Pretty Sly (27 page)

“Mom,” I called, now inches away.

“Willa?” Her face was drained of color. Her voice was hoarse. “Oh my God.”

I sucked in a breath. It wasn’t the reaction I’d hoped for. Not by a long shot. Not after everything we’d gone through to get to this place.

“You—you shouldn’t be here.”

“I know,” I said quietly, trying to choke down the mixture of disappointment at her scolding and the plain, dumb happiness that she was still alive.

“Dammit, Willa.” She gritted her teeth. “Well, come inside before someone sees you.”

We followed her up the side steps and in through the trailer’s small entrance. I was surprised to see that it was as nice as some of the apartments where we’d lived, with wall-to-wall carpeting, wood-paneled walls, and plush armchairs. I noticed a pair of her sneakers on the floor by the door. Just the way she kept them at home.

I was hit again with longing—was it possible to be homesick for a person when they were standing right in front of you?

Once inside, with the door shut behind us, she finally hugged me, but it was not the embrace I had imagined. It was rough and quick and I felt her huffing a sigh over my shoulder. Almost like she was impatient. Or angry. Why was she so angry?

“This is Aidan,” I said, introducing them.

“Hello,” she said. “I hope you understand that this isn’t really the best time and place to be meeting a friend of Willa’s.”

He nodded, and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I figured.”

She closed the shades on the few unconcealed windows before she went to put the kettle on. “So do you mind telling me what you two are doing here?”

Wasn’t it obvious? “We were worried. We wanted to make sure you were okay. . . .
I
was worried.”

She took this explanation in with a stiff smile and turned around. “I’ll make some tea.”

“What’s wrong?” I prompted, following her.

She hunched over the stove, looking broken. “I’m glad to see you. But I really wish you hadn’t come. In fact, I was hoping you were going to turn yourself in. I saw you on the news, you know. And you’re in big trouble, breaking your probation.”

That was enough. All the days of endless dead ends and exasperation exploded in fury. “Yeah, I
know.
But what was I going to do? You just take off and leave me and I’m supposed to go to school and hang out with friends like nothing’s the matter?”

“You should’ve listened—”

“No. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry but it just doesn’t work that way. And you’re insane if you think it does.” I’d never been so blunt or disrespectful to her before. But then, it was an extreme situation.

She pointed at me with a shaking index finger. “You’re too young to understand. You have no idea what you’ve just walked into.”

“Actually, I have a pretty good idea,” I said, cutting her off. “I know those guys are after you. And I think it’s
time you stopped treating me like a baby and just tell me what’s going on here,
Leslie.
”

The name dropped into the room like an explosive device. I actually saw her shrink back.

My heart whirred in anticipation of what I knew was coming. It was time to get some answers—time to finally find out the truth.

“You really want to know, huh?” Her voice quivered. “Fine. Sit down. I’ll tell you.”

Then the kettle went, screaming out in steam. She poured us our tea and brought the mugs over to us.

We sank into the chairs at her little kitchenette table. My hands curled into tight balls around my cup. I felt Aidan’s stare on me, but I didn’t dare turn around to look. I was pretty sure I knew what she was going to say, but I needed to hear her say it.

Except nothing could have prepared me for what she said next.

“There’s no good way to do this, so I just have to come out with it.” She closed her eyes and pressed her lips together as if squeezing the words out of her mind. Then she opened her eyes. “Willa, I’m not your mother.”

Everything just stopped. Everything cracked open.

I dropped my mug on the table, the hot liquid leaping everywhere. I was too shocked to notice that it had splashed my arm and stained my shirt.

Not my mother?
The words hung and swayed over me like a guillotine.

“You’re burning yourself,” she said, and got up for a damp cloth. She came back to the table and started mopping it up.

Then she tried to wipe my sleeve, but I recoiled from her touch. I gathered my arms across my chest.

“Who are you?” I asked slowly, my voice gravelly and ragged.

Her eyes met mine, the same eyes I’d been looking at all my life. “I’m your sister,” she said, letting out a heavy breath. “And technically your name is Maggie Siebert. I renamed you Willa Fox, though. Officially, I mean.”

I looked at Aidan’s puzzled face and then back at her—Leslie, my sister—with growing agitation. My real name. None of this was making any sense. “What are you
talking
about?”

She wrung her hands together, and her face crumpled. “You were a baby. We were living in St. Louis then. With our real mother—her name was Brianna.”

Instinctively, I grabbed at the bird necklace. So the woman I’d thought of as my grandmother was actually my real mother? “And she was killed,” I said, thinking back to the FBI file.

“Yes.” Her eyes welled up at the memory and she flicked her head as if she were trying to shake it loose. “One day after school, I picked you up from day care, like always, and we came home to see Mom. That’s when I found her body. She’d been shot. The house was trashed. I was only sixteen years old but I knew something was
wrong. She’d done something. I knew that they were going to take us away, maybe separate us, if social services or the police found out what was going on.”

“I don’t . . . understand,” I said. But it wasn’t even like I was actually sitting there and asking the question. I no longer felt like I was inside my own body.

She reached across the table and put her hand on top of mine. “You were so cute. I’d practically been raising you myself since Mom worked so much. I couldn’t bear the thought of you going to a foster home. So I grabbed you and a duffel bag with our stuff and took the first Greyhound bus out of town.”

She paused, looking down. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere, and the sound of the breeze rattling against the window, and someone’s radio humming a few trailers away. The quiet of this place.

“So this other woman—Brianna—was my mother. But then who’s my father?”

“I don’t know. That part is true—what I’ve always told you. He took off before you were born and he’s never been around.”

Great. Another big family mystery. “But is he—do we have the same?”

“I don’t think so, Willa. I never knew my dad, either. At least, no one ever told me who he was. That part, about me having you at sixteen, that was Mom’s story. She was kicked out when she had me. Do you want me to continue with what I do know?”

I nodded with a sour, pinching face. “No point in stopping now. Have any more bombshells about our screwed-up family? Because I’m all ears.”

She withdrew her hand and let out a sob. “This isn’t easy for me, either, okay? You don’t know what I’ve been through, what I’ve given up, how hard it was to leave you. You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

I did, though. Couldn’t she see that? I needed to grasp on to anything I had left and hold on tight. Even if it was my own bad attitude.

“Just tell me, okay?” I spat, surprising myself with the force of the outburst. “I’m sick of these secrets.”

She raised her palms in defense. “Okay. Fine. When we got on the road, and I went to change you at one of the rest stops, I noticed that there was something sewn into the lining of the duffel bag. I ripped it open and found the money. It was a lot of money, Willa. Five million dollars.”

“The money from your paintings?” I asked. But I wasn’t really asking. “You had it all along.”

“It was an accident that we even found it. Mom had hidden it away. She’d been acting weird—she moved us, and she was using a new name, though she’d let us keep ours. I realized that’s what they were looking for, those guys. And now
we
had it. I was scared. That’s when I decided to change our names, too.”

“And Joanne Fox?” Aidan asked. “Was that just a name you saw in the paper?”

She turned to him. “She was the same age as me.”

“She was a runaway,” he said, thinking out loud. “So you could assume her identity and no one would notice.”

She nodded. “I even took on her social security number. It gave us a fresh start.”

I bit my lip. “And my name?”

“And Willa, well, I just always liked the sound of it. I had a doll named Willa when I was a kid.”

The fury boiled up inside me again, breaking through the haze of confusion. She named me after a freaking doll? She wasn’t even my real mother. Who gave her the right to do that?

“It actually worked for a long time. I mean, I would move us every now and then—that was just to keep us safe,” she said.

“And you told me it was because you were ‘inspired,’” I said bitterly. “I can’t believe I fell for that.”

“I was trying to protect you! Do you think I was ready to be a parent? All I ever wanted was to give you the best opportunities. And I think I managed to give you a pretty normal upbringing despite it all.”

Normal?
Nothing she was saying was normal in the slightest. In fact, it all added up to the most deranged childhood I’d ever heard of. I couldn’t help looking at her differently. Even if she was still related to me, this woman was a liar. And a thief.

Then, a voice in my head:
Maybe you come by it honestly after all.

She kept on talking, even though I was no longer making eye contact. “I finally thought it was safe, that I could use the money to give you all you deserved. It was great for a while, wasn’t it? I mean, we loved Paradise Valley, didn’t we?” Her voice was almost pleading.

I didn’t answer. Just let her question trail off and hang. There was no more “we” as far as I was concerned. Her despair—that was something I just couldn’t deal with. Not right now.

I pulled my chair away from the table, and its legs dragged noisily on the floor.

Her lashes were wet with tears. “Willa, please believe me—”

“I’ve gotta go,” I said.

She was on her feet, reaching for me. “Don’t go— they could be out there!”

I didn’t care. She couldn’t control me anymore. As if pushed, I flung myself out through the screen door, banging it behind me, ignoring her calls.

It was cold outside and there was nowhere for me to go, really, but I felt like if I stood still I would vomit. Before I knew what I was doing, I broke into a run.

The rhythm of my feet and my breathing pulsed between my fevered thoughts. In all the time we’d been on the road trying to find her, I’d never once imagined this possibility. Of course it was one of those things that, once imagined, couldn’t be unimagined.

My feet kicked up the dirt as I ran past the trailers.
It was too overwhelming. I’d come all this way only to find out that she wasn’t who I thought she was.
I
wasn’t who I thought I was.

Nothing would ever be the same for me—five minutes into this new reality, I knew that already.

I ran until I hit water. A river. I stopped, huddled over my knees, trying to catch my breath through sobs.

“Willa! Wait!” Aidan’s voice carried behind me.

I turned around and he was there. Right there. I fell into his arms and sobbed. “I’m done, Aidan. It’s over.”

“No.” He patted my hair. “We’ve come so far. Don’t say that.”

“I don’t understand how this could be happening,” I said through my crying. “You were in there, right? You heard it.”

I wanted him to tell me I’d made a mistake, or that this was just a dream. I wanted an escape hatch.

“I know. I heard. And I can’t imagine how you must be feeling right now.”

“Well, I’m pissed,” I said. “I mean, how could she do that to me?”

“Willa, I don’t think she had anything but good intentions. Look, I’m sure if we go back in there, she can explain what was happening—”

“I can’t go back in there,” I said. “I just want to go home.”

But even as I said it, I knew that home didn’t really exist for me anymore. Not without her.

I didn’t realize I was swaying until Aidan steadied me by putting his hands on my shoulders.

“Look,” he said. “You have every reason to be upset right now. I mean, she basically just pulled the rug out from under you. But let’s not do anything rash, okay? Let’s not throw it all away. She needs you. They’re still after her. We have to help her.”

I gasped for air. “I can’t, Aidan. How am I supposed to want to help her after all of that? She lied to me my whole life.”

And then, I remembered. My mom—Leslie—wasn’t the only one. I pulled away from him. “And what about you? You’ve lied to me, too.”

His face didn’t change exactly, but I saw his jaw tighten. “Never. I’ve never lied. Whatever you think about me, you need to believe that.”

“But you haven’t told me the truth. Isn’t that the same thing?”

“No,” he said. “I’m trying to protect you. That should count for something.”

And that’s what she was doing, wasn’t it? Protecting me.
Look how that turned out,
I thought. “How can I trust you, or anyone else?”

Aidan shook his head. “You wanna know the best thing about trust? Either it’s there or it isn’t. That simple. It’s not a partial sort of deal. You have to go with your gut.”

I thought about this for a moment. In my gut, if I was
being honest with myself, I did trust Aidan.

But maybe my gut was twisted and confused. My gut didn’t even know its own mother.

A chill ran through my body as it all hit me again. “My whole life is a lie.”

“It’s not, though,” he said. “How she feels about you? That’s real. I can see it in the way she looks at you. She might not be your real mother, but she is your parent, for all intents and purposes. She raised you, and she protected you. That’s what good parents do.”

I shook my head, and felt hot tears drop on my face as I looked out at the vast body of water in front of us. “She changed my name. She made me into someone I’m not.”