Bad Things (Tristan & Danika #1)(103)

I only realized that Frankie was there when she knelt in front of me, her face tear-streaked and full of sympathy. She and Jared had been tight, and it alarmed me that she was so worried for me, because it made me realize that she was so right to be worried. I didn’t have a clue how to handle this.

“You think it could be true?” I asked her, my own voice startling me with how it broke on the words. “You think Dean is pulling some shitty prank on us?”

She shook her head, black trails running, and running, and running down her face, her makeup in ruins. She didn’t even wipe it off, as though she hadn’t noticed. “No, Tristan. Cory saw him firsthand, and you know he wouldn’t joke about something like this. Look at him. It’s destroyed him too.”

I couldn’t. I couldn’t look at anyone. I looked down at my hands, my shame almost as strong as my sense of denial. I knew that as soon as the first one caught up to the second, I’d be in for it. “This is my fault,” I sobbed.

Frankie threw her arms around me, sobbing with me.

In the background somewhere, I heard my mother shout a loud agreement. She’d always instilled a sense of responsibility in me, to look after Jared, and I felt it like a stab to the heart. He’d been my little brother, and it had been my job, my duty, to watch over him, and while I’d been lost in my own depression, he’d slipped away, without me there to stop him, without me there to even hold his hand at the end.

That train of thought was pure masochism, and as I followed it, the denial left me, and the pain came, and I broke with it. I knew, absolutely, that I could die from this pain, that I could very well kill myself just to escape it.

I did the only thing I could in the face of utter despair. I reached out for a lifeline.

“Does Danika know?” I asked, pulling back.

Frankie shook her head, sniffling. “I haven’t called her yet.”

“Will you call her now? Will you tell Danika that I need her?” My voice broke again on the words. “She won’t take my calls.”

She patted my shoulder, standing. “Of course I will. I’ll go outside to make the call. It’s too loud in here.”

I grabbed her hand before she could move away. “Do you know if she’s listened to my messages?”

She squeezed my hand. “I don’t think she has. She told me a week ago that her phone has been buried in a drawer. I’ll have to call Bev to get ahold of her.”

I nodded. “Will you tell her to listen to them, if she gets a chance?”

“I will. I’ll be right back, k?”

I just nodded, looking down at my hands, watching my tears smack against them, surprised that I could actually hear them hitting my knuckles over the sound of my mom howling.

Frankie returned quickly, looking even more upset than before. “Bev said she’d tell her, but she’d taken the boys to run errands, and didn’t have her phone, so she isn’t sure how long that’ll take. She said that, as soon as she returns, Jerry will bring her over.”

I tried to be okay with that, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t cope with this for one more second without her, let alone some indefinite period of time.

I got up, then sat again, feeling totally lost. Dark thoughts circled through my head, thoughts of guilt, and agony, and self-destruction.

I found my phone, and just stared at it for sixty-three minutes, while I waited in purgatory, counting every minute, because every minute felt like an hour.

When sixty-three minutes had come and gone, I knew I couldn’t wait another. I got up, threw my phone on the couch, and burst out the front door.

It was pouring rain outside, which I’d somehow failed to notice before. I didn’t care now, breaking into a run, running from anything and everything, intending to run until I literally dropped.

DANIKA

I knew that something was terribly wrong the second I stepped in the front door. The look of caring sympathy on Bev’s face would haunt me.

It’s strange the things that haunted you for years and years after a tragedy. The look on Bev’s face when she braced to tell me the news, the tears in Jerry’s eyes, a man who I’d never seen cry, the way the boys didn’t say a word, as though clued into what was going on as soon as they saw their mother’s face.

Some of it you’d expect; the last time I’d hugged Jared, the last time I’d seen him smile, the last time he’d called me for some silly reason, or for no reason at all. Those were a sweet sort of haunting though.

The bitter haunting came in the form of finding missed calls from Jared weeks later, calls that I’d missed because I’d been so wrapped up in my own problems, my own dysfunctions. The idea that I could have spoken to him again before he passed gave me the most acute sense of loss, because I’d thrown away something precious. There was even one precious message from him that I could never find the heart to erase. In fact, I kept that phone in a drawer by my bed, years after I’d upgraded, because I couldn’t bear to let the sound of his voice be erased.

Hand in hand with the haunting, came regret.

As Jerry drove me to Leticia’s house, I started listening to Tristan’s messages, as he’d asked Frankie to ask me to do. As I listened, and realized that, while I’d been wrapped up in convincing myself that he could never give me what I needed, he’d been ready to give it to me, if I’d only bothered to listen.