“We never betrayed each other’s confidences.”
“I understand, but this is a different situation now. It’s grown far more serious. I’m sure you realize it.”
I took a deep breath. Oh, how painful I made it look. Were they standing off to the side with my Oscar? “My sister was more frustrated than I was with how our mother insisted on and enforced our similarities,” I began.
Mrs. Lofter sat up straighter. “Go on.”
“She often talked about running away, but like that sort of talk was for me, I thought it was just wishful thinking for her. Maybe there was no Internet romance. Maybe she lied to me. She wasn’t herself these past weeks. There was a time when we would tell each other our most intimate thoughts, down to how we felt when a certain boy touched us in places boys want to touch you. We hid nothing from each other.”
I paused again to take a deep breath and wipe an errant tear from the crest of my cheek. Good touch, I thought. Sometimes I was so good at this that I convinced myself I was telling the truth.
“I don’t know what to say, Mrs. Lofter. I don’t mean to give the police or anyone false information, but I feel terrible revealing these intimate things about Kaylee. It’s like . . . revealing things about yourself, don’t you see? It’s so hard, so hard to explain.” I had the police wondering about this already, so I didn’t think I was doing anything damaging to myself. Keep it all consistent, I told myself.
“If she did indeed run away of her own accord, where would she go?” Mrs. Lofter asked.
I smiled to myself, thinking she wasn’t so clever after all, even with all that education and experience. She was so obvious. Why would she care about any of this if she was here to be a nurse and not a detective’s assistant?
I shrugged. “She saved money. We both did. She used to talk about going to California and becoming an actress or a model. Either of us could do that. Mother herself often told us so, and so did many other people, including some teachers. To us, it wasn’t such a far-fetched dream, although I would say Kaylee believed it more than I did.”
“Maybe you should discuss this more with the police,” Mrs. Lofter said.
“I’ve told them as much.”
“But if you have any more details . . .”
“I don’t,” I said.
She looked skeptical. That was fine. I was keeping them all off balance. And wasn’t that what she was really doing to Mother, keeping her a little confused, a little foggy, so she wouldn’t suffer so much? Everyone was lying to everyone else in one way or another.
The truth was, in this world, we couldn’t exist without lies. Mother had been lying about Kaylee and me all these years, telling people we were exactly alike, even in our thoughts. Daddy had lied his way out of here. My grandmother Clara Beth certainly lied all the time. I could see the lies teachers spun when they tried to convince one of their students to work harder, claiming they could do so much more. Lies were gray and dark, like angry clouds swirling madly above and around us, always threatening to rain the truth on us and make us do what Mrs. Lofter did not want Mother to do: face cold reality head-on. The truth was too strong.
Some believed that suicide had become an epidemic among depressed teenagers and wounded war veterans. If Kaylee never came home, Mother might just do that. If she did, how would I feel? I didn’t know. Maybe, just before she killed herself, I would confess to save her, or maybe I’d do what Mrs. Lofter believed people did and block out reality to keep myself from suffering at all.
The phone rang. I looked at it as if I had just realized we had one.
“You should start talking to people, especially your close friends,” Mrs. Lofter said, rising. “It’s at times like this that we need our friends. Don’t drive them away. I’m going to look after my things and settle in.”
Sure, I thought. What you’re really going to do is call the detectives on your cell phone and report everything I told you, I bet. I nodded at her.
The phone rang again as she walked away. “Haylee Fitzgerald,” I said after I had picked up the receiver.
“Hey,” Daddy said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t answer. How’s it going?”
“Not good. She gave Mother a pill, even though she told us she wasn’t going to keep her on pills. Maybe this is all too much for her to handle now that she sees what’s happening. I mean, she didn’t know much about us before she came here,” I said, to see if Daddy would reveal that he and Dr. Bloom had met with her. “It’s very complex.”
“No, no, she knows what to do and when to do it, Haylee. She’s trained for such things. But did anything else occur to upset your mother? Someone call or . . .”
“Nothing to upset her, but something occurred to upset me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mother called me Kaylee,” I said, and started to cry, sucking in sobs. “When she saw me, she thought I was Kaylee, who had come home.”
“Well, under the circumstances . . .” I knew he didn’t think that was anything to lose sleep over, even before all this.
“No. You don’t understand. She’s never mixed us up, Daddy. She really didn’t know who I was. It hurt. A lot.”
“Okay, okay. She’s not herself. You can’t take any of it to heart.”