When Secrets Die (27 page)

“Look, I need to go home. I know it's a lot to ask, but could you drive me back? I really need to go back to school and work things out with my mom.”

Amaryllis gave her a look over her shoulder and headed to the sink, opened a drawer, and took out a pair of scissors. “You know I have about a million things to do myself, Miss Blaine. I have a little business I'm trying to get established down here so I don't have to stay at my job, which is pretty unhappy for me these days because I've been helping your mother, taking her side against Dr. Tundridge. I'm using my vacation time to get this done. It will take me four and a half hours just to drive you back to Lexington, and then another four and a half to drive back here.”

“Maybe you shouldn't have brought me down here.”

“Maybe I should have left you by the side of the road.”

Blaine blinked. It was one thing for her mother to say things like that. This woman was weird and mean.

“Fine,” Blaine said. “I'll find my own way.”

She was to the door and out on the front porch when Amaryllis caught up with her, puffing away like she'd run a hundred miles.

Outside, a good wind was kicking up, and the sky had gone dirty blue. The air was snappish, and it was oddly warm.

“Blaine, don't be silly. I talked to your mother last night. She's driving down to get you this afternoon.”

Blaine felt her knees give just a little.
Mom. Finally. Thank God
.

“Come on back in, it's going to storm.”

Amaryllis watched her, eyes very round and unblinking. And Blaine stood in the doorway, hand on the screen, thinking how good it would feel to walk away and get out of this house because Amaryllis was really starting to creep her out. But Mom was coming. If her mom had already left, she'd be there before dinnertime. No more gaggy peanut butter sandwiches.

If she walked away her mother would never find her. All she wanted was to go home. Blaine looked back up at the dark kitchen, the living room, overfurnished and cluttered. And followed Amaryllis back into the house.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE

It was surreal, sitting on the worn fabric of Amaryllis's couch, in god-awful Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, Tennessee, listening to the woman's brother snore, trying to avoid looking at his large feet and his big toe thrusting through a hole in dingy athletic socks. Amaryllis had been talking about her brother all afternoon, saying he had called and was coming to stay, because they shared the house and he used it when he was in the area.

She talked about him like he was this very savvy-cool entrepreneur. Actually, he was tired looking, with slicked-back hair that was either oily or wet with rain, a potbelly that stuck up over the waistband of his cheap navy blue cotton trousers, and hair growing out of his ears. So totally unattractive and masculinity-gross that Blaine said an actual thank-you to God that hers was a single-mother household. Thank God her mother had never brought anything like this back to the house.

He had seemed startled to see Blaine sitting on the couch watching reruns of
Roseanne
in the middle of the day; seeing him had taken her equally aback. She had heard him first, the grinding metal noise of a semi truck, only it was just the cab, being parked on the street beside the house, because no way was there room in the actual driveway or out front. The cab was purple. Like bubble gum.

He had taken his shoes off when he entered the front door, and Blaine connected that with the pile of shoes on a mat by the entranceway and concluded that this was one of those “shoes off” households she and her mother always made fun of. No doubt she had already offended Amaryllis by wearing her shoes around inside, and while she normally went barefooted at home, or sock-footed in the winter, she now kept her shoes on at all times. It made her feel better. Like she was ready to go.

Blaine got up and looked out the window. She did not care if she woke Stanley up. He had introduced himself as “Stanley the Manly,” and she had smiled really hard, unable to even force out a laugh.

No sign of her mother. She made a point of not looking at Stanley. Just being in the room with him brought on more intimacy than she liked.

She had eaten two of the peanut-butter–stuffed celery sticks that Amaryllis had brought her on a plastic plate. Blaine felt like a snob, but her mother never used plastic plates, and if you stayed at their house, her mother cooked or took you out and did not just give you peanut butter all the time—even though the peanut butter was homemade. Amaryllis always gave out jars of the homemade peanut butter like it was a kidney she was donating, and always with that aura of the overworked, perfectionist housewifey. But looking around this place, that was a joke. Dust, dirt on the carpet. Dishes with dried-up food stacked in the sink. It smelled. It smelled like garbage. Blaine felt a bit of nausea back in her throat, and she took slow, steady breaths. Please God she was not going to be sick again, not like last night. It was just a wave of stress nausea, she got that sometimes.

She looked out the window again. It was getting dark. Lunchtime had passed to dinnertime, and where was her mom? She should have been here by now.
Please come, please come, please come
.

It had been raining hard, since before Stanley the Manly had driven up. She'd overheard him talking in the kitchen to Amaryllis. He didn't sound happy she was there—Blaine wasn't any happier about it.

It made Blaine uncomfortable, knowing he was just sitting there waiting for her to leave. She should be home by now, in the cozy little house Great-Aunt Jodina had given them so they would always be safe and have a place to live. She thought of her room, and the new furniture she and her mom had bought, the mahogany desk they'd found. She shut her eyes hard, trying not to cry. She should have called Aunt Jodina for help, or even Franklin. Why had she ever called Amaryllis Burton?

Blaine wanted to go home, to hear her mother in the kitchen chopping away at cloves of garlic, slicing onions, and playing her old-lady jazz music on the CD. She wanted to zone out in front of the TV with eight hundred cable channels instead of the ridiculous four Amaryllis and Stanley got with that stupid antenna on top of a television that was so old it was in a faux walnut veneer console cabinet. She wanted to go home to her mother's weird but wonderful kitchen, where her mom would be pulling out the iron skillet and sloshing it slick with olive oil, and probably making some pasta and singing to herself, and asking Blaine how her day was. Just the two of them. Normal. Ned was gone, and they'd always miss him, but it was okay, just her and Mom, and better than okay when Franklin was there.

She liked Franklin a lot. She knew he was crazy about her mother. They actually smoked cigars together and watched old movies in their sweatpants. What a cool relationship. And the best part was that it was the three of them hanging out, not a couple with a kid in the way. Sometimes Blaine and Franklin got on so well that her mother left them to whatever they were doing—usually killer backgammon or chess. Franklin was a fantastic chess player, and Blaine was still learning. And Mom would cook while they played, and it was just kind of easygoing and nice, and then Blaine could go out later with Twyla or something and not worry about leaving her mother alone. And Franklin liked to take the two of them places.
His girls
, he would say, clearly so happy to have two girls to call his own.

Had her mother told Franklin what had happened between them? Had she told him about how Blaine had gone berserk and “attacked” her in the Jeep? Maybe Franklin hated her now. Maybe he'd take her mother's side against her and never like her again.

Blaine pictured the two of them, Mom and Franklin, driving up in front of the house to pick her up. Maybe the rain was slowing them down. She heard a car outside and got up to look out the window again. Some car she didn't know, that didn't slow down. She was standing on tiptoe, trying to see farther down the street, when the pain hit again, sudden and hard, stabbing just under the rib cage on her right side. Any minute now she was going to throw up.

She wanted to run to the bathroom in her bedroom, but the pain was so bad she could hardly stand up, so she moved carefully, carefully and slowly. Stanley didn't even wake up. Amaryllis was in the kitchen, back turned, when she headed past the doorway and down the hall, but she was aware, on some level she was
sure
, that Amaryllis watched her while she held her side and bent double, and Blaine expected, even dreaded, some kind of concern, a question, a
Do you feel all right?
But there was nothing but silence, and Blaine was in too much pain to turn around and look.

She left the bathroom door open because she knew that Amaryllis would probably be in to see about her any minute. As expected, the vomiting was violent, so deep and so violent that Blaine felt she should be vomiting blood. There went the peanut butter, the celery, and that was all she had in her stomach. Bile next, then the white milky froth.

She knew that she was really bad off. She knew she needed help. She threw up, again and again, as if a vomit switch had been thrown and her body could not stop no matter that there was nothing left in her stomach. And the pain up under the ribs was so bad, she could not call for help. She had no breath for it. She could not speak.

The chills came, like they had the night before, and now she was seriously scared. It was like her body was going into shock or something. She curled up on the floor, head next to the toilet. If she didn't move, maybe she would stop throwing up. But no, that didn't work, and she was back up on her knees, until she could not get back up again, and she just vomited, sideways out of her mouth, on the floor.

Where was her mother? Why didn't she come? Why didn't one of the adults out there come back and put her in a car and take her to an emergency room somewhere? She had always hated going to the doctor, had cringed when people even spoke about surgery, and had thought after dark thought about the things Ned had suffered in the name of medical science. She didn't like remembering all the red marks and bruises on his little puffy arms when he came back from the hospital. But right now she would give anything to see a brightly lit emergency room, and she would tell a doctor to do whatever kind of surgery he wanted, just make the pain go away, make the vomiting stop, get her a blanket.

Footsteps, finally, and someone in her room. A heavy tread, then Stanley's face in the doorway. Help, she wanted to say, but it hurt too much to talk to him, and he looked at her with a certain amount of pity, but also a certain amount of shocked revulsion. What, she wanted to say, have you never seen barf? But she could not talk, she could barely breathe, with the pain that radiated beneath her ribs.

More footsteps, soft sliding ones, and Amaryllis was there right behind Stanley. Blaine closed her eyes, then heard the bathroom door close and realized that Amaryllis had shut it. They were just leaving her there, in a pile of spew. Her throat went very tight, and she could not stop herself from crying. None of this made any sense. Why would nobody help?

She shut her eyes tight. She could hear them.

…
needs a hospital, Amaryllis
…

… no, no, it's the drug … the Antabuse. She has a drinking problem, this kid, and she's violent, and she attacked her mother and refuses to go to school. Poor poor Emma Marsden, she was just at her wit's end. And couldn't afford the Charter Ridge thing again …

Again?
She'd never been to Charter Ridge. And she didn't have a drinking problem, her mother did. Did her mother really say those things about her? Had she really betrayed her that way? It made no sense.

And Stanley was getting angry. Going on about how Amaryllis let people take advantage of her good nature, and they weren't running a halfway house for teenage delinquents, and Emma Marsden was taking advantage, and for his peace of mind he was pushing on to Orlando, he could make it by early tomorrow morning and pick up a load down there.

The voices faded. The bedroom door shut. And Blaine, who was a very smart young woman, figured it out, sick as she was. No, she did not have a drinking problem, and neither did her mother. Amaryllis was lying. Lying about Mom—after all, there were no other signs. The only sign had been her mom getting sick—sick just like Blaine was sick right this minute. Mom was not a drunk, and Blaine was not a drunk, and Amaryllis … Amaryllis was an evil bitch and up to no good, but what exactly she was up to was hard to figure.

But the worst thought was that if Amaryllis lied about all those other things, had she lied about her mom being on the way to get her?

Blaine remembered the wind kicking up before the storm, the way the breeze had felt, so warm and so inviting, and something inside her had wanted to just take off then and there, and oh, God, why hadn't she gone? In her mind she saw that open front door, and knew how far away it was, for a girl who did not even have the strength to sit up when she spewed. She closed her eyes tight because she knew one other thing too. She knew that her mother had no idea where she was.

CHARLIE

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-TWO

Charlie had been with Child Protective Services for seven years, though back when he and Janine had first located in Kentucky, Child Protective Services had been the enemy. Charlie was still career army then—a sergeant major. He'd been offered OCI three times, and his wife had gone doe-eyed at the notion of him going to Officer Candidate School and leaving for work every day in the color and confabulation of the management uniform. Neither one of them cared so much whether or not the family moved up in the social pecking order that rules military life, and Charlie had never seriously considered it. He was a rescuer, and a molder of young men, and his calling was to nursemaid teenage boys throbbing with the hormone dumps, inexplicable rages, and confusion that came with the territory. He knew when to take them seriously, when to ignore them, and he knew how to earn their respect. Better still, he knew how to motivate them, inspire them, and, most particularly, how to scare them utterly shitless.