AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"A real shocker," he said, shaking his head and coming farther into my room. He blew some air between his lips and sat on the bed. "I can appreciate how difficult all this is for you to process."
I didn't say anything. I kept my eyes toward the ceiling, nervous that Karen might drop something or do something that made enough noise to attract my father's attention. I was literally holding my breath. I saw him glance at me and then look away.
"Your mother is worried about you, and since she's a nurse as well as a mother, I thought I'd better get just as worried real quickly," he said, trying to insert some humor.
Instead of smiling, I closed my eyes.
"So tell me, honey, did you have any idea, any inkling, that such a thing might happen?" he asked.
I let out my breath. I was about to take my first step into the world of deception and lies, hiding the truth from the people I loved the most in the world, betraying their trust, and risking their deep-seated disappointment and anger forever and ever. This was the crossroads I had feared approaching the moment I heard what Karen had done.
Few of us get to know and understand the moment when our childhood ends and our adulthood begins. In childhood, all our feelings are simple and easy. Nothing is really very complicated. We want this; we can't have that. We love this person; we don't love or even like that one. We're excused from responsibilities or agree to our little chores. Our decisions are about things so trivial that later on, it makes us laugh at how much weight and importance we put on them. There is, after all, no greater dispensation, no excusing and forgiving coming from anything as much as from our youth. We are protected by the simple phrase, too young to know or appreciate the full extent of her actions.
A fifteen-year-old girl can commit an act as terrible and as significant as what a twenty-one-yearold could do, and she will be known as a juvenile. It doesn't matter how bright she is or how sophisticated. Her age is all that matters.
Here I go, I thought again. In my heart, I knew that someday I would regret and struggle to explain myself to the people I loved, but for now, there was nothing to do but remain a juvenile on the surface while making a major adult decision.
"No, Daddy," I said. "I had no idea." He nodded and wore that face that my mother said made him so successful in a courtroom. Why couldn't I have inherited his ability to look so unrevealing or what my mother called "poker-faced"?
"No wonder he wins at cards. He's good at bluffing," she said. "Half the time, I can't tell if he means what he says or not."
"Well, honey," he said now, "because everyone knows you and Karen were close friends, the police want to talk to you as soon as they can. I got a call from the township police chief just a little while ago. They'd like to come here or have me take you to the station. Which would you prefer?"
"The station," I said quickly. It was terrifying to think of the police in the house with Karen up in the attic.
"Okay. I'll be right there with you the whole time. You just answer their questions truthfully, and that will be that." He glanced at his watch. "Why don't we say we'll leave here in about fifteen minutes? I've got a few calls to make to the office. Don't worry about putting on any different sort of clothing or anything. We go there, get it over with, and then how about the two of us going to Carnesi's for pizza? I'm in the mood, if you are."
"Okay," I said. At the moment, the more time we were out of the house, the better I thought it would be for Karen. I wished there were some way I could tell her what was happening. I could take a chance and run up the stairs to the attic, but if my father heard me, he would wonder why, and I could give it all away.
He leaned over to kiss me and then left. I heard him go downstairs. I went into the bathroom, threw cold water on my face, and ran a brush through my hair. Then I left, gazing up the stairway toward the attic door. I was tempted, but I resisted and instead went downstairs to meet him.
"Ready?" he said, coming out of his home office. "Yes." "Don't worry about it. They just have their job to do. We'll be in and out in no time."
It wasn't until we were in his car and backing out of the driveway that he turned and asked me if I had any idea where Karen might have gone. I know my eyes shifted, and I looked up at one of the attic windows, but luckily, he was looking at the road and didn't see.
"She always wanted to live in a big city," I said, which was true. "She wished she would grow older faster so she could leave and be on her own."
"Really? Well, unless she has some money, she's going to find that living in a city is much more difficult than she thinks. They'll know if she boarded one of the buses heading to New York. There aren't too many people traveling back and forth
yet. Do you think that's what she did?"
"That's what she would have liked to do," I said. That wasn't a lie.
He nodded. "Wherever she is, she's got to be a very frightened young lady."
She didn't seem as frightened as he thought. Was that only an act?
"What would make her do such a terrible, terrible thing? I never realized she had that sort of desperation, anger, in her. You never did either, huh?" he asked.
"She didn't like having him as her father. She never called him her father. She's very sad about her real father dying so young. She's always been angry about that, and she never liked that her mother married Harry Pearson." It was all true.
"Understandable," my father said. He smiled at me and shook his head. "Only, that's no reason to take such a violent action against Harry Pearson.-No, my guess is there was something else going on there, something so well hidden not even you, her best friend, knew it. I'm sure it will all come out in the end. It always does. Keeping truth down isn't easy. It has a way of showing up sometime or another." He laughed. "It's like trying to keep a beach ball underwater. Somehow, it slips around your hands and pops up."
We drove to the township police station. Just the sight of it made me tremble. I hoped I didn't look as shaky as I felt when I got out of the car. Before we reached the front door, my father seized my wrist and gently turned me to him
"You want to help Karen, don't you, Zipporah?" "Yes," I said.
"Then tell the truth in there, Zipporah. You can't help her any better than by doing that," he said. "You understand? Don't hold anything back, no matter what. In the end, it's only worse for everyone. Okay?"
