Beautiful Lies (14 page)

“Hi, Claire.” My dad seemed uncomfortable. The girls looked the four of us over. The tallest one—Claire—gazed at me with her wide, blue eyes. She was skinny and big-chested, a set of car keys dangling from her right hand. As she watched me, I took a step closer to Rachel. I felt so young and immature, like such a kid compared to these almost-women.

“Are these your daughters?” another of the three girls asked. She looked like she could be Claire’s sister. All of them looked so similar: long hair, tanned skin, tight clothes.

Nodding, my dad reached out and took my hand. “Yep, these are the twins. This is Alice and Rachel.” He and my mom never had any trouble telling us apart.

Claire and her friends smiled at us, but their expressions
didn’t seem all that friendly. For some reason, I knew I disliked them. Who were they to approach my dad like this, in a public place? He was their teacher. We were his family. This wasn’t school. I felt like they should have left him alone. He belonged to us.

But my mother obviously wasn’t bothered by their interest. As she tugged her hair free from its ponytail, she wiggled the fingers on her right hand in a wave. She grinned at them like they were all sharing a secret. “So,” she asked, leaning forward, “how’s Mr. Foster in class?” She slipped her arm around my dad’s waist. “Is he a meanie?”

“Of course I am,” my dad answered. “I’m probably the meanest guy they know.” And he winked—first at my mom, then at the girls. “Right?”

Rachel’s gaze caught mine. I knew we were both thinking exactly the same thing about these girls.
Get. Lost.

“I’m Anna Foster,” my mom said. I don’t think it occurred to her that it might be more appropriate if she introduced herself as
Mrs.
Foster. She smiled at the girls again, relaxed, almost bored. “I guess you probably figured that.”

My dad rubbed his palm against his head, further messing up his hair in the process. “Good to see you, girls,” he said. “You’d better enjoy the rest of your weekend. Midterms start tomorrow.” He squeezed my hand. I watched with satisfaction as Rachel—usually so calm and sweet—shot daggers at the girls with her eyes.
Go away,
I thought, willing them to leave.

“We’ve been studying all day,” Claire informed him. “Don’t worry about us.” And she gave another amused giggle. “So … are you here getting ice cream?”

Before our dad could open his mouth, Rachel interrupted to respond. “No,” she said, sarcastic, “we’re here to go iceskating.”

I laughed out loud, clapping a hand to my mouth.

“Rachel!” Our dad was embarrassed. But our mom, I could tell, was suppressing a smile.

Claire and her friends didn’t know how to respond to my sister, her young face so snide and unfriendly for what probably seemed like no reason. They lingered for a few awkward seconds before saying good-bye and heading toward the grassy lawn surrounding the ice cream stand, where they settled at a picnic table and spoke to each other in hushed voices. Occasionally, one of them would look our way while we waited in line, and they would all start laughing. At that moment, I hated them so much. They didn’t know my dad. They probably didn’t even know his first name—he was just this other person to them, this “Mr. Foster” who my sister and I were unfamiliar with. Who were they to intrude? The day felt ruined.

Ice cream has a way of making everything better. My parents got milk shakes, and Rachel and I both got chocolate cones with rainbow sprinkles. We waited as my dad counted out exact change.

“Should we sit down?” he asked, squinting in the
direction of the picnic tables. Claire and her friends hadn’t left yet.

My mom tugged on Rachel’s hair. “Maybe we should just go home.”

If only we’d stayed just a few moments longer. If only we’d never run into those girls. If only we’d sat down to finish our ice cream.

The road to our house was hilly, winding, so narrow in some parts that there was only room for one lane of cars. My mom put her bare feet on the dashboard and turned up the radio. She twisted the dial, searching for a clear signal, before stopping at “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. Her toenails were painted bright purple. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in hindsight it seems like such a childlike, girlish color for a grown woman to choose.

In the backseat, I glanced over at Rachel. Our car’s air conditioning didn’t work, so even with the windows down, it was warm enough that our ice cream was melting quickly. She caught a few drops on her tongue, which had turned blue from the sprinkles. When I caught her eye, I mouthed
ice-skating,
and we both started to laugh.

For whatever reason, our giggles seemed to annoy my dad. “Hey,” he said, looking at us in the rearview mirror, “that’s enough.”

We were quiet for a few seconds as we suppressed our laughter. Then, so softly that only I could hear her, Rachel whispered,
ice-skating
. I lost it. Instead of reprimanding us
again, our dad turned up the radio. He steered the car with one hand, the other one resting on my mom’s leg, and rolled his eyes at her as he nodded at the backseat. My mom just shrugged and smiled. “Kids,” she said.

The Taurus approached a tight, one-lane turn. We were in a small valley less than a mile before the entrance to Loyalhanna Lake. To our left, there was a steep hillside covered with trees and jutting rock formations. A sudden drop on our right led to a murky pool of still water littered with trash: a dirty mattress, a child’s plastic rocking horse, a ripped garbage bag overflowing with clothes. Broken beer bottles. Old tires.

His hand still on her leg, I saw my father rub my mother’s calf, the gesture tender and loving. I squinted at the garbage in the crevasse beneath us and noticed graffiti on the side of a huge gray rock. In orange spray paint, someone had written: DEAR KATE, I LOVED YOU MORE. Even at age nine, I felt a pang of heartache for whoever had scrawled those words. I believed them. I thought of how impossibly romantic it was that someone, probably a heartbroken ex-boyfriend, would profess such a private pain to the whole world.

It was a lovely day. Cirrus clouds drifted overhead like frayed cotton. The sun was beginning to descend, casting light and shadows across the wide surface of Loyalhanna Lake in the distance, beyond the trees in the valley below us.

I looked out the windshield in time to see a flash of bright green coming around the bend in the narrow road.
It was a pickup truck full of kids: three in the front, two in the bed.

Our vehicles hit each other head-on. After the initial impact, the truck spun out and rolled down the steep hillside. I heard it even though I couldn’t see it anymore.

The whole thing seemed to happen in slow motion. The Taurus came to a stop at an angle, its body completely blocking the road.
That’s it,
I thought to myself,
it’s over. We’re okay.
I felt my chest rise and fall. I stared down at my body, my arms and legs. Aside from a dull, deep pain across my torso, I was unharmed.

I glanced over at Rachel, assuming she’d be fine, just like me. But my sister was slumped in her seat, unconscious. Her window was splintered into tiny cracks where her right side had slammed against the glass. I could tell she was breathing, obviously alive, but a dim flicker of fear began to grow in my gut as I realized that everything was not okay, that maybe something had gone very wrong.

I looked over the edge of the road again and saw the green pickup truck resting upside down among the trash and shallow water, which rippled outward now from the impact, glinting in the sun. I saw a man in a white T-shirt lying facedown in the water, unmoving.

The radio was still playing “Space Oddity.” What had felt like minutes had been only seconds.

I unbuckled my seat belt and climbed toward the front to check on my parents, who were silent. My mother was gone;
it was like she had disappeared, like it was all part of a nightmarish magic trick. The windshield was shattered. My father sat in the driver’s seat. If his eyes hadn’t been open, I might have thought he was only sleeping, or that he’d been knocked unconscious like my sister. He stared off to one side, his head tilted at an odd angle. He was completely still. His nose was bleeding, dripping onto his white shirt. One drop. Then two. Then another, like someone slowly turning the handle of a faucet, until the drips became a trickle.

I’m not sure how anyone else might have reacted in the same situation. A small part of me understood what had happened, but it was like my mind wouldn’t allow me to fully grasp the reality. Maybe I was in shock. I didn’t cry or scream or get out of the car. I just sat back down, waiting for someone to find us. I stared at my sister, who was still unconscious, and it occurred to me that she wouldn’t remember any of this once she woke up. But I would. And in those moments as I sat in the backseat with her, I thought of the plea:
I loved you more.
I could see it being written; I could imagine the heartache of that boy, because my heart was breaking too.

I pulled my legs close to my chest and rested my cheek against my knees, my head turned so I could continue to stare at Rachel. I sat there looking at my twin sister, one thought playing in my mind over and over again, long after a little red sports car happened upon the scene, after the police came with a whole slew of ambulances, after I watched them drive my parents away slowly, in no hurry at all, because there was nothing anybody could do to help them. Even that night, as
I lay in bed at my grandmother’s house, I stared at the ceiling and mouthed the same phrase, until the rhythm of the words on my breath finally put me to sleep. I thought of Rachel in the next room, the fact that she hadn’t woken up until an EMT held smelling salts beneath her nose. And I repeated the words like they were a prayer:
I wish I were you. I wish I were you. I wish I were you.

And in a way, I
was
her. When I got up the next morning, my right side was throbbing from my head all the way down my arm; even my fingertips tingled unpleasantly. My flesh was swollen with vicious purple bruises. But my injuries weren’t from the accident—not exactly.

I went into Rachel’s bedroom, where she was still fast asleep, and nudged her awake. At first she looked up at me with a smile, and I knew that, in her sleep, she’d forgotten all about what had happened to our family the day before.

It only took a few seconds before she realized. I can’t describe how horrifying it was to see her expression change, her body tensing up as her eyes filled and spilled over with tears before I had a chance to crawl into bed next to her.

I pulled the blanket aside to look at my sister’s body and saw that her injuries were identical to mine. But the revelation didn’t scare or upset me; instead I felt calm. I put my arms around Rachel, and for the rest of the morning we held onto each other with our eyes closed, and I remember thinking that we only had each other from now on, and how important it was that we never let each other go. No matter what.

It’s still dark outside when the sound of the phone ringing downstairs ebbs me awake. It’s the gentle, almost soothing
thrummm
of the house line, which my aunt and uncle keep connected in case there’s an emergency. But nobody ever calls it; I didn’t even know anyone had the number.

After a few moments, I hear footsteps coming up the stairs to the attic. From the sound, I know it’s my aunt. I take a quick look in the mirror near my bed, checking to make sure the makeup that hides my bruises is still in place, which it is. Beside the mirror, the digital clock on my desk reads 5:17 a.m.

My aunt Sharon looks like she’s been awake all night. Her face is typically drawn and tense, but this morning she looks much worse than usual. Her blond hair, which is usually shiny and styled, is pulled into a messy ponytail. She wears a long pink terry-cloth bathrobe that I don’t recall ever
seeing before now. She’s in her bare feet, and I can see gauze wrapped around the side of her foot, to bandage her cut from yesterday morning.

“Hey, kiddo.” I’m not used to hearing such a gentle tone to my aunt’s voice; when she’s speaking to me as Alice, our interactions are usually tense, her words clipped and frustrated. But right now, of course, she believes she’s talking to Rachel. She sits down beside me in bed and puts a warm hand on my shoulder. “That was Susan Shields on the phone just now.”

“Who?”

“Mrs. Shields.” She stares down at me. “Kimber’s mom,” she clarifies.

“Oh. Sure … at five in the morning?”

“She was calling for Kimber,” my aunt says. “She wanted to know if you needed a ride to school this morning.”

At the mention of school, I feel a flutter of panic. How can my aunt expect me to go to
school
right now?

I sit up, shaking my head. The motion sends a sharp pain through the back of my skull and into my neck. I wince. As I brush my fingers across my wound, I’m startled to find that it’s still damp, like it only happened a few moments ago. It should be scabbed over by now—shouldn’t it?

“Aunt Sharon, I can’t go to school today. Please.”

She gives me a sympathetic look. “I know you’re worried, Rachel. But you heard the police yesterday. She’s been gone more than a day, so they’re looking for her now. You know,
I’d be very surprised if she hadn’t run off with Robin on Saturday. She’ll be home soon.” Aunt Sharon narrows her eyes and gives her head an angry little shake. “That jerk. Doesn’t he have any human decency? What kind of a person refuses to meet his girlfriend’s family? If Robin had any respect for Alice, he would have made more of an effort to get to know us. But all he’s done so far is get her into trouble. If he truly cared about her …” Her voice trails off. “We don’t need to discuss this right now. It won’t bring Alice home any sooner.” She flashes a quick smile. “Come on, get up. Get ready for school.”

“But what about this?” I shove my hand beneath her face; my fingers are sticky with blood. “Something is happening to me because it’s happening to Alice. She’s in trouble. Why won’t you listen to me?”

“I am listening,” my aunt says, her tone so calm that I feel intense agitation, like I want to reach out and shake her. “Rachel, you know she’s done this before—”