by Tess Oliver
"I don't understand," I said. "I knew your dad was strict, but I always thought you guys had it pretty good."
A dry laugh spurted from her mouth. "Uh, perhaps you missed the chapter in the story when my mom disappeared." She said the word disappeared with a tone that didn't match my understanding of her leaving.
I paused to see if she'd elaborate. She didn't.
"Everyone in town said she just packed up and left. She was unhappy with the marriage," I added.
"That was not an understatement." There was a hard edge to her tone now. Bringing up her dad had changed her demeanor. "My dad was an abusive prick, but my mom would have given up her life for Kenzie and me. She never would have left us on her own. Never, ever. Sometimes she talked about the three of us packing our bags and running off to some hot, sunny place near the beach. We always dreamt of living on the beach." She smiled with a light laugh. "Kenzie said the only thing on her bucket list was swimming with dolphins."
"And yours?" I asked.
"Cure for cancer."
I nodded. "Yep, that pretty much nails the difference between you two."
She smiled at my comment but it felt more like she was having her own internal dialogue and amusement about it. She shook off whatever had grabbed her thoughts. "My life went so haywire as a teenager, I had to give up that bucket list and get more practical. Lofty goals were replaced by much simpler ones, like staying alive, keeping a roof over my head. I traded in my Ivy League dreams for the life of a nomad. No real home and trying avoid a heavy past."
For the first time since I'd sat down, I felt relaxed. This whole thing had turned my emotions upside down. "See, now you've really lost me. I don't understand what happened. Why did your dad tell everyone you were dead, that you committed suicide because you were so distraught about Kenzie's suicide?" She flinched as I said the last few words.
"It's wasn't a suicide," she said plainly, as if she'd just tossed out a comment about the weather.
I sat forward. "What do you mean? I saw them pull her from the river. They said she jumped from the bridge. I mean I had a hard time believing someone with her spirit would do something like that, but you sort of indicated her continuous cheer was more of a facade."
"It was a facade, mostly." Sutton sighed and stood up. "But I don't believe she jumped."
"Do you want to walk?" I asked.
She shook her head. "No, I'll just pace if you don't mind. It helps when I start getting anxious, and talking about Kenzie's death always fires me up. You guys always saw the bubbly, vivacious, sexy girl, but at night, she would cry herself to sleep. Sometimes she would talk about her feelings, about how all the guys chased after her but that nobody really wanted to catch her. She was a tease and a flirt and that kept everyone intrigued, but she would complain that she really just wanted to be loved."
"I did love her," I blurted lamely.
She turned back to look at me. "Did you?" She spun around to walk the length of the table again. "Or was it just that constant erection that had you convinced it was love?"
"Yes, no, I mean, fuck, I don't know." I scrubbed my face and got up too. I stood at the end of the tables, shuffling my feet around only because sitting was making me anxious too. "I was a teenager, so I guess my dick was doing far more of the decision making than my head. But my memories of her—they're all good, you know as if she walked around with a goddamn rainbow and a herd of silver unicorns following her through town."
Sutton laughed lightly. It was a sound I remembered, her laugh, Sutton's laugh. Why had I remembered it?
"I could almost picture her with her herd of unicorns." She slowed the pacing and sat back on the table.
This time I sat next to her. "You never answered me. Why did your dad tell us you were dead?"
She sighed. "Guess it was easier than the truth."
"Having you dead was easier?" I asked. I had always hated Sheriff Jensen, but it seemed his true level of evil was only just coming to the surface.
"Less embarrassing. He made up the lie about me going off to an aunt's house. The rest of the town wasn't aware, but Kenzie and I had a social worker. Her name was Mrs. Fulton. She was good, only, like everyone else, she was afraid of my dad." She crossed her arms possibly against the cold or possibly just against her past. "Occasionally, Kenzie and I showed up to school with bruises and marks. Mostly Kenzie. She tended to push Dad's buttons more than me, and that was all it took. One eye roll and he'd backhand her. You guys saw this beautiful, carefree girl. Those rose colored glasses never let you see the abuse. But teachers never missed shit like that, so the school would call social services and Mrs. Fulton would arrive, quivering in her boots, so to speak, as she let my dad know that she would have to write a report. But it never went anywhere. Dad had too much power in the county. After Kenzie's death, Mrs. Fulton wasn't going to take any more chances. She grew a pair of balls and took me from the home. I ended up in foster care and had to spend my last year of high school down in Redmond. I was heading toward class valedictorian at Westridge High, but all of my hard work was wiped away. Kenzie's death had gutted me. My foster mom would drop me off at school. I'd wait for her to pull around the corner and then off I'd go to hide in the wilderness. Needless to say, my grade point average tanked, but I didn't care. I never even sent off any college applications. My whole life was turned upside down. Still is, unfortunately."
"But you escaped him," I said. "You escaped your dad. Why don't you try and pull things together again, start college, do all the things you wanted."
She looked over at me and smiled. "You know I always had a big crush on you."
It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but I didn't hate hearing it. I elbowed her lightly. "You hated me."
"Right. Because you loved my sister. I was just that annoying girl who occasionally showed up when you guys hung out at the park and the river. You did everything in your power to ignore me."
I chuckled. "Because you hated me."
She laughed and then grew quiet. "I've got a secret, something I probably should have confessed to you long ago, but admittedly, I was having fun hanging on to it."'
"Well, considering that I thought you were dead and yet here you sit, I doubt anything else could knock my socks off like that secret."
She shrugged and stuck her hands between her knees. "I don't know. It's a pretty sensational one."
"Now, you absolutely have to tell me."
"All right but try not to get too mad at me. That night at the park, when you and Kenzie kissed—"
"She told you about that?" I was giving my teenage self a pat on the back for making it memorable enough for Kenzie to mention it to her sister.
"Not exactly," Sutton said. "She didn't have to tell me."
I turned halfway to her. "You were watching?"
She reached up and tapped the side of my head. "No dummy, I wasn't watching. I was sort of part of the kiss. In fact, I was the other pair of lips."
I hopped up and stood in front of her. "No way. I was with Kenzie. I would have known if it was you. I refer you to the aforementioned hate-on you had for me."
She shrugged. "You were wearing a black shirt with a Green Day logo, the one with the grenade in the fist, and your hair was long underneath a black baseball cap. You spun it backwards for the kiss so the bill wouldn't get in the way. And you ate a few Tic Tacs first, secretly, but I could smell them and hear you crunching on them."
I sat back down hard on the table across from her. "My entire fucking childhood was a lie. I never kissed Kenzie Jensen. Why'd you do it? Just to get back at me?"
"Maybe for that reason or maybe I just wanted to kiss Kingston Bristow. Kenzie was home, grounded for some stupid thing. She mentioned that she was supposed to meet you at the park, so I put on her clothes and a little makeup and . . ."
"Holy shit. My first kiss was with Sutton Jensen."
Her leg stretched out, and she gently kicked me. "You don't have to look so fucking disappointed."
&nb
sp; "I'm not. It's just I'm surprised."
"What? That with the same clothes and makeup that I could look just like my identical twin?"
"No, maybe, I'm just surprised that little serious, no-nonsense Sutton Jensen could kiss so well."
The shrubbery behind us rustled sending Sutton off her table and onto mine. "That sounded big and toothy," she noted.
"Not sure if you can predict toothy from a movement of leaves. Probably just a raccoon. I'll bet he was planning to check out that trash can over there, and now we've thwarted his midnight picnic. It's getting cold. Do you want to go somewhere and get a coffee? Maybe a slice of pie." I rubbed my stomach. "Didn't eat much dinner tonight."
Sutton seemed to be considering the idea but with definite hesitation.
"I promise I won't try and kiss you. I didn't even bring my Tic Tacs. There's still so many questions I have about what happened back then, about your life now. You can even ask me about my life."
"Kingston Bristow is a smokejumper who works out of the Western Base Camp and his best friend, Jack Devlin, works with him."
I laughed, scaring off whatever was lurking in the shrubs. "And I thought I was being a stalker by showing up to see your band."
"I wasn't stalking. I was curious after I thought I saw you in the coffee shop, and I wasn't too sure because, frankly, you are not the fresh faced teenager I remember."
"Uh oh, sounds as if an insult is coming."
"Nope, not at all. You're a man now, which, of course, makes sense that you grew out of your teens," she added with a smile. "I was kind of freaked out after I saw you. I Googled your name, and up it came with a bunch of photos of you and Jack in big bulky jumpsuits and parachutes. You always were a little too comfortable with danger. I still remember you jumping off that ledge over the waterfalls. You didn't even think twice."
"That's because I was an idiot. Wait, I don't remember you being there?"
She laughed lightly. "See, you never even noticed me because my sister was in the vicinity. I always faded into the shadows."
"That's not true. I was probably just too nervous about the jump. I was acting like a big shot but inside I was trembling like a scared puppy. What about that pie?"
"I can't, Kingston. My stuff is packed. I'm going to head out of town tonight. I prefer to drive at night."
"What? You can't leave. We've got catching up to do. What's going on?"
"I keep moving. It's better that way. And since I've been spotted by someone from Westridge—"
"Wait, you're leaving because of me? I won't tell anyone I saw you."
She raised a cynical brow. "So, you never mentioned seeing me to Jack?"
I nodded once. "Yeah, I might have told him. But you have to give me that one. It was kind of a shock seeing someone who I thought was dead for the past ten years. Have you been this close to me all this time?"
"No, I travel all over the country."
"But why?" I asked. None of it was making sense to me.
"Because," she said, "my dad would prefer it all to be true. He wants me dead."
11
After Sutton dropped a bomb on me, I convinced her to at least drive through a fast food place and get some fries and drinks. It turned out she'd skipped dinner too, so we added in the burgers and sat in my truck to eat our late night meal.
She ran out of ketchup and was dipping her fries in my puddle. "I took you for a much more enthusiastic ketchup dipper," she said, before pushing the fry into her mouth. I had to admit, her spunk reminded me so much of Kenzie, I occasionally forgot I was sitting next to Sutton.
"Oh trust me, I can ketchup dip with the best of them," I said. "I'm just more interested in my burger. Turns out skipping dinner is not something my stomach appreciates." I wiped my mouth after the last bite and rested back. "Do you really think your dad wants you dead?" I asked.
She batted her lashes at me. "I just said that to get a free meal."
"Sutton," I said.
"All right, I'm sorry. Since I won't be seeing you after tonight, I guess I can tell you the whole sordid tale." Unexpectedly, her assurance that we wouldn't see each other after tonight dropped on me like a pile of bricks. I didn't want this to end tonight. We might have had our differences in our teens, but it felt so natural being with her, as if we'd known each other forever. Which we had.
"I'm all ears," I told her. And eyes, I thought. She was still the same sensational beauty that she was in high school. How had I not seen it? I was never able to look past Kenzie, even though Sutton was there all the time, excelling at everything and winning every award.
Sutton pointed at her pouty bottom lip. "Do I have ketchup on my mouth?" She licked her bottom lip, a gesture that I watched with keen interest. A gesture that again transported me back in time, when her sister would tease me with that pink lip gloss.
"You're trying to change the subject . . . again," I added.
"The day my mom disappeared—" She kept using the word disappeared instead of left. "It was raining hard."
I sat up straighter. "Yeah, I remember. It was the day before my fourteenth birthday. Worst rainfall we'd ever had. The streets were flooded. I'd been avoiding home because—well, because of my mom. I kept riding my bike through the drenched streets because it was creating this awesome rooster tail. I stayed out way past dark that day, and now I'm the one on a tangent. Continue."
"That day, I remember it so clearly it hurts every time I think of it. Kenzie and I were late for school because my mom was moving extra slow." Her voice wavered slightly. "The night before, Dad had hit her stomach. It was a stupid argument over the roast being cooked too long. Dad said it tasted like leather. He picked it up and dropped the whole thing in the trash. My mom screamed at him and his fist flew right into her, as if he was taking out a hardened criminal. Kenzie and I went to bed without dinner, crying and holding each other through the night."
My fists curled. It was coming back to me in waves, how much I hated, how much everyone, hated Sheriff Jensen. Yet, none of us knew the true depths of his cruelty.
Sutton put down her burger and rested back. Her eyes were glassy as she stared out at the street lights. "Whenever it rained, Mom would pick us up in front of the school. It was coming down in sheets, so Kenzie and I stood in front of the school huddled under the overhang. We waited for her car but she never came. So we held our backpacks over our heads like canopies and we raced home through the flooded sidewalks and streets. Mom's car was in the driveway. I still remember Kenzie yelling at my mom as we walked inside. She said, we're not mermaids. How did you expect us to get home without fish tails?" She glanced over at me. "She used to love The Little Mermaid movie. She'd watch it every Saturday morning. She was determined to find a Prince Eric for herself."
Sutton picked up her soda and took a sip. She crinkled her nose. "It's flat." She sighed. "Kenzie and I tracked rainwater through the whole house, searching room to room for our mom. Her things were still there, her coat, her favorite green scarf, her rubber galoshes. Her closet was full. I'm mentioning that because it's important in this story." She looked at me. "Am I boring you? I know it's late and you're probably tired."
"I'm listening and I'm not bored. I've always thought there were a lot of dark secrets in our town, things no one wanted to talk about, things that shouldn't have been so easy to ignore."
"Like the barn fire back when our parents were teens?" she asked. "There's been so many rumors and retellings of that story, I'm not sure anyone knows what really happened."
"Exactly. I brought it up to my dad, but he brushed it off, like always, insisting it was just a tragic fire and three girls died."
"Did you know my grandfather, Nicholas Jensen, was sheriff back then? Nicholas Junior was all but guaranteed the job. My dad said he trained his whole life to take over for his dad. I hardly knew my grandfather. He died when I was four. My mom used to joke that we weren't missing much by not knowing him. Guess he was an even bigger asshole than my dad."
"Now that you mention it, I think I did hear my dad say that once, that it was some sort of presumed family legacy." I wadded up the food wrappers and shoved them in the bag. It was late enough that even the midnight munchies people had gone to bed. Sutton and I sat alone in the parking lot.
"We never saw our mom again," Sutton continued. "We called Dad to let him know that we couldn't find her. He rushed home and put on quite the stunned and shocked act as he pretended to search the house for clues. He told us he was sure she'd just gone off to be by herself and that she'd be home soon. He drove us over to Mrs. Buxton's house. She had babysat us when we were kids. We both argued with him, letting him know we wanted to be home when Mom got back, but he told us we had to stay with Mrs. Buxton. We got home that night, after dark. It was still raining like crazy. Like you said the streets were like rivers. I remember my dad's squad car rolling slowly against the current as water sprayed the windshield. It was so damn dark. The sky was heavy with it. We got home and her car was gone." She shook her head sadly. "We got so excited. We decided Mom must have come back to get her car. We were sure she'd gone out to buy us some pizza or burgers for dinner. Dad got so angry at us. He told us the car wasn't there earlier either."
"But you two saw it?" I asked.
"Yes, it was definitely in the driveway when we got home from school. That's why Kenzie stormed inside with the whole mermaid thing. She was sure Mom was home sitting somewhere in the house. Kenzie and I both insisted we saw it, but he put on that hard jawed, rabid dog look he used to get whenever he was about to throw his fist into something. Kenzie and I dropped the subject. Once we got inside, it was obvious that her stuff was gone, the scarf, the rubber galoshes, even the makeup on her vanity. It was as if she'd been wiped away out of our lives. The worst part was that Kenzie and I were so fearful of him, we had to listen to him tell people that she left, that she had packed up her belongings and gone. When people reminded him that as an officer he could have found her by putting out a search on her car, he had a story ready to go. He told them she had sold the car at a dealer outside of town and that was the last anyone saw of her. Even her family, back in Ohio, never heard from her again."
