Page 70 of Forget Me Not
“We met here on her first day at work,” he says. “Obviously, I’ve been here my whole life.”
I think back to our picnic again, the way he’d simply nodded and said nothing at all when I asked if he’d been working here long.
“About a week after she started, I brought her and some friends out into the woods. I had found this abandoned old camper a few years back. My parents didn’t know I knew about it, but I was a teenager, you know. It was a good place to escape to when I needed to get out of the house.”
I swallow, envisioning those pictures of a party deep in the trees; the flash of the camper in the corner of the shot.
“Natalie loved it,” he continues, a small laugh slipping out asthe memories of my sister start warming him up, her smile always so infectious and free. “She would go in there when no one else would, poke around through all those old things. Then, one day, she told me she found something. An old roll of film and a book shoved between the wall and the mattress.”
My breath catches in my throat, the image of the diary flashing through my mind.
“There was a picture of your parents inside,” he says as I remember how Marcia had admitted to taking it, slipping the picture between the pages as a reminder of what she might someday have. “And it was so weird, we didn’t understand why it would be in there, but then you guys showed up a few days later and your mom freaked out. She made Natalie quit and then, eventually, she finally came clean.”
“Mymommade Natalie quit,” I repeat, this new information moving slow through my mind like the steady dripping of sap. “I thought Natalie quit because of their divorce.”
“No,” Liam says. “I guess your mom didn’t realize Galloway was owned by Mitchell. She never even knew his last name.”
I think of my mother in the living room my first night in town, the sadness in her eyes as she looked through those pictures like she was reliving some nightmare I couldn’t understand. She spent time with Mitchell when she was young, the Annie of those entries all lost and adrift after both of her parents had died. She probably knew how he was, what they did out there, and once she found out Natalie was working for him, she didn’t want her daughter to get too close… but then I feel my skin grow hot as I finally understand what Liam is trying to say.
“Do you get it?” he prods as I make myself imagine that picture again, the one of my parents on the steps of our porch.
The way my dad had been holding on tight to her stomach, a look in his eyes like he was so proud.
“That can’t be right,” I say, still unable to process it all as Ithink about the inner workings of the Farm, all the different girls Mitchell brought back. “My parents got together when they were sixteen.”
“Your mom told Natalie they broke up briefly, shortly after her parents died.”
I exhale, forcing myself to take a deep breath as I do the math in my head. That picture was dated March of 1984; Natalie was born the following August. That would mean my mom was four months pregnant when it was taken… but she had left the Farm only two months before.
“Mitchell was Natalie’s father, too,” Liam says as a deep heat starts to creep into my cheeks, my head feeling foggy like I’m about to pass out. “Her biological father, at least.”
I nod, trying to swallow the rock in my throat as I finally understand why Natalie was so angry that summer, why my sister had been acting so strange.
“I’m sorry,” he continues. “It was obviously hard on her when she found out, too.”
I close my eyes, thinking about how she had started to avoid me. Her eyes skipping over mine when we met in the hall. It wasn’t because she didn’t love me, though. Because she didn’t want me around. She wasn’t outgrowing me; she wasprotectingme. Protecting me in the only way she knew how, burdened by this secret she knew she couldn’t share. We were still related, of course, but half sisters feels so vastly different, this essential part of our shared DNA suddenly and inexplicably ripped away.
I was awestruck by her, obsessed in the way only little sisters can be. She must have known it would kill me if I found out the truth.
“She told your dad,” Liam continues, my eyes flipping open as I think about the day they told us about their divorce, the fact that it had caught me completely off guard. “That’s why he moved out.”
I drop my head, remembering how my mother used to sneakaway to her bedroom, locking herself in there for days at a time. The way she would take Natalie’s lashes with her lips pursed tight because she knew she didn’t have the right to fight back.
“So, when Natalie was coming out here,” I say, looking up at Liam again, “what, exactly, was she doing?”
“She was with me,” he says. “She would drive herself here and we would meet at the camper, just sit out there for hours and talk. We were half siblings, we had the same dad, but our lives turned out so vastly different.”
I picture Liam and Natalie now, cross-legged as they hid beneath a canopy of trees. The steady drone of crickets and a giant bag of scuppernongs burrowed between them as they swapped the stories of their lives in the dark.
“I loved the idea of having a sibling,” he says. “I was always so lonely out here, all by myself.”
I see Liam’s face during our picnic, that look he gave me as he dipped his voice low.
I won’t lie to you, though. I’m enjoying the company.
“But for Natalie,” he continues, “it was more complicated than that.”
“Complicated,” I repeat, the sound of her name pulling me back.
