A Mother's Lie - Sarah Zettel Page 0,54

say he hit Jeannie, but nothing’s going to happen unless she presses charges, and maybe not even then. And I can tell you for a fact she is not going to press charges.”

“Well, you could at least get them to open a file! They do that, right? We could—”

“We can’t, Dana!” shouted Mom, but then she tried to take it back. “At least, we can’t yet. Maybe later.”

“Later? This is not a trip to the zoo!” Dana shouted back. “You do not get to hide from me! You do not get to make another secret out of me, or them, or anything! This is my life! Anybody would think you were scared of the cops!”

Mom’s face went hard, and the raw, hot resentment that was so awful and familiar shone in her eyes. For a moment, it felt like victory.

“What’s going on, Dana? What do you want from me?”

I want you to know you can’t keep this from me anymore. “I want to know if you ever killed somebody.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“What?” Beth heard herself say.

She was not stunned. She was not hurt. Dana’s words rocketed her past either of those things into a numb state of being where thought and breath were equally inaccessible.

“I want to know…”

Dana’s condescending singsong snapped Beth back into herself. “Where did that even come from?” Beth didn’t wait for her answer. “This is Jeannie. She told you.”

“No.”

“Then who?!”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes, Dana! It really does!”

“Then it’s true! That’s why you won’t go to the police! You’re afraid they’ll find out!”

Slowly, Beth got up and walked over to the balcony doors. She told herself she was looking for her father, or her mother, or Doug. That was irrational but more acceptable than being afraid of her own child.

Beth tried to imagine what her daughter must be going through. Her secrets were more than burdens. They were vicious, living things with claws and fangs. She tried to imagine what it would be like the first time they came bursting out of the dark.

Every old instinct in her screamed at her to lie. To feed the monsters so they would go back to sleep.

No, I never actually killed anybody. I did come close once.

Beth licked her lips. She tasted copper and iron and gunpowder.

Dana wasn’t going to let her go. She marched right up to the balcony doors to stand in front of Beth, defiant and frightened like the child she still was.

“What happened? Tell me!”

It was after your grandparents left me. I was trying to steal his car…

She looked at her daughter. Took in her defiant, amazing self. Beth curled her fingers around the pull handle on the door, like she was thinking of escape.

“It’s true, Dana,” she said. “His name was Robert MacNamera Early.”

Beth waited for the flashback, for the shakes and violent tears that used to leave her crouching on the floor of her therapist’s office. Or maybe there would be some sense of relief. Confession was supposed to be good for you, wasn’t it? But Beth just felt…gray.

“He’d held me hostage for three days,” she said. “He was waiting for my parents to come back so he could kill them.”

“Oh,” breathed Dana. Beth didn’t let her get any further.

“It had been a pretty good time for us, as things went, before…that,” she said. “We’d been able to stick around this one town for…it was at least a year. Maybe a little longer. We had an actual apartment. Top floor of a house out by the freeway. It was pretty crappy, but it was better than a lot of places we’d stayed. Mom had a job as a delivery driver. At least, that’s what she told me she was doing.”

Dana looked away. So. She already knew that “deliveries” weren’t what Jeannie was doing. Beth sighed. She’d have to find out just what Jeannie had said.

One more thing for the to-do list.

“So, anyway, we had money. Which meant Dad was in a good mood most of the time. I was actually in school. I hated it. I was pretty sure all the kids and teachers hated me, but you know, it was better than other stuff, so I went. What happened…It started on a Saturday morning. I was home, watching TV.”

She could still see the room. It had a pea green carpet, with three cigarette holes and a grungy path worn down the middle leading from the couch to the kitchen area, which was marked out by curling, speckled linoleum tile. The TV sat on a cart that

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