If I Lie (13 page)

I hope the garden stays barren.

*   *   *

“Quinn, wake up. Shh . . . You’re okay.”

My father shakes me and I’m awake all at once, startled to find him sitting on the edge of my bed with his hand on my shoulder.

“There you are,” he says as my eyes focus on him. He drags his work-roughened fingers under my eyes, wiping away tears I didn’t know I was crying.

I am six parts ocean.

My father’s presence confuses me after our silent warfare. “Dad?” I stop because my throat feels raw.

“You were screaming Carey’s name,” he explains. “Must’ve been one helluva nightmare, too,” he adds gruffly. “I think you even woke Rueger.”

We listen to the Lab barking from next door.

I remember the dream now. I’d been watching the news. A reporter had come on to announce the execution of a prisoner-of-war. The shot had switched to a home video of masked men with swords. Carey knelt before them, and I’d watched as one man cut off his head, holding it up to the camera in triumph. Even now, I shudder reliving it, knowing it could actually happen. Has happened.

“What if he doesn’t come back?” I sound like I did when I was a little kid, asking when my mom would come home.

My father hooks my hair behind my ear, like he used to when I was younger and had bad dreams, and I remember how he once-upon-a-time loved me. I clasp his warm hand between mine to make him stay with me, but he pulls away after a few short seconds.

“He’s a good man. Don’t you give up on him, okay?”

I nod. The house creaks and knocks around us, and Rueger still barks in the distance.

“I didn’t know how upset you were, Quinn,” my father says. “I came down hard on you.”

Tonight the moon shines through the blinds, too bright to camouflage how tired he is. His eyes are pinched the way they were when he first came home from his tour in Iraq after my mom left, and it was just him and me. He’s worried, I guess, wondering what the hell to do with me. Raising a daughter alone isn’t the life he wanted.

“Sometimes I forget you’re not one of my Marines.”

“I’m not that strong, Daddy,” I whisper.

One side of his mouth concedes a smile. “It’s been a long time since you called me that.”

Too long.

“You okay now?” he asks, rising.

I don’t want to, but I let go. “Yeah. Sorry I woke you.”

He pauses in my doorway. “I’m not. I love you, kid. Get some sleep.”

My door closes before I can recover enough to tell him I love him, too.

Chapter Fifteen

My alarm isn’t set, but I wake early enough to make it to Spring Lake by 0830.

I avoided seeing my father by sneaking out the front door while he poured himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen. Some Sundays I hang out at the hospital, so I’m guessing he’ll think that’s where I am. In reality, I’m sitting in my Jeep in front of the Blue Dawn Café, waiting for my mother to show and wondering what the hell I’m doing here.

The Blue Dawn Café is set back from the tree-lined sidewalk. The huge square windows frame the picturesque view of the inside with its vinyl booths and the regulars lined up on stools at the bar. It’s a freaking Norman Rockwell painting.

Why Spring Lake?
I think. Uncle Eddy is Army. Were they stationed at Fort Bragg—a half hour from Sweethaven—all this time? Or did they move back to North Carolina recently? And why now?

The questions whirl through my mind, but I don’t have any answers. She does, though. If I find the courage to walk into the diner, I can find out what I want to know. But will I like what I hear? I’ve learned that things can always suck worse than they did five minutes ago. Do I really want to rock this boat, with its plugged holes and missing oars?

I haven’t made any decisions, but it’s too late. She’s arrived. The café must have a back entrance, because one minute she’s not there and the next she’s sliding into a booth in the front window.

My mother.

At the hospital, maybe thirty seconds passed from the moment I saw her to when she’d walked out the door. Now, I take my time to absorb the changes. She hasn’t aged as much as I’d thought. Perhaps whatever was wrong with Uncle Eddy made her look strained that night.

She is beautiful, but not sultry like I remembered. I can’t put my finger on what’s different. The longer black hair and the toned-down makeup, obviously, but something more. Something in her attitude. She is a mystery.

I want to know. Everything.

*   *   *

Six years ago, my mother had promised we would take a trip. A train trip to New York City. Or a car ride to Wilmington. I didn’t care where we went. I loved that it would be just her and me.

Of course, after I found my mother in bed with Uncle Eddy, she stopped mentioning the vacation, and our getaway dissolved into mist. I knew the call I’d made to my father had sealed the deal. Uncle Eddy had disappeared from our house, and my father had yet to return home from the Middle East. My mother had scarcely noticed me in days, and I’d spent more time at Carey’s than at home. At least at his house, Carey tried to cheer me up. He even went so far as to convince Blake to let me pick the movie—
Mulan
—which they both hated and I loved. We did not agree on what constituted a “chick flick.”

One night, I’d heard my parents arguing by phone, the words indistinguishable except for my mother screaming “Don’t talk to me like I’m one of your fucking Marines, Cole!” and “I married
you
, not the damned Marines.” The last she punctuated with a loud, repeated slamming noise.

The next morning at breakfast, I alternated between worried glances at our broken phone, which lay like shrapnel on our kitchen table, and her. Distracted, she exhaled through pursed red lips and stared into the curlicue of smoke drifting above her head.

I shoved my Cookie Crisp cereal in circles around my bowl, dunking them in the milk and watching them bob back to the surface. Unsinkable cookies. Funny how the chocolate chips always looked bigger on the box than in real life.

“Stop playing with your food, Soph,” my mother said.

I looked up quickly to find her smashing a cigarette into the fancy white candy dish she used as an ashtray.

Her blue eyes met mine, suddenly fierce. “Let’s go somewhere.”

“Like to the movies?”

She shook her head. “Not the movies. Listen, we can do anything. Where would you want to go right now if you could go anywhere?”

The expectant look on her face weighed on me. She wanted me to pick somewhere exciting. If I said what I wanted—to spend time with her—it wouldn’t be the right answer. I shrugged and drank the last of the milk in my bowl.

“You’re too much like your father.” She sighed and rose to her feet, clearing away my cereal and her ashtray. “You don’t always have to be so perfect, Sophie. Be spontaneous.”

I grasped enough of that to know I’d disappointed her. “The beach,” I blurted out.

“The beach?” she asked as if the idea intrigued her. “I like it,” she added decisively, dropping our dishes in the sink with a clatter. “Go pack an overnight bag.”

She didn’t have to tell me twice. We both rushed through the house, laughing and calling to each other from our rooms. She made it into a race, giving me ten minutes to gather my things and get into our car. I made it in nine and a half.

We didn’t stray far from home.

The four hours to Nag’s Head on the Outer Banks reassured me like my call to my father hadn’t. We played games—“Find an object that starts with each letter of the alphabet” and
“I Spy”—and sang along to the radio. When we arrived, my mom splurged on one of those motels that sat right on the beach
and
had a pool.

A few moments of those two days pop out like Polaroids taped to my heart: Savoring saltwater taffy in waxy rainbow shades as we sat in the sand watching the sun color the water. Doing a flip into the pool in my red polka-dot one-piece with the bow on the front while mom clapped from under the shade of a lemon-yellow umbrella. Dancing in our hotel room with the radio turned up loud enough to feel my heart knocking in my chest, and the flash of my mother’s skirt as she whipped me around. And at the end of the day, curling up at her feet as her fingers tickled my scalp and she unknotted a day’s worth of tangles from my waist-length hair.

For two days she focused every bit of her attention on me. She listened to me chatter on about Carey and Blake. I told her everything I liked and everything I disliked and everything that popped into my head. Unfiltered. Uncensored. Unaware.

And then we returned home to find Uncle Eddy on our doorstep. I snubbed him as only an eleven-year-old can, running past him and stomping into the house. My mother sent me to my room, and their voices rumbled from the kitchen. They did not sound angry, like my parents usually did. They did not argue or shout. No—they spoke in hushed tones, excited whispers. Sharing secrets.

I sat on the floor with my ear to the door, tearing at the skin
around my fingernails, but I couldn’t make out their words. It didn’t matter, though. The next day the two of them picked me up from Carey’s house in Uncle Eddy’s old Buick. I sat in the backseat with my arms crossed, glaring out the window. I didn’t want my mother near
him
. He’d ruined everything.

Instead of driving to our house, we pulled up at my grandmother’s. My father’s mother, her steel-gray hair coiled into uniform rows of perfect barrel curls, shook her head at my mother. Uncle Eddy used to say that Grandma had sharpened her tongue on my grandfather for so many years, it could flay the skin off a man from one hundred yards away. While my mother and I climbed out of the car, my grandmother approached Uncle Eddy who busied himself pulling a suitcase—my pink suitcase—out of the trunk.

“You’ve betrayed your brother and this family,” she told him, taking the suitcase. “You’re not welcome here.”

Uncle Eddy’s face tightened, like each word had slapped him. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mom.”

She turned to my mother. “And you. You should be ashamed of yourself. I told Cole you would never be a Marine’s wife.”

My grandmother tried to restrain me, but I shook off her hand. I cinched my arms around my mother’s waist.

My mother had never liked my grandmother. She’d spent as little time as possible with her, complaining to my father that Grandma criticized everything from her smoking and her housekeeping to the way she raised me. Despite her feelings,
she’d always been polite on our visits, but that mask fell away as we stood there.

“You’re right, Ellen,” she said. “I’m not cut out for this life.”

They exchanged a look that went over my head.

My mother bent to kiss me on the forehead. “Be a good girl, Sophie.”

I refused to loosen my grip on her until she whispered in my ear, “I promise I’m coming back.”

I felt silly, then, for acting like a baby, clinging to her. My grandmother’s hands clamped on my shoulders the second I let my mother go. And we both watched my mother wave goodbye from the passenger’s seat of Uncle Eddy’s Buick.

What a sad picture I must have made. Sophie Topper Quinn . . . unwanted.

*   *   *

And now she’s back. Is she here to keep her promise?

I climb out of the Jeep and walk toward the café. She glances up from a menu when I’m a few feet away from the entrance. This time there is instant recognition when she sees me. Half rising from the booth, she touches the window as if she can reach me through the glass. Emotions flicker across her face, one stampeding into another. Fear. Pain. Need.

I stop and take a step back.

No.

Self-preservation finally kicks in. I can’t handle another person needing anything from me. I’ll have nothing left if I give
another piece of myself away. Why did I come here? She left. She walked away. My father stayed. Every day. Every night I had a nightmare in those weeks after she left. Every dinner was at 1800 hours, whether either of us liked it or not.

She was wrong. When she married my father, she
did
marry the Marines, for better and often for worse. She quit on us.

To hell with her and her needs.

Her mouth forms my name when I climb back into the Jeep. As I reverse out of the parking space, she runs for the café’s front door. Then she is a speck in my rearview and I’m regretting my trip to Spring Lake and wondering what this secret is going to cost me.

She broke our family when she broke her promise to return.

And I feel like I’ve betrayed my father by going there to meet her.

Chapter Sixteen

I’m sitting on a bus with forty-three other seniors and juniors. We outnumber the chaperones eight to one. We’re on our way to DC, where we’ll tour Capitol Hill, the National Mall, and stare at the White House through the security gates.