“Yeah,” I say, before I wait too long and it sounds like the lie that it is. “Cassie knows that, definitely.”
“Thank God.” Karen sounds so relieved that it kind of breaks my heart for her. “That’s really—that’s good.”
Karen puts the sneakers down, then reaches over to take my hand in hers, rubbing my knuckles in a mom-ish way that makes my throat squeeze tight. Her other hand moves to the hacked remains of my wavy brown hair, her fingers drifting away before they reach its most jagged ends.
The night before I’d glimpsed myself in the hallway mirror and for a second—one fucked-up second—I thought I was her. My mom. That she was there, warm and alive and well again. With my hair longer, I was starting to look exactly like her. And last night I needed not to. I needed to know I’d never again mistake myself for her. Never again would I believe for one awfully beautiful moment that she had come home.
So I grabbed the scissors and leaned over the bathroom sink to cut my hair. So that it, that I, looked nothing like her. I nailed the different part. That’s for sure. I’d been avoiding mirrors ever since, but I could tell it was bad from the freaked-out look that had passed over my dad’s face when he first saw me. But even worse, actually, was the way Gideon—always up for making me feel bad—didn’t say a word.
When I look up at Karen, she smiles, her eyes glistening as she wraps a hand gently around my head and pulls it to her neck. And I’m pretty sure it’s because she needs to be holding someone. Even more, maybe, than I need to be held. She strokes my hair. Don’t cry, I tell myself as my eyes start to burn. Please don’t cry.
“You’re going to be okay, you know,” she whispers. “Not now, but someday.”
When Karen and I get back downstairs, my dad is just hanging up the phone. But instead of putting it down, he keeps it gripped in his hand, so tight his fingers are white at the edges. Something is wrong. Something new. Something bad on top of whatever is wrong with Cassie.
“What did Dr. Simons want?” I ask, because it was the conversation with him that freaked my dad out apparently.
Dr. Simons was my dad’s professor at Stanford. He’s a psychologist and a professor like my dad, but he studies peer pressure, not EI. Similar enough, I guess. And he has no family of his own anymore, so my dad is like his surrogate son. He’s always off teaching this place or that—England, Australia, Hong Kong—which is why we haven’t seen him since we were super-little kids. Lack of geographical proximity is probably part of what my dad likes about Dr. Simons. They are as close as two people, forever thousands of miles apart, can possibly be.
“He was just calling back to answer a question, something about my new data.” My dad waves a hand: nothing for you to worry about. And I so want to find that believable. But it is not. At all. My dad forces a bigger, even less convincing smile as he turns to Karen. “We ready? Wylie, just be sure to lock up once we’re gone, okay?” He says it casually, like it’s an ordinary, everyday request.
“Lock up?” I ask.
My dad has never thought to lock a door in his entire life. If it hadn’t been for my mom, he would have left for our annual two-week vacation on the Cape with our front door hanging wide open.
“Wylie, please,” my dad snaps, like he’s fed up with me and my obsessing, and fair enough, I guess. “Just lock the door. Until we know what’s happened to Cassie, I just—we should exercise all due care.”
That explanation would be a lot more believable if he didn’t look so freaked out. He hasn’t looked that spooked in ages. Not since the day the first baby came.
We were at the breakfast table a couple of days after Halloween when my mom found the first one. It was sitting there on our front porch when she went out to get the newspaper.
“I guess they get points for creativity,” my mom said as she came inside, holding up a plastic baby doll. Her nose crinkled as she peered at the red splattered all over it, which one could only hope was paint. “Much more vivid than the usual emails. I guess that’s the price you pay for page one. I should probably call Elaine and see if she got one, too.”
Elaine was the journalist my mom had been working with on a story about a coalition bombing in Syria. It had run that day on the front page of the Sunday Times, and it was my mom’s photographs of a bombed-out school that had stolen the show. She had always gotten her fair share of hate mail. A couple of times even left at our house. But nothing like a plastic baby.
“Why are you even touching that!” my dad shouted. And so loud. “Put it back outside!”