Лорен Кейт - The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove

“Shut your mouth. Nobody’s out.”

I screamed because he’d scared me, because his grip was tight and his breath smelled dead, because his lips and his gums were blue.

“Mom?” I called again. My voice wobbled through the cramped room.

“Your mom’s not here,” he spit. “She didn’t bother coming home last night.”

“How would you know?” I said, wrestling free to scurry to the corner of my bed.

It was then that Dad lurched from the easy chair and came at me. I didn’t think he had it in him to make it across the trailer, but then again, when he wanted to scare me, it didn’t matter how strung out he was.

“You think I don’t know what goes on in my own house?”

When he stood up fully, which was rare, Dad was the height of the trailer’s low ceiling. His big arm reached for one of the bottles of painkillers strewn across the kitchen table, but he stopped to look up at me. I could feel my lips trembling. I was willing him to inhale his morning fistful. It’d be better for us both if he just swallowed them down.

“I know what your mom tells you,” he said in a low voice. “Talking behind my back as if I’m half a man. You think I need it?” He’d uncapped the bottle, but instead of taking out the pills, he chucked the whole thing at me, hard. The bottle bounced off my thigh, and the pills clattered across the floor.

“You think I need any of you?” he yelled.

“Dad,” I pleaded, wincing when he pinned me up against the wall. His fist came close to grabbing my hair, but when I ducked to dodge him, he stumbled forward, knocking his shin on the bed.

“Damn it, Tal,” he groaned, grabbing his leg and hopping on one foot toward his chair.

I grabbed my purple backpack and shoved flip-flops on my feet, not caring that this meant I was going to school in my pajamas, again. Better to show up in flannel pants today than covered in bruises tomorrow.

“You get back here,” Dad yelled, chasing me out into the yard of the trailer park.

I kept running. I only looked back when I heard the thud.

My father was face first in the dirt. It wasn’t the first time he’d fallen like that, but it was the first time I’d seen him lie there silently, not trying to get up. He’d tripped over the bottom step of the trailer and come down hard. I saw the smear of blood dripping from his lower lip. His eyelids fluttered and he was out again. I reached down to his neck, felt his pulse, then turned around and kept on running.

Mom showed up at school that day to tell me that the cops had picked him up. It was the last time either of us saw him. It was the first time I started keeping that old promise never to speak to him again.

Could a man change? Definitely not.

He opened the door before I’d even finished knocking. He looked frail and tired; the skin around his silver eyes looked loose like a grandfather’s. But when he put out his arms, they were unexpectedly steady.

“Tal-doll,” he said, waiting for a hug.

I stood on the metal steps of my Uncle Lewey’s trailer, my arms crossed tight over my waist. I was fighting the part of me that wanted badly to step toward my father and put my head on his broad chest. Instead, I stared at the point on his forehead directly between his eyes. It was an old trick I’d learned in debate class — use it when you’re too nervous to look someone in the eyes but still want to display your control.

“What do you want?” I said.

“To congratulate you,” he said, nudging me with his bony elbow. “My daughter the Princess. Not that I’m surprised.”

“I don’t need you to say congratulations.”

Dad frowned. “Okay, then maybe I need you to say, ‘Welcome home.’ I’m still on probation, of course, but with enough good behavior, everything can go right back to—”

“No,” I said, feeling the old tremble come back into my voice. “It’s different now. Mom and I are different. We moved on.” My voice strained with the hope that this was true.

“Come in,” Dad said, ignoring me and holding open the door. “I’ll make you some tea. You look beautiful, but you don’t look well.”

Before Dad left and Mom and I moved out, Uncle Lewey’s trailer had been three doors down from ours. It was always the bachelor-party zone. I still expected to find a free-for-all of drugs and booze, maybe a woman no one knew asleep in the corner.

But when I stepped inside today, the place looked modest and clean, with two worn place mats on the table and a silk Jessamine in a small plastic vase. It smelled like disinfectant and shaving cream.

Dad’s favorite photo still hung on the wall above the kitchen table. Mom had snapped it with her disposable Kodak down by the wharf. Dad, Uncle Lewey, and I stood posed in front of the famous Caught ’er in Cawdor billboard, reserved for the lucky fisherman who caught a fish weighing more than fifty pounds. In the picture, Uncle Lewey’s arm looped proudly under the fish’s head, and Dad held up its stomach. I stood at the tail end, straining even then to hold up the weight. I was six years old, and though I didn’t know it, Dad was already dragging me down.

“You’ll notice things have changed around here,” he said today, spooning the instant Lipton powder into two mugs and topping them off with boiling water from an electric kettle on the windowsill. “I’m not the guy you remember. My buddies at the station say they hardly recognize me.”

I rolled my eyes. When Dad referred to his buddies at the station, he meant the cops who took his bribes for that brief period of time after his arrest, before the embezzlement charges came out. Dad could go on for days about his buddies at the station. A lot of good they’d done him when the shit finally hit the fan. I couldn’t believe he was even still speaking to them.

“What else do your buddies at the station have to say these days?” I asked, keeping my eyes on my tea.

“Oh, that’s right.” Dad snapped his fingers. “You’re over on that side of the world now.” He chuckled. “You know, when bad things happen to rich folks, everybody gets worked up. Sounds like the dead kid’s old lady has this new cop on a real witch hunt.”

“What do you mean?” I said. I thought Officer Parker was working for the school, not Justin’s family.

“You know, the families are always happier with a closed case.” He waved his mug in the air. “Understandable,” he said. “But these young cops, they just want to pin the first guy on the list. The bad news is, the first guy on the list is some kid with an alibi for the night of the murder.”

“Oh, yeah?” I asked, trying to sound as disdainful as possible — without completely shutting my dad down. “And did your buddies at the station entrust you with any details of that alibi?”

“Get this,” Dad laughed. “The kid was in rehab. He was too busy drugging himself to drug anyone else.”

I shook my head. “But Baxter’s not in rehab,” I said. “He was there the night of the party.”

Dad nodded, like he’d heard all this before. “It was one of those middle-of-the-night deals,” he explained, “where they cart the kid off while he’s sleeping. Convenient that it happened the night of the accident, but. . wait a minute—” His voice changed. “What were you doing at that party?”

“Please. You lost all your fatherly privileges years ago.” I waved him off. “Who have you been talking to anyway? Officer Parker? Do they know when Baxter’s going to get out?”

Dad was looking at me strangely. He took a slow sip of his tea.

“Why so interested in Baxter?” he asked. “You’re not mixed up with this guy, are you, Tal?”