Finally, he dished up and set her food in front of her. “You going to tell me what you want to drink, or should I decide for you?”
Her chin shot up. “Wine.”
“Milk,” he decided, and poured them both glasses. Thank God she didn’t buy skim. He could live with two percent.
He sat down kitty-corner from her with his own sandwich and soup. Maybe it would help if they weren’t looking right at each other. “Eat,” he ordered her, and started in on his food. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her stare at the food as if she didn’t know what it was, then finally pick up the spoon. After some hesitant sips, she began to eat faster and faster until she was all but gobbling.
Good.
The meal settled him down some, too. Without a word he got up and set the coffeemaker to brewing, then sat again.
“Okay,” he said. “Now we talk.”
She’d worked up enough spirit to glare. When she opened her mouth, Jakob interrupted.
“It’s not going to do you any good to say ‘I don’t have to.’”
“I don’t understand why you care.”
He fell back on the old standby. “We’re family.”
And finally she quit fighting. The pain in her big brown eyes was so vast, his stomach clenched.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think we are. And you know it, don’t you?”
* * *
SO, WHY DO you care? she wanted to beg him again.
But maybe she didn’t want to know. Because...he was here, and whether she was willing to admit it or not, she’d needed someone. Anyone at all.
“Tell me what you learned,” he said, not addressing her accusation. There were lines on his forehead that hadn’t been there. Despite the neutral tone, she thought he wasn’t only here out of obligation.
Maybe she was kidding herself, but she was going with it for now.
“I’ll show you,” she said, after a minute. Two days ago, she had swept the manila envelope and its contents along with her baby book and the photograph album into a reusable shopping bag—Mom had a whole drawer full of them, neatly folded—and hid it at the back of the coat closet under the staircase, which she went to retrieve.
She returned to find he’d piled the dirty dishes in the sink and was pouring coffee. Amy dropped the bag with a thud in the middle of the table. She pulled out her mother’s datebook.
“Cream? Sugar?” Jakob asked.
She put in her order and he brought both mugs to the table, then retook his seat. Amy shoved the datebook toward him. “I read the whole thing. You can go right to the end. It pretty much tells the whole story.”
He looked down at it for a minute, as if reluctant, then opened it to the back. The pages for April, May and June were blank, of course; by then, the datebook had been entombed in the time capsule. He reached the page that held Michelle Cooper’s final statement, read silently.
Amy knew what it said by heart. The part about how the old me is dead. And finally, This is what happened to me at Wakefield College. This is what I choose to say: Steven Hardy raped me.
Jakob muttered an obscenity and looked up, a storm of emotions in his eyes. Anger was the only one Amy was certain she’d picked out.
“You think this—” he glanced back down at the open page of the book “—Steven Hardy is your father.” The emotions had roughened his voice, but it was also astonishingly compassionate.
“Yes.” The single word sounded so small, so stark. She couldn’t look at him anymore. Instead she gazed, as she had done most evenings since she had moved into her mother’s house, at the garden and the roses she hadn’t watered since she left for eastern Washington.
“Do you have any other evidence?”
“Yes.” She had to clear her throat. She pulled out the baby book. “I was born small enough that no one questioned Mom’s claim that I was premature. But I went through this and compared my milestones with the standard charts. If I really was premature, I should have been behind. I wasn’t. If anything, I was ahead from the very beginning. If my birth weight was evidence that I was premature, I should eventually have gained on my contemporaries, but I didn’t. The truth is, all through school I was in the bottom twenty-five percent in weight. I still am. I’m skinny.”
His gaze flicked over her and he nodded. “You’re small-boned,” he said slowly. “Slim.”
She appreciated his kindness in making skinny sound a little more appealing.
“And then there’s the family album.” She opened that next, turning pages until she found a picture taken, at a guess, not long before the divorce. All four of them were in it. She scooted the album over so he could see the picture.
He looked in silence for a long time. Without looking herself, she knew exactly what he was seeing. Not only the fact that she didn’t fit, but also the tensions that were visible despite smiles for the camera. There was something anxious on her face, bewilderment in her eyes. The adults might be smiling, but they weren’t touching. Josef’s hand lay on his son’s shoulder. Jakob’s expression was stony. Michelle stood behind Amy, but wasn’t touching her, either. There was a distinct distance between the two children, too. Body language all but shouted the news that this family was splintering.
“Not a good moment in our lives,” Jakob observed at last.
“Funny, I remember looking at the picture and not seeing that. I think I’ve been guilty of a lot of self-deception.”
“Maybe.” He waited until she had to turn her head and meet his eyes, closer to gray right now than blue. “But you don’t know, do you?”
“I do,” she said sharply.
“You’re still guessing.”
She narrowed her eyes. “But you already knew, didn’t you?”
He hesitated. “No. I heard things that made me wonder, that’s all. Remember, I wasn’t very old. Mostly, I put what I heard out of my mind.”
The slightest change of intonation in his voice there at the end suggested he was lying, although she didn’t know why he’d bother. After a minute, though, she nodded, as if in acceptance.
“You were only eight. No, I guess nine at the end.”
“Their yelling freaked me out.”
“Me, too,” she admitted. “I pulled the covers over my head at night. Sometimes the pillow, too, when they got especially loud. I knew I didn’t want to hear what they were saying. I was so scared.”
Jakob laid a hand atop hers on the table. His was big and warm and comforting. She stared down at it until, to her disappointment, he removed it.
“I didn’t like your mother,” he said gruffly, “but change is always scary for kids. I felt safe when we were a family. Sometimes I worried Dad would leave me behind if he moved out.”
“Like he did me.” Amy swallowed. “I wanted to go with him so bad.”
“I think he believed your mother needed you, that she loved you.”
She snorted. Not with a lot of authority, but still... “Sure. Right. Get real. He didn’t want me, because I wasn’t his kid. And yes, he was nice enough to keep pretending for my sake, but even then I could tell. He didn’t look at me the same. I knew, but I didn’t want to know. Now, well...” Amy shrugged. “I guess denial only takes you so far.”
Jakob sat there frowning at her. “What have you been doing the past two days? Hiding out?”
She tried a smile, even if it didn’t come off very well. “Yeah, I suppose. I felt...” A huge lump clogged her throat. Felt was past tense. Feel. I feel. “Sick,” she finally acknowledged. “I always knew that Mom...” She gave something like a laugh. “I was going to say, Mom didn’t love me. But it was worse than that. Especially when I was little. It was as if she couldn’t stand to touch me. She’d shy away from me if I tried to cuddle. I learned not to try.” Oh, that sounds pathetic. She managed a shrug. �
��It’s not like I didn’t survive. Maybe I’m tougher because she wasn’t touchy-feely. In all honesty, I don’t think she would have been even if I’d been a planned pregnancy. Her parents were rigid and cold.”
Jakob nodded. She’d forgotten that he had, of course, met them.
She sighed. “I’ll bet they didn’t do a lot of cuddling, either.”
Jakob’s expression was troubled. Looking at him, she felt as if a band was tightening around her chest. He was a really beautiful man, with that lean face and strong, prominent bones. His hair was disheveled, even spiky tonight. It seemed darker in this light, but the hint of stubble on his jaw glinted gold. As a child, she had so wanted them to be close. She’d taken comfort in knowing he was her brother, that however funny she looked she still shared his blood. Maybe if she had kids of her own, the Scandinavian genes would reassert themselves. Nope, she thought sadly, no such genes here. Hers were...who knew?
“You never suspected?” he asked. “Your mother never said anything?”
“Like, by the way, your real father is this creep who raped me when I was only nineteen?”
“Uh...I was thinking more along the lines of saying that she was pregnant already when she met my dad, but he’s a good guy who took responsibility for you.”
Amy huffed out another laugh. “One of the things she wrote in that diary—” she nodded toward the book that still lay open to the final, devastating passage “—is that she didn’t ever want to think about what happened again. Then she said, and I quote, ‘But I can’t completely pretend, can I?’ And she was right, because she was stuck with me. A living, breathing manifestation of the worst thing that ever happened to her.”
Jakob visibly winced.
“Hard to put it all out of your mind once you realize you’re pregnant,” she continued, her tone hard. “Did you know Mom was raised Catholic? I think we can assume if she hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have seen the light of day.”
He sat forward abruptly. “Jesus, Amy, don’t talk like that.”
“I’ve had two days to think about it. Wouldn’t most women who had been raped want to abort the baby?” She saw that he couldn’t deny her conclusion. “But Mom was stuck between a rock and a hard place. Specifically, her religion and her parents. Your dad gave her an out.”
He closed his eyes and scrubbed a hand over his face. He looked older when he was done. “No wonder he was so angry.”
“No kidding.”
“I tried to call him last night. When I hadn’t heard from you. He hasn’t returned my call yet.”
“You were going to ask him if he knew what was in the time capsule?”
“Yeah.” Jakob grimaced. “I was going to ask him if you were his kid.”
“I suppose the panties raised a few questions in your mind.”
“You could say that.” His eyebrows drew together. “DNA testing wasn’t available that long ago, was it? Did she say what she was thinking?”
“Only that she never washed them because she couldn’t bear to touch them. She says in there that they and the diary were a sort of funeral offering. That the woman—girl—she’d been was dead.”
They were both quiet for a minute after that.
Jakob let out a long sigh. “You know what you have to do, don’t you, Amy?”
She gazed at him in alarm. “What do you mean?”
“You have to talk to your mother. We could be completely wrong about all of this. The pieces could fit together in a way you’re not seeing at all.”
“You know I’m not wrong.”
“That doesn’t mean you should sweep it all under the rug, even if that’s what she did. You won’t be able to come to terms with it until you hear her side of what happened, why she made the decisions she did.”
Amy crossed her arms protectively. “What makes you think she won’t keep lying to me?”
“Why would she? You’re not a child anymore. I imagine she kept the secret partly, or even mostly, for your sake. You’re in your thirties now, and it’s tough to take in. Imagine if you’d found all this out when you were sixteen.”
Amy shivered a little. Of course he was right, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still mad at her mother. Which wasn’t the worst part, she realized. Most painful was the fact that, as a woman, she understood and sympathized with her mother. A second shiver was more of a shudder as she thought about having to bear a child of rape, keep her, raise her, pretend to love her.
Could I?
She honestly didn’t know.
“I’ll call her once I’ve absorbed all this.”
Jakob shook his head, his expression implacable. “Nope. We’ll figure out the time difference and you’ll call her tonight, while I’m here.”
“What?” she snarled. “You think I’ll collapse if I don’t have you here to support me?”
He actually had the nerve to smile. “No, I think you won’t do it at all.”
“My privilege.”
“I want to know, too,” he said simply.
She should have asked why. What difference did it make to him? Did he want permission to go back to ignoring her?
But she couldn’t do it. Some veiled emotion in his eyes made her uneasy. Did he suspect some other truth? If so, she couldn’t deal with it.
Anyway, maybe he was right. She should demand answers now, while the tide of anger still carried her. Wimping out wasn’t her style. She wasn’t about to start now.
“Fine,” she snapped. “I’ll do it. But not because you say I have to.”
He chuckled, deepening the creases in his cheeks.
Amy wanted to punch him.
CHAPTER FOUR
JAKOB’S PHONE RANG only a minute after he and Amy had finished calculating the time difference with Sydney, Australia. He looked at the number then answered.
“Dad.”
Posture having gone rigid, Amy closed her laptop.
“Hope you were calling to tell me you talked your sister out of that time capsule nonsense,” his father boomed in the voice that served him well on job sites.
Jakob winced. “Hold on, Dad.” He pressed the phone to his belly and said quietly to Amy, “Do you want to talk to him? I can put this on speaker and tell him I’m with you.”
“Well, that would be cozy.” Snarky seemed to be her fallback mode, but he saw the anxiety in her eyes when she lifted her head. “Call me a coward, but I don’t think I’m ready to talk to him. I know I’ll have to eventually, but...not now.”
“All right. You can eavesdrop if you want,” he offered, even though he didn’t much like the idea of luring his dad into confidences he didn’t know were being overheard.
She shook her head and started past him. “I need to shower.”
“Amy.” He said her name softly, but she stopped, her back to him. “Ask me if you want to know what he says. I won’t keep secrets from you.”
She nodded jerkily and kept going.
Swearing under his breath, Jakob lifted the phone back to his ear. “Dad?”
“Who was that? Did I get you at a bad time?”
“No, this is fine. A woman. She’s, uh, going to take a shower.”
“Lady friend?” His father sounded pleased. “You haven’t mentioned one recently.”
Jakob didn’t say, That would be because there hasn’t been one in a while, even though it was the truth. He liked sex as well as the next guy, but with the big four-oh looming on the horizon, he’d begun to tire of the effort it took to get some. Dating was mostly a huge waste of time.
He also didn’t say, Nope, I’m with Amy. She’s upstairs stripping and getting in the shower right now. He didn’t even want to think about that, never mind say it aloud.
“No, it’s been a while.” Vague was good, he congratulated
himself. “And no, I didn’t head Amy off. In fact, I went with her, spent the weekend in Frenchman Lake.”
Deafening silence.
He made his voice hard. As a businessman, he had it down to a fine art. “You knew what was in that goddamned time capsule, didn’t you, Dad?”
“Why the hell are you taking that tone with me?” Josef blustered. “How would I know?”
“There was a reason you didn’t want her to go. Tell me what you know.”
Another pause. “What was in the capsule?”
“You tell me first.”
His father muttered something Jakob took for profanities. “I don’t know what she put in there. She said some cryptic things about it, that’s all. Stuff about how in fifty years, the Wakefield College people would find out there was a dead body in there. Made no sense, but I got to say, it made me nervous.”
“There were no bodies, but maybe the next best thing.” Jakob stared out the French doors at an idyllic garden, golden in the evening light and too pretty for his current mood. “I remember your fights with Michelle. I heard you accusing her of trapping you.”
“You were a kid. Why would you remember anything like that?”
He turned his back on the garden and took a few steps into the kitchen, where he could lean a hip against the counter. “Be straight with me, Dad.”
After a long silence, Josef said, “I don’t want Amy to know any of this.”
“The horses are already out, Dad. Too late.”
He could hear his father breathing. “Oh, hell,” Josef said finally.
“So you know?” That enraged Jakob. Hadn’t it occurred to either his father or Michelle that a secret like this had the potential to be more destructive than the truth ever would have been?
“All I know is, Amy isn’t mine.”
Jakob found himself reeling even though he didn’t move a muscle. All these years, and now he knew.
She’s not my sister.
The part that stunned him, and yet didn’t, was that his primary emotion was relief. Relief so potent, it poured through him like a drug injected in his veins.
From This Day On Page 6
