13 Gifts (23 page)

Well! I wasn’t expecting that! I look down at the bottle again, as though seeing it for the first time.

The woman rushes on. “It cost me all the money I’d saved over thirteen years, but all I’d need to do is get the boy to drink it, look into my eyes, and he’d love me forever. Somehow,
though, and I still don’t know how, I lost it. One day it was in my desk drawer, and the next day it was gone. I searched everywhere. My grandmother offered to give me the money to buy another batch, but the old lady refused to sell it to me. She said she never made the same potion twice.”

As interesting as her story is, I can’t help noticing my friends glancing over at us. Ray even points to his watch, but what can I do? I turn back to the woman.

“Anyway, I went to the dance, determined that I’d still find a way to get the boy to like me. But when I got there, my best friend was dancing with him. And there, on the table beside them, was the little glass bottle, empty.”

“Wow,” I say, looking down at the bottle again. Talk about your middle school drama!

“I took the bottle and left the dance. From that day on, Molly and James were inseparable. She and I never spoke about it. In fact, we never spoke from that day on at all.”

My head springs up. “Did you say Molly and James?”

She nods. “They had this storybook romance. Wound up getting married, having a kid, the whole thing. I couldn’t stop thinking how it should have been me. How she robbed me of my life.”

A roaring sound fills my head. “You … you must really hate her.”

“I did. For a long time.” She looks over at her daughter, who is currently demonstrating to Rory’s brother, Sawyer, how she can touch her nose with her tongue. “But seriously,” she says with a laugh, “who marries the guy she dates at thirteen? I look back at it now, and I’m sure James wouldn’t have been the great
love of my life. I got married in my late twenties, and had Sara four years ago. If that potion had worked, she wouldn’t be on this planet. How could I hate Molly after that? More than losing the guy, though, it was the loss of my best friend that was the hardest to accept.” She shakes her head, like trying to shake the memory loose. “So, when I saw that someone was interested in the bottle, I realized I was ready to let go of it, and the bitterness that it represented. Thank you for that.”

The hand holding the bottle starts to shake, and I have to cover it with my other one. That doesn’t help to stop the shaking.

“Are you all right?” she asks. “You look a little green.”

The roaring sound keeps getting louder, threatening to drown out our conversation. “Just out of curiosity,” I ask, my voice shaking as much as my hands, “the old woman who sold you the potion, did she have a birthmark on her cheek? Shaped like a duck?”

“Yes, how did you know that?”

“A lucky guess,” I tell her. I stand up, gripping the bottle so tightly the bottom digs into my palm. “Thank you for telling me your story.”

“Thank you for listening. It felt good to get it out.” She touches my arm lightly, and I watch as she goes behind her daughter and gives her a squeeze.

By this point, all the extra chairs have been put away, and the tables and couches have been returned to their usual spots. Angelina is nowhere to be seen. I spot Ray taking down the last of the sets and hand him the gym bag. “You should stay and
celebrate,” I tell him. I focus on keeping the rising hysteria out of my voice so he doesn’t question me.

Before he can reply, I run out of the community center. The
GONE FISHING
sign is up on both the antique store and the historical society, which does not surprise me. I take off toward Emily’s house, trying to outrun the emotions that threaten to unravel me. Anger, hurt, betrayal, shock. They keep hitting me, one after the other. My mother, the one who never does anything wrong, the one who always says how important it is to have friends, this is the woman who did such a terrible thing to her own best friend? Not to mention tricking her own husband into falling in love with her? Poor Dad! My heart aches for him. All these years he’s been so smitten, and it wasn’t even his choice! Maybe he would have picked the other woman if he’d been allowed to decide. It explains why he’s always put her on such a pedestal, always looking at her as though he’s the luckiest man in the world to have her.

I feel sick. It’s like my whole life is different from what I thought it was. I wish I could just call Mom and confront her with this, but it could take days for the message to reach her.

I’m
totally
not giving her my new iPod!

It feels like I’ve been running forever. By the time the house comes into view, I’m ready to pass out. I’m halfway up the lawn before I notice the shapes of two people sitting on the porch steps. One very tall, one short.

My parents.

Chapter Twenty-three

 

“Surprise!” Dad yells.

“Happy birthday!” Mom shouts.

They jump up and throw their arms around me and I’m too stunned to do anything other than stand there, panting from the run. “What … what are you doing here?” I manage to choke out.

Dad laughs. “Aunt Bethany told us about how you were really running this whole play. We wanted to show up and surprise you, but we missed it by twenty minutes. So we figured we’d wait for you here rather than disrupt the activities.”

“But how?”

“The lemurs were very accommodating in the mating department,” Mom says, still holding on to me. “We finished the study earlier than expected.”

She finally pulls away. “Let me see you. You look so grown-up!” Her eyes fill with tears.

“And so colorful!” Dad says.

I look down at my white shorts and blue top, courtesy of Aunt Bethany.

“Why don’t we go sit down?” Mom suggests, stroking my hair like she used to when I was little. “You seem a bit shell-shocked.”

Hand shaking, I pull the glass bottle out of my pocket and hold it up to her. It takes a few seconds to register, but then her very tanned skin drains of all color. She physically backs away from it.

“What’s that?” Dad asks, taking it from me. “It’s pretty. Did someone give it to you as a birthday gift?”

“Not exactly,” I reply. “Mom? Maybe you’d like to tell him what it is?”

She drops down onto her knees, right on the grass.

“Molly!” Dad says, rushing to her side. “Are you all right?”

“Where did you get that?” she asks. Her voice sounds like it’s coming through a very long tube. “Did Polly give it to you?”

“I don’t actually know her name,” I tell her.

“Long brown hair? Very pretty? Probably hates me?”

I nod. “That’s her.”

“Your old friend from school?” Dad asks, kneeling beside her. “I know you two fell out of touch, but why would she hate you?”

Mom looks at him, her eyes bleak. “You never noticed that we stopped talking once you and I started dating?” He shrugs. “Not particularly.”

She stares at him for a minute, then rolls her eyes in my direction, as though I’m supposed to commiserate with her on the cluelessness of guys. I don’t show any expression, and she stares back down at the grass.

“I knew one day we’d have to have this conversation,” she says. “It might as well be now. My guilt has only been getting worse.”

Dad reaches out to take her hand.
Now
I roll my eyes. Wait till he hears that he only wants to comfort and love her because she tricked him into it.

“Whatever it is, Molly, you can tell us,” he says.

She gently pulls her hand away from his, and takes a deep, shuddering breath. “One day, back in eighth grade, I was at Polly’s house after school. I overheard her grandmother on the phone, bragging about how her granddaughter was about to snag a boy. I remember she said good genes run in that family. They’re tall and sturdy. Good stock.”

The corners of my mouth twitch at that one, but I quickly stop myself.

“Anyway, she said how Polly had bought something from Angelina D’Angelo. A love potion.” She cringes as she says the words, unwilling to even look in Dad’s direction. He starts to laugh, but Mom’s story is about to get a lot less funny. “I knew exactly who Polly would be using it on, and I knew exactly where she’d have hidden it. A few days later, I snuck in when I knew no one would be home — no one locked their doors in Willow Falls back then. Probably still don’t. Anyway, I took the bottle.”

At this point in the story, Dad looks down at the bottle he’s still holding. “This?”

She nods miserably. “Then at the eighth-grade dance, I brought the boy I liked a cup of juice and he drank it.” She pauses here and waits for Dad to catch up. I watch as realization dawns on him, slowly at first, then with a sudden burst of understanding.

“Me?”
he asks, letting the bottle slip from his grip onto the grass.

Mom bites her lip and forces herself to look at him. “Saying I’m sorry doesn’t cut it, I know. I couldn’t risk Polly snagging you.”

He rocks back on his heels. “Polly liked
me
?”

She nods. “And I knew you liked her. And I trapped you into a lifetime of loving someone you didn’t want to love. At first, when we were young, it didn’t bother me much. Then as we got older, and Tara came along, the guilt started to eat away at me. What right did I have to play with people’s lives like that?”

No one answers her. She reaches out for me and tries to pull me down. I stay standing. She sighs and says, “But on top of all that, and maybe the worst part, is that Angelina knew I’d taken it. She chaperoned the dance that night, and she saw me pour the purple liquid into a cup. She didn’t try to stop me, or to make me pay her for the potion, but she warned me that if we had a child one day, that child would pay the price of my betrayal.”

My knees buckle and I join them in the grass.
“What?”

“She said that when our child turned thirteen, he or she would have to come work for her to pay off my debt.
Alone.
I agreed, because when you’re thirteen, how can you even conceive of having your own child? It seemed a lifetime away.”

I place both hands on the ground, willing myself not to topple over.

Mom grips Dad’s leg. “That’s why I didn’t want to come back here after college. I thought if we moved away, Angelina would
forget about all this. And for a year or two, I put it behind me as we settled into our life. Soon Tara was born. I was so in love with this baby, I actually congratulated myself on stealing the potion. Otherwise I wouldn’t have her.

“I had one month of pure joy with the man that I loved and the baby who I treasured more than anything on the planet, until a silver rattle arrived from Willow Falls. The card inside the gift box said simply,
Looking forward to meeting Tara in thirteen years.

“So we moved again. And again, she found us. So we just kept moving. I always made sure our phone number was unlisted. I made sure our address wasn’t online anywhere. I tried to keep Tara close, never letting her be with strangers, always making sure I knew where she was and how to reach her. But somehow, Angelina kept tracking us down. I thought we’d finally shaken her this last time, but then that telegram arrived and —”

Dad sits up straight. “That wasn’t about your job?”

Mom shakes her head. “It was my final warning. Tara was almost thirteen and it was time to pay my debt. But how was I supposed to get her to go to a place we’d never even taken her before? And to send her alone, when I’d barely let her out of my sight for thirteen years? I called Bethany — who of course knows nothing about the love potion, or my arrangement with Angelina — and she said she’d love to have her for the summer. So that was a relief. Then I booked the train, since she had to arrive alone. But I still had no idea what explanation to give.” She turns to me. “And then you handed me the solution on a
silver platter. You got suspended from school. So I bumped up the dates with Bethany and told her you’d had a bit of trouble and would be arriving early. I changed the train, and, well, here you are.”

My whole body is literally shaking with disbelief and shock at all the things she’d kept hidden for so many years. Out of all the things she just told me, one shines like a beacon through the thick web of lies. “So it was you?
You’re
the reason I’m here in Willow Falls?”

Mom doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. “I can’t believe it!” I cry out. “She was right after all!” The last thing I want to do is laugh, but I can’t help it. It’s just all so crazy.

“What’s funny about this?” Mom asks. “Who was right about what?”

“Angelina! She said after the play I’d find out why I was here, in Willow Falls. I told her I knew exactly why, but she said I didn’t. Guess she was right about that!” Then I fall silent again. The whole story doesn’t make sense. Angelina didn’t come find me and make me do work for her.
I
was the one who went into her shop. I think back to the order of things. The chain of events started because I needed money. If I’d kept the money my parents had given me, I wouldn’t have needed to sell anything. But how could Angelina be sure I’d need money? There was only one person who had the opportunity to take my wallet. She was short, she was wide, and she wore a ton of makeup that would cover any blemishes or birthmarks shaped like talking animals. How could I not have seen it before? “The woman on the train!”

Mom nods miserably. “I almost fainted when I saw her. It took a few seconds to recognize her under all that makeup and the dark wig.”

“Wait,” Dad says, “you’re talking about the woman with the first-class ticket?”

“She stole my money!” I say, in amazement. I didn’t lose it after all. Or my phone, or Mom’s iPod! “That’s how she got me into her store. She made it seem like it was my choice, when it never was.”

“Tara, I’m so incredibly sorry about everything. I know I’ve disrupted your life over and over with the moves, and by being so overprotective. But I love you so much and I only wanted to keep us all together. Has your time here been awful?” Mom cringes in anticipation of my answer.

I consider telling her yes, but what good would that do? “It was really hard in the beginning. But I made some good friends, and that made it better.”

Her whole body relaxes. It relaxes to the point that tears start pouring down her face. “You can’t imagine how relieved I am to hear that.”

“Well, then,” Dad says, wiping away Mom’s tears with his giant hand, “you’re going to be relieved to hear this, too. Polly was a nice girl, and pretty of course, as you said. But I only liked her because she gave me her math homework.”

In between gasps of breath, she asks, “Really? You’re not just saying that?”

“I’m not just saying that,” he says.

She attempts a smile, but it slips away. She looks down at the grass again and waits until she can get her tears under control.
Then she says, “I’m glad I didn’t make you lose out on being with Polly. But there’s still no excuse for what I did. And don’t say you love me in spite of it, because that’s just the love potion talking. We’ll never know if you ever would have loved me without it.”

“That’s true,” he says. “If I actually drank it.”

“What?” we
both yell.

“I was a thirteen-year-old boy! You think I’m going to be seen at a dance drinking bright purple juice? It would stain my teeth! I was trying to impress the ladies.”

“But … but I saw you drink it!”

“You saw me take it, then you saw me point out the full moon, then you saw me drink an empty cup.”

“But … what happened to the potion?”

He shrugs. “I poured it into the fountain.”

Now it’s Mom’s turn to have the full-body shakes. She actually looks like she’s convulsing. Dad and I both reach out to her and she collapses in our arms, sobbing. I start crying, too, and Dad joins in. We’re crying so hard that I don’t register the opening and closing of car doors until Uncle Roger says, “Now,
that’s
what I call a family reunion!”

The three of us look at each other and start laughing so hard we start crying all over again.

After I change my tear-soaked clothes, I stand in front of the bathroom mirror. There’s no denying it. I feel different. I even
look
different. My dark eyes have more depth to them, like I
can see further inside, and further outside, too. Knowing the true story of my life — and my mom’s life — changes everything. My anger’s gone; I think I cried it all out. All that’s left is the understanding of what Mom tried to do for me for all those years. And it’s nice to know that she wasn’t always so perfect — far from it. I might have tried to steal a stuffed goat, but she stole her best friend’s future husband!

Aunt Bethany stores some of her extra makeup in the medicine cabinet, and for the first time in my life, I think it might be nice to put some on. After watching Bettie, I know what to do. Or I thought I did, until the mascara winds up on my nose instead of my eyelashes. I wash everything off except for the shimmery lip gloss that makes my lips feel really soft.

Mom’s waiting for me in the hall when I get out. She’s wearing fresh clothes, too. Her face is still very blotchy. She lifts my arm so that the red bracelet slips down a little toward my elbow.

“I thought that looked familiar,” she says.

“What, this old thing? I’ve had this forever.”

She smiles. “Have you, now?”

“Okay, it’s yours. I found them when I was looking for jewelry for Aunt Bethany. Emily had the other one but then I had to trade it … actually, it was for the bottle. Polly took it.”

She looks alarmed. “Polly?”

I nod. “She saw it on Emily’s wrist and asked for it.”

“Huh,” Mom says, letting my arm fall. “I wonder what to make of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“They used to be ours. Mine and Polly’s. They were friendship bracelets. After the, ah,
incident,
she slipped hers into my locker.”

I shrug. “I’m sure she didn’t know it was the same one. She doesn’t know I’m your daughter.”

Mom’s eyes fill with tears again. “It was terrible what I did to her. And she wasn’t the only one who lost out; I lost my best friend. How many of those does someone get in a lifetime? Not many, I’ll tell you. That’s why I always tried to tell you how important friendship is.” She sighs. “I know moving so much didn’t give you much of a chance to find that out.”

“Hey, if it makes you feel better,” I tell her, “Polly doesn’t hate you anymore. She said once she got married and had Sara, that she —”

“Wait,
what?
She has a daughter named Sara?”

“Yes. She’s four years old, I think.”

“I can’t believe it,” she says, and the tears spring back again. But this time she’s smiling, too. “When we were little girls we loved it that our names rhymed. We promised when we had our own daughters we would name them rhyming names, too.” She laughs. “And we did!”

“That’s really weird.”