The Mystery of Hollow Places(49)

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I try to snap. It comes out more like a gasp, my breath shredded from the brief sprint, from force-swallowing the lump in my throat.

“Imogene,” she says desperately, following me through the living room.

“Leave me alone, Lindy,” I warn her.

“Immy, I can’t do that.” She swoops in front of me. “Something’s obviously going on with you. I know you’re scared.”

“No, I’m not.”

“I know how worried you are about your dad. Lord knows I am.” She grabs for my stiff fingers. “But I’m asking you not to shut me out. Not now, when we’re depending on each other. Josh would want us to—”

“I don’t need a f*cking therapist, Lindy.” I tear my hand away. “Nobody in this house does!”

The corners of her carefully painted poppy-red lips wobble. “That’s all that I am to you?”

As Lindy’s face blurs in front of me, I can’t stop myself from saying what I know I shouldn’t say: “That’s what you are. I don’t need your stupid talks, and I don’t need you, and neither does my dad!” I reach out and push, and my thin-boned stepmother stumbles into the wall at the foot of the stairs.

Lindy’s whisper is a whip crack between us. “Please go to your room, Imogene.”

“You can’t—”

“Yes, I can. Maybe I’m not the parent you want, but I’m what you’ve got. So go to your room.” She no longer seems on the verge of tears, and if she would look me in the eye, I suspect I’d see nothing but careful composure.

Except she won’t look at me.

Why should she? Not only am I pathetic, I’m mean. And I’m the dumbass for truly believing that just because my real mother didn’t want me, she needed saving.

But this isn’t helping me find the only person who I now know really needs me: my dad.

What I do is, once I’m safe in my room, door appropriately slammed, and I’ve flopped facedown on my faded bedspread, I imagine my heart in my chest. I imagine prying it open with a chisel and rock hammer, and once it splits down the seam I push out Lindy and Chad and Jessa, one by one. I fit the halves back together after them and tell myself I’ll learn to love the quiet they leave behind. I don’t need a stepmother, I don’t need a boyfriend, and I really don’t need a best friend.

Dad’s taught me a lot over the years: how to pick the lock on my old Civic, how to choose the best table at Subway. How to read. How to make a Bloody Mary. How to swim and how to breathe out and sink. How to find a woman with only a seventeen-year-old picture in the back of a mystery book and a bedtime story as clues—and I did that much at least.

But if there’s one thing Dad’s bad times have taught me, it’s this: I never, ever want to have anything I can’t survive without.





SIXTEEN


Wednesday morning, I wake up to a horrible raw ache—like Monday’s hangover but full-bodied—and Lindy standing over my bed.

“Where are your keys, Imogene?”

“What?” I mumble into my pillow. I slide my head up and feel something grind into my chest: the stone heart, crystal-side down on the mattress, trapped under me while I slept.

“Your keys. Car and house. Are they in your bag?” By the sound of her perfectly measured voice, she hasn’t forgiven me.

I nod once and pull the comforter over my head, watching through a peephole between the blanket and the mattress.

Going literally undercover doesn’t stop Lindy from monologuing while she roots through my bag. Keys jingle as she pries them out of the front pouch and tucks them in her blazer pocket. “I really wanted us to be a team, but things have to change around here. You’ve been running around without telling me, without asking permission, hardly checking in. You won’t talk to me at all. Phone?” she asks, and despite my silence spots my cell phone on the charger on my nightstand. She pockets that, too. “I don’t know what to do with you, Imogene. I don’t know how to convince you that I’m the parent and you’re the child.” Lindy crosses to my desk and unplugs my laptop, which she tucks beneath her arm. “I’m working late, and then I have my meeting with Officer Griffin. She wants to get together once a week, until this is all . . . over. I’m going to tell her I want us to go the media. Get this on the news and online. It’s time we face facts that your father isn’t going to drift back in and make everything all right on his own steam. I’ll be home before nine, and if you’d like to talk to me then, we’ll figure out what to do and where to go from here. You can spend the day at home, thinking about what you want to say to me.”

Though my own breath stales the air beneath the blankets, I wait until I hear Lindy leave my room, descend, and go out through the garage door. Not until I hear her car rumble to life and pull away do I come out.

I listen to the wind whistling through the cracks in the house and massage the spot below my collarbone where the stone definitely left a bruise. I remember taking it to bed with me, staring into the center of it until I fell asleep. I remember thinking maybe I’ve been wrong this whole time. Maybe it never meant anything that Dad left it for me. Maybe I’ve been just as crazy as he is, thinking this was some kind of mystery I was capable of solving, when really he’s god knows where in god knows what kind of shape.