We Fell Apart: A We Were Liars Novel(10)

“I think so.”

“He was a Dutch guy in like, the sixteen hundreds. Lots of blue and yellow. People standing near windows in milky sunlight. Whatever. Everyone calls me Meer, ’cause I called myself Meer when I was a baby.” He takes my duffel bag off my shoulder and heads toward the castle but stops before he opens the door. “You know what? Let’s not go in. With the indigo and all that. Let’s go to the beach instead. You tired?”

“Not at all,” I lie.

“Good.”

Who is Meer? And who is this June he’s talking about? Do they live here, or work here, or what?

I look at my phone quickly. Nothing from Kingsley. He hasn’t bothered to tell me he was called away from home.

This whole trip suddenly seems like a terrible idea.

We pile the bags by the front door and I follow as Meer leads me around the side of the castle, rattling on. “Tatum could be down there in the water. But he also might have been sucked into the indigo. Or he could be at work, I have no idea. Brock’s gone off, I don’t know, to the market, maybe?”

“Who’s Brock?”

“He lives here. He came on like, a pilgrimage to Kingsley. Like you did.”

“I came to see my father.”

“Brock’s father is a very different type of guy. Like, a swindler. He took all Brock’s money and spent it on pills.” The path takes us past what I now see is a separate pool house and an enormous, circular swimming pool. It’s filled with water, but it’s filthy—sludgy with rotting leaves. “We don’t use the pool much,” quips Meer. “The beach is down this way.”

We walk through a copse of trees to a wooden staircase. It’s built into a monstrously high cliff in a tortured marriage of angry wood to submissive clay. The stairs go down, then left, then down, then right, twisting their way to the sand.

At the top of the steps is a large plastic jug with a pump top. A label of blue masking tape reads Horrible liquid. Do not drink. Meer pumps what looks like oil into his hand, then rubs it on his cheeks and arms, making his skin shine.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Horrible liquid.”

“Really.”

“Don’t drink it,” he says, grinning.

“It’s sunblock,” I say. “Oh, duh.”

“June makes it,” he says. “The stuff from the drugstore is evil or toxic or too expensive or something. But I wrote the label.”

I pump some into my hand. It smells of tangerines. I rub my hands together and slick it on my face and arms. “Who’s June? Because Kingsley didn’t say much when he invited me. Nothing about her, or Tatum, or Brock. Or anyone else who lives here.”

Meer shrugs. “Kingsley never tells anyone anything. It’s not your fault.”

“Okay. I don’t know who you are, actually,” I confess.

“Kingsley’s my father,” says Meer. “Just like he’s yours.”





13


The sound of the ocean rings in my ears as I follow Meer down the staircase. I run to catch up with him on the sand. He stands with his feet in the sea.

“You’re my half brother,” I say, stupidly.

He nods. “I was stoked to meet you.”

“Why didn’t Kingsley tell me?”

“I don’t know. It’s just his way.”

“Did you always know? About me?”

“Mm-hm.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t know about Kingsley, even.”

“That’s okay. Now you do.”

I stare at Meer. The late-July sun makes his hair shine. The bottom of his shorts is wet from the waves that crash around his ankles.

He and I, we never squabbled. We haven’t bothered each other on long car rides or licked each other’s ice creams. We never padded downstairs together on weekend mornings to play video games and eat fistfuls of cereal straight from the box, and we didn’t sit through each other’s dentist appointments and chorus recitals.

I didn’t eat the asparagus off his plate to rescue him because he doesn’t like it. We never shared a tent. He didn’t break the blender and blame it on me. There are no stories to tell about us, no funny family anecdotes. We didn’t compete for our father’s love and attention because Meer had it all.

He is the child Kingsley decided to raise.

His mother is the woman Kingsley loved instead of Isadora. My father has a son, but he never wanted me, his daughter.

I can’t resent Meer for any of that. He wants a sister. I can see it in his wide-open face, the puppy smile he’s giving me. And though we have no history, we have blood. Kingsley’s runs in both our veins. I can see Meer’s pulse in the side of his neck, and the blue just visible in his wrists. It calls out to me. A brother who has been here, all along, when I thought I was an only child.

“What did Kingsley tell you about me?” I ask.

“He was just like, you have a sister, she’s out there in the world. Her name is Matilda Klein. And he told me that your mother is in the Persephone painting. That’s all.”

“I don’t think he could have known very much else. He hasn’t spoken to my mother since before I was born.”

“He thought it would be good for my imagination, to know you were out there.”