The Lies We Told (22 page)

“She was afraid. She knew how much having a baby meant to you.”

“And to her.”

“Yes, to her…but she would have been willing to adopt. She would have
loved
to adopt.”

He ignored her comment. Instead, he picked up the pillow from the couch and tried to plump it between his palms. She knew that nothing he did could fluff the pillows they’d been given.

“Maya said you wouldn’t consider it.” She heard the accusation in her voice.

“I was…” He sat down on the couch. “It’s hard for me to give up the hope of having my own child.”

“An adopted child
is
your own child.”

“You know what I mean. I have no family. No blood relatives. I just wanted my own biological child.” He shook his head. “Was that so wrong?”

Rebecca got to her feet and ran her hands through her hair. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t so wrong. Maya was a big girl. She could have said ‘I quit’ whenever she wanted. But you were
meant to be a father, Adam. I can see it when I watch you with your kid patients. What does it matter if a child’s related to you by blood or not?”

Adam didn’t seem to hear her. There was sadness in his eyes that she wished she could erase. “I put her through too much, Bec,” he said. “I was upset after I found out about the abortion, but I didn’t talk to her about it. She knew I was upset, but she wasn’t talking to me either, and…
damn
.” He leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. “Now it’s too late,” he said. “It’s too damn late.”

Rebecca lay in the double bed, listening to the cicadas. The evening was cool, and she and Adam had opened the windows before turning in. As tired as she was, she knew she’d once again have a hard time falling asleep. The conversation with Adam had her tied in knots. An abortion.
When, Maya? Why didn’t you tell me?

Had Maya known something Rebecca had tried so hard to hide? That tangled web of love and hate she felt for her? The admiration tainted by resentment? Her mind and heart could barely hold the contradictions. Lying there, she felt as though she might explode with them.

She thought of the hurt look in Adam’s eyes as he realized he’d probably never have a chance to talk with Maya again. So much regret in his face. Such yearning for a second chance. She knew that feeling, although she hadn’t recognized it in herself until tonight. She’d been carrying the feeling around with her for days, and now it was keeping her awake. She had her own set of regrets. Her own yearning for a second chance with her sister. She knew exactly how it felt when you realized that too much had been left unsaid.

I
WOKE UP IN THE ROOM THAT WAS BEGINNING TO FEEL HALF
like home, half like a prison. How long had I been there now? Definitely more than a week. Two weeks? I should have made marks on the wall to keep track, the way a prisoner might in his cell. I doubted there was a calendar in the house. Tully and Simmee knew it was September or January or April by the slant of the sun through the trees.

I turned on my side and my eyes fell on the old bassinet in the corner. This room was to be the nursery, although I knew it would never meet my personal definition of the word. I thought of the mural Adam and I had fantasized about for the nursery in our house.

No.
I wouldn’t go there. Wouldn’t think about our babies. Our house. I wouldn’t think about
Adam
. Especially not about Adam. In the past few days, as I realized I didn’t want to endure any more fertility treatments or another pregnancy, my love for him had become tainted by a resentment I didn’t want to feel. I didn’t want to think about my life at all.

I would think instead about Simmee.

I looked at the bassinet again. The baby would be here in a few weeks. I sat up, an idea taking shape in my mind. If I was stuck here, it was time I made myself useful. I wouldn’t let Tully accuse me of making more work for either of them.

I dressed quickly, then found Simmee in the kitchen where she sat next to the window, mending a tear on a pair of Tully’s pants.

“Good morning,” I said. I filled a glass with water from the tap and took a sip. I’d stopped sterilizing the water a few days earlier and had not gotten sick. Most likely, my illness that first night had been due to the floodwaters that had come close to drowning me.

“Morning,” Simmee said, without looking up.

I sat down across the table from her, the glass between my hands. “I have an idea for something we can do today,” I said.

“What’s that?” She glanced up at me then, and I saw that her eyes were rimmed with pink.

I set the glass down on the table. “Are you all right?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said, her attention again on her stitching. “What’s your idea?”

I hesitated, deciding not to press her. “Let’s fix up the baby’s room.”

She frowned at me. “What do you mean, fix it up?”

“Get it ready. Do you have any paint? You or maybe Lady Alice?”

She shrugged. “Maybe some old paint under the house. Probly not still good.”

“Well, maybe good enough,” I said, although I was wondering: exactly how old? Could there be lead in it? “I thought maybe we could…I don’t know. Freshen the room up with some paint over the wallpaper. Or if you had a couple of different colors, we could paint designs on the walls. We can make
a mattress cover for the bassinet.” I realized I hadn’t looked inside the bassinet to see if she’d already thought of bedding. “Does the bassinet have a mattress, or—”

“Do you ever feel trapped?” she interrupted me.

I sat lower in my chair, nearly sinking into it. Hell,
yes,
I felt trapped. But this wasn’t about me. “Do you feel trapped, Simmee?” I asked.

She set the pants and her needle down on the table and looked me in the eye. “I love this baby, Miss Maya.” She seemed so different this morning. I’d come to think of her as otherworldly. Today she looked all too human.

“Yes,” I said. “I know you do.”

“I love it with my complete heart, but I’m so scared.” She wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold.

“Oh, Simmee.” I leaned forward, my forearms stretched toward her on the table. Of course she was scared. “I understand,” I said. “But everything’s going to be fine, honey. What happened with your mother was an aberration…an unusual circumstance.”

She looked down at the pants again but didn’t release her arms from across her chest.

“Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t think for an instant that you’ll have a problem, but I really wish you’d have the baby at a hospital. Wouldn’t that ease your mind?”

“Tully won’t go along with that,” she said.

“Why don’t I talk to him about it.” I sat up straight again. “I’ll insist.” What gave me the right to insist on anything? “Once Larry comes and you can get a new boat, then you’ll be able to get to the mainland and have your baby there. If there’s a problem…and there is
not
going to be a problem…but if there is one, you’ll feel more confident that you’ll be safe.”

“I keep feelin’ like the baby’s gonna come soon.” She glanced
at me almost shyly. “Maybe before Larry comes. If that happens, at least you’ll be here. You can birth it for me, can’t you?”

I was taken aback. One way or another, I planned to be long gone by the time Simmee’s baby arrived. “Of course,” I said. “Most likely, Larry will have shown up by then and he’ll help you get a new boat and you can have the baby at the hospital, because I
am
going to talk to Tully about this. But if the baby comes sooner, of course I’ll help you.”

For the first time since I’d walked into the kitchen, Simmee smiled. “You bein’ here’s a blessin’, Miss Maya.” Then she glanced through the window screen, and I knew without her saying a word that she was looking to see if Tully was nearby. I knew before she opened her mouth that what she was going to say next was something she didn’t want him to hear.

“I need to tell you somethin’,” she said quietly. “It’s real important.”

“Okay.” I kept my voice as low as hers.

Simmee licked her lips. “I want you to have my baby,” she said.

I didn’t know what I’d expected her to say, but that wasn’t it. “Why would you say that?” I asked.

Simmee looked down at Tully’s pants and ran her fingers over the fabric. Her chin trembled. I wanted to hug her. Make that trembling stop.

“You can give him a better life than me,” she said without looking up.

“Simmee.” I reached across the table for her hand. I had to tug it a little to get her to look at me. “Material things are not what matter most,” I said, although I was thinking,
God, yes. I could do so much more for this child!
I erased that thought from my mind before I dared to feed it. “You love your baby. You’ve said so, and it’s so clear to me that you do. I know you can’t wait to hold it in your arms, and you’re going to be such a good
mother. Look at how you took care of me. You’re a caretaker, Simmee. You’re meant to be a mom.”

Simmee pulled her hand from mine and hugged herself again. “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “You can’t know. You can’t understand how it is.”

“Do you mean what it was like growing up out here? So isolated?”

She shrugged with a half nod, not looking at me.

“I know it must have been hard for you.” I pictured her as a child, taking the boat across the water to go to school, having to leave her classmates behind as she returned to Last Run Shelter each day. At least she’d had Lady Alice’s children to play with. Simmee’s baby would have no one. “Maybe you and Tully can move to the mainland,” I said.

“He won’t.”

“Maybe for the sake of the baby, he would,” I said. “He loves you, Simmee, and he’s excited about this baby. You know that.”

“I know.” She shut her eyes. I could see the slender blue veins in her eyelids. She looked so fragile.

“So maybe for the good of your baby, he’d be willing to move someplace where his son or daughter would have better chances,” I continued, but I thought of how stubborn Tully could be and how he relished his backwoods lifestyle. It would kill something in him to give that up. Still, people made all sorts of sacrifices for the sake of their children.

“Why won’t you take it?” Simmee asked me. “You want a baby, and I want you to have him.” Her eyes glistened. “Is it ’cause it ain’t your blood kin?”

I shook my head. “It’s because he’s
yours
and I know you’ll fill him up with loads of love.” My arms began to ache with the thought of cradling her baby. Simmee was only seventeen.
Seventeen!
“There are social services to help you,” I said. “You have so much to give, Simmee.”

“Please.”

“The way you’re feeling right now is normal,” I said. “It’s normal to be overwhelmed. You’ll feel differently when the baby comes and he looks up at you for the first time. You won’t want to let him go then. I promise.”

She stood up abruptly, picked up the pants and her scissors from the table, and walked past me toward the hall. In the doorway, she stopped and turned to look at me. Her eyes were flat and empty and she suddenly looked closer to thirty-seven than seventeen.

“You’re wrong,” she said. “You ain’t never been so wrong.”

S
HE WAS AVOIDING
A
DAM
.

They’d been on different work schedules since their conversation a few nights earlier, Rebecca dragging herself into the trailer just as he was leaving, and she was responsible for the change in their shifts. She couldn’t handle another long conversation with him. She was not a “long, heavy, deep conversation” type of woman. Maybe that was why Maya had kept things from her. Rebecca could talk about DIDA all day, but cross the line into emotional territory and she was ready to bolt. That was one reason she was putting off calling Brent, although Brent was worse than she was when it came to that sort of intimacy. Adam, though…Adam was a champ at it, and that felt both dangerous and seductive, because she found herself craving a closeness she’d never known she needed. She couldn’t believe she’d gotten into the whole baby hunger thing with him when she didn’t yet understand it herself. Now she felt both exposed
and
attracted to him and totally confused about her feelings, and she didn’t handle confusion well. It seemed she
couldn’t talk to Adam without revealing things she didn’t want to reveal. She couldn’t look at him without noticing how damn gorgeous he was. And when he’d fling a brotherly arm across her shoulders, the same way he had for years, every molecule in her body now suddenly stood on high alert.

So she was avoiding him—as much as she could avoid someone she was sharing a trailer with. She resolved to think only about her work, and only once did that resolve slip—when the volunteer, Patty, mentioned that she now wanted to be a doctor herself. “It was so awesome watching you and Adam save the life of that asthmatic boy,” she said, and Rebecca remembered the reflection of the overhead light in Adam’s eyes, the gentleness of his voice. The memory sent a shock wave of heat through her before she could put up a wall to keep it out.

Most of the time, though, the work inside the school provided a welcome distraction as the hours turned into days. A few things had improved: some of the evacuees, especially those with the money to move into hotels, had left the school, and housing was slowly being found for others. Although the power was still out, there were more generators now and chicken-and-rice casserole had been baked in the kitchen and served to a thousand or so people the night before. After more than two weeks of MREs, the casserole tasted like manna from heaven. Best of all, in Rebecca’s opinion, the medical supplies had been well replenished and National Guard members now stood outside the makeshift pharmacy’s door twenty-four hours a day.

In spite of the improvements, the medical staff was still extremely busy in the clinic. People whose chronic illnesses had been neglected during the first week of the crisis were now paying the consequences. Wounds that had seemed inconsequential days ago now festered with infection, and viruses spread like wildfire throughout the school, particularly among the children.

The doctors and nurses who’d been working in the airport and the school for the past couple of weeks had, for the most part, left Wilmington for their homes and jobs around the country. Dorothea no longer bothered to ask Rebecca and Adam if they wanted to leave, though. Instead, she simply sent the replacement medical staff to them for orientation and training. In a way, it was like starting all over again as she and Adam helped the stunned new volunteers cope with the human casualties of the sister storms.

Rebecca finished her shift in the clinic around sunrise one morning, but instead of returning to the trailer, she sat on the ground in front of the Welcome—Viking Territory! sign and lit a cigarette. Leaning her head against the wall, she shut her eyes. She was so tired that when she felt the unmistakable bite of a mosquito on her forearm, she ignored it.

“Hey, Bec.”

She opened her eyes to see Adam walking toward her, ready to start his day shift, a thermos of coffee in his hand.

“Coffee?” She couldn’t mask the hope in her voice.

He smiled, handing her the thermos. She took a long swallow and gave it back to him.

He lowered himself to the ground next to her. “Trade you another sip for one of those.” He pointed to her cigarette.

“You’re kidding.”

“Uh-uh.”

She pulled the pack from her pocket, handed it to him and watched as he shook a cigarette onto his palm. He lit it from the end of hers and drew the smoke into his lungs as though he always had a cigarette with his morning coffee.

She frowned at him. “Since when?” she asked.

“Well, not since I was twenty, actually.” He blew a stream of smoke into the pink morning air. “It just looked so…
delicious,
watching you inhale.” He laughed. “I thought, why the hell not?”

She understood. It felt like there wasn’t much left to lose.

“I think you’ve been avoiding me,” he said after they’d smoked a moment or two in silence.

“How can I avoid you?” she countered. “We share a trailer.”

“Exactly my point. We share a few square feet of space and haven’t spoken to each other in days.”

She rested her head against the wall. Here we go again, she thought, wondering what to reveal, what not to reveal. She sighed. “Talking to you the other night made me realize…” She felt too tired to have this conversation now, yet it was better that they have it by the light of day. What
was
it about him that made her want to talk in spite of herself? “I was so upset that Maya had an abortion and never told me about it.” She’d always said—always
believed
—that she and Maya were as close as two sisters could be. Yet that was a sham, wasn’t it? A lie they were both careful to tend and nurture. Learning about the abortion only drove that fact home to her. She tipped her head against the wall to look at him. “There was a lot of unfinished business between her and me, too,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like, we never, ever talked about our parents’ murders.” The words came out in a rush, as though she knew if she didn’t say them quickly, she wouldn’t say them at all.

“What do you mean, ‘never, ever’?”

“We never really got it all out in the open,” she said. “I’m sure she blamed me, and I…we just moved on with our lives after it happened. We let it become this gigantic elephant in the room.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the grass and immediately pulled another from the pack.

“Why would she blame you?” Adam took the matches from her and lit her cigarette, cupping his hands around it, although there was no breeze. She smelled the soap on his fingers, the scent an aphrodisiac, and she turned her head away as she inhaled.

“Because I brought Zed into our lives,” she said, blowing the smoke from her lungs.

“Who’s Zed?”

She looked at him quizzically. He sounded as though he’d never heard of Zed before. Maybe Maya had never told him his name. “The guy who killed our parents,” she said.

He frowned. “I thought the killer was a student of your father’s. Some kid who was pissed off about his grade.”

Rebecca was dumbfounded. “I can’t believe she didn’t tell you,” she said.

“Tell me
what?
”

In the parking lot, Rebecca saw Dorothea leaving her trailer. This was not the time for an interruption. “Let’s walk,” she said, getting to her feet. She nodded toward the lot. “Dot’s coming.”

Behind the school, they turned left and began walking along the border of the woods.

Rebecca helped herself to another swallow of his coffee. She could think of only one reason that Maya had kept Adam in the dark about Zed’s identity.

“Maya must have been trying to protect me, Adam,” she said. “She didn’t want you to look down on me. Zed
was
one of our father’s students. But he was also my boyfriend. My ex-boyfriend.”

“Back up,” Adam said. “You’ve lost me.”

She let out a breath. “I was eighteen.”

“And Maya was fourteen. That much I know. It sounds like that’s
all
I know, though.”

“I fell for Zed. He was twenty. I met him at a party, and he was sexy and hot looking, but he was also a total asshole. I just couldn’t see that part of him.

“I was obsessed with him. He dealt drugs, and I thought that was cool. My father hated him, which made him even more appealing to me, of course. My parents forbade me to see him, which infuriated him. I started sneaking out to see him. Maya knew what I was doing, though she would never have told on me. My parents figured it out, though, and really clamped down, and I stopped seeing him. That’s when Zed started acting crazy. He kept trying to see me, following me home from school. That sort of thing.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “He once told me he’d kill my parents for breaking us up, but I thought…I just blew him off,” she said. “Kids said things like that all the time.”

“Wow,” Adam said. “How much of this did Maya know?”

“Well, I sure never told her he said he’d kill our parents. And she didn’t know that I…” She stopped, unsure how—or why—she would tell him the rest.

“That you what?”

“I was so stupid,” she said. “I went back to seeing him. He was seductive and I was…I’ve thought about it so many times, Adam. My motivation. He was hot, my father hated him, I wasn’t allowed to see him, and I was a wild child. A bad combination. So that’s the other thing Maya didn’t know. I never told her I started seeing him again.” She glanced at Adam. His gaze was on the ground as they walked, his brow furrowed. “I never told
anyone
that,” she added.

He put his arm around her shoulders, and the scent of soap, of shampoo, filled her head. “You’ve been carrying a lot of crap around inside you, haven’t you?” he asked.

She could only manage a nod.

“And I can’t believe that Maya never told
me
any of this,” he said.

“Well, now you know,” she said. “And of course you know the rest of the story.”

“I don’t know
what
I know, anymore, Bec,” he said testily, dropping his arm to his side. “I’m beginning to wonder if she’s told me half-truths throughout our whole relationship.”

“Oh, no, Adam,” Rebecca said, but how did she know that? She no longer felt as though she knew her sister.

“She told me a masked stranger—who turned out to be your father’s student—killed your parents in your driveway. And she was in the backseat. Is that true?”

She nodded. “I was upstairs,” she said. “I heard the doorbell. My father was picking Maya up from a class or something. He was always taking her someplace or picking her up. She was Daddy’s little girl.” She was appalled at hearing the bitterness in her voice and hoped Adam hadn’t noticed it. “My mother was home and I figured she’d answer it. Then I heard our car pull in the driveway and the squeal of brakes, which was weird, because my father would usually just pull into the garage. My mother started screaming.” She stopped walking, pressing her hands to her eyes, and she felt Adam take the cigarette from between her fingers. “I looked out my bedroom window,” she said, lowering her hands. “It was March, so it was dark out even though it wasn’t that late.” She looked into the woods behind the school, but what she saw was not the trees in front of her. She was back in her childhood bedroom, staring out the window. “In the headlights, I saw a guy standing in front of the car. I knew right away it was Zed. I couldn’t see him well, but I knew by his build and the way he was standing who he was.”

She plucked the cigarette back from Adam’s hand, took a shaky drag, then crushed the butt into the grass beneath her
shoe. “My mother was…” She was afraid she was going to cry. “Oh God, Adam, I can’t stand to remember this!”

He put his hand on the back of her neck. “Don’t then,” he said. “You don’t have to.”

But she
did
have to. She wanted to finish what she’d started, to say it all out loud to someone, for once. “My mother got in the car,” she said, sitting down in the grass, as though her legs couldn’t hold her up any longer. “I guess she was trying to…I don’t know
what
she was trying to do, exactly. Zed started shooting through the windshield. I ran downstairs and outside, screaming for him to stop.”

Adam sat down facing her. “Weren’t you afraid?”

“I should have been, but I wasn’t. Not for myself, I mean. I guess I didn’t believe he’d hurt me at first. But I was
terrified
for my family. He didn’t even turn around when I shouted at him. Just kept shooting. We had a boot cleaner by the front door and I picked it up. It was incredibly heavy, but it felt like a feather to me. I had superhero strength, all of a sudden. I ran toward him and when I got a few yards away, I threw it at him.”

She plucked a blade of grass from the ground and tied it into a knot. Adam watched her without speaking. Without pushing.

“It hit him in the shoulder, and he dropped the gun,” she said. “Then he turned on me. He grabbed me and I thought he was going to kill me. I was kicking him and screaming for my parents and Maya, and he clamped his hand over my mouth. He said, ‘You tell the cops it was me, and I’ll be back to kill Maya, too.’ Then he got down on the ground. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, but later I realized he was getting the gun he dropped. He ran away and I opened the car door. My parents were…” She tossed away the knotted blade of grass and ran a trembling hand through her hair. “It was a bloodbath,” she said. “Maya was curled into this little ball behind the driver’s
seat. She was covered in blood, and at first I thought she’d been hit. She wouldn’t move. She wasn’t even crying. Just in shock. I heard sirens, because some neighbors had called the police. Everything is kind of a blur to me after that. Neighbors came over. The police came. Ambulances. It was the most horrible night of my life. I wouldn’t let go of Maya. Literally. I would
not
let go. They took her to the hospital and I insisted on riding with her. I just kept holding her.” Rebecca raised her eyes to meet Adam’s. “I want to hold her now, Adam.”

“I know.” He touched her knee. “Me, too.”

“The police questioned us, and I was afraid and completely irrational. I told them I thought the guy was one of my father’s students and gave them the address where I knew Zed lived with a bunch of druggies. Maya heard me, and she just parroted what I’d said, and there we were, in the lie together. The police went to the house where Zed was staying, and he shot at them and they killed him. I was so relieved he was dead. If I could have killed him myself, I would have.”