Everything We Didn't Say(100)

“Why?”

Reb laughed, but it was brief and hollow. “Why do you think? I wasn’t in love with him. I’m not sure I ever was. He swooped in and saved me at a point in my life when I desperately needed not to be alone, but gratitude and love are not the same thing. I thought he knew that. We were never supposed to be forever.”

Juniper tested those words, put a little weight on them and found out they held. She had always known that Law loved her mother more than Reb loved him back, but no relationship was balanced—someone was always pursuing, the other pushing away. Honestly, Juniper had never seen her parents’ marriage as anything other than practical. They were kind and loyal, respectful as coworkers. But was there a spark? Something raw and sacred?

Juniper wanted to say: What about us? What about her and Jonathan, the family that they had built? But instead she asked: “Why didn’t you go?”

“He found out. I don’t really even know how. I covered my steps so carefully…” Reb reached for her mug of tea, took a sip out of habit.

“I found your suitcase,” Juniper admitted, almost against her will.

“You did?”

“It was an accident. I popped the trunk of your car. You didn’t do a very good job of hiding it.”

Her mother sighed. “Maybe I wanted to be caught. When I think about it now… What was I going to do? Forty-one years old and starting over from scratch. I didn’t go to college, never learned a trade. I cooked and cleaned. I gardened and sewed. I was a homemaker. If I would have left my home, what would I have been?” She didn’t answer her own question, but it hung in the air between them all the same: nothing.

But Juniper didn’t believe that. She had forgotten that Rebecca was only forty-one that summer, not much older than Juniper was now. Young and lovely and full of life. She was an artist and composer, a smart, strong woman in her prime. She could have started over, forged a new life far away from the drudgery of a small Iowa farm and a man almost twenty years her senior.

“I wasn’t leaving you,” her mother said quietly. “I’d never leave you or Jonathan if you needed me. But you were almost adults. I didn’t think it would ruin you if your parents divorced. It’s not like I was just going to disappear.”

“What happened?”

Reb put both hands around the clay mug and held on tight. “We fought. Of course. I was playing the Braga, and he wanted to talk. So we… scuffled. The body of the cello was cracked in the process.”

Juniper wasn’t sure what to say. She knew how much that instrument meant to her mother. But she had to stay focused on the main thing. She wasn’t here to talk about her parents’ marriage. This was about Cal and Beth. “And Law broke his foot?”

“Not then. I convinced him to go to the Pattersons’ party, but it didn’t help. He was still so angry.”

Juniper could picture the look in Law’s eyes as he steered her mother out of the Pattersons’ backyard. But the story was starting to collapse beneath the weight of unspoken details, of things that she was struggling to understand. It had been an exhausting day, and it took her eyes a moment to focus after she blinked.

“Mom,” she said, hating herself a little for fast-forwarding to the information she sought, “I still don’t get it. How did Law break his foot?”

“Why does it matter?” Reb couldn’t keep a note of bitterness out of her voice.

“I don’t know!” Juniper didn’t mean to yell, and instantly tempered her tone. “Look, it just does. Cal and Beth were killed that night, and Jonathan sat in a jail cell without you nearby. I was escorted in a police cruiser to the station for questioning, and because I was just nineteen years old, I didn’t even know that I could have refused to go with them. You weren’t there when we needed you the most, and to this day I don’t know why.”

Reb looked stricken. But she said, “I was boiling bone glue to fix the cello. Law was,” she swallowed, “trying to get my attention. The pot fell. Broke his second and third metatarsals through his work boot. By the time we got to the hospital it had swelled so much they had to cut through the leather to get it off.”

Something inside of Juniper deflated. She didn’t realize how afraid she had been until the relief of finally knowing pierced through her doubts.

“He was with you. All night. So there’s no way that…” She couldn’t even voice it. She hadn’t even thought it, not really.

But Reb’s chin cut to the left just a fraction. “No,” she said, refusing to meet Juniper’s gaze. She laced her fingers around the nearly empty mug of tea and studied the dregs as if there were a mystery written in the leaves. “He left for a while. Tried to walk it off. That’s why his foot swelled up so much.”

“What do you mean he tried to walk if off? Where did he go?”

“I don’t know. Around. It was a warm night. I cleaned up the mess in here, and when he got back, I drove him to the hospital in Munroe.”

Juniper could hardly form the words. “When was that?”

“Quarter to eleven?” Reb guessed. “We didn’t get home until nearly two, so…”

That night was so suddenly, so viscerally upon her that Juniper gasped. The cool breeze on her hot skin, gunshots like a car backfiring. Her legs throbbed from the awkward way that she knelt, sweat prickling at the small of her back and the line of her upper lip so that she was afraid for a moment she would sneeze and give away her hiding place. She had believed, if only for a few broken heartbeats, that she knew the killer.