Райли Сейгер - Home Before Dark - A Novel

I nodded, my hand pressed to my cheek, the skin there hotter than a sunburn. It was the only time I can remember one of my parents hitting me. Probably because it left a mark. For two days, the bruise from my mother’s slap eclipsed my scar. Until today, I have never mentioned the Book to her again.

Thinking about that day always brings a pulse of memory pain. I touch my gin and tonic to my cheek and say, “We need to start talking about it, Mom.”

“You read the book,” my mother says. “You know what happened.”

“I’m not talking about Dad’s fictionalized account. I’m talking about the truth.”

My mother downs the rest of her martini. “If you wanted that, then you should have asked your father when you had the chance.”

Oh, I did. Plenty of times. Since my father had never backhanded me, I continued to try to get him to admit the truth about Baneberry Hall. I liked to spring the question on him when he was distracted, hoping he’d slip up and give me an honest answer. At breakfast, right before he dropped French toast onto my plate. At the movies, just as the lights dimmed. Once, I tried while we were at Game One of the World Series and Big Papi’s three-run homer was whizzing toward our corner of the outfield.

Each time, I got the same answer. “What happened, happened, Mags. I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”

But he did. In public. On national TV.

Although I loved my father unconditionally, I also thought he was the most dishonest man I’ve ever known. That was hard for adolescent me to wrap my head around. It’s still hard in adulthood.

Eventually, I stopped asking him about the Book. My late teens and twenties passed with nary a question. More than a decade of things left unspoken. It was easier that way. By then, I knew my family preferred tense silence over addressing the Book-shaped elephant in the room.

It wasn’t until I was a week away from my thirties that I tried again. And even then it was only because I knew it was my last, best chance to get answers.

The end for my father had been in sight for days—long enough for me to get the idea that his passing would be marked by weather befitting our stormy relationship. Dark clouds in the sky and cracks of lightning. Yet his final breath emerged on a bright April day with the sun rising high in a flawless sky, its yellow glow matched by the forsythia blooming outside the hospice window.

I didn’t talk much in the last hours of my father’s life. I didn’t know what to say and doubted my father would understand even if I did. He was barely conscious at the end, and certainly not lucid once the morphine drip had lowered him into a state of dreamlike befuddlement. His sole moment of clarity came less than an hour before he died—a shift so unexpected it made me wonder if I, too, was dreaming.

“Maggie,” he said, looking up at me with eyes suddenly clear of confusion and pain. “Promise me you’ll never go back there. Never ever.”

There was no need to ask what he was talking about. I already knew.

“Why not?”

“It—it’s not safe there. Not for you.”

My father winced against a ripple of pain, making it clear he’d be slipping out of consciousness very soon, likely for good.

“I’ll never go back. I promise.”

I said it quickly, worried it was too late and that my father was already gone. But he was still with me. He even managed a pain-weakened smile and said, “That’s my good girl.”

I placed my hand on his, shocked by how small it was. When I was a girl, his hands had seemed so big, so strong. Now mine fit squarely atop his.

“It’s time, Dad,” I said. “You’ve been silent long enough. You can tell me why we really left. I know that none of it is true. I know you made up everything. About the house. About what happened there. It’s okay to admit it. I won’t blame you. I won’t judge you. I just need to know why you did it.”

I had started to cry, overcome with emotion. My father was slipping away, and I was already missing him even though he was still right there, and I was so close to learning the truth that my whole body buzzed.

“Tell me,” I whispered. “Please.”

My father’s mouth dropped open, two words forming among his labored breaths. He pushed them out one by one, each sounding like a hiss in the otherwise silent room.

“So. Sorry.”

After that, all the light left my father. Even though he would technically remain alive for fifty more minutes, I consider that the moment of his death. He was in the shadowland, a realm from which I knew he’d never return.

In the days that followed, I didn’t dwell on that final conversation. I was too numb with grief and too consumed with making funeral arrangements to think about it. Only after that draining ordeal had ended did it dawn on me that he never gave me a proper answer.

“Asking Dad is no longer an option,” I tell my mother. “You’re all I have left. And it’s time we talk about it.”

“I don’t see why.” My mother looks past my shoulder, desperately seeking out our waiter for another drink. “All that is ancient history.”

A bubble of frustration forms in my chest. One that’s been building since the night we left Baneberry Hall, inflated a little more each day. By their divorce, which I’m sure was caused by the Book’s success. By every question deflected by my father. By the relentless taunting from classmates. By each awkward encounter with someone like Wendy Davenport. For twenty-five years, it’s grown unabated, getting bigger and bigger, nearly bursting.

“It’s our lives ,” I say. “ My life. I’ve been associated with that book since I was five. People read it and think they know me, but what they’ve read is a lie. Their perception of me is a lie. And I never knew how to handle that because you and Dad never wanted to talk about the Book. But I’m begging you, please, talk about it.”

I down the rest of the gin and tonic, holding the glass with both hands because they’ve started to shake. When our waiter passes, I also order another.

“I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” my mother says.

“You can start with Dad’s last words. ‘So sorry.’ That’s what he said, Mom. And I need to know why.”

“How do you even know he was talking about the book?”

Because he was. I’m certain of it. That final conversation had the feel of a confession. Now the only person who knows what my father was confessing to sits directly across from me, anxiously awaiting another hit of vodka.

“Tell me what he meant,” I say.

My mother takes off her sunglasses, revealing a softness in her eyes that I’ve rarely seen in adulthood. I think it’s because she feels sorry for me. I also think it means I’m on the verge of learning the truth.

“Your father was a very good writer,” she says. “But he had his struggles. With writer’s block. With self-doubt. He had many disappointments before we moved to Baneberry Hall. That was one of the reasons we bought it. To get a fresh start in a new place. He thought it would inspire him. And, for a time, it did. That house and all its problems and quirks—it was a treasure trove of new ideas for your father. He got the idea for a book about a haunted house. A novel.”

“But Dad wrote nonfiction,” I say, thinking about the magazine covers that had hung in his apartment, proudly framed. Esquire. Rolling Stone. The New Yorker. During his heyday, he had contributed to them all.

“That’s what he was known for, yes. And that’s the only thing his connections in the publishing world wanted from him. Facts, not fiction. Truth, not lies.”

I implicitly understand where this story is heading. Since my father couldn’t snag a book deal with a typical novel, he decided to go a different route. Make-believe masked as something true.