The Invisible (30 page)

“Anyway,
he
did it,” my father growls, his hands fisted, staring away from me, at some distant point in the sky. Staring, maybe, at his past. At memories he’s long tried to bury. “
He
’s why it happened.”

“I don’t understand,” I whisper. “How did he do it?”

“By taking her away. Turning her paranoid. Cutting her hair. It was like she was in a cult, Anthem. I didn’t recognize her until . . . How was I supposed to know my daughter, who, let me tell you, who was a
princess
, the way we raised her, a goddamned princess who never worked a day in her life? How could I know my daughter had learned—”

“Learned what?” I cry, impatient, disgusted with this stranger. How can I believe anything he says? But I’ve never seen him this agitated, this hollowed-out and panicked and trapped. It feels all too real.

“How to shoot a gun.” It all comes out in a rush, the words tripping over themselves falling out of his mouth. His eyes are unfocused, like he’s back there. In the place where she died.

“I was given a tip about where she was. I’d been looking for so long. I wanted to sneak in, catch her before she ran away from me again. Just to talk. Just to convince her to return. She heard me coming, I guess. She’d become violent. Paranoid. She was armed. It all happened so fast.” He pauses, looks around him, but his eyes are turned inward. His face a mask of horror. Then he continues. “I thought . . . I thought she was someone else. I responded the way anyone would. And then I realized it was her—” His voice breaks, and I wave my hand in front of me to get him to stop, not wanting to hear any more.

It’s too horrible, what he’s saying. Too brutal to imagine. That little tow-headed girl sitting in the field of wildflowers in the picture in my parents’ bedroom—how can he have woken up and seen that every day of his life? It’s unthinkable.

“So she shot at you and you shot back,” I whisper numbly. A comment, not a question. My father’s—the stranger’s—shoulders sag, and the stunned rawness on his face translates to
yes
.

“Where? It wasn’t in the lake,” I whisper, trying to reconstruct it. The lake must have been a place to dump the body, to buy time. “You moved her later.”

Harris nods, looking at the floor, all that thick gray carpeting. His socked feet. I stare at his shoes peeking out from under his desk, neatly side by side. Shiny black. And for a half-second I am full of self-pity. Those shoes belong to a man I call my father, the familiarity and security of seeing his shoes under his desk all wiped away now. He turns away from the window and faces me, his eyes red-rimmed now. Underneath them, black hollows. He looks a hundred years old. “I never told a soul. How could Serge do this to our family? To your
mother
.”

My mother. That shattering sensation in my chest again.

“All this time, the two of you have been keeping this from me.” The room starts to blur and tilt, my knees locked for too long. A circle of black opens up in the center of my vision and starts to expand. I clutch the back of Harris’ leather desk chair for support. All the pills. The drinking. Her numbed state. Her near-suicides. She had so much more inside her than grief over a dead daughter. Harboring a murderer. Sleeping in his bed, night after night. Lying to me about everything that mattered. She built a fortress of lies, and lived inside it alone.

“Your mother—Helene—” He pauses, checks my face to see if there is revulsion there. Finds that there is. “Doesn’t know all of it. Not about the shooting. Helene knew you were Reggie’s baby. That’s all. I said I found you, that she’d dropped you off at a police station before killing herself in the lake.”

“But the papers don’t say suicide,” I say. “They say it was an accident. And what about the gunshot?”

“The police left it alone because they thought suicide. And I had friends at the papers,” he says gruffly. “They printed what I want. Especially back then. There was one story for the papers, another for your mother. Another for me, and only for me.”

“Until now, you sick son of a bitch.”

We look up. My mother’s standing in her stocking feet, leaning against the wall near the door. She padded in so quietly I didn’t hear. “You bastard.”

“Leenie.” My father moves toward her. “You’ve got to understand. It was his f—”

“Did you kill him too?” Helene’s eyes are so wide with anger I can see the whites all around her irises. “The Hope? Is that why he disappeared?”

“I don’t—I don’t know what happened to him. We may have—”

“Enough!” I say. “I can’t be near you anymore. Either of you. My grandparents.”

My mother is weeping uncontrollably. I need to stop. I should stop. But I don’t.

“It’s over.” I fight to sound calm as I walk toward the door, though every part of me is shaking. “We’re not playing this game anymore where I’m your daughter.”

And then I run out, turning around once when I hear my mother screaming at my father, watching her batter his chest with her fisted, manicured hands. He reaches for the door, not to go after me but to shut it so that others don’t hear. That gesture says it all. Always the calculator, Harris Fleet. Always conscious of his secrets.

And then I’m walking out on that deathly silent ocean of gray, shaking all over, while at the same time aware that something has lifted from me. No more secrets. No more burdens. I can be anyone I want now, because I’m not their daughter anymore.

I’m the daughter of a dead girl who was brave enough to shoot a gun, and a vigilante who I’ll never know.

My whole life’s been a lie, an empty story built on top of death. There’s nobody to disappoint anymore. No way to throw away my potential as the Fleet girl. My murdering grandfather has taken care of all that for me. There is nothing more to screw up.

The only place I can possibly go from here is up.

Up, and away.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“When you were eight or nine, I finally tracked him down,” Serge says, folding his hands on the table between us at The Scrambled Yolk. Both our coffees sit untouched in their mugs. It’s a Sunday in early September, my one day off from the eight-hour practice sessions that have become my life since accepting a spot on the Bedlam Ballet Corps last month.

I nod, absorbing this. We’ve met here at my request, to talk about my father. My
real
father. Not Harris. I’m still not talking to Harris. But I’m getting stronger all the time, both as a dancer in the dorms, and emotionally, too. Strong enough after a few weeks to forgive my mother for lying to me all my life. And strong enough now, after a few months have gone by, to understand that it wasn’t up to Serge to tell me the truth before I was ready to hear it. My father was his employer. No matter how sick he felt about what happened, he couldn’t expose the truth before I demanded it. And I wasn’t fully ready to have this conversation until now.

“So he lived. After the accident.” I stare down at my hands in my lap. Shaking, just slightly, when I picture Serge slamming the car into The Hope, the way my father ordered him to, keep driving, don’t stop. And imagining how he held me, a tiny infant in his lap in that car, all he had left of Regina.

What could it mean that my real father is alive, out there somewhere? Will I ever meet him?

“I always suspected he did,” Serge says, “because there was never anything in the papers. So I kept looking. Put out whatever feelers I could. Finally, an old friend of mine found him living outside a tiny mountain town, entirely off the grid. He’d gone there to recover from his injuries. I went to see him.”

“You did?” My heart revs wildly in my chest. I look into Serge’s eyes, trying to understand. “Did he know I was alive? Did he care what had happened to me after he left?”

Serge nods. “I know it must seem like he abandoned you. But he was a very broken man, Anthem. Not just his body, but his spirit, too. I urged him to visit you, and I know he wished he could. I gave him some money he tried to refuse, and then I left.”

I sit back, stunned, absorbing this news. Serge looks like he’s aged. He works for a friend of my mother’s now. Harris fired him the day I came into his office and blew up our family. “I’m sorry about what happened,” I say quietly. “I wish it hadn’t affected you.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. Your mother has been very good to me,” he says. I’ve been seeing my mother once a week lately. She’s quit drinking, thrown all her pills away. Moving out of Fleet Tower and into her own apartment has made her into a braver person. Serge is still in her life, as a friend now and not an employee. She is still considering telling the police about what my father did, though so far we’ve kept it between us. In part because we suspect he has enough friends inside to exonerate him. Neither of us speaks to my father now. I’m not sure we ever will again.

“The only apologies are mine to give, to you,” Serge continues. “I wish I could have told you the truth. When you began fighting, I was tempted to. You were so much like him, suddenly.” A wan smile twitches across his mouth and vanishes.

“It’s okay,” I whisper. It took me a few months to stop being angry at Serge, but all that’s over now. I’m glad to have him back in my life. I open my mouth, barely daring to ask my one remaining question. Something I would never dare ask my mother, who is still unsteady when we talk about the past. “What is The Hope’s real name?”

“Jacob Lokhem.” It feels like a key to something, hearing his name. Like the syllables could unlock something scary and yet vitally important.

“Do you think . . .” I can’t finish the sentence. It feels too loaded. I don’t know if I want to meet this person. After all, he abandoned me. He knew right where I was, all these years. And yet he never showed up.

“That you could meet him someday? Yes. If you feel ready, I think he would like that.”

We sit in silence for a while, the clattering of the diner a welcome cacophony. I look out the window and imagine what it might be like if he walked in right now. I know from looking up old news stories that he has red hair. He’s where I got my red hair. And a lot more things, besides.

Serge takes a long envelope out of his pocket and slides it across the table. “I’ve been holding on to this for six years,” he says. “He wanted me to give it to you when you were ready.”

I pick it up. It’s light, but the moment is heavy enough to choke me. My hands are shaking again, but I don’t want to wait and read it alone. Better Serge is here. Safer, somehow.

Dear Anthem,

We named you Anthem because you lifted us up and gave us hope. It was an exciting and scary time, and you felt like the embodiment of everything we’d ever wanted. For the city, and for the world. That’s how magical you were, to Reggie and to me. You were a perfect baby. A miracle. We couldn’t get enough of looking into your big eyes.

I hope you’ve found some happiness in your life, and that it’s not too great a burden to bear to know you came from Regina and me. I assume that by now, you know the truth about your parents, or Serge wouldn’t have given you this.

I loved your mother very much. Maybe too much.

When she was taken from me—and more importantly, taken from you—I couldn’t recover. It’s funny, they called me “The Hope,” but nobody has less hope and more sorrow in their heart than I do. Reggie was what allowed me to do what I did. Her optimism is what kept me going. Without her, everything turned gray and dull and dead for me. It became impossible for me to go on, almost. I wanted to die, to just disappear, but I wasn’t brave enough to join Reggie in the next world. Nor was I brave enough to take you away. I thought about it a hundred times a day at first, for a few years.

I came once to the city, when you were five or six. I waited outside Fleet Tower, thinking you’d recognize me somehow, that you’d see it was your dad and I would belong to someone again. When you came downstairs with your grandparents I stood on the opposite side of the street, frozen, watching you. You were happy, laughing as you pulled a new-looking wooden zebra on a string. You were dressed so beautifully, and you had on new shoes you were excited about wearing. I saw you were taken care of in a way I could never care for you myself. Your grandparents had all the money in the world to give to you, and I didn’t have anything.

Please know that nothing has made me happier than hearing about you over these years. I think it’s why I’ve stayed alive, to hear about your dancing and to see your picture sometimes in the society pages. Reggie would have been so proud of you. You are the best thing we ever gave to the world, Anthem.

Your parents—Reggie’s parents—can’t be all bad. They have raised an amazing girl. I work every day on forgiving your father for what happened.

I would understand if you could never forgive me for what a coward I became. But if you would ever like to meet, nothing would make me happier.

Yours always,

Jacob Lokhem

Tears slip down my cheeks and onto the table as I read, and when I’m done, I look up at Serge and see his eyes are glassy too. “Don’t go crying on me, Serge.”

He nods, solemn and kind as ever. “He’s a good man. If my opinion matters to you, I can tell you that much,” he says quietly.

“It matters a lot,” I say. I glance up at the clock on the wall of the diner. Almost eleven. I fold the letter up carefully and slip it back inside the envelope. Then I get up from the booth, folding the envelope in half and slipping it into the pocket of my jeans. “One of these days, I’ll meet him,” I tell Serge. “But for now, there’s somewhere else I need to be.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

In the South Bedlam Cemetery, the sky is a startlingly vibrant shade of blue and dotted with cotton-ball clouds. I’m walking the gravel pathways through the graves, Ford’s calloused hand in mine. In the easy silence between us, I listen to the wind blow through the trees and hear the faint rhythm of a metal shovel against wet earth, a gravedigger working somewhere on the other side of the hill.