White Rabbit(7)
My mom answers on the fourth ring, her voice groggy and thick. I can picture her lying on top of her bed, a paperback splayed across her chest, fumbling for her glasses on the nightstand. “Hey, kiddo, what’s up?”
“H-hey, Mom, I—” My voice chokes off, the reality of what I have to say slamming into me like a crosstown bus. April might have murdered her boyfriend.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” She’s immediately alert, her hair-trigger panic tripped by my hesitation. “Did you and Lucy have a fight? Do you need a ride?”
“No, it’s nothing like that,” I assure her in a quiet hurry, feeling my way through my own words. “It’s … actually, it’s, um … April?”
“That girl.” Mom’s tone becomes as hard and sharp as a broken tooth. “What did she do this time? Did she crash your party tonight? Listen, if she said … if she said something about my calling Peter—”
“No, Mom, it wasn’t—” I stop short, her words hitting their target. “Wait, what do you mean, ‘calling Peter?’ Did you talk to him?” She stays silent, and I feel the back of my neck prickle. “Mom?”
“I might have phoned your sperm donor today,” she admits at last in an aggrieved huff. “It was a moment of weakness, and I’m not proud of it.”
“Why?” I ask, surprised to find that it’s actually still possible for my night to get worse. With one possible exception—me—nothing good has ever resulted from any kind of contact between Peter Covington and Genevieve Holt.
Sixteen years ago, my mother was a bright-eyed, twenty-five-year-old interior designer and art consultant, new to the city of Burlington, Vermont, and the proud owner of a small firm bearing her name. She’d done three years of art school, dropping out when an internship with a major decorator in New York turned into a full-time job she couldn’t refuse, and then eventually followed her heart to New England. Thanks to a modest inheritance from my grandparents—a, by all accounts, quirky and lovable couple who ran a country store in a small Maine village, taught their kids to pursue their dreams, and unfortunately died before I could ever meet them—she was able to rent an office, hang out her shingle, and take on private clients.
It wasn’t always easy. Work came in when the economy was up, and vanished when it went down, leaving her scrambling to cover the bills; and so, when a law firm by the name of Pembroke, Landau, and Wells offered her a massive chunk of cash to help them choose a few impressively priceless works of art for their offices, she was overjoyed to accept. When she met their junior partner, a Harvard legacy by the name of Peter Covington II, she was quickly swept off her feet. He was tall and handsome, with blond hair and gray eyes, and he was utterly charmed by the bohemian and unpredictable free spirit that was the young Genevieve. They were a total mismatch, his white-collar starchiness at complete odds with her offbeat joie de vivre, but—in my mom’s mind, at least—the sparks their differences generated were what fueled their romance.
The sparks worked their magic for approximately two weeks before my mom discovered that Peter Covington was in fact married, that he had a toddler at home—a little boy named Hayden—and that most of the things he’d said to her in private were a pack of lies. She ended things immediately, with a fiery speech that she has a tendency to recount verbatim whenever she’s had a little too much white wine, and then spent a few months debating whether or not to rat the man out to his wife. When she learned that she was pregnant, it was merely the icing on the cake.
I was born into the midst of an ugly war that continues to this day, erupting in periodic skirmishes as Peter Covington tries to ruin my mother’s career and life, and she sues him repeatedly for slander and back child support. Peter’s wife, Isabel, amazingly has stuck by him through the whole lengthy ordeal; supposedly, April was born to save their marriage, but I suspect a prenup is the real reason their matrimonial bonds have never been torn asunder.
Peter wouldn’t have anything to do with me; in sixteen years, I’ve never received so much as a birthday card from him. When I was a kid, he fascinated me—my wealthy and elusive father, who lived in a beautiful home and drove a fancy car—but I only made the mistake of calling him Dad once, when I was five years old and he came by our house to deliver some personal message to my mom; his reaction, which was swift, furious, and terrifying, permanently cured me of my misplaced affection. In an emergency, my mother would have turned to the Cloverfield monster for help before asking for a favor from Peter Covington—and if she’d called him now, it could only mean one thing.
“How broke are we?” I ask flatly, when her silence becomes unbearable. My thoughts fragment inside my skull. Fox’s corpse is practically looming over my shoulder, but the poverty my mom and I struggle against is a black hole with its own inescapable gravity; I can’t avoid it, so I might as well dive in instead and give myself a little more time to think about how I’ll bring up the dead body I’ve just discovered.
She takes a hesitant breath. “It’s not for you to worry about, kiddo.”
“Mom.”
“I’ve got it under control, Rufus.”
The lie is so threadbare, it’s impossible to let it pass unchallenged. “You said you’d rather take a bath with a lawn mower than ask that ass-butt for money again! You’d never have called him unless it was really serious.” More silence follows, and I bite the inside of my cheek as the bottom drops out of my stomach. How much worse is this night going to get? “How bad is it?”