Daddy even burned down a courthouse to hide his crimes? I’m thinking.
“Becca? That courthouse was struck by lightning,” Mom says, as if she knows how my brain’s working. She frowns. “Or, for all I know, maybe your daddy heard about some courthouse burning down and used that detail to make his lie convincing.”
What’s the difference? When Daddy hid this secret from me too?
I shake my head, trying to clear it.
“What’s Daddy’s real name?” I ask.
Mom shrugs.
“Robert Catri,” she says, spitting out the unfamiliar words. “Not that I care. Not that it matters.”
I remember how Daddy always said his whole family was dead. Another lie, probably. I remember way back to the day Mom and I first talked about running away, how Mom said we didn’t have to make up fake, anonymous-sounding names to go into hiding because we already had anonymous-sounding names.
Even then my name wasn’t real. Daddy made sure my name was a fraud right from the start. He made sure I was a fraud.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask Mom. Once again, it’s Daddy I should be mad at, but Mom’s the one sitting in front of me. So she’s the one I scream at.
Mom holds up her hands helplessly.
“Remember how . . . destroyed . . . we both were after the trial? Before we moved?” she asks. “Did you really need another reason to believe your father was scum? You were fourteen. You’d always been such a daddy’s girl. I thought one more bit of evidence might . . . might . . .”
“What? Kill me?” I challenge. I am full of bravado, my face shoved down low so I’m in Mom’s face. “Like just a name would ruin me forever?”
It could have, I think. I don’t want to, but I can remember how I felt three years ago: wobbly and fragile and frail, like my whole body was tissue paper. There had been moments when the gentlest puff of wind could have torn me to shreds.
“Becca . . . ,” Mom says. She lifts her hands again, a useless, fluttering motion, going nowhere.
I will not be helpless or useless like my mother.
“Sure, I was fourteen then, but I’m seventeen now,” I say. “Almost an adult. You had three years when you could have told me the truth about Daddy. Why didn’t you? What else are you still keeping secret?”
Mom’s eyes dart to the side, a familiar movement. There have been dozens of times over the last three years when she’s looked away like that. And I’ve let her. I’ve looked away myself, or I’ve buried myself in homework or grabbed my computer or stuffed in earbuds and turned my iPod up loud.
But I just blew any chance I ever had of getting the Court scholarship, and I’m going to have to think up some excuse to give Rosa and Oscar tomorrow for ignoring them. And unless Ms. Stela is even more incompetent than I think, I’m going to have to figure out some way to convince her I am not a paranoid schizophrenic or psychologically deranged or anything but a good student stressed out by the pressures of senior year.
I can’t get tripped up again by something unexpected like a missing birth certificate.
And . . . I actually told the truth today. I told the whole truth and nothing but the truth for the first time in three years, and even though it didn’t go well, somehow speaking the truth just once made me even more disgusted with the past three years of secrets and lies.
No—my whole life of secrets and lies.
“There is something else, isn’t there?” I hiss at Mom. “Something else you’ve been keeping from me, something else you’ve lied about—”
“I was just trying to protect you,” she wails back at me. “Why frighten you even more?”
I grab her by the arm.
“Tell me,” I insist. “Tell me, or else I’ll, I’ll . . . I’ll tell everyone in Deskins who we are.”
The color drains from Mom’s face. She wrenches her arm from my grasp and grabs me by the shoulders.
“No!” she shrieks. “Weren’t you listening to me before? There are people who would kill us if they knew!”
I pull away easily.
“Oh, right,” I scoff. “The death threats. You’re just paranoid. All those months after Daddy was arrested, all those weeks the trial went on—everybody in Atlanta knew where we lived then. Anybody in the world could have found us. If someone was going to kill us, wouldn’t they have done it when we still lived in Georgia?”
“We had special protection through the FBI,” Mom says. “Twenty-four hours a day.”
Okay, I didn’t know that. I try not to let my reaction show on my face.
“Anyhow,” I say. “That was a long time ago. Anyone who hated Daddy that much—they’ve got to know he’s in prison now. He’s already being punished. He’ll be punished for another seven years! Whatever danger we were in three years ago—it’s over!”
“Keep your voice down,” Mom says.
I realize the buzzing of the phone and the pounding at the front door stopped a long time ago. My friends gave up on me, just like I expected. Just like I wanted.
Mom is still white faced and cowering. And she’s glancing around as though there might be spies and enemies anywhere around us.
“The danger isn’t over,” Mom says. “None of this is over. It’s worse than ever. Your father and his attorney are trying to work out a deal to get him out of prison early. All he has to do is betray some former clients. And they’d do anything to stop him.”
I want to say, “You’re exaggerating! They wouldn’t actually kill us! What good would that do?” I want to say it in the same sarcastic, scoffing tone I’d used before. But I’d sat through hours of testimony at Daddy’s trial. I heard the type of person he really was, the type of people he did business with. I can imagine some of them deciding to kill Mom to warn Daddy about what they’d do to me if he talked, or vice versa. I could see them kidnapping us or torturing us or . . .
“Becca?” Mom says gently. “This is why I didn’t tell you.”
I realize I am standing stock still, frozen with fear.
“It’s all right,” Mom says, still in that same cautious, easy tone. “This is the real reason we ran away. We’re perfectly safe here. Nobody knows anything about us. I swear, I didn’t know about the missing birth and marriage certificates online, but that must have been some other protection the attorney set up. Like extra insurance.”
She’s smiling at me—hopefully, reassuringly, kindly. She looks calmer, too, as if she feels better now that she’s spilled the last secret she was keeping from me.
It really does seem like this was her last big secret.
And maybe I would have felt reassured—maybe I would have trusted her and felt completely safe—if only she’d told me this yesterday or the day before or practically any other day over the past three years.
Why did she wait to tell me on the very day I just revealed our biggest secret?
Now—
too much now
If there’s such a thing as “un-cowering,” that’s what Mom is doing. She stretches out her legs and un-hunches her shoulder. Even her face smoothes out, the furrows gone.
“Wow,” she marvels. “I never realized how relieved I’d feel, finally telling you that.”
I want to punch her right in her smooth, happy, relieved face. I want to put my fist through the wall. I want to kick the door off its hinges. I want to grab Mom by the shoulders and shake her until she screams—until she’s back to being as miserable and terrified as I am.
I don’t want to tell her what I did.
“How could you have kept this from me?” I scream. “How could you have believed that I wouldn’t accidentally let something slip—and get us both killed?”
Mom’s face turns solemn again.
“I never worried about that,” she says. “You were so . . . pathologically mortified. Fourteen is kind of the worst age to be embarrassed by anything, and you had the whole world knowing what you were ashamed of. I knew you wouldn’t slip up.”
“Didn’t you think I??
?d ever outgrow being fourteen?” I want to shout at her. But I can’t, not without confessing what I told Mr. Court.
Mom is staring me straight in the eye. How is it that over the past three years I never noticed that she avoided looking directly at me as much as I avoided looking directly at her?
I force myself to gaze right back at her. My face feels stiff as stone, as if I’ve dared to peer at Medusa.
“Honestly?” Mom says. “When we first moved here, what frightened me the most was the psychological damage I thought this might do to you. You were always such an open, loving child. You had such a gift for making friends. I should have been urging you to trust people again—select people, anyway. Instead, I had to keep telling you, ‘Hide! Keep secrets! Don’t get over any of this!’ ”
“And, ‘Don’t even think about going to college,’ ” I snarl.
Mom winces.
“The danger, the secrecy, the hiding . . . it was only supposed to last a few months,” she says. “A year, tops. We were already talking about moving, anyway, when I found out about the deal your daddy and the attorney were making. It’s under something called Rule Thirty-five, where a prisoner gives prosecutors information about a crime somebody else did. Once the prosecutors checked it out and arrested the Excellerand officials, then—”
“Excellerand?” I say. “That’s what this is about?”
Excellerand is like Apple or Microsoft or Google—one of those companies that everyone knows about and wishes they’d bought stock in ten years ago. It’s huge.
“Remember how proud your daddy was when he did that contract work for Excellerand seven or eight years ago?” Mom asks. “Evidently, he found proof they were double-dipping on government contracts, charging millions for computer work they never actually did.”
“Why didn’t he turn them in then?” I ask.
I think about how different my life would have been if he had: I would have been the hero’s daughter, the one whose father nobly sacrificed his own business to blow the whistle on cheats and scoundrels.
Mom shoots me a disdainful look.
“That would have put the spotlight on him,” Mom says. “His own crimes would have come out too.”
“They came out anyway,” I grumble.
Mom nods.
“But this way, with the whole Rule Thirty-five deal, there’s some chance your daddy can make up for what he did,” she says. “At least a little.”
Redemption, I think. If—when?—this news comes out, I won’t exactly be the daughter of a hero, but at least I’ll be the daughter of someone who tried to make up for his crimes. Someone who isn’t all bad.
No, just someone trying to get out of prison early, I tell myself.
“So, why wasn’t this Rule Thirty-five thing over in a year?” I ask. “Why are we still waiting?”
Mom sighs.
“Every time I talk to the attorney, there’s some new complication,” she says. “Excellerand is rotten to the core, and the prosecutors keep finding new evidence they want to nail down before they go public with any charges. Everything’s taking longer than expected.”
How long will it take the secret I told Mr. Court to travel to Excellerand? I wonder. How much time do Mom and I have?
“Can’t the attorney get them to hurry?” I ask. “Don’t they know we’re in limbo here?”
“Mr. Trumbull knows you want to go to college next year,” Mom says.
That’s not a close-enough deadline. I sink down onto the bed. I rub my temples.
I’m going to have to tell her what I did, I think.
I try another approach instead.
“College applications are due by the end of December,” I tell Mom. “That’s just two months away. I have to turn in financial aid forms in February. And I’ll have to get financial aid. We’ll have to reveal—”
“Excellerand holds some computer service contracts for administering the FAFSA,” Mom says. She lets this sink in for a moment, then she adds, “Mr. Trumbull says they know your father’s trying to betray them. They know he has proof that can sink them. And he’s pretty sure they have searches looking for us on every site they have access to. On the entire Internet.”
Fear shoots through me. What if they find us because I started filling out the Common App? Because I sent in my Court scholarship by e-mail? Because it’s practically impossible to do anything online without leaving footprints that lead right back to you?
Isn’t that how Daddy succeeded at a lot of his crimes?
Isn’t that what tripped him up in the end?
Mom starts wrapping and unwrapping the edge of the sheet around her fingers.
“I didn’t take this as seriously as I should have when your daddy and Mr. Trumbull first told me about it,” she says. “I was so . . . shellshocked by the trial and the whole media circus. And anyway, I thought, who in their right mind would believe anything your father said? I just wanted to get away. Get you and me both to a place where nobody was watching us, nobody was screaming questions at us, nobody was going through our trash looking for their next big story.”
“Me too,” I mutter.
Mom stops for a minute in the midst of unspooling the sheet.
“You were right, what you said the other night,” she said. “All those reporters would have lost interest in us by now, even if we’d stayed in Georgia. But Excellerand wouldn’t. They’re more desperate than ever to find us. They know there’s a ticking clock here.”
I squirm. How many ticking clocks did I set off with what I told Mr. Court? He said he was going to talk to Ms. Stela about me. Would he call or e-mail? Who else would he tell? Would he post anything on Facebook? Would Ms. Stela? How many times would my name and Daddy’s and Deskins, Ohio, be linked out there in cyberspace? Because of Daddy’s scams, I know how easy it is for a talented computer expert to find even one link, even one gleaming bit of golden information that anyone else would consider a needle in a haystack.
And how many thousands of talented computer experts work for Excellerand?
“Even if they find us,” I say weakly. “What do you really think they’d do?”
Mom squares her shoulders, bracing her back against the wall. The expression on her face makes me think of a doctor preparing to tell a patient his illness is fatal.
“Some of the new information the prosecutors found,” she begins, “was about two men who worked for Excellerand, who got fed up and wanted to go to the authorities and tell them everything. One of those men died in a car crash. The other—his house burned to the ground. With his two-year-old son inside. Then he vanished. I guess . . . I guess he still had another son he wanted to protect.”
Mom lifts her face to me, her eyes shiny with unshed tears. She gives a bitter laugh.
“The irony is, being in prison means your daddy’s safe. Excellerand can’t do anything to him directly,” she says. “We’re the only ones they can use to get him to retract his story, to get him to refuse to testify.”
I see now why she’s acted so terrified the past three years. Ever since the drive to Ohio, ever since the radio report about where we were supposedly going. Ever since we would have been exposed if Daddy’s attorney hadn’t planned ahead and switched the U-Haul trailers.
I don’t want the burden of all that terror myself.
“Everything might come out within the next couple months,” Mom says. “And then Excellerand couldn’t do anything to us. They’d have no reason to, because everything would be out in the open. We’d be safe again. We could tell anyone anything we felt like telling. You could apply to any college you wanted, try for all the financial aid and scholarships you need . . .”
I flash back to that stupid note Mom left the day I talked to Mrs. Congreves, when Mom said she’d work lots of overtime or take a second job to pay for my college. This is what was behind that note. Mom knows I can’t afford college without help. She was just trapped: She didn’t want to tell me about Excellerand, but she wanted me to keep believ
ing college is possible.
Only, it actually isn’t. Not right now.
“You don’t think everything’s going to work that way,” I say, because I know that’s coming. I can hear it in her voice. “You don’t think the charges against Excellerand will be revealed that fast. We’ll have to wait—how much longer?”
Longer than it would take for what I told Mr. Court to find its way to Excellerand?
Mom shakes her head.
“It wouldn’t be the end of the world if you had to wait an extra year before college, would it?” Mom asks. She’s trying so hard. “After everything else you’ve been through, what’s another year? Lots of kids want a gap year after high school. By next year surely everything will be taken care of and you’ll be able to apply to college then.”
I can see by Mom’s face how much she wants to believe this fantasy. How much she wants me to agree, “Oh, yes, Mommy, what a wonderful idea. Another year of limbo wouldn’t matter at all. You’re right—we can be sure everything will end after another year. Thank you for keeping me safe.”
But this scenario is just as much of an illusion as the past three years. I’ve never been safe. I just thought I was.
“Oh, right, so I don’t have to wait until I’m twenty-four to start my life,” I say sarcastically. “Just until I’m nineteen. And then—who knows?—maybe things could stretch out another year and I’d ‘just’ have to wait until I was twenty. Or twenty-one. Or twenty-two. And by then, who am I? Someone who’s been buried alive for seven or eight years instead of three. I might as well be in prison with Daddy!”
“Becca, please . . . ,” Mom murmurs.
I jump up, too twitchy to keep sitting on the same bed with Mom. To have anything in common with someone who’s so ineffectual and helpless and willing to sit around and wait. I tower over her now.
“It’s too late for ‘please,’ ” I hiss. ‘Because, guess what? I already ruined everything. I already applied for my first college scholarship. I had the interview today. And I blew it. You want to know why? Because I didn’t know all your secrets. Because I thought I could save myself by admitting who I am!”