Do you think all your secrets and lies aren’t upsetting? It’s not fair! I have a right to know. Why did Ty come here? To find Dad? Does it have something to do with Iris?” I give her a minute to answer my rapidly fired questions, and when she doesn’t, I say, “What really happened to her, Mom? Was her boyfriend involved in it? Do you know Jake?”
Mom recoils at the mention of his name. I think she’s surprised at how much I’ve learned.
I wait another few seconds for her to answer, then stomp past her. “I hate you right now. I really do. I’ll just find out on my own.”
“You’ll only get hurt if you listen to what he says. You trust people too easily.”
“You’re right. I trusted you,” I shout, running up the cabin steps and onto the porch.
“Stay away from Ty,” she calls after me. “He used you. He used both of us.”
Pausing at the door, I look back at her. “How, Mom? What is going on?”
She opens her mouth and takes a step toward me. But just when I think she’s finally going to talk to me and give me some answers, she draws back. “I’m your mother,” she says. “You have to do what I say. I don’t want you talking to Ty Collier anymore, do you understand? Your father would agree with me about this.”
“No, I don’t understand. I don’t understand anything.” I walk into the cabin and slam the door.
Ty doesn’t answer any of my calls. I’m so upset that while Mom is napping, I take one of her sedatives from the medicine vial and gulp it down with a glass of water. Thirty minutes later, I understand why she loves them so much.
The fog is quiet. It absorbs all sensations. Weightless and numb, I curl into the vaporous mist and sleep for hours or maybe only minutes, until the haze parts and a guy’s face appears, hovering above me . . . a vision . . . a revelation . . . the answer to a thousand prayers. I’ve been waiting for him all of my life. Searching for his blue eyes in every person I’ve met since I was little, longing to touch his black hair and feel it brush my cheek.
Jake, I whisper to the wavering apparition. Jake Milano, I love you. Don’t let me go.
I wake up with a jerk, and sit straight up in bed, wide-awake now, stunned. The slant of sunbeams through my bedroom window tells me I haven’t slept long. “Milano,” I whisper, and Iris spins like a cyclone inside of me. “That’s Jake’s last name, isn’t it?”
Yes! she breathes. We thought we had forever . . .
Not only do I know Jake’s last name, I remember him. I know him. The sound of his laughter. The scratch of the rough calluses on his palms, the soft touch of his fingers. I know the press of his mouth and the warmth of his body. He loves to drive too fast and sing too loudly and push himself to the point of puking as he runs around a track. He’s afraid of failing, of not meeting his parents’ expectations. And he’s afraid of losing the girl he loves.
But he knows he’s going to.
“Oh my god,” I whisper. The memories seem to be as much mine as Iris’s. But how can that be? How can I know these things if Jake is from my sister’s past, not mine?
We have to find out what happened to you, Iris. It’s weird, but I feel like I’m a part of it somehow. What should we do?
Jake can help us, she says with certainty. Somehow, I know it.
“Someone else can help us, too,” I say aloud.
I can’t let Ty leave Silver Lake. Not until he tells me what he knows about my parents.
I call Silver Lake Studio Apartments’ office and ask the desk clerk if Ty checked out. When she says he hasn’t, I start making plans to slip away to see him. Mom doesn’t make it easy for me. She stays close all day, keeping an eye on me. In the evening, I lie and tell her I’m driving into town to meet Sylvie, and she insists on going along. I tell her no, and we have another argument that sizzles like the lightning splitting the sky outside.
When she forbids me to leave, I get so angry that I bolt upstairs to my bedroom, determined to grab my keys and go