Nothing But the Truth (32 page)

“Besides, one of the women at the moving company got air mattresses and sleeping bags for us,” Dad said as he checked a
message on his iPhone. “It’s no big deal, Bits. It’ll be just like camping in your treehouse, right, Rebecca?”

No matter how much I rubbed my hands together, I couldn’t work in all the lotion, leaving my skin slippery, like I had dipped them in a vat of grease. Even though I was back to being the cheerleader, I couldn’t muster the energy to agree with Dad that, yeah, sleeping on the ground was no biggie. So I simply nodded.

The tote bag slipped off her shoulder, but Mom didn’t bother adjusting it, too busy scouting for our luggage even as she held out her hand to take the excess lotion from me.

The one sixth sense I might admit to having is my ability to feel space. For as long as I can remember, I could tell within a moment of entering a building—home, library, corporate campus—if the space worked or if it failed. The first time I felt true rightness was on Grandpa George’s houseboat, bought a month before I nearly drowned. Even when I was seven, some internal tuning mechanism had declared this home pitch-perfect. That sense solidified as soon as I spotted the inviting window seat beneath the reclaimed wood stairs.

Our massive Georgian house in New Jersey, complete with faux Grecian columns, couldn’t have been more different from Grandpa’s charming houseboat, much less our quaint cottage on Lewis Island. A Street of Dreams house—that’s how Peter, our architect, would have dubbed this mansion. An opulent show
home built specifically for Seattle’s once-a-year luxury-home tour to showcase indoor waterfalls, twenty-thousand-bottle wine cellars, and theaters complete with red velvet curtains.

I stood in the cavernous foyer, silent as I scanned the cold space. Even with every single stick of our furniture in it, this house would feel uninhabited and empty.

“I’m sure the house will be fine,” Mom said, staring up at the overhead chandelier papered with dehydrated moths that had mistaken the hot lightbulb for home.

Though Mom’s intention may have been to reassure, Dad flushed at her “fine,” that damning descriptor of the Bland and Boring. I seethed at Mom even as I grinned toothily at Dad, determined to love our new home: “It’s going to be awesome to have my own bathroom.”

Dad swept his arm over Reid’s shoulder. “Yeah, don’t you kids think it’ll be fun to live somewhere with enough space for once?”

“Heck, yeah!” I said, even if I wondered why Dad had gotten a place this mammoth when I would be living at college most of the time. Quickly, I read Jackson’s new text explaining that his body was battered and bruised from a non-life-threatening spill. Aching to be with him, I replied:
Battered and bruised by parental bickering… and missing you.

Still, Dad had it right. Six thousand square feet would provide us all with ample space away from Mom. Tired of the tension, I stepped away from my mother to close the front door, but not before I breathed in air so humid my lungs congested. I had the sudden image of being swallowed whole within the jaws
of the mansion’s wide front door. Even so, I forced myself to shut the door as Dad suggested, “Why don’t you kids go explore?”

Reid scampered up the spiral staircase as if he were at summer camp, ferreting out the nooks and crannies before all the other kids. From upstairs, he shouted, “This is our own temple!”

Dad beamed and agreed, “The Temple of Muir.”

Meanwhile, I turned another full, slow circle in this paean to modern architecture so vastly different from Mom’s shabby chic and my Zen minimalist styles.

“It’ll feel like home soon,” Mom assured me, assuming I felt as out of place as she did.

“It’s home already,” I shot back, and bolted upstairs, wanting to escape in my sketchbook. As I reached the landing, a feeling of disquietude made me hesitate. I heard a sharp intake of breath, the breath that preceded wild sobbing.

Stop, stop, stop.

“Welcome home,” called Dad.

Reid’s bedroom door was closed, but I heard his excited murmuring as he investigated his space. Then I passed what had to be the master bedroom, where garish curtains of aqua and fuchsia bookended the picture windows—brazen colors Mom would never pick, not even for her container gardens.

Further down the hall, my bedroom was painted in the same shades as home: a deep plum on the far wall, soothing taupe on the remaining three. Even the windows were draped in the same linen curtains. Other than the air mattress topped with a rolled-up sleeping bag, there was nothing in the bedroom… except the brown box in the middle of the floor. I
settled myself on the beige carpet and picked up the light box, cradling it on my lap as I read the printed label from a company I didn’t recognize.

Inside, a delicate wrapping of tissue paper protected the small cardboard jewelry box. From that encasement, I pulled out a necklace with a square pendent. No note, just an etched inscription:
LIVE EVERYTHING
.

There was nothing else. But nothing more was needed. I knew who had sent this, but how had Jackson known that this message was what I needed right now? I slipped the long necklace over my head and pressed the pendent to my heart. The room, empty as it was, felt like mine.

“So what do you think?” Dad asked after I rejoined my parents in the living room a short while later and lowered myself to the marble floor beside him. My lips parted, ready to thank him for arranging my bedroom, when Reid hurtled down the stairs with a loud “Mom, you’re awesome!”

Of course it was Mom’s idea to recreate our bedrooms so we’d feel instantly at home. I flushed at my oversight, started to pull away from Dad, but his arm tightened around my shoulders to anchor me at his side.

“You like it?” Mom asked Reid.

“Love it!” he yelled, and held a new set of
MythBusters
DVDs. “Thanks, Mom!”

“Did you find your moving-in gift, too?” Mom asked me.

I shook my head. “Just something from Jackson.”

“Oh.” Mom’s forehead furrowed as she lifted herself off the cold stone floor. “Then it’s probably in the closet. I’ll find it.”

As she did, Dad clapped Reid’s shoulder with one hand. “You can thank Giselle, too. She orchestrated all this.”

“Who’s Giselle?” Reid asked, reading the back of the DVD case.

“One of the women at the moving company.”

Mom stopped at the stairs and turned around. Her eyes didn’t waver from Dad. “We should get her a little something for all her help. Do you think she’d want a scarf? Or chocolate?”

I had a sudden image of what Giselle looked like—tall, fine-boned, long hair. No, she wouldn’t be one to devour chocolate, to dare add a stray ounce on her body.

“Definitely not chocolate,” I said.

Mom frowned as she leaned against the stair rail. “Why?”

Like an energetic puppy caged overlong, Dad sprang to his feet and trotted to the front door, saying, “I’m sorry about this, but I got to run to work. Emergency.”

“But we just got here,” I said, even as Mom took a step toward him with a “Today, Thom? Really?”

“I can’t help it, but hey! I almost forgot.” He crouched down to his briefcase leaning against the far wall in the foyer, and withdrew two flat parcels. “Something to welcome you to Manhattan.”

“That’s so nice,” Mom said, craning closer to watch Reid and me unwrap the presents: a membership to the Museum of Modern Art for me, and for Reid, a pass to the Museum of Natural History.

After breathing out a long “Wicked!” Reid demanded, “When can we go?”

“Maybe tomorrow. There’s so much to see in Manhattan.” Dad practically bounced on his toes. “You guys are going to love living at its back door! Just wait.”

I caught Mom gazing wistfully at the thick concrete door as it shut behind Dad. Before she noticed me, she locked the door with a sigh.

“Oh, Reb, you did find your present,” she said, smiling at the pendent I wore. “It looks great on you.”

I cupped the pendent. “I thought this was from Jackson.”

“No.” Her lips pursed briefly, a faint line. Then, a scant moment later, my move-in gift forgotten, Mom ordered us, “Go unpack.”

That evening Dad met us in the town square where Mom, Reid, and I had been waiting for nearly two hours. All around us, happy, well-fed families were parked on their picnic blankets, content from their gourmet dinners. Reid had been getting progressively grumpier until Jackson reminded me by text of the emergency food Mom always carried. One of those just-in-case protein bars had saved Jackson on our Tuscany trip four months ago.

“Hey, there you are!” Dad said jovially, as if we were the ones holding him up.

He approached our polar fleece blanket that Mom had
somehow thought to stuff into her luggage. By then, it was almost eight, and Dad had been gone for five hours. I didn’t know why, but I watched him carefully when Mom asked him where he’d been and why he hadn’t answered her phone calls. Dad simply shrugged and said, “The emergency at work was gnarlier than I thought.”

I busied myself with making room for Dad on the blanket. Even then, I couldn’t help wondering: If he had driven all the way into the city, why didn’t we watch the fireworks and spend the night there, as Mom had suggested? As I had wanted?

“So, who’s ready for dinner?” Dad asked, hefting two plastic bags that strained from the weight of our meal.

Reid asked ravenously, “What did you get?”

Dad settled himself next to Reid, sitting on the grass rather than on the blanket with the rest of us. “The works for Fourth of July.”

No matter how much I tried to clamp down on the feeling that something was wrong, urgency needled me. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I wanted to knock the ribs, the baked beans, the corn bread off my plate. And Mom’s. This was the food of the fairies who trick you into believing you were dining on chocolate, only to find yourself chewing a mouthful of dirt. There was no rational explanation for my panic, no logical reason for my complete loss of appetite. It was just there, as real as a frightened heartbeat.

Don’t eat, don’t eat
, I wanted to warn Mom.

I needn’t have worried. Under my watchful gaze, Mom pushed the gooey ribs around on her plate for a few minutes before she abandoned them, uneaten, too.

“Too hot to eat?” Dad asked me.

“Yeah,” I said right as the first Roman candle burst in the sky, showering gold dust above us.

In the afterglow of a crimson starburst, I caught Dad shrugging as Mom waved off a piece of pie that he offered. He took a big bite, the juice from the apple pie dewing his chin. I couldn’t bear to watch him eat so greedily while I was sick to my stomach with foreboding. So I lowered myself onto my back and stared up at the night sky splintering with fireworks.

B
reakfast the next morning was a grim affair of leftovers, since the refrigerator was the Sahara desert of food, desolate in its emptiness. Back on Lewis Island, Mom had vigilantly stocked our fridge with produce from local farms, and gallons of milk so fresh you could hear cows moo with every poured cup.

“But I want cereal,” Reid said plaintively, his mouth curling in disgust at the cold rib glistening with coagulated fat on the paper towel that served as his plate.