The Silent Sister (44 page)

“Hi.” She smiled at Riley as she walked toward the bed, trying to pretend this was a simple hospital visit rather than a reunion between three hurt, brittle, and wired-up people. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“I'm all right,” Riley reassured her.

Jade bent over to kiss her daughter's cheek. “I'm so relieved,” she said. “I was terrified when I heard.” She tore herself away from Riley and walked across the room, her body stiff with fear as she held out her hand to her brother. She'd never felt less sure of what to say in her life. There were no words to make up for the years apart.

“Danny,” she said. He'd stepped away from the backlight of the window and she could see him now. He was so handsome, but the look in his eyes was ice-cold. He kept his hands buried in his pockets and Jade lowered hers to her side. “I'm sorry,” she said. “For everything.”

“Fine,” he said, but she knew that nothing was fine. Nothing would ever be fine between them. Her father had told her that Danny was
troubled,
but now she saw for herself that
troubled
was too mild a word. Danny was a damaged soul. Those cold eyes and tight lips. What had happened to the happy, effervescent child he'd been? How much of the damage was her fault? She reached toward him again, this time to touch his arm, but he pulled away from her quickly.

“You killed our family, do you know that?” he asked.

“Danny,”
Riley said from the bed. Her voice was a plea.

Danny's hostile tone made Jade take a step backward until she stood next to the footboard of the second bed. She didn't know how to answer his question. She worried that he was right. “I never wanted that,” she said. “I couldn't … foresee all the things that happened.” She clutched the rim of the footboard. “When I think back to that time, it's just a gigantic mess in my memory.” That was the truth. “I didn't know what to do,” she said, “and when Daddy suggested—”

“Right,” Danny said. “It was all his fault.”

“I'm not saying that,” she said. “I'm not trying to defend myself. I know I made terrible mistakes and I've had to live with what I did. The guilt. The separation from my fam—”

“And Riley and I had to live with two shitty parents in a house full of lies.”

“Danny,”
Riley said, “I never felt that way.”

“Well, lucky you!” he barked at her, and Jade had a sudden urge to slap him.
Don't talk to my daughter that way!
she wanted to shout, but she hardly had that right. She saw Riley shut her eyes and sink back into her pillow.
This is too much for her
, Jade thought, but she didn't know how to end it. They shouldn't be having this conversation here. Or now. Yet there was no time to have it later. Later, she could be locked up.

“Why the hell didn't you just tell the truth?” Danny asked. “Accept the consequences? You really fucked all of us over.”

“I was afraid,” she said. “I was frantic. I'd killed someone…” The day it happened, tucked so deep inside her memory, rushed back to her, and her voice cracked. “I relived that moment over and over and over and—I'm sorry, Danny,” she said again. “Everything was such a mess, and I didn't know how to make it right. I was so screwed up.”

“But did you ever, in the last twenty years when you were no longer ‘so screwed up,' think of Riley and me and the disaster you left us? Did you ever, in the last twenty fucking years, think of coming back? Making things right?”

“Of
course
I thought about it,” she said, “but Daddy would have paid if I ever told the truth.”

“He paid anyway!” Danny pulled his hands from his pockets, raising them in the air to make his point. “We
all
paid. And it's about time you paid, too.”

“Stop it!” Riley shouted. “I can't handle this any longer! Please stop it!”

It was as though they'd forgotten Riley was in the room, and they both turned to look at her. Her pale cheeks were tear streaked, and she'd pressed her hands, one of them bandaged, over her ears. Jade moved quickly to her side.

“Sweetheart.” She sank onto the chair next to the bed, rubbing Riley's shoulder through the thin hospital gown. “I'm so sorry. I know this is the last thing you need right now.”

“You two are tearing me apart.” Riley looked from Jade to Danny. “I love you both,” she said. “I
need
you both.”

Jade looked across the room at her brother. His expression was hard to read, and she thought he was avoiding her eyes. She turned back to her daughter. “I'm here for you, Riley.” Bracing herself, she waited for Danny to mock her words. How did she plan to be here for Riley when she was in prison? How had she been here for her over the last twenty-plus years? But Danny said nothing. Instead, he walked to the other side of Riley's bed, and for the first time, Jade noticed his limp. She remembered the note from their father:
Danny was seriously injured in a grenade attack.
She remembered being unable to sleep for days, and losing her baby as she grieved and worried and blamed herself for everything that had ever gone wrong in her family. She wanted to reach across Riley's bed to pull her wounded brother into an embrace, but that embrace would never be welcome. Her love for him would always be one-sided.

Danny bent low, pressing his lips to Riley's temple, and he stayed that way for a moment, whispering something to her that Jade couldn't hear.

He stood up, and without even a glance in her direction, headed for the door.

Jade panicked. She couldn't leave things with him like this, or the next person through that door would be carrying handcuffs. “Please forgive me, Danny,” she begged, rising from her chair.
“Please.”

He turned to look at her, and again she was struck by the pain in his face. “Someday this is all going to catch up to you, Lisa,” he said, making her catch her breath at the sound of her old name. “But it won't be because of me.”

 

60.

Riley

The door shut behind Danny with a whisper, and Lisa looked at me. Her eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, her face nearly white. She wrapped a hand around the safety rail, the way Danny had wrapped his a short time earlier.

“What does he mean?” she asked. “It won't be because of him?”

“He whispered that he won't tell Harry. The cop.”

I saw the tension dissolve from Lisa's body and she lowered her head to her hands. For a moment she didn't speak. When she lifted her head again, she wore a sad smile. “I feel like I've been given a last-minute reprieve,” she said.

“You have.”

“I feel terrible for him,” she said. “He's so hurt.”

“I know.” I nodded. “His life's been hard.” I gingerly touched the spiky stiff hair on the top of my head again. I'd need to ask for more painkillers soon, but the last thing I wanted right now was to dull my thinking. “Is Celia with you?” I asked.

“She's giving us some time alone,” she said. “I'm sorry she went to see you last night. I never wanted that.”

“I'm glad she did,” I said. “I needed to know the truth. Even though I'm not sure how I'm ever going to live with knowing he was my father … and everything that happened.”

“Oh, Riley, I know!” She reached for my hand. She smoothed her fingers over my skin, and her touch felt like no other I'd ever known. I felt the love in it. “I was never an angry sort of person,” she said, “but when I walked into our living room and saw you on Steven's lap, I lost it. I absolutely lost it.” She squeezed my hand. “I still feel sick when I think about it. Everything about that day … everything that happened afterward … it's my nightmare.”

I didn't want to hear any more about that day. I didn't think I'd ever want to know more details—the details my nearly two-year-old self had managed to block out. They could stay that way forever, as far as I was concerned.

“I'm sorry for getting so upset with you last night,” I said. “Talking to Celia really helped. I don't know what I would have done if she hadn't come over.”

“I'll thank her for that,” she said, “if I ever get over being mad at her about it.”

“Don't be,” I said.

Lisa looked toward the window, a small, mystified smile on her face. “I can't believe this is happening,” she said, turning her head toward me again. “I'm actually sitting here with my baby girl.”

“I can't believe it, either,” I said. “I wondered how different our lives would have been if you hadn't left. If we'd actually grown up in the same family, we probably would have moved in such different circles because of our ages. We never would have really gotten to know each other.”

“Oh, I would have known you,” she said. “I would have had my eye on you every waking minute.”

A wave of pain ran through my head and it must have shown on my face. She tightened her hand on mine. “Want me to get the nurse?” she asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I don't want the interruption.”

She nodded.

“I talked to a friend of yours,” I said. “Grady.”

She sat back in the chair, mouth open. “What? How could you have known about—”

“It's a long story,” I said, not wanting to talk about Sondra Davis's blog at that moment. “I'll save it for another time. But he said to say hi if I ever found you.”

She shook her head, a look of wonder on her face. “Flash from the past,” she said.

“It must have been terrifying, leaving home like that without knowing a soul in San Diego. Starting your whole life over, knowing you'd never be able to see your family again.”

Her eyes filled and I knew that I'd tapped a bottomless well of sorrow in her. She let go of my hand to press both of hers to her face. I touched her knee through her jeans, sorry I'd upset her.
This is my mother,
I thought. I couldn't believe she was right here. That I was actually touching her.

When she lowered her hands, her cheeks were red. “It was so hard,” she said, “but I thought it was my only choice. I knew they'd tear apart every word I said in a trial. I was afraid I'd end up in prison forever.”

“Daddy didn't know the truth?” I asked. “That Steven Davis was my…” I let the sentence trail away.

“God, no,” she said. “I didn't want him to ever look at you differently. He thought it was Matty, like everyone else, even though I swore up and down it wasn't. And Matty never had a clue what was going on. He was my best friend, but even he didn't know I'd had a baby.”

I was relieved now that I hadn't been able to reach Matthew Harrison. I would have involved another person in the deception. He might have been the one to knock over the house of cards Lisa had so carefully constructed.

She gripped my hand again, more firmly this time. “Please, Riley,” she said. “Don't think about it. Don't dwell on it. Your father was a nameless, faceless boy I met in Italy. It's better that way.”

I nodded slowly. For now, at least, she was right. “I want to be in your life, Jade,” I said, determined to use her chosen name.

She wore the first full, genuine smile I'd seen on her. “It makes me unbelievably happy to hear you say that,” she said.

“Is it possible, though?” I asked. “Is there some way we can make it work?”

She looked thoughtful. “I think it's up to you,” she said, after a minute. Then she tilted her head. “Are you willing to live a lie?”

I thought about the question, knowing it was an invitation to step into her world and leave mine behind. It was a world of deceit, but it had my mother in it, and that was all that mattered.

I nodded. “Whatever it takes,” I said. And I meant it.

 

JULY 2014

EPILOGUE

Riley

“Check this out,” Jade says, opening the door to a walk-in closet. “It's bigger than the one I share with Celia.”

“I don't have enough clothes to fill it,” I say, peering inside, “but I absolutely love this apartment.” What I love best about the apartment is that it's less than a mile from Jade and Celia's house, where I've been staying for the last two weeks. While I feel welcome there and I adore Alex and Zoe, their house is snug with a fifth person squeezed inside it. I will live nearby, as close as I can get. Now that I have a mother, I'm not letting her go.

I moved to Seattle at the end of the school year, and I've already had a couple of job interviews. I did well during those interviews, I think, although I hadn't been able to tell the interviewers one of the main reasons I think I've become a better counselor. During the year I've known Jade, my counseling has definitely changed. I no longer see the depressed sister from my imagination in every student I work with. I no longer lie awake at night, worrying about the kids who are struggling, afraid they might harm themselves. My emotional detachment from them makes me better able to help them. I see their needs more clearly, unclouded by the haunting specter of the suicidal sister who never truly existed.

I know that the lies in our family hurt all of us, especially Danny and myself. Growing up in a household where something is terribly wrong, you feel the weight of that mysterious something even though it's unspoken. It eats at you. Confuses you. It leaves you wondering if your view of the world will ever make sense.

And the thing is, I'm now willingly perpetuating a new lie, though it has its roots in the truth. To Jade's and Celia's friends and family, I am Riley MacPherson, the daughter Jade relinquished for adoption when she was fifteen. My adoptive parents died and I searched for her, finally tracking her down. She's welcomed me, as have Celia and her family. We all feel fortunate to be together.