And then there was one of Marnie standing in the courtyard at school, holding a dozen balloons. The caption read, Surprising Wyatt on our 6 month anniversary!
I tucked my phone back in my purse and closed my eyes, thinking, My life could not possibly get any more complicated.
I was wrong about that, though. So wrong.
After all I’d been through, all the care I’d taken to stay out of trouble, in the end it was a human, not a ghost, who got me called into a parental after-school judgment session.
It was Marnie, who I thought was supposed to be my friend.
I sat at the dining room table with Jonathan and Mom. My stepfather’s iPad sat on the table, and the front page of Starstalkerz stared up at us. The website, to my incredible non-delight, had added the following tidbit to the item about Marnie and me:
EDITOR’S NOTE: Whoops, Stalkerz! As many of you pointed out, this glamorpuss is NOT Bernadette Middleton, despite her claims to the contrary — in fact, we have it on good authority that her name is Willa Cresky and she’s the newly imported stepdaughter of Infinity Realms director Jonathan Walters. Gotta watch out for those east coast girls. Hey, she may not be royalty, but we’ll give her this — she looks great in red!
That was it. Not a word about Marnie, or the fact that she was lying, too. Not a word to say that I hadn’t been the one to start the story, or send out a stupid press release.
Jonathan’s publicist had called him that afternoon in a red-hot fury, claiming that his new stepdaughter was a total embarrassment to his public image.
“What would make me feel better, Willa,” Jonathan said now, “is hearing some explanation as to why you thought it was okay in the first place.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “It wasn’t my idea.”
“But you went along with it,” Mom said.
“I don’t know if you understand how reputations work in the real world,” Jonathan said. “Your word is your bond. When you get a reputation for not telling the truth, it can follow you forever.”
I nodded. After a half hour of useless attempts to defend myself, quiet acquiescence seemed like my best chance to get out of there before my twenty-first birthday.
“We’re not angry, exactly,” Mom said. “Just disappointed.”
But I could tell by the way Jonathan frowned that he was a little angry.
I apologized again. And then they rehashed it again. And that happened four more times and then they finally told me I could go up to my room and think about what I’d done.
As if I didn’t have any other problems to think about in my spare time.
I’d forgotten how delicate my old computer was. If you pushed the screen open too fast, or a millimeter too far, the whole display would turn a very alarming shade of muddy green. I pulled it closer and held my breath until the backlight came on again.
Then I clicked on the folder labeled DAD’S STUFF. It was only a backup, meant to be deleted after he transferred all of his files to the new computer. But I never got around to deleting it.
I clicked through, looking for the backup of his contacts list. Then I opened that and did a search for DR.
Dr. Pamela Tilliman, General Practitioner.
And a phone number.
It was four o’clock, which meant seven o’clock in Connecticut, which meant that Dr. Tilliman was probably long gone for the day, but I figured I could leave a message and ask her to call me back on Monday.
To my surprise, someone picked up on the first ring.
“Hello, Dr. Tilliman speaking.”
“Um, hi, Dr. Tilliman,” I said. “My name is Willa Cresky. My dad was a patient of yours. Paul Cresky?”
“Paul Cresky,” she repeated. Her voice was deep and rich with authority. “Oh, Paul Cresky — yes, of course. It’s been about two years since he passed away, hasn’t it?”
“It’ll be two years May sixteenth,” I said. “I know it’s late, but I was hoping I could ask you some questions.”
“Well, I may not be able to answer everything,” she said, “but I’ll see what I can help you with.”
“My dad died of a heart attack —”
She interrupted me, and I heard typing. “Hang on. I’m pulling up his chart…. You said you’re Willa? I think I met you at the funeral. And I remember your dad used to talk about you. Didn’t you guys exercise together?”
“We swam,” I said, gripping a handful of my comforter in my tightly balled-up fist. “But he died. While we were swimming.”
“Oh, right …” she said. There was an embarrassed silence.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I just have a question about heart attacks. Because the day my dad died — I mean, right before he died — we had a big fight.”
“A fight?” she echoed.
“An argument. I mean, we weren’t even yelling or anything, but we were both really angry.” The sting of the memory made my throat tighten but I kept talking, unable to stop. “I left the pool, and when I changed my mind and went back, he was … floating. I don’t know if he was dead at that point or not, but the paramedics declared him dead after they tried CPR. Everybody tried CPR. The gym even had a defibrillator, but it didn’t work.”
“Right,” she said. “I see all that here, in the notes from the hospital. What’s your question?”
I pressed the phone to my ear, my breath coming in shaking bursts. “Did I … um … kill my dad?”
“Oh, honey,” she said. “No.”
I waited for her to elaborate.
“That’s it,” she said. “That’s my answer. A categorical no. Not a chance.”
“But I stressed him out. I gave him a heart attack.”
“Your father was exerting himself physically. And, honestly, a normal, healthy forty-four-year-old man should not have had a heart attack from that level of physical exertion. Certainly not from an argument. One where you weren’t even yelling.”
Wyatt had basically said the same thing.
“But then …” I stared at the keys on the keyboard until they all seemed to meld together. “Why did he die?”
“Hold on, let me look at something, okay?”
The line was filled with jazzy hold music. The sudden contrast almost made me laugh, in a crazy way.
A couple of minutes passed, and I was afraid Dr. Tilliman had forgotten about me. Then there was a click, and the music disappeared.
“Hello, Willa?” she asked. “Still there?”
“Yes, I’m still here.” My heart was beating a thousand beats a minute.
“I just called the hospital and had the medical examiner’s records emailed over,” she said. “Hang on … ‘the findings were consistent with asymptomatic hypertrophic cardiomyopathy … resulting in sudden cardiac death.’ ”
“I don’t know what that means,” I whispered.
“It’s a genetic heart condition,” she said. “It means that your father lived his whole life with a mutated gene that predisposed him for a condition known for causing sudden cardiac events, often without any hint of a symptom prior to the event. Tell me, Willa … how long had you guys been swimming that morning?”
I tried to dredge up the details, so long suppressed under an avalanche of guilt and pain. “Maybe about fifteen minutes? We usually swam for a half hour, but Dad stopped.”
I drew in my breath sharply.
“He stopped,” I said, suddenly remembering. “He said he was suddenly really tired. He thought he’d rest for a minute and then we could start again, but that’s when we started talking about Aiden — my boyfriend, Dad hated him — and it turned into an argument, so I left. I went back to the locker room.”
“Obviously I didn’t have a chance to examine your father myself,” the doctor said, her voice gentle. “But given what you’ve just said, and the findings from the autopsy, nothing you did caused your father’s death. What’s more, Willa … nothing you could have done would have saved him.”