Heartstopper (8 page)

Kerri always said “passed on” instead of “died.” She also said things like “kick the bucket” and “bite the dust,” although never in front of Grandma Rose, who considered such irreverent expressions sacrilegious. Delilah knew Kerri put up with her mother’s ill temper and demanding ways because she hoped to inherit all her money when she died. Whoops, Delilah thought. Make that “passed on.” She might have laughed had Grandma Rose not been sitting there looking as if she’d just stumbled onto a nest of sleeping serpents.

Was that a metaphor? Alliteration? Maybe both. Something else to ask Mrs. Crosbie about.

“How are you doin’, Grandma Rose?” Delilah asked now, approaching with caution. Her grandmother sat at the edge of the sofa’s middle seat, her swollen feet stuffed into tatty pink slippers that barely touched the floor, her large, masculine hands entwined in her lap. Her hair was colored a deep auburn red, although the gray at her hairline betrayed her need for a touch-up. Her face was round, her features coarse, her brown eyes cold and unforgiving. Weren’t grandmothers supposed to be soft and kind? Weren’t they supposed to welcome you home with open arms and freshly baked cookies?

“How do you think I’m doing?” came her grandmother’s response. “I’m worried sick.”

“I’m sure Mom’ll be home any minute,” Delilah said, although she was sure of no such thing. What was her mother doing anyway? Why hadn’t she called? “She hasn’t phoned?”

“If she’d phoned, would I be so worried?”

“I guess not.” Delilah let out a deep breath and tried not to let her annoyance show. She tried to tell herself her grandmother was snapping at her because she was worried about her daughter, but in truth, snapping was her grandmother’s normal way of communicating. No wonder Kerri took every opportunity to be elsewhere. No wonder she was in no hurry to get home. No wonder she spent so much time at her computer when she
was
home, preferring the quiet of Internet chat rooms to the noise of real people. If someone snapped at you online, you could simply snap them off.

“I thought it was her when I heard a car pull up.”

“That was Sheriff Weber’s car. He gave me a lift home from Chester’s.”

“Too bad,” Rose said. “You could use the exercise.”

Delilah forced her lips into a smile as she headed for the kitchen. “Can I get you anything, Grandma? Some Coke or some juice?”

Rose shook her head. “No. And you shouldn’t have any either. Do you have any idea how much sugar is contained in one glass of Coke? And they say orange juice is just as bad. Did you know that?”

“I think you’ve told me that, yes.” At least five hundred times, Delilah added silently, stepping into the small kitchen and opening the fridge, stretching for a can of Coke near the back.

“Stick with water,” her grandmother advised, as if she were standing right behind her. “They say you should drink at least eight glasses of water a day. Did you know that?”

“That’s an awful lot of water,” Delilah said, releasing the can’s metal tab. A rush of fizzy gas burst into the air, tickling the bottom of Delilah’s nose. She raised the can to her lips, took a long, satisfying gulp.

“Foolish girl,” Rose muttered, loud enough to be heard.

“You sure you don’t want anything? I think there’s some ice cream left.”

“Lord, no. They say you shouldn’t eat anything after seven o’clock.”

“Who’s they?” Delilah returned to the living room, clutching her can of Coke with grim determination, and plopped herself down on the brown leather chair. It made a great whooshing sound, as if groaning under her weight.

“Everybody says it,” Rose said, as if this were answer enough. “It’s common knowledge. And be careful with that Coke. If you spill it—”

“I won’t spill it.”

“—you clean it up,” her grandmother continued, as if she hadn’t spoken.

The two women sat in silence for several seconds.

“So, how is Sheriff Weber?”

“Fine.”

“What was he doing at Chester’s?”

“Having a beer.”

“I take it his wife wasn’t with him?”

Delilah shook her head. “He was there on business.”

“Business?” Her grandmother raised one thin eyebrow.

“Liana Martin’s missing.”

“What?”

“Liana Martin. A girl in my class. She’s missing.”

“Judy Martin’s daughter?”

“I guess.”

“Beautiful woman. She was runner-up for Miss America once, you know.”

“I don’t think it was Miss America—”

“What do you mean, her daughter’s missing?” her grandmother interrupted.

“Apparently she didn’t come home last night, and nobody’s seen her since yesterday afternoon.”

It took several seconds for the full impact of that statement to sink in. “What does the sheriff think happened to her?”

“He doesn’t know.”

“She probably just ran off,” Rose said dismissively, although she sounded less than convinced. “Why did you tell me that?” she demanded seconds later. “Can’t you see I’m worried enough as it is?”

“Don’t worry, Grandma. I’m sure Liana will turn up.”

“I’m not worried about
her
, for God’s sake. I’m worried about your mother. If there’s some maniac out there—”

“Whoa, Grandma Rose. Who said anything about a maniac?”

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

“You’re starting to scare me.”

“What have you got to be scared about? Even a maniac would have more sense than to mess with you.”

Tears instantly filled Delilah’s eyes. So now she was so repulsive even a maniac wouldn’t touch her. She raised the can of Coke to her lips, didn’t lower it again until the can was empty. By then her tears were gone. She stood up. “Would you like me to put on the TV, Grandma?”

“No. There’s never anything on the damn thing. Maybe you should go out again. Have another look around.”

“I’m tired, Grandma. Besides, Mom’s probably with Dr. Crosbie.”

“No. He has his kids tonight. You don’t think she’s been in an accident, do you? Your mother’s not the best driver in the world, you know.”

“I think someone would have phoned.” Where
was
her mother? Why
hadn’t
she called? “Why don’t you get ready for bed, Grandma. It’s late and—”

“—and your mother’s not home. And a young girl is missing. And how am I supposed to get any sleep until I know she’s safe and sound?”

“You’ll make yourself sick,” Delilah warned, although she didn’t believe it. Her grandmother was a force of nature. She was indestructible. She’d survive Armageddon. Grandma Rose and the cockroaches. Sounded like a good name for a band.

“You can get ready for bed, if you’d like,” her grandmother was saying. “You don’t have to keep me company.”

“I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“That’s all right. I’m used to it.”

Delilah rolled her eyes toward the ceiling as she approached the sofa and leaned forward to give her grandmother a kiss on her dry, flaky forehead. Was it her imagination or did her grandmother flinch at her touch? “Sheriff Weber said to call him if Mom wasn’t back by midnight,” she said as she walked from the room.

“Midnight?” Rose repeated, as if it were a four-letter word.
“Midnight?”

The angry epithet followed Delilah up the stairs and bounced off the pale pink walls of her bedroom. She sank down on her narrow twin bed, the white-and-pink-flowered comforter billowing up around her wide hips. Pink broadloom covered the floor; pink-and-white-checkered curtains framed the window overlooking the street; a pink lampshade sat atop a delicate white lamp that itself sat atop a white dresser, the dresser hand-painted with pink flowers. It was the ultimate little girl’s room, Delilah thought. No cliché had been forgotten or left out. And it didn’t matter that its occupant had long ago outgrown the doll-size bed and lost interest in the plush, stuffed animals lining the bookshelves. What mattered was the dream of feminine perfection. What mattered was the ideal.

Except Delilah was as far from the ideal of feminine perfection as a girl could get. Even as a child, she’d fallen short of the room’s expectations. While she’d weighed only a puny six pounds at birth and was a pretty average-sized
toddler, her weight had begun to climb in the years following her mother’s second divorce and had continued its steady ascent, reaching a peak of 163 pounds over the Christmas holidays. While, at five feet five inches tall, this was more than enough to label her as heavy, it was hardly enough to qualify as obese.

She glanced toward the window, her gaze falling to the computer on her desk. Her classmates regularly posted such horrible things about her on their websites. They called her names and made vile, lewd comments about her sexuality. Joey Balfour was the worst. And Greg Watt. To think she’d once thought Greg kind of sweet. One day, when she’d worn a new blouse to class, he’d actually told her she looked nice. That simple statement had kept her afloat for weeks. She’d replayed the compliment endlessly in her head—
You look nice. You look nice. You look nice
—until eventually the words became warped and indistinct, like a CD that’s been played too many times. At any rate, those words had long since been replaced by others.

Her mother was always telling her she had such a pretty face, and her mother was right, Delilah decided, pushing herself off her bed and examining her perversely delicate features in the full-length, freestanding mirror standing next to the closet. “All you’d have to lose is thirty pounds,” she heard her mother whisper in her ear. “Thirty pounds.
Thirty pounds,”
Delilah repeated in her grandmother’s incredulous voice.

But she knew even thirty pounds wouldn’t be sufficient to satisfy Grandma Rose. She could swear off Coca-Colas and stop eating after seven o’clock at night, and maybe she’d drop thirty, even forty, pounds, and it still wouldn’t be enough where her grandmother was concerned. She thought of the fashion magazines her mother gobbled up as avidly as some people read their Bible, of those skinny girls with sunken eyes and swollen lips who filled the glossy
pages. They all looked alike. You couldn’t tell one from the other. Was that what her grandmother wanted?

It’s what
I
want, Delilah acknowledged sadly. To look like everyone else. To
be
like everyone else. To be invisible. She almost laughed. In a strange way, that’s exactly what she was. For all her bulk, nobody really saw her.

If only she had someone she could share things with. A close friend. Or a sister. She’d always longed for a sister, despite the stories her mother used to tell about her own childhood, the constant rivalry with her siblings for their mother’s approval, how Grandma Rose was a master at playing one girl off the other. “Be grateful you’re an only child,” her mother used to say.

Where
was
her mother? She’d left the house around four-thirty to go to the drugstore, and now it was closing in on ten o’clock. Maybe Grandma Rose was right. Maybe there’d been an accident. Maybe she should start calling all the hospitals in the greater area. Maybe she should go back outside, keep looking.

The phone rang.

“Can you get that?” her grandmother called from downstairs.

Delilah raced down the stairs to the kitchen and reached the phone in the middle of its fourth ring, hoping the caller hadn’t already hung up. Grandma Rose was in the next room, for God’s sake, and she wasn’t paralyzed, Delilah was thinking as she lifted the receiver to her ear, prayed to hear her mother’s voice. “Hello?”

“Delilah,” the voice on the other end said flatly.

Delilah knew who it was immediately. His voice was as intimidating as the rest of him. “Mr. Hamilton,” she replied. Had her mother come into Chester’s after she’d left? Was she there now? Was there some sort of problem?

“I saw you here earlier,” Cal Hamilton was saying, “but you left before I had a chance to talk to you.”

“Who is it, Delilah?” Her grandmother appeared in the doorway. “Is it your mother?”

Delilah shook her head. “It’s Mr. Hamilton,” she whispered. “Is everything all right, Mr. Hamilton? Is my mother—”

“I was hoping you could stop by on Saturday afternoon and keep my wife company for a few hours,” he interrupted, as if she hadn’t been speaking. “I have to be somewhere, and you know how Fiona hates to be alone.”

“Of course,” Delilah said, although she knew no such thing. In previous visits to the Hamilton home, Fiona had barely said two words to her. It was like babysitting an infant, she thought, and more than a little creepy. She would have said no, except that Mr. Hamilton insisted on paying her twenty dollars an hour. “He wants me to come over Saturday,” she began, hanging up the phone, but her grandmother had already turned her back.

They heard a car pull into the driveway. Delilah closed her eyes, said a silent prayer.

“Hi, everybody,” Kerri called as the front door opened. “Anybody home?”

Delilah released a deep sigh of relief. Her mother was home. She was safe. She hadn’t been in an accident. No maniac had snatched her. And it didn’t matter that she’d been gone for almost six hours, or that she hadn’t told anyone where she was or called to say she wouldn’t be home for dinner. What mattered was that she was home.

“Where the hell have you been?” Rose bellowed, marching back into the living room. “We’ve been worried sick.”

“Don’t be silly,” Kerri told her mother, waving bloodred fingernails in the air impatiently. She was wearing tight, red-and-white-checked capri pants and a white halter sweater, her nipples prominent beneath the fine wool. Long, platinum hair fell in loose curls around her shoulders. Red toenails peeked out between the straps of
her red sandals. The sandals sported skinny, four-inch heels. “I told you I might be a while.” She dangled a large, brown shopping bag from her other hand. “Don’t be mad at me. I come bearing gifts.”

“Where’ve you been?” Delilah asked.

“Bloomingdale’s,” Kerri purred seductively, reaching into the brown bag.

Bloomingdale’s? Delilah repeated silently. The nearest Bloomingdale’s was in Fort Lauderdale. “You went to Fort Lauderdale?”

“I wanted to get my girl something nice to wear.” She pulled a beautiful blue cotton sweater out of the bag and pressed it against her enormous chest.