Chapter Thirty-Three
THIRTY-THREE
“Caren, what on earth?” Kenya says, her eyes boring into me, her voice flinty.
Kenya and Yumi stopped chatting as soon as they saw me enter the backyard. Such a dreadful yet familiar feeling, one I remember from middle school, that silence that screams, We were just talking about you!
Yumi at least has the decency to stare at her hands, which lie in her lap.
“How’s the nap going, Yumi?”
She shakes her head and mumbles a barely audible, “I’m so sorry.”
“Caren, what’s going on?” Kenya asks, all curt and officious.
As if she’s going to make me feel self-conscious for barging in on her afternoon tea party.
But we are way past niceties. I walk over to where they are seated beneath a yellow umbrella and pull out one of the heavy wrought-iron chairs, relishing the way it screams as I drag it over the flagstone. “Why did you lie to me, Yumi?”
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles. “I wanted time to finish talking to Kenya—”
“Not about that. About Rachel. Why did you tell me you saw Rachel with Van the night Holly Stone’s bracelet was stolen? I checked and we were visiting Zach at college that weekend. Rachel was away the whole weekend.”
She looks up at me, dark circles under her eyes, and I wonder if she’s been crying.
“I panicked,” she says. “When you called and told me about the stolen bracelet, I already knew. I had seen Van break into Holly Stone’s house.
I thought if I told you it was Rachel that you might drop it, you know, be willing to be more forgiving. It was a bad idea. I’m sorry.”
I don’t know what to say. I feel more confused than hurt by the betrayal. “But why?”
“Please, I’m sorry, Caren. I never meant to hurt you.”
“You have to stop saying you’re sorry.” My voice trembles with anger. “Why did you tell me you saw Rachel? You didn’t have to say anything, but you specifically told me you saw Rachel. Make it make sense.”
“You were going to keep digging. I know you. You’d ask around, stir things up. But if you thought it was Rachel who was with Van that night, maybe you’d let it go. Look, I’m not excusing what I did. It was wrong. I’m just trying to explain it.”
“Who were you protecting?”
“Oh, leave her alone,” Kenya says. “She was protecting me if you want to know. Noah, to be precise. Are you satisfied?”
My eyes go back and forth between the two, seeing a bond that had previously been invisible now materializing before my eyes. How many conversations, how many text messages have they sent back and forth, conspiring to keep me in the dark?
“You don’t know what it’s like, for Kenya and me, raising boys,” Yumi says, her voice plaintive.
I scoff. “I raised a boy too, remember? His name is Zach?”
“I know you did. And you did a great job. But Zach was easy—you’ve told me so yourself. Noah and Ryan have had their challenges. And the world is not forgiving of boys who make mistakes.”
“Oh please.”
“It’s true,” Kenya says. “And we all know that there would be a big difference in the way the world would react to Noah getting caught breaking into houses than, say, Rachel. Or even Van.”
I pause a moment, choosing my words carefully. “You mean because Noah’s Black?”
“Yes, because Noah’s Black.”
“But why wouldn’t you trust me?” I say. “After all these years.”
“It’s not about trusting you,” she says, holding her chin aloft.
“I’m giving you the context. I love you, Caren, but this is why we didn’t tell you.
You can be so sure of yourself, very … rigid.
That’s not the way life is. And when it comes to our kids, our own flesh and blood, my baby boy, we have to look out for them, because the world sure as hell isn’t going to. ”
“As soon as I got the DM about the stolen bracelet on the Facebook yard sale page, my antennae went up,” Yumi said. “I had seen Noah and Van breaking into that woman’s house. I knew it would be trouble for them.”
I shake my head at Yumi. “So it was you. You’re the one who saw the DMs from Holly Stone.”
Yumi nods.
“And what, you told Kenya?”
“Yes.”
“And then you hatched a plan? To drug me at the Allards’ party and take back the bracelet?
” I turn to glare at Kenya. “I know all about how you ‘returned’ the bracelet to Miguel.” I make air quotes around the word returned.
My tone is all bravado, but I’m fighting back tears.
I don’t mention that Finn is the one who told me.
I’m sure she’ll assume I learned that tidbit from Miguel.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that,” Kenya says. “No one was supposed to put anything into your drink. That was not in the plan. The plan was that we would keep you at the party—”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“Daniel and Jo.” Kenya’s hand flutters to her neck. “Shawn and me.”
“Got it. All four of you were in on this. Nice. And you, Yumi? What was your role?”
“I was supposed to go to your house and get the bracelet.”
“Got it. You won’t even go to an outdoor art show with me because germs, but you’ll break into my house?”
“That’s not fair. I wasn’t going to break in. I was going to walk in. We have each other’s house codes. But I didn’t do it. When I came up the street, I saw you coming back from the party. I chickened out. You weren’t supposed to be home yet. I was terrified you’d see me. I ran home.”
“Without the bracelet.”
She nods.
“So your little plan backfired spectacularly.” I scowl at Kenya. “You took it, didn’t you? When you came to ‘check’ on me.”
“Yes, I did. And I was checking on you. Both things can be true. I needed that bracelet and I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
I face Yumi. “When you saw me enter my house Saturday night, did you know I had been drugged?”
“No! Of course not. You looked tipsy. That’s all.”
“None of us knew, I swear,” Kenya says. “We were all trying to keep you at the party, not let you leave. But you did. It wasn’t until after you left that Daniel said don’t worry, she won’t get far, that he had put a lorazepam in your drink.
I told him that was messed up. Wrong. That he needed to go follow you, make sure you were okay. ”
“How thoughtful.”
“Caren, I had no idea what would happen. That you would walk the dog and that you’d black out and Daniel would leave you in that awful basement. I swear. We would never have agreed to that. No one was supposed to get hurt.”
“So let me get this straight. Your plan was to keep me at the party somehow. And Daniel was the one who spiked my drink. And neither of you knew about it beforehand?”
They both nod.
“I could have killed him when he told me,” Kenya says.
“What did he tell you happened?”
“Nothing. He didn’t say anything until the next day. Then he said you were fine. We just assumed you got home safe. We had no idea what happened until you told Yumi.”
“When I got that text from you Saturday night saying that you were calling it a night, I didn’t know he was the one who had sent that,” Yumi says.
“I thought that was from you. But when you told me your story, Kenya and I confronted Jo and Daniel. That’s when they told us the truth about what happened. ”
“Which was?”
“That he followed you as you walked Kugel. He said that you fell and hit your head. He said he panicked. He didn’t know what to do.”
“Umm, call an ambulance?” I don’t try to hide my disbelief. “Drive me to the hospital? Or at least help me get home?”
Yumi tears up. “I know. It’s crazy that he didn’t do that. I feel so horrible knowing that happened to you, but you have to believe me—I didn’t know until after the fact.”
“He told us that when you blacked out, it was in front of their rental house,” Kenya says.
“So he walked you into the basement to rest and then went home to get his car, but when he came back, the next-door neighbors had a firepit going in their driveway. He said he couldn’t just, you know, walk into an empty house under construction and then walk out with an unconscious woman. ”
“So he left me there. All night.”
“If I had known—” Yumi starts, but I hold my hand up to stop her. I’m not ready to shift into forgiveness or pity for Yumi.
“Neither of us knew until later on,” Kenya says. “You have to believe us, Caren. You can’t think we’d let you lie bleeding in some basement.”
“I don’t know what to think.” But my mind is racing ahead to the worst-possible scenario: that the people I trust the most in the world have conspired against me. My stomach churns with nausea.
“It was Daniel who did that,” Yumi says. “Not us.”
I let out a dry laugh. “That’s convenient. Daniel’s to blame for everything, huh?” My voice cracks, betraying my hurt. “And Jo? Funny how they’re not here to tell their side of the story.”
“They would tell you the same thing,” Kenya says. “They feel terrible.”
“I saw Jo a few days after it happened. It didn’t seem like she felt terrible. In fact, she implied I had a drinking problem.”
“No one wanted to hurt you,” Yumi says. “We wanted to protect you.”
“If that weren’t such a pathetic attempt at self-deflection, it would be funny.”
“We didn’t want to drag you into all this.” Kenya leans forward. “We thought we’d get the bracelet back, return it to Holly Stone, and that would be the end of it.”
“What about the Millie’s takeout? The wine?”
Kenya winces. “Jo’s idea. She told us that it was a spur-of-the-moment thing.
She said that when Daniel told us he put something in your drink, she went to your house to make it look like you’d spent the evening at home.
She thought you’d wake up and see the wine, the Millie’s, and you’d think, Oh, I drank too much.
I got home safe, I ordered dinner, opened a bottle of wine.
That it might make you feel better to know you’d been at home the whole night. ”
“Feel better? Do you hear yourself?”
“It wasn’t my idea!” Kenya smacks her hand on the wrought-iron table, making the glasses jump.
One tips over and she grabs it before it spills onto the table.
“I’m sorry. I’m upset. We didn’t know what happened until later.
It just got so out of control so fast. The plan was just to keep you occupied for like an hour so Yumi could slip in and out.
That’s it. No one talked about drugs or wine bottles or ordering Millie’s.
We would never have gone along with that. ”
“If Miguel had been here last weekend, none of this would have happened,” Yumi says. “We would have just asked him for the bracelet. But he was away. And we needed it that night. Holly Stone said if she didn’t get it by Sunday she was calling the cops.”
“So you try to steal the bracelet from my house, drug me, screw that up, don’t steal it, then you do steal it but you have to give it back to me because Holly Stone emails me. Do I have that right? Freaking idiotic. You are terrible criminals.”
“We’re sorry,” Kenya says. “In retrospect, we should have just told you.”
“You think? What about Miguel? How much did he know about this plan? To stall me at the party? To sneak into the house and take the bracelet?”
Neither says a word. They don’t have to. The look they exchange tells me everything,