From This Day On. Janice Johnson Kay

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СКАЧАТЬ Amy shoved the datebook toward him. “I read the whole thing. You can go right to the end. It pretty much tells the whole story.”

      He looked down at it for a minute, as if reluctant, then opened it to the back. The pages for April, May and June were blank, of course; by then, the datebook had been entombed in the time capsule. He reached the page that held Michelle Cooper’s final statement, read silently.

      Amy knew what it said by heart. The part about how the old me is dead. And finally, This is what happened to me at Wakefield College. This is what I choose to say: Steven Hardy raped me.

      Jakob muttered an obscenity and looked up, a storm of emotions in his eyes. Anger was the only one Amy was certain she’d picked out.

      “You think this—” he glanced back down at the open page of the book “—Steven Hardy is your father.” The emotions had roughened his voice, but it was also astonishingly compassionate.

      “Yes.” The single word sounded so small, so stark. She couldn’t look at him anymore. Instead she gazed, as she had done most evenings since she had moved into her mother’s house, at the garden and the roses she hadn’t watered since she left for eastern Washington.

      “Do you have any other evidence?”

      “Yes.” She had to clear her throat. She pulled out the baby book. “I was born small enough that no one questioned Mom’s claim that I was premature. But I went through this and compared my milestones with the standard charts. If I really was premature, I should have been behind. I wasn’t. If anything, I was ahead from the very beginning. If my birth weight was evidence that I was premature, I should eventually have gained on my contemporaries, but I didn’t. The truth is, all through school I was in the bottom twenty-five percent in weight. I still am. I’m skinny.”

      His gaze flicked over her and he nodded. “You’re small-boned,” he said slowly. “Slim.”

      She appreciated his kindness in making skinny sound a little more appealing.

      “And then there’s the family album.” She opened that next, turning pages until she found a picture taken, at a guess, not long before the divorce. All four of them were in it. She scooted the album over so he could see the picture.

      He looked in silence for a long time. Without looking herself, she knew exactly what he was seeing. Not only the fact that she didn’t fit, but also the tensions that were visible despite smiles for the camera. There was something anxious on her face, bewilderment in her eyes. The adults might be smiling, but they weren’t touching. Josef’s hand lay on his son’s shoulder. Jakob’s expression was stony. Michelle stood behind Amy, but wasn’t touching her, either. There was a distinct distance between the two children, too. Body language all but shouted the news that this family was splintering.

      “Not a good moment in our lives,” Jakob observed at last.

      “Funny, I remember looking at the picture and not seeing that. I think I’ve been guilty of a lot of self-deception.”

      “Maybe.” He waited until she had to turn her head and meet his eyes, closer to gray right now than blue. “But you don’t know, do you?”

      “I do,” she said sharply.

      “You’re still guessing.”

      She narrowed her eyes. “But you already knew, didn’t you?”

      He hesitated. “No. I heard things that made me wonder, that’s all. Remember, I wasn’t very old. Mostly, I put what I heard out of my mind.”

      The slightest change of intonation in his voice there at the end suggested he was lying, although she didn’t know why he’d bother. After a minute, though, she nodded, as if in acceptance.

      “You were only eight. No, I guess nine at the end.”

      “Their yelling freaked me out.”

      “Me, too,” she admitted. “I pulled the covers over my head at night. Sometimes the pillow, too, when they got especially loud. I knew I didn’t want to hear what they were saying. I was so scared.”

      Jakob laid a hand atop hers on the table. His was big and warm and comforting. She stared down at it until, to her disappointment, he removed it.

      “I didn’t like your mother,” he said gruffly, “but change is always scary for kids. I felt safe when we were a family. Sometimes I worried Dad would leave me behind if he moved out.”

      “Like he did me.” Amy swallowed. “I wanted to go with him so bad.”

      “I think he believed your mother needed you, that she loved you.”

      She snorted. Not with a lot of authority, but still... “Sure. Right. Get real. He didn’t want me, because I wasn’t his kid. And yes, he was nice enough to keep pretending for my sake, but even then I could tell. He didn’t look at me the same. I knew, but I didn’t want to know. Now, well...” Amy shrugged. “I guess denial only takes you so far.”

      Jakob sat there frowning at her. “What have you been doing the past two days? Hiding out?”

      She tried a smile, even if it didn’t come off very well. “Yeah, I suppose. I felt...” A huge lump clogged her throat. Felt was past tense. Feel. I feel. “Sick,” she finally acknowledged. “I always knew that Mom...” She gave something like a laugh. “I was going to say, Mom didn’t love me. But it was worse than that. Especially when I was little. It was as if she couldn’t stand to touch me. She’d shy away from me if I tried to cuddle. I learned not to try.” Oh, that sounds pathetic. She managed a shrug. “It’s not like I didn’t survive. Maybe I’m tougher because she wasn’t touchy-feely. In all honesty, I don’t think she would have been even if I’d been a planned pregnancy. Her parents were rigid and cold.”

      Jakob nodded. She’d forgotten that he had, of course, met them.

      She sighed. “I’ll bet they didn’t do a lot of cuddling, either.”

      Jakob’s expression was troubled. Looking at him, she felt as if a band was tightening around her chest. He was a really beautiful man, with that lean face and strong, prominent bones. His hair was disheveled, even spiky tonight. It seemed darker in this light, but the hint of stubble on his jaw glinted gold. As a child, she had so wanted them to be close. She’d taken comfort in knowing he was her brother, that however funny she looked she still shared his blood. Maybe if she had kids of her own, the Scandinavian genes would reassert themselves. Nope, she thought sadly, no such genes here. Hers were...who knew?

      “You never suspected?” he asked. “Your mother never said anything?”

      “Like, by the way, your real father is this creep who raped me when I was only nineteen?”

      “Uh...I was thinking more along the lines of saying that she was pregnant already when she met my dad, but he’s a good guy who took responsibility for you.”

      Amy huffed out another laugh. “One of the things she wrote in that diary—” she nodded toward the book that still lay open to the final, devastating passage “—is that she didn’t ever want to think about what happened again. Then she said, and I quote, ‘But I can’t completely pretend, can I?’ And she was right, because she was stuck with me. A living, breathing manifestation of the worst thing that ever happened СКАЧАТЬ