Catching Serenity (Serenity #4) (4 page)

“So we match.”

She releases my hair and rests again against the pillow. “We match enough.”

“If I shave my head then we’ll be twins.”

“You’re just saying that because we’re the only ones in the family who look the same.”

It’s true. Between my parents’ rainbow coalition of adopted children—Asian (me), black (my twin brothers, Booker and Carver), Cuban (my sister, Adriana) and Guatemalan (my sister, Alessandra), and Rhea’s folks’ adopted child, Rhea, and their natural daughter Claire, our family is a weird little ethnic anomaly. Eighty percent of Cavanagh’s residents are Irish, including my parents and Rhea’s. So our diverse family make up has us standing out. Eight years ago when my Aunt Carol brought Rhea home, I instantly gravitated toward her.

“She comes from
Shirakawa-go
, Sayo. Just like you. You might even be related.”

I hadn’t cared if we were. I hadn’t cared if she was Japanese or Bulgarian or lily white like my aunt and uncle and my parents. I only knew that little Rhea was the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen and a sudden, blinding need to protect her, to guard her from the world fell upon me. I was still a kid myself, no more than seventeen, and had no clue where I was headed in life. I only knew that this baby was a shadow of my younger self. Maybe she was the echo I left behind in Japan.

Then came the news four years ago, when Rhea had already taught herself to read, when the prospect of day school and Pre-K had the girl twirling around my aunt’s den dizzy with excitement: Aunt Carol had spotted a deviation in her Rhea’s left eye. Then came the MRI, more exams and the discovery of a brain tumor along the optic nerve. Bilateral optic glioma, inoperable. Chemo, low white blood cell counts, and low platelet measurements, have become commonplace in our lives since then. When the platelets are very low, Rhea is sequestered in her room and everything must be sterilized. When they are very bad, with no sign of improving, she lands back in the hospital.

“I don’t want you to shave it.” Her voice is quieter now and I adjust her pillows, fluffing them before I rest on my shoulder at her side. Again she picks up one of my pink waves and runs her fingers through the end. “I want to color mine when it starts to come back again.”

“What color? Pink?” I tug on a fallen strand of my pink hair from the pillow next to Rhea’s head. I should have already gone in for another re-dye, but Rhea’s latest relapse had kept me from most all activities that didn’t include sitting with her or taking her to appointments while my aunt and uncle worked to find funding for the experimental treatments the doctor’s wanted Rhea to try if the current treatments failed yet again.

“No, not pink,” she says, stifling a yawn. “Pink is for you.”

“Okay, so you want to do red? Maybe orange or green?”

“Purple.” She dropped my hair, turning on her side to face me. “We’ll be twins but not identical.”

“I like that.” Another cough begins, but isn’t as severe as the last one and she lets me hold her hand. I don’t like how cold her skin feels or the way she shrugs off the blanket when I pull it over her shoulder. “Let me get Aunt Carol. You need a treatment.”

“Fine…” she finally says, but the word drops off in another rapid fire cough that has Rhea kicking the blankets from her legs and pointing to the metal bin on the floor.

“You want her now?” I ask, handing het the bin as she rips off the mask to spit out the mess her coughing has produced.

She gives me a sideways look full of irritation but doesn’t argue. “But then you have to go. I don’t want you to be late for the barbeque.”

She wants to be alone, something Carol told me she’s been asking for a lot lately. The comics, the books, the debates on names of fictional characters just aren’t enough anymore. I’m scared nothing will be.

“You want that lesson that bad?” I ask, wiping her mouth with a Kleenex.

“I want that chocolate.”

A NEW FALL
semester in Cavanagh ushers in beginnings and endings—kids embarking on the start of their college experience, parents subjected to the deafening quiet in their homes where there had once been teenage noise and commotion. With September comes the lingering of summer, the only a hint that the tight grip Mother Nature seems to have on the heat will eventually give way to milder temperatures.

The day has me baking and the six block trek to the house of my best friend’s father seems longer with the heat thickening the air. Still, I do enjoy the scenery. Our town is small, no more than 10,000 inhabitants. Residential areas meld effortlessly into the university campus, which in turn gives way to the older part of town that hosts retail shops, pubs and small cafes.

Beyond that lies an even older section of town with smart little well-maintained Victorians and Craftsman, all at least seventy or eight years old. This is where Joe, Autumn’s father, lives. Beyond the fence line of his backyard, beyond the reach of this older residential street, are mountainous ranges that peek and stretch so tall that they disappear into the sky, dislodged from view by the billowing sweep of clouds.

I never tire of seeing it in any part of town, but here in Joe’s neighborhood the view is the clearest. It’s here, at Joe’s, that Autumn chose to host a small barbeque for us to welcome her boyfriend, Declan, home properly from his two-week trip to Ireland, where he’d been sent to fetch his newly revealed half-brother, Quinn.

Quinn, who was two years younger than Declan, had spent a big chunk of his deceased parents’ estate on drink and women. No, that made him sound like just a run of the mill bad boy. Quinn was out of control. The amount of drinking, drug use, and sleeping around was not only threatening his health and well-being, but was also becoming an increasing embarrassment. Autumn had shared with me horror stories from Declan about how his half-brother would go for days shit-faced drunk or drugged out of his mind, waking up in a bed where he didn’t even know the name of the girl—or girls—with him. The estate trustees wanted him out of the country and on the straight and narrow, and realizing that he had an older half-brother in the States apparently gave them the “out” they needed to make sure the estate didn’t get completely squandered. I myself had no idea why they thought Declan would be the right person for the job. He barely keeps up with the varsity rugby squad he captains and his final semester studies at Cavanagh University. But, Declan being Declan, went to Ireland to take care of this unearthed family business anyway.

Despite wanting to see my friends, my steps slow as Joe’s small house comes into view. Maybe it’s Rhea and her having to undergo chemo yet again that has me hesitating to climb the steps to the front porch. Most days I’ve just wanted to stay with her. It’s why I’ve taken a leave of absence from my job as library director at CU, why I haven’t seen much of my friends in the past few months. It’s the worry, the real fear that Rhea’s condition will worsen while I’m out, and I won’t be there when she needs me, that keeps me anxious.

“Rubbish,” Uncle Clay would say. “It’s not your job to look after her, love.”

That didn’t stop me from wanting to.

Uncle Clay would often give me a wink and a nod of understanding, and despite his protests that I shouldn’t take so much time from my job, I got the feeling that both he and Aunt Carol appreciated the help I gave them. It isn’t an easy thing, tending to a sick child, especially one who has spent more than half her life in and out of hospitals. That obligation becomes monotony. That worry becomes dread. There was no way I was going to leave my aunt and uncle to face that on their own, especially since my little cousin looked up to me the way she did. And not when I knew, deep down, that the time I had with her was limited.

So it’s Rhea, yet again, who occupies my thoughts, even as the front door swings open and I’m greeted with Joe’s sweet half-smile.

“There she is,” he says, sweeping me inside before I have a chance to change my mind about attending the barbeque. “Told Autumn, I did, that you’d be along.” A tight squeeze on my shoulders and Joe has me through the den, the kitchen and out onto the back porch before he’s even paused speaking. “Knew you’d come to welcome home our Deco, didn’t I, love?”

Joe turns, holding up one finger and is down the steps, making for the small table holding cups and bottles of wine, soda and beer next to the porch and I’m left on my own, taking in the neatly outfitted back porch and patio.

A large pergola connects the porch to the back of the house, made of recycled timber that Autumn told me Joe rescued from a demolished barn just outside of Sevierville. My best friend and I helped Joe last spring, decorating the space with dozens of large pots brimming with blooms of fragrant flowers and hedges that line the perimeter of the fence and along the steps that lead to the covered patio. He had complained only mildly about the fairy lights we weaved through the breaks in the pergola and the chunkier solar lights we fastened in the branches and limbs of the large oak that hung nearly over the entire yard and swept against the ground and planked flooring that made up the back porch. He didn’t mind so much, Autumn told me, about the palette table and kitchenette Declan helped us build along the side of the house or the repurposed wicker chairs and table Autumn found at a garage sale for fifty bucks.

It has a homey, comfortable vibe, and with the mouthwatering scent of barbeque wafting in the air and the sudden lick of a breeze rustling my hair off my shoulders, I begin to relax, to feel less guilty about being here and not with Rhea. Suddenly, I feel something else on that wind. It isn’t the heat of summer that has sweat collecting against my lower back. It isn’t even the humidity that clouds in the air, or that replaces that small reprieve of cool air with something akin to a waft of heat from a fire. It is something deeper, more significant, that I feel the second I step off the back porch and onto the patio.

I’m so distracted by the sensation that I don’t bother to acknowledge Donovan, Declan’s best friend standing at the back of the yard, or pay much attention to the slumping shape of a man I pick up out of the corner of my eye next to him.

Yet something prickles up my neck, like the quick breath of a stranger passing you in the congested crowd of a subway car. I can’t quite put my finger on it, can’t tell if it is the day, or the excitement that we are all finally back together for the first time since Declan had left for Ireland. Whatever it was leaves me feeling on display, as though something thick, something weighted has taken the air around us and turned it still and faint.

“Here you are, love.” Joe offers me a drink, momentarily distracting me from that odd feeling that someone watches. No, not just watches. I am being gawked at, am the center of someone’s focused attention. “Now then. How are you?” the older man continues, holding my arm at the elbow. Joe is mildly flirty, but Autumn swears he’s harmless. And bored. Very, very bored as of late. “How is your bitty cousin?”

A small squeeze of my fingers against Joe’s thick forearm and the man takes a small step back, though he still keeps hold of my hand. “The same, I’m sad to say, but not getting worse, I don’t think.”

Joe makes the sign of the cross and his grip on my fingers tightens. “Don’t you fret, love. The Good Lord has a plan for everyone, even the smallest among us.”

I don’t argue. There is no need. I’d stopped debating my elders, or their priests a long time ago. Their assertions never wavered, and I’ve discovered that long held beliefs, those taken on out of tradition and obligation, not research or logic, were the toughest to penetrate. I have no idea why Rhea is sick but I suspect God isn’t the one that made her that way. Still, whatever His plan, I couldn’t say I agreed with Him.

Joe sips on his beer, shaking his head as he awkwardly tries to defuse the slip in mood, and his toothy grin returns. “Tell me if you’ve heard this one then… erm… how do you make an egg-roll?”

It’s his way, telling jokes that are more corny than funny. It’s the only way he knows to offer comfort—with that sweet laugh and silly sense of humor.

“You push it, Joe.”

“You do, don’t you, love?”

And Joe laughs at himself, nudging me once again as though nothing in life had been funnier than his stupid joke. Joe Brady is one of my favorite people on the planet. He is kind, gentle and always smells of wood smoke and the brandy he isn’t supposed to drink. Autumn says the woodsy smell is from the constant landscaping he does, burning limbs and leaves to keep his place and his neighbors’ neat when no one else is up to the task. It’s hard to remember that Joe hadn’t always been good or kind, having left Autumn and her mother for most of her life, but the past two years he’s mended fences and has quickly become an important part of our lives. All of our lives.

I take the kiss on the cheek he gives me with as much grace as I can muster. He’d go on telling me corny jokes and trying to convince me of God’s plan for Rhea all afternoon if I didn’t break away from him.

Just as the wind shifts again, Autumn appears through the back gate followed by Declan with his arms full of cases of beer. “Hey you,” she says and I gladly take the hug she gives me. It is long, firm and I smile at her reaction. You’d swear it had been weeks since I’d seen her last, not just this morning when she and I had our customary breakfast with our friends Mollie and Layla.