if there was an edge of mockery in the address, he was too focused on his cognac to care.
When I ran into Shanti on the stairs, I said, “Avoid him tonight.”
Her face blanched. “He’ll be angry.”
“He’s on the way to getting drunk again—he won’t remember.” She’d still bear the brunt of the emotional fallout tomorrow, but she was used to that type of thing and seemed to consider it my father’s right as her husband.
Poor Shanti. No one had told her that her fairy-tale wedding to a rich man from abroad was one of the original dark tales and not the sanitized cutesy version.
I watched from the stairs as she reached the bottom landing. Though she hesitated outside the door that led to the dining area, she turned in the other direction . . . just as glass shattered against one of the dining room walls.
It was as if my father couldn’t stop himself from re-creating his final night with my mother.
I continued on to my room, then locked the door behind me before entering the closet once again. The right yearbook was midway down the shelf that held the detritus of my high-school life.
Carrying it as well as my old notebook out to my desk, I sat and ate a handful of sweets from my sugar drawer. Yeah, I wasn’t about to confess this little habit to Dr. Jitrnicka when he was still only “cautiously optimistic” that my booze addiction was in the past. But unlike with the alcohol, I could only take a certain amount of sugar before it became nauseating—I’d had no limit when it came to alcohol.
Drawer now shut, I flipped through to the section on notable sporting events.
There it was: Riki’s grim face, his hand clenched around his medal as he lifted it high.
22
The caption gave more information than I’d remembered: Ariki Henare after his gold medal discus performance at the New Zealand Secondary Schools Athletics Association championship. Ariki dedicated his victory to his mother, who is currently fighting cancer: “I hope this makes her proud.”
I ran my finger over the words, then rechecked the dates against the entry in my notebook. The timeline matched. Hemi had been sleeping with my mother while his wife was battling cancer.
Riki had known.
Of that I had zero doubt—not after the conversation in the garage. He hadn’t been SAS ten years ago, but as a discus champion, he’d been big and strong. My mother would’ve been no match for him had he decided to strike out.
He’d had a motorcycle back then, too. Not hard to follow my mother’s car from the Cul-de-Sac, flag her down on the loneliness of a road made dark and claustrophobic by the forest, then force her into the passenger seat.
It was a mistake to assume she must’ve been overwhelmed in the Cul-de-Sac. She could’ve survived whatever had made her scream and leave the house, only to be attacked farther on, far from anyone who could help her.
Far from me.
Rain began to hit the windows with a rattling clatter that indicated hail, the tiny beads of ice collecting on the balcony before vanishing as my mother had done that dark night.
* * *
—
I woke with a gritty, groggy feeling that told me I’d been dreaming all night, hovering on the edge of sleep but never quite getting there. To add to that, my foot ached like I’d beaten it with a hammer. Groaning, I just sat in bed for long minutes until I could get myself moving.
Shoving aside the thin blanket I’d pulled on at some point last night, I swung my good leg out of bed. “What the hell?” The bottom of my foot felt stiff, wrong. Frowning, I lifted it to see a dirty sole.
Not the dirty of picking up a few bits of fluff while walking barefoot on wooden floors, or the dirty of running down the drive without shoes. This was the dirty of walking barefoot on soil and grass. A blade of the latter was stuck to the pad below my big toe, the green drying to a kind of brownish olive.
Cheeks cold with a burn, I glanced at my moon boot . . . to see blades of grass and streaks of dirt on the nearest side. When I managed to get myself up and limped off to the bathroom using the cane, the full-length mirror had a nasty surprise for me: the bottom of the boot was filthy. But most heavily on one side.