The Perfect Son by Freida McFadden(28)

“Everything is fine,” I choke out.

Mom picks up her cup of coffee. She has selected one of the mugs with four-year-old Liam’s face on it. He looks so cute in that picture—freckles across his nose and missing one of his front teeth. But all I can think about is how that was the year I first started to realize what he was really like.

“I heard about that girl who disappeared,” she says. “How terrifying. I’m surprised you let Hannah out of the house.”

I clear my throat. “I’m sure she’ll turn up.”

“That’s the worst thing about having daughters,” she says. “You’re always worried about stuff like that. With Liam, you don’t need to worry.”

I think about the map that popped up in my car. The gap of time when he was gone last night. It’s got to be a coincidence.

Please, God, let this girl have run away. Or anything that doesn’t involve my son…

I plop down on the sofa, too upset to attempt to do anything else. My mother joins me with her coffee cup. The sofa shifts as she sits beside me.

“Listen, Erika,” she says quietly. “I have to tell you, this isn’t a social call. There’s something I need to tell you. And… it’s… it’s not going to be easy.”

I sit up straight. What does she want to tell me? Does my mother have cancer? Is that how the rest of this horrible day is going to unfold? I feel like I’m going to throw up. “What’s wrong?”

She lowers her eyes. “You’re going to hate me.”

I look at my mother’s face. Even though the wrinkles are new from when I was a child, she still looks the same to me somehow. She’s the same brave woman who raised me all by herself after my father was hit by a car and killed. She didn’t date all through my childhood, because she said she wanted to focus on me. It’s only in the last ten years that she started to have occasional flings and travel. I can’t imagine what sort of thing she could possibly say that would make me hate her.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

“I haven’t…” She heaves a sigh and looks out the window. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you, Erika. There are things you don’t know. Things I have to tell you now, before you find out on your own.”

She’s really beginning to scare me. “Well, what is it?”

“It’s… it’s about your father.”

“My father?” I conjure up the image of a handsome man with dark hair and dark eyes in the one photograph I keep in my bedside drawer. My memories of him are patchy at best. I remember the scratchiness of his face and the smell of cigarette smoke that used to cling to him. He died when I was not quite four years old, so he never lived to see me grow up. He never lived to see the grandson who looks more like him every single day. “What about my father?”

“The truth is…” My mother’s hand trembles slightly on the handle of the coffee mug. She puts it down on the coffee table, ignoring the coaster a mere inches away from where she put the cup. On any other day, this would make me crazy. But today, I couldn’t care less. “The truth is that your father isn’t… He’s actually…”

“What?”

“He’s alive.”

“What?”

Two minutes earlier, I had been thinking there was nothing that could ever make me hate my mother. But now I’m beginning to think maybe there is. My father is alive? How could that be? And how could she make me think he was dead for all those years? Daddy was in a car accident. I had accepted her word blindly for over forty years.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” she breathes. “I wanted to tell you earlier, but there’s no easy way to say something like that.”

“How about not lying in the first place?” I grit my teeth. “Why would you tell me he was dead? What happened? Did he run off with another woman?”

I suppose that could make a crazy sort of sense. Maybe my father ran off with some tramp and, in her anger, Mom pretended he was dead instead of a deadbeat. I still don’t know if I could forgive her for lying about it for forty years, but maybe I could try.

“No,” she says. “He didn’t.”

I fold my arms across my chest. Am I going to have to pull the story out of her? “Then what happened, exactly? Where has he been for the last forty-two years?”

Mom looks down at her wrinkled hands in her lap. “He’s been in prison. For first-degree murder.”





Chapter 25


Erika



Everything my mother says is another punch in the gut.

My father is alive.

Punch.

My father has been in prison for over forty years.

Punch.

My father is a murderer.

Punch. Punch.

I don’t even know what to say. I stare ahead at the wall, my heart jumping around in my chest. This has been the most stressful morning of my entire life. At this point, my day is going to end with me in the hospital with a stroke.

“You can see why I didn’t want to tell you,” Mom says, her words coming out quickly. “I thought it would be traumatic for you. And if it got out, the other kids might tease you.”

“What…?” I start my sentence, but my voice sounds strangled. Ugh, poor choice of words. “What did he do?”