Just for the Summer(96)

Pictures of the two of them standing next to an eighteen-year-old Daniel at his high school graduation. Birthday parties and Daniel blowing out candles. Homemade Halloween costumes and William at some bar calling a Bingo game. Linda holding up a pie she made at Christmas with a Christmas tree behind her here, in this living room.

They seemed warm. Friendly.

I swallowed. “Did you have a good childhood?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Daniel said. “It was a great childhood.”

“Were they good people?”

I saw him study me. “They were the best people I’ve ever known.”

We sat there in silence.

“Was your childhood good?” he asked.

It took me a long time to answer. “No.”

I stared at the album. The picture on the page was kids. A lawn full of kids, playing in the sprinklers. My cousins. My brother.

I had been robbed. This life, this family, had been stolen from me.

This was my alternate universe, laid out in full color.

And then Daniel flipped to another page and there was a picture of a twentysomething Amber. Sitting in a lawn chair drinking one of her Bloody Marys.

She’d been here. But where was I?

“What year is this?” I asked. But I think inside I already knew.

Daniel turned the page and the date was scrapbooked onto the bottom.

The Fourth of July when I was eight.

Bile rose in my throat. The summer of the smoke alarm and the carrots. The first time I went into the system.

She’d left me alone and come here. She left me to starve and fend for myself while she came back to her secret family to eat burgers and pretend I didn’t exist. It was the last thing I needed to see.

I got up. “I need to leave.”

Daniel got up too. “Are you sure? I was—”

But I was already running for the foyer, a panic attack building. I had to get out of here.

I heard Maddy making excuses for me, and Justin came out on my heels, clicking the car locks off a second before I got to the door.

By the time Maddy got into the back seat I was sobbing.

Maddy leaned into the front. “Are you okay—”

“GO! GET ME OUT OF HERE!” I shouted.

Justin put the car in reverse and I watched through water-blurred eyes as my brother and his wife stood on the porch, shrinking in the distance as we backed out of the driveway.

I was breathing into my hands, trying not to hyperventilate.

“That fucking bitch,” Maddy said from the back seat.

“Why the hell would she do this?” Justin asked, turning on the wipers. Dragonflies were all around the car. It was like a sudden swarm of locusts through the blur of my tears.

Maddy handed me tissues from her purse over the back of the seat. “Because she’s a horrible human being.”

“They seemed like nice people,” Justin said. “I don’t get it.”

“They are nice people,” Maddy said.

I couldn’t stop crying. I had never in my life cried like this. I felt like my soul was leaving my body.

How could she have done this? How could anyone be this selfish? This cruel? And it wasn’t just the people she kept me from, or the betrayal of knowing where she was when I was left behind. It was the depth of the deception. The layers upon layers of lies she told to keep me from ever knowing this existed.

If Amber could do this, what else was she capable of?

“I can’t see,” Justin said. “I have to pull over, there’s too many bugs.”

I felt the car drive onto the dirt.

“I can’t breathe,” I cried. “I can’t breathe!”

As soon as Justin put the car in park he was unbuckling himself and getting out to come around to the passenger side. Then he opened my door and lifted me into his arms. “Breathe with me, okay?” he whispered. “In and out. Slow.”

He held me there on the shoulder of the highway while I sobbed into his neck. He held me so tight, it felt like he was the only thing keeping me from falling apart.

“Tell me what I can do,” he whispered.

“You can take me to her.”

Maddy had been right all along. She’d always seen Amber for what she was: someone who destroyed everyone and everything in her path.

My childhood shifted forever in my mind.

My mother’s neglect wasn’t the product of mental illness, or lack of resources, or circumstances beyond her control, the inability to do better. My life was chosen for me.

It was chosen by her.

CHAPTER 41

EMMA

I walked right into Neil’s mansion without waiting for someone to open the door.

Justin and Maddy were waiting in the pool house. They hadn’t wanted to leave me, but I didn’t want an audience.

I stood in the living room for a moment to stare at the incomplete rose wall that I now knew was the banister in Mom’s childhood home. The re-creation of her pretty memories, distorted and beyond salvaging.

All the beautiful things she started, only to abandon.

I turned and went up the staircase to find her, opened the bedroom door without knocking.

The room was a mess again. Three empty wine bottles, along with takeout cups and containers, littered the floor. The bed was in disarray—except for Neil’s side. That was perfectly made.