The Book of Cold Cases, page 18
“What about your mother? Do you plan to find her?”
Lily thought about this again. “My mother doesn’t want me,” she said. “But maybe she has no choice.”
The next day, they ran out of cookies, so they tried baking cookies themselves from a recipe book that was stacked under the sink, the pages stuck together with disuse. Beth singed a finger when she opened the hot oven, so the girls turned the oven off and ate the uncooked batter instead. There was a brief fight that day, when Lily took a doll Beth wanted to play with. Lily won.
Beth’s mother came home, still wearing the red sweater and the plaid skirt. Her hair had been taken down and put up again, and her mascara had dribbled into raccoon bruises beneath her eyes. She looked around the mess of the house, at the two girls sitting on the living room sofa, surrounded by blankets they’d pulled off the bed.
“How sweet,” she said. “It looks like you two had fun. I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry I wasn’t home for Christmas.”
“It’s okay,” Beth said. Her mother had been so sad ever since Beth’s grandmother died. She’d probably just gone off to be sad somewhere, Beth decided, since Lily was here to keep her company. It wouldn’t be much of a Christmas if your mother had just died.
Beth had explained this to Lily, who had given her a blank look. Beth had to remember that Lily didn’t understand anything about mothers.
Her mother looked past Beth at Lily and said her name, the word seeming to twist in her throat. “Lillian . . .”
“Yes, Mrs. Greer?” Lillian asked sweetly.
Mariana just looked at her. Beth noticed that Lily and her mother had the same color hair, the same pretty blond.
“Nothing,” Mariana said after a moment. “You two sweet girls have fun.” She went upstairs, and Beth heard her parents’ bedroom door click shut.
Beth’s father came home the next day, ragged, tired. He looked at Beth and said, “Housekeeping will be here in an hour. Have them clean up this mess.” Then he turned to Lily. “Pack your bags. You’re going home.”
“No!” Beth cried.
“Shut up,” her father said, and even though he wasn’t a very warm father, even though he expected her to be neat and quiet and never play, he’d never said those words to her before. He turned to Lily again and said, “You have five minutes. I’ll have a taxi at the door to take you to wherever you’re going.”
Lily looked up at him with wide, sweet eyes. “Yes, Mr. Greer,” she said.
Beth followed Lily upstairs to pack. She felt like crying, but Lily was unperturbed. She didn’t even seem concerned that she was being sent out into the world, into a taxi, alone, at age eight. Beth didn’t want to cry in front of her, didn’t want to seem like a baby.
“Will you come back?” she asked as Lily slung her single cloth bag, filled with only a few clothes and a toothbrush, over her shoulder.
“Yes,” Lily said. “They can’t keep me from this house. No one can.”
* * *
—
Over dinner one night a week later, Beth asked her mother and father who Lily’s parents were.
Mariana glanced at Julian, then looked back at Beth. “I’m glad you two are such good friends,” she said, touching Beth’s hair. “And Lily doesn’t have parents. Isn’t that sad?”
“Everyone has parents,” Beth said. “Kids don’t come from storks. I know that now.”
“Well, no, she didn’t come from a stork,” Mariana said, picking up her fork and studying the silver tines. “Goodness. I don’t know who you’ve been talking to about babies. I’ll have to call the school and ask what they’re teaching these days. I meant that Lillian’s parents are dead.”
“But who are they?” Beth said. “Did you know them? Is that why she came to visit?”
Mariana looked uncertain. “Yes,” she said. “I knew them. Lillian’s mother was a friend of mine, but she’s dead now, and I feel bad for that little girl. She’s practically your cousin. Okay?”
At the other side of the table, Beth’s father put his fork down and pushed his chair back. He walked out of the dining room without a word.
Beth knew her mother was lying to her, because Lily had said that her mother wasn’t dead at all. Her father knew she was lying, too.
But Mariana pretended that nothing was wrong, even though everything was wrong, just like she always did. “He’s just angry,” she said of Julian, smiling and touching Beth’s hair again. “He doesn’t like little girls the way I do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
December 1961
BETH
Lily was as good as her word. She came back to the Greer mansion the next Christmas. And the next.
At first, every year for months and months, life went on as usual and Lily wasn’t mentioned. Then, as the darkness of winter set in, Mariana’s mood would begin to spiral down and she’d drink more. There would be more day drinks, which would start earlier and earlier, more arguments that Beth could hear as she lay in bed at night, because her parents thought that if they argued after she went to bed, she wouldn’t hear them. As if they could fool her into thinking they had a happy family if they only argued after she was supposedly asleep.
Then, like clockwork, Mariana would get excited about Christmas. She’d decide that Christmas was going to be wonderful this year and it was going to solve all of her problems. She’d go shopping and buy stacks of decorations that she never put up. She’d go looking for the biggest, most expensive Christmas tree. And she’d invite Lily to visit. If Lily’s foster family had any objections—which was unlikely—their objections would vanish at Mariana’s influence and her money. Mostly her money.
Lily always came, sleek and beautiful as a cat, her blond hair brushed soft and shining. She’d be polite and talk about how grateful she was, but as she spoke she’d lock eyes with Julian, and the two of them would stare each other down. Then Julian would pack a bag, say he was going to visit friends, and he’d leave the house.
Beth learned early that Lily and Julian hated each other. She had to learn it. The undercurrents in the house at Christmas were too deep, too important, and she needed both Julian and Lily for survival. She couldn’t afford to lose either one, so she made strategies to appease both of them. She didn’t talk about Lily in Julian’s presence, because if she did he’d simply get up and leave the room. She made one attempt to win Lily over to Julian’s side by telling her that her father was actually very nice, that once you got to know him he was kind.
Lily only looked at Beth with dead, flat eyes. “Your father would let me die in the street like a stray dog,” she said. “But he can’t, so that’s too bad for him.”
Beth didn’t talk to her about Julian after that.
Some Christmases, Mariana left the house after her husband did, and the two girls played alone. A TV was installed in the living room one year, and that Christmas, Beth and Lily watched My Three Sons and Bonanza and Bewitched. There were cartwheel competitions on the back lawn, but Lily always got closer to the edge of the drop than Beth did. No matter how close Beth got—it was part of the competition—Lily always got so close it was scary, her sneakers sliding almost over the precipice when she landed. Every competition they had went the same way, with Lily pushing and Beth sick with fear, until Beth learned, over and over, not to let the fear bother her.
Other years, Mariana stayed home at Christmas. She tried playing board games and baking cookies with them, things she never did when Beth was here alone. She pretended that Christmas was cheerful and that everything was fun. She read them stories, most of which were for little girls, younger than Beth and Lily, but they listened anyway. She played made-up games with them.
“Once upon a time, there were two little girls,” she’d say. “They were kidnapped by an evil witch who wanted to eat them, but one of them was bitter and one of them was sweet. Which girl is which, do you think?”
Beth always wanted to be the sweet girl, of course. But no matter how sweet she was, Mariana never played these games when Lily wasn’t here. Besides, even though Mariana never told the end of the story, Beth knew the sweet girl was the one who got eaten. The bitter girl was the one who survived.
* * *
—
Lily was Beth’s best friend. Her only friend, really. Beth didn’t need anyone else, because Lily knew everything. Lily knew what sex was before Beth did; she knew what death was; she knew which adults were stupid and which were even remotely worth listening to. She knew how to handle the other kids at school. She taught Beth when to fight, when to suck up, and when to flirt, even with other girls. “She’s easy,” Lily said when Beth described one particular classmate. “Pretend you like her, and you’ll get what you want.”
“I don’t like her,” Beth said.
“For thirty seconds, you do. Smile at her like you would a boy.” Lily snapped her fingers. “Now she’ll do what you say.”
It worked. Everything Lily told Beth to do worked.
When Beth was ten, a group of boys in her class noticed her. Beth was tall by then, with long red hair and wide eyes. The boys would corner her in the playground, pinch her and poke her, call her names. Try to push her down.
“It’s because you’re pretty,” Lily, who was twelve, said when Beth complained about this problem. “Get used to it.”
“I hate being a girl,” Beth said, throwing her favorite doll across her bedroom. She’d boxed up most of her dolls the year before but had kept this one out because she loved it so much. Now she’d get rid of it. “I hate it. Being a girl is awful.”
Lily only looked at her with that flat, dead expression she sometimes had in her eyes, as if she felt absolutely nothing—good, bad, nothing at all. “Being a girl is the best,” she said, “because no one ever believes you’d do something bad. People think you’ll do nothing, which means you can do anything. I’ll show you.”
That night, they snuck out at midnight and went to the school, their boots crunching in the snow. With Beth’s hopscotch chalk, they wrote bad words on the wall of the school—words that Beth knew in theory but had never said aloud. They wrote them in blocky letters that didn’t look like loopy, girlish letters. When Beth got back to school after the break, she found that the boys had been questioned about the swear words, and two of them had gotten in trouble for it. No one ever asked questions of the girls.
Beth felt a little bit bad about that. But she knew what Lily would say: that the boys shouldn’t have bullied her in the first place. And really, Lily was right. Beth was a fast learner.
* * *
—
The Christmas Beth was twelve and Lily was fourteen, Mariana stayed home. They played Snakes and Ladders, which the girls were too old for, and Mariana drank through the entire game. By the end, she was slurring her words, tilted over on the sofa, drunk. The girls helped her upstairs to her bed, where she promptly fell asleep.
In the dim light of the bedroom, as half-frozen rain pelted the window, Lily looked down at Mariana, sprawled on the pillow. Beth watched Lily’s face, her eyes, as Lily watched the woman on the bed. Beth stared at the shape of Lily’s nose and chin, which were so like Mariana’s.
She had always known, deep down. Even when she didn’t understand how babies were made, when she didn’t understand anything about her own mother or her parents’ angry and complicated relationship, she had known. She still didn’t understand everything, but she’d guessed enough. “Your parents aren’t dead, are they?” she asked Lily, her voice soft, so as not to wake Mariana.
“No,” Lily said, still looking down. “They’re not. That’s just a lie your mother told you.”
“Our mother.”
The words hung there, meaning everything, changing everything. Beth’s feelings were enormous, too big for her to contain: excitement, dread, guilt, shame. But when Lily looked up at her, she saw no answering emotions in Lily’s eyes. She simply looked blank again.
“She doesn’t want you to know,” Lily said. “She brings me here every Christmas because she feels bad for abandoning me. It’s always too much for her. Then she does it all over again.”
Beth made the words come out, the ones that were harder to say. “And my father?”
“He isn’t my father,” Lily said bluntly. “I don’t know who my father is. I don’t know where he is. I don’t think he’s dead. I don’t know what happened between them or why. I plan to find out.”
“Maybe she’ll tell us someday,” Beth said. But they both looked down at the sleeping woman, her sprayed hair stiff on the pillow, and they knew it wouldn’t happen. Whatever had occurred was so deep inside Mariana that maybe she’d made herself forget it was there.
“She isn’t his,” Lily said, talking about Julian and Mariana. “She’s mine.”
No, she’s mine, Beth thought. I’m the real daughter, the one she had after she was married, the good girl. The sweet one. But she already knew she had lost that battle. There was no question about Mariana belonging to Beth. She belonged to the bitter girl, the one who wouldn’t be eaten.
“So what do we do?” she asked Lily—who was her half sister, and not her cousin or a distant family friend, which was how Mariana referred to her whenever she spoke about her to other adults. If any of the other adults suspected the truth, they were too polite to say anything. “Do we just keep pretending we don’t know?”
Lily reached out and traced a finger down the side of Mariana’s face. Beth fought off the instinct to punch her hand away, to prevent Lily from ever touching her mother. “For now,” she said, answering Beth’s question. “It doesn’t matter, really. I’m going to get what I want. Everything I want.”
“What do you want?” Was it to live here? To be a real daughter? Beth didn’t know if that was possible, or if Lily even would. Living here would mean living with Julian.
“I want lots of things,” Lily said. She looked around. “This house, for one.”
Beth had no idea how fourteen-year-old Lily would get this house, but she said, “I hate this house.”
“That’s because you don’t understand it.”
“It’s ugly.”
“It’s an abomination that shouldn’t exist,” Lily said, “and it knows it. That’s why I like it. It’s exactly like me.”
“You can’t own a house,” Beth said, tentative because she didn’t want Lily to get angry. “You’re too young.”
“Not for long.” Lily looked at Beth, really looked at her for the first time in a long time. “What do you want?”
I want you to get away from my mother, she thought. I want you to leave and never come back. But, no, she didn’t mean that. Beth was just afraid. She’d be lonely and desolate if she didn’t have Lily.
She needed Lily. Just like she needed Julian and Mariana. Beth had to get through another day, and another year, and she needed all three of them to get there. But she needed Lily most of all.
So she said the one thing she knew would work, the one thing that Lily was susceptible to. The one thing that would keep Lily on her side. “I want to be like you,” she said.
There was a moment when she wasn’t quite sure Lily believed it. And then her sister smiled.
CHAPTER THIRTY
December 1968
BETH
The Christmas Beth was fourteen, Lily came to the Greer house with a bruise on her temple and faded yellowy green marks under the skin of her cheekbone. Mariana pretended not to notice, but later that night both of the girls could hear her sobbing in her bedroom as Julian told her to stop, please stop. It’s my fault, Mariana said. All my fault.
Lily didn’t want to talk about it, but Beth knew that something had happened at her foster home. Lily wasn’t above faking bruises to get sympathy, but she wasn’t faking this. That year, she was quieter than usual and her eyes were hollow, her mouth set tight.
Surprisingly, Julian stayed home that year, the first Christmas he’d done so since Lily had first visited. Something about seeing Lily bruised and angry must have made him feel more comfortable having her around, as if she’d lost a round in their endless contest. They avoided each other and barely spoke, but Beth saw Lily’s gaze follow Julian whenever she saw him, and she didn’t like the look in Lily’s eyes.
That was the year David disappeared.
David was a groundskeeper. In the summer, there was a small crew of men who came to maintain the lawns and the gardens, but in the winter there was only David. He came at the end of every month and spent a few hours cutting out dead annuals, removing any snow and ice on the ground, and raking old leaves. He was supposed to come the day after Christmas, but he never showed. As days passed, it became clear that he was gone, and no one knew what had happened to him. Maybe he had suddenly left town. He was just a groundskeeper, though, so it was considered a minor mystery, shrugged off by Julian and Mariana and never spoken of again.
Lily went home on the twenty-eighth, and for once Beth was glad to see her go, glad to be free of the flat look in Lily’s eyes.
They didn’t find David until late April, his broken body on the rocks below the cliff. They couldn’t pinpoint how long he’d been there, but it had been months. It was declared a suicide, but Beth had an uneasy feeling in her stomach. Lily . . . But she had never seen Lily anywhere near David, never seen her look at him or talk to him. So, no, it wasn’t possible. What would be the reason? There wasn’t one.
Beth put her suspicions away and didn’t think about them anymore.
The next year, Lily’s bruises were gone and she was thinner, her cheekbones sharper, her hipbones as hard as diamonds. She was seventeen, a year from aging out of the foster system. “My new family barely pays any attention to me,” she said. “They let me do whatever I want.”
