Grave Secret

Page 5

"So you haven't talked to Iona lately." I had to think in the here and now.
"No." Mark looked at me, a question on his face.
"You know that Iona's heard from your dad?" It was my stepfather's handwriting I'd seen on the letter protruding from the stack of mail.
Mark would never be a successful poker player, because he didn't look anything but guilty. I had to smile at his obvious relief when the waitress picked that moment to take our orders.
But that smile didn't sit on my lips for long. I was scared to look sideways at Tolliver.
When the waitress had bustled off, I opened my hands to Mark, indicating it was time for him to come clean.
"Well, yeah, I was gonna tell you about that," he said, looking down at his silverware.
"What were you going to tell us, brother?" Tolliver asked, his voice even and pleasant and forced.
"I got a letter from Dad a couple weeks ago," Mark said. No, he confessed it. Then he waited for Tolliver to give him absolution-but Tolliver wasn't about to. We both knew Mark had responded to the letter, or he wouldn't be so hangdog.
"Dad's alive, then," Tolliver said, and anyone but me would have called his voice neutral.
"Yeah, he's got a job. He's clean and sober, Tol."
Mark had always had a tender heart for his father. And he'd always been incredibly gullible where his dad was concerned.
"Matthew's been out of jail how long?" I asked, since Tolliver wasn't responding to Mark's assertion. I'd never been able to call Matthew Lang "Father."
"Um, a month," Mark said. He folded the little paper ring that had circled his silverware and napkin. He unfolded it and folded it again. This time he compressed it into a smaller rectangle. "He got early release for good behavior. After I wrote back, he called me. He wants to reconnect with his family, he says."
I was sure that (entirely coincidentally) Matthew also wanted money and maybe a place to stay. I wondered if Mark truly believed his father, if he could really be that foolish.
Tolliver didn't say a word.
"Has he been in touch with your uncle Paul or your aunt Miriam?" I asked, struggling to fill the silence.
Mark shrugged. "I don't know. I never call them."
While it wasn't technically true that Tolliver and I were each other's only adult family, with the exception of Mark it might as well have been. Matthew Lang's siblings had been hurt and disgusted too often by Matthew to want to maintain any relationship with him, and unfortunately that exclusion had spread outward to include Matthew's kids. Mark and Tolliver could have used help-could have used a lot of help-but that would have entailed dealing with Matthew, who had been too difficult and frightening for his more conventional siblings. As a result, Tolliver had cousins he barely knew.
I wasn't sure exactly how he felt about Paul's and Miriam's self-preserving decisions, but he'd never made any attempt to contact them in recent years, when Matthew had been safely behind bars. I guess that spoke for itself.
"What's Dad doing?" Tolliver said. His voice was ominously quiet, but he was holding together.
"He's working at a McDonald's. The drive-through, I think. Or maybe he's cooking."
I was sure Matthew Lang wasn't the first disbarred lawyer to work the drive-through window at a McDonald's. But given the fact that while I'd lived in the same trailer with the man, I'd never seen him cook beyond popping something in the microwave, and I'd never seen him wash a single dish, that was kind of ironic. Not enough that I'd bust out laughing, though.
"What happened to your dad, Harper?" Mark asked. "Cliff, was that his name?" Mark felt it was time to point out that Matthew wasn't the only bad dad around.
"Last I heard, he was in the prison hospital," I said. "I don't think he knows anyone anymore." I shrugged.
Mark looked shocked. His hands moved involuntarily across the table. "You don't go see him?" He actually sounded amazed at my heartlessness, which I found almost incredible.
"What?" I said. "Why would I? He never took care of me. I'm not going to take care of him."
"Wasn't it okay before he started using drugs? Didn't he give you a good home?"
I understood this wasn't about my father at all, but it was still really irritating. "Yes," I agreed. "He and my mother gave us a nice home. But after they started using, they never thought twice about us." There were lots of kids who'd had it worse, who hadn't even had a trailer with a hole in the bathroom floor. Hadn't even had siblings who were willing to watch their back. But it had been bad enough. And later, awful things had happened when my mother and Tolliver's father had had their crappy "friends" over. I remembered one night when all of us kids had slept under the trailer, because we were so scared of what was happening inside.
I shook myself. No pity.
"How'd you know to bring up Dad, anyway?" Mark asked. He looked sullen. Mark had always been a transparent sort of guy. It was clear I wasn't his favorite person at the moment.
"I saw a letter from him on Iona's table. It took me a while to remember where I'd seen the handwriting. I wonder why he wrote her. Do you reckon he's trying to get Iona to let him see the girls? Why would he be doing that?"
"Maybe he thinks he ought to see his daughters," Mark said, and he flushed, a sure sign he was angry.
Tolliver and I looked at our brother, and neither of us said a word.
"Okay, okay," Mark said, rubbing his face with his hands. "He doesn't deserve to see them. I don't know what he's asking Iona for. When I saw him, he told me he wants to see Tolliver. He doesn't have an address to send Tolliver a letter."
"There's a reason for that," Tolliver said.
"He'd seen some website that tracks her," Mark said, nodding toward me as if I were sitting far away. "He said you-all's website had an email address, but he didn't want to contact you through her website. Like he was a stranger."
The waitress came up with our food then, and we took the little ritual of spreading napkins and using salt and pepper to regroup.
"Mark," Tolliver said, "is there any reason you can think of that I ought to make any effort to include that man in my life? In Harper's life?"
"He's our dad," Mark said doggedly. "He's all we've got left."
"No," Tolliver said. "Harper's sitting right here."
"But she's not our family." Mark looked at me, this time a little apologetically.
"She's my family," Tolliver said.
Mark froze. "Are you saying I shouldn't have left you-all in that trailer? That I should have stayed there with you? That I let you down?"
"No," Tolliver said, astonished. We exchanged a quick flicker of a glance. "I'm saying Harper and I are together."
"She's your stepsister," Mark said.
"And she's my girlfriend," Tolliver said, and I smiled down at my salad. It seemed such an inadequate term.
Mark's mouth hung open as he stared at us. "What? Is that legal? When did this happen?"
"Recently; yes, it is; and we're happy, thanks for asking."
"Then I'm glad for you," Mark said. "It's good that you have each other." But he still looked doubtful. "Isn't it kind of weird, though? I mean, we grew up in the same house."
"Like you and Cameron," I said.
"I never felt like that about Cameron," he said.
"Okay," I said. "But this is the way we feel. We didn't start out this way, but it's the way we ended up." And I smiled at Tolliver, suddenly feeling ridiculously happy.
He smiled back. Our circle closed.
"So what do you want me to tell Dad?" Mark said. There was a little desperation in his voice. I couldn't imagine how Mark had pictured this conversation going, but it had not turned out to his satisfaction, obviously.
"I thought I'd made myself clear. We don't want to see him," Tolliver said. "I don't want him to get in touch with me. If he emails us through the website, I won't answer. That last year... you were lucky you were out on your own, Mark. I'm glad you were old enough to leave, to start your life. I've never blamed you for leaving, if that's what you're thinking. Even if you'd been in the trailer, you couldn't have stopped anything that happened. And you brought us food and diapers and money when you could. We were glad one of us had made it out into the real world. My job at Taco Bell wouldn't have been enough."
"You don't think I was just running away?" Mark sawed on his steak, his eyes on his knife.
"No, I think you were saving your life." Tolliver put down his fork. His face was serious. "That's what I really believe. And that's what Harper believes."
Not that Mark was so concerned with my opinion, but I nodded. It had never crossed my mind to think any differently about it.
Mark tried to laugh, but it was a pretty pitiful attempt. He said, "I never intended this evening to get so intense."
"It's your dad reappearing. Not your fault." I smiled at him, trying to will him to lighten up.
But that seemed to be a lost cause. "You really haven't visited your dad?" he asked me. He was wrestling with my attitude.
"No," I said. "Why would I lie about that?"
"What is his illness?"
"I don't know."
"Has he heard your mom died?"
"I have no idea."
"He know about Cameron?"
I thought about that for a moment. "Yeah, because some of the newspeople tracked him down and talked to him when she went missing."
"He never came to see..."
"No. He was incarcerated. He wrote me a few letters. My foster parents gave 'em to me. But I didn't answer. I don't know what happened to him after that. More of the same, I expect. I never heard from him, or about him, until he got so sick. Then the prison chaplain wrote me."
"And you just... didn't answer?"
"I just didn't answer. Tolliver, can I have a bite of your sweet potato?"
"Sure," he said and slid his plate sideways toward me.
He always orders one when we're at a Texas Roadhouse, and I always have one bite. I swallowed it. It wasn't as good as it usually was, but I didn't think that was the staff's fault. I thought it was Mark's.
He was shaking his head, his eyes turned down to his plate. He looked up, meeting first Tolliver's eyes, then mine. "I don't know how you two do it," he said. "When Dad comes calling, I have to answer. He's my dad. If my mother was alive, it'd be the same way."
"I guess we're just not as good as you, Mark," I said. What else could I say? He'll drain you and leech off of you. He'll break his word and your spirit.
"I don't guess you've heard anything from the police since the last time I talked to you?" Mark said. "Or from that private eye?"
"You're determined to push all the buttons tonight, Mark," I said, and now it was a struggle to sound even civil.
"I have to ask. I keep thinking someday there'll be news."
I let my anger go, because I sometimes thought the same thing. "There's no news. Someday I'll find her." I'd said it for years, and it had never happened. But one day, when I least expected it-though on some level I always expected it-I'd feel her nearness, like I'd felt the proximity of so many dead people before. I would find Cameron, and I would know what had happened to her that day.
She'd been walking home alone after helping to decorate the high school gym for the prom. I had become the kind of girl who doesn't do things like that, by that time. The lightning had done its job on me. I was still settling into my new skin, terrified of my new and weird ability, recovering from the physical damage. I was still limping, and I tired easily. I'd gotten one of my terrible headaches that day.
It had been in the spring, and we'd had a cold snap. The night before, the temperature had dropped below forty. That afternoon, it was only in the sixties. Cameron had been wearing black tights and a black and white plaid skirt and a white turtleneck. She looked great. No one would have guessed she'd pieced the outfit together at the thrift store. Her blond hair was long and shiny. My sister Cameron had freckles. She hated them. She made all As.
While Mark and Tolliver made conversation, I tried to imagine what Cameron would look like now. Would she still be blond? Would she have gained weight? She'd been small, shorter than me, with thin arms and legs and a will of iron. She'd run track with some success, though when the paper had called her a "track star" after she'd vanished, we'd all looked at each other and rolled our eyes.
My sister hadn't been a saint. I'd known Cameron better than anyone else. She was proud. She could keep a secret till it screamed. She was smart. She studied hard. Sometimes she resented our situation, our fall from affluence, with such anger that she screamed out loud. She hated our mother, Laurel, hated her passionately, for dragging us down with her. But Cameron loved our mother, too.
She couldn't stand Matthew, who was Mother's second husband but her hundredth "boyfriend." Cameron had had this persistent delusion that our father would return to his pre-drug self, and that he would show up at the dismal trailer someday and take us off with him. We would go back to living in a clean house, and someone else would wash our clothes and cook our meals. Our father would show up at the school for PTA meetings, and he'd talk to us over the supper table about where we might want to go to college.