Dad steered me to the couch, which I sat on and tried to maintain a semiconscious state that would allow me to go back to sleep when we were done with whatever it was we were doing. Dad sat down at his desk; Mom stood next to him. I smiled sleepily at her but she seemed not to notice. Between me and my parents were Hickory and Dickory.
Dad spoke to Hickory. "Can you two lie?" he asked it.
"We have not yet lied to you," Hickory said. Which even in my sleepy state I recognized as not being an actual answer to the question that was asked. Dad and Hickory bantered back and forth a little about what being able to lie brings to a conversation (in my opinion, mostly the ability to not have to argue about stupid things it's just better to lie about, but no one asked me), and then Dad asked me to tell Hickory and Dickory to answer all his questions without any lies or evasions.
This finally woke me all the way up. "Why?" I asked. "What's going on?"
"Please do it," Dad said.
"All right," I said, and then turned to Hickory. "Hickory, please answer my dad without lying to him or evading his questions. All right?"
"As you wish, Zoe," Hickory said.
"Dickory too," I said.
"We will both answer truthfully," Hickory said.
"Thank you," Dad said, and then turned back to me. "You can go back to bed now, sweetie."
This annoyed me. I was a human being, not a truth serum. "I want to know what's going on," I said.
"It's not something you need to worry about," Dad said.
"You order me to have these two tell you the truth, and you want me to believe it's not something I need to worry about?" I asked. The sleep toxins were taking their time leaving my system, because even as I was saying this I realized it came out showing a little more attitude to my parents than was entirely warranted at the moment.
As if to confirm this, Jane straightened herself up a bit. "Zoe," she said.
I recalibrated. "Besides, if I leave there's no guarantee they won't lie to you," I said, trying to sound a bit more reasonable. "They're emotionally equipped to lie to you, because they don't care about disappointing you. But they don't want to disappoint me." I didn't know if this was actually true or not. But I was guessing it was.
Dad turned to Hickory. "Is this true?"
"We would lie to you if we felt it was necessary," Hickory said. "We would not lie to Zoe."
There was a really interesting question here of whether Hickory was saying this because it was actually true, or whether it was saying it in order to back me up on what I said, and if the latter, what the actual truth value of the statement was. If I were more awake, I think I would have thought about it more at the time. But as it was, I just nodded and said, "There you go," to my dad.
"Breathe a word of this to anyone and you're spending the next year in the horse stall," Dad said.
"My lips are sealed," I said, and almost made a lip-locking motion, but thought better of it at the last second.
And a good thing, too, because suddenly Jane came up and loomed over me, bearing her I am as serious as death expression. "No," she said. "I need you to understand that what you're hearing here you absolutely cannot share with anyone else. Not Gretchen. Not any of your other friends. Not anyone. It's not a game and it's not a fun secret. This is dead serious business, Zoe. If you're not ready to accept that, you need to leave this room right now. I'll take my chances with Hickory and Dickory lying to us, but not you. So do you understand that when we tell you not to share this with anyone, that you cannot share it with anyone else? Yes or no."
Several thoughts entered my mind at that moment.
The first is that it was times like this when I had the smallest inkling of how terrifying Jane must have been as a soldier. She was the best mom a girl could ever have, make no mistake about it, but when she got like this, she was as hard and cold and direct as any person could be. She was, to use a word, intimidating. And this was just with words. I tried to imagine