The Night Olivia Fell Page 4

  Get a grip, Abi, I said to myself. She’s just being a teenager.

  I busied myself with my laptop bag, the cold slice of her rejection smarting.

  “I know it’s Saturday, but I have to go into work for a bit.” I hated leaving her alone, but as a single mom sometimes I had no choice. “You know the rules. No riding in your friends’ cars. Don’t walk on the main road.”

  I waited for her to point out that I never worked on the weekend. I wanted to tell someone about a new case I was working on at my CPA firm, Brown Thomas and Associates.

  It was the first time I’d felt excited about work in years. Accounting wasn’t what I was supposed to do with my life. Once upon a time, I’d been a journalist. I’d had fire, ambition, ideas. I loved the buzz of investigating, seeing my byline under a headline.

  But the antisocial hours of a journalist didn’t work for a single mom with a baby who battled severe ear infections. I was a mother first. I would never abandon my daughter the way my mom had abandoned me—loving me, then turning away; being there, then . . .

  So I’d switched to accounting. It allowed me regular hours and more time with my daughter. I’d come to accept the trade-off years ago.

  “Do you want me to stay?” My smile slipped a notch. “You know you come first.”

  “No, honestly, it’s fine, Mom.” She’d already dismissed me. “I have to study for this calculus test anyway.”

  I looked at her, feeling strangely lost. I wondered suddenly when the last time was that we’d talked properly. I opened my mouth to find out what was going on. We were closer than other mothers and daughters; we told each other everything. But Olivia stood abruptly and stretched, yawning big.

  “I’m gonna take a shower, Mom. See you at the barbecue later.”

  She’d plucked up the red scarf from where it now lay on the table, turned, and walked away, the slip of silk dragging like a discarded teddy bear across the floor.

  Within seconds, she’d disappeared into the shadows at the top of the stairs.

  × × ×

  The memory sliced through me. It seemed so obvious now. Of course she was pregnant. I hated myself for not seeing it, for walking away when I should’ve stayed. Guilt suffocated me, pressing down on me like a crippling fog.

  I slowed outside my driveway as lights flashed around me. Cars and vans overflowed along the street outside my house. A microphone was shoved in my face as soon as I opened my car door, and people started shouting my name.

  “Abi! Rob Krane, KOMO-TV. Can you tell us more about Olivia’s condition? Will her doctors try to keep her on life support? Will they be able to save the baby?”

  “I-I-,” I stammered, edging toward my front porch. How did they know? My elderly neighbor, Mrs. Nelson, stared at me from across the road, her mouth hanging open, the evening newspaper in her hand.

  “No comment,” I said, my voice wobbly and unsteady.

  I raced up the steps and let myself inside, black dots dancing across my vision from the flashbulbs. Exhaustion swept over me and I leaned against the door, the voices now muted to a dull mumble.

  Finally I staggered to my feet. I needed a distraction from the creeping anxiety threatening to overwhelm me. I went into the kitchen and pulled a bottle of vodka from the freezer. I poured a finger into a glass and swallowed it fast. It burned, but I poured another and took it upstairs to Olivia’s room.

  I snapped on the light. It was still messy, like an explosion in a clothes factory. It smelled of lemony shampoo and dirty socks. Her blankets trailed off the bed.

  I set the glass of vodka on Olivia’s dresser and draped the blankets neatly over the bed, then sat on the edge. Something on her bedside table caught the afternoon light. Olivia’s cell phone. It was attached to a charging cord, but when I picked it up, the plug dropped out. The battery was dead.

  The sound of a knock at the front door startled me. I slipped Olivia’s phone into my hoodie pocket as I went downstairs. I looked through the peephole, expecting it to be a reporter, but instead it was a tall, broad-shouldered teenager wearing a wrinkled blue shirt halfway untucked from his jeans. His fair hair was disheveled, his hazel eyes so raw and swollen I almost didn’t recognize him.

  The football build of Olivia’s boyfriend looked like it had been put through the washing machine and shrunk. I took in his red eyes—the dark circles, the tear tracks trailing his putty-colored cheeks—and felt a swell of compassion. This inexorable tide of grief was his as well. It was something we shared.

  I opened the door and flashbulbs instantly started popping, reporters shouting questions. I ignored them, pulling Tyler inside. Word traveled fast in a town as small as Portage Point, and it looked like every major Seattle media outlet was on this story.

  “Is it true what they’re saying about Olivia?” he asked.

  “Yes.” I pressed my fists into my eyes. “There was an accident.”

  Tyler swayed on his feet. I grabbed his elbow and directed him to a chair at the kitchen table, pressed a glass of water into his hands. He gulped it down.

  “An accident?” he echoed.

  “I don’t know. The police . . . I have to report it . . .”

  “What happened?” he asked thickly.

  “Nobody knows. She might’ve fallen off the bridge. But . . .” I hesitated, unsure if I should share my suspicions. “Did she leave the barbecue with anyone?”

  “No. She was by herself.”

  “Madison didn’t drive her?”

  “I’m pretty sure she walked.”

  Olivia knew she wasn’t allowed to walk home alone in the dark. It was a firm rule of mine—one she’d never broken before.

  “What time was that?”

  “Like, ten thirty? Maybe more like ten forty-five?”

  “Tyler, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  He stared at me. Waited.

  “Olivia’s pregnant.”

  His arms dropped to the sides of the chair, heavy and limp. He looked like I’d punched him in the stomach.

  “Did you know?” I needed information. Anything he could tell me mattered intensely.

  He swallowed, then balled his hands into fists and stood. He turned away from me and hunched his shoulders.

  “Tyler?” I walked to him, touched his back with my fingertips. “I promise I won’t be mad. Did you know she was pregnant?”

  The muscles under his shirt jumped, and he pulled away from my touch. When he finally looked at me, his eyes were wide, the whites dominating his face.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Knight. There’s no way that baby’s mine.”

  6

  * * *

  ABI

  october

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Fear crept over me, sliding along every muscle and bone as a new realization settled over me: maybe I didn’t know my daughter at all.

  “How?” I asked Tyler. “How could—how do you—?”

  “I know it’s not mine,” he cut me off, his voice rough. “Because Olivia and I never . . .” He looked away.

  I pressed my fingers hard into my eyeballs, stars exploding on the undersides of my lids. The vodka I’d gulped earlier burned bitterly in my empty stomach. “You never had sex.”

  “Right.”

  Olivia was cheating on her boyfriend. It explained so much. She’d been so different lately. Distant. I had a sudden memory of her at the Stokeses’ annual neighborhood barbecue. I’d arrived late, work a handy excuse.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like people, just that I didn’t really have anything interesting to talk about. Once I’d ticked off Olivia’s achievements, the conversation went stale. Besides, I was really more of an observer than a participator. I was better at standing on the sidelines.

  Jen Stokes had opened the door, a glass of champagne in each hand and a wide smile on her lips. Her dark corkscrew curls bounced around a heart-shaped face.

  “Hi, Jen.” I smiled hard, the muscles in my jaw twinging painfull
y.

  Jen and I had known each other since the girls were five. Even after all this time, we were friendly but not friends. Truth be told, Jen intimidated the hell out of me. Standing next to her made any bravado I had disappear, as if it had been sucked into the black hole of her self-confidence. She reminded me of what it was like being in junior high and high school.

  Back then I was an outcast. The Girl Whose Mom Committed Suicide. Nobody knew what to say to me, nor I to them. I never wore the right clothes or had the right hair or makeup. I spent lunch alone in a corner of the cafeteria, was never picked for teams in PE, was the last to get a partner for school projects. My teenage years were even worse, lonely until I developed breasts and learned to use my looks to get guys to like me.

  As I got older, I learned I was perfectly fine on my own. In fact, I preferred it that way. I didn’t need any better friend than my daughter.

  “Abi, so glad you could make it!” Jen leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, then handed me a glass of champagne.

  I took a tiny sip. It was sweet and crisp, obviously expensive.

  “How are you?” I asked. My voice was too quiet, lost in the chatter of people inside, so I said it again. “How’ve you been?”

  “Oh, you know, kids, work, life.” She rolled her eyes and laughed drily, but I knew she loved it. Jen was an ER doctor; she thrived under pressure.

  I followed Jen through her tastefully decorated living room, my feet sinking into thick, oatmeal-colored carpet. We exited the back door to a sprawling deck that overlooked a shade-dappled yard. A shimmering rectangular swimming pool glinted in the waning light. The rich scent of barbecued ribs and burgers wafted up toward me.

  “Have you seen Olivia?” Jen asked. Something in her voice made me look up sharply. I felt my face freeze, determined not to show that her words sent a gush of worry flooding through my veins.

  “No,” I said slowly. “Why?”

  “Oh, no reason.” Her eyes skated sideways, and she set her glass on a table. “I’m gonna grab you a plate of food. Then we can catch up. Here—” She turned to a leggy blond woman wearing a short sunset-colored caftan and high canvas wedges and pulled her over to me.

  “Marie, this is Abi. Abi, Marie Corbin.”

  Before I had a chance to reply, Jen had headed down the stairs and disappeared into the crowd. I frowned, feeling inexplicably abandoned. I tidied a few loose strands of hair behind my ears.

  Marie was gorgeous, and I felt my shoulders round as nerves pinched my stomach. She smiled at me, her sapphire eyes crinkling, her blond hair a sleek mane perfectly framing an angular face. “Oh, Abi, yes. I remember you. You’re—”

  “Olivia’s mom.” I forced a smile.

  “I was going to say an accountant at Brown Thomas and Associates. You did the books for my new interior design company, and I was so pleased at how quickly you got them done.”

  “Oh,” I said, startled. Usually people only knew me as Olivia’s mom, the mother of the rising star of the swim team. I tried to think of the last time I was anything else, and couldn’t. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  Across the yard, Jen’s husband, Mark, raised a hand in greeting. Mark was a square-jawed business type, handsome in an aging frat-boy sort of way. I waved back.

  “I’ll just go say hi.” I pointed at Mark, glad for an excuse to leave. “Nice to meet you.”

  I went downstairs, grabbed a Coke from an ice bucket, and huddled next to a tall shrub in the corner of the backyard. If Sarah were here, she’d push me to go talk to people. She said I used work and Olivia as bricks in a wall I’d built around myself.

  Sarah was always right and she did everything in the proper order. She’d finished college with a degree in psychology, then got a job, then a husband, a kid, and so on. Now she was a counselor for victims of traumatic cases. Most of her clients were referred from the Seattle Police Department. I was a wrecking ball in comparison: a single mom with a job I’d settled for and no real friends.

  Just then something cold splashed against my arm.

  “Hi, Abi!”

  “Derek. Hi.” Mark and Jen’s son used to call me Miss Knight. I remembered when he was a chubby-cheeked second-grader with perpetually grass-stained knees, and now here he was, calling me by my first name. I suddenly felt rather old.

  He grinned sheepishly. “Sorry about that.”

  I brushed the liquid from my arm. “When did you get old enough to drink?” I teased.

  “I’m nineteen now,” Derek said, proud in that way teenagers get when they think they’re all grown-up.

  I smiled fondly at him. “Have you seen Olivia?”

  His smile faded. “No. Why? Is she in some sort of trouble?”

  “No!” I laughed at the thought. Olivia never got in trouble. “Nothing like that. We were planning to meet here.”

  “Oh. . . .” He ran a hand over his jaw and I noticed how much he looked like his mother. He had the same intense beauty: shaggy, dark curls; a narrow, heart-shaped face. His dark-blue eyes were piercing and intelligent. He was a good-looking kid. Probably already breaking hearts.

  Somebody—a young woman—came up next to him then, touched his shoulder. He glanced at her, then at me, then stepped back. The entire exchange probably only lasted seconds, but it took me all that time to realize that the young woman next to him was Olivia.

  My brain felt like it was spinning in mud. Her long, silky blond locks were gone, cropped into a pink-streaked pixie cut. Gone also were her usual T-shirt and jeans, replaced with black leggings and a low-cut peasant top that plunged into her cleavage.

  I remember looking at Olivia in the fading evening light and feeling like I didn’t know her anymore. I knew then that something had been shaken loose, something I had no power to put back together. . . .

  “Whose baby is it?” I asked Tyler now, my insides tight as a fist.

  He didn’t answer. He looked very far away.

  “Tyler. Whose baby is it?”

  He didn’t look at me. Didn’t answer. Instead he said: “I wish I could’ve saved her.”

  “Saved her from what?”

  His eyes crashed into mine.

  “From everything.”

  7

  * * *

  OLIVIA

  april

  After dinner, Mom went upstairs to take a shower. The house still smelled of burned bread even though all the windows were cracked open. It clawed at my throat and seared my nose, making me feel sick.

  As soon as I heard the shower turn on, I ran to the desk in the corner of the living room and shuffled through the neatly organized paperwork and alphabetized, color-coded files. Nothing there. I took the stairs two at a time to Mom’s bedroom. I pushed through electric cords and notebooks in her bedside table drawers. I dropped to my knees and checked under her bed. Just a scattering of dusty, mismatched hand weights, random books that didn’t fit on the bookshelf downstairs, a box with cards and notes I’d given her.

  Obviously I’d been in Mom’s room loads of times, but I wasn’t a weirdo. I’d never searched through her personal things. It felt gross. Disgust slithered up my throat, but then I remembered her lie: . . . those brown eyes.

  There must be some proof somewhere about who my father was. The minutes crawled by. I was running out of time.

  In her closet, I shuffled through clothes and shoes, ran my hand along the top shelf. Suddenly my fingers knocked against something. I stood on my tiptoes and pulled it out. It was an old shoebox, a thick layer of dust across the top. I sat cross-legged on the floor with it on my lap. My heart pounded wildly in my chest. The shower was still going but I knew I didn’t have much time.

  The box was light. I almost thought it was empty. But when I took the lid off and pushed a layer of tissue paper aside, I saw a thick piece of paper. It was my birth certificate. I looked at the spot where my parents’ names were listed, but only my mom’s was there.

  I put it down and lifted out the tissue paper. Underneath was a hospit
al ID bracelet with my name in pale blue letters.

  And then I saw it: a small square piece of plain white card, the type you might find in a bunch of flowers delivered to your doorstep. On one side it was blank. On the other, in thick capital letters, it said:

  SORRY.

  G

  × × ×

  The next day I stayed after school to help Peter with our chemistry homework. Tyler gave me the silent treatment all day, but I just pretended everything was fine. It was the best way to deal with Tyler. Pretend everything was all right, and pretty soon it would be.

  I didn’t really want to go home after that, so I texted Mom and told her I was still studying, then grabbed the late bus to Madison’s. I wanted to tell her about the card I’d found and the lies my mom had told.

  I pulled the hood of my coat up over my head as the mist thickened into rain. Storming down the quiet suburban road toward Madison’s house, I passed elegant mock Tudors and Pacific Northwest timber homes and dove into the dripping green pines spread out lush and thick above the ZigZag Bridge.

  The ZigZag Bridge wasn’t really a zigzag—it was only called that because the river that ran underneath it twisted back and forth until it reached Puget Sound. When I was a kid, we used to call it the Cinderella Bridge because it looked like something out of a fairy tale. The suspension cables were hung from four silver towers, two at either end, crowned by soaring spires, while the gleaming metal framework was decorated with lacy arches and ornamental railings.

  I hunched my backpack higher on my shoulders and headed over the bridge, my feet echoing loudly against the wooden slats of the pedestrian walkway. Usually I took the shortcut from my house through the woods to Madison’s instead of looping up and around, walking over a mile along the ZigZag Road. Mom had made me promise never to take the shortcut—she thought the woods were full of murderers or something—but the paved road took way too long.