She could either go find Adam or go home. She decided to go home first; it was closest, and she had an idea Adam didn’t like the conversation she’d had with Trevor. Why would he have bolted from the party?
What kind of person was I before this? she wondered. A secret boyfriend. Running around with her neighbor’s son, betraying her oldest friend. A mother who didn’t want her to remember. Why? Was I so awful?
Today alone: her mother’s affair, the fact that her father was likely spying on her mother’s infidelities and might have turned to suicide, and now this. She had wanted to remember, and now ugly truths were showing their hideous bones, their tattered skins.
She put the truck into reverse and backed out of the driveway, slowly. She didn’t remember taking driver’s education, but the muscle memory remained…she could drive. Slowly she backed out and she saw Trevor Blinn standing on the porch, watching her.
You don’t know him. You don’t know what he was like. You don’t know what you were like. But he lent you a truck, she thought. He finally told you. That has to count for something.
She drove home, sweat dripping down her ribs. She saw one light on in the house. She wondered if her mother was at home. She wasn’t. Mom, gone again.
Where was Mom spending her hours? What if she was setting fires, breaking up engagements, making private investigators disappear? You didn’t want to believe this of anyone, but her mother had a single-mindedness at times that could be frightening.
The file for the accident—which she thought at first was a gold mine, and now realized told only the barest of tales—had been in the back of her mom’s file drawer. She hadn’t seen a separate medical file on herself. She went straight to the file cabinet. She flipped through the collected paperwork of her family’s life. Nothing on her medical records, except for a file that held the everyday receipts from doctor’s visits and prescriptions, from before the accident.
Nothing relating to the crash. She closed the file cabinet.
Where would Mom put such a file?
The safe. She went upstairs to her mother’s closet. There was a safe behind a false cabinet panel; she had seen her mother take particularly precious jewelry out of it once, when she was still trying to hold on to her place in Lakehaven society and she still attended functions, before the invitations dried up. It was a keypad lock. She entered in the same code as the house alarm system, which was her parents’ anniversary date; it didn’t work. She entered in her birthday. No. Her mom’s birthday. No. Her father’s. No.
There was more than jewelry here. There had to be.
What else was an important date?
The crash. She entered in the crash date. The door opened, ever so slightly.
It was not the Open Sesame she would have initially guessed. But it made sense, didn’t it? The defining moment of all their lives. Her hand shook as she opened the safe.
Inside lay small boxes of jewelry, very fine stuff, but less of it than she remembered. Papers, photos.
And in the back there was a gun. She took it out carefully. She wasn’t used to guns. She didn’t know how to check whether it was loaded or the safety was on. She had never known that her mother kept a gun in the house. And behind the gun, and a—what would you call it?—a full magazine of ammunition, there lay a thick envelope, shoved into the far back as if it were unwelcome thoughts shoved into the back of a mind, best forgotten. Pulling it free from the safe, she felt dread worm its way into her chest.
It was a medical file, a thick one. She opened it and began to page through it. It was in chronological order, from the initial ambulance report to the hospital file for her coma, her awakening, and her recovery. She flipped through. The pages were filled with lists of diagnoses and observations, with lists of medications she had been given. Brain scans and neurological assessments, insurance forms and paperwork. She read about her brain damage, her coma, the pronouncements of the doctors in crabbed handwriting and notes about her chances for recovery.
What was here? The initial diagnoses, the battery of tests, the outline of her physical injuries (broken arm, fractured wrist, two broken fingers, concussion)…
Then on the third day…there was a report labeled Miscarriage.
The doctor noted an indication of vaginal bleeding on day two of the coma, and a pelvic exam. Her cervix was open; it was inevitable. Blood tests the previous day had indicated that she was pregnant…she flipped back to a blood analysis and found it, with a circle around a “Y” next to the word “pregnant,” in small type. A further note indicated that the pregnancy was not far advanced, perhaps a month.
Had she known?
She felt very cold. Were we sleeping together? No, Trevor had said, you weren’t ready.
The report outlined the presence of clotted material. The bleeding was stopped; she was already on antibiotics; they did not need to increase the dosage. There was no DNA analysis to tell her who the father was.
She was seeing Trevor. Had he lied about intimacy? What was the point?
But you were out with a boy who’d just broken up with his longtime girlfriend. A boy you’d been close to your entire life. A boy who had his arm around you in public, comforting you. A boy you always loved in a back corner of your heart, even if you wouldn’t say it out loud.
I didn’t even know I’d lost you, baby, she thought. She felt a wrenching pain in her chest, in her stomach. No one had told her.
Her mother had kept this from her.
And why…why keep this quiet? Would public opinion think she was more likely to be suicidal if she was pregnant by David or by Trevor? It seemed an old-fashioned notion—but teenagers in trouble did desperate, thoughtless things. Maybe she knew. Maybe she didn’t want the nobly patient Trevor or her best friend, Kamala, to know. Maybe her mother just didn’t want another angle to this already tragic story.
After a moment’s consideration, she returned the file to the safe. She kept the gun.
She texted Trevor: OK now I know. Found the records. Why didn’t you tell me?
Lots of reasons. I’m deeply sorry. Are you all right? I know you don’t want to talk to me but if you need me, I’m here. I’ll stay out of your way if that’s what you want.
She didn’t text him back for ten minutes, sitting on the edge of the bed. She took deep breaths and calmed herself. She needed to be smart right now, not emotional, not reacting to the increasing flood of unhappy news about her life in the days around the accident.
If Mom kept this from you, there is literally nothing else she wouldn’t keep from you as well. Mom is not exactly who you thought she was. There is more there.
She gathered her thoughts and then she texted Trevor: I need your help tomorrow. My shrink lied to me and my mother is paying him to help have me committed. You want to make up for this? Be there with me when I confront them. I think my mother wants to drag me off to a mental hospital and she won’t if you’re there. Will you?