Page 11 of Thicker Than Water
Aiden stiffens, then goes completely still. His gaze hollows out like a sleepwalker’s. “Whose blood is on the knife?” he asks.
“Probably your dad’s!” Sienna stomps toward the cabinet to pull down a glass, then fills it at the sink. “He probably got clumsy and nicked himself.”
She tosses her head back, draining her drink in only three gulps, and as she reaches for a refill, my attention drifts toward the living room walls—the splotches of blood Sienna insists are only animals.
“Um. How—” Aiden’s voice is hazy, as if speaking from inside a dream. My focus snaps back onto him. “Can’t Dad just explain to the cops what’s going on?”
“No, not yet,” I say. “He’s still in the coma. But pretty soon he’ll…” Pretty soon he’ll what? Wake up? Dr. Brighton was clear with us: the timeline for Jason’s recovery isn’t guaranteed. I look to Sienna, hoping she’ll take over, but she’s still at the faucet, drinking from her glass. “The doctors are very hopeful he’ll get better soon.”
Aiden sways on his feet. Side to side, slow as a pendulum. I inch toward him, hands in front of me in case I need to catch him. “Aiden?”
He doesn’t answer, but his face grows pale. His brows pinch together.
“Aid?” I try again. This time, I touch his cheek, and when he doesn’t spring away, I pull him into a hug. He stands like a statue in my embrace, and my heart aches, remembering how he used to ask me to hold him, to engulf his entire body with mine.I’m the ice cream and you’re the scoop!he said once. And I answered,How can I be the scoop if I’m the one eating you up, as I nipped at his neck, drank up his squeals of laughter.
Now he wrenches out of my embrace, speaks without meeting my eyes.
“How do you know Dad didn’t do it?”
Sienna’s head jerks toward him. “Do what? Kill his boss?”
Aiden nods, and I step away from him, blown back by the question.
“Because hedidn’t,” Sienna says, her nonanswer doing little to alter Aiden’s posture.
“Because he’s Dad,” I try. “Because we know him.”
Because Jason would never hurt someone. Quite the opposite: he obsesses over keeping people safe. He bought me an escape tool for my car, on the off chance I ever drive into a lake and need to break the glass. He mostly ignores his own phone, but he figured out how to set up parental controls on Aiden’s so if our son ever edges too close to danger, we’ll be alerted. And it’s not just with us. He missed Aiden’s fifth birthday party because he witnessed a hit and run, and even after the police took his statement, he drove to the hospital, sitting vigil for the victim, who was a twenty-year-old woman with no family in the area. Despite the distance I’ve kept from him lately, Jason is a good man. To us and to others.
“Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do,” Aiden says.
The sentence clangs inside me, ringing a bell whose sound is too familiar.
“What?” Sienna says. “Why would you say that?”
The hair on my arms lifts up, hundreds of tiny antennas. He knows. Our walls aren’t particularly thick; he easily could have heard Jason and me, that night we fought in December. I’d tried to be quiet, to say as little as I could, but my voice was shrieky with the shock of my discovery.
Ten thousand dollars missing from our bank account.
It was almost a fluke that I noticed it at all. Jason handles our bills and transfers; it’s not very often I log in to the accounts. But our fifteenth anniversary was approaching, and I was eager to finally start booking the second honeymoon Jason had promised me since our tenth. That year, we marked the occasion with takeout at home, candles on the table, an impromptu slow dance in the kitchen. Then, in a whisper against my ear, Jason told me he’d opened a new bank account, one specifically allotted for the big, multicity European vacation I’d always dreamed of. Growing up with a single mother—who could barely afford vacations in New England, let alone other countries—I never had a chance to travel, and after we had Aiden, the farthest we went was Virginia Beach. But Jason planned to change that. He told me he’d already deposited his recent bonus in the new account, and for the next five years, we’d save as much as we could.I want to dance with you, he said, his palm warm on my back,just like this, in as many countries as I can.The line was clearly rehearsed, but still so sweet, and it reminded me that I’d been right, ten years before, to commit to a man I’d only known for a handful of months.
But this past December, I was checking the account’s balance, and instead of all deposits, I saw a stunning withdrawal, its zeroes lined up like beads in an abacus. I pointed it out to Jason, at firstimagining that he’d booked our trip himself—planning, perhaps, to gift me the itinerary for Christmas. But his face flooded with color, his expression darkening, and I knew then, before he explained anything, that whatever he’d done with the money was not a surprise, but a secret. Instantly, my mother’s voice, bitter and suspicious, barged into my head:Never trust a man.
He called it a bad investment, one that had been pitched to him as a sure thing, a way to double what we’d saved.Well, then, un-invest, I said.Get the money back.We can’t go anywhere with this.I gestured to the amount left—barely enough for plane tickets—and Jason paused for a long time, chewing his bottom lip, something like fear streaking through his eyes. Then he told me that someone had screwed him over. Those were his words:he screwed me over, the money’s gone, I’m so sorry.And he got on his knees in front of me, like a strange proposal, promising to fix it, to work like hell to get the promotion he was up for, the salary of which would earn back our honeymoon money in no time.
Since then, I haven’t asked him more about it, haven’t even spoken of it, really—just drifted from his touch, skirted his gaze, answered his jokes with a courtesy smile. It spooked me too much, this thing he did behind my back, the dream of mine he shattered, and it made me wonder what else he’s done that I never could have guessed at.
Now Sienna repeats her question. “Aiden, why would you say that?”
I hold my breath, scared he’s going to say it—that he heard everything. That I failed to protect him from my hurt. That I hurt him in turn, marring his shiny vision of his father. That, for as few words as I said to Jason that night, I still said too much.
“Just forget it,” he says instead, and I release a morsel of air. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Aiden, you’re clearly upset,” Sienna says. “Let’s talk about it. We can make you some hot chocolate.”
She sings the name of the drink, trying to entice him, trying to do for me, for him, what I can’t do myself. Because the only sentence I can conjure now is his—Maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do—which is, of course, unnervingly similar to my mother’s:How well do you know this man?
“I’m fine, Auntsy,” Aiden says to Sienna. “Goodnight.” He swishes out of the kitchen, pantlegs catching beneath his feet.
