Chapter 4: Keep An Eye On Your Brother
2029 Words
Her stomach constricts, begging for food. She has sworn off eating for now. The physical pain helps to keep the gray place around her, cuts out the light and color. Instead, she maneuvers the mushy vegetables with the tip of her knife, lining them up in alternating variety to keep her mind from engaging the other three people at the table.
Dinnertime with the family is more painful than hunger. The forced laughter, her father's bad jokes pounding through the dullness. The steady thump thump thump of Cole's swinging feet. Her mothers voice, so light but with a tightness behind it making her skin crawl. If only they would let her leave them but they cling to her like she is necessary.
She knows the truth. She isn't. They would see it too, if they would just let her go.
"How's school?" Why does he feel the need to ask her questions? Especially when he knows he'll only get a mumble in reply?
"Okay."
Thump. Thump. Thump.
She wants to tell her brother to stop but knows if she speaks up she'll scream and that will just shatter the fake calm, now, won't it? She is fragile enough. The glass of her life is just holding together.
Instead, she keeps her eyes down. Without her permission, they skip sideways. Jack's plate is almost empty. The smear of blood her father's steak left behind turns her stomach in a slow roll. Suddenly it's easy to push her plate away.
Their blood was black. Even the wet pooling in Sam's right eye. She lifted the beautiful head into her lap and the shining stuff oozed away...
She gags and covers it with a cough and a sip of water to wash away the bile.
"Trish Johnson called earlier." He is watching her. They all are. Their eyes eat her up.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
It takes a moment for her to process. "Yeah." The neighbor's daughter. She is only fourteen, two years younger. Tried forever to get the girls to let her in. And now wants Emily to be her new best friend. Not a chance. She isn't them.
"Maybe you should pop over? Wouldn't hurt to start making new friends." Pamela's knife grates across the plate, like a warning. Jack falls silent.
They are trying. She knows they just want her to be okay. But she doesn't. Want. To. Be. Okay. She wants her girls back or to join them.
Period.
"Whatever." She crosses her arms over her belly, feeling the girls there with her. "Can I go now?"
Thump.
Cole's foot stills. She looks up and meets his eyes. He looks away.
"Sweetheart." Pamela always calls him that even though he hates it and thinks ten is too old to be called anything so cute. "Why don't you ask Emily again?"
He mutters under his breath.
Thump. Thump. Thump. She is going to strangle him and his stupid feet.
"Well?" Their parents wait. For the inevitable. For something, anything.
"I want to go to the park." When did he get so sullen? Find his own gray place?
"We'd like you to take him, honey." Jack's fingers search for hers but she avoids him. She hates terms of endearment just as much as her brother.
"I can't." They must understand. She simply can't.
"It would be good for you," Jack says. "Fresh air. Exercise."
The parent prescription for everything. She stares at her fork and imagines plunging it into his face. Fury rises in the gray.
"No."
Pamela sighs her "Mom" sigh. It has been a fixture in their relationship, but her mother has used it far too frequently in the last four months. "It's not a request, young lady. Take your brother to the park."
She weighs the odds. Would the fight be worth losing her privacy? She has no doubt her bedroom door will be removed. Her mother is that stubborn. And yet to risk being so exposed... bad enough she has to go to school, to walk home. But to sit at the park with other people, watch them have fun, listen to them live while she dies bit-by-bit inside with every breath...
Before she knows it, she is at the door. Her dad grabs her arm. She flinches away and he lets her.
"Keep an eye on your brother," he says. "You know he likes the woods."
"Yeah." She inserts her ear buds, turns to go, but he stops her again.
"Thank you, Em."
Cole is happy again, bouncing on his toes, waiting for her at the end of the driveway.
"Yeah."
Her iPod screams death metal, the best way she knows how to hear Sam still. She digs her hands into the front pocket of her hoodie, Sam's hoodie, her fingers locked on the bumps inside the money belt. She forces breath after breath to come and go, pushing her feet ahead one at a time.
Cole waves at someone. She turns to look without thinking. Their neighbor. Mr. Harris. Just moved in a few months ago, him and his beagle, Jester. A blur of a man she barely registers. She drops her eyes. She doesn't want to talk to him and, thankfully, Cole is so excited about the park he keeps going.
She fights for every step for three blocks while Cole bobs around her like a crazy cartoon character, his bright blue ball, a favorite, bouncing and ricocheting from the dirty pavement. A cloud crosses the sun when she steps on the grass. It feels good but doesn't last.
Cole grabs the wires from her ears and pulls before she can stop him.
"Play with me, Emmy." He seems so much younger than ten standing there, ball bouncing in one hand, begging her to be a part of his life again.
"Go use the swings." She drifts toward the giant oak looming near the edge of the small park. She will be shaded from the sun and far enough away from the screaming kids shrieking and running in the sand-filled playground.
He follows her, takes her hand. She doesn't pull away.
"I wish you weren't so sad." He lets her go. She slumps to the ground under the tree, shoving her headphones back in.
"I brought you here like you wanted. Just. Go."
He hesitates. "You used to be fun."
That kicks her in the stomach like a steel-toed boot. She turns the music up louder and watches from the corner of her eye as his sneakers disappear.
That's all she wants. To be left alone forever. Well, not exactly. She wants the girls to come back. The four of them were complete, perfect, balanced. Unbreakable.
The black sludge is on her hands, running through her fingers. Sam's mouth is full of it...
A tear wells for her emptiness, a stray emotion made real. Her body betrays her but she catches it in time. Swipes at it with the grubby cuff of the black hoodie. Shoves it back down to the place beneath so she doesn't have to feel.
It's not like tears do her any good. Did they bring Sam back as they poured down into her friend's face, filling her empty eyes, mixing with her blood? Did they help Tara's parents decide it had to be a closed casket so no one would see half of her head was gone? Did it make Madison's perfect dead body any more of a comfort?
Tears were a waste of energy she didn't have.
***
The train bucked beside her. She scrambled for the bank and fell to her knees, terrified. Car after car slid forward, piling up on top of each other, death cries of tortured steel and wood. She ran again, for them, to save them. Her feet were bare, running difficult past the brief jabs of pain from stones underfoot. Something slid down her leg from her knee, something hot and wet.
She saw it up ahead, the flatbed car. A sob jabbed her in the throat. Her vision swam. She scrambled down the embankment toward the twisted mess, stumbling and falling over debris and blackened earth. Her breath screamed from her lungs, nose filled with the tart scent of super heated metal and churned dirt.
***
"Emily!"
She tears herself away from the memory, her ears ringing. The music has stopped. She looks around, body jerking left and right. Someone yelled her name, right beside her. A familiar voice, but she can't place it. Besides, she is alone. There is no one even close. In fact, the park has fallen quiet as night closes in.
She hugs herself so hard she gasps for air. The contents of the belt dig into her stomach. She pulls herself to her feet. That's enough. Tonight she will empty the bottle of vodka in the stillness of the sleeping house and use the knife to join the girls.
Plodding forward, the plan solidifying, she can almost feel the blade slicing through her arms, opening her veins just like Sam showed her. She rubs her thumb over the inside of her left elbow through the sweatshirt. The scar is old, five years old. They both tried it but Sam's incision was longer than hers. Deeper. Still, she had done it and now she was ready to finish it.
Cole. She remembers as she steps off the curb for home. Stops. Turns back.
Damn it.
"Cole." Her voice doesn't carry. She sighs, a deep and bitter thing with no resemblance to her mother's long-suffering huffs. She will have to try harder and resents it.
"Cole. Come on. Time to go home."
He is hiding. Her anger rises. Motherfucker.
"I'm not kidding. Let's go."
She approaches the sandy center and looks at the play set. The monkey bars are empty. One swing sways with the coming breeze, the support ring squeaking. She smells candy and kid vomit and the falling night.
"Cole!" Something awakes inside her. A strange and forgotten feeling. She can't identify it. "Cole, let's go!" It gets stronger and more insistent that she pay attention. But it's been so long. "I'm serious! I'll kick your ass!"
It surfaces, grabs her by the soul and shakes her
It brings/brought/drags/drug her back to life.
***
Emily started to tremble. Her heart clenched as fear for another, caring, pain outside her private hell slammed into her private world and jerked her out of it.
Cole was gone.
She scoured the park for signs of him. Even went to the woods, calling over and over until her voice was hoarse. But he wasn't there, wasn't anywhere.
Not knowing what else to do, she ran as fast as she did that night, as panicked, her terror a knot in her chest forcing the air from her lungs. He went home, he had to have gone home by himself, to punish her, to make her parents mad at her.
She hoped.
The front door made a terrible sound when she slammed through it. Her mother came running from the kitchen, father from the living room where the television chattered.
"Is he... is he here?" The words stumbled, fell much as she did that night. Crashed into themselves. Bled.
Pamela's eyes grew wide. The dishtowel fell from her hands, fluttering to her brown leather shoes in slow motion. Denial. Head shaking. Transfer of terror.
Emily knew. She was too late again.
They moved into action, but Emily stood frozen. Her fault. Hers. If only she had been paying attention. If only she hadn't let him go off on his own.
Her father brushed past her, out the door, wordless, flashlight in hand. Pamela's fingers rushed across the telephone keys.
911.
The voice. That's what it had been, the one that called her name, brought her back. A warning. But who? She knew that voice.
As her mother did her best to calmly tell the emergency operator that her son was missing, Emily gasped. Of course she knew that voice. Had known it her whole life. Had loved it and paid attention to everything it told her.
As her mother began to weep into the receiver, Emily felt a chill.
Sam's voice.
***
- Writer
