Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  All the lights are off at Reid’s house, which makes sense, since it’s nearly three in the morning by the time I pull into the driveway. I turn the key in the lock and leave my shoes on the porch so that I won’t disturb anyone while I’m creeping inside.

  I sneak into the kitchen to get a glass of water, and see her sitting at the kitchen table like a ghost. Liddy’s white cotton nightgown swirls around her ankles like sea foam as she stands up to face me. “Thank God,” she says. “Where have you been?”

  “I went surfing. I needed to clear my head.”

  “I tried to call you. I was worried.”

  I saw her messages on my cell. I deleted them, without listening. I had to, although I can’t explain why.

  “I haven’t been drinking, if that’s what you’re getting at,” I say.

  “I wasn’t. I was just . . . I wanted to call the hospital, but Reid said you were a big boy and could take care of yourself.”

  I see the phone book, open on the table, and feel a pang of remorse. “I didn’t mean to keep you up. You have a big day tomorrow.”

  “Can’t sleep anyway. Reid took some Ambien, and he’s snoring to beat the band.”

  Liddy sits down on the floor, her back aligned against the wall. When she pats the spot beside her, I sit, too. For a minute we are quiet, listening to the house settle around us. “Remember The Time Machine?”

  “Sure.” It was a movie we saw a few years back, a particularly cheesy one, that was about a time traveler who gets lost in space and stuck 800,000 years in the future.

  “Would you want to see the future, even if you knew you couldn’t change it?” she asks.

  I consider this. “I don’t know. I think it might hurt too much.”

  When she leans her head against my shoulder, I swear I stop breathing. “I used to read these mystery books when I was a little girl, where you could choose a different path at the end of every chapter. And depending on what you picked, the outcome changed.”

  I can smell her soap—mango and mint—and the shampoo she uses, which sometimes I steal out of her bathroom and use myself.

  “I used to skip to the back of the book and read all the endings and pick the one I liked the best . . . and then I’d try to figure it out backward.” She laughs a little. “It never worked. I could never make things happen the way I wanted.”

  The first time Liddy saw snow, the time I was with her to witness it, she held out her hand to catch a snowflake on her palm. Look at the pattern, she said, and she held it out to me so I could see. By then, though, it was already gone.

  “Reid told me what he said today in court.”

  I look down at the floor. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.

  “I know that Reid can be—well, a bully sometimes. I know he acts like he owns the whole wide world. I know it better than anyone else, except maybe you. I also know that you’re wondering why you’re doing this, Max.” Liddy comes up on her knees and leans closer, so that her hair falls forward. She puts her hand on my cheek. Then, slowly, she kisses me. “You’re doing it for me,” she whispers.

  I am waiting to wake up from this hellish, wonderful dream; certain that at any minute I will find a doctor peering over me and telling me that last wipeout left me with a massive concussion. I grab Liddy’s wrist before she can pull it away from my face. Her skin is warm, buttery.

  I kiss her back. God, yes, I kiss her back. I cradle her face in my hands and I try to pour into her everything I’ve never been allowed to say. I wait for her to pull away, to slap me, but in this alternate world there is enough room for both of us. I grab the hem of her nightgown and inch it up, so that her legs can wrap around mine; I yank my shirt over my head so that she can kiss the salt from my shoulder blades. I lay her down. I love her.

  Afterward, when reality settles in and I can feel the hard tile under my hip and the heaviness of her draped across me, I find myself in a total fucking panic.

  All my life, I’ve dreamed of being like my brother, and now I am.

  Like Reid, I want something that doesn’t belong to me.

  When I wake up on the kitchen floor, I am alone and wearing my boxers and Reid is standing over me. “Look at what the cat dragged in,” he says. “I told Liddy you had nine lives.” He’s dressed impeccably, and he’s holding a mug of coffee. “Better hop in the shower, or you’re going to be late for court.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Sick as a dog,” Reid says. “Running a fever, apparently. She wanted to stay home, but I told her she’s the next witness.”

  I grab my clothes and hurry upstairs. I should get ready, like Reid said, but instead I knock on the closed door of Liddy and Reid’s bedroom. “Liddy?” I whisper. “Liddy, you okay?”

  The door opens a crack. Liddy is wearing a bathrobe. She pulls it tight at the collar, as if I haven’t already seen everything underneath anyway. Her cheeks are flushed. “I can’t talk to you.”

  I wedge my foot in the door so she can’t close it on me. “It doesn’t have to be like this. Last night, you were—”

  “A sinner,” Liddy interrupts, her eyes filling with tears. “Last night I was married. I’m still married, Max. And I want a baby.”

  “We can figure it out. We can tell the court—”

  “Tell the court what? That the baby should go to the couple with the wife who’s cheating on her husband? The wife that loves her husband’s brother? That’s not quite anyone’s definition of a traditional family, Max.”

  But I barely hear the last sentence. “You love me?”

  She ducks her head. “The guy I fell for was willing to give the most important thing ever—his child—to me for safekeeping. The guy I fell for loves God, like me. The guy I fell for would never think of hurting his brother. Last night didn’t happen, Max. Because if it did—then you’re not that guy anymore.”

  She closes the door, but I just stand there, unable to move. Reid’s footsteps echo down the hallway as he approaches. When he sees me in front of his bedroom door, he frowns and looks at his watch. “You aren’t ready yet?”

  I swallow. “No,” I tell him. “I guess not.”

  On the witness stand, Liddy can’t stop shaking. She tucks her hands underneath her legs, but even then, I can see shudders going through her. “I always talked about being a mother,” she says. “In high school, my girlfriends and I would make up names for the babies we’d have. I had it all planned out even before I got married.”

  When she says the word married, her voice breaks.

  “I have the perfect life. Reid and I have this beautiful home, and he makes a good living as a portfolio manager. And according to the Bible, the point of marriage is to have children.”

  “Have you and your husband tried to conceive?” Wade asks.

  “Yes. For years.” She looks down at her lap. “We were just going to look into Snowflakes Adoption. But then Max . . . Max came to us with another idea.”

  “Do you have a strong relationship with your brother-in-law?”

  Liddy’s face drains of color. “Yes.”

  “How did you react when he told you he wanted to give his pre-born children to you and your husband?”

  “I thought that God had answered my prayers.”

  “Did you ask him why he didn’t want to raise the children himself? Maybe at a later date?”

  “Reid did,” she admits. “Max told us that he didn’t think he’d be good at it. He had made too many mistakes. He wanted his children to grow up with a mother and a father who . . . who loved each other.”

  “Have you had much interaction with children?”

  For the first time since she’s gotten into that chair, she brightens. “I run the Sunday School program at our church. And I organize a youth ministry camp during the summers. I love kids.”

  “If the court saw fit to give you these pre-born children,” Wade asks, “how would you raise them?”

  “To be good Christians,” Liddy says. “To do the right t