The Truth About Keeping Secrets(72)

This was the hospital Dad had died in.

Did his ceiling have stars? I couldn’t remember, I couldn’t remember.

‘So much,’ she said, then lowered her voice. ‘I’m so sorry this has been so hard.’

‘I didn’t mean to make it seem like – like, I don’t know.’ My throat clenched. ‘Like you didn’t care, or. Obviously you care. You were trying to make it easier.’

She nodded. ‘You like that June,’ Mom said. ‘A lot.’

My body tensed but I didn’t look away from the ceiling, partly because it would’ve been too much effort to get back up and partly because after she had said that, I didn’t want to face her. It felt like an accusation. ‘I do.’

‘Does she care about you in the same way?’

‘I think so. I hope so.’

‘Is it … romantic?’

‘I don’t really know any more. Maybe. On my end, anyway.’

Mom’s feet shuffled against the tile. ‘Well. Then I care about her too.’

I went to chew my thumb to keep from crying, but clenching my jaw made the cut on my cheek open, so I just lay there expressionless while my vision blurred and thought about all the things that would come next.

The doctor saw me. Stitched me up, confirmed I had whiplash and sent me home.

I’d asked her if she’d seen June. The doctor had sort of straightened her back, frowned, said, ‘She’s getting X-rayed at the moment. We’re hoping she won’t need surgery. But the main thing was that cut on her head, to get to it …’ She winced. ‘We had to shave a patch.’

Afterwards, Mom and I were led to a side room where one of the police officers who’d found me and June was waiting for us.

My stomach lurched at the sight of him, as if I was back in the worst of it, as if I still needed to be saved from something.

But I swallowed and breathed and when he asked, I told him everything. I told him about my dad and June and Heath and the messages and what he’d done. What happened in the car. I told him I grabbed the steering wheel. I told him everything, anything I could think of, but disconnected, factual, because I wasn’t entirely sure I’d be able to get through all of it otherwise. He asked questions intermittently, prompted me to elaborate, but nothing was pointed or accusatory – he believed me, I could tell. He was sympathetic. He believed me. He was going to do something.

I mentioned that I’d taken a video while we were in the car, but Heath had destroyed my phone.

‘What happens now?’ Mom asked when I was finished. ‘What’s going to happen to him?’

The officer flipped his notebook shut and put his pen in his breast pocket. ‘We’re going to do our best.’

I froze. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Personally – I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but personally – there’s no doubt in my mind that that boy should see jail time. Not a doubt.’

I knew what he was implying. ‘So why won’t he?’

‘It’s a very complicated situation.’

Mom gestured at me, all of me, living, breathing proof of what Heath Alderman was capable of. ‘That didn’t sound very complicated to me.’

The officer bent in closer to us and lowered his voice. ‘That family has this town in a chokehold. We liaise with the district’s benefactors, the local government, the schools – and not a single one of those bodies will be interested in seeing that boy in handcuffs.’ He leaned back and brushed down his trouser legs with his palms. ‘Unfortunately there’s no way to corroborate any of this, especially without the documentation, like you said. Even this incident – I’m afraid it’s your word against his. There’s little we can do.’ He got up to leave. ‘I’m sorry, ladies. I realize this has been a stressful time for you. We’ll let you know first if anything changes. Get some rest, now.’

The officer left, and with him, the entirety of my faith in the United States justice system.

Mom and I seethed. We talked about what to do in a situation where nothing could be done. She said we’d keep trying. She said she was sorry.

But mainly, we pulled out a board game from a sad-looking pile of them in the corner – Chutes and Ladders – and it was actually fun. We kept talking, and the words came effortlessly, now – but still, I found it hard to relax without actually seeing June in person. I worried that maybe she’d slipped through a crack in time and space. I thought of her, looking back at California, worried it would crumble if she wasn’t there to watch it – I guessed I felt the same way about her now. But she was fine. And I didn’t have to think about Dad constantly for him to continue existing in some form. That wasn’t fair. Not to me. Not to him. He was my dad, and I was his daughter, and that was enough; that was imprinted somewhere, either in me or somewhere else I couldn’t conceive of. And I looked at Mom, really looked at her face, and I realized that I was her daughter: and this was important too.

Mom had told me months before that I still had a life to live. And now, having stared into oblivion, playing some game with her in a hospital waiting room, waiting for the girl who was everything, I actually felt like it was true.

I was OK. And June was OK.

But she had questions to answer.

Two hours later there was a knock on the door. June’s face lit up when she saw me, and at first, I didn’t even register anything different about her; it was June, and she was here, and that was all I needed to know.