“Right before Daniela and I got together, there was one other girl. It was just once. It was stupid, and you can’t tell Beckett.” He lowers his voice even further as I press myself against the door, palms flattened on either side of my face, my cheek flush against the wood.
I have no idea what his confession has to do with me, but I need to hear it.
“Amira?” my mother guesses, and Penn makes this shocked sound.
No.
“How did you know?”
My mother’s laugh sounds like the pop of a cork from a champagne bottle. A sudden release of pressure. “Have you forgotten what I do for a living?”
But Penn isn’t laughing. “Like I said, it was just once. She was here, trying to be helpful right after Dad died, and Beckett was ignoring her. I offered her a ride home, and she started bawling on the way. She was upset because she thought Beck was freezing her out, and she didn’t know how to help.
“I was trying to make her feel better.” Penn huffs. “My dad had just died, and I was trying to make her feel better. But then, maybe that’s what she was trying to do for me too. I honestly have no idea. All I know is that I pulled over behind the Dairy Queen so she could calm down before we got to her house. And I gave her a hug.
“The next thing I know, we’re in the back seat of the car.”
The car. My car. Because Penn hadn’t taken over Dad’s truck yet.
“It was a mistake. I wasn’t thinking straight, and I messed up. Daniela and I got together about a week later, and things have been weird between Amira and me ever since.”
“I bet they have,” my mom says. “Were you careful?”
“Kind of?” Penn’s voice is closed off again. “Like I said, I wasn’t thinking straight. But she would have told me . . . I mean, Amira would have said something, if . . .”
My mother’s sigh carries a world of doubt.
My brother slept with my best friend in my car.
I’m not sure why that matters. But it does. It matters that I’ve been driving around for seven months in that car, with no idea that it could be where—
Oh my god. Lullaby Doe could have been conceived in my car.
I back away from my brother’s door as quietly as I can. In the living room, I grab my keys and the twenty-dollar bill Mom set out for dinner, and I shout, “I’m going for pizza!” But in the driveway, after I start the engine, I can only stare at the dashboard while my brain pelts thoughts at me like a mental hailstorm.
I pull out my phone and open the calendar, then I count back to my father’s death. Thirty-two weeks.
Lullaby Doe was born one week ago, at around thirty weeks’ gestation.
Amira could very well have stopped coming over—stopped trying to pull me out of my grief—because of things getting weird with Penn. Or because she was secretly pregnant with my niece.
Numb, I drop my phone in the tray between the seats and shift into reverse to back out of the driveway. And though I make it to the Little Caesars twenty-five minutes later, I have no memory of actually driving to Daley.
Mom doesn’t go back to work after dinner. She just shoves the leftover pizza into the fridge and puts a load of towels in the washer. Then she helps Landry with her algebra.
I try to catch Penn alone, unsure whether I intend to interrogate him about Amira or apologize—again—for telling Mom about his Titans shirt. But as soon as he’s done eating, though he hardly touched his pizza, he changes into running clothes and leaves the house on foot.
When he gets home, just after nine, his eyes are red and his nose is running, and I’m not sure all of that is from the cold. He goes straight into the bathroom to shower, then he locks himself in his room. Mom sees me eyeing his door and tells me to give him some space. So I close myself into my own room and try to focus on my homework.
A few minutes later, the rattle of the sign against Landry’s door tells me she’s doing the same thing. Which leaves Mom all alone in the kitchen.
Though the truth is that she’d pretty much be alone even if we were all three in there with her.
My eyes open in the dark, and at first, I’m not sure why I’m awake. I pick up my phone from the nightstand, and the clock tells me it’s 1:18 a.m. I start to roll over and go back to sleep, but then I hear the clink of glass, and I notice that there’s weak light shining from under my door.
I get up and pad barefoot into the hall, my feet whispering on the worn-thin carpet, to see that my mother’s bedroom door is open across from mine, and her light is on. She’s sitting on the floor at the end of the bed with her back to me, still fully dressed, surrounded by cardboard boxes. A nearly empty wine bottle and a nearly full stemmed glass stand on her windowsill, in front of vinyl shades that are missing a couple of slats.
Dad always meant to replace them.
If our house is an inventory of my father’s unfinished projects, including his three kids, then my parents’ room is a record of everything he ever did right. Everything he left behind. And right now, it’s all scattered around my mother. A sea of memories.
Her shoulders shake as she sobs softly. I think she may be drowning.
“Mom?” I whisper.
She twists, startled, and wipes her damp cheeks with both hands, leaving a smear of dust beneath her left eye. “Beckett.”
She sits straighter, and I get the distinct impression she wishes she were wearing her badge, because at least then, she’d know how she’s supposed to act.
The police department has guidelines for what to do in any situation. But to my knowledge, there’s no such manual for parenting.
She sniffles. “Did I wake you?”
“Nah. I had to pee,” I lie as I pick my way across the room, stepping over the remnants of my father’s life. Piles of clothes. Books. Shoeboxes full of photographs. His acoustic guitar is propped against the wall next to the window, the fretboard worn free of the finish from years of contact with his fingers.
When I was little, he used to play me a song before bed every night. One he’d made up just for me.
“You can’t throw out his guitar.” I push aside a shoebox of army challenge coins—one from every platoon he was ever in—and pull the guitar into my lap as I sit.
“I’m not throwing anything out, Beck. But I have to do something with all of this.” She shrugs, then she reaches for her glass. “Donate it. Store it. I’m open to ideas.”
I strum my fingers across the strings of the guitar, wincing when the twang sounds out of tune. I have no idea how to fix that. Or how to play. I always meant to learn.
Dad always meant to teach me.
Mom stares at the guitar as she sips her wine. There’s maybe enough for one more glass in the bottle, even though she didn’t open it until after dinner. But she doesn’t seem drunk. She just seems . . . sad.
“He hadn’t played in several months.”
When he died.
We both know that’s what she means.
I pick up the box of army coins and run my fingers through them. There are at least a dozen, all of them big, heavy, and shiny.
“Penn will want one of these.”
Maybe he’ll want all of them.
If he gets into West Point, he’ll have one of his own soon. But Dad will never see it.
“I only have half as many.” Mom leans toward me to peek into the box. “But we both used to drink for free all the time with these.”
“How?”
“When you’re out with guys from your platoon, someone inevitably throws one onto the table. Everyone else has to follow suit, and anyone who’s forgotten theirs has to pay.”
Mom only served one six-year enlistment in the army. During that time, she did two deployments to the desert, married my father, finished college on the GI Bill, and had Penn. She was pregnant with me when she got out.
The pictures blow my mind. Sometimes I forget that I’m basically being raised by superwoman. Penn forgets that too, but my sister never has.
“Landry was upset tonight.” I set the box down and pick up a stack of letter-size envelopes wrapped in a big rubber band. It’s at least four inches thick.
“I know. But she wouldn’t talk about anything but algebra. She’s closing me out.”
“She’s trying to keep you from worrying. Before dinner, I caught her reading a list of my Twitter hate comments.”
My mother groans. “Great.”
“I told her you have it under control.” I snap the rubber band on the envelopes. “You do, don’t you?”
“Yes. I promise you, Beckett. I may be a shit mother, but I’m a good cop.”
For a second, I can only stare at her. “You’re not a shit mother.”
My response seems underwhelming, but I don’t know what else to say. I’m not prepared to rate my mother’s parenting skills while we’re surrounded by my dead father’s things.
She snorts. Then she takes a long drink from her glass and sets it on the windowsill. “I didn’t know Landry was on Twitter. I told her she was too young.”
“She doesn’t have an account. She was reading the replies to my account on a third-party app.”
“I didn’t know Penn was sleeping with Daniela, much less—” Her mouth snaps shut hard enough to clack her teeth together.
“Amira?”
She blinks at me. “You knew?”
“Not until tonight.” My laugh sounds harsh. “Turns out I’m not such a bad amateur sleuth after all.”
My mother suddenly looks bitterly, tragically sad. “Don’t become a cop, Beckett. This job will break your heart over and over, until there’s nothing left.”
But I don’t think her job is the only thing that’s broken my mother’s heart.
“Are you going to ask for a DNA sample from Amira?”
She sighs as she lifts her glass again. “I don’t think there’s any need for that unless Penn’s test comes back positive. Maybe not even then. If we have proof that he’s the father, I can’t imagine Amira will deny that she’s the mother.” My mom’s shrug feels a little hysterical. “Unless you think there’s a third girl your brother could have gotten pregnant.”
“I don’t think he got anyone pregnant. It’s not his baby, Mom. We don’t even know for sure that it’s his shirt, do we? Has he identified it?”
“No, it’s still in evidence. But it’s ripped in the left armpit, just like he says his was. And it was found in Jake’s bag. Which Jake says he left here, right?” She drains her glass. “I mean, that’s still all circumstantial. As a cop, I know that. But as a mother . . .” Another shrug, as she sets her empty glass down. “It’s hard not to fear the worst.”
“What are these, anyway?” I hold up the bundle of letters, hoping to change the subject.
“Oh my god, I haven’t seen those in years.” My mother grabs the bundle from me and flips through them without taking the rubber band off. “These are the letters your dad and I wrote to each other during his first deployment, after I got out of the army. You were just a baby.”
“What was wrong with email?”
She shrugs as she stares at the top envelope. “Our connection was dial-up back then. Super slow. I hardly ever went online. Besides, you can’t carry an email around in your pocket and reread it.” I laugh, and she rolls her eyes. “Okay, you can now that we all have smartphones. But back then, we had these. Your dad said he always carried my latest one with him.”
“You two were literally too cute for words.” Though the envelopes in her lap seem to argue otherwise.
While she pulls one of the letters out of its envelope, I pick up a box of pictures and thumb through shots of my father and a bunch of other men in uniform. I recognize some of them. Others, I don’t think I’ve ever met. But in all the pictures, my father is smiling. He looks strong. Healthy. He looks like the father I want to remember.
Behind the pictures from deployments and platoon picnics, I find several shots of my dad with Penn, Landry, and me when we were little. He’s in uniform, holding Landry on one hip, while Penn stands on his left and I clutch his right hand. In the background is a parking lot full of folding tables decorated in red, white, and blue, where other men and women in uniform wait in line with their families for food, drinks, and keepsakes like little American flags.
I hold the picture up. “Homecoming?”
My mother squints at it for a second. “Yeah. I think that was his first deployment with the reserve battalion.”
She must have been the one taking the picture, because she’s not in it.
“This is the newest one in the box.”
“Yeah. That’s around the time we quit getting them printed.” She wraps the rubber band around her stack of letters again. “I always meant to start that up again. Walmart will do it pretty cheaply. But there never seemed to be enough time.”
“Can I have this one?” I hold the picture up again.
She nods. “Yeah. I think you should. Remember him like that, Beckett. That’s who he really was. That last year . . . he was sick. You know that, right?”
I stand, and she grabs my hand. Her grip is warmer and tighter than I would have expected. She squeezes even tighter. As if she can press the words right into my skin.
“Yeah, Mom. I know.”
I want to ask her about the rumors. About who he became when he was sick. When he wasn’t himself. But those questions feel blasphemous, with his guitar and his army coins sitting right there. With his clothes all over the place, filling the room with the scent of his cologne and his deodorant, as if he might walk in from the bathroom any moment and pull my mother up into an embrace.
But that isn’t going to happen, because thirty weeks ago, on a warm night in May, I woke up in the middle of the night and found my father facedown in a puddle of his own vomit, on the living room floor. There was a fifth of whiskey on the end table with the cap still off and an empty pill bottle wedged between two of the couch cushions.
I tried to shake him awake, and when I realized he wasn’t breathing, I started screaming.
Penn cleared his airway and started CPR while Mom called for an ambulance. I held Landry while she sobbed, trying over and over again to turn her so that she couldn’t see him, but she’s nearly as big as I am. So in the end, I just held her as tight as I could until we heard the sirens. Until red lights began to strobe into our living room through the window in the front door.
Penn thinks he did it on purpose. I know he thinks that, even if he’s never said it out loud. He thinks Dad got tired of fighting an enemy he couldn’t see. An enemy he couldn’t shake free of or hide from. He thinks Dad was grasping for peace, the only way he knew how.
But I don’t believe that. I can’t believe it. My father would never have left us on purpose. He would never have left us like that, knowing that one of us would find him, if he could possibly help it.
Because no matter how hard I try to remember him in uniform or playing his guitar, I’m never going to be able to forget the way I found him. The way he died.
None of us will.
And he would never have done that to us on purpose.
CNN
@CNN · 3h
Students at Clifford High School are raising money for afuneral for little #LullabyDoe. Find out how you can helpgive the #CliffordBaby a proper burial. cnn.#it/3957e20
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THIRTEEN
Amira finds me at my locker eight minutes before the first bell, and my mouth opens to ask why she never told me that she slept with my brother. To ask if she’s Lullaby Doe’s mother.
To ask if she’s the reason I’m getting death threats.
But after accusing both my brother and my ex of the same thing—after risking irreparable damage to both relationships—I’ve learned to be more circumspect in the conclusions I draw. In the accusations I throw out.
So I just smile at her as I dig a textbook from my backpack, then I shove the bag, books and all, into my locker. Because they haven’t let us carry purse
s or bags around campus unless they’re transparent since the second semester of my freshman year. In case someone brings a gun to school.
“You okay?” she asks as we turn toward first period English.
Today, we only have half the normal number of classes, but they will each last twice as long. Because it’s the first day of midterms.
“Yeah. I mean, things are pretty weird at my house right now, but that’s basically always the case.”
“Did you ask your mom about . . . what we talked about the other day?”
I shake my head. Amira has no way of knowing that something even bigger came up before I could work up the nerve to ask my mother if she’s ever abused her position as a police officer to benefit our family.
“You guys!” Sophia Nelson races to a breathless stop on my right, her eyes lit up like they could guide ships to shore. “We crossed fifty thousand.”
“Fifty thousand what?” Amira steps to the left, closing in our little circle, and we have officially turned our backs on the rest of the semicrowded main hall, five minutes before the first bell.
I heartily approve of this maneuver.
“Dollars. People have donated fifty thousand dollars to Lullaby Doe’s funeral fund. And the number keeps going up by the minute.” Sophia shows us her phone, and sure enough, that number on the right changes as I watch, jumping up by twenty dollars.
Amira grabs Sophia’s phone and starts scrolling through the list of donors. It comes as no surprise to me that I don’t recognize a single one of the names. They’re strangers. From all over the country. No, from all over the world.
“Wow. But you know we can’t keep all that extra, right? We said we’d give anything over the funeral costs to a charity to be determined—”
“I know. But I didn’t think we’d really get to do that. I didn’t think we’d actually get to eight thousand! And now we have so many options!”
Sophia takes her phone back and starts walking, and Amira and I fall in next to her, listening to words spewing from her mouth like water from the crack in a dam.
Every Single Lie Page 15