Her Mother's Shadow (34 page)

“S
o,” Bobby said as Mackenzie climbed into his VW bus in front of the school, “how was it?”

“Awesome!” Mackenzie said, hugging her backpack to her chest. She had a glow in her eyes he hadn't seen before. She waved to a couple of girls, dressed as inappropriately as she was in their too-low shorts and too-high tops, and the girls waved back at her. One of them shouted to Mackenzie, “Call me!”

“Looks like you made some friends,” he said as he pulled away from the curb.

“Could I ask them over?” She was still waving to the girls, her neck craned to look back at them. “They want to see the keeper's house.”

“Sure,” he said with a smile. Suddenly the keeper's house was an asset rather than a liability.

“They have the cutest boys here,” she said. “And I heard one of them talking to another one about me. He said, ‘That new girl is hot.'”

Oh, God, Bobby thought. It was starting already. Lacey
would have to have the sex talk with her, and probably very soon.

“And I remembered not to say anything about how much better Phoenix is,” she said. “But people asked me about it. And there's another girl who used to live there.”

“How are your classes?” he asked.

“Awesome,” she said. “The teachers are really nice. Except one, who's a total loser.” She wrinkled her nose.

“There's always got to be one of those,” he said. “It's a requirement.”

She reached for her cell phone, then remembered it was not attached to her waistband and let out a dramatic groan. “I can't
stand
that they won't let us have cell phones in school,” she said.

“It makes sense, though, don't you think?”

“But what if there's, like, a disaster or something and I needed to call you or Lacey?”

He smiled, guessing this was the argument the kids were using to get the authorities to change the rule. “I suppose it would be like in the old days,” he said. “We'd just have to sit around and worry about you until we found out you were safe.”

“Half the boys have earrings,” she said, then she looked at her watch. “Clay's got a new dog coming at four. It's an eight-month-old Border collie. I can't wait to meet her.”

From boys to dogs, all in one breath. Eleven-year-old girls were complex little creatures.

“Do you have homework?” he asked, amazed to hear the parental words coming out of his mouth. He glanced at her bulging backpack. “That backpack looks pretty full.”

“I have a little,” she said. “I'll do it after dinner, okay? First I want to see Lacey and tell her everything about today. Then I'll meet the dog. Then we'll eat. Then I'll do some
homework. Then I'll read Rani a bedtime story. Then I'll do some more homework.”

She looked so pleased with herself that he wanted to stop the car and pull her over for a hug.

“And when are you going to fit in all the phone calls you have to make?” he teased her.

She rolled her eyes at him. “You are, like, getting to be such a dad, with lame dad humor and everything.”

He wondered how she knew about “dad humor,” having never had a dad before.

“You don't have to drive me tomorrow,” she said. “Everyone takes the bus. It's cool.” She'd insisted he drive her that morning, anxious about taking the school bus, uncomfortable in her newness.

She chattered nearly nonstop all the way to Kiss River, and when he pulled into the parking lot, she hopped out of the VW and ran toward the house, backpack swinging from her shoulder. He knew she was anxious to tell Lacey about her day.

He moved more slowly than she did, reaching into the back seat for the two bags of groceries he'd picked up on his way to the school. He walked past the blessedly empty kennel, wondering if he would ever be able to pass it without remembering the previous week, when he'd come home to the bleeding child he adored and the nearly dead woman he loved. He would never forget all the blood on the sand, or the feeling of strength in his muscles as he lifted Wolf into the air, or the sound of the dog's neck cracking as it hit the doghouse. The best he could hope for would be to be able to pass the kennel without feeling sick to his stomach. That would be progress.

Inside the house, he found Mackenzie in the living room with Lacey, who was relaxing in the recliner they'd bought
so that she could keep her bandaged legs elevated. She'd had surgery two days earlier and might need another some time in the future, but she was recovering very well, by all accounts.

He put away the groceries in the kitchen, listening to Mackenzie recount to Lacey all the news she'd just told him. Lacey was better at that sort of conversation than he had been. She asked Mackenzie a lot of questions and made sounds of appreciation and wonder at her answers, as though Mackenzie was the most interesting and amazing child on earth.

Once Mackenzie had gone upstairs to her room, Bobby brought Lacey a glass of lemonade and sat on the sofa. “Looks like the first day of school was a success,” he said.

“Better than expected.” Lacey nodded.

She was so pale. He knew she was still in a good deal of pain that the medication could not control. Or rather, she would not take the amount of medication needed to control it because it put her to sleep, and she seemed to want to be awake all the time, as though she might miss something important if she was not.

They were pampering her, waiting on her hand and foot, and she deserved it. There was a lot of guilt in this house. Clay was filled with it for having Wolf there in the first place, and Bobby knew that Mackenzie had cried herself to sleep at least two or three nights for having gone into the kennel when she'd been warned not to. But Lacey seemed to bear no grudges. “I am so
happy
to be alive,” she said, so frequently and with such fervor that he thought the meds might be frying her brain just a little.

“You're going to need to talk to her about sex soon,” Bobby said now.

“Already?”

“The boys are cute, they wear earrings, they think she's hot.”

Lacey let out a giggle.

“I think she's taken the school by storm,” he said.

She smiled at him. “You look like you're feeling some fatherly pride.”

He nodded. “I'm proud of her,” he said slowly. “And I love her. But she's not my daughter, Lace.” He shook his head. “I wish she were, but she's not.”

She raised her head a few inches from the back of the recliner. “Why do you still think that?” she asked.

It was time to tell her. There was no point in keeping the truth to himself any longer.

“Look at her eyes,” he said, “then look at mine.”

She frowned. “You both have blue eyes,” she said.

“Then—” he felt his heart start to race “—look at your brother's.”

L
acey started to tell Bobby that he was being ridiculous. Clay could not possibly be Mackenzie's father. But before she even opened her mouth to speak, the evidence began to pile up in her mind. It wasn't just Mackenzie's eyes, although she certainly did have those translucent blue eyes that belonged to both her brother and father, while Bobby's were a deeper blue, and Jessica's had bordered on green. It was also the lanky body that was an O'Neill trait and that neither Jessica nor Bobby possessed. It was the shape of her teeth and the arch of her eyebrows. Still, it seemed an outrageous idea.

“Clay would never have slept with Jessica,” Lacey said. “He couldn't stand her—or me, for that matter. We were nothing more than little annoyances to him that summer. And he had a girlfriend. Terri. The woman he married when they got out of college.”

Bobby gnawed on his lip, looking unsure if he should say any more.

“What makes you think he is?” Lacey prodded.

Bobby leaned toward her, resting his elbows on his knees. “When I first saw Clay here at the keeper's house, he looked familiar to me, but I couldn't place him. I just figured that I must have met him somewhere that summer, since you and I were hanging around together all the time. But a few weeks ago, Mackenzie and I were out in the yard talking to…to Wolf's owner and Clay. Wolf had just arrived.” He looked apologetic for mentioning the dog's name. “The sun was really bright, and at one point Clay turned around to look up at the house and the sunlight was in his eyes and they looked so…”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” Lacey said. He didn't need to finish the sentence. “It's like you can see clear through them when the sun hits them.”

“Exactly,” Bobby said. “They're unusual, right? And I remembered seeing them once before.”

“Where?”

“One of those parties we went to that summer. You remember what those parties were like, don't you?”

She nodded. Drugs, sex and rock and roll, with very little emphasis on the music. She'd had a love-hate relationship with those parties. The easy sex she gave away, along with the huge quantities of alcohol she'd consumed, had tortured her conscience. And sometimes her brother would be there. He'd yell at her, tell her she and Jessica didn't belong at the older kids' parties, and how right he'd been about that. But she'd tell him to leave her alone. She'd hated it when he was around, because she would need to be secretive about what she was doing to prevent him from telling their father what she was up to.

“Jessica was in one of the bedrooms,” Bobby continued. “We'd had a fight or something, I don't remember, but we had chilled on seeing each other for a while. It was killing me, because I knew she was in there with someone else.”

Lacey's hand was wrapped so tightly around her glass of lemonade that her fingers hurt. She was afraid to think about where this story was going.

“The house was pretty dark, but there was this light on in the living room,” Bobby said. “When I heard the door open to the bedroom, I kind of was…I don't remember, exactly, but I was hanging out around there, trying to look cool, but really wanting to see who she'd been with. The guy came out, and the light in the living room shone right in his eyes. He blinked, it was so bright, but right before he blinked I saw how strange they were. He looked right at me, although I don't think he knew Jessica was my girlfriend.”

Her hand over her mouth, Lacey felt momentarily numb, her physical pain forgotten. “Are you sure it was Clay?” She was whispering.

He nodded. “I'm ninety-eight percent certain,” he said.

Lacey let out her breath, resting her head against the back of the chair. Could Clay truly have slept with Jessica? It seemed unbelievable. Jessica had been barely fifteen and he'd been seventeen. In retrospect, the age difference did not seem that great, but at the time, it had seemed insurmountable. And what about Terri? She couldn't picture Clay cheating on her. Back in those days, she'd thought of her brother as straitlaced, a bit of a moralistic stuffed shirt. Maybe she'd been wrong.

“If he
did
actually sleep with her…” Lacey's mind was racing. “Do you think he might suspect that Mackenzie is his?”

“I don't think he has a clue,” Bobby said. “Jessica let everyone believe Mackenzie was mine right from the start, so the thought probably never entered his mind. But I believe that's why Jessica was so adamant that Mackenzie go to
you.
” He sat up straight, his hands cutting the air to make
a point. “She
knew
Mackenzie was an O'Neill. If she died, she wanted Mackenzie to be part of your family—part of
Clay's
family. And that was the only way she thought she could do it.”

“That would also explain why she refused to tell you that you were Mackenzie's father.” Lacey was thinking out loud. It all was beginning to make terrible sense.

“And why she couldn't tell you the truth, Lace,” Bobby said. “She couldn't tell you she'd slept with your brother.”

“Oh, my God,” Lacey said, struggling to take it all in. “And he's gotten so close to her these past few weeks.”

“I've been glad about that,” Bobby said. “They really care about each other.”

“I think we need to talk to him,” she said.

Bobby looked surprised. “Are you up for that?” he asked. “Do you want to wait until you're feeling better?”

“I'm not going to be able to relax until I talk to him about it,” she said. “Not in an accusatory way, though,” she added quickly, “because, who knows, we could still be wrong. But I think he needs to know what we're thinking.” She shut her eyes with a sudden realization. “Oh, Bobby,” she said, “if she's Clay's, then I've dragged you into something that had nothing to do with you.”

He smiled, leaning forward again to take her hand. “Do you think for one minute that I regret that?” he asked.