Page 94 of The Lies I Told
Friday, March 18, 2022
7:15 p.m.
“Did you know Clare was pregnant?” I asked Brit the instant she opened her front door.
Brit was taken aback by me and my question. I’d not called because I knew she’d put me off. She was fine with showing up at my place unannounced, but that shoe never fit well on the other foot.
“Yes, I knew. Dad told me when he was sick two years ago.” Brit averted her gaze and opened her door wider, already tensing at the idea a neighbor might hear. “Come in. I’d rather not have this conversation on my front porch. Neighbors are nosy.”
I stood my ground, not caring whether the whole damn neighborhood heard me. She wasn’t telling me the entire truth. “Why was I left out of the loop?”
“Inside or we don’t talk.”
I stepped into the foyer, and she closed the door behind me. “Dad only told me because he was sick,” she said softly. “Dying churned up a lot of regrets for him. Though that man had many reasons for remorse,that one rose to the top. And as I remember, two years ago, you were drinking heavily.”
“I’ve been sober a year.”
“And learning your dead sister was pregnant would’ve helped you how?”
“I had a right to know.”
“I didn’t want to challenge your delicate hold on sobriety.”
“I had arightto know. She was my sister. My twin.”
“You don’t get the rights of an adult when you’re high.” Her sharp words lingered between us before she drew in a breath. “Look, I feared if you knew there was a baby, it would be too much.”
“The baby could have been the reason she was killed,” I said.
Without a word, Brit turned and walked down the hallway to her kitchen. From the fridge she pulled out a seltzer for me and set it on the counter before moving to a wine bar and uncorking a bottle of red. She poured a generous serving. “Dad said Richards was worried that the baby’s father could have killed her. But Kurt’s DNA didn’t match. Who was the father?”
Mama Brit didn’t have all the answers.
“Clare was with several guys, some she might not have remembered. I’m not judging. We all dealt with Mom’s death differently. For me it was booze, for her it was sex, and you control.”
“Control? I didn’t want the control. Dadneededme to look after you two. We were all in over our heads after Mom died. The last thing I wanted was to play mommy at age fifteen.”
“You’re right. It wasn’t fair. Dad wanted to forget about all three of us,” I said. “Our home was his physical address, but he checked out months before Mom died. All three of us felt orphaned. The lush, the slut, and the control freak. We were quite the trio.”
Brit’s lips thinned into a grim line. “You make us sound like monsters. We were kids, doing the best we could.”
“Did Mom poison us?”
“What?”
Richards’s theory still felt so far-fetched, but I hoped saying it out loud to Brit would give it credibility. “It’s called Munchausen syndrome by proxy. In our case, poison a kid to get Daddy’s attention.”
“Did you get that idea from Richards, too?”
“Is it true?”
“How would I know?”
“Because we kept getting sick after Mom died. Did you continue the tradition?”
“Richards is filling your head with shit. None of that is true. I took you to doctors. They all agreed the stomach pains were stress!”
As much as I wanted to press, that didn’t matter right now. Clare’s death topped all our family’s demented emotional problems. “Did you know seventy percent of women are murdered by someone they know and that the incidence of a woman being killed rises when she’s pregnant?”
