I'd Give Anything(47)

“Leave it to you to bypass the college girls for that piece of cheap goods,” she’d said. “That girl is beneath you.”

“Almost every night!” said Trevor, winking.

And it got worse from there. Ever since my mother had refused to pay Trevor’s tuition at the state university unless he agreed to live at home for his first year of college, Trevor had been a volcano, molten rage—maybe even hatred, although I didn’t want to believe that—seething under his surface, ready to blow at the smallest provocation. The fight about Melanie had ended as so many of their fights did: Trevor cursing and hurling threats before storming out, either slamming the door hard enough to shake the house or leaving it wide open, so that my mother had to shut it herself. By then, I was mostly taking their fights in stride, but on top of everything else that had happened, on top of my heartsick worry for Gray, the fight was one thing too many.

As I usually did when I couldn’t sleep, I left my bed and crept downstairs in the dark to the family room couch, to see if a change of scene would help, but the full moon beamed like a spotlight through the window, so I left and went to my mother’s office, a room just off the kitchen, and tried to settle in on the velvet divan, which, having been purchased purely for its decorative qualities, had cushions hard enough to bounce a penny off. Somehow, though, I fell asleep, so that I was still there when Trevor came home.

The sound of our kitchen door opening must’ve woken me. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was, and once I did, I was about to get up to see Trev, when I heard my mother’s voice say, “Trevor,” and I felt the hair on my arms stand on end. My mother could be like that scene in a movie wherein everything seems normal until you notice the moonlight glancing off the butcher’s knife in someone’s hand. She must have been waiting at the kitchen table for Trevor.

I expected Trevor to be loud and stumbling, but when he answered her, his voice was as cool, as even as hers.

“Sitting in the dark waiting to pounce,” he said. “Very dramatic.”

“It was not for your benefit. I was enjoying the quiet.”

“Well, don’t let me interrupt.”

“Wait. I have something to say to you.”

“What?”

“If you insist on having sex with that girl, I will not pay for an abortion when she gets pregnant.”

Trevor laughed. “There’s this invention called the birth control pill, Adela. Too bad you weren’t using it nine months before you had me.”

“Melanie’s father runs a hardware store, Trevor.”

“Owns. Owns a hardware store.”

“Girls like that will do whatever it takes to escape their little lives.”

“Melanie’s family’s life is ten thousand times happier than ours, and she knows it. She’s not interested in escaping.”

“We’ll see,” said my mother. “If you’re wrong, I will not acknowledge that child in any way, much less support it financially.”

“I’m going to bed.”

“Furthermore, I am putting you on notice that I am finished cleaning up your messes. From now on, I won’t lift a finger.”

“Yeah, right.” I could envision the sneer on Trevor’s face, clear as day. “Like you’d ever let my ‘messes’ dirty up your sterling reputation. I’ll do what I want and you’ll make it go away, just like always.”

“I hope, for your sake, you don’t try to test that theory. Because I am finished.”

There was a long pause, and though I wasn’t even in the room, I could feel Trevor’s anger roiling, getting ready to erupt.

But when he spoke, again, his voice was as clear and steady as before. “Well, that’s a shame, for both of us. Because it’s too late.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’ve already done something way worse than I’ve ever done before, and any day now, everyone will know.”

“What did you do?” When my mother said this, I could hear something that I’d almost never heard before: a ruffle in her usual implacability.

And in the awful, airless, dark red, pulse-banging, silent-scream silence that followed, I knew what my brother was going to say before I heard him say it, before he dropped that ugliness right into the center of my life.

“I set the fire.”



I wrote it down. I tore it out. I burned it.

But it stayed and became a secret.

And the secret ate like acid into everything I loved and dulled my senses and devoured my joy and dragged me into darkness and broke me off like an ice floe from my brother and my friends.

After his father died, Gray went back to school, went to classes, walked down the hallways, but really he was curling in on himself, pushing us away with all his strength, and the only right and decent thing to do was to not let him, was to be relentless, dogged, vigilant, to keep our arms around him no matter what. And I tried. But Trevor had killed Gray’s father. How could I be Gray’s friend, knowing and not telling him that my brother had killed his father? And even though Trevor’s having committed that impossible, wretched, brutal act meant that he was not the Trevor I had loved for every second of my entire life, I still couldn’t, wouldn’t, would never rat him out.

So I abandoned Gray, my beautiful friend, when he needed me most. I pretended to be sick for all of winter break, and I was sick, but not with pneumonia. For two weeks, I barely left my room, only showered when my mother stood over me in my dark room and refused to leave. I remember standing, empty-hearted, limp, swaying a little on my feet like an underwater plant, letting the water fall on me until it went cold.