47. Emmy
The next three weeks are a flurry of meetings and paperwork and contracts. There’s still no guarantee this will work out—Charles could always hire lawyers to fight the historic designation, and Ellis doesn’t have enough money on the line to make it worth his while to fight back, though I suspect he would anyway. He actually seems like a pretty good guy, and every meeting we’ve had has been respectful and entirely free of sexual innuendo. Ultimately, what he cares most about is making money. And that’s something I do rather well.
In my spare time, I’ve been helping a few of the businesses in town—Jeannie’s in particular—prepare for the changes to come. They need better marketing, a small overhaul in what they offer, and some renovations, but I think they’ll be just fine once they’ve finished those improvements. And in between all those meetings, I do the one thing I’d have sworn on my life would never happen: I meet with Bradley.
It’s she who texts me, asking if we can talk. Based on our history, I’m understandably nervous, but she’s my half-sister, after all. And if nothing else, if I’m going to stick around Elliott Springs for a while, we need to clear the air.
She arrives at Liam’s wearing the same sneakers and outdated jeans I saw her in when we saw each other in town. The last time, I gloried in the differences between us, in the fact that I looked wealthy, and she looked downtrodden, but it’s a little harder now. If my mother hadn’t kept every penny of my dad’s money, would the difference between us be lessened? Of course it would.
She takes the seat beside mine on Liam’s porch. “So,” she says.
“So.”
“My mom said you didn’t know. About your mom keeping all the money.”
I sigh. “I didn’t even know we were related, Bradley. The bit about my mom keeping the money was a relatively small revelation by contrast.”
“Small for you maybe,” she says snippily.
This is going about as well as I’d expected it would.
“Jesus, are you still bitter about this? Don’t you think the endless shit you did to me for eight years straight more than made up for the fact that a person I had no control over withheld funds?”
“Do you think so?” she snaps. “I mean, look at the two of us. You’ve got a fucking graduate degree from an Ivy League school, and that car you’ve been renting since you got here probably costs more per month than I earn in a year. I have to live with the fact that our father only chose to take you. Do you really think a little high school bullying made up for all that? Do you want to fucking trade places with me? Because I’d sure as shit trade places with you.”
I roll my eyes. “Our father only chose to take me because my mother, not yours, is a sociopath who has hated me since I was born. Did it ever occur to you that maybe my life was already hard enough, being stuck with her?”
She swallows, and for a half second I almost think I see remorse in her eyes before her gaze turns steely again. “And,” I add, “you were punishing the wrong goddamn person the entire time. I personally took nothing from you.”
She folds her arms, glaring at me. “No, but you were the beneficiary of it, weren’t you?”
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in my life so unable to accept responsibility for their own bullshit—aside from my mother.
“And did it help your situation in some way, plastering photos of my texts all over the halls?” I demand. “Did that improve your SATs a little? Did it give you the extra edge you needed in a science fair?”
Her eyes narrow. “No, but it made me feel a little better about the fact that none of those things were coming together for me.”
Her expression is truculent; her arms are folded while she glares at me. She reminds me of someone. When I realize who it is, I start laughing despite myself.
“What’s so funny?” she demands.
“I just realized who you remind me of,” I tell her. “You’re pissy and vengeful and completely blinded by rage, and I’m exactly the same way.”
She stares at me, and then her glare gives way just a little. Her mouth twitches. “I don’t remember much about our dad, but I can’t say I love the parts of him I see in the two of us.”
I sigh. “He was a good man. Aside from, you know, the money laundering and abandoning us and cheating.”
She frowns. “Now I’m pissed again. Because you have a thousand memories with him, and what do I have? Some donuts on the pier in Santa Cruz and those fucking angels he sent.”
A chill slides up my spine. “Angels?” I ask quietly. “What angels?”
“He sent one to me and one to my mom the Christmas after he left. Someone must have dropped them off for him. No idea who.”
“What makes you think they were from him?” My voice is weak.
She shrugs. “My mom told me they were. She said he always used to buy them for your mom. She was pretty pissed about it. For all I know, they were just from someone who came into the store and felt sorry for us.”
“No,” I whisper. “They were from him.”
She frowns at me. “How are you so sure?”
God. God. All this time, and the answer was right under my nose.
“Because I got one too,” I reply. “And I think I know what we’re supposed to do with them.”
* * *
Bradley wasdubious when she left—I hope I didn’t mislead her. Any small progress we’ve made toward a truce is probably ruined if I just told her to go smash up the only memory she has of her dad for no reason.
“You really think you’re supposed to break it open?” Liam asks as he drives me to my mother’s house.
“It would be pretty fucked up to talk about smashing angels into a million pieces with your daughter and then send her an angel with nothing inside it,” I counter.
His worried gaze flickers to me and back to the road. I know exactly what he’s thinking: your dad did a whole lot of fucked up stuff. Why assume now that he’s reasonable or thoughtful? And he certainly has a point. My father definitely cheated on someone, and then he started working for a crime syndicate to support his second family. It’s pretty easy to imagine a guy like that wouldn’t be the most sensitive of parents.
“You don’t think your mom got rid of them?” he asks.
I shake my head—my mom doesn’t seem to get rid of much. But wouldn’t it just figure if this was the one exception?
He pulls into the driveway, and we walk to the shelves on the front porch together. We’ve just turned on a flashlight when my mother emerges from the front door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she demands. “You’ve got no business on my property.”
I stare at her and feel…nothing. I feel no desire for her approval, and therefore, no fear. She made a choice to keep me in the dark about Bradley and then she allowed me to believe my father had simply been using me to get away. She also refused to use any of the funds my father left behind to help Bradley and her mom, and with the way this town gossips, she must have known how they were living and that Bradley worked all hours as a young kid too.
Maybe if I were a better person, I’d feel some sympathy for her; her husband cheated on her, after all, and when he ran away, he only took me.
But there’s none inside me. She bled every emotion out of me with her carelessness. “I’m just getting what’s mine.”
I find the angel and grab it. If she’d even been civil tonight, I’d have told her to look inside hers too. But no—she can remain in this junky old house alone, without any final bits of truth from my dad. She doesn’t seem to care about the truth much anyway.
“Next time I’ll call the police,” my mother warns as Liam and I head to the truck.
“There won’t be a next time,” I reply.
I’m mostly silent on the way home, the angel clutched in my sweaty fist. I’ll feel like an idiot if there’s nothing inside it.
Liam helps me out of the truck and hands me a hammer from his toolbox. “Do the honors,” he says.
With one last look at this final gift from my dad, I swing. The angel snaps open into three distinct pieces.
And there’s something inside. It’s an old key with foam taped around it, and a small note, which Liam unwraps and hands to me.
Emmy,
I’m so sorry. I should never have tried to take you with me and then put you on that train alone. I hate that your last memory might be of me running off like a coward. God, I hope it’s not. I’ve got someone keeping an eye on you, making sure you’ve got what you need until I can get back. The key is to the lockbox in the shed, which now belongs to you. Maybe it won’t seem all that special. Just know it contains my entire heart. I miss you so much.
Love,
Dad
P.S. I imagine you know by now that Bradley is your sister. Please make sure she knows to break her angel open too.
My eyes jerk to Liam’s. “Shit.”
Why did I tell him to throw it out? Why was I so scared of what it would reveal about my dad, so angry about his abandonment, that I never even looked?
He bites down on a smile. “Hang on,” he says.
He walks into the garage and returns with the lockbox.
“I told you to throw it out!” I gasp.
He grins. “Sometimes your ideas are bad. And I ignore them.”
I reach for the key and then hesitate. “He was working for some kind of gang. What if there’s a human hand in there? Or fingers? What if it’s something they were after?”
Liam’s smile is gentle. “I’m a little troubled by the way your mind always goes to severed limbs.”
He unwraps the key from its packaging, fits it into the lock, and slides the box to me. “Open it, Em. It’s pretty clear your dad loved you. I’m guessing it’s not a hand.”
Gingerly, I unlock the box. It’s full of papers, with a small note on top.
Emmy,
If you’re opening this, it means my plan to get us out of here safely didn’t work, and for that I’m so sorry. I’ve saved every drawing and card you ever made me. I’m taking a few on the trip and leaving the rest behind in case things don’t work out. I just want you to know that being your father was my greatest joy and my greatest accomplishment. And I’m so sorry I got us into this mess.
Love,
Dad
Beneath it aredrawings I made of the two of us. Lifting sandbags, eating donuts. Stick figures shivering after doing the polar bear plunge on New Year’s Day, stick figures riding the redwood train. There are cards I made him for every occasion, and stupid little kid certificates I won. The second-grade math championship. A newspaper clip of me holding a winning science project aloft.
None of these things mattered to my mother. She was annoyed by the cards I brought home from school. More of this glitter crap, she’d say. I’d see them at the top of the trash can later.
But they all mattered to my dad.
I swallow hard, fighting tears as I look at Liam. My father’s final gift to me was simply letting me know he cared.
And it’s enough.