Every Single Lie

by Rachel Vincent

  She used to eat as much as she put on the house.

  We haven’t done that in three years now. Dad was deployed three Christmases ago, and it didn’t feel right to make a gingerbread house without him. The Christmas after that, he was in rehab. And last Christmas, he was “sick.”

  But now . . .

  It’s not the same. The picture on the box is of a very simple square house, decorated with the very basic collection of candy that came with the kit. But Landry’s smiling as she helps Mom glue on a section of roof. Penn’s biting his lip while he uses a can of green beans to support the piece I just helped him glue on, while the frosting hardens.

  It’s not the same. But it’s close enough that I can’t ruin this by asking Mom about that tweet. So I grab a slab of gingerbread and join in.

  Penn remembers how to make icicles hang from the edge of the roof by squirting a small glob of frosting, then pulling the tip straight down, to stretch the glob into the shape of a tiny little ice spear. He makes a million of them, all the way around the roof.

  Mom squirts frosting on Landry’s nose and tries to make a piece of candy stick to it. She fails repeatedly, but she laughs over every effort. She’s relentlessly cheerful tonight. Maybe she’s making up for lost time, or for time she plans to lose in the near future. Maybe she has to go in early tomorrow, so she’s capitalizing on this night at home.

  I wish I could trust her cheer.

  At some point, Landry remembers her Santa hat, and while she’s in her room, digging around for it, a beep from her phone interrupts a beautiful rendition of “White Christmas” playing over the Bluetooth speaker.

  I grab her phone in time to see an alert for the Crimson Cryer’s tweet, from the app I caught her scrolling through the other day.

  “Delete that,” my mother whispers, staring over my shoulder, and I jump. I had no idea she was there.

  I swipe left to delete the notification before it disappears from Landry’s lock screen, and the music starts playing again. Mom’s smile is gone, until the moment my sister walks back into the room in her Santa hat. Then her merriment blooms anew, brighter than ever. And finally I understand her tenacious cheer.

  She’s already seen the tweet. Maybe Penn has too. They’re shielding Landry, as much as they can. Trying to give her a good holiday in the middle of the shit storm hounding our family like the cloud of dust that follows that kid from the Charlie Brown Christmas movie.

  Maybe they’re onto something. Maybe my questions can wait.

  An hour and a half later, we stand back to look at our creation. I have to admit that for a store-bought kit, it’s pretty cute. Landry tiled the roof with sections from a box of stale wafer cookies, and Mom sprinkled powdered sugar over the whole thing, to look like a light dusting of snow.

  “I’ve had enough sugar for an entire lifetime,” Penn announces as he swipes empty candy wrappers from the island into the trash can.

  “For a week at least,” Landry agrees. “I wish Dad could see this. I think he’d like it.”

  Penn snorts. “He’d tell us that our joints aren’t at ninety-degree angles and our door is off-center.”

  “And he’d be right,” Mom says. “But he’d still like it. Flaws and all.”

  Fact-Check Rating: One hundred percent true. Because no one understood more about flaws than my dad.

  “Beckett.” Someone grabs my shoulder and shakes me. “Beck, honey, wake up.”

  I blink into the dark and see my mother’s silhouette leaning over me. “I’m awake.” Almost.

  “I need to talk to you,” she whispers. My bedside lamp clicks, and light floods my room. “I’m sorry it’s so late.”

  “S’okay. What’s wrong?” I blink sleep from my eyes.

  “Shhh . . .” She nods toward the hallway. “In the kitchen.”

  My mother is no longer smiling.

  I’ve only been asleep for two hours, because I watched It’s A Wonderful Life over FaceTime with Jake until nearly midnight. But I throw back the covers and shiver as I step into my fuzzy green Grinch slippers—a gift from my dad last Christmas. At least, his name was on the tag, but I’m not sure how much shopping he did himself.

  “What’s going on, Mom?” I ask again as I follow her into the kitchen. Her eyes are red from crying, and I can smell wine on her breath, but she’s not drunk. Her gaze is very, very focused. If teary.

  “Do you want some cider? I can stick a mug in the microwave.”

  I shrug as I settle onto one of the bar stools. “I kind of feel like that’s the least you owe me, after waking me up at two in the morning.”

  “I’m sorry.” She pulls a plastic carton of apple cider from the fridge and half fills a mug, then she sticks it into the microwave and sets the timer for thirty seconds. And for that entire thirty seconds, I wait for her to say something.

  Twice, she starts to. But then she closes her mouth again and bites at that hangnail on her thumb. Both times.

  I eat a white-chocolate-covered pretzel that’s fallen from its position as part of the fence around our gingerbread house.

  When the microwave beeps, we both jump. My mother opens the door and pulls out the mug, then she grabs a shaker of cinnamon from the spice rack and sprinkles a little on top of my cider.

  “What’s going on?” I ask again as she sets the mug in front of me.

  She settles onto the stool at the other end of the island, leaving the one between us empty. “Beckett, I have to ask you a question again, and I really need you to tell me the truth this time.” She takes a deep breath, and dread churns in my stomach. “Is Lullaby Doe your baby?”

  “What?”

  “Please just answer the question.”

  “I’ve already answered that question a million times. No, she’s not mine. I’ve never been pregnant. Why are you asking me this again, at two in the morning?”

  “I . . .” She shrugs. But my mother never shrugs. She’s always certain, if not of the answer, then at least of the question. Of the fact that she should be asking it. “Some new evidence has come to light, and—”

  “What evidence?” This doesn’t feel right. Cops ask questions about evidence, but Mom’s not wearing her badge. Not even psychologically. She’s been drinking. And crying. And it’s two o’clock in the morning. “Is this about that tweet? Because it’s a lie. I never—”

  Wait. Mom was upset before tonight. “Last night, when we were decorating the tree, I could tell something was wrong.” She should have been as relieved as Penn was about his test results. But she wasn’t. “You said it was just the pressure to identify Lullaby Doe, but that wasn’t it, was it?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Beckett. I wasn’t ready to tell you yet. Hell, I wasn’t ready to process it for myself yet.”

  “But now you’ve processed it?” Whatever it is?

  “Not really. But with all three of you out of school for the next two weeks, this is the only chance I really have to catch you alone, when I’m not working.”

  And she’s definitely not working. This is not the bearing, or the phrasing, or the approach of a cop. “What’s the evidence, Mom?”

  “Beckett, did you have a baby?”

  “No! I’ve already told you! That baby is not mine.”

  “Lower your voice, please. I need you . . .” She inhales deeply, then she exhales slowly. “I need you to have an exam.”

  I push my cider back, untouched. “What kind of exam?” But I think I already know, and the answer makes me feel sick.

  “I need to take you to see my gynecologist.”

  For several seconds, I can’t think of what to say. I can’t even form clear thoughts. “I can’t—I can’t believe you! You want a doctor to tell you I’ve never had a baby?” I shove my stool away from the island and storm into the living room. I’m halfway to the hall when she catches up to me and grabs my arm.

  “Beckett, come back and hear me out.”

  “Let go!”

  “Shhh,” she hisses. “Please come
back and hear me out, and if you still don’t want the exam after that . . . that’s fine.”

  I go with her not because I have any real interest in hearing her out, but because I’m almost as curious as I am pissed off. What kind of evidence could make her think it’s my baby, just as she finds out it isn’t Penn’s?

  And how did the Crimson Cryer get ahold of that intel before I did?

  “Tell me everything,” I say as I sink back onto the bar stool and pick up a mug that has grown cold. “All of it. Right now. Or I’m going back to bed.”

  “Okay. You have a right to know anyway. I was just waiting for the right time to tell you. In private. Because I didn’t want to upset Penn and Landry.”

  She looks like she wants to be holding a wineglass. Instead, she grabs a glass from the top rack of the dishwasher and fills it with water from the tap. Her hands are shaking as she sits on the last bar stool again.

  “So, I told you that Penn’s paternity test was negative, but the truth is that it’s not quite that simple. Paternity tests don’t just say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ They give a percentage of DNA shared by the child and the potential father, along with the likelihood that the man tested is the father of the child in question.”

  “Okay. And Penn’s test said he can’t be the father, right?”

  “Yes. He doesn’t share enough DNA with Lullaby Doe to be her father.”

  “Enough? He doesn’t share enough DNA? So he shares some?”

  “Around twenty-five percent.” My mother takes a long sip from her glass, and I’m surprised she can get any water into her mouth, with how hard her hand is still shaking.

  “What does that mean? The baby is, like, a cousin?” But we don’t have any other relatives in Clifford, other than my paternal grandmother.

  “According to the lab tech who sent me the results, it means that Lullaby Doe is almost certainly either Penn’s niece—or his half sister.”

  “Oh my god.” I gulp my cooling cider, to give myself time to think. “And I’m guessing you’re not her mother . . .”

  “No.” My mom’s voice breaks on that one syllable.

  “I’m not either. Which means Dad—” I pull my phone from the pocket of my pajama pants and open the calendar.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Counting back thirty weeks from last Friday.”

  “I’ve already done that at least fifty times,” my mother says. “The math never changes.”

  “But he died thirty-two weeks ago, and you said Lullaby Doe was at thirty weeks’ gestation when she was born a week ago. She’s a week too young. She can’t be his baby.”

  “Thirty weeks was just an estimate, Beckett. That baby could have been conceived within a couple of weeks of your father’s death, in either direction, and still be within the margin of error of her gestational development.”

  Those are just a bunch of fancy words—of doctor-speak—for “Lullaby Doe could be your sister, Beckett.” She could be my father’s illegitimate child.

  “Oh my god. Oh my god!”

  “Shhh.”

  “Is that why . . . ​Mom, do you think he knew? Do you think he did it on purpose? Did he kill himself because he knew about the baby?” The seat beneath me suddenly feels unsteady, as if it could fall out from under me at any moment. Or maybe that’s the whole world.

  My whole world is crumbling.

  “I don’t think so, hon.”

  But I can’t get that thought out of my head. What if Penn was right? What if my dad’s death wasn’t an accident? What if he knew what this baby would do to my mother—to all of us—and he took the only way out that he could think of?

  “No, Beckett.” My mom scoots onto the bar stool next to mine and grabs my hand. Because evidently she can read my mind now. “Even if the baby is his”—and I can see how much it costs her just to say those words aloud—“the pregnancy wouldn’t have been far enough along for him to know about it. For anyone to know about it. Even the mother.”

  The mother.

  If Lullaby Doe is my dad’s baby, who’s the mother?

  “Oh my god.” I’m repeating myself, but I can’t help it. “Mom, who is she? Does she go to my—”

  “No!” my mother snaps, and her grip on my hand starts to hurt. The look in her eyes is fierce, in spite of the red ringing them. The veins standing out among the whites of her eyes like bloody little tree branches. “I can’t—Don’t say whatever you were going to say. We don’t know that yet, and I can’t think about . . .”

  —school.

  I think the word anyway. Because how can I not?

  Why would my dead father’s dead baby be born in my school, unless the mother went to school there too?

  “Maybe it’s a teacher.” I give my mother this hypothetical gift because it’s so damn close to Christmas. Because neither of us can stand to think that my father might have cheated on my mother at all, much less with a teenager. “Mom, Lullaby Doe’s mother could be a teacher.”

  She blinks at me, and relief floods her face. That clearly hadn’t occurred to her, and in this moment, I understand how much like my mother I truly am. We both need answers at any cost, and the worst possible scenario is guaranteed to burrow its way into each of our brains, as if an earworm were an actual thing that could get into your gray matter and chew and chew and chew, until there’s nothing left to think but this one thought.

  My father might have been a pedophile.

  “It has to be a teacher,” I tell her. “I know you thought Lullaby Doe’s mother must have been a student, because an adult wouldn’t have had any reason to hide the pregnancy, but this could be the reason. An affair.”

  An affair with a married man.

  An affair with a married man who has three children and an addiction to alcohol and pain pills.

  The more I think about it, the worse it all sounds.

  “Yeah. It could be a teacher.” She lets go of my hand, and slowly the feeling starts to return to my fingers.

  And the truth is that even if it is a student, he could have slept with a seventeen-or eighteen-year-old. That feels like a horrible thing to be relieved about, but I’m grasping at straws here, and eighteen-year-olds are technically adults. And seventeen-year-olds are old enough to legally consent. So I will hold on to this straw until it falls apart in my hand, because the alternative would be to lose my mind.

  “Beckett, I still, um . . . ​I still need you to have that exam. Please.”

  “What? Why? It’s not my baby, Mom.”

  “I just . . . ​I need to exhaust all the other possibilities before I can let myself go down this path, mentally. Please, Beckett. Dr. Baker said she can see you at seven tomorrow morning. Seven this morning, I guess,” my mother corrects herself with a glance at the clock on the microwave.

  “She’s open that early?”

  “No, this is more of a favor. You need to go anyway. You’re sixteen, and that’s about when a girl should have her first gynecological exam, so we can just call it that. Our insurance will even cover it.”

  So, she wants to get me up at the crack of dawn to go for my very first, perfectly normal gyno checkup, on the Monday before Christmas. Before the doctor’s office even truly opens.

  It’s ridiculous. It’s insulting. But I can’t say no, because as much as this is obviously going to suck for me, my mother needs this proof, just like I needed proof that the baby wasn’t Amira’s.

  “Okay, but why can’t you just run a DNA test on me, like you did with Penn?”

  “Because we’re no longer looking for the next of kin. The coroner has released the body for burial. The Clifford PD’s part in this has ended. And if that weren’t true, the results of your DNA test would become part of the official evidence, and I’m not sure I want that, no matter what the outcome is.”

  I don’t want that either. Not that it matters anymore. This is no longer a police matter. It’s personal now. “Fine. I’ll go.”

  My mother’s sob of relief echo
es in my head on my walk back through the living room and into the hall. It follows me all the way into my room and under the covers.

  But I already know, as I turn out my lamp, even though there’s zero chance of me getting any more sleep tonight, that this isn’t going to end like it did when I suspected Amira of being the mother. There won’t be cookies and hot chocolate, and relief that also feels a little bit like resentment. Like a lack of trust.

  Because proving to my mom that Lullaby Doe wasn’t my baby won’t solve my mother’s problems. It will just expose another secret that could tear this family apart.

  SEVENTEEN

  The table is cold. The instruments are even colder.

  My mom agreed to wait in the lobby, but even without her here, this is the most humiliating moment of my life.

  “Almost done,” Dr. Baker says. “You might feel a little bit of a pinch.”

  I lay my forearm over my eyes and hum the theme song from How the Grinch Stole Christmas, until finally the doctor pushes her stool back.

  “You can get dressed now. There are some tissues on the counter if you need them. When you’re ready, just open the door.”

  I don’t thank her. I’m not trying to be rude. I’m just not feeling very thankful.

  I use the tissues, then I pull on my clothes and leave the hospital-style gown on the bed. Right at the end, between the stirrups. Then I open the door and sit in one of the two chairs against the wall.

  My mother follows Dr. Baker into the exam room and closes the door, even though there’s no one else in the office yet. Not even a nurse or a receptionist.

  “Beckett, do I have your permission to share your medical information with your mother?”

  I shrug. “That’s what we’re here for.” And I’m a little surprised that she asked. I’m not sure whether she’s being polite or she’s legally obligated.

  “Well, everything looks fine,” Dr. Baker says as she sinks onto her rolling stool. My mother just stands there in the middle of the room, looking like she’s about to be shot. “Normally, we would have the results of the pap smear in a couple of days, but with the holiday coming up, it may be a week. But I don’t anticipate any problems there.” The doctor sets my chart down and looks up at my mother. “Beckett has not recently given birth, and I see no sign that she’s ever been pregnant. However, considering that she is sexually active—”