If the Witness Lied (10 page)

“Let me give you my cell number,” cries Gwen, brought to a stop by thorns.

Madison hurries. Gwen is just the type to run all the way around and meet Madison coming out the other side.

*   *   *

Jack and Tris have no sooner finished watering a tree than Jack’s cell phone rings. It’s Diana. He doesn’t even consider
answering. He can’t have a second conversation about Cheryl painting his room.

When Tris spots the big-kid jungle gym, he forgets the library and hurries toward the playground gate. Jack trudges after him. In adventure films, people soar with adrenaline and leap from cliff to cliff, using some vast, untapped reservoir of energy. Jack can hardly hoist his own sneakers. It doesn’t bode well.

The phone rings again in his hand. He jumps at the sound of his own ringtone.

Madison. Twice in ten minutes. She sure is eager. How does television do this to people?

Jack answers carefully. One syllable. No inflection. “Hi.”

“It’s me, Madison.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I just drove over to the house. Jack, Cheryl’s gotten hold of a TV producer. They want to do a special on us. On Tris, actually. They’re going to bring in a psychiatrist and get us to talk in front of cameras and portray Tris as some evil baby creature, and hope that we cry, and above all they want to film the moment when Smithy gets here and we have a reunion. Smithy’s agreed to this, Jack. She’s in favor of it. She is actually on the train right now. She couldn’t come home to visit us or anything like that, but a chance to be on TV, and she’s on her way. Cheryl’s trying to hunt you down for this reunion. She knows you have Tris. I called Mrs. Griz and tried to convince her not to sign on, but that’s not going to happen. Mrs. Griz is going to help them.”

The prospect of an ally should bolster him. Instead, Jack’s
fading, like a setting sun. “How did you happen to be at the house today?” he asks, since Smithy isn’t the only one who doesn’t visit.

Tris reaches the jungle gym, stretching his little fingers toward the high bar. His pants fall down. Usually this means that Tris falls down too. Instead, he carefully pulls his jeans up. It’s a first. Tris is normally as unaware of clothing as a chimpanzee.

Jack catches up and helps with the blue jeans. It’s hard to hold the phone at the same time.

“I came home because of yesterday,” Madison is saying. “Daddy’s birthday. I’m the oldest. I should have gathered us together and bought a sheet cake, and we would have written I LOVE YOU, DAD on his cake, and had enough candles. Do you ever think of them in heaven, and they’re looking down, and they’re disappointed in us? Well, not you, they’re not disappointed in you. But me.” Madison is crying. Jack is oddly comforted by this. “There’s a second thing that happened yesterday, Jack,” she adds. “Mrs. Emmer had to go shopping at the mall.”

Girls! Just when you think they have something to offer.

“I stayed in the car while the Emmers went shopping. I pretended I was going to study when I was really going to sit and think about Dad’s birthday. And parked at the back of the lot was a Jeep. Same model and year as Dad’s. I thought it might
be
Dad’s, so I went over to look for initials carved in the dash. Well, there weren’t any initials, it wasn’t his, but it was unlocked. Remember how Daddy never locked his Jeep either? I couldn’t help it, Jack. I opened the door and sat in the passenger seat.”

He can’t stand remembering this moment when their father made his final fatal move. Shut up, shut up! he wants to shout.

“Maybe not all Jeeps are like the one in the parking lot. Maybe there’s something different about that particular Jeep. But here’s the thing, Jack. The asphalt was flat and I knew the Jeep couldn’t roll, so I tried to release the parking brake. I wasn’t strong enough. It took me three tries.”

Madison doesn’t continue. She doesn’t need to. She has just told him that Dad’s death did not happen the way the witness claimed.

The only witness.

Cheryl.

It isn’t Tris’s fault? It never was? Is that possible?

But then how
did
it happen?

Tris’s stubby fingers are wrapped around the highest bar, his little shoe flailing around trying to find the right step. “Don’t help me,” warns Tris.

Tris is like their mother. Determined. Now two weeks short of his third birthday, Tris has lost that baby look. He’s sturdier and firmer. Like Mom. Sturdier and firmer in a decision than anyone Jack will ever know.

Jack has never cried. Not one tear. Not one sob. Not for Mom or Dad or Tris or himself. Now he can hardly talk over the lump in his throat. “We’re at the library, Mad. Meet us in the playground out back.”

*   *   *

Madison cuts through yet more backyards to return to her car. She hasn’t run back and forth in the mud like this since she was
young enough to play hide-and-seek. She’s unlocking her car door when the windowless rear of the white TV van appears through the trees as it slowly backs out of her driveway. Madison leaps into the Celica, yanks the door shut and slides down as low as she can get behind the wheel. She’s still visible.

The van heads toward her. Is Gwen driving? Madison doesn’t risk a look. When the van passes, Madison straightens up. Tris’s day care is in the other direction, so whatever the TV crew is doing, it isn’t doing that.

Yet.

She starts the engine and is putting the car in first when the blue BMW drives straight toward her. It’s Angus. Too late to duck—movement would draw his attention. She sits still. He’s not looking her way. He’s not looking at the road, either; he’s fiddling with the windshield wipers or radio or something. The guy is a multiple menace.

There’s one worry she can solve. She calls Mrs. Emmer. “Aunt Bonnie?”

Mrs. Emmer is always distraught when she’s interrupted at work. “Hello, Madison, honey,” she says, sounding frazzled before she hears a word.

“Jack phoned. He needs me at home. I’m just going to throw a few clothes in a suitcase and drive on over and stay for the weekend, okay?”

“Of course. Is something else wrong? Can I help? What shall I do?”

Madison is awestruck by Mrs. Emmer. What a sense of duty. How completely she has accepted her role as godparent. It
doesn’t have God in it, but it has love. Maybe that’s the same thing. “I think he’s just feeling low. I’ve been the world’s worst older sister. I’ll let you know how it’s going.”

Madison heads for the library. It’s only a mile. She checks her rearview mirror constantly. The three cars she’s worried about—the gray Lincoln, the white van and the blue BMW—are distinctive. She doesn’t see them and nobody is following her. Just in case, she goes through a bank drive-in lane, comes out in the supermarket lot and cuts through the alley, which is kind of fun. Or lunatic.

She parks behind the library. The children’s playground is fenced so toddlers can’t run out among the cars. Through the chain link, she sees Tris teetering at the top of the old-fashioned jungle gym, an open metal cube with crossbars. Her heart lurches.

But Jack is there.

Of course he is.

Jack lifts his big hands—hands that ought to be at football practice—as a net for his little brother. They both see her. Jack might be smiling. She pretends he’s smiling. She waves, even though she’s not sure Tris will know her at all, let alone from this distance. Tris waves back.

Waving is one of Tris’s favorite activities, maybe his earliest. Talking comes late, and when Tris does start talking, he’s comically adult. At two, Tris doesn’t say “Me do it.” Tris says, “I do it also.” Tris loves the word “also.” I eat a cookie also. I throw the ball also. I drive the Jeep also.

The media loved that sentence. “You do, Tris?” they baited him. “You drive the Jeep also?”

Tris would nod, eager to demonstrate.

Now Madison thinks, Why was Tris available to the media? Because every time there was a camera, Cheryl put him in front of it.

*   *   *

The train seems to brake for miles before the actual station, wasting precious seconds when Smithy could be home. Smithy can hardly wait to get off the train. It seems that a friend of Cheryl’s is visiting. He’ll pick Smithy up at the train station and bring her home. His name is Angus. “I showed him your picture,” confides Cheryl. “The really pretty one, when you were home over the summer and we went out for Sunday brunch. He’s driving a blue BMW. I’m so glad you’re coming home, Smithy! We’ve missed you so. This is simply wonderful!”

Aunt Cheryl has never written to Smithy. Never e-mailed. Never phoned. But who cares? All along, the family wanted her. Even Aunt Cheryl wanted her.

At last, the train stops and Smithy steps off.

It’s one-thirty on the afternoon of November sixth, and her new life, or maybe her old one, is here.

A high wind sweeps away clouds and rain. The sky is clear and blue and immense. It feels like God. Are her mother and father somehow up there, in some space or sphere called heaven?

I’m sorry, she tells God. My baby brother needed love and I turned my back. I
have
the love. I just didn’t use it. Help me go home. Let me love all of them. Let them love me.

The passengers head for a covered pedestrian overpass that leads to the parking lot. The stair is so high it’s funny. Lighthouses have this many steps. Smithy is in the best shape of her life because boarding school is crazy for athletic activity. It feels good to run up, because this time she’s running in the right direction. She dances across the walkway as the train below her roars out of the station, and then skitters down the other side.

A handsome man, with beautifully white hair and wonderfully blue eyes, is waving at her. His hair isn’t old-age white; it’s sun-bleached blond. What a great smile he has! This is Cheryl’s friend? Smithy would have said Cheryl didn’t have any friends, never mind a great-looking one like this. But Smithy has an attitude. She’ll have to get rid of it. That’s the point of coming home. Down with attitude. Up with affection.

“Your aunt Cheryl talks about you so much,” he says, “I feel as if we’re already friends. And don’t worry about the whole school runaway thing. That can be solved with a few phone calls. How was the train trip?”

“Good.” Smithy is so excited she’s out of vocabulary. It’s a neat feeling, as if she’s all heart and soul. She’s vaguely aware of somebody with a monster camera filming the station. Probably a promotional thing. Not that November is a great advertisement for tourism in Connecticut.

The blue BMW Cheryl mentioned is idling in the tow-away zone. Smithy darts over, and has to wait forever until Angus reaches his car. When he leaves the parking lot, there’s an annoying intersection to negotiate where he’ll turn left onto the
Post Road and from there onto the thruway. Angus leans forward, studying traffic. He turns right.

Smithy feels a bit of unease. The Post Road has red lights for miles. It’s slow. Nobody would choose it over I-95.

Before she can tell Angus to turn around, he smiles at her. It’s too big a smile. Smithy’s unease deepens. Could he be Cheryl’s boyfriend? Has he moved in? Will her welcome home be diluted by this man and his huge smile? What if he’s become a stepfather to Jack? What if Tris calls him Daddy?

Smithy will be the outsider. The classic nightmare: everybody knows something she doesn’t know. Everybody has alliances she doesn’t have.

Smithy hates Angus now, which is embarrassing. Having just told God that she is all love, perfect love, she finds that her first thought is of hate. She laughs. “How do you happen to know Cheryl?”

“Cheryl and I plan to embark on a project together.”

This doesn’t sound like romance. What project would interest Cheryl, who is certainly not involved in civic affairs or studying for a degree?

“I’m a television producer,” he says. “I have wonderful opportunities in life. Every month is an adventure. Cheryl and I have an adventure planned.”

Cheryl? Adventures?

“What shows do you watch on television?” he asks Smithy.

Boarding school is a holdout against television. Study hours are enforced from Sunday through Thursday night, seven to nine-thirty P.M. Bedroom doors have to be open, and every
student must be doing classwork. Computers, yes. Computer games or videos, no. Smithy can only tell Angus what she used to watch.

But he has moved on. He names several reality shows—a family with skillions of children, a family whose children have disabilities, even a family with morbidly obese children. “Tons of fun to produce. So much drama.”

“Wow,” she says, bored. She has never seen any of these. Smithy prefers cops, arrests and chases. It occurs to her that she can watch TV again, like a regular person. This is a nice bonus to coming home.

“I see a McDonald’s!” cries Angus, as if he sees the skyline of Paris. “I’m starving. Let’s hit the drive-thru. What can I get you?”

“Oh, nothing, thanks. I just want to get home.”

“Smithy, I’d really love to get acquainted before there’s a big press of people around.”

What does that mean? The only people who will press around are her family.

He turns into McDonald’s. “Smithy, I want to do a documentary on the brave and beautiful Fountain children. Madison was just over at the house a few minutes ago, discussing it, and your aunt Cheryl is on her way to pick up Jack. It’ll be a portrait of courage and determination.”

A documentary? On her? On Madison and Jack?

It seems extraordinary that Madison and Jack would agree. Jack even shut down his Facebook page last year, as if he could
close off all evidence of being a Fountain. If only Smithy had been home for the discussion. She’s missed so much. Thank goodness she’s here now. She won’t miss all of it.

She sees herself lifting Tris for a hug. This time, the cameras will capture Smithy as a good sister instead of a rotten one. Maybe she’ll bake cookies, like Mom, and pour milk, and be the sister who keeps a home, not the one who abandons it. She sees Madison and Jack smiling gently in the background.

She thinks, I didn’t bring any makeup.