Don't Fail Me Now(21)

“How bad is it?” she asks. “Like . . . how soon is he . . .”

I shrug. “It’s enough for me to know he’s on his way out,” I say. “I’m not really sweating the details.” Actually, of course I want to know. I’m kicking myself for being too mad to ask Tim for more information when I had the chance. But Buck clearly didn’t care about my life, so I’m trying hard not to let myself care about his death. So far, as evidenced by my recent Google searches, it’s not working out so well.

“God, do you know anything?” Cass groans.

“I know he’s leaving us something,” I say defensively. “I know he’s in California.”

“What’s he leaving us? Where in California?”

“I . . . don’t know,” I admit, and Cass rolls her eyes so hard she could knock over a set of bowling pins. “But apparently Leah’s having a rough time with it all, and this guy, her brother or stepbrother or whatever, Tim, wants me to go talk to her.”

“Seriously?” Cass asks. “She’s having a rough time?” My sister stares down at the carpet for a minute and then says, “Cry me a f*cking river.”

“Cass—”

“Don’t tell me not to curse,” she snaps. “You don’t get to play mom right now. Everything’s too screwed up.”

I bite my tongue—only figuratively—this time. She has a point. “See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you,” I say.

“Are you gonna talk to her?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “Of course not.”

Cass nods and seems to relax a little bit but closes the web browser and shuts the laptop. She shoves her hands back into her hoodie. “I pretend he’s dead sometimes,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”

“When I imagine it, he gets shot in a holdup. Like at a liquor store or something.”

“That’s kind of violent,” I laugh. In my version, he just sort of evaporates out of existence, kind of like I’m ordering an execution with a pencil eraser instead of a lethal injection.

Cass shrugs. “What other way is there?” she asks.

“I think maybe you’ve been watching too much CSI,” I say. “And we should probably go to sleep before we give ourselves nightmares.” I reach out to hug her, but she swivels out of the way and leaps to her feet.

“He left them, too, right?” Cass asks. The sweatpants pool around her ankles, making her look like she’s disappearing into the floor.

“Yes.”

She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth and chews on it a minute, visibly relaxing, before letting it go. “Is it bad that that makes me feel better?”

“No.”

“Do you know how long he . . .” She pauses in the doorway and shakes her head. “Never mind.”

“How long he has left? I don’t know. Not long, I guess.”

“No,” Cass says. “I was gonna ask how long he stayed. With them.”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Forget it,” she says and slips out the door as quickly as she came in.

A few minutes later, after a little more Instagram stalking, I return everything in my aunt’s bedroom to the way I found it and then pad down the hall in bare feet, feeling around in the dark for my spot on the floor but finding either warm bodies or sharp pieces of furniture taking up all the prime real estate. So even though I know Sam will find some reason to give me shit about it, I crawl onto the couch and nestle my still-damp head into the well-worn, tobacco-scented cushions.

He left them, too.

The thought is comforting, although after seeing those pictures, it’s a hard scenario to imagine. How did Buck ever fit into, let alone abandon, that happy, normal, magazine-shiny family I just glimpsed? He’s the same color, but that’s where the similarities seem to end. The Buck I remember, the long-haired, allergic-to-dress-shirts, raucous, laughing, mercurial drunk who drove a car that even in its prime looked like it was destined for a junkyard, could never have posed believably in front of a white picket fence.

Then again, neither could I. Neither could any of us. No matter what shade of sea foam you dressed us in or how you straightened and smoothed out our hair, our untrusting eyes and our closed-mouth smiles would give us away in a second.

We’ll never be a part of that kind of family. We’ll never be our sister’s sisters, not outside of a DNA lab. That fantasy is just a silly game best kept in the past.





FIVE


Wednesday Morning, Part 1

Baltimore, MD




I wake up unable to breathe and start to panic thinking I’m paralyzed again—it always happens more when I’m stressed; it’s actually kind of amazing I’m not in a coma by now—but then Denny peers into my face, and I realize he’s straddling my chest like a wrestler, a wriggly, fifty-pound bundle of sharp elbows and knees.

“Max and I are hungry,” he whimpers.

“Then go get some food,” I groan, struggling to push him off with the minimal strength in my sleepy spaghetti arms. “You know how.”

“She doesn’t have anything,” he whines, sliding down onto the tangle of blankets on the floor. “Just some weird cheese and mom juice.” Mom juice. That’s what he calls booze.