Gabe doesn’t finish, but he also doesn’t have to. There are very few words that can come after a start like that, and at a moment like this one. I try to push him off, but Gabe won’t budge. He latches one palm on my waist and the other behind my head, his big body caging mine on the couch cushions.
“Let me rephrase. I want this. You know how much I want this.” And just in case I miss his meaning, he presses down and I feel how much he wants it. “But you’ve had a rough day. Are you absolutely, positively sure this is the right time?”
The weight of the day falls around me like a lead blanket. My father’s name on the memo. His expression when I confronted him in the garden. The sound of my heart breaking in two.
Talk about an anticlimax.
I blink up at Gabe, thinking how much I want him, and with an ache that pounds in the middle of my chest, bitter and sweet at the same time because he’s right.
Maybe not now. Maybe not for all the right reasons.
I shake my head, and the disappointment I see reflected on his face matches mine. “Rain check?”
Gabe presses his forehead to mine and nods, and his voice is just the right combination of strained and eager when he says, “Please, God, yes.”
18
That Friday, at precisely six o’clock, I ring my brother’s doorbell, praying it’s not Mike but Betsy who answers. My brother and I are not exactly on the best of terms. He’s furious about the memo, about Victoria breaking the story, about it turning his neat and tidy life into front-page news. And I’m still livid about his reaction, which was basically to pound down my door and condemn me, and in loud and rather colorful language, for all of it. Long story short, Mike sides with Dad. Unconditionally. I am a traitor and a snake and a fool. I am the worst kind of daughter. Our reunion tonight is going to be beyond awkward.
But no matter how much I want to avoid seeing Mike, I want to take Rose trick-or-treating more. For kids, Halloween is the most sacred of holidays, and the fact that she wants to spend the evening with me and only me makes braving another round of my brother’s vitriol well worth the cost.
The double oak doors open to reveal Rose in a green fairy costume, glittery wings flapping at her back. She’s flanked by a barking Ginger, who looks more like a maniacal insect than a dog, thanks to antennae that hang lopsided over one eye.
“Trick or treat,” I sing, opening my wool cape with the back of an arm and bending in a deep curtsy. Rose’s eyes widen at the sight of my costume, and she giggles behind a tiny hand.
According to Party City, this particular ensemble is called “Renaissance Maiden,” but so far the only thing it’s been is annoying. A full-length, multi-layered skirt. Puffy sleeves with finger loops and bat wings. A corset that digs into my ribs and a headpiece with long, netted drape. But on a bright note, at least I’m not a slutty nurse.
Mike appears behind Rose, his face set in a perma-scowl. She plucks a plastic pumpkin container off the foyer floor and skips to the door, bouncing up and down and screaming, “Let’s go! Let’s go!”
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