Chapter 11
O h no, Mr. Sparkles! How could I have forgotten him for so long? I saw my little bunny in front of me before I lost myself again in the timeless memory, in memories that floated inside me as if happening now.
I’m standing in front of Balou and Banana’s huge bird aviary again and discover my stuffed bunny on the marble column in the garden.
I scold it playfully and tuck it under my arm when I hear a noise.
It’s a door slamming shut, a door at the back entrance, and suddenly, Dad is standing in front of me.
I’m deeply frightened and dig my finger into the fragile part of Mr. Sparkles. “Dad!” He shouldn’t be here yet! He should still be at work and not know anything! Mom said I couldn’t tell him anything.
He looks at me in utter astonishment. “What’s wrong, Willa Mouse?
You look like you’ve seen a ghost?” He strokes my head gently and laughs.
I think that if we just disappear, I might never see Dad again.
Like Banana and Balou—but they’re just birds.
Dad is Dad! I don’t want to leave him behind just because he loves Mom too much.
That’s a good thing! I dig my finger into Mr. Sparkles harder and harder, and suddenly, the fabric gives way.
Blue beads roll at my feet like rabbit droppings or Mom’s vitamin pills that our family doctor prescribed for her.
Now Dad’s expression turns stern. “What is that, Willa Rae?” He leaves out Nevaeh. “Are you secretly stealing Mom’s vitamin pills?” He picks one up and looks at it in the late sunlight, then nods so that I know they are her pills. “Willa Rae?”
For some reason, I become terrified and shake my head. “No,” I squeak. “I don’t know…I don’t know why they are in Mr. Sparkles’ tummy, Dad. I didn’t put them there…” I stare at my bunny and my eyes fill with tears. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why those pills are inside Mr. Sparkles.
“Hey!” Dad lifts my chin with his fingers and looks at me lovingly. “You don’t have to be afraid. I believe you. If you say it wasn’t you, then it wasn’t you, okay?”
“Yes, Daddy.” I nod with relief, but I have a lump in my throat.
Dad sighs loudly and deeply. “If your bunny ate those pills, your mom must be very sick now.”
Obviously, we both know that Mr. Sparkles couldn’t have eaten the pills, he’s a stuffed bunny! What Dad is trying to tell me in a nice way is that it could only have been Mom, but he obviously doesn’t want to say that. I think that’s incredibly sweet of him. He would never say a bad word about Mom.
Because he loves her so much!
“Willa Mouse, your mom really needs these pills. Should I tell you a secret, an adult secret? Something that even Mom doesn’t know?”
My eyes widen. “Yes,” I whisper, my heart pounding, unsure because you don’t usually tell children adult secrets.
“If your mom doesn’t take these pills regularly, she’ll start getting strange ideas. For example, she’ll be afraid that someone is threatening her, like your nanny, Claire. Or she’ll think I’m trying to poison her with the pills. Do you know what I mean?” Dad looks at me questioningly .
“Yes,” I say, hugging Mr. Sparkles.
“Has she said anything strange lately?”
I remain silent and stare at the wire mesh of the bird aviary. “Dad, are birds happier in the wild than in a cage even if the cage is huge?”
At first, he wants to reply impatiently, I can see that from his compressed lips, but then he seems to think about it and smiles, even if it looks strained.
“In the wild, Balou and Banana would very quickly be eaten by birds of prey or cats. Or starve to death. They don’t know life in the wild at all.
That would mean their death even if they would certainly be happier in the open air for a short time, yes.
It’s the same with people from time to time.
Some have a hard time getting along in real life—sometimes because they’re sick.
We have to protect people like that if we care about them.
Even if protecting them sometimes means we have to keep an eye on them. ”
“Mom is the kind of person we have to protect?” I ask quietly.
He nods. “Your mom is sick. She has to take these pills so she doesn’t think other people want to harm her.”
Tears well up in my eyes. I don’t know what to do.
If I tell Dad what Mom is planning, I’ll give her away.
But if I keep quiet, I might never see Dad again.
And why? Because Mom might really be sick.
“I’m the little bird,” she said. But that seems weird to me now.
Mom isn’t a bird and she can go wherever she wants. She’s not locked up here, is she?
“Dad.” Tears roll down my cheeks.
“Willa, honey, what’s wrong? You don’t have to keep secrets from me, you can tell me anything. I’m not mad at you.”
“Mom…” I sob, feeling miserable and empty. For a moment, I stare at Balou and Banana, who are happily fluttering around their cage and doing so well with us. “Mom wants to go away with me, but she said I can’t tell you,” I whisper through my tears.
Dad turns pale. I’ve never seen him so pale before. “What?” He even forgets the polite, “Excuse me” that he always drills into me. Now I cry even harder and he obviously understands how upset and confused I am.
“You did a good job,” he says gently, stroking my hair lovingly. “Thank you for telling me. I’ll fix things with Mom, don’t worry. She just needs to take her pills and she’ll soon feel better. I’ll talk to her, okay?”
I nod and wipe my cheeks with one hand while clutching Mr. Sparkles in the other. Dad picks up the pills and gathers them in one hand.
“We’ll put them back in his stomach. I don’t want your mom to feel bad.” He stuffs the pills back in one by one and ties two threads together that I never noticed. “See? That way she won’t know you’ve spoken to me.”
I’m so grateful to him and the feeling of betraying Mom is fading. If she’s sick, we have to protect her, that’s for sure. I’m about to run back when Dad says, “Maybe we should go on a trip on the Voyageur II tomorrow. Just you, me, and your mom, what do you think?”
My heart skips a beat. I love our trips out on the Atlantic. I get to drink orange juice from a champagne flute and I always feel so light on the ocean, like I have wind in my veins instead of blood. We haven’t been on the ocean in ages because Dad has to work so much all the time.
I look at him and I’m sure my eyes are shining. “That would be great, Dad.”
He nods. “Now go to Claire and let me talk to your mom…don’t worry, I won’t tell on you.”
A weight the size of a boulder falls from my heart. We’re not leaving Dad. Dad isn’t the bad guy. Mom is sick. She just needs to take her pills and everything will be fine.
Everything will be fine…everything will be fine.
The sentence echoes in my head, but the more it repeats itself, the more unreal it seems to me and the more I feel how big the lie behind it is, the more the pain returns.
I know I’m going to wake up and end up in a brutal reality, far away from Mom and Dad, far away from everyone I love.
“Mom?” I actually managed to whisper that word even though speaking was incredibly exhausting. I blinked, but Mom was gone. She had simply left me, only the strip of light remained, peeking through the narrow crack in the boards that sealed this room off from all life outside.
Maybe I deserved this.
If I hadn’t betrayed Mom that day, we would never have taken that trip on the Voyageur II.
Mom wouldn’t have drowned. She would still be alive and maybe we would have left.
Dad would have lost us, Mom and me. Maybe then he would have accepted Isaac as his son and would have been happy to give his love to another child.
Isaac wouldn’t have ended up in prison where he had become a victim and he wouldn’t have taken out his torment on me.
My half brother had never cared about Coldville, about sick people, dead people, or falsified reports, but only about revenge on my father.
On his father. And maybe me too because I was the reason he thought my father had denied him, whether it was true or not.
I blinked several times, trying to remember more despite my foggy mind, but I couldn’t recall the next day on the yacht. It was still in the dark.
Had I told Mom that Dad knew everything? Had Mom and Dad made up or had Dad lost Mom without talking it out?
I didn’t know. I just knew I was guilty.
I stared apathetically at the beam of light and thought I heard Nathan’s voice, but I was certain it was merely my imagination. He couldn’t be here. Even if he knew the bayous and the Atchafalaya Basin inside and out, it would take him years to find me.
Something changed that day. The men downstairs were quieter than usual and I no longer heard music, just the occasional shout of orders.
They didn’t seem to be drinking either because I didn’t hear glasses or bottles clinking.
Maybe everything was the same and I no longer noticed.
Still, changes, however subtle, made me panic.
With superhuman strength, I tried standing in order to peer through the wooden boards, but I couldn’t stay on my knees for even three seconds before I toppled over.
At some point, someone downstairs called for Isaac, and shortly after that, the stairs creaked.
I recognized Isaac’s footfalls because they sounded different than the others.
More determined perhaps. My body automatically reacted with convulsions and I curled up as tight as I could, and when he pushed the door open, he studied me for a while, perhaps because he liked my reaction to his appearance so much. I’ll never know.