Sweet Water(76)

Finn looks ashy and unwell. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say.

His shoulders are hiked, uncomfortable. And I realize these last two days have been more about our struggle to cover up what he’s done than about Finn himself.

I feel nauseous, loathsome.

My pulse races just looking at him, what we’ve done to him.

He’s quiet and struggling because we haven’t talked to him about the grieving process or how he feels about his girlfriend’s death. He looks ragged, barely functioning, but it’s amazing he’s able to function at all, and maybe that should be my bigger worry.

Maybe my concern should be Finn’s ability to thrive, like Martin, even though he potentially played a part in this girl’s death. “I’m sorry we’ve been so busy. What have you been doing all day?”

“Reading.” It’s a Friday night, and Finn is shut away in his room by himself. I used to read a lot too, but most of the time it was stories about uppity families like the Ellsworths. Not how-to books on the art of killing. I swallow the bile in my throat.

I sit down on Finn’s bed with him. “Do you remember anything else about the other night?” I ask, afraid to breathe, afraid to hear.

“No. I wish I did.” He looks away and shakes his head. He’s lying. “You went to see Yaz’s mom today.” His voice trips on his dead girlfriend’s name, and I wonder if he’ll ever get over this. Will he ever be able to have a normal relationship with a female again? My heart bottoms out in my chest. This is what we should’ve been focused on the last two days. “How is she?”

“She’s holding up. Strong lady,” I say, but all I can see when I think of Alisha are the awful pleas that trembled from her lips. “It will be better for him if he comes forward now.” “I want my daughter’s journal back.”

I stare at my son, and he’s thin and pale and dangerously depressed by his girlfriend’s death—the one we forced him to cover up. He’s carrying this burden because of decisions Martin and I made, and because of that I should carry the burden with him.

But I cannot carry it for him.

I can only try my hardest to find out if he made a mistake with this girl and decide how to move forward. If we’d given him the choice that night, would he have decided differently? Should we still give him a choice now or is it too late?

I decide to try honesty with Finn. I have more hope with him than Martin, although not nearly as much since I found out about the drug use. “Finn, Alisha was looking for Yazmin’s journal. Do you know where it is?” I recognize the Neal Shusterman book. Finn owns the whole Scythe series. But I didn’t recognize the brown leather book he’d shoved into the bookshelf. Like Martin, I want to give him the opportunity to tell me the truth.

Come on, baby, tell me what happened.

Finn shakes his head and looks away again uncomfortably. “I don’t.”

I suck in a sharp breath, punched in the stomach. At least he had the courtesy to look away from me before he lied.

“She used to write in it all the time. Do you think there’s anything bad in there?”

“What would there be, Finn?” My heart patters in my chest. My instinct is to turn away too, plug my ears. I don’t want to know if he hurt her. But the last twenty years have been about all the things I didn’t want to hear. Didn’t want to see. It’s time to open my eyes. “You can tell me.”

Finn shakes his head and squints. His hair falls into his eyes, reminding me a lot of Martin when he was younger, and I can’t imagine what must be going on in Finn’s head after the last two days. It must be crowded in there with all the lies we’ve told him and the ones he’s told us.

“Alton told me you’d been doing more drugs than you let on,” I disclose, my words rattling a bit. I hate how this truth about my son sounds coming off my lips, and I know I’ll hate to hear the other ones that are sure to come next. But maybe if I can get him to admit it, it will set us on a path to truth.

He nods. “I thought it would look bad if I told Monroe that.”

I clasp my dry hands together, firm. “Finn, it looks much worse that you lied.”

“I get it, Mom,” he says, but he doesn’t. I didn’t when I was his age either.

I rise from the bed, shaking my head. My son is a drug user and a liar and possibly a murderer. I press my hands against the dresser and stare eye level with the leather book.

It knocks the air out of me, and I rock back and forth, tears in my eyes.

“Mom?” he asks.

“Are you sure you don’t know where the journal is, Finn?” I ask him, and I’m practically crying.

He looks away. “No, I told you.”

You told me. But you lied!

And Martin keeps protecting his lies, enabling him to keep going. This is a failure on my part. I can’t fail him again.

I need him to own this, to want to be better.

To try to be better, for Christ’s sake.

“I found out tonight about something that happened when I was around your age, a mistake where I made a bad decision.” My throat closes up at the memory of what Dad told me. At the thought that my son might be more like his father than I ever imagined. “They follow you, Finn. The guilt follows you too.” I think of Tush and his large brown eyes and how I wish I could’ve saved him. “It’s made me change my mind about what happened with Yazmin. This should be your decision, not your father’s or mine,” I tell him. This is it.