Splinter (Fiction — Young Adult)

by Sasha Dawn

  I fill the glass and drink from it.

  Ryan comes up behind me and slaps something cold and wet into my hand. “Your knee.”

  It’s a wet washcloth. “Thanks.”

  “Tough morning,” Eschermann says when he enters the kitchen.

  I don’t know if he’s confirming the fact to me or attempting to explain my strange behavior to Ryan, and at the moment, I don’t care. I press the washcloth to my knee and get slammed with a sense of déjà vu . . . weird; that keeps happening in this house.

  “I can imagine,” Ryan says, but he won’t look at me. “Can you excuse me a second? I was about to shower when I heard the bell. I’m covered in dead tree.”

  “Of course,” the lieutenant says.

  “You can just”—Ryan glances at the floor—“let yourselves out when you’re finished.”

  “You okay, Sami?” Eschermann asks when Ryan’s gone.

  I’m inside a shrinking triangle, my father at one corner, one dead ex-wife at another, and my mother at the third. And I just called out the uncle of the guy I kissed last night, all but accusing him of knowing what happened to my mother.

  I focus on wiping the blood off my knee, nodding one of the biggest lies I’ve ever told: Yeah. I’m fine.

  Closing my eyes, I imagine I’m a little girl again, weaving around the hickories, my mother chasing me, laughing. Tickling my belly when she catches me.

  And then, like the hickory Ryan’s felling, she’s gone. Just like that. But I’m feeling she’s still here, somewhere, if I could only find her.

  Like her using the passageway to escape.

  Like her hiding in Schmidt’s barn.

  I’m gravitating toward the back door now.

  It was so long ago, but I feel the same urgency now, the same insistence I felt as a kid: I have to know if she’s in the passageway. I have to know, have to know, have to know!

  “Samantha?”

  I stop in my tracks when I hear Eschermann behind me.

  Numb, I turn toward him.

  “Sami, I know you’re worried, but—”

  “Understatement.”

  “—but ultimately, we’re getting closer to the truth, closer to the end. At this point, it’s just a jacket. Circumstantial at best, unless there’s any incriminating evidence in the threads.”

  I think of the stain on the cuff. “Like blood?”

  He nods.

  “Okay.” I flinch, blinking away the glaze in my eyes, and picture the pushpins marking towns in my mind. They’re comfortable distances from the edge of nothingness, over which I’m about to plunge.

  Water rushes through the old plumbing in this house—the sound of Ryan showering. And as much as I want to stay—at least to apologize to Ryan—“I should get home.”

  “I’ll walk you,” Eschermann says.

  This time, we take the long way home, past the empty front porch swing—that’s where Schmidt read Huck Finn to us; I remember now—and completing the loop from Reston to Jefferson to Kenilworth.

  “Does Cass know about the jacket?” I ask.

  “If she doesn’t yet, she will soon, but do me a favor. Don’t talk with her, or anyone, about it. Not until I have a chance to discuss it with Heather and your dad. And maybe not even then.”

  There’s another TV network van on the parkway. We’re going to have to walk past them. Sweat beads at my temples, and I impulsively grab Eschermann’s sleeve.

  “It’s all right,” he says. “We’re just going to walk past them. Don’t say anything, and I’ll make sure they don’t ask any questions.”

  We navigate through the small sea of intruders, their eyes boring into me. More than once, Eschermann holds up a hand to ward off somebody’s attempt to start a conversation. Soon we’re standing on my doorstep, and my father is quick to open the door and usher me inside.

  “Chris?” Eschermann’s voice stops my dad from closing the door on his face.

  “Yeah.”

  “That development we discussed a few days ago. I’m going to need you to come in to clarify a few things.”

  “Does it have to be today?”

  “I can take you away in cuffs, or you can come quietly in your own vehicle. The arrest won’t stick—we both know that—but you don’t want to walk past the camera looking like a felon, do you?”

  Suddenly, my own heartbeat deafens me.

  He just threatened to arrest my dad!

  “I’ll be right behind you.” Dad’s still sweaty from his workout, but he doesn’t even ask if he can shower first.

  “I’d prefer to follow you.”

  The next thing I know, my phone is in my hand and my father’s keys are in his.

  And then he’s gone.

  My grandmother takes off as soon as my father leaves. She mutters something about going to the station to support her son, pecks me on the cheek, and tells me not to go anywhere.

  When I was little and Eschermann would call Dad in for questioning, I’d wait with friendly officers who’d play with me while my dad was in the hot seat. I’m much more comfortable waiting out the ordeal in my own house, and I have to admit I’m glad Gram will be there for my dad when the questioning is over. Now that Heather’s left, I feel like he’s dealing with everything on his own, and he’s about to crack with the pressure.

  Cassidy and Brooke have parked in front of Schmidt’s house and walked through the yards to come to me. They came as quickly as I texted, and they’re now sitting at the breakfast table, scarfing down the burritos they brought with them, while I’m picking at the one they’ve designated as mine—brown rice, green salsa, avocado, lettuce, red pepper, extra cheese. No tomato, no meat. Good friends are like that. They know what you want on your burrito, and they bring it to you without even asking if you’re hungry.

  I am, but I can’t seem to eat.

  I scroll through my phone. Dad left all of the messages unread. If it was a test of trust, my father passed.

  I stop on a message Ryan left last night: Good friends, good times.

  I send him back a smiley face and hope it’s enough to rebuild the bridge I think I just burned by pointing the finger at his uncle. I wonder if Ryan is out of the shower yet, if he’ll reply. Maybe I’ll make a batch of Mom’s snickerdoodles and bring them over to formally apologize later.

  “So.” Brooke nudges me with her elbow. “You kissed that guy last night.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Matt Darcy saw.”

  “Great.” If I’d known we had an audience I probably wouldn’t have done it.

  With everything going on since last night, I’ve hardly thought about the kiss, but the energy of it revisits me now. “What was I thinking?”

  “What were you thinking, because if it’s half as interesting as what I’m thinking . . .”

  Cassidy lets out a chuckle while leaning over her phone. It’s hard to tell if she’s laughing at Brooke or at something Zack said via text.

  Brooke looks at me—“I fear we have lost her forever”—and takes an enormous bite of her burrito.

  “I think you’re making a mistake, Sami,” Cassidy pipes in, still tapping keys on her phone. “That guy won’t even be here next week.”

  “It’s not like that,” I say. “We used to be best friends.”

  “Yeah?” Finally, my sister looks up at me. “Then why the drama of the kiss?” She abandons her half-eaten burrito to lean back in her chair. Her text alert goes off again.

  “I wasn’t doing it to be dramatic—”

  “And then you left. I mean, we’re trying to be there for you, and you leave with some guy you hardly know.”

  “In what way were you trying to be there for me? You were submerged in Soccer King.”

  “She’s right about that, Cass,” Brooke says. “You were no more available than I was.”

  “How was I supposed to realize that she would throw herself at some random guy the moment we turned our backs?”

  “He’s not random!”
I snap.

  “Cass, come on,” sighs Brooke. “It was just a kiss. Get off her already.”

  “We’re her friends,” Cassidy says. “We’re supposed to get on her about this stuff.”

  “Fine,” Brooke says. “If that’s what friends do, I’ll get on you: why are you wasting time with Zack? He’s gone next year.”

  “Not valid. At least I might have a date for prom. I’m investing in something here.”

  “I hate to tell you this, Cass, but my brother may be well past this by the time prom rolls around. He’s a flaky guy.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Will you shut up about guys, and prom, and all the rest of this bullshit?” I shove my chair away from the table. “We have bigger issues to deal with right now.”

  Cassidy stares at me. “Look, just because I choose to ignore the bullshit with your mom’s case, it doesn’t mean I don’t care about it. But I can’t let it consume me like it does your father.”

  “My father? Since when isn’t he ours?”

  “You know what I mean. But to be honest, Mom and I were talking, and this other girl . . . it doesn’t exactly scream innocent, you know?”

  I cross my arms. I don’t have time to think about this betrayal, to process the idea that Cassidy—and apparently Heather too—could suspect my dad. Little does my sister know that the case is about to take a turn . . . and land at the Funky Nun. Or maybe she and Heather do know that. I wonder again if Heather is suddenly changing her tune about my dad because she’s trying to divert attention away from herself.

  There are only two scenarios in which Heather would start accusing Dad of being responsible: if she knows he’s guilty, or if she’s guilty herself.

  I snap out of this train of thought and focus on Cassidy. “I agree that everything looks pretty weird,” I tell her. “That’s why I want to find out the truth. And to do that, I need help.” Cassidy’s standoffish expression doesn’t change. I glance over at Brooke. “I need to look through photo albums. I need to see if there are any pictures of the jacket I was wearing last night.”

  “Why?” Cassidy asks as Brooke is saying, “I’m game.”

  I wasn’t supposed to mention it. “I don’t know. Eschermann won’t tell me, except that it could help Dad if I find any pictures of it.”

  “Well, you won’t,” Cassidy says. “Mom wouldn’t wear it.”

  I shrug and hedge my way out of it. “I know, but we at least have to look.”

  Cassidy’s phone twinkles again with a text alert. She doesn’t break eye contact.

  “Go ahead and answer it,” I say.

  She seizes the phone. “I have to. He’s leaving for practice in twenty-four minutes, and he’ll be at the soccer field all day.”

  “Ball is life,” Brooke mutters with a roll of her eyes. “That’s why I date the slightly-off guys who hang out at poetry slams.”

  “Go to Zack’s game,” I say.

  “I have to work at one thirty,” Cassidy says. “So I can’t do much to help you past lunch, anyway, and it’s not because I don’t care. It’s because someone has to work at the Nun.”

  “I work,” Brooke says.

  “Rarely.”

  “Sami’s in crisis right now,” Brooke says. “You might want to prioritize.”

  Cassidy slams her phone down. “You’re telling me about crisis? I know crisis! I lived through it with her! But, Sami, at some point you have to examine the coincidence of a few things: your mother disappears ten years ago, right around the same time cops find remains of a woman who might be Dad’s ex-wife.”

  I stiffen, tempted to tell her, even though Eschermann asked me not to, that Trina isn’t the Jane Doe, and that Heather’s about to be as thick into this quicksand as Dad.

  Before I can speak, though, Brooke says, “You know what, Cass? Go to his game. If he’s your priority today, despite everything going on, go. I’ll handle the Nun alone.”

  “You hardly work while you’re there!”

  “Come on, you love being in charge. You like running around with fitting room keys, getting customers different sizes, all that stuff. I just let you do what you like.”

  I’m already on my feet, making my way toward the photo albums on the bookshelf.

  “Whatever.” Cassidy offers Brooke a middle finger salute along with her words. “I can help as long as I’m here. Let’s make the most of the next twenty-four minutes.”

  I pull photo albums from the shelves, hand one to each of my friends, and set one aside for me. Just as I’m about to collapse into a sofa to flip through the pages, I allow myself to look upward, to the highest shelf, where hardcover books line the space: Melville, Twain, the Brontë sisters, Hemingway . . .

  They’re the only items Mom put here that remain where her hands last touched them. Many of the books are first editions, which perhaps is why Heather and Dad left them there when they cleared my mother’s footprints from this house.

  I pull Moby-Dick from the shelf—a decade of dust comes with it—and press my palm to the cover, as if it’s a Bible. Imagine my mother’s hands touching this book, turning its pages.

  The binding is worn; threads dangle from the spine. Mom was always reading, and although I don’t remember her cracking the hardcovers, I wonder if she may have annotated any of these books the way she did Gatsby.

  I open the cover, flip a few pages.

  My eyes meet with a piece of copy paper, thinner than the stock we keep in our printer, older maybe, folded in half. It falls open in my hands.

  Nobody’s Fool is typewritten in Courier and centered along the top, in a header, followed by a dash and by Delilah Lang. At the far right corner, I see a page number: 64.

  Page sixty-four. That means pages one through sixty-three should be somewhere too.

  “What are you doing?” Brooke asks.

  “I just found . . .” I leaf through a few more pages and find another typewritten page. And another and another. I turn the book upside down and gently shake it. More pages fall out.

  “Sam?” Brooke’s beside me now.

  “Look at this!” I say.

  She picks up a photo that’s fallen from between the pages of the book.

  I push Melville back onto the shelf and pull down Wuthering Heights.

  Shake, shake, shake.

  More pages filter out.

  I hand a Tolstoy to Brooke, who’s too short to reach the top shelf, and grab another for me. There are typewritten pages hidden in these books too.

  “What are you doing?”

  I hear Cassidy over my shoulder, but I can’t spare the time for eye contact. “Get a book,” I tell her.

  “Sami.” Brooke nudges me with an elbow. “Look.” She hands me a candid picture of my father, standing opposite a dark-haired woman in a short, willowy sundress. The woman is reaching for him, as if in the moments after someone snapped this picture, she would be touching his face.

  Brooke flips the picture over. There’s a date scrawled on the back. Quick math tells me I was almost five when the picture was taken.

  Got to be Heather. More pages fall from the book I’m wiggling. Nobody’s Fool by Delilah Lang heads each of them.

  “Cass, is this your mom?” Brooke asks.

  Cassidy gives the snapshot a glance. “I don’t think so.”

  Of course it’s Heather. Although the woman’s face isn’t discernible, there’s no mistaking that long, dark, wavy hair, or Heather’s mile-long legs. Given the title of the manuscript, Dad’s admission he cheated on my mother with Heather, and the fact that the pages and this photograph were stashed inside books only Mom read, I’m guessing Mom might have known about Heather all along and wanted to prove they weren’t fooling anyone.

  Brooke and I share a glance.

  “I know my own mother, okay?” snaps Cassidy.

  “Sam, your dad was a stud,” Brooke says.

  “Ew,” I say.

  “I’m not saying that,” Brooke says. “I’m saying it speaks to the ap
peal, you know? Think about it. Heather’s gorgeous. Your mom was gorgeous. And this chick, whoever she is, is gorgeous. Don’t tell me you’ve never wondered . . .” She shuts up, but I hear the words she’s yet to utter:

  How does a man with two exes and a drinking problem get a woman like Heather? And how does she agree to marry him?

  I take the picture from her grasp. “Focus.”

  Soon, the three of us have shaken out over one hundred fifty pages of what appears to be a manuscript, or at least part of one, hidden in the hardcover books no one ever touches. “Your mother wrote a book.” Brooke’s eyes are wide. “This is amazing.”

  The three of us are sitting on the floor now, with scattered papers surrounding us. We’re arranging the papers by number.

  I remember the clickety-clack of the typewriter keys. Despite the fact that we had a computer back then, Mom wrote the old-fashioned way. That means this is likely the only copy of her work. And the fact that she hid it tells me she didn’t want anyone to see it.

  It’s like finding a diamond in the midst of river rock.

  It’s precious. Rare.

  “What are you going to do, Sami?” Cassidy asks.

  “I’m going to read it tonight.”

  “Well, duh,” Brooke says. “Are you going to tell your dad? The cops?”

  “Of course.”

  “And what about this?” Brooke retrieves the photograph from where I set it aside on the end table.

  “I’m going to ask Dad if it’s Heather.”

  “It’s not my mom,” Cassidy says immediately.

  “Do me a favor,” I say. “Ask your mom when she and Dad got together.”

  “Which time?”

  Valid. “Ask her if she was ever with my dad while he was married to my mom.”

  “No! Sami, we know they started up again after the divorce.”

  That’s what we’d always been told, but I know the truth now.

  “What?” Cassidy says.

  I want to tell her what I know.

  But a worm of jealously eats its way through my heart. Dad has always loved her mom more than he loved mine.