Here Lies Daniel Tate

  “Wouldn’t you rather stay home tonight?” Lex asked. “Take it easy?”

  “Actually, I think I’d rather do something normal for a little while,” I said.

  Lex’s lips were pinched together. “I don’t think—”

  “It’s fine,” Patrick interrupted. “Whatever you want, Danny. Just let me go change.”

  A few minutes later Patrick and I were getting into his car.

  “We should get you enrolled in a driver’s ed course this summer so you can get your license,” he said. “Technically, Nicholas isn’t allowed to drive with another minor, so the sooner we can get you your own car, the better.”

  I smiled, imagining myself in my own car, the smell of new leather and music blasting from the speakers. A convertible like Patrick’s so I could have the sun on my shoulders, but black or maybe red.

  It wasn’t until we were nearly to Ren’s house in Calabasas that I realized I hadn’t considered how useful a car would be to me if I needed to run. How far I could get in it, how much I could sell it for. It gave me a strange twinge in my stomach, because not that long ago it would have been the first thing I thought of.

  But things were different now, and I knew it.

  I wasn’t going to leave. Not ever.

  • • •

  I stayed at Ren’s house for a couple of hours. I met her aunt and uncle, who were nice and kept offering me things to drink, and then we watched a movie in her media room. Kai, baked out of his mind, came in when it was almost over and announced that he needed some marshmallows immediately, but there weren’t any in the house and his license was suspended for another week. Ren told him that was too damn bad, but after a few minutes of negotiations, we took Kai to the store and ended up sitting with him at the fire pit in the Himuras’ backyard roasting marshmallows. Kai wandered off, but Ren and I kept sitting there in the dim glow, talking about nothing in particular.

  “How can you eat that?” I asked as Ren pulled a blackened marshmallow out of the fire.

  “This is how I like them,” she said, pulling the sticky thing apart with her fingers. “Don’t judge.”

  “I would never.”

  “Good, because I think accepting someone’s personal weirdnesses is the foundation for all good relationships,” she said. “I believe in unconditional love, you know?”

  Unconditional. It was a nice thought, if it really existed. Maybe it could.

  “Now what are you thinking when you make that face?” she asked.

  I smiled and looked down at the fire.

  “Mystery man,” she said with a sigh. “It’s okay. Someday you’ll tell me.”

  It was nice, all of this. And it was mine now. Home, family, pretty girl. Everything a person could ever want.

  • • •

  I didn’t know it then, but it was probably the happiest night of my life.

  Ren drove me home, and after I’d watched her headlights disappear around the curve in the driveway, I went inside, following the voices back to the kitchen. Mia was eating grapes from the stem at the kitchen island, Patrick was working at his laptop at the breakfast table, and Lex was wiping down the spotlessly clean counters. They didn’t notice me immediately, and I spent a moment just looking at them. Drinking them in. Loving them.

  For a second I wondered where the real Danny was, if he would understand that it was better for us all, including them, that I was here.

  Mia spotted me. “Danny!” She hopped off her stool and flung herself at me. I caught her and spun her in circles until she shrieked.

  “Careful!” Lex said.

  “Are you going to pass out?” I asked when I lowered Mia back to her feet.

  She grinned and swayed drunkenly. “Maybe.”

  “Then my work here is done.”

  “Time for bed, Mimi,” Lex said. “Go brush your teeth and get changed. I’ll be up to adjust your brace in a minute.”

  Mia kissed us all and headed upstairs. Patrick looked at Lex. Lex swiped at more invisible crumbs.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “The FBI called,” Patrick said. “They want to schedule another interview.”

  I felt a hot flush pass over me. “So soon?”

  He nodded.

  “Why?” I asked. “I told them everything.”

  The FBI didn’t buy my story. They wanted to prove I was a liar. I felt suddenly nauseous, the sickly sweet aftertaste of marshmallow sugar in my mouth turning my stomach. Lex was scouring a plate, even though she was standing right beside the dishwasher.

  “I don’t want you to worry about this, okay?” Patrick said. “I’m sure it’s no big deal, just a routine follow-up. I know it’s going to suck having to go through it all again, but you did great today and you can do it again. After this you’ll be done for a while. I’ll make sure of it.”

  I took a deep breath. I was sure Patrick was right. I still felt uneasy about Morales, but there had been no concrete signals that they didn’t believe me—hell, Lynch had practically wept—so this was probably just routine.

  It was just that now I felt like I had things to lose.

  “Do you want something to eat?” Lex asked. “I can make you something.”

  “I’m okay,” I said. “I think . . . I think I’m just going to go to bed. I’m wiped.”

  She nodded. “Whatever you need. We’re here.”

  Despite my exhaustion, sleep wouldn’t come. I lay in bed, staring at the faded stars on the ceiling, buried deep under the covers to stay warm in the air-conditioning. I eventually got up to block the air vent and open a window to let the balmy night air in, but it didn’t help. The cold had settled into my bones.

  My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten anything for dinner but marshmallows, and there was an ache inside of me that was something like hunger but different. It was a lack. A want. One too complex for me to label. I threw off the covers and got up. I would wake up Lex and ask her to make me something to eat after all. She’d told me to wake her if I ever needed anything, and she was always trying to feed me. Take care of me. It would help.

  I walked toward her bedroom and was a little surprised to see a dim light showing through the crack at the bottom of her door. It looked like I wouldn’t be waking her after all. I raised my hand to knock when I heard her voice, hushed but agitated.

  “How are you so calm about this?” she said. I could tell from the way her voice moved that she was pacing the room. I dropped my hand and moved my ear closer to the door.

  “Freaking out about it isn’t going to help anything.” Patrick was inside as well. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “I hate this,” she said. “We never should have done this. We never should have brought him here!”

  I frowned. What was she—

  “Maybe you’re right, but it’s too late to second-guess things,” Patrick said. “He’s here now, and we just have to make it work. We have so far.”

  “God, what were we thinking?”

  “We had no choice and you know it. She was getting too close. It’s all going to be okay.”

  “You don’t know that!”

  “I’ll make it okay if I have to,” he said. “Come here.”

  Lex made a soft sound, and the room went silent.

  Or maybe I just couldn’t hear them anymore over the rushing of blood in my ears. Tiny black dots had taken over my vision, and I was nothing but a silent, blind, breathless gasp in the dark.

  They were talking about me.

  I backed away from the door, numb and plodding, almost tripping over myself in my effort to get away.

  We never should have brought him here.

  How could she say that about me? Her own brother?

  She couldn’t.

  • • •

  She knew. They both did.

  Lex and Patrick knew I wasn’t Danny.

  • • •

  When I came back to myself, I was . . . well, I didn’t know where I was. I was in my pajamas, barefoot, sitting
on the grass of someone else’s lawn. I must have run from the house. I had no idea how far I’d gone or how much time had passed, and I didn’t care.

  Because Lex and Patrick knew.

  They knew I wasn’t their brother.

  No. No, no, no. I pressed my fists against my forehead like I could jam the word into my brain and force myself to believe it. I didn’t know what they knew. The snippet of conversation I’d overheard could be anything. I tried to remember every word. Lex was freaking out, Patrick was telling her it would be okay . . .

  We never should have brought him here.

  I could hear her saying that in my head, and I dug my fingers into the grass. I tried to think of anyone else, no matter how far-fetched, that she could have been talking about, but there was no one. I couldn’t explain it away.

  It was suddenly so obvious. Pieces that had never quite fit before began sliding into place. All this time I thought they’d been fooling themselves, willfully missing the clues because they wanted to believe so badly, but it was just the opposite. I was the one who had been deluded.

  They had instantly accepted me—a stranger with a Canadian accent living thousands of kilometers away who was several years older than their brother—without any kind of proof that I was Danny. They had refused to let my DNA be tested. They had never once questioned the fact that I couldn’t remember my life before my kidnapping and had never pressed me for information about what had happened to me.

  I was such an idiot.

  I thought back to our first meeting at the Collingwood Police Station, trying to remember the exact look in their eyes when they saw me, the exact words that were said. Lex should have pursued acting the way she’d dreamed, because she was good. The way she’d smiled at me when . . .

  “Oh my God,” I whispered as another piece slotted into place.

  That time we spent alone together, when Lex and Patrick showed me pictures of the family on her phone—they hadn’t been trying to bond with me or reassure me about my loving family waiting at home. They were prepping me for the test they knew the immigration official Patrick had contacted would give me. They were making sure I would pass.

  Then there was the way Lex had watched me so closely in my first weeks here. Not because she was worried about me, but because I was a stranger she couldn’t trust. Lex telling Mia to lock her door at night. Patrick not blinking when he discovered me studying video of the real Danny and coaching me on how to get through my FBI interview without sounding rehearsed. The signs kept piling up in my head.

  My stomach roiled, and I lay back in the grass, the dew cool through my thin T-shirt. Every outburst or whispered conversation I had overlooked or explained away suddenly made sense. And every affectionate look and touch and encouraging word had been a lie.

  Who else knew what I really was? Mia couldn’t, and I held tightly to that fact, one little piece of stillness in a world that was suddenly spinning around me. She was too young for such a complex deception or to recognize that I wasn’t the brother she’d never really known.

  Nicholas had been openly suspicious of and even hostile toward me, which was harder to parse. Was he angry because he knew I wasn’t his brother, or because he suspected I wasn’t even when everyone else told him I was?

  I had fewer doubts about Jessica. She had to know. I’d always doubted a mother would mistake a stranger for her own child, but I had assumed her alcoholism and disconnection from the family kept her from seeing through my deception. But now that disconnection seemed less selfish—and, frankly, convenient for me—and more sinister. Maybe she wasn’t just a self-involved alcoholic who never should have had children. Maybe she had a very big secret to hide, and the only way she could do it was to hide herself. If I hadn’t been so determined to believe I’d found a home here, I would have realized what was really going on the night she crashed her car and started screaming that I wasn’t her son. But I’d wanted to believe so badly that I’d swallowed every half-baked excuse I’d been given.

  This family, this home that I thought was becoming mine, it was all lies. Nothing here had ever been real.

  I’d never felt as alone as I did in that moment. Not when I was a little boy hiding in the back of a closet from the raging monster outside or when I was hungry and cold and spending the night walking empty streets so I wouldn’t freeze. It was one thing not to be loved, but it was another thing entirely to believe that people loved you and then learn all at once that they didn’t. It crushed the air from my lungs.

  I lay there, struggling to breathe, for a long time. I searched all of my memories, looking for more clues I had missed and any hint that there’d been something real. Goose bumps rose on my skin, but I didn’t sit up, didn’t try to warm myself.

  I was dimly aware of a thought trying to make its way through all the noise in my head, like a snake through tall grass. It had a long way to travel, but eventually it reached me.

  Why?

  The question was soft at first, but persistent.

  Why?

  Why would they lie? Why would they accept a boy they knew to be an impostor into their home and family? Why play such a risky game?

  Because they had to, Patrick had said.

  There was only one reason, and I tried to push it away. To focus only on my own tragedy, my own anger that they’d played me at the game I’d thought I invented, the death of my own hopes. But I couldn’t escape it. My skin had been covered in goose bumps from the cold only moments ago, but now it flushed hot, my forehead prickling with sweat, the heat building in my gut until I rolled over and vomited bile from my empty stomach onto the neighbor’s lush lawn.

  There was only one reason the Tates would let me pretend to be Danny when they knew I wasn’t. Only one reason they would have to.

  Because my presence hid their crime.

  Because one of them had killed him.

  • • •

  Fuck this. Fuck them and all of this. I was gone.

  I stood up on wobbly legs and headed in the direction I thought the house was. I would’ve taken off right then except I didn’t have any shoes. I had to go back into the Tate house one last time, but then I would disappear for good.

  It took me fifteen minutes to figure out where I was and make my way back. Patrick’s car was still in the driveway, and the lights were off in all the windows, so he must have been spending the night. I slipped in through the front door and then stood in the foyer, listening for sounds of movement anywhere, but the house was silent and still. I took the stairs up to the second floor two at a time. I opened the door to my bedroom—Danny’s bedroom—and saw it fresh. This was a dead boy’s room. I had always known Danny was probably dead, but I suddenly felt it. The chill wasn’t just from the air-conditioning. Danny Tate—the boy who’d stuck those stars to the ceiling, who had loved baseball and the color blue—was dead, and one of the people under this roof had killed him.

  I dug my old backpack out of the corner of the closet. It was already packed with some spare clothes. I grabbed the laptop Lex had bought me, the stash of cash I’d been collecting bit by bit for weeks just in case, and the credit card with Danny’s name on it. I would make one last cash withdrawal tonight and then toss it.

  I looked around the room. There was nothing of my own to take with me. The one possession that was really mine—the baseball card with the smiling boy—was in my locker at school where I’d hidden it. I’d always wanted to get rid of that boy, and now that I had to leave him behind, I felt a pang that was akin to a knife in the belly. But there was nothing I could do for him now.

  I walked out of the room and out of the house. I paused only once, outside of Mia’s door. I pressed my palm against it. She was my one consolation in all of this, the one memory that wouldn’t feel poisonous when I was gone.

  Then I left the Tate house, and I didn’t let myself look back.

  • • •

  Once I was outside of Hidden Hills, I caught a bus to Calabasas and walked a couple o
f kilometers to Ren’s house. By the time I got there, the moon was so high in the sky that it cast no shadows.

  I’m not entirely sure why I felt like I had to go there. I’d never said good-byes before when it was time for me to leave a place. Leaving was what I knew best, and I knew it was best to do it clean.

  But Ren made me feel messy.

  I stood outside the gate that protected her aunt and uncle’s house and watched her windows as I called her. After the seventh ring, she picked up.

  “Hello?” she mumbled.

  “I’m sorry to wake you,” I said.

  “That’s okay. What’s up?”

  “I’m outside.”

  “O-kay,” she said. “That’s a little creepy.”

  “I need to talk to you,” I said. “Can you come down? It’s important.”

  She sounded awake now. “You all right?”

  “I’ll explain everything,” I said, which was a lie. I wouldn’t explain anything. I didn’t want to disappear with her hating me. There’d be plenty of time for that later.

  “I’ll be right down,” she said.

  A couple of minutes later the gate slid open and Ren stepped out wearing a robe tied over ice cream cone pajamas. Her hair was up in a loose ponytail, and she was wearing glasses and a bewildered expression, but still she was incredibly pretty to me in that moment. People are always their most beautiful when you know you’re never going to see them again.

  “What’s going on?” she said.

  “I just . . . wanted to see you,” I said. Which, weirdly, was the truth. She’d never cared that I was Danny Tate, so our relationship was one of the only things I had that hadn’t just been tainted forever. Maybe that’s why I’d needed to come here.

  She looked at the backpack slung over my shoulder. “What’s going on? Are you going somewhere?”

  “No,” I said.

  “How about you come inside?” she said. “It seems like you’re wigging out a little—which is cool, we’ve all been there—but I think you should call your sister.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Then, I can call her and—”

  “No!”

  She started at the sharpness of my tone, and then she was looking at me in that way that so many people did but that she never had. Like I wasn’t quite human. Like I was an animal or a thing, something fundamentally different from her. It was the last thing I needed, and she might as well have punched me. I sank down onto the curb and buried my head in my hands. After a moment, she sat down beside me. We were both silent.