If I Lie (9 page)

George gave me an approving nod. “You know how to hold a camera.”

I shrugged. The camera Uncle Eddy had given me had broken long ago, and my father had never replaced it. While I’d had it, I’d loved taking pictures, though. Loved seeing how I could freeze time.

“But do you know how to use it?” George challenged.

I shook my head, and he proceeded to spend the hour giving me my first photography lesson. Somehow he managed to be surly and patient at the same time.

We stopped when the sun disappeared behind the clouds. I handed the camera back to George and moved behind him to push his chair.

“I can do it!” he said sharply, hitting the brake.

I knocked his hand away. Having dealt with macho men my entire life, I knew all about hurt pride. “And drop your camera? I just found a reason to like you. Don’t take it away so soon.”

He huffed a breath that sounded like a half-chuckle. “You’re kind of a brat, aren’t you?”

I found myself surprised to be smiling on what felt like the worst day of my life, and all because of this grouchy old man. Maybe my punishment wouldn’t be so bad.

“What the hell is your name, girl? It’s rude not to introduce yourself.”

“Oh, like you know all about having manners.” Another huff and I grinned at the back of his gray head. I stopped at the entrance to the elevator and walked around the chair to face him. “I’m Sophie Quinn.”

We shook hands.

“Sophie, I think you and I will do just fine.”

Nobody called me Sophie. Not since my mom had left. But I didn’t correct him.

“If you hit on me, I’m out of here,” I said, my hand still in his. “That’s just creepy.”

“Oh, please. You’re barely out of diapers.” George loosened his grip and rolled his chair onto the elevator. He called over his shoulder, “Nice to meet you, brat.”

“Thanks for the lesson,” I yelled.

He waved a hand over his shoulder and disappeared when the elevator doors closed.

*   *   *

“Hey, George?”

“Hmm,” he answers absently. He is still poring through Don’s photos.

“I have to go. It’s almost dinnertime.”

“ ’Kay. Night, Soph.” He looks up when I am shoving my arms into my jacket sleeves, his gray eyes sharp. “I know the
snow is gone, but the roads are still icy. You drive carefully, you hear me?”

It feels so nice so have someone worry about me. Before he can react, I drop a kiss on his forehead. “I promise. See you soon.”

“Not if I see you first, brat.”

Laughing, I walk out of the room, leaving behind the candy and the Cubans.

I bypass the stairs and regret it when I enter an elevator going up. A doctor exits onto the third floor. I impatiently hit the button for the lobby. The elevator doors are closing when a nurse rolls a sleeping man on a gurney down the hall, and I recognize him.

Corporal Edward Topper. Uncle Eddy.

Chapter Ten

The mirrored elevator door reflects my shocked face back at me.

Mouth open, eyebrows raised, glazed eyes wide.

I am frozen until the doors open on the first floor and a doctor gets on the elevator. He pauses for a moment when I stand there, unmoving, his expression wavering between concern and irritation, like he thinks I’m going to break down in the elevator. That finally gets my feet moving. I make it as far as the straight-backed chairs in the lobby before I collapse, dropping my bag at my feet.

Uncle Eddy.

How long has it been? Five years? No, six. Six years since he drove away with my mother in the passenger seat of his cherry Buick. Six years of wishing and wondering, my thoughts wandering from
Maybe they can’t call because they moved to some remote town in Africa to become missionaries
to
Are they dead, their bones
rotting in some lost graveyard like Josephine, Thomas, and Susie?
Six years of junior high, high school, best friends, lost friends, and my missing boyfriend. Six years of living with my father and his rules and his expectations and his
Dinner at 1800, you do what I say, you’re Quinn now not Sophie
. Six long years and he shows up out of the blue in the VA Hospital down the road from my house.

Uncle Eddy.

A red filter colors my vision.

I hate him. I want to rip his eyes out of his head and shove them down his throat. I want to roll him out of the hospital, push him off that gurney, and leave him to die in the freezing cold.

I bite my lip until it bleeds, and the iron tastes like molten rage. He stole my mother. I needed her more than he
ever
could, and he took her.

And as I sit there in that stupid, uncomfortable lobby chair, the elevator doors open again and my mother exits. She appears, strolling toward me like she’d never left. My mind clicks into a fast shutter speed, snapping continuous frames of her.

Her black hair is longer and pulled back. Elegant. Her lips are no longer berry-stained, but she is Elizabeth Taylor. Except she is no longer the Elizabeth Taylor of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
. She is older, I realize. Thirty-eight on her most recent birthday.

Her walk is different too. She no longer glides, her hips swaying in a sensual figure eight. Gravity has caught up and
tugged her to the ground. Even her eyes pull down at the corners as she glances toward me with a hint of a frown.

Uncle Eddy must have seen me in the hospital at some point. He’s told her I’m here, and she’s come to the lobby in search of me. She draws closer and I am shaking, my heart banging against my ribs like it could leap out at her if only my body would let it.

Ten feet, eight feet, six feet.

She almost reaches me, and my stomach clenches in anticipation of a hug, a confrontation, an
I’m so sorry I left you, baby
. I don’t know if I should hug her or hate her. Hug. Hate. Hug. Hate.

Hug.
I flow to my feet. My mouth opens—

And she walks past me.

Her expression does not change, and her step never falters. I stare at the back of her head until she disappears through one of the exits, tugging her black trench coat close to her body.

She saw me. My mother saw me and walked away like I was nothing.

Again.

I break.

*   *   *

It takes forever for me to calm down, for the quiet sobs to stop, for me to relive every second of her walk through the lobby. Over and over, I picture the expression on her face when she glanced at me.

Blank. Polite.

One stranger passing another. She didn’t recognize me. My own mother didn’t know me from a stranger standing in a hospital lobby.

What do they say? That a mother will know her own child even if they’ve been separated?

Bullshit.

My reflection appears in the window behind my chair. I feel drained. Not Sophie. Not Quinn. Not Q. Not anybody.

Six years have changed me, too.

I am hollow.

*   *   *

No eleven-year-old should have to choose between her parents.

After I found Uncle Eddy in my parents’ bed, things changed between my mother and me. The months my father spent in Iraq had anchored me to my mother. She was my ballast—sturdy, strong, balancing the upheaval my father’s absences and reentries blew into our lives.

“You’re too young to understand,” she said that afternoon in the car as we drove home from Carey’s, where she’d found us holding hands on his porch.

I studied the view out the passenger window, wondering what I hadn’t understood. Mom. Uncle Eddy. Naked in my parents’ bed. I was eleven, not stupid.

She kept talking. “I love your daddy, Sophie. You know that.”

She pulled the car into our driveway, and I turned to see her gazing at me, pleading. That look confused me.

“Are you and Uncle Eddy getting married?” I asked.

She recoiled, her eyes round with surprise. It took her two tries to speak. “No! Geez, Sophie, no!”

“Are you and Daddy getting a divorce?” I bit the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t cry again.

That time she didn’t answer so quickly. Her hands gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. Her lips—bare of any lipstick for once—tightened at the corners in a tense frown. Finally she said, “I don’t know, baby. I’m not sure we can all keep on like this.”

Her blue eyes blurred with tears, but she no longer seemed bitter. She looked sad. And scared. I’d never seen her afraid. I threw myself against her.

Her arms closed around me, and her sigh lifted my head against her chest. “Oh, Soph.”

“I won’t tell, Mommy. I promise.”

I didn’t know I was lying, but I think she did. She held me anyway.

For the next two weeks we continued living our lives like always. During the hot days, I played with Carey and Blake, returning home dirty and exhausted. Uncle Eddy disappeared, or at least he never showed up when I was around. And my mother . . .

She sat on the porch swing, pushing off the ground with a bare foot, her eyes latched on to something in the distance that I couldn’t see. During dinner I would be telling her about my day, but she was no longer part of my world. She’d become a
ghost I couldn’t catch hold of. Worse, she’d made excuses to avoid speaking to my father when he called. Even when they’d fought, she had always spoken to him. Every conversation could be the last. We all knew that. But my mother, she seemed to be slipping away.

I could think of only one person strong enough to make her stay. One person whose word was law in our house. If my father told her to stay, she would do it.

So I broke my promise to my mother.

When my father called home, I told him what I’d seen. He didn’t ask to speak with my mother. He didn’t comfort me. Instead, he told me to get to bed and hung up.

I went to bed, scared I wore my guilt on my skin. That my mother would come to tuck me in and guess what I’d done. But she didn’t come into my room that night, or any other night that week. I started to fear that she would never tuck me in again. She hardly looked at me, but sometimes I would catch her staring at me with great pain, as if she knew I’d betrayed her.

So when she dropped me off at my grandmother’s soon after, I knew she was mad at me. She drove away with Uncle Eddy, and I guessed she was leaving my father.

But I never—not once—expected her to leave me, too.

If only I’d just kept my damned mouth shut.

*   *   *

The longer I sit in the shadows of the hospital lobby, the more the rage expands, stretching into corners inside of me. Questions
pile on top of one another in incomplete, incoherent, half-formed thoughts.
How could she—? Where have they—? What are they—? Why?

My muscles tighten with the effort to be still when I feel like I could explode and burn the hospital down with Edward inside it.

Surveillance
, I decide.

I will stake out the hospital. Every free minute I have, every minute I am not at school or imprisoned in my room, I will be here, waiting for her to return.

Some screwed-up part of me hoped she’d died in a car accident five minutes after she’d driven away. I fantasized that her last thoughts were of me, wishing she’d never left. The stupid daydreams of a naive little girl.

Because the truth is, she really did abandon me. Like I was scum. Like I was NOTHING. Like she guessed I would become Sophie Topper Quinn, town slut. Unworthy of her, the original town slut.

Too damned bad for her.

I have things to say.

And I don’t really give a shit if she wants to hear them.

Chapter Eleven

I don’t tell my father I have seen them. I don’t even consider it. I’m not sure what he would do, if anything, but there is a slim chance he could make them leave. He has power in our world. I will not allow them to leave before I talk to my mother.

Now I have another secret.

Seven for a secret never to be told.

*   *   *

School sucks, but not like before.

I am different.

The rage, rekindled when my mother nonchalantly walked through the hospital, burns slow and bright. I think my skin glows with it, because the threats and the cruel treatment stop. Badass Jamie pushes me in the hallway once. I spin to face her, and something about me sends her backing away with a new
caution. In the week that follows my mother’s visit to the hospital, Jamie does not bother me again.

I’ve waited at the hospital in the evenings as much as I can, but I haven’t seen Uncle Eddy or my mother again. I decided not to ask questions. I don’t want them knowing I’m looking for them. Now I live for the weekends when I will have uninterrupted hours to search them out.