“Nobody,” said Sophie, remembering at the last second her plan to smile through the morning. “David’s making French toast.”
“Trying to,” he said with a frown. “Are we sure this is bread and not shingles left over from redoing the roof?”
Julie made air quotes. “I call it ‘breadish.’ Make do, or go buy something else, but if you buy, you have to explain to your ma why you’re bringing processed flour products into the house.”
“Because they make better French toast? Nah, I think this’ll work. I’ll just soak it longer. And it’s going to need a lot of syrup.”
“Nooooo,” said Sophie in mock despair. “Not lots of syrup. Anything but that.”
She crossed to the fridge, grabbed the jug of syrup, and returned to the table with it. The handle was sticky, and she put her knuckle in her mouth where it had touched. It was hard staying angry when she had real things to smile about. They’re lying, she reminded herself. Treating you like a kid like they always do.
She spotted a rubber band on the table and shot it at David’s back. “Ow!” he said, though it couldn’t have hurt at that distance. “What was that for?”
“Before,” she said sweetly.
The kitchen started to smell like cinnamon and nutmeg and something else she couldn’t name that she had smelled before, like déjà vu perfume.
“No,” Sophie said. “No, no, no.”
Mom and David both turned to look at her.
“I’m fine,” she said. Unless she didn’t say it.
She
Mom’s face was too close to hers and David stood behind Mom and something sizzled somewhere (on the stove) (French toast) (David was making French toast) (David had left the French toast to sizzle because he was over here because why because she must have had another stupid seizure) (What kind of seizure? Not the Big One because they were near her but not on top of her and she wasn’t on the floor and they looked like they were waiting for her to say something and why? Because she must have had a seizure). (Say something.)
Mom bit her lip and smiled. “Hang on, honey. You had a seizure.”
Gather the words. “I’m okay. I’m okay.”
She stood and walked into the living room. Not with any thought behind it. Following her feet. Something was burning.
“Shit!” said David.
The scrape of a chair told her Mom was following her. She wished they’d get that she needed a few minutes alone. They couldn’t help it, though. Bad Things Could Happen, they always said, at the same time as saying There’s no reason you can’t live a perfectly normal life. Contradiction, she thought, pleased her brain had picked such a large round word and that she knew what it was and it was the right word. If she pushed for other words they would come in a minute. She sat on the couch and waited for her head to clear.
“Deployed,” she said, trying another word a minute later. It didn’t have the same balance as “contradiction.” The p and the y facing each other in the middle of the word were ugly. An ugly word. A word with a “ploy” in the middle. She knew what a ploy was; it was a plan, but a tricky one. She didn’t feel like pretending anymore. All of a sudden it was like a bad taste in her mouth, all the fake smiles. Game over.
“What, honey?” Mom riffled through the mail on the front table, but Sophie knew she was there to keep an eye on her.
“Deployed,” she said again. “David’s going away and you were all going to lie to me about it.”
Sophie watched her mom squirm. Lie about lying? Tell the truth about lying? Even if her own head weren’t jumbled, that would jumble it again.
“We were going to tell you, but why ruin your enjoyment of the time together with counting the days?”
“I’d be counting the days in any case. He was going to leave either way. The difference is where he’s leaving to and that nobody thought I deserved to be told.”
Her mom didn’t respond, which meant she was right.
“Breakfast?” The note of question in David’s voice didn’t speak well for its edibility. It didn’t matter. Sophie was hungry or maybe not hungry. She headed back into the kitchen. At least David’s idea had been to hold out on all of them; equal-opportunity lies were better than lies that excluded only her.
“Sorry, Soph. We shouldn’t keep things from you.” Her mom’s voice called her back.
“You don’t have to baby me.”
“I’ll try to remember, sweetie. I’m sorry.”
Sophie nodded, but she knew it would happen again. That was how it went when you were the youngest.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
VAL
David vanished into the terminal.
“You can just drop me at the airport. No need to stay,” he’d said. “That way you won’t get stuck in morning rush hour.”
No need, but what if they had wanted to? An airport good-bye is for everyone, the leaver and the left. Val would gladly have followed him in, all the way to security, but instead she hugged him curbside at his insistence and watched the automatic doors swallow him. He turned once to wave at her, grinning. It was too broad a smile, and she was pretty sure he’d put it on for both their benefit; he was telling himself everything was fine, too.
She had trouble reconciling the soldier with the careful, thoughtful boy who had looked out for his sister and run with Val and worked out his math homework at the table with Julie. Nobody gained that much confidence in a few months. It had to be a facade. A car horn honked and she turned to see if she was blocking anyone; when she turned back, he was gone.
For all Val’s appreciation of running in silence, this was not a silence she could tolerate. She wished Sophie were there to break through the quiet with something funny or random.
