I had been hoping that Mom had some kind of crazy explanation for the bullets beneath the driver’s seat, or that she would think the story of Sam switching the bullets with batteries was hysterical, and we could have a good laugh together. There was only the slimmest of possibilities at this point that everything had a clear, logical explanation—but I clung to it, until I saw Mom’s face go white and drained, as if all her blood had decided at that moment to pool elsewhere.
“Mom? Say something.”
“I need to think about this, Liv. Why don’t you leave me for a minute, let me figure this out.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, but Mom’s posture was rigid, her spine frozen into place. I backed away from the kitchen, went upstairs and took out my Fear Journal. I sat on the bed with my legs tucked under the comforter, willing all my thoughts to spill out. But it’s hard to write clearly when you’re shaking or crying, and I was doing both. What the hell was Dad up to? What had he done, in the hours he’d been gone? What was he going to do?
It was nice to believe that the past was the past and we had moved on, but if I didn’t know it already, I knew it for sure now: that was a big fat lie. Everything in our lives came back to one event, one night. No matter what else happened in our lives, we’d lost Daniel. All we’d lost was him, and the rest of us had crumbled. There was probably a physics rule to explain it—topple one domino, and the rest went, too.
Daniel—you idiot. If you hadn’t been walking by yourself, late at night, headphones jammed into your ears, would any of this be happening right now? Couldn’t you have just been the charmed kid forever, the one who never did anything wrong, especially nothing as stupid as getting killed by a toppled speed limit sign?
I picked up my cell phone and called Dad’s number. I didn’t even hear a ring, just his voice mail greeting. “Dad,” I whispered. “I’m sorry for what I said. I’m so sorry. Can you just come back?” And then I waited.
Eventually I heard Mom’s feet on the stairs, followed by the sound of the master bathroom shower running full blast. I entered her bedroom, stepping over the clothes she had just been wearing, which were scattered on the bedroom floor as if she’d been undressing as she went.
“Mom? You okay in there?”
She used to check on me the same way, when I was a kid sitting too long on the toilet with a book in hand. You okay in there, Liv? You haven’t fallen in or anything, have you?
“I’m fine,” she called, her voice rising with the steam. “You’re going to need to pack up your things. We should be on the road as soon as we can.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard her. No—I’d heard her; I just wasn’t sure that anything made sense anymore. “What?”
The water stopped, and Mom reached a dripping arm to retrieve a bath towel. A second later she stood in front of me, the towel fastened around her chest. Her curls, momentarily flattened by the water, were sending fat droplets of water to the floor.
I leaned against the doorway for support. “Where are we going? I thought you said you didn’t know where Dad was.”
Mom’s eyes were bright, a steely blue. “I have an idea,” she said, moving past me to the bedroom. She pulled open a dresser drawer and began removing some clothes. “I’ll explain more when we’re on the road, okay?”
I looked away as she shimmied out of her towel, feeling sick and disoriented, the way I’d felt as a kid when I’d wound the chains of a swing into a circle and then spun out, the world a dizzy blur around me. Just over a week ago, I’d been living what passed for a normal life in California. I felt a desperate longing for a bowl of orange mac-and-cheese from a box, shared with Dad in front of a Friday night movie marathon. “Um, Mom, hello? You have to tell me what you’re thinking. I’m about to have a panic attack here. And I’ve been told—by you, actually—that I’m not a very fun person to be around during a panic attack.”
Mom grabbed me by the shoulders, her chin level with my nose. “No, you’re not. We don’t have time for a panic attack. You hear me, Liv? This is serious.”
I swallowed hard, forcing the words out. “Where, Mom? Where are we going?”
“Oh, honey,” she said, brushing my forehead with her lips. Her hair fell damp around my face. “We’re going to find him. We’re going to bring him home.”