Lie to Me (an OddRocket title) (15 page)

"Hey, can I check the camera out?" I sat on the steps beside her, leaving enough room for parents to walk past.

"Sure." Addie held it out without hesitation. I think she was thrilled I was finally paying attention to her world.

"So you've gone through a lot of film?" I asked.

"I haven't even finished one roll. I don’t like to waste shots. This isn’t digital, you know."

"Really? One roll?” This would be so easy. I turned over the camera looking at the back compartment. Inside I could see the film, I wondered which frame contained my secret kiss. "So, what's this button do?"

"Don't touch that,” Addie said, reaching just as I clicked the little orange button. The back of the camera swung open exposing the roll of film.

Oh, my God, Addie could wail. You would have thought I'd murdered Walter. She lunged for the camera knocking it to my hands. The cartridge popped right out of the back as the camera crashed onto the concrete. The roll of film lay unfurled on the ground like a shiny piece of brown confetti.

"No!" Addie screamed.

"Addie, chill out. You don't need to have a total meltdown." I picked up the camera, checking the lens. It looked clear. I’d only wanted to ruin the film. I wasn’t a total monster. "The camera is fine. Come on, let’s get in the car. We need to go home."

"I hate you!" Addie screamed, her face red, hands balled into fists. "You broke my camera!" She shrieked. "Why did you do that?"

"Addie. You're the one who grabbed it and it's just the film. Don't freak out." The coil of film lay exposed to the light at Addie's feet. She picked it up off the ground and slammed the car door when she climbed inside. Her breath came out in short, angry puffs.

I got into the driver's seat. "It was an accident, all right? I was just looking at the back and it flipped open."

"You ruined my pictures." Her lip quivered and she crossed her arms tight. I knew she would be upset, but she was freaking out way more than I'd expected.

Addie turned away from me, toward the window, and burst into tears. I started the car. "I'm so sorry," I said after a minute of stone cold silence.

Addie kept her arms crossed and sniffed a few times as I drove home.

"I said I was sorry."

"Are Aunt Lucy and Mom home?" Addie asked. She still wouldn't look at me.

"No. I don't know where they are."

"Where'd they go anyway?

"I said, I don't know."

"And why is Mom always resting?" Addie's tears had passed, leaving her with a wet-sounding sniff. She pulled at a "Save the Seal" sticker one of us had stuck to the inside door.

"I don't know," I lied.

"Mom’s okay, isn't she?" I looked at her face, pink with tears. Her hair needed to be combed and her eyes pleaded with me to answer.

"Mom's okay," I said.

"You promise?"

"I promise." I felt shaky lying to my sister, but I didn't know what else to do. Part of me thought that it wasn't really a lie. It was a wish. I wished with every fiber of my body that Mom were okay. Maybe lying wasn't wrong if you were protecting someone you loved. I wasn't sure how I was going to explain the mess in the kitchen, since I didn't really understand it myself.

When I pulled into the driveway, Aunt Lucy's car blocked the garage. "They're back!" Addie said. "You know, before you ruined my pictures, I was going to enter the Jekyll Art Contest." Addie unbuckled her seatbelt and kept talking. "I don't know if I'll be able to recreate any of those photos, but I'll try..." Her stream-of-consciousness chatter made me smile this time. Maybe things were getting back to normal. Mission Impossible accomplished. I'd destroyed the film and found a way to stop Addie's tears. Maybe I wasn’t the worst sister in the world after all.

Addie continued. New topic. "You know Aunt Lucy lives in California part of the year? Near Disneyland, which is so cool. Do you think we'll ever go to Disneyland?" As we walked into the house together, Addie took my hand, a gesture that surprised me and made me feel guilty at the same time.

"Hello?" we called together, waiting for Mom to answer.

"Hi." Aunt Lucy stood in the kitchen doorway with a white towel in her hand. From the pink stains on the cloth, I could tell she'd been cleaning up the juice. "You're back," she said to us, her face strained. She must have realized she'd forgotten to smile. She quickly managed a grin that seemed to take effort. "You didn't get my message, Cass?"

"Um," I looked at my phone. Missed call. This time at least it was genuine. I hadn't been hiding from anyone.

"Where's Mom?" Addie said, looking around as if she expected Mom to materialize out of thin air.

Aunt Lucy hesitated and the white towel fell to the floor. "Girls, we need to talk."

Aunt Lucy talked to us in the kitchen while she finished cleaning up. "Your mom's not here right now, sweet peas. She's not coming home today."

Addie clammed up. Lips pressed together, she sat at the counter on a wooden stool with her arms crossed.

The pathetic little progress I'd made toward recovering my normal life completely disappeared while Aunt Lucy spoke. I didn't need Addie to tell me she felt betrayed; her expression said everything. She would barely look me in the eyes and, when she did, her eyes narrowed.

Aunt Lucy used words like
metastasized
, which means moving around in a really bad way.
Transfusion
.
High-dose chemotherapy
.
Allergic reaction
. The names of drugs I didn't recognize. Aunt Lucy kept talking, but I felt like a kid failing a reading comprehension test. I didn't get it all.

"Your mother's body hasn't responded as well as the doctors had hoped." Aunt Lucy had one of those green and yellow sponges in her hand. She scrubbed the grout as she spoke, erasing every speck of grime in her path. "They gave her some medicine and it's pretty powerful stuff. Your mother's heart didn't like it."

"Her heart?" Addie looked up like she'd finally heard a friendly word.

"Yes. She had a kind of allergic reaction and her heart sped up way too fast.” Aunt Lucy swallowed. "So she needs to stay in the hospital until they say it's safe for her to come home."

Some things happen in life and no matter how they go down, they don't seem real. I couldn't cry. I wrapped a blanket of numbness around myself right then and I listened to everything Aunt Lucy said, holding the corners tight around me. "Can we go see her?" Addie asked, her voice small.

"Well, your mom thinks they'll let her come home tomorrow and she doesn't want you girls to have to go to the hospital. I'm going back tonight and I can have someone come over and stay with you girls. Mariah offered..."

"We'll be okay," I said. "We don't want anyone watching us."

Aunt Lucy looked at us as if she wondered whether or not we were pulling a fast one on her. "You sure?"

"Yes." The last thing I wanted was to sit in my own house with someone like Mariah trying to make everything better.

"Well, then. I'm going back to the hospital, but I'll be home in a couple of hours, okay?" Aunt Lucy hugged us both, the three of us stuck together in an awkward huddle.

"Addie the Clam" turned and looked at me when Aunt Lucy went upstairs. "You lied," she said. Then she hopped off the tall, wooden stool and walked out of the kitchen.

Addie wouldn't talk to me. It was incredibly lonely being in that house. I called RD's cell three more times, but he still wasn't picking up. It kept going straight to voicemail. I'd already left messages and texts, so I decided to just wait.

Maybe he was somewhere he couldn't get to the phone. I got so desperate that I almost called Priya, but I wasn't sure where to begin. We hadn't spoken since we'd fought in the parking lot. Priya always had something to say about emotions and I didn't want a lecture about forgiveness and the path to being present and letting go. The only inner peace I knew how to find was the moment I rested my head against RD's shoulder, the warmth I felt when his arms wrapped around me and touched my skin. That was the only safe place I could think of right now and I felt sick and nervous, wishing I could make RD call me.

Aunt Lucy was gone longer than expected. She called and told us to go to sleep and we'd see her in the morning. Lying in bed, I tried not to think about Mom, but my head felt so mixed up that all my thoughts eventually led to her. She was like a big magnet in my brain. I wondered what she looked like lying in her hospital bed. Could she hear beeps and noises around her? Was she sedated or in a coma? I'd read somewhere about coma patients who claimed they could travel the world untethered to their bodies. Could Mom do that? Did she know what I was doing? Did she know I had a note from RD hidden in my dresser drawer?

Rap.

I sat straight up in my bed.

Rap. Rap. Rap.

It was eleven o’clock at night.

It sounded like raindrops were hitting my window, but it wasn't raining. I got out of bed and peered through the shutters.

RD stood at the base of the chimney wearing a black t-shirt and a dark baseball hat. He flipped a flashlight on and held it under his face and grinned. He looked like a spooky camp counselor about to tell a ghost story. He pointed the flashlight beam on his cell phone and then flipped off the light. He disappeared in the darkness and my phone rang.

"Dropped my phone in the water," he said. "I got a new one today. Sorry I missed your calls."

I wanted to ask him why he'd waited so long to call me, but I was just so happy to hear his voice. "I got bad news today. About Mom."

"I heard from Mariah. She said your mom and Lucy are at the hospital."

I tried not to have my feelings hurt that he'd taken his time calling. He was under my window now. He'd come for me and that was all that mattered.

"Can you come outside?" he asked.

"I don't know." I thought about Mom's wrath the last time I’d crawled out my window. Getting caught again would mean getting grounded. Getting grounded would mean no Hideaway, which would make finding ways to meet with RD practically impossible. "I probably shouldn't," I mumbled.

"It's okay. If you can't come outside, that's fine. I just wanted to give you a hug. It made me sad to think of you all alone."

I peered outside my bedroom window. He'd turned off the flashlight, but I could still see his shape in the darkness just inside the woods. God, I wanted to be outside with him.

"Cassandra, are you there?"

"Yeah. One sec." I opened my bedroom door and stuck my head down the hall. The house was quiet. Addie was an extremely deep sleeper and Aunt Lucy's door was open. I wondered if she'd decided to sleep at the hospital, she still wasn’t home. "Give me five minutes. I'll be right there."

RD swept me up in his arms right away. I smelled beer on his breath, thick and heavy.

"You've been drinking," I said.

"I am a very naughty boy," he said, pulling me toward him, his mouth warm and his body firm against mine. "I'm destined to disappoint you with my drinking and my badness. I warned you from the start." It was like a scene from a movie, the way he kissed me and held me in the dark. It almost felt too good to be real.

"Walk with me," he whispered. Taking my hand, he led me down the winding pathway toward the water away from our house. Somehow, I knew where we were going. He led me straight to the empty boathouse at the tear-down house by the beach. It was the only boathouse of its kind on the island. Most people just had plain docks. But this building was a real cabin with a workshop inside right on the end of the dock. I knew it was unlocked because Addie had hid in there one night while we'd been playing hide and seek.

The door creaked opened and RD let me inside. The smell of musty life jackets and damp wood hung in the cool air. "How'd you know about this place?" I asked him.

"I didn't," he said.

I reached for the light and RD stopped me. "Don't." He pulled me toward him. "We don't want anyone to know we're here."

My legs trembled. He wanted to stay hidden which meant he wanted to touch me. I couldn't wait for him to take me in his arms. Inside the boathouse, moonlight filtered in through the dirty windows. A blue light filled the space and, after a few minutes, my eyes adjusted and I could see details like paint cans and some old blue float cushions stacked up in the corner.

And I could see RD. The crinkled corners around his eyes and the way the light hit the stubble on his chin. I reached up and touched his cheek. I noticed that his breath seemed shallow like he couldn't breathe that well, either. "You are trouble," he said.

"Who, me?" I smiled and stood up on my tiptoes to kiss his chin. His skin felt rough under my tongue.

"Oh, don't do that." He gave a low laugh and I liked knowing that my touch did this, that I could make his breath change. "You know how crazy you make me."

I looked at him as innocently as I could. "I was just kissing you."

"I don't ever want to let you go, Cassie. This is a serious problem. Do you know that? Every day I tell myself that today is the last, that today I can't touch you, that today you are just a girl and I'm a guy and you can't belong to me." He murmured and dropped his chin on my head, tilting me just a bit so he could kiss my forehead. "Tell me what's going on with your mom," he said. "What can I do to help? What do you need?"

And all of my worries about Mom rushed up from my stomach to my head, making me feel dizzy. I wanted to escape it all; I didn't want to think about anyone in my family. "She's in the hospital right now."

"They admitted her?"

"She had an allergic reaction to her medicine." I swallowed, feeling my eyes swell with tears. He held me close, his fingers traveling up and down my arms. "She's coming home, but Aunt Lucy told Addie and she didn't know before."

"You have the weight of the world on your shoulders." He kissed my neck. "You are so strong, so much stronger than me."

"I'm scared, RD," I said.

"I know," he said. I felt his tongue slide across my neck, giving me shivers. "I wish I could make everything better for you."

"Make me forget," I whispered. "Please make me forget for a little while."