Liars and Fools (6 page)

Her face lit up. “Would you like me to look at yours sometime?” She glanced at Dad. “If it's okay with your father?”

“No, thanks.” I pushed myself along the slippery bench seat and stood up. “Excuse me. I have to go to the washroom.” Ignoring the roaring in my ears, I walked as fast as I could past the rows of red-and-white-checked tablecloths and into the safety of the ladies room. I slammed the cubicle door and locked it behind me. Safe. I leaned against the door, feeling its cool smooth metal, and started to cry. How could Dad do this?

A few minutes later, someone knocked at the door. “Fiona?”

It was her. “Go away.” I didn't want her to hear me crying.

“Your dad wanted me to check on you. He can't come in the ladies room. He wanted to make sure you were okay.”

I pushed my hands against my mouth and didn't answer.

“Fiona? Can you…Just tell me if…” Her voice trailed off.

“I'm fine.” I choked out the words. I could still hear her stepping closer to the stall door, testing it to see if it was locked.

“Fiona.” She lowered her voice. “Look, I didn't mention Saturday to your father. The reading, you know?”

“I thought maybe you didn't recognize me.”

“Of course, I recognized you. I'd been thinking about you, actually. I was a bit worried about how you reacted to the reading. When you walked in with your father tonight, I put the pieces together. I'm so sorry, Fiona.”

Sorry my mother was dead? Sorry she'd had some crazy psychic vision of my mom's last hours alive? Or sorry she'd lied to me and made the whole thing up?

“I felt so uncomfortable about it.” Kathy cleared her throat. “And I didn't know if you had told your father about the reading.”

“Are you kidding? He'd freak out.”

Kathy sighed. “Oh, dear. What a mess. I should have said something right away, but I wanted to respect your privacy.”

“No. Don't tell him.”

“Why not, Fiona? It doesn't seem right to keep this a secret.”

“He'll freak out. I'm serious.” I balled my hands into fists and pushed them against my thighs. “Anyway, I wouldn't have talked to you if I'd known you were… if I'd known you knew my dad.”

Kathy didn't say anything right away. I was starting to wonder if she was still there when she said, “I won't say anything if you don't want me to, but I'm sure he wouldn't be angry. I think you should tell him yourself. Especially if you're still feeling upset or confused about the reading.”

I snorted. “As if. Abby and I only went into that shop for a laugh. It's not like I believe in any of that stuff.” I felt a sharp twinge as I said it: What if Kathy was right, and Mom was still around? Could she even be listening right now? She might not try to get in touch with me if she thought I wasn't even open to the idea.

“That's fine, then.” Kathy hesitated; then she spoke softly. “I do know something about grief, Fiona.”

Like I wanted to hear about her problems. “Whatever,” I said.

“I know it might seem hard to believe right now, but it will get easier for you.”

“Right.” If she really wanted to make it easier for me, she could start by staying away from my father.

“Come back to the table when you are ready, okay?”

I didn't answer. After a few seconds, I heard her leave.

It will get easier.
Yeah, right. Sure, there were moments of feeling okay: sitting in classes at school, eating dinner at Joni's, laughing about stuff with Abby. Moments when I forgot about Mom being dead. No, not forgot about it, but just didn't think about it for a while. And I'd be having fun, and then I'd remember Mom and feel worse than ever. Because how could I be having fun when my mom was dead and would never have fun again?

Mom was all about having fun.
Life's too short to
waste time on things you don't enjoy,
she said one time when Dad complained about his job.

Dad had rolled his eyes.
Someone has to pay the
bills, Jennifer
.

Dad was a high-school principal, and Mom was a substitute teacher. They actually met at a teachers' conference. But in the last couple of years, Mom had been too busy sailing to work very much. She always checked the weather forecast before she decided whether or not to be available to teach the next day.

Mom was one of those people you couldn't help liking. She had this wide smile that made everyone else smile too; it was infectious in the same way yawns are. And I couldn't believe—I just could not believe—that I was never going to see her smile again. I started crying, arms wrapped around myself, rocking back and forth. Remembering hurt too much. Even my happiest memories pulled me into a whirlpool of guilt.

Because I had taken Mom's side.
Stop trying to
tell her what to do all the time,
I said to Dad.
She
knows what she's doing. You don't even know how
to sail.

My father must hate me. I pushed my hands against my mouth and tried to muffle the sound of my crying. I tried taking deep breaths, but it wasn't working. I couldn't catch my breath—it was like my throat was partially closed off or something. I started crying in this hiccupy kind of way, in noisy gasps that hurt my chest.

There was another knock on my cubicle door. “Fiona, honey?”

Dad, in the ladies room. I tried again to take a deep breath, and this time the air went down more easily. “Dad?”

“Listen, honey. You have to stop doing this to yourself.”

“I'm not doing anything,” I gasped out. I pushed my hands against my chest. “I just…I just…”

“Can you please come out of there?” I heard a door open, and a woman's voice said, “Oh, excuse me.”

I opened the door. Dad smiled apologetically at the woman and put his arm around me, pulling me out of the ladies room and into the tiny hallway. He rubbed my back. “Oh, honey.”

I was still crying, but it wasn't the panicky-can't-breathe type anymore—just the regular kind of tears. “I want to go home.”

“Take a few minutes and calm yourself down, okay? Then we'll finish our dinner and…”

“I'm not eating with her.”

Dad looked at me, his hair flopping the wrong way and his shoulders lifting helplessly. “Fiona. Please. This is important to me.”

I didn't know how he could even stand to be in the same room with her. Anger flashed through me like electricity, and I stopped crying abruptly. “Come on, Dad. She says she talks to dead people.”

“Fiona. Don't be so closed-minded.”

I thought about what Kathy had said back at the Mystic Heart—the waves, the darkness, the feeling of fear. “Do you believe her?” I rubbed my eyes with my sleeve, harder than necessary. “You can't believe her, Dad. That's crazy.”

He took off his glasses and polished the lenses on his shirt, not looking at me. “I don't know, Fiona. Who's to say it isn't possible?”

I wanted to believe it was possible. I really did. I'd give anything to talk to my mother again. But wanting to believe something didn't make it true. I couldn't robin stevenson stand to see Dad being taken in by Kathy's lies. “Me,” I said fiercely. “And anyone who isn't a total idiot.” I reached up and snapped my fingers in front of his eyes. “Dad. One. Two. Three. You are waking up now. Open your eyes.”

He swatted my hand away. “What are you doing?”

“I thought maybe she'd hypnotized you,” I said.

“Don't be smart. This isn't funny.” He put his glasses back on.

“You're telling me.”

We stared at each other for a long minute. Dad's face was creased with fury, and for a second I thought I'd gone too far. His Adam's apple jumped as he swallowed. “Fiona.” He took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, as if he was trying to calm himself down. “I know it was probably a shock to find out I was dating, if that's the right thing to call it. But I don't understand why you got so upset, why you rushed off like that.”

“You don't?” I raised my voice slightly. “Seriously? You don't know?” My stomach hurt, and I folded my arms across it.

“Fiona, come back to the table. Whatever is going on with you, well, you can be angry with me if you want to, but it isn't fair to Caitlin and Kathy to take it out on them.”

I hesitated.

“Now.” Dad lowered his chin and met my eyes. “Right now.”

Obviously, I didn't have a choice. I followed him back to the booth and slid back in beside Caitlin like nothing had happened. She was even more wide-eyed and stunned-looking than before.

“It'll be okay,” Kathy said, like she was trying to be reassuring. “You'll see.”

Did the spirits tell you that, Kathy
? I bit my tongue and said nothing. I wasn't so sure that everything would be okay. My hopes on that subject were not high at all. In fact, they were somewhere down around the fallen pieces of pepperoni on the black-and-white-tiled floor. I sighed. For now, I just had to get through the next couple of hours.

To my relief, everyone decided to ignore me, and they carried on with their meal as if I wasn't there. Every so often, I snuck a peek at Kathy. I couldn't believe Dad had actually fallen for someone who claimed to speak with dead people. I couldn't believe he'd fallen for someone who told lies for a living.

seven

The awful dinner at Paul's Pizza Palace ended eventually. I looked away as Dad said goodbye to Kathy, all awkward handshakes and shoulder pats, like he wanted to kiss her, but not in front of me. He tousled Caitlin's hair. “Bye, kiddo.”

Kiddo
was what Tom called me, but I'd never heard Dad say it before. It looked like he already knew Caitlin well enough to be on a pet-name basis. Apparently, I was the only one who had been kept in the dark about Dad and Kathy's relationship.

“Bye, Fiona,” Kathy said. “It was nice to meet you.”

“Uh-huh.” I kept my eyes lowered, embarrassed about having lost it earlier. They probably thought I was a drama queen. Then again, who cared what they thought?

Dad and I got in the car, and he drove toward home. Neither of us spoke until we were pulling into our driveway. Dad glanced at me and looked away again. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and fiddled with the windshield wipers, squirting washer fluid and cleaning the windshield even though it looked perfectly clean already. He turned off the engine and looked at me. His eyes were pink and tired-looking behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

“I guess I shouldn't have sprung it on you like that,” he said. “Maybe you needed a little more warning. A little time to get used to the idea before you met them.”

I felt flat and emptied out from crying. “Maybe.” I didn't think I'd ever get used to the idea. I didn't even
want
to get used to it.

It was a relief to get up to my own room and shut the door behind me. It wasn't late but I changed into my pj's before lifting my mattress and sliding out the chart book I had hidden there. I sat cross-legged on my bed and spread the chart book open in front of me. I stared at the familiar pale blue background dotted with the tiny yellow shapes of the islands and swirled with contour lines. Somewhere in that pale blue expanse was my mother.

Dead reckoning
. That's what it was called when you navigated without using a
GPS
or anything, without having landmarks or even the stars to look to. Dead reckoning meant finding your way by keeping track of your position based upon your speed, your compass course and the passing of time. I knew how to take a fix on a point of land; I knew how to plot my position and my course on a chart. Mom had taught me that. I also knew that when you were on the water, lots of things could throw you off. Tides, currents, drift. Even your watch running a few minutes slow, or the algae on your boat's hull interfering with your boat's knot meter so that you didn't gauge your speed accurately. You could end up miles from where you thought you were.

That's what we believed happened to Mom: a simple navigation error. She had flown down to French Polynesia to help a friend with a passage from Raiatea to another island, and they hit a reef in the middle of the night. They shouldn't have been anywhere near it. A
GPS
error, some people had suggested, but Mom would never have relied on
GPS
. She'd have been plotting her course the old-fashioned way. Another boat saw the flares they set off, but it was a rough night, and Mom's boat a long way from anywhere. It was the next morning before anyone could even start looking.

By that time, it was too late. The sailboat had been battered on the reef and completely destroyed. A couple of weeks later, their life raft was found hundreds of miles away. It had been inflated and released, but no one was in it.

They never found Mom or her friend.

I traced my finger over the lines around Raiatea. Sometimes I imagined that Mom was still out there somewhere, that she had washed up on some tropical shore and was surviving on coconuts, waiting to be rescued. Or maybe she'd been rescued by the islanders and was living with them, playing on a golden beach with their chubby laughing children and catching brightly colored fish and watching the waves rolling over the fine white sand. But I didn't really believe it.

I knew she wasn't ever coming home.

The next day at school, I grabbed Abby in the hallway before the morning bell rang.

“You are not going to believe this,” I told her.

She raised one eyebrow. “What?”

“Dad made me go for dinner last night with the woman he's been seeing. And guess what? It was that woman from the Mystic Heart place.”

“Are you serious?” Her mouth fell open in a perfect circle. “The owner or the psychic?”

“The psychic. Well, the one who claims to be psychic.” I made a face. “Her name's Kathy.”