“Your mom introduced her as her foster sister.”
“Oh.”
“Was it the pain pills talking?”
“No,” she said, “that’s accurate.” Robin headed into the house, thinking of her new family: Mom, Eric, Nicola. Of the three of them, she knew Nicola best.
Once she was inside her parents’ home, Robin found herself in her father’s study, standing in front of his glass-enclosed bookcases, her gaze trained on the shelves. All those leather-bound notebooks. What would happen to them all, now that he was gone?
She imagined a bonfire in her parents’ backyard, years and years of his patients’ secrets and fixations and recurring nightmares all gone up in smoke, turned to ash like the Gideon compound, before April escaped, changed her name to Nicola, found herself a foster home and befriended an innocent, slightly older girl named Renee White.
It made so much sense. It made too much sense.
She sat down on his soft leather couch, breathing deeply, the way she sometimes used to do when she was feeling panicky as a kid.
As hard as she tried to calm herself, though, she couldn’t contain her thoughts—images of Nicola Crane flinging open the back door, opening fire on Dad, shooting at Mom when she runs into the room, trying to stop her. Nicola Crane holding a gun to Quentin’s head as he confesses to the crime on tape, the two of them in a park, Nicola so sweet and jovial that nearby children take no notice.That laugh...Nicola Crane threatening Mom in her hospital room:Keep quiet or else. Laugh with me, or else. Say you remember nothing, Renee, or I will finish what I started.
And why had she started it? Why had she shot Dad? Because he’d just been told that his wife had some connection to a teenage mass murderer. And he thought of that stray babysitter who kept coming back and put two and two together.
Robin knew Nicola better than anyone else in her family, and this was what she knew: She was April Cooper. Mom knew it. Just likeshe knew about the safe in the basement—some hidden place where she could hide a gun from her husband and daughter for more than twenty years.
She left her father’s study and headed for the staircase, the basement door behind it. She stumbled down the dark, rickety stairs and into the musty space, knocking into boxes and broken furniture until she finally found the light. She breathed in the moldy air, pushed cobwebs from her hair—this room the neglected sibling of every other room in this otherwise spotless house. It used to scare her as a kid, this basement. She remembered coming down here once with a boy from her seventh-grade class. A football player she’d been helping with math. He’d dared her to come down here, and then he’d dared her to kiss him and she had, just to get back upstairs again.What was his name? Grant something, she thought, her gaze coasting from an old changing table to a toybox to an enormous stuffed bear that she never remembered owning, all of it down here for years. Lurking like ghosts. Like memories.
She saw a clothing rack, hung with her parents’ old Halloween costumes. His and hers surgical scrubs, his and hers pirates, Groucho and Harpo Marx—her parents always a team, inseparable. Though, as she remembered it, the costumes had always been Dad’s idea. She collapsed onto the dusty floor and looked at that costume rack—easily twenty Halloweens’ worth of his and hers outfits, worn once and never again... except... Robin put a hand against the ones at the end—a pinstripe suit. A pencil skirt and sweater. A fedora and a beret and two fake machine guns.Bonnie and Clyde.Robin could remember her dad bringing those costumes home, when she was young enough not to have understood the cultural reference. Mom had taken one look at them and locked herself in their bedroom.
How could you, Mitchell? How could you?
Young as Robin had been then, Mom’s reaction had stuck in her mind—the drama of it. Robin had always assumed it was because of the guns.
She pulled herself up to standing. And that’s when she caught sight of it between her feet. A trapdoor. She lifted the door open, and saw it, glaring at her from within. A small, industrial-looking safe. Robin hoisted the safe out. She placed it on the floor in front of her and crouched down. Looked it in the eye. “Nice to meet you after all these years,” she whispered.
The safe had a digital combination lock. She tried her mother’s birthday, then her father’s. Then their anniversary. Then her own birthday. None of them worked. She glanced at the costumes again and tried Halloween. 1031. The door drifted open.
Robin crouched down and looked inside, unsure of what she was expecting to find. The gun, after all, was in police custody...
The safe held a single, leather-bound notebook, identical to the many that lined Dad’s office bookshelves. She slipped it out. Looked at the cover. The taped label, just like the others, the patient’s name in mechanical print:
APRIL COOPER
The notebook fell from Robin’s hand, but she picked it up again. Opened it to the first page. She saw her father’s handwriting at the top in ballpoint pen, barely legible: “April Cooper, aka Renee White: Forensic Case Study #1 February 28, 1977, Borderline Personality Disorder. Patient exhibits...”
Robin slammed the book shut.
“Do you remember what I said, Robin, about how no one should be an open book to their children?”
Nicola stood behind her.
Robin turned to face her. Nicola Crane, who wasn’t April Cooper after all. Just an angry-looking woman with bright blue eyes, speaking with studied menace, holding a gun. “You want to know?” she said. “You really want to know that badly?”
Robin stared at her.
“Mitchell wanted to talk to Quentin Garrison. He wanted to come clean. You’re grown, he said. He’s semiretired. He said he believed he could help Quentin Garrison. As though some selfish little podcaster were more important than your mother.”
Tears seeped out of the corners of Robin’s eyes. “My mom was...”
“He didn’t think things through. Mitchell never really thought things through, not when they didn’t concern him. Your mother is a fugitive. There’s no statute of limitations on the shit she did when she was a teen.”
“I... I don’t want to hear any more.”
