Saugatuck Summer (Saugatuck, #1)(2)
Finally I dropped onto the blanket beside her and sighed when my sister’s name came up on the caller ID. Thumbing the callback button, I made a mental wager with myself as to how long it would take Colleen to disregard or casually insult me.
“Family drama incoming in three . . . two . . . one . . . Hey. You called?”
“Hey, Topher. I was wondering when we could expect you in Flint, to stay with Mom for a while.”
“Hi, big sis! Nice to hear from you! College is great! Swim season went well!” That wasn’t really true, but whatever. “I got great grades on all my finals.” That one was true, but it wasn’t going to change the mess I was in now. “Thanks for showing such a keen interest in my life and well-being! It’s so touching to know you care.”
“Oh. Sorry. Hi.” Wow, she actually sounded embarrassed at being called out. I didn’t expect it to last long, though. “So, you’re doing good?”
“I’m getting by. I need to train this summer—next season is going to be important if I want to keep my scholarship—and I’m looking for a job to help cover tuition, but other than that, I’m okay.”
“Oh. Good. Good. I’ve been working hard, too. Trying to save up for a vacation this year. My new boyfriend Terry wants to go to Hawaii, and I want to go with him.”
“Hawaii sounds fun,” I said noncommittally. Her duty to pretend to care about my life having been discharged, I knew exactly where this conversation was headed next.
Colleen didn’t disappoint. “So, anyway, yeah. Mom. Helping. When can I expect you?”
I gripped a fold in the blanket in my fist. “Hmmm, I dunno. What’s the weather in Hell looking like? Any ice storms lately?”
“Topher, don’t be a dick. She’s having a hard time getting around. I have to work all summer; I don’t get summer break like you do, and running her errands takes up a lot of my time. You’re not doing anything for almost four months. The least you could do is come help out. I would really love to take a vacation sometime this summer.”
“Oh, hey, did I just do the time warp back into last year? Because, damn girl, if this conversation isn’t giving me déjà vu all over again. The answer was no then, and it’s no now.” I grimaced at Mo. “And I’m not doing nothing over the next four months, thanks. I just told you, I need to train. A lot. Not to mention get a job.”
“They have a Y here in Flint, you realize.”
“And yet the answer is still no.”
“God, you’re such a selfish little prick. This is family.”
“Your family. Not mine. My association with Frederica ended when she took a truckload of pills, knowing I’d be arriving the next day to find her body.”
“Not this again.” I heard her growl on the other end of the line. “Right, it’s all about you, isn’t it? She can’t even get sick without you trying to make yourself the victim. She had a stroke and collapsed and spent a day and a half on the floor nearly freezing to death, and you still have to make it all about you and your self-centered f*cking drama.”
I shook my head firmly, even if she couldn’t see it. “It wasn’t a stroke. I know what I saw.” I rubbed my forehead, where a headache was beginning to twinge. How many times were we going to have this f*cking discussion?
“It wasn’t a suicide attempt!” Colleen practically shouted in my ear. “She’s too f*cking melodramatic to do it that way, okay? If she’d been planning to kill herself, there would have been notes and she would have been giving shit away left and right, writing wills, making grand gestures.”
I slammed my fist down on the blanket, grateful for the sand beneath that prevented the little tantrum from hurting. “That was her grand gesture. You don’t know the way she thinks, Colleen! She never played the head games with you like she did with me. Why would she need to leave a note when she could arrange to have her funeral while everyone was home for the holidays already? She was putting on a show, and we were all cast in the roles of the grieving loved ones.”
“She said she didn’t try to kill herself!”
“No. She said she didn’t remember trying to kill herself. Which is Frederica code for Yeah, I did it, but I’m not going to cop to it, and hey, isn’t brain damage a convenient f*cking excuse!” Damn it, now I was shouting.
Colleen heaved a long-suffering sigh and pitched her voice lower, adopting the tone that said she was trying to make herself the reasonable one. “There are a lot of other reasons things could have looked the way they did.”
“She didn’t want to be lying there alone, undiscovered, eaten by her damned cats. She knew I was coming that day.” I was jabbing my finger violently in the air, like I could point it in Colleen’s face, and made myself stop. “But you go ahead and pretend you’re some brilliant forensic detective in your own little episode of CSI. Stage a recreation to prove how the way things look like they happened isn’t the way they really happened. Convince yourself that there was some perfectly good, completely coincidental reason for her to have had a sixteen-ounce drinking glass full of pills spilled on the floor beside her.”
I glanced over to see Mo looking at me with gentle sympathy. She knew the whole story, of course. We’d met the semester before that incident, my freshman year, and bonded pretty much instantly. When I’d held my vigil in the ICU during Christmas break, I’d spent a lot of time talking and texting with her.