“I’ll call you later, okay?” Nicholas said, finger already hovering over the button that would end the call.
“Okay, liar! Love you!”
Nicholas jabbed the button, and the car went silent. He glowered, and I tried to hide my smile.
“It’s not funny,” Nicholas said. “I hate hiding things from him.”
“Then why are you?”
“I just . . . I need to keep him separate from family stuff,” he said. “He gets that.”
“How long have you two been together?” I asked.
“Two and a half years.”
I blinked. “Jesus.”
The corner of his mouth turned up. “Yeah, that’s the usual reaction.”
“So you were, what, fifteen?” I asked. “And you’ve been together ever since then?”
He nodded. “He’s seen all the worst parts of me, and it hasn’t scared him off yet.”
Those words hit something deep inside of me, and I knew they were going to linger. “That . . . must be nice.”
“Sure makes the world seem less scary,” he said.
I turned and looked out the window. How different might my life have turned out if I’d had that at fifteen? I’d been an outcast at school, barely spoke to anyone. More days than not, I ended up just sitting behind the building, watching leaves fall from the trees while I waited for the bell to ring. What would it have been like if I’d had someone to walk those halls with me or someplace safe to run to when my home wasn’t? Maybe I wouldn’t have dropped out at sixteen, wouldn’t have run away and ended up here, with no name and no history of my own.
I started to see that imaginary person’s face, and it was Ren’s.
Nicholas hit my arm. “Hey, look.”
I turned and saw him pointing forward. Jessica was exiting the freeway.
• • •
She drove down a series of smaller roads, orange dust billowing up behind her SUV, until she reached a parking lot with a couple of picnic tables and a sign designating it a SCENIC OVERLOOK. We watched from a distance as she parked her car and just sat there, staring out at the vast stretch of desert.
Despite the hot sun slanting in low through the window, I shivered. I didn’t know why. My body had made sense of the scene before my mind did.
Nicholas suddenly revved the car and threw it into reverse.
It was only as we were leaving that I understood why Jessica would make a pilgrimage out to a deserted corner of the desert to sit and stare at the endless expanse of barren orange dust.
Because she knew there was something out there, somewhere, hidden in that dust.
Nicholas and I didn’t speak for the entire ride home. Not even when he pulled over to the side of the road and retched. We both knew what we’d seen, and neither of us wanted to say the words aloud.
We’d just followed Jessica to Danny’s grave.
• • •
Nicholas dropped me off at the house and immediately left again, headed to Asher’s. I guess if I had someone who made me feel like the world was a less scary place, I’d want to be with them right then too. I walked blindly into the house, mind racing, and bumped into Lex on her way out the door.
“Oh, Danny, I was just—” She stopped and touched my cheek, drawing my eyes up to hers. “Hey, you okay?”
Her show of concern suddenly made me want to cry. Or break something.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just tired.”
“Well, I’m on my way out for the night,” she said. “Mia’s spending the night at Eleanor’s house, so I thought I’d meet some girlfriends. Will you be okay on your own? I can bail if you want.”
“I’m fine. Have fun.”
She looked at me closely. “You sure?”
I suddenly really wanted her to stay. More than anything. We could sit in the rec room and watch soaps and eat popcorn and everything could be the way it was before. All I had to do was ask.
“No,” I said. “You should go.”
“Okay, call if you need anything!” She kissed me on the forehead, and then she was gone.
I spent the rest of the evening wandering the house aimlessly. I couldn’t focus on anything for more than a minute or two at a time. The image of a little boy’s body—probably just bones now, surrounded by scraps of fabric—kept rising in front of me. Buried in a shallow grave in the sand, maybe discovered by predators, fought over by coyotes and carrion birds. It made everything too real. This wasn’t just playacting anymore, and my horror at what I’d done was dizzying. It was a real boy’s life. A real boy’s death. I thought of the smiling boy on the baseball card hidden in the pillowcase upstairs and imagined him still and cold, not breathing, his body thrown away like a piece of trash. By any logical assessment, it should have been him instead.
I had to get out of that house.
There was only one car at the house, Robert’s beloved Jaguar. Patrick kept a key for it in a junk drawer in the kitchen. I didn’t have a license, but Patrick had given me several lessons in the Jag. I was reasonably certain I could get it from here to Ren’s house or LAX or the Canadian border in one piece, and if I couldn’t, well, maybe that was for the best anyway.
I was in the kitchen, fumbling through the drawer for the key, when the front door opened. I should have just ignored it. Should have gone straight to the garage, gotten in the car, and left.
“Hello?” someone called. I didn’t recognize the voice. “Anyone home?”
I went into the foyer and found Jessica slumped by the door in one of the fancy chairs I’d never seen anyone sit in. A middle-aged man wearing a Bluetooth earpiece and a rumpled polo was hovering in the open doorway.
“Can I help you?” I said.
“You can pay me,” he said. I looked past him to see the cab idling in the driveway. “She couldn’t find her wallet.”
“Oh God.” I took Jessica’s purse out of her lap. She looked up at me blearily, reeking of alcohol. “Where did you pick her up?”
“Sherman Oaks. The parking lot of a liquor store.”
I found her wallet and gave the guy one of the hundreds inside. “At least she didn’t try to drive.”
“She was out of gas,” he said.
Of course. I thanked the driver, and he left while I turned to Jessica.
“Can you walk?” I asked her.
She struggled to her feet, and when she stumbled, I caught her around the waist.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“Just leave me . . . ,” she mumbled.
“I’m not going to leave you,” I said. “Come on.”
Slowly we moved up the stairs, pausing often. Jessica talked most of the way, but I could understand very few of the slurred words. All that was clear was the anguished tone of them. So this is what she did. Drove out to the desert to be near her son’s bones and then drank herself into oblivion. I saw my mother sitting impassive in front of the television, and I swallowed and tightened my arm a little more around Jessica’s waist.
We finally reached her bedroom, and I lowered her to the bed, where she buried her face in the mounds of pillows. I went to the bathroom and filled up the cup on the counter with water. I sat on the edge of the bed and handed her the glass.
“Try to drink some of this,” I said.
She took the glass with a quavering hand and dissolved into tears.
“Danny . . . ,” she keened.
“It’s okay, don’t cry,” I said. I helped her take off her jacket, while she, childlike, did nothing to resist me. “You just need some sleep.”
“My boy,” she said. “My Danny.”
I took off her shoes and tossed them along with the jacket into a nearby chair. The rest she could sleep in. She was sobbing now, and I helped her lie down and covered her with the comforter. I turned off the lamp on her bedside table, but when I started to stand, she grabbed my arm.
“Don’t go,” she said. “Danny, don’t leave me.”
“I . . . okay.” Did
she really think I was Danny? Had she had so much to drink that reality and the lie were starting to blur?
“I told you,” she murmured. “I told you!”
“What did you tell me?”
She was saying something softly, and I had to lean to make it out.
“I’m sorry,” she was whispering. “I’m so sorry,”
My heart stopped.
“For what?” I asked. “What did you do?”
She pressed the side of her face against the pillow.
“I’m so sorry,” she said over and over, the words muffled and indistinct.
I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. “For what? What happened, Jessica?”
She just cried harder.
“Mom,” I said. The word tasted like burnt orange dust on my tongue. “What happened?”
“I told you not to ride your bike in the driveway after dark,” she said. “I told you so many times . . .”
My skin flushed hot.
“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I’m so sorry . . .”
I sat there, silent and stunned, until Jessica passed out.
• • •
Jessica had killed Danny.
My head was hot and buzzing and I couldn’t think. I went out to the backyard—vaguely noticing that my hands were shaking when I opened the French doors that led to the patio—and kicked off my shoes and jeans before jumping into the pool. The cool, silent water surrounded me, and I stayed under until my burning lungs forced me to the surface. I clumsily swam a couple of laps. I didn’t know how to swim properly, but the movement felt good.
Jessica had killed Danny. He was riding his bike in the driveway. It was dark, and she didn’t see him.
It was an accident. None of the Tates had hurt him on purpose. None of them was a murderer. I started to laugh. I floated on my back, looked up at the sky, and laughed at the stars.
I’d thought Danny’s killer must have done it on purpose, because otherwise there was no reason not to just call the police and report the accident. But it was obvious what Jessica had wanted to hide. She must have been wasted when she hit Danny with her car. Her marriage to Robert was starting to go bad, she’d had an affair with her ex-husband that had gotten her pregnant, Mia had been born with health problems, Ben McConnell had killed himself, and she was watching Lex fall apart before her eyes. Drinking herself unconscious was the only coping mechanism Jessica had, and I knew very well that it didn’t stop her from getting behind the wheel. She knew she would go to prison if anyone found out what had really happened that night and—
I sucked in a breath and got a lungful of water along with it. I stood up, sputtering and coughing.
That night?
That’s what Jessica had said; she always warned him not to ride his bike after dark. But the family realized Danny was missing in the early evening, when it was still plenty light outside.
Either Jessica’s drunken, sobbing confession was just another lie, or the official story was wrong.
I heaved myself out of the pool and returned, dripping, to the house. I grabbed a towel out of the laundry room and wrapped it around myself as I climbed the stairs back to Danny’s room.
I knew the supposed timeline of that Saturday by heart now, but once I got to Danny’s room, I opened my file anyway just to check. Jessica made breakfast for Patrick, Lex, Danny, and Mia at about nine in the morning. She left with Mia for the doctor’s office at ten. As she pulled out of the driveway, she saw Danny retrieving his bike from the garage to ride to Andrew’s house. Lex and Patrick left the house not long after and met their friends at the mall about an hour later.
But if Jessica had hit Danny with her car because it was nighttime and she hadn’t been able to see him, it must have happened the night before. Nicholas and Robert had been away from the house Friday night and all of Saturday, and Mia was just a toddler, but Lex and Patrick both said that they’d seen Danny Saturday morning before he went missing. They had to have been lying. Almost an entire day passed between when Jessica killed him and when she called the police to report him missing, plenty of time for the three of them to come up with their cover stories, destroy any evidence of the accident, dump the bike and Danny’s body in the desert, and establish alibis for themselves.
It was an extreme plan, but it was hard to blame Lex and Patrick. They were practically kids themselves and probably terrified of the prospect of their mother, the only parent they had left, going to prison so soon after the death of their father. Nothing would bring Danny back, so why not do what they could to help their mother? And then they were a part of it, just as culpable as Jessica was. All three of them needed me to deflect suspicion from their crimes. When Jessica was on the brink of cracking, Lex and Patrick kept her in line. Even if they no longer felt so protective of a mother who had all but abandoned them for the bottle, they knew they would also be in trouble for the part they’d played in covering up the truth.
It made sense. Right?
I reached for my phone to call Nicholas and get him to come home so I could tell him the whole story. The mystery was solved, and it wasn’t as bad as either of us had feared. None of the Tates were murderers.
Downstairs the doorbell rang.
What now? I hurriedly pulled on some dry pants and grabbed a shirt on my way out of the bedroom. I pulled it over my head as I jogged down the stairs and opened the front door.
“Hey!” Ren said. “You’re all wet!”
With everything that had happened, I’d completely forgotten I’d invited her over this morning. It seemed like days ago that I’d attempted to go to school.
“Hey,” I said, adjusting the shirt as it stuck to my damp skin. “You’re here.”
“As promised,” she said, stepping past me into the house. “It was a good call skipping school, by the way. The place was a madhouse.”
“Yeah?” I said. My brain was still struggling to deal with her presence here on top of everything else.
She cocked her head at me. “You okay?”
“I . . . yeah,” I said. “Just a lot on my mind. You know.”
“Oh,” she said. “Do you want me to leave?”
She was trying to cover it up, but there was disappointment in her voice. Even after the day I’d had, it surprised me, and I couldn’t turn that away.
“No,” I said. “Stay.”
She smiled. “All right.”
We ended up on the sofa in the basement, watching a movie on the big screen. I don’t even remember what it was, because I wasn’t watching. I was thinking about Jessica and Danny and Nicholas.
I should call Nicholas, I knew that. But if the mystery was solved, there was no reason for him to keep me around. Although some of his rage at me seemed to have dissipated in the past day or so, there was a good chance he was only biding his time before seeing me put in jail for impersonating his brother.
But if I kept him in the dark, he would let me stay to keep helping him find out what had happened to Danny, at least for a little while longer. That would give me time to plan my next move and make sure I got away before he could turn me in. Or, maybe, if I could play things out long enough . . .
But I couldn’t let myself think about that.
Ren laughed at something that happened on-screen and turned to me, and I feigned a smile. She shifted, pulling her legs up under her and ending up with her arm resting just barely against my elbow. Neither of us moved, and that stopped my brain in its tracks. For a little while.
I should call Nicholas. It was the right thing to do. He was the one person I’d been honest with, and we were slowly starting to become . . . not friends, but something. Something real. If I kept this from him, that was over.
The question was, what did I really want?
If I was honest with myself, I knew.
Ren turned her head and smiled at me. “Hey.”
I smiled back. “Hey.”
I didn’t call Nicholas.
• • •
&nb
sp; “. . . want me to come stay with them for the summer, but I don’t—Danny?”
“Huh?” I said.
Her expression turned soft and she leaned closer to me. “Where are you?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. After the movie had ended we’d gone to sit out on the patio, and my mind kept wandering.
“It’s okay,” she said. “What are you thinking about? Is it the bike?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked. “Or should I keep trying to distract you? Maybe I could do a little dance for you? I used to take tap.”
I laughed. Somehow she managed to make me feel better without making light of things, and I didn’t know how she did it. “I find that hard to imagine.”
“Why?” she asked in mock outrage. “I was very good, I’ll have you know! I probably could have gone pro.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“The demands of fifth grade were just too much,” she said. “I decided to focus on my education. Oh, you’ve got an eyelash.”
She leaned toward me and brushed my cheek with her fingers, and it felt like my heart constricted in my chest, became small and dense and hot under my skin.
God, I wanted to kiss her. Kiss her and hold her close and show her all the worst parts of me and have her tell me it was okay, she liked me anyway.
But I couldn’t, because she wouldn’t.
“Here,” she said, holding the tip of one finger in front of my eyes so I could see the eyelash stuck there. “Make a wish.”
Maybe I couldn’t tell her all of my secrets, but I could kiss her. She was so close, and the look in her eyes was so warm. But then I remembered the way she had brushed me off the last time, and I knew I couldn’t risk it.
“Go on,” she said, and I closed my eyes and blew.
• • •
Do I even need to tell you what my wish was? Or whether it came true?
• • •
The next morning Jessica stumbled downstairs for a cup of coffee while the rest of us were eating breakfast. She kissed the top of Mia’s head when Mia threw her arms around her, and when Nicholas asked how she’d slept, she said fine.
Then her eyes met mine and darted away again, and I couldn’t tell if it was just because that’s how she usually looked at me—in fleeting, furtive glances—or because she remembered what had happened the night before.