If the Witness Lied by Caroline B. Cooney Read Free Book Online Page A

used to prime the children with topics to discuss: a school project, a ballet step, a sleepover. When they no longer had parents to set this up, it didn’t happen. Smithy and Madison couldn’t stand sitting in front of that screen, pretending to be happy, chatting with grandparents who were also pretending to be happy.
    Last summer, Nonny and Poppy took all their precious vacation time and traveled out east. They tried to collect the children for a reunion. Smithy was in summer school, but they drove up to see her. She lied and maneuvered to spend as little time with them as possible. Her grandparents, who love her.
    And yet it is with Nonny that Smithy has had the most profound conversation of her life.
    Tris wasn’t born yet. Smithy was eleven. She and Nonny were sitting on the tired old sofa pushed against the wall in the big kitchen/family room, tucked under one of Mom’s knit blankets.Mom liked color. No soft denim blue or vanilla lace. It was a wallop-you-in-the-eyes combination of orange and red.
    (Where is that blanket now? Where is anything now? The old saggy couch was the first thing Cheryl got rid of, when she was in charge at last.)
    On that day, Nonny and Smithy were alone. Mom was napping, Dad at work, Madison at a friend’s house, Jack at a ball game.
    Outside, the picketers chanted. The picketers weren’t early risers, which meant that Smithy and Jack and Madison could get to school without running into them. It was coming home that was tricky. Dad rented Nonny and Poppy a car with tinted windows so nobody could see in, and they picked the kids up at school, drove into the garage and waited for the automatic door to close behind them before anybody got out.
    “Do you think Mom is doing the right thing?” Smithy dared to ask her grandmother.
    “I don’t know if it’s right. But it is extraordinary. Your mother is brave. Any mother would lay down her life for her baby
after
it’s born. But your mother is laying down her life for her baby
before
it’s born.”
    A fifty percent chance, the doctor said, when he told Mom about her cancer. But only if she started chemo immediately.
    “I’m going to have a baby, though,” said their mother. “Chemo would damage my baby.”
    The doctor wasn’t interested. “Get rid of it,” he said, shrugging.
    At dinner, Mom repeated this conversation to her husbandand her three children, who thought they would talk about dessert or the possibility of quitting piano lessons. “What do you get rid of?” demanded Laura Fountain. “Broken toys. Stained shirts. Not your baby.”
    Smithy was not paying attention to the baby part. She was paying attention to the cancer part. Her mother had a fifty percent chance of dying?
    “This baby,” announced their mother, and she was smiling—Smithy always remembers that smile—“is your brother or sister. I want him. Or her. Because our fourth baby will be wonderful, just like you.”
    A few days later, an ultrasound established that it was a boy. Mom was beaming. “He’s healthy,” she said excitedly.
    “You’re not,” pointed out the doctor. “You have to start chemo.”
    “No. I can make it,” said Mom confidently. “I’m tough. It’s only five more months. I’ll start chemo after the baby’s here.”
    “You’ll be dead before then. This cancer is invasive. You have to have chemo. We don’t have other weapons,” said the doctor brutally.
    Mom shrugged. She’d be the weapon. Her own determination would save her. She carefully prepared her children for what the doctors insisted would happen, but she always added a disclaimer: “I’ll whip it.” Did she believe this? Or was it a gift to her children? Smithy never knew, because the end came so swiftly, there was no time for questions or answers.
    But on that day, on that sofa, Smithy buried her face againsther grandmother, and Nonny said, “When I was a girl, decades ago, we said the baby always comes first. Now people say the mother always comes