Liars and Fools (18 page)

Dad's voice was strained. “I just can't believe you did this, Fiona. Stealing a boat that doesn't even belong to us anymore. Running away. What were you thinking?”

Joni spoke so softly, it was almost a whisper. “Go, Peter. You can sort things out later. And Fiona didn't see it as stealing. You know that. And I don't think she was really running away.”

“Jennifer never saw
her
trips as running away either.” Dad's voice was as stiff and hollow as an empty hull. Gutted. Like there was space inside him that the wind could blow right through.

There was a long silence.

“Peter, I'm taking her home. She's hypothermic, and the first thing here is to get her warmed up. If you try to talk to her now, you'll both end up saying things you'll regret. She's too cold to think clearly anyway. Let me look after her for the afternoon. It'll give you both time to cool off.”

Another long silence.
Warm up
, I thought vaguely.
Cool off
. I stifled a giggle. Maybe Joni was right: I wasn't thinking clearly.

“Fine,” Dad said at last. “Fiona, will you go with Joni?”

I turned to face them both. Dad's face had this awful crumpled look, and I avoided meeting his eyes. I nodded quickly. “I guess so.”

Dad turned and walked off down the dock without a word. I was surprised he'd actually gone: I'd half expected to be picked up and carried screaming to the car like a little kid.

Joni sighed. “Oh dear. I'm afraid your father isn't too happy with me.”

“I'm not too happy with him,” I said, stepping off the boat.

She shook her head. “He's been a wreck all morning. Convinced something terrible had happened. So his anger…well, that's where it's coming from.”

“You must have been worried too, but you're not yelling at me.”

Joni shuddered and closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them again, they were shining with tears. “You have no idea, Fiona. No idea.”

I swallowed. “I'm sorry, Joni. I didn't think.”

“We've all been completely terrified. I think your dad's aged about ten years.” She shook her head. “Come on. My car's in the parking lot.”

“I have to tidy up first. Put the sails away and all that.”

Joni knocked on the hull of the powerboat, and the owner poked his head out the door. “Do you think you could take care of
Eliza J
? I want to get Fiona home and warm.”

“Not a problem,” he said.

“Don't forget to close the engine intake,” I said. “And turn off the battery.”

He winked at me. “Don't you worry.”

“Thanks a lot, Mike,” Joni said. “For everything.” Her voice wobbled, and she started crying.

“Shock,” he said gruffly. “Go on home. She'll be fine.”

Joni clutched my arm as we walked to the car, her grip uncomfortably tight. Tears were streaking her cheeks, and she kept shaking her head.

“I'm really sorry I scared you,” I said.

“Just get in the car.” Joni opened the passenger door. “And please don't ever do anything like that again.”

I stuck my hand in the pocket of the oversized sweats and felt the cool metal of
Eliza J
's key. I wasn't sure why I had kept it, but at the last minute, I hadn't wanted to leave it behind.

We were halfway to Joni's house, the heater in her car blasting warm air at my face and feet, when something suddenly struck me. “Joni? The man on the powerboat? You called him Mike.”

“What about him?”

“Is that short for Michael?”

She looked at me oddly. “I imagine so.”

I started to laugh.

“You're hysterical,” Joni said, shaking her head. “It's the cold.”

Kathy had seen the name
Michael
.
He could be from
your past or future
, she'd told me. And now someone called Michael had more or less saved my life. I didn't want to think about what that meant.

twenty-two

Joni's house was warm and smelled of baking, but I couldn't stop shivering. Joni loaned me two thick sweaters and made me wear them both, one on top of the other. Tom padded into the kitchen in his housecoat and made us all mugs of hot chocolate. Joni piled cookies onto a plate. When I was snuggled up on the couch with a comforter and the refilled hot-water bottle, she sat down beside me.

“How are you feeling?” she asked. “You're still shivering.”

I looked at her face, lined with worry and puffy-eyed from crying, and the craziness of what I had done hit me all over again. “Joni? I was sure I could do it. I really was. But I was so cold, and it got so windy.” I hugged myself, trying to stop the shaking. “I was scared. Really scared.”

“You did the right thing, calling for help.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but my chin was trembling, and I felt like I might start to cry again myself. “I thought I might die,” I choked out. “I called Mom, you know? To tell me what to do. To help me.”

“Oh, Fiona.” Joni's face creased with pain.

“And she didn't answer.” I sniffed and wiped my eyes on a fold of the comforter.

“No. She couldn't. She's gone, Fiona. I wish she wasn't, but—”

I cut her off. “I met Kathy before. I mean, before she knew who I was. She did a reading for me downtown, in a store. With Abby. And she said…she told me she had this vision about Mom.”

All Joni said was, “Really,” but her eyes hardened, and I could tell she was working hard to hold back her feelings.

“At first I thought she might be for real. I thought maybe I could talk to Mom again.” A tear escaped and traced a warm line down to my upper lip. I brushed it off and tasted salt.

Joni leaned toward me. “Does your father know about this?”

I shook my head. “I didn't tell him. But it doesn't matter, because now I know for sure she's a liar. If Mom could really communicate with anyone, she would have helped me out there today. There was no way she'd talk to Kathy but ignore me shouting for help.”

“I don't know what to say, Fiona. I don't believe in any of this psychic stuff, you know that.”

“It's confusing.” I twisted a fold of comforter between my fingers. “I mean, I know she's lying, but then she'll get something right. Like she said someone called Michael might be important. And that guy who came and got me on his boat was called Mike.”

Joni shrugged. “It's a very common name. I guess if someone makes enough predictions, sooner or later some of them will come true.”

“Yeah, I suppose.” Something else occurred to me. “And besides, Kathy couldn't find me, could she? Her psychic powers couldn't tell you where I was.”

Joni shook her head. “She was certain you were at Abby's, actually, so I drove over there. They were just getting back from church. Abby was the one who guessed you'd be at the marina.”

Ha. “That should prove it to Dad, then,” I said. “That should convince him Kathy's a fake.”

Joni looked horrified. “Fiona! Please tell me that isn't why you did this.”

“No, I never even thought of it. But it'd be worth freezing solid if it meant Dad would forget about Kathy.”

“Oh, Fiona. Do you really hate her so much?”

I squirmed. “I thought you were on my side.”

“There are no sides here, honey.” Joni took a careful sip from her mug. “I love you, that's all. And your dad loves you. We all want you to be happy.”

Across the room, Tom sat down in his old rocking chair. “Of course we do,” he said.

“How am I supposed to be happy about Dad dating a professional liar?” I asked.

Joni gave a helpless shrug and looked at Tom.

“Are you warming up?” he asked.

“My hands are tingling.” I held them out to show him how red they were.

Tom winced. “Can't believe you went out there without decent clothes. Still shivering?”

“Not so much.” I still couldn't imagine ever being warm again, but the shivers that had been shaking my whole body seemed to have subsided at last.

“Hungry?”

I realized I was. “Starving.”

He grinned at me and got to his feet. “Scrambled eggs special deluxe, made by your talented and terribly handsome personal chef?”

I looked at Tom standing there in his ratty housecoat, with his round belly and his hair sticking up in all directions, and I had to laugh. “Yes, please,” I said. Dragging the comforter along with me, I followed him into the kitchen.

twenty-three

Tom cracked two eggs into a silver bowl and whisked them with a fork:
clickety-clickety-click
. He cleared his throat. “Listen, chickie. This business about you hating Kathy. You know what happened, right? To her older daughter and her husband?”

I narrowed my eyes, hoping he wasn't going to try to make me feel sorry for her. “She told me. But that doesn't make it okay for her to lie.”

Tom rinsed a mushroom under the tap, put it on a wooden chopping board and started slicing it. “I just wondered if it might make a difference if you could see her as someone who has found a way of coping with a terrible loss.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “Someone who needed to believe something a little unusual to make her reality more bearable.”

Joni sat down on the stool beside mine. “I think Tom's right, Fiona. Your dad told me that Kathy is absolutely convinced that she can communicate with people who've died.”

“Poor Caitlin,” Tom said.

I'd expected him to say
poor Kathy
. “Losing her dad and her sister, you mean?”

“Well, that must have been an awful thing to go through, of course. Unimaginably awful.” Tom opened the fridge door and stuck his head halfway inside, still talking. “But on top of that, now she has to grow up in the shadow of a perfect older sister. A ghost sister that her mom talks to all the time.” He pulled his head out and made a face. “You've got to wonder what that's like.”

I hadn't thought much about any of this from Caitlin's point of view. Dad had tried to point out that Caitlin had her own grief to deal with, but I hadn't wanted to hear it. “I haven't been very nice to Caitlin,” I confessed.

“Not too late to start.” Tom plonked a block of cheddar on the counter and sliced off a few thin ribbons of cheese. “You can't go too far wrong by being kind.”

I wondered how I'd cope if Dad pretended that he could still talk with Mom. It seemed to me that Caitlin was one more reason Kathy shouldn't make up things that weren't true. How was she supposed to deal with losing her dad and sister if her own mother pretended they weren't really gone?

“Even if Kathy does believe it all, she's still a liar,” I said. “She's lying to herself.”

“Oh, we all lie to ourselves.” Joni put her mug down and leaned closer to me. “I think you might be lying to yourself a little bit if you think your anger is just about Kathy.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look how angry your dad was today. Do you think that was all about what you did?”

Her words didn't make sense to me. I felt like my brain was full of fog. “What else would it be about?”

Joni's voice was slow, patient. “Well, he seemed pretty angry with your mom too. Don't you think? People often feel angry when someone dies. Angry that the person isn't around anymore. Angry that they have to keep going without them.”

I nodded, but the fog inside my brain felt thicker than ever. So thick, I could barely hear what she was saying, let alone make sense of it.

“Maybe you're a bit angry about that too,” Joni said.

“It isn't fair for us to be mad at Mom. She didn't mean to die!” But in the back of my mind, all the things I'd been trying not to think were getting louder and more insistent. Dad yelling at her:
The least you can do is take along the technology to
communicate. A satellite phone, maybe.
And the conversation I overheard at the marina. That self-righteous woman shaking her head, saying,
Jennifer wrote her
own ticket
.

“No. But we aren't always rational in how we feel.”

I watched Tom pour the eggs into the hot pan. My eyes started to prickle, and I pulled the comforter more tightly around my shoulders. “Dad wanted her to take more precautions,” I whispered. “Safety equipment, stuff like that. So that rescue boats could find her if there was a problem. And I took her side. I said he didn't know anything about sailing.”

“Well, he doesn't.” Joni studied my face. “Honey, you aren't blaming yourself, are you?”

I blinked back tears. “I don't know. Sort of.”

“Well, don't. Your mother was an adult and an experienced sailor. She made her own decisions.” Joni shook her head. “Besides, she had flares and a life raft. It wasn't that rescuers couldn't find her. People reported the location of the flares. It was just that it was so rough, and they were so far from anywhere. By the time people could respond, it was too late.”

I nodded. “If I'd asked her not to go…”

“You really think she'd have listened?” Joni raised her eyebrows.

“Your father asked her not to go plenty of times,” Tom reminded me. He scraped the mess of eggs off the bottom of the pan with a plastic spatula, flipping it over like a pancake. “Jennifer always did what she wanted to do.”

“I know. I just miss her, that's all.” I felt empty and tired. “And I can't stand that no one talks about her anymore. Dad doesn't. Even you don't, Joni.”

“Oh, honey. I suppose we all worry about you. We don't want to upset you.” She looked at Tom. “Right?”

He cleared his throat. “Right.”

“I don't want to forget her,” I whispered.

“You won't forget her,” Joni said.

I didn't say anything for a minute. My head was full of words, but I couldn't speak. Mostly what I was thinking was that she was wrong. When I was on
Eliza J,
Mom seemed close, but the rest of the time, she didn't. I was already forgetting stuff. It was getting harder and harder to picture her face, and even though it had only been a year, my memories of her were starting to get that stories-and-snapshots feeling—shrinking, and becoming sort of disconnected and distant. Sometimes I thought it was because I conjured them up too often, playing and replaying scenes in my head. I wondered if a memory could get worn out.