Now it seemed such a stupid thing to worry about, especially when Kate looked away from the books and over to the one wall without shelves. It was covered with photographs—Amelia as a little girl with Leelah, with her teammates and camp friends. With Kate. There was a large one of Amelia and Sylvia on the sixth-grade field trip to DC that Kate had chaperoned. It had been one of the few times over the years that Kate had been able to sneak away from work for that kind of school commitment. And it had been perfect, except for the lingering sense Kate had had afterward that almost every other parent there—even the full-time working ones—had come along on that kind of trip many times before.
What mattered now, though, was that Amelia had been happy in the photographs. Every single one. Their small family might not have been the one Kate had planned on, but Amelia had never cared. At least not until a couple of weeks before she’d died, when she’d suddenly started asking about her father.
“You seriously never told him about me?” Amelia had demanded, waking Kate up early one Saturday morning. “I mean, did you ever even try to find him?”
“Find who?”
“Hello, my dad.” Amelia had crossed her arms. “You know, the hippie with the guitar on his way to Africa? The one that you supposedly met one dark and stormy night at a dive bar up by Columbia? Did they even have bars in that neighborhood back then? Wasn’t it like a war zone up there?”
Kate blinked at the clock, then at Amelia, then back at the clock. Seven fifteen a.m. on a Saturday. She didn’t want this to be happening. She didn’t want Amelia to be asking these questions, not now. She’d known that someday, when Amelia was old enough, the sketchy story Kate had told her about her father would require elaboration. But it was too soon. She hadn’t yet worked out what to say. The truth still felt out of the question. But a vague lie to a child perpetuated over the years by silence was different from a brand-new one straight to her teenage daughter’s face.
“What are you even doing awake, Amelia?” Kate asked, trying to buy time. “Let’s talk about this later. I’m really exhausted, and you must be, too.”
“Later, sure.” Amelia sounded angry, but there was something else in her eyes—fear, worry. It made Kate’s stomach churn.
“Amelia, what’s wrong?” Kate asked, pushing herself up in bed. “Did something happen?”
“No,” Amelia said, crossing her arms. She looked away from Kate with a pout, her eyes fixed on the far corner of the bedroom. Kate kept staring at her daughter, hoping the weight would make Amelia confess whatever had brought her there, demanding answers at the crack of dawn. “Nothing happened. I mean, except for me getting tired of waiting for you to tell me the truth.”
But it was more, Kate could tell. Did she want to know what? No, that was the honest truth. Kate did not.
“Amelia, I don’t know what you think—”
“Mom, come on,” Amelia said, her voice cracking. She turned to look out Kate’s bedroom windows. Anywhere, it seemed, but at Kate. “You, alone, in a bar? Hooking up with some random guy? Some accident that was the ‘best thing that ever happened to you’?” Amelia shook her head, then finally looked at Kate. Her eyes were glassy. “No way, Mom. I’m not buying it. It’s not you.”
Kate stared at Amelia for a minute, then dropped back down onto the bed. She turned over and pressed the side of her face into the pillow so that her daughter wouldn’t be able to look into her own damp eyes.
“I never said it was me, Amelia. That’s kind of the whole point. I also never said I was perfect. Back then I was doing a lot of things that weren’t exactly well thought out,” she said quietly, careful to make sure she didn’t suggest that Amelia had been a mistake. “Anyway, if you have questions about your dad, you can ask them. I’ve always told you that you can ask me anything you want, Amelia.”
“And you’ll tell me the truth?”
“Yes, Amelia,” Kate said, her little liar’s heart pounding hard in her chest. “I’ll tell you the truth.”
And in that moment, Kate had decided that she would. She would tell her daughter everything about how she had been conceived, about the mistakes Kate had made and the things she had done to cover them up. Because Amelia deserved the truth. She was entitled to her history, whatever the cost. Just not at that precise moment. Kate needed time, to prepare.
“I want to meet him,” Amelia said.
Kate had blinked at her daughter, trying to hold her face still.
“Okay,” she’d said finally. And then she’d decided to lie some more. “Then we can try to do that. But I just . . . I can’t make any promises that we’ll find him.”
Four days later, Amelia was dead. Kate didn’t think that Amelia’s questions about her dad were related to her death. And not knowing her dad would never have been a reason for Amelia to kill herself. But it was strange, the timing of Amelia’s suddenly suspecting something. Worse yet was the possibility that Amelia had died thinking Kate had lied to her.
Kate forced herself off the windowsill and over to the bookshelves. She ran her hand down the well-worn spines—The Odyssey, The Sound and the Fury, Lolita, and, of course, all those books by Virginia Woolf. Virginia Woolf—suicide committer extraordinaire—was her daughter’s favorite author. The coincidence hadn’t been lost on Kate. But Amelia would have found copying her literary hero in that way to be a pathetic cliché, of that Kate felt sure.
She backed up and sat down hard on Amelia’s bed, then dropped her face into her hands. She was still slumped over when she heard Amelia’s door creak open. For a second she thought it was the wind—until she saw a big hand reaching inside to push the door open. She should hide, dive under the bed, run for the window—
But she was frozen.
“Who’s there!” she screamed as loud as she could. “Get the fuck out of my house!”
“You’re not armed, are you?” A voice called from behind the door. Seth’s voice.
“Holy shit, Seth, what are you doing sneaking up on me?!”
Slowly, Seth’s face peeked around the door. His eyes were wide, and he had his hands raised in the air.
“I rang the doorbell,” he answered sheepishly. He shuffled into the room in his khakis and muted button-down—the modest, nondescript uniform he’d always favored, even now that he had a high-profile job as senior legal adviser to Senator Schumer. It was the kind of outfit that probably gave Thomas—Seth’s handsome and supremely fashionable husband—hives. “No one answered, and your front door was unlocked. You know, you really should lock your front door. Any lunatic could just wander in off the street.”
“I can see that,” Kate said sharply. Her heart was still pounding.
“Well, I’m not sure that was necessary.”
“I’m sorry,” Kate mumbled as she dropped her face back into her hands.
She shouldn’t snap at Seth. He’d been so good to her, and it wasn’t as though she had friends to spare, at least not in the city. Between the hours she worked and the time she spent with Amelia, she hadn’t made many new friends over the years. All of Kate’s close friends—apart from Seth—were ones she’d made years ago in college or high school. And none of them lived nearby. Kate looked up at Seth and patted the bed next to her. He came over and sat down. He looked around Amelia’s room, his face stiffening as he seemed to realize, finally, where they were.
“Maybe we should go downstairs,” he said anxiously. “Get you some fresh air.”
“I got a text today about Amelia, two actually,” Kate said, ignoring his attempt to get her out of the room. “They said she didn’t jump.”
“Really?” Seth’s eyes widened momentarily, then thinned suspiciously. “Wait, texts from who?”
“I don’t know. They were anonymous.”
His eyebrows lifted. “Anony—”
“Don’t you start, too,” Kate said quietly, looking Seth straight in the eye. “Please?”
He stared back at her hard for a minute before his face finally softened.
&
nbsp; “Okay.” He wrapped an arm around Kate’s narrow shoulders. His chin rested on the top of her head as he squeezed. “Okay.”
“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Kate said. “Deep down, I never really believed Amelia killed herself. But I knew that would just look like denial.”
“Yeah, and didn’t the police—”
“Police make mistakes,” Kate snapped. “Why not this time?”
“Okay,” Seth said again, holding up his palms.
He was humoring her. It was obvious. But Kate didn’t even care. She looked around the room. It was one thing to go through Amelia’s things, but it would be nice not to have to do it in that room, so filled with her daughter’s memories and the smell of death.
“The first thing I need to do is make sure the police didn’t miss anything in here.”
“Like what?” Seth asked. “What do you think really happened, Kate?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.” She took a deep breath, trying not to let her imagination start rolling out even more awful possibilities. “But I need to find out. Do you think you could look around up here, through her desk, her drawers, and see if there’s anything? I was going to take her book bag downstairs. I just . . . I’d rather not be in here anymore.”
“Of course,” Seth said, though he didn’t exactly look thrilled. “But what am I looking for?”
“Something that proves that Amelia didn’t kill herself,” Kate said quietly. “Or something, I guess, that proves that she did.”
Kate headed downstairs with Amelia’s worn messenger bag. Far away from her daughter’s room, she found she could handle looking through Amelia’s phone and computer. But sitting at the kitchen table with the bag on her lap, Kate was still worried that some critical trace of Amelia would fly out as soon as she opened it.
Finally, she managed to get herself to flip open the top of the bag. Inside were a couple of notebooks, Amelia’s small laptop, a granola bar, Chapstick, some gum, her iPhone, and her wallet. Kate lifted each out of the bag and rested them gently on the tabletop. The ordinary things of a living, breathing girl. Now, the precious artifacts of a dead one.
Kate picked up Amelia’s iPhone first. It, too, was dead—the grim irony of which made Kate wince. Once she’d found the charger in an outside pocket of Amelia’s bag, Kate quickly discovered that the phone was also password protected. Kate could have sworn that Molina had specifically told her he’d gone through Amelia’s phone. But without the password—which even Kate didn’t know—that was impossible. It took Kate two tries to come up with the right combination of numbers: Amelia’s birthday and her own. It brought tears to Kate’s eyes.
When Kate finally made her way to Amelia’s text messages, she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. There were hundreds and hundreds of saved messages, from scores of different people—some were named, some were just phone numbers, many were listed as unknown or blocked numbers. Some were from Kate. Some texts were long threads of conversations. Others were a single message. How had Amelia—with her courses and extracurriculars and her sports—had the time to send so many texts? More important, shouldn’t Kate have known?
Maybe she should have even been reading them all along. Some mothers of teenagers did that, read all their kid’s electronic traffic—texts, e-mails, Facebook pages. Kate was plugged in enough to the world of mothering—mostly through other women at work who had kids—to know that some mothers put their kids on notice that they’d be checking periodically; others seized the opportunity of a child’s unattended smartphone to do their snooping undetected.
Kate had done neither. She’d opted, instead, to trust Amelia.
Or at least that was what she’d told herself she’d been doing. Because sitting there staring at all those many, many messages, not monitoring suddenly felt less like a deliberate parenting philosophy and more like a consequence of Kate’s compressed schedule. Certainly, it had been neglectful, and so very, very stupid. Amelia had been fifteen years old. Even if she had been trying to stay away from trouble, it had been Kate’s job to make sure she’d succeed.
Kate held her breath as she began to scroll randomly through the text messages. Most of them were meaningless teenage exchanges about lunch, or sports practice, or homework. Then there was one near the end, the day before Amelia had died. It was a back and forth with an unnamed phone number that turned out to be a boy named Ben.
AMELIA
Who is this?
UNKNOWN NUMBER
Ben, it’s my brother’s phone
AMELIA
Oh hi, I almost didn’t answer.
UNKNOWN NUMBER
Did you ask about Paris?
AMELIA
Yep. No go.
UNKNOWN NUMBER
Maybe she’ll change her mind?
AMELIA
I don’t think so. Other ideas?
UNKNOWN NUMBER
Not really. She’s your mom.
AMELIA
I know. She’s all mine. Lucky me.
Kate closed her eyes and bent over, a sudden ache in her belly. To be mad at your parents was the birthright of every teenager. Kate knew that. She was still mad at her own parents. But for good reason. They were cold and distant and limited. Kate had truly believed that she was a much better mother than Gretchen had ever been, not that she’d set the bar very high. But what if her relationship with Amelia hadn’t been as good as she’d believed? What if Kate really hadn’t known Amelia that well after all?
Kate pressed the phone to her chest and squeezed her eyes tighter shut, as if that alone could keep her from crying. It didn’t. And so she let herself go. Her spine collapsed as her cheeks grew wet, and she cried on until she could cry no more.
Finally, Kate sniffled hard and dragged a hand across her wet nose and mouth. She placed Amelia’s phone gently back down on the table. She knew she’d have to wade through all those text messages eventually. She’d have to swim down the tangled tributaries of Amelia’s chatter and hope that she didn’t stumble across too much else that hurt her feelings. But not right now. For now, it was enough to know that there were things there she’d need to take a closer look at.
Kate grabbed some tissues to dry her face, then picked up Amelia’s notebooks and started paging through them. She ran her fingers over Amelia’s jaggedy scrawl, tracing the impressions she’d left in the paper. She tried to imagine Amelia putting them there. As Kate flipped the English notebook closed, some stapled pages slid to the floor. She bent to pick them up.
Representations of Time: To the Lighthouse, by Amelia Baron. It was the paper Amelia had supposedly cheated on. This could be Kate’s chance to clear her daughter’s name. Not Kate specifically, of course. She could examine each and every page and still have had no idea whether Amelia had copied portions of it. But in Kate’s mind, the part of Amelia’s story that suggested she had cheated had always been the most far-fetched. Amelia had known everything there was to know about Virginia Woolf. She’d read To the Lighthouse many, many times and had always received her very best grades in English, which was saying a lot, given how great her grades were generally. Amelia wouldn’t have needed to plagiarize anything. Add to that the fact that Amelia had never been a liar. That she was, in fact, a compulsive rule follower and that she absolutely worshipped her English teacher, Liv, and none of it made any sense. Knowing Amelia hadn’t cheated and proving it, though, were two very different things.
Kate put the term paper down on the table and pulled Amelia’s laptop out of her bag. Soon she had it on and was scanning her way through the extremely well-organized files. The Word documents were separated into folders labeled with class names and the corresponding semester. There were only four loose files, each titled gRaCeFULLY and labeled with a different date. Kate picked one at random and opened it. The document had a glossy layout—professional border, colored banner, elaborate font—that made it look like an official school newsletter.
gRaCeFULLY
SEPTEMBER 19TH
Because there are 176 definitions for the word loser on urbandictionary.com.
Don’t Be a Statistic
* * *
Hey bitches!
Yes, it’s us again, with all the shit that’s not fit to print . . .
Lots of news to report today. First of all, we hear that a certain chemistry professor is getting a whole bunch of his questions for his first year Chem Lab from the California Standards Exam. And those, ladies and gents, are available ONLINE. I mean, how fucking lazy can you be? The guy can’t even make up his own test questions? . . . It’s not our fault he’s a lazy shit. So, I say, have at it—here’s a link to the exam: caedu/standardtests/chemistry.com.
Apparently, there was another rainbow party in the 6th grade this past weekend. Will somebody please tell those kids that that is so 2008. And totally gross BTW.
And will someone else tell Tempest Bain to wear underwear? I mean, we know the chick’s a dancer and she has a fly body and all, but do we seriously need to see her cha-cha?
And word is that Bethany Kane is ready and willing. Oh wait, sorry, that’s OLD news. She’s already screwed half the varsity lettermen.
Sylvia Golde is also getting her ticket punched again these days. Don’t know who the lucky boy is yet, but Sylvia was on the gymnastics team when she was little, so no doubt—whoever he is—he’s getting his money’s worth.
And the Maggies started tapping this week, people, so the other clubs can’t be far behind. If you didn’t get your invite yet, maybe you still will. But most of you losers shouldn’t hold your fucking breath.
A rainbow party? And in the sixth grade? Kate had heard the term once, from Beatrice, who’d seen something about it on Oprah. But she’d quietly assumed it was something exaggerated for ratings, if not made up entirely. And this gRaCeFULLY thing had effectively called Amelia’s best friend a slut. Could that be true? Suddenly, the fact that Amelia had never talked about boys seemed suspicious. Somebody who went to that much trouble not to talk about something probably had too much to say.
Reconstructing Amelia Page 8
