Mr. Dunley is very accommodating, and I can’t tell whether that’s because he knows that the world will be watching Lullaby Doe’s funeral, or because Sophia basically tells him that cost is no issue. In a couple of hours, we have the whole thing planned for the afternoon of the twenty-fourth—Christmas Eve—and he assures us that three days is plenty of time to pull the whole thing together.
After the funeral home, we pick out a plot. I don’t think the cemetery has ever dealt with teenagers before, but the man who shows us our options is very nice. I’m not sure it matters which plot we pick, but Sophia is worried about which way the sun will glare on the attendees and how far people will have to walk from their cars.
I think that putting so much fuss into a funeral is a bit like spending all your time worrying about your wedding and none thinking about the actual marriage. It’s just one day. After the crowd has gone home, with any luck Lullaby’s secret relatives will be able to visit her in peace and privacy, and I doubt they’ll care about the sun shining in their faces.
God, please let someone claim her, even if only in private.
“So, why couldn’t Amira come today?” Sophia asks as we head back to our cars after picking out the funeral plot.
I shrug. “I didn’t ask her to.”
She stops walking and lifts one brow at me. “Why not? Did you guys have a fight?”
I’m not going to tell her about my suspicions, but I feel like Amira’s suspicions about me are fair game. “Kinda. She thought I was the baby’s mother.”
“I’m sorry,” Sophia says. “I don’t think I realized how hard this must be for you until last night. Until that crowd practically came after you with torches and pitchforks.”
“They think I’m lying about not being the mother. But you don’t, do you? How are you so sure everyone else is wrong about me?”
I realized last night that Sophia would never have given me a speech about how the town of Clifford needs to heal if she thought she was talking to the mother of a dead baby. Is it because she’s the baby’s mother? Am I just starting to suspect everyone now? Have I officially lost my mind?
Sophia shrugs as we start walking again. “I have no reason to think you’re lying. And I think people deserve the benefit of the doubt.”
Well, that’s refreshing.
She brushes her hair over her shoulder, exposing the name brand of her expensive down jacket. “I should have listened to you about the vigil, though. I don’t think that helped anyone heal.”
“You were just trying to do something nice.” Misguided though it was.
“Still, you were right.” She clicks the button on her fob to unlock her car door. “The vigil was a bad idea, considering the negative attention this has been getting. But the funeral isn’t. The headstone and the grave aren’t. Those are for the baby. They’re the least we owe her.” She opens her door and slides behind the wheel. “For failing to notice.”
Sophia gives me a sad smile as she closes her door. Then she starts her car and pulls down the narrow cemetery path and through the gates.
Mom’s car is in the driveway when I get home, and the front curtains are open. For a second, I sit in my car, looking through the window at all the smiles as my mother, brother, and sister string lights around the tree.
I thought this would be more of a bittersweet holiday, since it’s our first Christmas without Dad. But for once, I would be happy to be proven wrong.
I hear the music the second I open the front door. The Grinch. Someone’s dug out our collection of Christmas DVDs, and the marathon has begun. Usually, Dad would recite the narrator’s lines, making faces as he and Penn strung lights around the top of the tree, where none of the rest of us can reach. Then Dad would drop his voice into bullfrog range and sing the Grinch song.
Tonight, Penn is singing, and I’m stunned by how much he sounds like my father. By how he can reach the top of the tree without even going up on his toes.
“Hey!” Landry beams at me, a strand of lights looped over her arm. “Shut the door! It’s cold!”
I shove the door closed and nearly trip over the couch in its new position, which made room for the tree in front of the window. “That’s a nice one!”
“It was on sale because the branches at the bottom were basically dead, but we just trimmed those off with Dad’s hedge trimmers,” Landry informs me.
“There’s hot cider in the kitchen,” my mom says. “Are you hungry?”
“I’ll grab a cookie,” I tell her. And I can’t stop staring. “Why is everyone in such a good mood?”
“It’s Christmas!” Landry grabs a Santa hat from the coffee table and props it on her head, so that the point with the little white ball flops over her right ear.
Mom smiles. Then she nods for me to join her in the kitchen. “Penn’s test results came back,” she whispers as she ladles steaming apple cider into a mug for me from the Crock-Pot where it’s being kept warm. “He’s not the father.”
“Well, that certainly explains his good mood.” He couldn’t possibly have been sure, in the same way a woman would be. “So that means Amira . . . ?”
“If she’s the mother, it’s a huge coincidence,” Mom says. “And it has nothing to do with Penn.”
Then I owe her a huge apology.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. Because my mother is still smiling, but her eyes aren’t crinkling. Or shining.
“Nothing. It’s just . . . There’s a lot of pressure for us to identify that baby, and we’ve just hit another dead end.”
That’s not it. There’s more. But she’s not going to tell me. Not when tonight is so wonderful. So . . . normal.
Mom makes nachos for dinner, and we eat them on the couch, staring up at the Christmas tree while Miracle on 34th Street plays on the television. Penn even smiles at me. Twice.
The next day, I take a plate of leftover cookies to Amira’s house, but I have to ring three times before she answers the door. Her parents’ cars aren’t in the driveway, but hers is. Still, I guess she could have gone with one of—
The door opens. “Please stop ringing the bell, Beckett.”
“I have cookies.” I hold up the plate, but she doesn’t even look at it. “And an apology.”
Amira leans against the right side of her door frame and crosses her arms, evidently waiting for me to go on.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about the baby. I, of all people, should know how shitty it feels not to be believed. The only excuse I can make for myself is that I really need to get to the truth. That feels like the only way I can clear my own name. Since someone smart stopped me from baring my stretch-mark-free belly to the entire school.”
Finally, she smiles. “I’m starting to think that was the right impulse after all. Maybe that would have put an end to this a week ago.”
“It wouldn’t have. You were right; people believe what they want to believe. So until someone comes forward and claims that baby—until someone gives them a story they’d rather believe—I’m stuck with these rumors.” And, possibly, the death threats.
Amira steps back to clear the doorway. “Come in. And bring the cookies.”
I step inside and close the door, then I follow her into the kitchen. “Would those be good with hot chocolate?” she asks.
“Yes. Thanks.” I set the plate on her counter and lean back against one of the cabinets while she makes us each a mug of hot chocolate from little white packets printed with an outline of the Swiss Alps.
“So.” She sets a mug in front of me. It’s shaped like a cat, with pointed ears sticking up and a tail for a handle. “What made you decide I was telling the truth?”
I asked Sophia that same question yesterday, and she didn’t seem to have as much trouble answering it as I am. I take a sip of hot chocolate from between the cat ears to buy time to think.
Amira gives me a look. “I take it you didn’t spontaneously come to your senses.”
“I think we both know that if there�
��s any way to misinterpret the situation, I’m going to find it.”
She snorts into her plain blue mug. “When we were kids, you always took the winding path to any goal, be it the swings or an invitation to a sleepover.”
“My dad called it the—”
“—the scenic route. I remember.” She takes a long sip. “He told me once that being your friend would never be easy.”
I set my mug down and stare at her. “He did? Really?”
“Yeah. When we were around twelve. I had come over to stay the night, and you and I got into a fight. Your mom was upstairs talking to you, and your dad gave me a soda in the kitchen. He said that being your friend would never be easy, because you were always going to trust yourself more than you trusted anyone else. He said you were just like your mother in that way.”
It’s strange hearing something about my dad that I didn’t know. Something I’m willing to believe, anyway. Something that makes me sad in a good way.
“I pretended I knew what that meant,” Amira says. “But I didn’t really. I don’t think I truly understood what he was saying until just now.”
I pull the plastic wrap from the plate I brought and take a cookie from the pile. “Well, maybe you can explain it to me.”
“I think he meant that you’re never going to be good with faith. In other people, or in anything else. And he’s right. It’s not that you don’t believe what other people tell you. It’s that you can only truly trust things you find out for yourself.”
“Great. I am just like my mother.”
“I don’t know her well enough to say that. But your dad was right about you.” Amira takes a cookie. “So, what did you find out for yourself that made you believe me?”
“Wow. When you put it like that, I sound like a real jerk.”
She shrugs and takes a bite.
“Penn’s paternity test came back negative.”
Amira frowns. “That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be my baby. Just that it isn’t his.”
“I know. But the only reason I thought it might be yours was that you slept with him, and Lullaby Doe was found wrapped in his shirt. So there’s nothing left linking you to the baby.”
“Well, as long as you’re satisfied,” she says, brushing crumbs from the front of her shirt.
“Like I said. I’m a jerk.” And she has every right to stay mad at me.
“At one point or another, we each suspected the other of the same thing. So why don’t we call it even and just move on?”
“Yes. Thank you.” I break another cookie in half and hand her one of the pieces. “I’ve missed you this year.”
She takes a bite, then she covers her mouth as she speaks around it. “You had Jake.”
Hopefully I still have Jake. Hopefully I haven’t quite screwed that up beyond repair. “Yeah. But that’s not the same.”
Amira had Sophia and Cabrini, and it may be selfish of me, but I hope that wasn’t the same for her either. I hope she missed me.
I take another sip from my mug, and my gaze falls on a family portrait on Amira’s living room wall. Her dad looks the part of a middle school principal—which he is—and for the first time, I wonder what he’s like here in his home. Away from all the teachers, and students, and parents. I wonder what he’s like as a father.
I bet he’s . . . normal. I bet he asks her about her homework and knows the names of all her teachers. And that he’s always in bed asleep by ten p.m., with a half-read crime novel on his nightstand.
“It’s kind of crazy. My dad just . . . doesn’t make any sense.”
“Okay. I’ll bite.” Amira holds up her cookie and grins over her stupid pun. But her smile fades with one look at my face.
“He . . . I just can’t understand how the man who wrote bedtime songs for me and flew Landry around like an airplane when she was a toddler could be the same man who popped pain pills like they should have come out of a gumball machine. How can the soldier who served several tours in Afghanistan and put out fires for a living be the same man who practically melted into the couch there at the end? Who never wanted to leave the house?”
Those pieces of the puzzle that was my father don’t seem to have come from the same box. It’s like the factory mixed up two puzzles and gave us a few pieces of someone else’s dad. And someone else got the missing pieces of my dad.
And that has to be it, because we certainly didn’t get those last few pieces.
“Nobody’s only one thing, Beckett.”
“I know. But how can one person have been so many different things? So many different people?”
“Addiction is an illness.” Amira looks distinctly uncomfortable with the platitude. As if she doesn’t know what else to say. How to help me understand.
“Everyone says that, but what other illnesses do people choose to have?”
She sets her mug down and watches me. She’s sitting very still. “You think he chose to get hooked on pain pills?”
“No. But I think that at some point, he made a decision, right? Isn’t that what really happened? At some point he must have consciously decided that he liked being high better than he liked being with us. Or being alive. Every pill he swallowed was a choice. Every drink he took—same thing.”
“I don’t think it’s ever that simple. I don’t think addicts see it as an either/or kind of situation. I don’t think he chose to die, Beckett. I can’t imagine him wanting to leave you guys.”
“Penn thinks he did.”
She’s quiet for a moment, and I understand that I shouldn’t have said his name. Finally, I realize that she’s not over my brother. Even though they’ve hardly spoken in seven months.
“I know,” she says at last. “He said that, in his car that day.”
In my car. The day my brother and my best friend had sex in my car.
Not the point, Beckett.
“But I don’t think it’s true,” she adds.
“Why would it be? I mean, he had a family! A good one! Mom loved him, and their marriage was good, until the Oxy. Landry—She worshipped him. Penn’s killing himself right now, trying to turn himself into our dad. To be a better version of him. And I’m not sure whether to applaud him or slap him silly for that. For wanting to be like the man who abandoned us. Or for believing that he can do a better job of it.
“He was in the newspaper once, did you know? The Dallas Morning News. My dad’s unit was sent out to Texas, for hurricane relief, and a reporter snapped a picture of him saving a dog from floodwater. My mom still has, like, ten copies of—”
Amira’s phone beeps, and before she can pick it up, I see that it’s an alert. My hand clenches around what’s left of my cookie.
The Crimson Cryer has tweeted again.
CRIMSON CRYER
@crimsoncryer · 2h
Finally @CliffordTNpd has evidence that @BeckettBergen TRULY IS #LullabyDoe’s mother.
#JusticeForLullaby
1058 2477 3057
SIXTEEN
I leave Amira’s house so quickly that I forget my plate in my rush to race home and ask my mom what on earth the Crimson Cryer could be talking about.
So far, that anonymous asshole’s information has been so accurate, according to my mother, that the police think someone in the department is leaking information. But there’s one exception.
Me.
Twice now, the Cryer has either implied or announced that I am Lullaby Doe’s mother, and obviously that’s been wrong, both times. Yet a few days ago, the Cryer also came to my defense, asking people to leave me alone and reserve judgment.
Why the change of heart? Why the transition from fact-based—if leaked or stolen—information to flat-out lies about me?
I park on the curb in front of the house, because Penn’s already claimed the second spot in the driveway, and I stomp across the yard, ready to demand answers from my mother. But when I throw open the door, Landry stumbles to a startled halt in the middle of the living room, on her way to the kitchen.
“Beckett! Come on! We’re doing gingerbread!” She holds up the Bluetooth speaker Mom gave her for her thirteenth birthday, which she’s evidently just retrieved from her room.
Doing gingerbread?
I close the front door and follow my sister into the kitchen, where my mother and brother are gathered around our small island, huddled over something. Landry sets the speaker on the counter and plugs it in, because the stupid thing has never been able to hold a charge. She taps something on her phone, and Christmas music starts playing over the speaker.
“Hey!” My mother stands with a tube of icing in one hand and a big, square cookie in the other, and suddenly I understand.
They’re making a gingerbread house.
Or rather, they’re putting together a premade gingerbread house, from a kit.
“They were on clearance!” Landry announces as she steals a piece of candy-coated chocolate—a generic M&M—from a bowl on the end of the island. “Even though it’s still three days until Christmas!”
“Wrapping paper and lights were on sale too,” Penn says around a chunk of something sticky. There’s an empty candy wrapper on the counter next to him.
“When I was a kid, my parents always bought clearance wrapping paper and lights the week after Christmas,” my mom says. “But now the stores put everything on clearance a week before the actual holiday, assuming everyone’s already done decorating for the year. Boy, have they underestimated the Bergen family’s willingness to procrastinate!”
“Hey, can you hold this?” Penn nods at the gingerbread wall he’s propped into place. “So I can glue it?”
I hold the wall—another big, square cookie—while he squirts thick white frosting on one edge, then I place it where he shows me, pressing the frosted edge against another big cookie to form the corner of this super-basic gingerbread house.
We used to do this for real. Mom and I used to make homemade gingerbread dough, while Dad and Penn sketched out a design for the house. Then we’d roll out the dough and measure and cut the pieces, while Landry danced around in Christmas pajamas and a Santa hat, because she was too little to help, until we got to the part where she could glue on pieces of candy.
Every Single Lie Page 19
