Page 67 of Thicker Than Water
It’s okay, he said as we surveyed the damage.I still love you.
Now, tears crawl down my cheeks, icy where they should be scalding.
Chapter NineteenJULIA
The house is dark when I return. I left in such a hurry earlier that I didn’t think to keep a light on to guide me back. While the rest of our neighborhood gleams—porchlights on, windows glowing—our house is a gap of blackness, like a missing tooth in a grinning mouth.
Still, when I step inside, I don’t flip any switches, don’t reach for any lamps, don’t want to glimpse the blotchy roosters staining the walls. I feel my way to the family room with my hands, then collapse onto the couch, where I remain for a long time.
It took something from me, learning about Sienna’s lie. Some essential energy. Some intangible thing that’s powered me for a long time. It’s not even the lie itself; if she wants to see Wyatt, she should. It’s the ferocity of it all, the intensity with which she insisted she never speaks to him—and the way I never thought to doubt it. Doubt her.
Sienna’s lie was so much smaller than all of Jason’s. So why does it feel like it’s clobbered me? Why do I feel like I can’t even move?
I guess, with Jason, I had some warning, even as I tried for years to ignore it:How well do you know this man?That old seed my mother planted. Not to mention the cliché of it all: one partner betraying another, their secrets as sacred to them as any vow. But Sienna and I—better than partners; better, even, than friends—were above all that.
I can’t see it in this night-dark room, but in one of the photos masking the wallpaper, there’s Sienna and me, palms clasped on the beach, mouths roaring with bent-over laughter as the ocean glitters behind us. In the past, whenever I looked at that photo, at our hands linked together, I saw only the places we overlapped, the spaces we filled for each other—not the cracks between us through which some things might slip.
In a way, these family room photographs feel like ghosts. Sienna and me, standing on sand. Jason with Aiden on his shoulders. Jason and Sienna and me on courthouse steps.
How many secrets are in each picture, pressed and preserved beneath glass? How much have we kept from each other?How well do you know this man—or any of them?
I can’t help but think of my mother, the distrust that festered in her like an infection. My whole life, she was cured of it only once, briefly, that month she dated Bob Sullivan, the man I later found stealing from her. She screamed when I told her, yelled that I’d ruined a good thing, that I never knew how to just keep quiet, and I wonder now if she understood what that would do to me, how it would make me swallow my own voice, shutter my truths and suspicions.
For the first time since it happened, I feel sad for her. That day I saw Bob pulling money from her purse, my mother learned there were two versions of the man she loved: the one who bought her flowers, made her blush, and the one I told her he was, a man who’d take from her, a man who’d waste the rare jewel of her trust. Maybe,then, when she screamed at me, she didn’t do so in anger, but in horror—that the two versions could conflict so much.
In the entryway, a key clicks inside a lock. The dead bolt flips back. The front door opens.
“Mom?” Aiden calls.
At first I don’t respond. I stare into the darkness, my mouth open like a fish on a line, the discussion we need to have a hook inside my lip. The pain, the danger of it, renders me silent.
“Mom?” he tries again.
“In here,” I say, my voice creaky, like a door that hasn’t been opened in a while.
Aiden’s feet clap down the hallway, sounding dimly metallic in his dress shoes. When he flicks on the overhead light, I raise my hand to shield my eyes, then drop it to take him in. He’s so handsome, so achingly grown, even if his pants are a bit short at the ankles, allowing a glimpse of his flamingo socks, a sight that nearly drowns me in affection. His hair is a little damp, sweat-slick, and I hope it’s because he spent the night dancing, because he laughed and joked with friends, and, for three hours, didn’t give a single thought to his father.
“Why are you in the dark?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I guess I liked it.”
He frowns at my answer, then swings his gaze between the family room and kitchen. “Where’s Auntsy?”
“I don’t know,” I say again, and he frowns at that, too.
“Okay…” He arches his neck to loosen his tie. “Well, I’m gonna go change—”
“Come here a minute.”
I pat the cushion beside me. He hesitates, eyeing the couch like it wants to eat him, but then he shuffles over, flopping onto the corner of it, as far from me as he can get.
“How was the semiformal?” I ask. “You look perfect.”
“It was fine.”
“Yeah? Did—did anyone give you a hard time? Was Nate Hyde there?”
“No,” he says, and I’m not sure which question he’s answering. I give him a moment to elaborate, but his mouth is a firm line.
