Life Is Short and Then You Die

by Kelley Armstrong

  It showed me a whole hell of a lot more than that.

  I’d gotten home that afternoon, made myself a snack, and curled up on the couch with my laptop. I plugged my name into the search engine. It wasn’t like I hadn’t Googled myself before. I mean, who hasn’t?

  The usual stuff came up on the first page. A couple of articles about the soccer team I was on in Maryland, where we lived before we moved to California. My time in a 5K Dad and I ran to raise money for cancer research in Illinois, where we’d lived before Maryland. A mention of an art contest I won in second grade in Rhode Island, where we’d lived before Illinois. We’d lived all over. Dad said, “Changing jobs is the only way to get ahead. Gotta chase that money, kiddo. I’m it for breadwinners in this family.” So we moved. A lot.

  Carmichael had said not to stop at the first page of results. He said that would be the obvious stuff. He said to keep going. That was something I hadn’t done before.

  The second page had some of the same things along with some stuff about another Lucy Harding. She played the cello. Go figure.

  It was at the top of the third page that things got interesting. I was listed as a possible relative of Joleen Harding. I knew that name. Joleen had been my grandmother. Out of curiosity, I plugged her name into the search engine, figuring I’d get an obituary. Dad’s parents had died when he was really young and he didn’t have any siblings. Just like Mom. It was the reason it was only Dad and me after Mom died in the accident. Him and me. Back to back.

  But I didn’t get an obituary. I got, among other things, a Facebook link. Joleen Harding was alive and well and posting on the regular. She was taking a watercolor class at the senior center and had really enjoyed the tamales she’d ordered at a cantina last Saturday. I stared at her face, looking at the soft wrinkles and the fluffy white hair for traces of the woman in the photos Dad had shown me of my grandmother. It could totally be her. Except it couldn’t be. My grandmother was dead. Dad had said so.

  Matthew Harding, Dad’s name, was on her list of relatives as her son. That could be a coincidence, though, right? Dad wasn’t on Facebook, and there was no link on Joleen’s page. Joleen had two other sons, though, Ian and Will, who were on Facebook. I clicked on Ian’s profile and scrolled through his timeline. Photos of a family ski vacation and some kid’s lacrosse game. I scrolled farther. My fingers froze at a #TBT photo of a wedding party clowning around, making funny faces, sticking out tongues, doing bunny ears behind each other’s heads. Except for the couple in the center. They were kissing. I recognized the couple. Dad had shown me a similar photo. In the photo I knew, Mom and Dad were alone, posing for the photographer. Under this one, the caption read: BETTER TIMES. MISS MY BRO.

  My father had lied to me. His mother wasn’t dead. He wasn’t an only child. My head buzzed. My lips felt rubbery and weird, like if I’d tried to speak they wouldn’t have cooperated. My fingers cooperated, though. My fingers typed my mother’s name—Molly Ferguson, she’d kept her maiden name—into the search engine. Could Dad have lied about her, too? Was my mother alive? Were we on the run? Was that the real reason we moved every few years? To keep people from getting to know us well enough to ask questions he didn’t want to answer?

  Turned out Mom was totally on the internet, but not on social media. She was in the news. The headlines screamed: YOUNG MOM SHOT DEAD BY THREE-YEAR-OLD, TODDLER KILLS MOTHER WITH MOTHER’S OWN GUN, LOCAL REALTOR KILLED BY CHILD, and ARIZONA CONCEALED CARRY LAW CALLED INTO QUESTION AFTER WOMAN KILLED BY TODDLER. All of them accompanied by a photo of my mom, a studio shot taken from her realty business.

  The flashes came back. The loud noise. The pool of red. The smell of apples and spice and sawdust.

  I opened the first article, trying to read, trying to understand. According to the article, Mom and I had been at a recently finished model home in a new development outside of Phoenix. Mom was the Realtor for the project and had been getting ready for an open house. The article said she must have left her purse on the floor where I could get into it. Somehow three-year-old me had been able to fish the .38 out of her bag and shoot her in the head. They’d found me sitting next to her body, trying to wake her, gun still clutched in my hand. A deputy on the scene said he didn’t know how many things must have gone wrong for me to be able to get the gun out, get the safety off, and exert enough pressure on the trigger to actually make the gun shoot. “And to hit her mama like that. Dead center in her forehead. I’ve never seen anything like it. I hope never to again.”

  I heard the garage door going up. Dad was home. I slammed my computer shut, like I had something to hide. My cheeks got hot and my heart raced. Who was this man? I’d trusted him my whole life, and he’d lied to me the entire time. He’d lied about our family. He’d lied about me. I was a murderer. I’d killed my mother. My hands shook. I looked down at them, imagining them covered with blood.

  “Hey, peanut,” Dad yelled as he walked into the kitchen from the garage. “Dinner’ll be ready in about twenty. Tacos okay with you?”

  I picked up my laptop and padded into the kitchen, where he was throwing ground meat into a frying pan. Setting my computer on the breakfast bar, I opened it to one of the articles. I turned it to face Dad.

  “Anything interesting happen at school today?” he asked, back still toward me while he cooked.

  I didn’t answer.

  He turned away from the stove. “You okay?”

  I pointed at the computer.

  He squinted at the screen. His face fell. “Where did you … How did you…” His words trailed off. “We should talk.”

  “Ya think?” I said, heat getting ever higher in my cheeks.

  He turned the burner under the pan off and shut my computer with a soft click as if the image on the screen was too much for him to bear. “I swear I was going to tell you. The timing … just never seemed right.”

  “You thought there would be a good time to tell me I murdered my mother? I’m pretty sure that’s one of those things you just have to do.” Dad never could rip off a bandage. He always had to soak it loose.

  He sat down next to me at the breakfast bar. “I know, I know. At first, I thought I’d explain when you got older. Then … it just seemed easier to keep the information from you.”

  “Did it seem easier to keep my family from me, too?” I opened the computer again and pulled up his mother’s Facebook page.

  He buried his head in his hands. “She agreed. Everyone agreed. If I took you away and we cut off all ties, we could protect you. You wouldn’t have to know. Wouldn’t have to live with it.” He raised his head to look at me. “When you passed out during that active shooter drill, I was worried you might have started remembering what happened. Then you didn’t say anything more. I figured the danger had passed.”

  “Why did you wonder if I was remembering?” I asked.

  “The stuff about the smells. The sawdust. The apples. The model home had just been finished. It still smelled like raw wood in there. Your mom always put a big pot of apple cider on when she held an open house. She said the smell of apples and cinnamon and spices made the place feel like home when they walked in.” He lowered his big head into his hands again.

  The cabinet. Gwen’s stupid apple-scented perfume over the smell of clove cigarettes. The bang. That must have been the gunshots. The pool of red must have been my mother’s blood. Blood I spilled.

  I didn’t even know I’d started to cry until Dad brushed the tears off my cheeks. “I’m a monster, a killer.”

  “No,” he said. “No. This is why I didn’t want you to ever know. This is why we had to leave, cut off all ties. If we’d stayed, someone would have slipped. Someone would have said something. None of this was your fault. You were only a baby.”

  A baby who killed. I shut the computer and slid off the stool. “I’m going to bed.”

  “It’s only six o’clock. You haven’t eaten yet,” he protested.

  “I’m not hungry.” I left the kitchen and climbed the st
airs to the second floor.

  * * *

  I woke up at two A.M., the dregs of my dream still staining my brain. Voices arguing. A man and a woman. The loud bang. The growing puddle of blood. I’d fallen asleep with my laptop open, scrolling through search results and social media posts until my tears made everything too blurry to read. I had uncles and aunts and cousins and a grandmother and I was a monster, a monster who had murdered her own mother.

  I sat up and rubbed the back of my neck. The prickly feeling in my skin remained. Dream images flashed. Except it wasn’t a dream. It had happened. All of it. The apple and spice smells, the raw wood, the gunshot, the blood.

  My stomach clenched and growled. I was starving. I eased open my bedroom door. The house was dark. Dad’s door at the end of the hall stood ajar. I could hear his faint snores. I crept down the stairs into the kitchen and made a sandwich, trying to process everything.

  The only thing that didn’t fit with what I’d learned about that day from the articles was the voices. Mom and I had been alone in that model home. The open house hadn’t started yet. Who was the angry man? I couldn’t remember. Yet.

  I ate another bite of my sandwich and froze. Who had whisked me away from anything that might remind me of what had happened, from anything that might trigger my memories? My father. But he couldn’t have been there. He would never have left me like that, alone and scared. He’d have stayed, taken care of me, back to back. Him and me.

  Except that was the Dad I thought I knew. The Dad that would do anything to keep me safe. That Dad didn’t want me to slide tackle on the soccer field or drive at night. That Dad didn’t lie. That Dad told me when a shot was going to hurt, and admitted that the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real when I asked.

  Did that Dad even really exist? Maybe he was a lie, too.

  The words of the deputy came back to me. So many things had to happen for a three-year-old to get hold of a gun, get the safety off, aim it, and shoot. What if those things hadn’t happened? What if I hadn’t shot that gun at all? What if the man with the angry voice shot my mother?

  What if—that man was my father?

  Twelve hours earlier, I would have told you that my father would walk through fire for me. He’d throw himself in front of a bullet to keep it from hitting me. He’d lie down in front of a speeding train to protect me. That had been before I’d known he’d been lying to me for fourteen years. He wasn’t the man I thought he was. Could he be a man who would kill his wife and blame it on his baby daughter? If he was, who could I go to for help? What would he do if I remembered all of it? It was just him and me. Back to back. We were alone in the world.

  Except, we weren’t. That was another lie he’d told me. I had a family. I had a grandmother who went to watercolor classes on Tuesday nights at the senior center in Glendale, Arizona. I glanced up at the clock. If I left now I could make it there in plenty of time. I’d be going past Joshua Tree National Park before Dad realized I was gone.

  * * *

  I pulled the Subaru into the parking lot of the Glendale Senior Center, rolled down the windows, and watched the door. With any luck, I’d be able to talk to my grandmother before Dad found me. I’d had to use my debit card to get gas. He’d see where I’d done that and guess where I was going. What would he do then? The Dad I thought I knew would be on the next plane, but I wasn’t sure who the man who might have killed my mother was.

  The door to the senior center opened, and people came out. I searched their faces for hints of the woman I’d seen on Facebook. I knew her immediately. It wasn’t just from seeing her photo online. Something in my chest leaped. It was like I knew her somewhere in my bones or my blood.

  I slipped out of the car and walked toward her. She saw me and stopped.

  “Joleen?” I said. “Joleen Harding?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m—”

  “Lucy,” she finished for me. She dropped her art supplies on the sidewalk and folded me into a hug.

  * * *

  My grandmother’s house was pretty much as Arizona as you could get. Tile floors, high ceilings, pottery, Navajo rugs. I told her I’d found her on Facebook because of a school project. I didn’t mention the active shooter drill or the flashes or the dreams. She made me dinner—mac and cheese from what had to be the same recipe Dad used—and now we were sitting on the couch, eating ice cream and looking at photo albums.

  “I knew who you were the second you walked up,” Grandma Jo said. “You look so much like your mother right now.”

  I blushed at the compliment. “You knew her then? When she was seventeen?”

  “Oh yes. She and your father started dating in tenth grade.”

  High school sweethearts who’d gotten married. He could have gotten sick of her and wanted out. Had he killed her so he could escape?

  “What about her parents?” Did I have more grandparents? More family?

  Grandma Jo’s face creased. “They passed quite a few years ago. Not long after…” Her words trailed off. “She was their only one.”

  At least Dad hadn’t lied about that.

  We stopped at a photo of the three of us. Mom, Dad, and me. We were on a beach. Mom looked at the camera. Dad looked at Mom. My finger traced the outline of her face. “What were they like?”

  “Your parents? Like any other young couple, I guess. Busy. Happy. Tired,” she said.

  My finger moved to Dad’s face. “You’re sure they were happy?”

  She shifted on the couch to face me. “What are you asking, honey?”

  I couldn’t say what I was thinking. I couldn’t ask this sweet woman if her son might have murdered his wife and blamed it on his daughter.

  Not yet. Not based just on some voices in a dream. I didn’t even know if the woman’s voice was my mother’s. “Grandma Jo, do you have any video of my mom? Something where I might hear her voice?”

  She tapped her finger against her lips for a second. “You know, I think I do. I think we have some video of the night she won Realtor of the Year. Your dad was so proud. He taped the whole awards ceremony.”

  It took a while for her to find it, but forty minutes later we were watching the slightly blurry images of a home video appear on the television screen. A man on a stage announced Molly Ferguson had won Realtor of the Year. The camera swung around fast enough to give me whiplash, but then there was my mom, beaming, getting up from her seat and walking to the stage to accept her award. Her voice was definitely one of the angry ones from my dream, one of the ones I’d heard in my mind pressed up against the cabinet during the drill. Was the other voice Dad’s? I wasn’t sure. I’d never heard him sound that angry.

  “Thanks, Grandma,” I said, getting up to carry my bowl into the kitchen and to gather myself.

  She followed me, letting the video continue to play behind us. “I can tell there’s something you want to know that you’re not asking, Lucy. I wish you’d let me help.”

  I turned, about to tell her everything, when another voice came out of the television speakers. A man’s voice. Someone else receiving an award.

  I froze. I knew that voice. I rushed back into the TV room, grabbed the remote, and rewound a bit.

  “What are you doing?” Grandma Jo walked in behind me. “That’s not the part with your mom. That’s one of her co-workers. Carl Harrington. He’s made quite a name for himself since then. I see his signs everywhere.”

  I hit PLAY. The man stood at the podium receiving an award for best newsletter. Sounded like a participation trophy to me. He thanked everyone, but he didn’t look happy.

  “Did he and Mom get along?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t know, honey. Or if I did know, I don’t remember. It was so many years ago.” She put a hand on my shoulder. “Please tell me what’s going on.”

  I slumped down on the couch. The angry voice in my dreams wasn’t my father’s. I was sure now. He wasn’t the one who was there when my mother was killed. Yes. He’d lied to me. He shouldn’t have done tha
t, but maybe he really had done it for all the right reasons. Maybe he’d really done it to protect me. I told my grandmother the rest of what had led me there, about wondering if my father had killed my mother.

  Her eyes were wide. “No, honey. No. Not ever. Your dad would never have hurt your mother. Never.”

  “I know,” I said, miserable. “I know now, but when I realized he’d been lying to me for so long, I wondered what else he might have been lying about. There was definitely someone else there, Grandma.”

  “You’re sure you might just not want it to be true that you … you know…” Her words trailed off.

  I knew what she was asking. Was I trying to blame my mother’s death on someone else so I wouldn’t have to be a monster? It was possible. Maybe even more than possible. I didn’t want to be that person, the one who murdered her mother. But the flashes seemed so real. I needed to find out for sure. “I don’t know, Grandma. But that man’s voice is the one I keep hearing, and I don’t know how else I would remember it.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense.”

  I stifled a yawn, suddenly exhausted. That yawn was all it took for Jo to go into full grandma mode. In a half an hour, my teeth were brushed, my face washed, and I was tucked into bed in the guest room, a kiss dropped on my forehead with a couple of tears.

  The dreams were even worse that night. More vivid. More clear. The man’s voice—Carl’s voice—louder. My mother’s voice matching his. I woke up, a scream clogging my throat as his face loomed in front of me. Distorted and angry. Twisted and ugly. I stared at the ceiling in the dark, eventually drifting back to sleep.

  The front door slammed, and voices downstairs woke me. Dad. Of course he’d come after me. How could I have ever thought that angry voice could be his? I headed downstairs into the living room and lurked near the doorway to the kitchen for a moment.

  “She’s a smart girl, Matthew. She figured out how to find me,” Grandma Jo said.