by Zoe Carter
The memory makes me smile. “He did love his bacon. Mom used to get on his case for eating too much.”
“She should have left him alone.” Maisey scowls.
“Hey, she didn’t know. None of us did. One minute he was fine, and the next...”
“Look at me, Mom! I’m queen of the meadow.”
With my newly made daisy chain perched on my blond hair, I spin around and around with my arms outstretched. Mom leans back on her heels and watches me. The sunlight catches her hair, turning it into a halo. At that age, I thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. I wanted to be just like her.
“That’s wonderful. Why don’t you make one for your sister now, and then she can be your princess.”
My drooling sister chooses that moment to seize another fistful of grass and stuff it in her mouth.
“That’s stupid,” I say, pouting. “She’ll wreck it. She always wrecks everything.”
Mom plucks blades of grass out of Maisey’s mouth. “The distraction would be really nice right about now.” She shoots a pleading look at my father, and my heart sinks. The truth is, I don’t want to make a daisy chain for my sister. Maisey always gets the attention because she’s the baby. I want to be queen of the meadow today.
“Come on, Sarah. Let’s make one for Maisey.”
As Dad picks more daisies, I’m filled with sadness, as if a black cloud has swept in to block the sun. “But won’t the flowers die? We’re killing them, aren’t we?” It was okay for him to sacrifice a few daisies for my crown, but to destroy them for someone who will slobber all over them? It doesn’t seem right.
Mom shakes her head. “There you go—that’s your morbid influence, Jim.”
“Sarah’s not morbid. She’s a deep thinker.”
He beckons to me and I run to him, throwing myself in his lap. I’ve caught him off guard, and he wheezes as I knock the wind out of him. “Sarah one, Daddy zero,” I say, like he does whenever he startles me.
Mom wears an expression I’ve never seen before. “Sarah, get off.”
“But—”
“Get off him, I said.” She leaves Maisey on the picnic blanket and comes running over to him, shoving me away. I fall to the ground hard, smacking my head on a rock, but before I can muster a single tear, she shoots me a look that makes my outrage die instantly. Then I notice Dad. He’s lying on the grass, his breathing raspy.
“Jim? Jim, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong? Can you hear me?”
I try to get close enough to touch him again, and this time she lets me. A minute ago, he was tan, healthy, smiling. Now he’s the color of milk as he lies panting on the grass. I feel his forehead. My hand comes away damp with sweat.
“I’m... It hurts,” he says, gulping for air between words. “Don’t know what’s...wrong. Need help, Alice...so much...pain. Please help me.”
Mom smooths his hair off his forehead. “Try to relax. Everything is going to be all right. You’re going to be fine.”
I’ll never forget the panic in his eyes as he stared up at her, unable to move.
We both know she is lying. It is not okay. Nothing is ever going to be okay again.
Soon we’ll be told my father has stage-three testicular cancer. But no one tells us it won’t be the cancer that kills him. It’ll be the pneumonia that follows.
“He was sick,” I say.
My sister pushes off with her toes to rock the swing. Lost in my memories, I’d forgotten to keep the rhythm going.
“We lost both parents that day.”
“Mom was still there.” When Dad was first diagnosed, she was the perfect nurse. But as he started to fail, she did, too.
When he died she refused to get out of bed for weeks.
“She was never the same. I should know. I was the one who was always trying to cheer her up.” Maisey removes a tattered Kleenex from her sleep shorts. “I would have done anything to make her smile. Or yell at me, even. Anything, as long as it wasn’t crying.”
My sister was always Mom’s darling. Our mother was never cruel to me, but even before Dad died she’d kept me at arm’s length. Although everyone said how much I resembled her, she often joked I must have been adopted.
“You were good to her,” I say.
Maisey had soothed our mother during Alice’s endless crying bouts, while I ensured everyone ate semi-healthy meals on a regular basis and that cockroaches didn’t conquer the kitchen. One day a man came to repossess our car, and I gave him such a sob story he’d left without it.
“You’re old enough now,” my father says. He takes a deep breath that rattles in his lungs. It’s clear the pneumonia is succeeding where the cancer failed. “It’s time to tell you the truth.” The intensity in his eyes unnerves me as he takes my hand, wrapping his thin fingers around mine. “I’m not getting better.”
“That’s not true.” The lie comes automatically. I’ve told it often—to Mom when she breaks down in the hospital parking lot, to my sister when she wakes from a nightmare. “You’re going to be fine.”
“No,” he says. “I’m not.”
Rather than making me feel worse, his words are a relief. I don’t have to pretend anymore. I don’t have to be strong. In this room with him, I can cry, too.
He strokes my hair while I sob, and I can feel his fingers tremble. More than anything, I wish I could return to the time when my father was the strongest man in the world, but I’m no longer a child. No one has to tell me wishes don’t come true.
“Will you make me a promise, Share Bear?”
I grimace at the silly nickname, coined during a regrettable childhood obsession with Care Bears. Dad said it was perfect, since I shared everything with Maisey. “The Little Mother” was his other name for me. Maisey was “The Little Monster,” since she was forever getting into things.
Unable to speak, my throat clotted with tears, I nod.
“I need you to promise you’ll take care of your mother and sister when I’m gone.”
I start to answer, but he shushes me. “I know you’ll take care of Maisey—you always do. But I need you to take care of your mom, too. She’s going to need you more than ever. Maybe more than Maisey does.”
At that moment, Mom is still holding it together. The depression that will cripple her is weeks away. I can’t imagine her ever needing me, but I promise.
Dad is quiet for so long that I gently remove my hand from his. But he’s not asleep.
“Share Bear?”
“Yeah?” My voice cracks.
“There are going to be days when you feel alone, but I will always be there for you, as long as you need me. Remember our picnics in the Catskills?”
“Yes,” I whisper. How could I forget?
“Whenever you feel alone—whenever you are lost, or hurt, or something bad is happening, remember the happy times we had there. Picture every detail in your mind, and I’ll be right beside you, protecting you.”
“I wish you didn’t have to go, Daddy.” The sobs return, and I hate myself, but I can’t stop.
“Me, too, baby.” He hugs me as best as he can, but it’s awkward with the tubes and he’s so weak. We’re not supposed to get too close since our germs could kill him, but I let him hold me. I inhale deeply, memorizing his smell, his once-strong hands on the back of my head.
“I’ll always be there when you need me,” he says. “Just remember the meadow.”
“Dad did everything for her. She was lost without him. Then she met Peter and everything changed. Everything, except she continued to pretend we didn’t exist. When is she coming?” Maisey asks.
“Tomorrow.” I send a silent prayer to Dad, wherever he is. Please give me strength. Give me the patience I’ll need to handle Alice. One thing’s for certain—Mom is guaranteed to make our littl
e soiree more interesting. She’s always the life of the party.
“Has Eleanor met her?” Maisey twists her fingers, and I want to laugh. What does my sister have to be anxious about? She’s not a Taylor-Cox. She doesn’t have to worry about being disowned.
“Are you kidding? I didn’t even tell Alice I’m married.”
“What?” My sister turns to me, eyes wide. “Why didn’t you tell her?”
“Because I didn’t want her to ruin the wedding.” The thought of Alice crashing that beautiful little ceremony kills me. “That would have made a great impression on my future in-laws.”
“Is she still—?”
“Drinking? I assume so. Why would she stop now?”
Maisey exhales in a huff, blowing her bangs off her forehead. “This is going to be a disaster.”
“Probably, but Eleanor insisted. She wants us to be one big, happy family. There was no talking her out of it. Believe me, I tried.” The second the words are out of my mouth, I could kick myself. I don’t want Maisey to know I wasn’t going to invite her, either.
If my sister picks up on that, she doesn’t let on. “You should have tried harder. No one can spoil a party like Alice.”
I frown, remembering our mother’s drunken antics. She’d been so inebriated at her own wedding to our stepfather that she could barely stand. Instead of tossing the bouquet, she’d pelted it like it was a grenade. The “lucky” woman who’d caught it had earned herself a black eye.
“But she knows about Elliot, right?”
Maisey always did have an unerring ability to ask the questions I didn’t want to answer. I’d hoped to resolve things with our mother before my sister found out just how estranged Alice and I had become. “No,” I admit. There was no point in lying—Maisey would have figured it out soon enough.
“No? If she doesn’t know about the christening, why does she think she’s coming?”
“I invited her to spend some time with me. I assumed she wouldn’t need a better reason, and she didn’t. You remember how much she loves the beach.”
There’s a pause as Maisey processes this. Her next question catches me completely unaware.
“Do you ever think about Peter?”
An image of a sneering man invades my brain before I can stop it. I shake my head, refusing to give that creep any real estate in my mind. “Never,” I lie. Unfortunately, sometimes I can’t think about anything else. Peter ruined everything that was still good in our lives after Dad died.
Maisey twists her fingers until the knuckles pop, and it takes every inch of willpower not to grab her hands. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I can tell I’ve been crying. That’s when I know I’ve been dreaming about him again.”
Hearing that my sister is still tormented by our stepfather infuriates me, and my reply is harsher than I intend. “You should forget about him. I have.” Liar. Why don’t you tell her the real story? Why don’t you admit you have nightmares, too?
“Believe me, I try, but then I think about us hiding in my fort as he screams at Mom. I can’t get it out of my head.” She runs her fingers through her short hair again, making it stand on end. The result is comical, but I’m too upset to smile. “You don’t remember?”
“I remember telling you we were too old for blanket forts.” Maisey had insisted the fort was magic, that once we were hidden inside, Peter would never find us. It was true he never bothered us there, and after a while, I’d almost come to believe it myself. But magic was kid stuff, and I never really got to be a kid. Only one of us had that luxury.
“You’re never too old for blanket forts,” my sister says. “Or too young, for that matter. We should build one tomorrow, show ol’ Elliot here the ropes.”
I kiss my son’s head. “Elliot has no reason to hide.”
“That’s good. I’m glad he doesn’t have to hear...” Her voice trails off, and I suspect we’re sharing the same memory—the night Peter quit screaming at our mother and started hitting her.
“Never. He’ll never go through anything like we did.” I start the swing rocking again, releasing some nervous energy through the motion of my legs.
“No one should. Whenever I think of our childhood, all I can remember is the fighting, and Mom bawling as she begged him to stop, and—”
“Maisey, please.” My pulse thrums in my ears. “You always did have too active an imagination. You need to think about the good times instead of dwelling on the bad.”
My sister gives her fingers another vicious twist. “What good times?”
“Well, think about Dad, and how we all used to go on picnics together.”
Maisey looks confused, so I give her my greatest gift—my cherished meadow, in the hopes it will do for her what it’s always done for me. She’ll be safe from Peter there. It’s a hundred times more powerful than a fort made out of blankets.
The memory is so vivid I can feel the sun on my face, the earth under my toes. My father’s laugh is the music I dance to as I spin around and around, showing off the daisy crown tucked among my curls.
“Do you ever think of Frankie?”
Lightning cracks as clouds roll over the meadow, blocking the sun. The grass withers under my feet, and our father’s kind face becomes a leering skull. A beetle crawls out of an eye socket as he reaches a bony hand toward me, and I scream. My mother rends her face with her nails, leaving bloody grooves in the skin. The child at her side is no longer Maisey.
This baby is blue. It lies with its face buried in the dirt, motionless. Water pools around its head.
“No,” I tell her. “I never think about Frankie.”
* * * * *
Maisey doesn’t understand Sarah’s relationship with her husband, but it’s clear something is deeply, dangerously wrong... Can she find a way to help her sister?
Find out more in
Episode 3 of TAKE IT TO THE GRAVE,
available now!
Don’t miss TAKE IT TO THE GRAVE!
A 6-part psychological thriller that will have you guessing till the very end!
“I know your secret. I’m going to tell.”
As Sarah Taylor-Cox stares at the anonymous letter, her body starts to shake with dread. She has everything to lose—a gorgeous husband, a beautiful baby, and a picture-perfect house in the Hamptons. And now, the lies she’s built her life on are starting to crumble, one by deadly one…
Collect all 6!
Take It to the Grave (Part 1 of 6)
by Zoe Carter
Take It to the Grave (Part 2 of 6)
by Zoe Carter
Take It to the Grave (Part 3 of 6)
by Zoe Carter
Take It to the Grave (Part 4 of 6)
by Zoe Carter
Take It to the Grave (Part 5 of 6)
by Zoe Carter
Take It to the Grave (Part 6 of 6)
by Zoe Carter
ISBN-13: 9781488028632
Take It to the Grave (Part 2 of 6)
Copyright © 2017 by Harlequin Books S.A.
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Shannon Curtis and J. H. Moncrieff for their contributions to this work.
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