Waking Olivia (22 page)

I
’m bruised
and my heart is still beating fast enough that I can’t believe it doesn’t just explode as Will lowers me. He’s going to yell at me for climbing after he told me not to and he was
right
, damn it. It was unbelievably stupid.

As I approach the ground, I brace myself for the coming onslaught, but instead, I find him silent and panicked, wrapping his arms around me before I’ve even hit the ground. His front is pressed so hard to my back that I can feel his heart racing just as fast as mine.

He buries his face in my hair, holding me so tightly I can’t quite take a full breath. “Jesus Christ. You scared the shit out of me.”

“I’m sorry,” I begin, turning toward him. “You were right and I—”

Something in his eyes makes my stomach clench, the way a flower contracts before it bursts open. His mouth lowers and captures mine, silencing my gasp of surprise. It’s a heedless kiss, one that holds nothing back and shuts down my brain entirely.

His hand runs from my waist to the outside of my breast, cradling the weight in his hand and his exhale shudders against my lips, making me arch against him in a silent demand for more. More pressure, more contact, more skin.

“I thought you were going to die, Olivia,” he growls. “If you ever do that again, I’ll kill you myself.”

His hands cup my ass to pull me tight against him. Desire for him coils in my belly, makes me strain to be closer to him as his hands slide into my shirt, spanning my back, pressing fingertips to overheated skin.

“We’ve got to stop,” he groans, but his mouth is still on my neck, his hands sliding up, beneath my bra.

I reach between us, snaking my hand into his waistband. He inhales sharply as my hand slides down to wrap around him, and not that I’d expected any differently, but there’s a lot to grasp. “Olivia,” he hisses. “I …”

I run my hand over his length, loving the way his whole body jolts when I do it, his eyes squeezing shut.

“Oh fuck,” he says. “Stop. We have to stop.”

I ignore him, running my thumb over the tip of him, slick and swollen and ready.

The air catches in his throat even as he grabs my wrist to stop me. “Please,” he begs, resting his forehead against mine, his voice a harsh whisper. “I’m not sure I’ve got enough self-control to stop if this goes any farther.”

“Good.”

“Liv … Jesus, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore,” he says, pulling back. “If things were different … but they’re not. Nothing’s changing. Nothing’s going to make this okay. We both know that. I’ve tried so hard to do the right thing and then this shit happens, like you falling and Brendan kissing you, and I just lose my fucking mind. I don’t even know what to say. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Based on what’s happened, I should be driving straight to Peter and handing in my resignation, and I can’t even do that.”

I want to be angry at him right now but I can’t. He looks so torn, so guilty. Will wants to help all of us. He wants to save me, he wants to see Brendan get through school, he wants to save the farm and give Peter a winning season and do the right thing by everyone, and I’m the one making it impossible, making him put it all at risk.

I tell him I understand. I ignore, for the time being, the part of me that doesn’t.

T
hat night
I climb into bed knowing that it’s my last night in this house for a long time, possibly forever. It has to be that way, if only for my own sanity. Dorothy, Brendan, the farm—none of these things are in my future. Nor is Will, and that’s the part that kills me. The fact that he doesn’t care about me enough to wait.

My chest aches, my throat goes tight. “Don’t you dare cry,” I hiss. My heart races, but I manage to push it back down, that sadness. I’m not going to cry over Will.

I’m not going to cry about anything.

M
y mom calls
me her early bird. “Please go back to sleep, baby,” she’ll murmur when I climb in her bed in the morning. So it’s weird to find Matthew up before me, perched at the end of my bed.

“Dad’s home,” he says quietly.

“Oh.” My stomach drops.

My father was gone for a while this time, long enough that I started to feel like I could take a deep breath again. Long enough that I almost forgot this moment of trepidation we have when we wake in the morning, wondering how things will go when we get downstairs.

We walk into the kitchen together, sitting at our places in silence while my mother finishes putting breakfast out. I know immediately when I sit that this is not one of the days that will be okay. He has that look, that awful stillness. Today, the solid ground we use to edge around him will be a tightrope.

We begin to eat, silent and tense. My mother’s face is drawn, but he ignores her, ignores all of us. He doesn’t eat, but instead, opens bills, one after the other, growing angrier and angrier. I feel a tightness in my arms and chest as if I’m being squeezed in from all sides.

And then he holds one bill longer than the others. The air in the room seems to compress around him while we wait. “What is this?” he asks my mother, holding the bill in front of her face. His quiet voice is bad, far more dangerous than his loud one.

I can smell the fear coming off of her as she answers. “Daisy was having seizures,” she says, her voice too faint, showing weakness. She shouldn’t show weakness, even I know that. My father can smell fear and weakness the way a predator can smell blood, and he reacts the same way.

“I didn’t ask you what the fuck was wrong with the dog. I asked you what the bill’s for.”

“The medicine,” she whispers. “The vet said she needed it or they’d get worse.”

I’m only five but I know she needs to stop talking, stop justifying, stop acting like she’s done something wrong.

He says nothing. He holds still for a moment, and we wait for his hand to fly out, to send her sideways from her chair with a startled cry. But instead, he turns toward Daisy, curled in the corner of the room.

“Let me show you what we do with a sick dog,” he says.

Daisy doesn’t sense danger. She nuzzles into him as he reaches for her. Sometimes, just when I think a terrible thing is going to happen, it doesn’t. And then I feel stupid for fearing it, as if I must have been crazy to expect things to go poorly. He cradles her in his arms and she relaxes, and I relax.

And then my father grabs Daisy’s neck and twists.

She’s still in his arms, her eyes open, unmoving. There is utter silence. I can hear my own pulse, nothing else. And then we begin to cry, a symphony of tears and pain and disbelief. My mother gasping, choking on her tears.

“Oh my God,” is all she can say. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God.”

“You killed her!” my brother weeps.

“Stop crying,” he says to Matthew. “And go dig a hole.”

But Matthew ignores him, his face flat to the table, his whole body loose and boneless with grief. My father pulls his collar so his face comes off the table.

“I said stop your goddamn crying and go dig a hole!” he yells.

I stop crying so fast that I choke a little. I stop as if it will make up for the fact that Matthew cannot. Matthew’s always been soft in ways I’m not, and it’s the only thing about me that’s ever made my father happy.

Stop crying, Matthew. You’ve got to stop. Look at me
, I plead silently.
You can stop just like I do. Look at me.

Even my mother has come to her senses. She grabs Matthew’s hand and through her own tears urges him to calm down, to go on outside like my dad said. But he doesn’t. He can’t. His tears are a form of insanity, suicide, and he just can’t stop.

I jump up so fast my chair falls behind me. “I’ll do it!” I cry. “I’ll do it!” My voice is hysterical with enthusiasm. “I can dig the hole!”

My father nods. “That’s my girl. Glad someone in this family takes after me.”

My brother looks at me. I see blame in his face, hatred. I did it for him, but suddenly I’m a monster now, just like my dad.

H
er screams wake
everyone in the house.

I’m there first and seconds behind me my mother and Brendan arrive, huddled at the door, staring at us in shock.

“I dug the hole,” she says, scraping at her throat as if she can’t breathe. She gasps for air once and then again. “I dug the hole.”

She’s curled up in a ball, knees squeezed tight to her chest. I try to pull her toward me but her whole body has gone so stiff that nothing moves. “It’s okay, Liv. You’re just having a dream. It’s okay.”

“No,” she says, choking again, grabbing her own throat. “It wasn’t a dream. It was me.
I
did it. I dug the hole.”

“Dug what hole?” I ask, trying to pry her arms apart.

“Where he buried Matthew,” she says. “I dug the hole.”

I
f I heard
the story from anyone else, I’d never have believed it because it’s too terrible to be real. But Olivia’s entire childhood was too terrible to be real, and her dream made far too much sense.

Her father drove her down the road to dig the hole for their dog, she said. He found a spot in the woods and left her there all day. There was a tree above her, raining down acorns at unpredictable intervals, and by the time he came to get her it was dark and she had small pinpoint bruises covering her arms. The next morning, Matthew was gone. Her father said he’d run away.

When she finishes talking, she’s crying so hard that she’s gagging. For the first time ever, I almost wish she could forget. All night I lie there with her, rocking her against me, running my hands over her back and promising things will be okay.

She sleeps sporadically, always waking with a gasp as if she’s just remembered all over again. It’s just before dawn when she wakes again, staring at me with her glassy, unseeing eyes on the pillow we share.

“We probably need to talk to the police, Liv,” I tell her.

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her look terrified. Even when she fell yesterday, it wasn’t like this. “No.” She shakes her head. “I can’t.”

“Olivia, your father killed him. You know he did. If he’s still alive, he needs to be stopped.”

“I
can’t
,” she says. “I just can’t.”

I
leave
her asleep in the morning and go back to the office. I find the detective’s card tucked carefully into the right side of my desk calendar. Somehow I think I knew that it would be me, not Olivia, eventually making this call.

I report what occurred last night, and he tells me he’ll need to interview her right away. “She’s not going to talk to you,” I sigh. “She’s as scared of talking to you as she is almost anything.”

“Sometimes the kids involved are threatened so badly that the fear of speaking up never goes away,” he sighs. “But I still need to try. Secondhand information from you doesn’t get us anywhere.”

“Look, can’t you just interview the other adults involved? At least try to confirm the story through her mother if you can find her?”

“Her mother’s been dead almost 15 years,” the detective says, “so I don’t think she’s going to be much help at this point.”

I lean back in my chair, and his words seem to whistle through me and right back out, as if they are impossible to comprehend. “Olivia told me her mother abandoned her. I mean, she really
believes
her mother abandoned her.”

The detective exhales. “Look, buddy. I don’t know what stories this girl’s been feeding you, but she knows her mother is dead. She watched it happen.”

I know for a fact Olivia doesn’t think she’s been lying to me about this. But I don’t understand how she can’t know the truth. “So … was it her father? Is he in jail?”

“He should’ve gone to jail, but there was nothing to pin it to him. Olivia was the only witness and she claimed to have seen nothing. It’s probably what saved her life. If she’d talked, you can bet your ass he’d have come after her.”

I feel something icy crawl along my back. “So if her father’s still on the loose,” I ask, “is Olivia even safe?”

“I think it’s fair to say,” he replies, “that as long as this guy isn’t in jail, Olivia will never be entirely safe.
Especially if she starts remembering.
”

I
’m
full of dread as I open up my laptop. A part of me, like a part of Olivia, doesn’t want to know. Wants to continue believing the version of events she’s created in her head.

It isn’t hard to find articles about it once you know what you’re looking for. Had I even once typed in her mother’s name months ago it would have been the first thing I’d found. Is it really possible that Olivia hasn’t? Yes. Something has warned her away from looking too carefully at anything for a long time, has assured her that she can’t handle what she’ll find out.

The story is awful, but it’s the photo that it hurts to look at – Olivia, tiny and smiling beside her mother, who looked very much like Olivia does now. She was stabbed forty-two times. Olivia ran nearly four miles in the dark and was found unconscious the next day, still bleeding from the wound on her back.

The night running. The scar on her back. The way she seems to black out when she’s attacked. If I’d even tried to guess at the source, I’d never have come up with something quite this awful.

I
call
the nursing home once more. This time, I don’t ask for Olivia’s grandmother. I ask for her grandmother’s next-of-kin, who turns out to be a sister. Olivia’s great-aunt, I suppose. I should have thought of it before. Olivia was only sixteen when her grandmother was admitted. There’s no way she’d have had the wherewithal or the funds to fly her grandmother to Florida and get her help.

And if this great-aunt helped Olivia’s grandmother, she sure as shit should have helped Olivia too. I hate her before she’s even picked up the phone. I hate her more after she has.

I explain the situation and the woman immediately launches into a tirade against Olivia. “Well, it might have been nice if that girl could have told the police back then, wouldn’t it?” she explodes.

“She didn’t remember anything until just now,” I snap. “She’s still under the impression that her parents abandoned her.”

She clucks her tongue again. “That stupid story. Anya let her keep believing it, but let me tell you, I’d have put a stop to it right away. She knew good and well what happened. She nearly bled to death. You don’t just forget something like that.”

“What story?” I ask.

“Oh. Olivia’d get so hysterical when people spoke about it that everyone finally gave up. You couldn’t even say ‘died’ around her. So Anya started saying ‘when your mother went away’ and they left it at that.”

I’m so out of my depth at this point it feels like I’ll never surface. I’m pretty sure I could have an MD and a Ph.D. and this whole thing would still be beyond me.

“Is there anyone else I can speak to? I assume Olivia must have lived with someone else, at least in high school, if her grandmother’s been sick for a while.”

There is defensiveness in her silence. “You understand I couldn’t take her in,” she finally says. “I’m too old to be raising someone, ‘specially someone troubled like that.”

“Yes,” I say impatiently. “So who did she live with?”

“She just stayed in the house by herself. She was fine. Anya had been sick for a long time and Olivia was used to taking care of both of them. She was better off on her own anyway.”

I slam the phone down and sit at my desk after we hang up, staring out the window without seeing anything. It’s so much worse than anything I could have imagined. There have been times in my life when I wasn’t sure how to fix something. But now? I’m not sure I
can
.

From the very start, I had this urge to protect her, and that urge should have warned me away. I wanted to be the one to save her, and instead, I’ve opened up this well that might just destroy her.

It’s time to come clean before I do more damage.

I
t would be
impossible for Peter’s face to be more wary than it is when he opens his door. “Didn’t expect to see you on a Saturday morning,” he says, stepping aside for me to walk in.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “But I’m pretty sure this can’t wait.”

I tell him about Olivia’s night running and the nightmare she had last night. I tell him what I learned from the police and how I’ve been keeping her from running, which leads to the somewhat obvious fact that Olivia and I have been sleeping under the same roof.

“Will,” he groans, rubbing his eyes. “I’m gonna pretend you didn’t just say that, okay?”

“Look, I had to tell you. Her problems are bigger than my job. I can’t just abandon her right now.”

“I know that,” he says. “Which is why you can’t say what you just did. Because if you tell me you’re sleeping under the same roof, I have to tell you to stop, and we both know you’re not gonna. So I’m going to pretend you never said it.”

He says he’ll ask around for the name of a professional. Not the idiot at the health center, but someone actually equipped to deal with this situation. “And in the meantime, just stay the course. She’s got the Cooper Invitational next weekend. Let’s just get her through that.”

“This doesn’t seem like the kind of thing we should be keeping from her,” I say.

Peter shakes his head. “That girl’s had nothing but bad breaks in her life. She isn’t asking anyone for the truth, but she is asking for a chance to make a name for herself. And if she wins next week we can make that happen. I say we do whatever we need to do so she gets her shot.”