“She’s dead, Oz.”
He winced. “So that’s a ‘no?’”
“For this lifetime, unfortunately.”
We were all pretty drunk. Lake was apparently enough so to get started on her confession with me. It was after we’d snuck our drinks back upstairs and sat on the top of the steps, watching all the drunken antics unfold below us. It had been quiet for a minute when she tossed back the rest of her champagne and spoke.
“I started talking to my mom again after my grandma died.”
I looked at her without showing my surprise. “Yeah?”
“You know my mom’s name right? My biological mom?”
“Trisha.”
“Trish, yeah. She tried asking my grandma for my contact info once, I think when I was like, thirteen, and my grandma shut that shit down so fast,” Lake laughed, staring bleary eyed into nothing. “She knew she was bad news. Never wanted my dad to be with her. My dad was apparently a good guy. I mean, obviously, since my grandma made him.”
She never really knew him. He didn’t have much contact with her mom and died young in a car accident. I wanted to say something comforting but instead, I just nodded and listened, afraid to disturb whatever had shifted in the air to inspire Lake to talk.
“My grandma warned your mom, too. She said Trish found out about the nice, cushy life I suddenly had and she was suddenly very interested in me. Your mom was worried. She told me to tell her if I ever received contact from Trish.” The amusement faded from Lake’s voice and shame trickled its way in. “I really should have done that.”
“When did she try again?”
“Literally the day we got back from my grandma’s funeral. On Facebook. She was really nice at first, actually. She went through my pictures and said I looked so pretty and I had such a cute boyfriend and she was happy my life was so good. I knew from the way your mom and my grandma acted that it was wrong if she tried to talk to me but it didn’t… feel so bad. She was my mom. She was the only blood I had left. And I was kind of curious about how she might’ve changed. If maybe she’d gotten better.”
“Better? From what?”
Lake shrugged. “I was six when I left her. I don’t really remember knowing names or any official diagnoses of what was wrong with her. Looking back on it, and just from what I saw on her Facebook, she was… obviously on drugs. She made some crazy poor choices when it came to men.”
My muscles tightened. “Did any of them hurt you?”
“No. They hurt her but they never touched me. Then again, I think they forgot I was even there.” She looked at me, bracing me for laughter. “I hung out in the closet a lot, with the door closed. Even when I was home alone. I just liked the dark. I’d just sit there braiding my hair like a little dumbass,” she giggled at herself. I cleared my throat, offered a smile as my heart crushed at the thought of little Lake before I knew her, sitting alone in a pile of laundry and oblivious to how she was saving herself. “I mean I’m sure it wouldn’t have stayed like that if my grandma didn’t eventually take me away, but honestly, all the bad that came from that time was from Trish. From living with her. She just wasn’t mother material – she was fifteen when she got pregnant with me.”
I kept my face decidedly frozen. I didn’t want any look of surprise to discourage Lake from going on. But I hadn’t known that detail. I hadn’t known much at all about her family aside from her grandmother, Elena. I didn’t consider Trish her family at all. I had no idea she was ever curious to. “What was it like living with her?” I asked. From what my mother told me, Lake came from a “broken family” but it hardly seemed like she even had a family to break.
“It’s foggy. I remember being home alone a lot. I honestly can’t even remember if that house was an actual house or a trailer home. I don’t even remember what the neighbors’ houses looked like.” She let out a breath of disbelief as she realized it. “I didn’t even go to school. I kind of existed as this little thing that floated around bothering her and reminding her that she probably should’ve gotten an abortion instead of thinking that a baby would make her a better person.”
I flinched. Couldn’t help it. I supported every bit of a woman’s choice but the thought of Lake never existing rocked me to my core.
“Anyway, I’m sure you can imagine it,” she murmured, setting her empty champagne flute on the stair below and gazing into it. “She was unemployed, on drugs. A complete mess if there wasn’t a man in her life or at least her bed that week. It’s weird – I feel like I can’t recall a single image of her eating.” She laughed but I was sure she found nothing funny. “It was like – bottle or needle, bottle or needle. That was what she subsisted on. I thought maybe that was the secret to not being hungry so I was like, four years old, for God’s sake, when I tried drinking what I’m pretty sure was whisky. Spit it all out. She smacked me right across the face for wasting her shit.”
My insides burned hot. I hated this Trish with everything inside me but I continued bottling it all up so Lake could have the peace with which to keep talking. When she looked up at me, I leaned in and pressed my lips to her forehead. She closed her eyes.
“She asked me to send her money to get away from her new husband.”
When I pulled back, she was looking into my eyes with shame. I figured it out before she said it and suddenly, it made so much sense I wondered why I never thought of it on my own. It was for Trish that Lake used to steal from us.
“Your mom gave me a credit card to use for emergencies. You had one, too.”
“Yeah.”
“Except you actually only used yours for emergencies, which you basically never had,” she smirked, shaking her head at herself. “Even before Trish started messaging me, I took that thing and got myself mani-pedis with Isabel so many times. I was such a little asshole. But your mom was like, ‘Who says nice nails aren’t an emergency?’”
I laughed. “That sounds about right.”
“Anyway.” The slit in Lake’s dress fell wide open as she hugged her knees to her chest. “Trish said she needed money, so I started buying things with the card that Theo was gonna buy anyway. He’d just give me the cash for it and your mom would just think I was buying him a lot of presents. And that seemed to work. She thought we were cute. But then I went too far and she finally had a talk with me. And even though I knew I was always pushing her to her limits, the second she got mad at me for anything, I turned into this… depressed, kicked puppy.” Lake snorted at herself. “I said to myself after that – no. Never again with the credit card. I can’t handle when Caroline’s mad at me so I’m going to find another way. I felt like I had to. Trish always said she couldn’t wait for the day that she’d see my graduation photos but at some point, she started talking crazy, like she was afraid she wouldn’t make it to see that day.”
“Because of her husband?”
“Dean. He was a vet and she said he had really bad PTSD. She sent me this article from this assault charge he got. They lived in this trailer park and he was the manager of it and the article said he…” she trailed off and suddenly looked with guilt at me. “Sent someone to the hospital with a baseball bat. But it was different from you. That guy ended up brain-dead.”
Christ.
“Am I scaring you yet?” she asked, her voice small.
“No.” I gave her some sort of look to lighten the mood. “You don’t scare me.”
“You’re not mad that I took so much shit from you and your mom and sold it to give to my horrible family?”
“That wasn’t your family. We were your family.”