Half-Truths

by Randileigh Kennedy

  Sawyer appeared to be pretty choked up but smiled as he placed the daisies near the headstone baring his grandma’s name. We sat in the afternoon sun and ate lemon cake, and he told me stories of her from his childhood. We laughed and shed a few tears. He was very blessed to be raised by such wonderful people, despite the circumstances of how it all came to be.

  I gave him a few minutes alone before we left, and although his eyes were moist when he returned to the truck, he looked fulfilled.

  “Thank you for today,” he said sincerely as we made the drive back to the cabin. “It meant more to me than you’ll ever realize. I never imagined having to spend this day without her, so I’m very grateful for your company. It makes it easier.” He reached over and grabbed my hand, and I held it in my lap.

  I stared out the window on the way back, truly thankful that Sawyer had entered into my life. Moments like this, when it mattered so much to have someone there for you, were what life was all about. Sawyer had certainly been there for me when it mattered most, and it felt so good to be able to do the same for him. So much of life is about merely showing up, being present for someone, not because your presence changes the outcome or result of what has already happened, but because being there is enough to get them through it.

  We eventually reached the stunning tree-lined drive leading to the cabin, and both of us were surprised to see a car other than my own parked in the driveway. Sawyer parked the truck, and I saw a woman sitting on the hood of her car, staring down at her hands.

  We climbed out of the truck, and the woman turned to face us. Although he looked confused at first, all of the color drained from Sawyer’s face as she spoke.

  “Hi, honey,” she said softly, staring back at him.

  Sawyer looked like he’d seen a ghost and couldn’t speak. I held my hand out awkwardly, hoping an introduction would help.

  “Hi, I’m Whitley.”

  She gently grabbed my hand and gave it a light shake.

  “Nice to meet you. I’m Sawyer’s mom, Audrey.”

  Chapter 20

  “I’m sorry, what?” I asked for clarification. I wasn’t trying to be rude by any means, but this wasn’t making sense.

  “What are you doing here?” Sawyer asked sternly. The tone of his voice sounded more like anger than confusion.

  “She’s not dead?” I said stupidly, unable to process my thoughts before they fell from my mouth. My head was spinning.

  “That’s the story you tell people?” she asked, confused by my words. I looked back and forth between her and Sawyer, hoping for some kind of explanation.

  “Whitley, I think we need a minute,” Sawyer said firmly. He seemed quite agitated.

  “What the hell is going on?” I questioned, not ready to be brushed off so quickly. This made no sense.

  “Whit, please. Just . . . go for a drive or something.” He held out his keys, but I refused to take them.

  “Go for a drive?” I scoffed. Clearly there was so much more he wasn’t telling me. My nerves were on fire. He had made it very clear when we met that he’d lost his parents when he was a child. We bonded over that. I was heartbroken for him and felt such a strong connection when we talked about it while I thought I was losing a parent of my own. If his grandparents raised him, who was this woman?

  “Happy birthday, Sawyer. That’s really all I wanted to tell you,” she said with sadness in her voice.

  These words seemed jumbled to me. None of it was adding up.

  “I thought it was your grandma’s birthday today,” I said snidely toward him, still waiting for some kind of explanation for all of this.

  “She was the only person who ever got me through this day, year after year.” He sighed, still looking irritated. “She’s the one who deserves the celebration.”

  “Sawyer, what’s going on?”

  “Whit.” He shook his head. “Just give me a minute.”

  “Is it your birthday today?” I asked directly.

  His nod confirmed it, and he looked defeated.

  “Is this your mother?”

  “Yes,” he replied softly. “But it’s not . . .” His voice trailed off. “Whit, just let me . . . I just . . .”

  “I’ll take that drive now,” I chided, walking past him. I grabbed the keys out of his hand and walked straight to the entrance of the cabin. I unlocked the front door then quickly threw my stuff into my overnight bag. Sawyer followed right behind me.

  “Whit, we need to talk, I know,” he said in a frustrated voice.

  “What have we been doing for the last two months?” I shrieked. “We spend endless nights together talking, Sawyer. You just asked me to move in with you, like, six hours ago. Weren’t we talking then?” My anger was seething out of me. I tossed my bag over my shoulder, grabbed my car keys, and headed for the front door.

  “Just give me a minute, Whit. Please.” Sawyer’s mom stared at us from the driveway, not saying a word. He wasn’t denying anything, but he wasn’t providing any kind of explanation either.

  “Sawyer, we’ve had intimate conversations about your family. We spent the afternoon celebrating someone else when it’s really your birthday, and you never said a thing about it? You said you lost your parents in a car accident. Yet this woman here, your mother, doesn’t seem so lost, given the fact she’s at your house.” I hadn’t intended to raise my voice, but my emotions made it impossible for me to control myself. “Your story seems a bit fabricated, unless I misheard you.”

  “I did lose my parents in a car accident, Whitley,” he said quietly, shaking his head. “I lost my dad immediately from the blunt force head trauma he sustained when he went through the windshield. I lost my mother that day as well. She went to jail for it.”

  My head was spinning.

  “You didn’t tell her what happened?” Sawyer’s mom asked. So nice of you to join this extremely jacked-up conversation now.

  “Half of it,” he said quietly. “I just thought maybe . . .”

  “That you could satisfy me with half the truth?” I cut him off. “What a brilliant ending to all of this. All along you’ve been giving me speeches about honestly and truth, and here you are, giving me half of it. Half of you. Why did you do it? It doesn’t make any sense. Half the truth is still half a lie, Sawyer. You’ve been lying to me since the day I met you? What’s the point of that? I should go.”

  “Twenty years ago today, it was my sixth birthday,” he began, not giving me any other choice but to hear him out. He held open my car door so I couldn’t close it. “I stayed the weekend at my grandparents’, like I did most weekends while my parents went out to do whatever they were doing. I was just a six-year-old boy, sitting alone at my own birthday party, waiting for my parents to come. My grandma had the table all set with festive plates and football cutouts everywhere, and I sat there by myself for two hours, wearing a red birthday hat, waiting for them to come. My grandma tried to distract me from waiting by talking about traffic and making excuses for their absence. I didn’t even understand the concept of traffic. I was just a kid. All I cared about was them walking in to celebrate me. But they never came. Instead two police officers showed up at the front door hours later. I overheard them explain that my parents were in a car accident. My alcoholic mother was driving at the time, and she collided with a semi and two other cars. My dad died instantly, as did someone in one of the other vehicles she struck. My parents never made it home to celebrate their son. Instead they were reckless, and my mom killed two people. And I just sat there, in that stupid red birthday hat, waiting for someone to show up and love me.”

  Tears slowly slid down Sawyer’s cheeks, and my eyes matched his. I imagined him as a kid, sitting at a table, waiting for his mom and dad—two people who would never again come home to celebrate this boy. This version of his story somehow seemed so much more tragic than what I’d first believed.

  “I didn’t see her after that,” he continued. “She was sentenced to forty years, and I was sentenced to a lifetime
of being told to forgive someone who’d ended everything a six-year-old boy loved. It completely broke me.”

  “Sawyer, why didn’t you just tell me all of that? From the beginning?” I searched his face for an answer.

  “Because I realized pretty quickly it was better to pretend like it didn’t happen that way. I got tired of people telling me how to feel about it. No one has the right to tell you how you get to react or grieve something of that magnitude. Yet everyone did anyway. It was maddening. Everyone thought their advice could ‘fix’ me, but it only made me feel worse. I even felt guilty about it, like my parents racing to see me could’ve been the reason they were driving too fast. I hated that it was my birthday. If they didn’t have somewhere to be, they could’ve just stayed wherever they were, and the whole thing never would’ve happened. It was too big for me to handle as a scared little boy. The only way I could shut it off was to bury it. Or at the very least to see it a little bit differently. So I stopped explaining it to people. If I simply said I lost my parents, I realized I didn’t have to answer too many more questions.”

  “I can’t even begin to imagine what you experienced, Sawyer,” I said sympathetically. “But I still don’t understand why you kept that from me. Everything else about what you led me to believe made sense. You grieving their loss and wanting to follow in your father’s footsteps as a doctor and all that. This experience obviously shaped you in a major way. I don’t know how you can pretend like half of it didn’t happen.”

  “Ray wasn’t a doctor,” his mom interjected, as if she was going to save this conversation. “He worked at the mill with me. As much as Sawyer wants to blame me for what happened, Ray had his own demons. We were all a little bit broken. Maybe everyone is a little bit broken.”

  Sawyer clenched his fists, and he looked angrier than I’d ever seen him before. “You need to leave,” he told his mom through gritted teeth. “You weren’t invited here, and you aren’t welcome.”

  “It was a long time ago, Sawyer.” She shook her head. “I think it’s about time we move on from this. We need to talk about it.”

  “I have nothing to say to you,” he sneered. “Everything I had, you ruined. I wasn’t broken before that day, not me—maybe you and Dad were, but I was just a six-year-old boy waiting to make a wish on a cake. You are the one who broke me. And now you’re doing it all over again by coming back here. I have fought for years to have a normal life in spite of you,” he continued with a steady voice. “My grandparents gave me that. Now they’re gone, and I’m just a boy, who’s alone, waiting for someone to make me feel like I matter on my birthday. Someone finally came into my life who matters, and here you are, breaking me.”

  His expression was full of sadness, and I wasn’t sure how to help him when I myself was struggling to figure all of this out. I felt like a distraction from the real issue in front of him. Maybe he needed some time with his mom to talk about it. I imagined it wouldn’t be a pretty scene, but it seemed necessary. “Sawyer, maybe you should be left alone to talk this out,” I suggested, unsure of how else to remedy the situation. This conversation was so much bigger than me at this point.

  “I’m not letting you leave,” he said sternly. “Not like this.”

  “I feel like I don’t even know you,” I replied as tears rolled down my face. “This version of you—I don’t recognize you. You have so much more heartache than I ever knew, and I don’t want to abandon you in the midst of that. That’s not what I’m doing. But it seems like you have a lot to deal with right now. You’ve lied to me since the moment we met, and even if you have a justifiable reason for doing that, I still feel hurt by it. And confused. I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t even know what’s true anymore.”

  “I’m sorry, Whit. I truly am. But you do know me,” he said softly. “I’ve never let myself get this close to anyone before. The rest of me, everything you’ve seen of me, Whit—it’s all true. You know me,” he said again. “How I feel about you—that’s all completely true.”

  “You told me you wanted to be a doctor because your dad was.” I shook my head. “She said he worked at a mill. Why would I care if he wasn’t a doctor, Sawyer? Why would you even make that up? What kind of girl would change her feelings for you based on something like that, if you’d just told the truth? Honestly I feel like I don’t know you at all. Or maybe you just don’t know me. It wouldn’t have changed how I felt about you. But the lying? That changes things.”

  “I’m a mess, Whit. That’s all I know to say.”

  “That’s not an excuse, Sawyer,” I shot back, referencing our conversation from the night he almost gave up on me after the bonfire. “You said so yourself, remember? You told me there are only two options: feisty or afraid. But I don’t even know what you’re afraid of. There’s no one here judging you. I wouldn’t have felt any different about you if you’d told me the truth. But I feel different now. Lying to me, Sawyer—that’s not okay. It really bothers me.”

  “I’m a coward, Whit,” he said solemnly, choking back tears. “I know that. There’s so much more to say.” He was still reaching out to prevent me from closing my car door. “I’ll tell you everything. Stay, and I’ll tell you. All of it.”

  “We seem pretty far past that, Sawyer. Now you’re just doing it because you’re being forced into it, and I hate it. In my absolute weakest moments, I trusted you. You said all the right things. You made me believe you knew what I felt, but none of this feels like the same thing. I will never know what your truth looks like now, because I don’t know how to believe what you say. Your entire story was a lie. Something is very wrong with that. That’s not normal.”

  “Dammit, I know that,” he muttered, clenching his fists again. “I’m completely screwed up, Whit. In an epic way. I know that.”

  “Is that what drew you to me? You saw me falling apart and thought, hey, there’s a girl who’s so messed up maybe she won’t even notice my problems. Is that what you thought?”

  “Not at all.” He sighed. “I saw you and . . .”

  My phone rang from the passenger seat, and as I glanced over at it, I noticed I had missed a few calls from my parents’ number. Apparently I hadn’t been paying much attention to anything else during this heated conversation.

  “Whitley, I saw you, and I . . .” He was cut off again by the sound of my phone alerting me to a new text.

  I glanced over at it, completely unprepared for the words I read.

  My father’s heart had stopped.

  Chapter 21

  “You’re answering your phone right now?” Sawyer asked, sounding a little miffed that I would do such a thing in the middle of an important conversation.

  I held the phone in my hands as heavier tears ran down my cheeks. My fingers were shaking, and my body felt numb.

  “I have to go,” I said quietly, brushing back my tears with my hands. I wasn’t sure how I was going to drive away from here. My body felt robotic, like I was outside of it, willing it to move.

  “Whitley, we can fix this. Please.”

  Another text came through from Warren, explaining my dad was being taken in for a heart transplant. They were trying to keep him alive long enough to make that happen. My soul felt crushed. “I have somewhere else to be,” I stammered, still trying to hold back the sobs, though I was unsuccessful. “Sawyer, my dad . . . His heart . . .” I held my phone toward him and collapsed into my seat, covering my head with my arms. I so badly wanted to wish all of this away—this entire day. Yet here I was, in the midst of one heartbreak, just to find myself drowning in something so much worse.

  I’m not sure how much time passed while I sat like that, sobbing into my shirt. I couldn’t move. I wanted to call my family, but I knew I couldn’t speak. I wanted to drive away from the cabin to process this somewhere else, but I didn’t have the strength. And I so badly wanted to scream into the wind for anyone or no one to hear, but instead I was around someone who felt like a stranger at the moment. I wanted to be with
my family, with Brie—someone who could connect with me during this. I felt lost with Sawyer now, and I knew I needed to move on, at least for the time being.

  I finally lifted my head to find Sawyer in the seat next to me, his arms firmly wrapped around me. His eyes were flooded with tears of his own, though I had no idea who he was grieving for now. He released his hold on me as I sat up.

  I called my brother. His voice was full of emotion, and it hurt so much more to share in this news with another person who loved my father the way I did. Everything seemed up in the air, and I could hear chaos and questions in the background. Warren didn’t explain much—just that my dad’s heart had stopped while he was resting, and although the external defibrillator did its job, it wasn’t enough to singlehandedly keep him alive without further intervention. His heart couldn’t take much more. Without a new one, that would be it.

  Naturally the first person I thought of was my mom. I imagined she was in pieces, wondering if the doctors could save him. Warren confirmed a brief breakdown, yet immediately following that she pressed on to keep everyone informed and had already booked me on a flight leaving Nashville in two hours. I still couldn’t read her. I thought maybe earlier, when we first thought we were losing him, that she was just in denial about the whole thing. But now, even with the reality that he may not recover from this, she got down on her knees and prayed, then got right back up to lift up other people who couldn’t keep it together. I knew I would never have her strength. I fell apart over far less. Yet here she was, possibly losing the love of her life, and she was orchestrating travel plans and keeping everyone informed as best she could.

  “Let me at least drive you to the airport,” Sawyer offered, brushing the hair back from my eyes. He looked like a stranger now. I couldn’t read his eyes like I used to. I knew there was so much more left to say between us, but it felt insignificant now.

  “I’ll take a cab,” I stated though my tears, trying to muster up the kind of strength my mom had, even if I was just faking it for the time being. “I’ll send someone to get my car here when I can.” I scrolled through my phone, arranging for a pickup to the airport. I had only a few changes of clothes in my small duffel bag, but it didn’t matter. There was no point stopping by my crappy apartment before leaving.