Tell No One: A Novel by Barbara Taylor Sissel

Author:Barbara Taylor Sissel [Taylor Sissel, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

12

Harris—Saturday, January 13

He keeps still on waking, holding on for as long as he can to the vain belief that where he is—on his belly, feet hanging off a too-short bed—is a dream and not the bald fact and circumstance of his life now. But he knows—knows this bed is his kid bed. The one his mom has kept all these years in his kid room in her house, the big white farmhouse on 14.9 acres eleven miles outside Wyatt. Eleven miles from the home in town that he shares with his wife and his sons—his family that he loves more than—

If you loved us, you would stop.

That declaration Holly throws in his face on a regular basis whispers through Harris’s brain, a truth he doesn’t want to hear. Stop the drug taking; stop the lying about it. Holly thinks that’s the extent of it—his crimes, his sins. She doesn’t know the half.

Harris plants his face in his pillow, stifling the sound that wants to come—some god-awful noise—jamming it against his ribs. Holly and Connor and Kyle will be at the breakfast table about now, talking about Harris. Holly will be doing her best to explain why Dad is gone. Harris needs help, she’ll say; he isn’t in any shape to be their father right now. He’s not the man I married. Harris hears her voice in his brain. Or any sort of man at all. His mind takes it a step further.

It half kills him, thinking of Kyle and Connor, how they’ll react. Kyle’s disgust, his sneering dismissal of Harris, is a given. Connor is younger, softer. He’ll be bewildered and sad. Come home, Dad. Why can’t you just stop taking that stuff, Dad? Harris imagines Connor will say—or something like it. How will he face his sons? He doesn’t even know how he’ll get out of this bed and face his mother.

He rolls onto his back. She let him off the hook last night when he showed up on her porch. He rang the bell like a stranger. He felt like one. He does still. He belongs—fits—nowhere. I don’t know who you are anymore, Holly said to him last night. He doesn’t recognize himself, Harris thinks. He doesn’t know how his life got so fouled up.

A soft rapping draws his glance to the closed bedroom door.

“I’m in the kitchen,” his mother says. “I’ve made coffee.”

He hears her footsteps retreat, her light tread on the stair.

Time to fess up, pay the piper, face the music.

Harris stares at the ceiling. He can’t think what story he can invent, what line he can come up with, that his mother won’t see the lie right through. He is so tired anyway of the deceit. But he can’t think how to set down the burden, the millstone he is around his own neck. He wishes he had someone to talk to. A friend. A real one and not some shrink who’s paid to act the part. There’s Zeke, but Harris has clouded the relationship with so much half truth and subterfuge he has no idea how to sort it out.

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