I took out my international calling card and dialed the number where Mom was staying in Spain. She picked up quickly, but her voice sounded sluggish when she answered. “Hello?”
“Hi, Mom. Did I wake you?”
“No!” she said, her voice suddenly bright. “I was just up doing some reading.” I knew she was lying, and I pictured her sitting up in bed, reaching for her reading glasses, which were probably resting on a pile of books nearby.
“It’s so good to hear your voice! Don’t we have a phone date on Sunday?”
“Yeah . . .” My voice wavered, only for a fraction of an instant. But she heard it.
“What’s wrong?” She slipped into her calm, authoritative tone, the one that always solved problems. It made me want to spill my secrets into the phone, lay my problems at her feet so she could handle them and I wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore. And yet . . . if I told her everything that was happening in Bone Lake, about Dad being missing, about the dead teens . . . she’d send me to stay with my grandparents in Florida for the summer. Or worse, she’d fly straight here to get me and take me back to Evanston, where I’d be “safe.” She’d miss out on the sabbatical that she’d lobbied and fought for two years to get, the one she’d been looking forward to her whole career. If that happened I might never figure out what was going on, and there’d be no one here who was on Dad’s side except for Dex.
If I was even on Dad’s side.
I decided it would be best to be vague, for now at least. “It’s about Dad . . .” I started.
There was a pause then, so deep and silent that I wondered if our call had been dropped.
“Okay,” she finally said, cautious.
“I know we don’t really talk about him much. Or at all. But . . .” I took a deep breath.
“Honey, is everything okay?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Of course. It’s just . . . do you think Dad is a good person?”
Another pause. I heard some slight shuffling, as though Mom was repositioning herself. “That’s a difficult question to answer,” she said.
“Because you hate him?”
“No!” The insistence in Mom’s voice surprised me a bit. “Gosh, Penny, I don’t hate your father. Is that really what you think?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, he . . .” I swallowed hard. “He cheated on you, Mom. It’s the whole reason you got divorced. The reason we moved away.”
“Oh, no . . . no, no, no, Penny, that’s . . . It was so much more complicated than that.”
“I was there, Mom. I remember—the cheating, the fights after you found out . . .”
“Yes, that’s part of it, but it’s not . . .” Mom sighed heavily. “I should have talked about this with you sooner. I just didn’t want to force you to discuss the divorce if you didn’t want to. You were at such a difficult age—old enough to know what was happening, but not old enough to want the details. . . .”
“I want the details now, Mom. It’s important.” Embarrassingly, I felt a lump rise up in my throat. Something about talking to my mom over the phone, hearing her voice but not seeing her face, seemed to strip away my defenses. It felt like crawling under a blanket. It felt like being ten years old.
“Your dad isn’t a bad person, Penny. I don’t think things are as simple as that—a good person and a bad,” she said, slow and deliberate.
“Sure it is,” I said. “The good person doesn’t lie. The good person doesn’t cheat.”
“That’s . . . a very black-and-white way to look at things, Penny. Though, knowing you, that doesn’t surprise me.” Mom made a small sound then, halfway between a sigh and a rueful laugh.
“That’s because the truth is black and white.”
“Not always, hon,” she said, then sucked in a breath. “I was very angry with your father for what he did. Not just that it happened, but that you saw it. I’m still angry about that, honestly. It’s a hard thing to let go of. But, Penny, Julie Harper did not cause our marriage to fall apart. It was dead in the water long before your dad cheated. It’s probably why he cheated.”
The lump in my throat grew as I tried to reconcile these words with the memories of that year I had in my mind. The memories I’d gone over again and again, until they’d crystallized into unmovable, unchangeable shards that hurt every time I touched them.
I shook my head, even though I knew my mom couldn’t see. “I know you were fighting some that year—”
“Not just some. And not just that year. Neither of us had the courage to just be honest and end things, so your dad . . . took a more drastic course of action.”
I thought about the photos I’d found in Dad’s living room, the ones dating back to when he and Mom first met. Their happy smiles had faded out long before the year everything fell apart. Exactly when did it all go wrong?
“What happened? Please, Mom. I need to know.”
A silence again. I pictured Mom pursing her lips, winding a piece of long, dark hair around her finger, like she did when she was thinking.
“Okay, Penny. Okay.” Mom cleared her throat. “When I met your dad, he was just . . . different from anyone I knew. He had a way of looking at me that made me feel like I was the most important thing in the world.”
“And then he changed?”
“No, honey. I did. I was twenty years old when I started dating your dad. I was saving up money to go to college, but then I fell for Ike, and then . . .”
“Then there was me.”
“Yes. But listen, Penny,” Mom said, her voice growing forceful. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, then and now. I don’t regret for a second the decision I made to stay in Michigan and have you. Not ever. Do you understand?”
The lump in my throat expanded, and it took all my effort to choke out, “Yes.”
“Good,” Mom said, and let out a big breath. “I really did love your dad, and we thought we could make it work. But with every year that passed, I started to feel it more and more, how small Bone Lake was, how it felt like it was getting smaller. I felt . . . trapped.”
As Mom talked, I pushed myself back farther against the couch cushions, fighting the sudden feeling that I might fall over the edge. Mom had never spoken to me like this, not really. She’d talked to me about my life, about my problems, my school, my dreams. But she’d never really talked about herself in this open kind of way. It felt strange to hear her speak about feeling stuck in Bone Lake. It was like reading the scribbled, confused, and unspeakable things I wrote in my own diary.
It was terrifying.
To imagine that my mom could feel just as lost and stuck as me . . . it was like trying to lean back on a solid, familiar wall and finding it had moved a few feet when you weren’t looking.
“Penny, are you still there?” My mom’s voice sounded small on the other side of the phone, and I wondered if it was just as hard for her to say these things as it was for me to hear them.
“I’m here,” I replied. “So you were unhappy, and then you and Dad . . . fell out of love.”
“Well . . . I did.”
I shook my head, again forgetting that my mom couldn’t see. “What do you mean? Dad was the one who fell for someone else.”
A heavy sigh then. “I think you’re fixating on that one thing. Which is understandable. But your dad tried to hold on to me for a long, long time after I’d let go, after I was already planning a future away from Bone Lake. Because I knew I had to leave, and I knew he’d never go with me. So I pushed him away. Your dad was so hurt, and I didn’t know how to make it better. And then he found his own way.”
“With my best friend’s mom.”
“I’m not saying it was a good way.” Mom paused. “And I know he regretted it, too. Especially since it cost him custody in the end.”
“Wait—what?”
Mom took another deep breath. “When I told him I was leaving for Chicago and taking you with me, your dad . . . didn’t take it well.”
“I remember.”
>
“He told me he’d fight for you, and then he did.”
I gripped the phone tighter in my hand. “What? But . . . I don’t remember that.”
“Well, we tried to keep you away from the legal stuff as much as we could. Your dad fought to keep you in Bone Lake. But with my increased salary in Chicago, your dad making less and less on his column, then his affair with Julie, and how you were the one to catch them . . . the judge said he was lucky to get holidays and three weeks every summer.”
The lump in my throat had turned sharp and jagged. I barely recognized my voice when I spoke. “I didn’t know he fought for me. I didn’t know.”
“Of course he fought for you,” Mom said, her voice gentle. “Honey, I don’t know what’s going on between you two right now, and Lord knows your dad’s not perfect . . . but he loves you more than anything in this entire world. You do know that, right?”
I pulled the phone away so my mom couldn’t hear the quiet sob I was forcing back down my throat. But she knew anyway. I knew she knew.
“I should have told you all this a long time ago,” she said, and I could tell she’d started to cry, too.
“It’s just . . .” I said, taking a shaky breath, “When I was a kid, I thought I knew Dad better than anyone. He was, like . . . this perfect person. And then all that changed. And for the past few years, I thought I finally knew the real truth about him, and I’ve been so . . . so . . . angry. . . .”
“Oh, sweetie,” Mom whispered.
“And now I just don’t know what to think. About anything. If Dad’s not who I thought he was—again—then who is he?”
“Well,” Mom said, sniffing and slipping back into her calm, reasonable tone. “You have all summer to start figuring that out.”
I didn’t know how to tell her that it might be too late.
“Yeah.” I sniffed.
“And you’re sure there’s nothing else going on? I haven’t heard you this upset in a while.”
“No, it’s . . . I’m fine. Just trying to figure stuff out, with Dad.” I swallowed, hating my half lie. “Plus, I think I miss you a little.”
She laughed a tiny bit at that. “Well, I miss you a lot,” she said.
After hanging up the phone, I sat on the couch, staring off into nothing. I wanted new information, and now I had it. But instead of answering questions, it left me with a million more.
Just who was Ike Hardjoy? All of my memories of him were one swirling, untidy mess in my mind. And maybe I’d never seen those memories from a wide enough angle in the first place. Behind every truth was another perspective, and another. And I was no closer to knowing how Dad was connected to everything that was going on in Bone Lake—
Except . . .
I jumped off the couch, the phone almost flying from my hand. Feeling almost like I’d received an electric shock, I ran quickly to Dad’s office. I threw open the door and sank down in front of his locked safe. By the time my hand reached for the combination lock, my fingers were shaking. This was a long shot, but if what my mom had told me was true . . .
I entered six digits into the keypad. 10-13-01. My parents’ wedding anniversary.
The lock beeped, and the door to the safe popped open with a soft click. So this was one of my dad’s secrets, then: that after all these years, the date he married my mom was still important enough for him to remember. Important enough to guard all his other secrets. I put my fingers around the edge of the door and pulled, ready to see what was waiting inside.
Eighteen
DEX CAME RUSHING into the room so fast his tennis shoes skidded across the wooden floor.
“You got it open?”
I gestured to the piles of paper that were gathered around me on the office floor. “Yep.”
“And?”
I sighed, pulling at the ends of my hair. “And nothing. There’s nothing in here about the hiker in the woods, or about Bryan and Cassidy, or where my dad might have gone. All of these papers are at least a decade old. Most of them seem like ‘research’ for his first story on the Visitors.” I held my fingers up, making air quotes at the word research.
“Let me see,” Dex said. He dropped ungracefully to the floor across from me, one of his knees pushing up against mine. He didn’t seem to notice, reaching instead for the piece of paper nearest to him.
It was an article from a local paper, already faded and yellow, that documented how scientists had flooded into Bone Lake after the meteorite fell. The meteorite itself had been larger than most, the size of a love seat. The crater it created in the woods outside town was more than fifteen feet across. I’d already known that, but what I hadn’t known about was what drew the majority of scientists—and national attention—to our town. It wasn’t the meteorite’s size that caused a stir; it was its composition.
I watched Dex’s eyes go back and forth as they scanned over what I had just read. The Bone Lake Meteorite contained not just silicate minerals, but a substantial amount of amino acids and other organic material. That in itself was relatively rare for a meteorite, but it also contained a streak of a gold-colored unknown metal running through its middle. That’s what really caused all the fuss. People speculated on what the new kind of metal could be, but after testing it was found to be just another, previously unseen kind of iron-nickel alloy. After all that, the whole meteorite crash was really nothing to write home about.
Unless you had the kind of imagination and nose for opportunity that Ike Hardjoy did.
Scattered across the various papers and articles were notes handwritten by my dad. Next to a scientific article detailing the unusually large amount of amino acids in the meteorite, Dad had scrawled, enough to sustain life? Next to an image of scientists in giant yellow hazmat suits lifting the meteorite out of the ground, Dad had written, radiation?!? If you didn’t know my dad, you might look at these notes and think he was some kind of crackpot conspiracy theorist, but I saw what his scribbles really were. They were notes on a story, and my dad had been pumping it for as many exciting details as he could.
“Look at all this stuff,” Dex said, awe in his voice. “Ike was really on to something.”
“Mm-hmm, the short list for the Pulitzer in bullshitting.”
I smiled, but Dex wasn’t having it. The bottom corners of his lower lip tightened, and his dark eyebrows pulled together. It almost made him look older, if you ignored the way his messy hair fell over the tips of his ears or how there was what looked like a small mustard stain near the collar of his shirt.
“It’s easy to be a skeptic, but there are things in this world that go beyond simple explanation,” Dex muttered. “Even you have to admit what’s happening in town is weird. Burned bodies. Missing people.”
Not to mention the sleek black car that had been popping up and the email from “Dad.” But there wasn’t any point in bringing that up and giving Dex more fodder for his overactive imagination.
“Weird, yes. But not unexplainable. It’s true we don’t know exactly what’s going on yet. But I do know with a hundred percent certainty that it’s not ‘alien landings.’”
Dex looked up then, his eyes going sharp. “You can’t say that with a hundred percent certainty. No one can. At least your dad was smart enough to realize there were things out there he didn’t know. You think you know everything, and you don’t.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but then closed it again. The conversation I’d had with my mom was still playing on loop in the background of my mind. I’d thought I’d known certain things about my dad to be absolutely true, and it turned out I’d been wrong.
The truth is black and white.
Not always, hon.
I bit my lip and went back to sorting through my dad’s notes.
“Sorry,” Dex said, looking chagrined. “I didn’t mean for that to come out so harsh.”
“It’s okay,” I said, but I still didn’t risk looking up and letting Dex see how much his words had affected me. I’d been clinging so hard to facts,
thinking they’d lead me from point A to point B to a firm explanation. But every time I grabbed hold of new information about my dad, it erased something I already knew. The truth kept mutating, and my grip on facts was slipping.
And that was frightening in about fifty different ways. None of which I was ready to share with Dex—or anyone.
We both went back to silently going through the papers.
Dex held up the local article again. “Hey, did you see this part? About when the meteorite was discovered?”
I looked back over the yellowing front page of the article. There was a one-paragraph mention of Tommy Cray, a Bone Lake resident who was the first to find where the meteorite landed after it fell from the sky. The paragraph had been circled four times in dark red ink.
“What do you think that’s all about? Why would your dad circle this section?”
I shrugged.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Dex said, after a few moments. “These papers are all old, but I know Ike keeps notes from his most recent stories in his safe. So maybe he was working on this story again, and some of these notations are newer. Ike did think that what happened to the hiker was connected to the Visitors. Maybe he went back over his old notes for that story, trying to find a new angle.”
Dex peered at a bit of my dad’s handwriting that was scrawled on what looked like a printed-out AP News brief. It covered how government scientists had closed off the meteorite crash site to journalists and the public while they were figuring out how to test the area. In the upper corner, Dad had written Cover-up? with a blue pen. Underneath that, in black ink, was the question Government agency—why?
“Wait, look at this,” Dex said. He was holding another old article in his hands, this one from the Traverse City Record-Eagle. “It’s not about the meteorite at all. It’s from a few years later. Maybe it can help you with that story you’re working on for college?”
I straightened, reaching automatically for the piece of paper. I hadn’t given my Northwestern article much thought since the moment I tripped over what was left of Bryan and Cassidy in the woods.
The Truth Lies Here Page 14
