Splinter (Fiction — Young Adult) Page 2

  There’s a lot I don’t remember, but there’s plenty I know for sure.

  I don’t know why it’s so hard for Eschermann to grasp.

  Mom’s gone because she didn’t want to be here anymore.

  Dad didn’t kill her.

  The Jeep bumps over the curb when Cassidy pulls into the driveway.

  “You okay?” she asks me.

  “Yeah.” But my mouth is dry. Beads of sweat roll down my back, and they’re not just from my run.

  And I’m acutely aware of the fact that curtains are parted and noses are pressed to windows in every house on this street.

  I open the car door; my feet hit the red-bricked driveway.

  “Good evening, Miss Lang.”

  “Evening.” I count four officers in front of me. The only tolerable one is Neilla Cooper, who babysat me a lifetime ago. Nothing differentiates the other three—closely shaved heads, broad shoulders—except for the slight paunch on the one who just spoke, Lieutenant Ken Eschermann. I’ve known him since I was six, since before he moved up the ranks.

  His hands are hooked on his belt, near his weapon. He nods to Cassidy, who’s getting out of the driver’s seat. “Miss Solomon.”

  “Hi.” She’s quieter than usual in their company. Always has been.

  “Do you know where your father is?”

  Wait. He isn’t home yet?

  “What time is it?” I ask Cassidy.

  “Five forty-eight,” she answers, in unison with another officer.

  “He’s usually home by now.”

  “He didn’t come to the door when I rang the bell. And given your call this afternoon, he should’ve known we’d be by.” Eschermann and my father are somewhat friendly, which is weird when you consider their relationship is based upon certain suspicions.

  “I didn’t tell him about the postcard,” I admit. “I was going to tell him about it tonight.”

  “So where’s this one from?” The lieutenant squints down at me, the day’s last rays of sun in his eyes.

  I figured Eschermann would want to see it, that he’d have questions about it. This isn’t unusual. I’ve been questioned nearly a dozen times about the day my mother left. But it still irks me that he’s chosen to show up like this, drawing the whole block’s attention.

  “We have to do this here?” I ask. “Why can’t you call me back like a normal person? Why can’t I just give you the postcard—you can dust it for prints, the whole rigmarole—and conclude, like always, that it’s been handled too many times, and—”

  “Samantha.” His sigh is long and drawn-out.

  “No, you know what this looks like,” I tell him. “And you know how hard this is. Tomorrow at school, everyone will be talking about a parade of cops on my lawn.”

  “Samantha,” he says again. “Someday you’ll see this is as much for your benefit as ours. It isn’t a punishment.”

  It is, sort of. Sit a girl down year after year after year, and remind her that her mother isn’t here. While you’re at it, fill her head with all your horrible theories about what might have happened to her. I don’t know why they don’t get it. Sometimes, mothers just don’t stick around. Their families aren’t enough to make them stay.

  “We’re trying to get to the truth, regardless of what that truth is,” he tells me.

  If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that line from him, I could’ve bought the Jeep from Cassidy.

  “Talk to our father when he gets home,” Cassidy says. Her hand is at my elbow, gently guiding me toward the brick path to the back door.

  “There’s been a development,” Eschermann says.

  Cassidy’s fingers tighten at my elbow. We stop.

  “Could be nothing, but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask you about it. And your father.”

  Cassidy reaches for me, even as I step back toward the cops.

  “What kind of development?” I ask quickly.

  “Does the name Trina Jordan mean anything to you?”

  “Trina Jordan?” I shake my head.

  “Girls.”

  I turn toward my father’s voice. He’s standing in the now-open doorway, his lips thinned into a crooked, angry line. “Dinner’s getting cold.”

  “Chris.” Eschermann nods.

  “Ken.”

  “I’d like to talk to you and Sam. We’ve come across—”

  “It’s not a good time.” If I know Dad, and I do, this is the end of the conversation.

  Cassidy’s already inside. I’m taking my time walking up the steps.

  “We’ll arrange a better time for an interview, then.”

  I look over my shoulder at the lieutenant. He was about to tell me something about my mother. He was going to tell me about Trina Jordan.

  “Tomorrow,” Eschermann says. “It’s important.”

  “Maybe,” Dad says. “Sam. Inside.” We step inside and the door closes behind us.

  “Hi, Cass.” Dad wraps her in a big hug. “What’ve you been up to?”

  “Oh, you know. Making the world a better place.”

  “You must be exhausted.”

  “Yeah, well, someone’s got to do it.”

  If I weren’t so preoccupied, I might have laughed, like Dad does.

  Dad’s different with Cassidy than he is with me—more affectionate, which I think says more about the way she feels about him than the way he feels about me. It’s easier for Cass. Heather didn’t bring her around during the dark days; Cass’s relationship with Dad began to grow a few years ago, when he was already sober.

  Cass disappears into the kitchen and Dad turns to me. “What did Eschermann have to say?” He rests a hand on my shoulder.

  I shrug away. Too sweaty to be touched right now. “If you were really that curious, you could’ve answered the door when they rang the bell.”

  “Your tone.” It’s his way of telling me I’m being disrespectful, but I call it like it is.

  “I didn’t hear the bell,” he says after he’s sure his message is received. “Must be broken again.”

  Of course. It’s the charm of living in an old house. Everything in it is in some state of disrepair. I choose to ignore the fact that Eschermann probably also knocked.

  I hear Cassidy bustling in the kitchen. The clangs of plates and utensils against the granite countertops echo through the hallway. I guess this is as good a time as any to tell him: “I got another postcard.”

  “And you called Ken before you called me.”

  “What can you do about it?” I push my hair back from my forehead. Besides—and I won’t say this out loud, not after I’ve already been warned about my tone—these little bits of news from my mother tend to shut my father down. I know what would’ve happened, had I told him: he’d close up, withdraw. And I’d be stuck here, being a shadow around the one parent I still have. “There’s nothing on it. Just like the other ones. The same pointless eleven-seven. I wonder why she bothers at all.”

  Dad opens his mouth, as if he’s about to say something, maybe comforting words, but the words don’t come.

  “At least when she left you, you got some semblance of closure when you signed the divorce papers.” I shove my running shoes into the cabinet designated as my locker.

  Still silent, he leans against the doorframe, blocking the path to the kitchen. “Samantha, I know this is hard. And I don’t understand it either. She loved you, and I can’t explain why she would do this to you. But if she’s chosen to walk away from you because she walked away from me, it’s her loss.”

  This is more than he’s usually willing to say about Mom, and under other circumstances, it would mean a lot. But I’m not putting up with this dodgeball routine.

  “Who’s Trina Jordan?” I cross my arms.

  For a split second, his mouth hangs agape, but he quickly regains his composure. “I don’t . . .” He shakes his head with a minute jerk. “What?”

  “Eschermann asked about someone named Trina Jordan. Who is she?”
/>
  “I don’t know.”

  “She has something to do with Mom.”

  “I don’t know, Sam.”

  For a good few seconds, we stand there, staring at each other.

  “You coming?” Cassidy calls. “I might eat all the egg rolls before you get here.”

  “Come on.” Dad pats me awkwardly on the shoulder, moving out of the doorway. “She really might eat all those egg rolls.”

  I don’t budge.

  “I ordered the veggie ones,” he offers. “Just for you.”

  I take a few steps toward the kitchen.

  Dad follows.

  But I hear him let out a tense, weary sigh—the sigh of someone who’s won a temporary reprieve from whatever’s weighing on him.

  He knows.

  He knows who Trina Jordan is.

  And he just lied to me about it.

  I don’t remember the day I realized my mother wasn’t coming home again. One day, it just became a reality.

  Despite rumors of my mother’s infidelities—which I’ve heard only from Cassidy, who swears she overheard Dad and Heather talking about it—the divorce had been amicable. So much so, in fact, that I got to stay in the house all the time. It was my parents who visited me, not the other way around. Dad would come in the front door, while Mom slipped out the back. They shared the space for what seemed like forever but was probably only a couple of months.

  And one day, she just stopped coming. Wednesday, November seventh, came and went without a sign of her.

  At first, the fact that she’d gone didn’t alarm my father. She’d been planning to take a weekend trip to Georgia. When she didn’t return that Wednesday, he figured she’d prolonged her stay—or just decided not to come back. She’d started packing her things. Since those boxes—like her car—never turned up, I assume she took everything with her.

  She’d neglected to pack the framed portraits of the two of us, which speaks volumes, if you ask me.

  I mean, it’s possible that she took along another picture of me. I have no idea how many pictures of us existed in the first place, let alone which specific ones are left. But recently, I’ve come to realize that in all likelihood, Mom just wanted out. Something about me, about being a mother, didn’t jibe with her plans.

  Then, when Dad married Heather, pictures of Mom joined the ranks of old stuff in the attic. Nearly every trace of my mother was wiped out with one pass of Heather’s eraser, and by that time, I couldn’t even resent my stepmother for insisting on it. My mother was gone. Images of her had haunted us from the edges of end tables, from the arched niche in the foyer. And why did we keep them there? To remind us that she’d left?

  A few things remain: Her classic novels, of course, still line the highest shelf in our family room. Found in any library, they’re generic-enough possessions that they could belong to anyone. They don’t scream Delilah any more than our cheese grater does.

  But I still have a few distinctly-Mom things too: her favorite recipes for butter cookies and snickerdoodles, a locket, a snapshot of the two of us, taken shortly before the divorce. I keep these things in the drawer of my bedside table. I don’t look at the picture much anymore, but I’ve memorized every detail: Mom in a black sundress, me on her lap in a pale yellow romper. Our matching golden-brown tresses flowing together like a confluence of two rivers. Identical lockets—silver hearts embossed with sunflowers—strung around our necks on silver chains. We wore them every day.

  Dad bought mine for my third or fourth birthday; Mom bought one for herself so we’d match.

  Thinking about it now, my fingers ache to hold my locket, which I hardly wear anymore, just to feel close to her again.

  “You okay?” Cassidy asks.

  “What?” I shake free from the photograph in my mind.

  Cassidy’s sitting on the bench in the mudroom and shoving her feet into her boots. We’ve just left the kitchen, where Dad is loading up the dishwasher after a nearly silent dinner.

  “You gonna be okay?” Cassidy asks. Before I have a chance to answer, she follows up with, “Who’s Trina Jordan, anyway?”

  I shrug a shoulder. “Who knows?”

  “Do you think Dad knows?”

  I do, but I don’t want Cassidy to think that too. Not unless there’s a concrete reason. “He said he didn’t.”

  “Here’s the great thing about my mom and me moving out,” she says.

  “You mean aside from the fact that you got custody of the dog?”

  “I have somewhere else to go when he gets all mopey,” Cassidy says. “And you know . . . you can come too.”

  I do know. Heather has told me countless times I’m welcome, but I belong here with Dad.

  “I don’t know how you do it.” Cassidy gives her head a slight shake. “He gets so quiet.”

  “I know.”

  “Uncomfortably quiet. Doesn’t it ever irk you? Stopping your life every few months when he zaps into depression mode? I mean, no offense, but he just can’t stand to be happy. Not even when he was with my mom.”

  Maybe she’s right. For almost a year after my mom left, not knowing what happened to her practically debilitated him. And even now, whenever something happens to remind him of her, he’ll get like this. It’s one reason that I know he had nothing to do with Mom’s leaving.

  But still, we adjust. He does whatever it is he does—incessant P90X, regular AA meetings, teaching his economics classes at Northwestern University, scheduling his days to death—and I get used to bumming rides off people.

  While his moodiness is sometimes tough to take, we manage to make do. The day Heather and Cassidy moved out, we’d played rummy late into the night. We both were emotionally drained, and it should have been one of the worst nights in my memory. I’d lost another mother, who’d taken with her my best friend. Yet whenever I think of it, I feel a sense of warmth and protection. Dad rose above his own despair because he knew I was hurting too. I needed him that night, and he needs me now.

  “Pick you up tomorrow morning.” Cassidy is dawdling at the door now. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. And hey . . . awesome news about Zack.”

  She grins. “I know, right?”

  ////

  I have a bad headache, brought on by tension, and there’s plenty of that hanging between Dad and me. Why won’t he just tell me what he knows? Has there ever been a time that he hasn’t answered one of my questions?

  No.

  But maybe that’s because I’ve never asked a particularly difficult one.

  My head pounds, and the walls of the room seem to be closing in on me. I reach for my Imitrex and down a pill without water to ward off what seems to be a migraine-in-the-making.

  My trigonometry textbook is open, but instead of working on the assigned functions, I’m staring at my laptop screen, at dozens of profile pictures of Trina Jordans. Any one of them could be the woman Eschermann referenced.

  I try another search—Trina’s name in connection with my mother’s—but nothing substantial comes up with that, either.

  One more: Trina Jordan Missing.

  The screen fills with links and thumbnail photos, and I hear her, my mother, in the back of my mind, winding through gray matter:

  Sami-girl?

  “Sami?”

  I startle. Whip around.

  Dad.

  I close my laptop fast.

  “How’s homework?”

  Silver halos encircle the triangles on the page before me, and the beat of ancient rock ’n’ roll rattles my brain. “Just one last problem.”

  Dad clears his throat. “Going bowling tomorrow night?”

  “Yeah, with Brooke and Cassidy. Maybe Zack.” If Dad ever actually saw my bowling score, he’d realize I can’t possibly bowl as often as I say I do. But I never tell Dad when we’re having a party, even if it’s a smallish one.

  He’s staring past me, as if the wall behind me is the most interesting thing in the world. “Stressful day.”
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  “Stressful evening, anyway.” I tap the eraser of my pencil against my notebook and wait. Please tell me about Trina Jordan. I know that if I ask again, he’ll only withdraw deeper into his abyss.

  “So.” He rubs his hands together. “Charleston, South Carolina.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Call me at work next time? Before you call Eschermann?”

  “What difference does it make? It’s not like I was going to hide it from you.” I pause. “I don’t hide things from you.”

  He chooses to ignore that. “But you’re distant tonight.”

  I answer with a guttural sound, but what I really mean is so are you.

  “We’ve already lost so much.” Dad’s voice is low and not quite steady. “Heather and Cassidy, your mother . . . I can’t imagine how I’d survive without you.”

  I don’t say so, but I don’t know what I’d do without him, either. Once, when I was little and we were shopping for school clothes, I lost track of him at the mall. Those three minutes without him felt like an eternity. And to calm me down after the ordeal, we split one of those huge, soft pretzels. See the twist in the middle? he’d asked. That’s you and me, laced together.

  These days, I wonder if we aren’t unraveling a bit, and if we’ll end up two separate halves of what used to be a whole family unit.

  “We can’t shut each other out,” Dad says.

  “Take your own advice.” Tell me about Trina Jordan. Tell me what you know.

  “Sam.” Regret seeps into his voice. “I know this gets frustrating for you. You and I—we deal with things differently. Sometimes I don’t communicate with you as well as I should. That’s on me, I know that. Maybe if this thing with your mom hadn’t been hanging over us for so long—” He cuts himself off. “Anyway, I just don’t want us to be at odds.”

  I say nothing. We wouldn’t be at odds if he’d just be straight with me, instead of backhandedly apologizing for not being straight with me.

  “Do you think she’s out there?” he says suddenly.