Certainty (24 page)

“No,” I said.

Kyle and Noah stared at me, but with different expressions. Noah was relieved and Kyle was angry.

It was awkward. Very awkward. I was basically refusing to leave his house.

I boldly continued, “Not until you admit you can’t deal with this on your own. You shouldn’t be trying to sort this out alone. I couldn’t do it.”

“Are you serious?” Kyle looked over at Noah, like he wanted help getting rid of me.

Noah started bouncing his leg on the stool, but he didn’t say anything.

“Yes,” I said.

He was really angry now, his eyes burning. “Let me get this straight. You won’t leave my house until I agree to…what? See a school counselor or something?”

I sighed. “Okay, I will leave if you want me to. But I know that you’re…” I couldn’t say it. How could I say this? “You’re thinking about suicide.”

His eyes were wide with disbelief and he backed away from the counter and held out his arms.  “Are you kidding me?”

Noah put his hand out, in case Kyle was going to hit me, I guess. “Okay, calm down. No one is saying you’re thinking about that. He’s just worried about you.”

“You don’t even know me!” he said, his voice echoing off the walls of his enormous house.

Suddenly I realized I didn’t have tell him I could see the future, I could tell the truth about the present. The truth right now was that he mattered to other people…people he didn’t want to hurt anymore. He wouldn’t save himself for his own survival, but he would for Derek.

“MacKenzie is worried,” I said.

He stopped, her name sinking in. No matter how he tried to pretend that he was all right, MacKenzie and Derek would always be his weakness. He couldn’t even try to pretend they didn’t matter to him.

“What do you mean?” Fear filled his eyes.

“She’s afraid you can’t deal with this.”

“Why?”

“She’s scared for you. If you care about Derek’s family at all, you need to think about getting help. Do it for them. You’re not the only one hurting. Don’t do this to them right now. “

He turned around, running his fingers through his hair. “Do they think I’m crazy?” he said it so low I could barely hear.

“No. And I don’t either…whatever crazy means. You aren’t thinking right, but that’s no crime. It’s okay to fall apart. Just don’t give up. You don’t know how quickly things could change. Derek might wake up tomorrow. He might wake up tonight. You wouldn’t want to miss that. It would be such a waste if you didn’t stick this through and find out it’s all right. You shouldn’t be alone right now, for one thing. Even if you don’t feel like being around people. You need to be.”

Noah was still, watching from his perch on the chair. We could almost feel Kyle changing his mind, and we held our breaths.

“My mom isn’t coming home tonight and my Dad is in New York. I can’t help it tonight.” Kyle said, talking as if he agreed with me. It might just be for today, but maybe it was all the time he needed to think it out.

“You can stay at my house. It’s loud. It has lots of people,” Noah said. “We’re having meatloaf, though.”

Kyle turned away from us and Noah stood up, looking over at me. Were we losing our fragile chance with him?

“I don’t want to need help.” Kyle’s voice broke on the words. Tears watered his eyes and he swallowed.

Noah shrugged. “No offense, but it’s got to be better than what you’re doing now. You can keep going on with this, or you take charge. I  personally think you should take control.”

Flicking the soda tab off the counter Kyle watched it spin across the kitchen floor and into a corner.

“ I’ll get my stuff.”

“Great,” Noah said.

We walked out of his house, the rain still pouring down in the dark, gray afternoon. The sky was nearly black, the clouds pressing down on the earth, shutting out all the light. I remembered the time my family flew to see my grandmother last summer in Japan. It was a long flight, and sometimes we would fly over dark clouds. I couldn’t get over how bright the world was when you could see it from above the rain. I hoped tonight was like the rain for Kyle. If he could see past the heavy darkness that surrounded him right now, he’d see it wasn’t always that way. Away from the clouds the true color of the sky was blue. And he’d remember it when the darkness came again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Kyle

The meatloaf was tasty. Anything you can put ketchup on is tasty. At first I thought Noah’s parents wouldn’t want me to spend the night on a school night. They might wonder what the big deal was. Noah was cool about it, though. He just told them my parents weren’t home and they were immediately sympathetic. We didn’t tell them my parents were always gone.

Noah and I slept on the couches in the living room because he shares his room with his two little brothers. Before bed we watched TV and his little sisters kept jumping on us and trying to do our hair for like, two hours before they had to go to bed.

When they left I had to take three yellow bird barrettes, three green clickety-clack things and some rubber bands with plastic balls on them out of my hair. Noah had a harder job because his hair was shorter. They put little rubber bands all over his head in spiky pony tails. He almost cried trying to pull them out. There was some minor pile-driving when his little brothers attacked us after the girls left.

I was pummeled, pushed, hugged and sat on all night. I hadn’t been this swarmed with human bodies since this summer when I went to a party and we tried to stuff ten people in a closet.

Noah was right, his house was loud with lots of people. Surprisingly, I was kind of in the mood for it.

When the lights went out I couldn’t sleep. I was nervous, wondering if his family knew I was insane. Or MacKenzie’s family. Ren definitely knew, although I’m not sure how. I don’t believe in intuition or psychics but he was creepy enough to change my mind.

I thought about the garage at home. I imagined what it would have been like if I wasn’t at Noah’s.

I would have gone into the garage without turning on the lights so the neighbors wouldn’t notice. I would have sat in the car, maybe waited for a while trying to decide if I was really going to do it. And then I would have turned the engine on. I could almost feel the key in my hands and the sound the engine made. I wondered if I would suffocate right away. Was it slow? I heard you just fell asleep. No one would know until one of my parents came home the next day. The car would have run out of gas.

A low hum startled me out of my thoughts. The heater or the fridge or something. I realized I was laying in the dark in Noah’s house on his couch, his family sleeping all around me, and I was thinking about suicide. That’s seriously screwed up.

I didn’t want to be this way. I didn’t know how to fix myself, but I was going to have to do something. As clearly as I could see myself in the garage with the car running, I could see Noah trying to explain to his little sisters that I couldn’t come over anymore.

Would he even say why? I didn’t want Noah’s little brothers and sisters to have to hear that I’d killed myself. They were too little to understand that.

And I could see the hospital room where Derek’s parents sat next to his bed. Is that where they would be when MacKenzie told them I’d killed myself? They might not care. They didn’t know me, but something told me they would. MacKenzie would. What would it be like for her every day in homeroom to sit in front my empty chair, still waiting for her brother to wake up?

My parents. I didn’t want to think about that. I didn’t want my parents to know I was like this. I might have to tell them. They’d probably freak out. They’d freak out a lot less about a psychiatrist than they would about finding my body in the garage, though.

Was I crazy? Maybe. But maybe I could get better. I wanted to be like Noah, sleeping on the couch with nothing else on his mind other than eating sugar pops for breakfast. Someday I might be like that.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

MacKenzie

Derek came out of his coma two weeks later, to our relief. My mom texted me right in the middle of class and I started crying. Mr. Leitner thought it was bad news because I was crying, but I told him it was okay.

I don’t know why I cried. Maybe even though Ren told me my brother was going to wake up I didn’t really believe the nightmare would be over. Dad picked me and James up from school. I couldn’t wait to see Derek awake.

On the way to the hospital, Dad told us that Derek was having trouble remembering stuff, like he had some kind of amnesia. He couldn’t talk very well—he was a lot like he was before the coma, except this time he couldn’t remember us.

I was worried about that, but Dad told us Derek would probably get a lot of it back, it might take time.

Dad was really happy—the drive to the hospital felt surreal, like the time Mom and I drove from the mall to the hospital when Derek first got hurt, only this time it was good. It made me think that anything was possible, that any good thing could happen.

It was starting to snow and I knew soon the whole world would be pure and white. It seemed right. We stepped out of the car onto the parking lot, our feet making footprints in the almost transparent snow on the black asphalt.

The hospital was so familiar to me now that I began to notice how lost other visitors looked, holding vases of flowers and stuffed animals and talking about what floor they were going to. I felt a bond with them. This was where we all went to hope for something better.

We walked in the room, and I felt like stepping carefully so I didn’t break the dream. Today was going to be different, even though the room looked the same, it wasn’t. The curtains were open to show the snow coming down on the roof of the hospital wing below us. The eerie, white light of snowfall washed over the blankets on Derek’s bed.

He wasn’t sitting up in bed like I thought he would, he was still lying down, but his eyes were open, the gold-brown of his open gaze the most beautiful color ever invented.

He watched the three of us as we came in, looking at Dad a little longer. When he met my eyes, I smiled at him. “Hey, Derek.”

He smiled back, a sort of polite smile and I understood what amnesia was. He didn’t know me, I could tell. It hurt at little, but I reminded myself that he would get better and at least he was awake now.

“I’m your sister, MacKenzie,” I said. Mom seemed pleased at my effort, smiling at me. She was wearing some mascara and had put her hair up, so she must be feeling better.

“Hello.” His voice was hoarse and the way he said it almost made me laugh, like he was addressing the president of the United States. Or at least some strange girl he didn’t know. He was still so handsome, though I never told him that. I loved his curly brown hair and the quirk in his mouth when he was laughing at me. If I told him now he would politely thank me. It wouldn’t mean as much to him as it would have before. It stung and I swallowed my regret.

“Hi, Derek. It’s James,” James said, going up to the bed and putting his hands on the rails. His big brown eyes weren’t scared. I was proud of him, as usual.

“Hello, James.” Derek answered, this time he smiled.

“We’re glad you’re awake,” I said.

Derek sighed, almost a groan, and his eyes closed, his face moving in a small grimace. Was he still in pain? 

“It was…” he stopped, frowning hard, opening his eyes. “Big. A big house.”

“Oh.” I faltered, looking over at Dad. I didn’t know what that meant.

“We know, Big Guy,” Dad said, leaning over and putting his elbows on the rail. “It was a long time.”

That actually made sense. Big. Long time. But what did a big house mean? Did it mean anything?

Derek closed his eyes again, wincing. “No. It’s….” He opened his eyes, and I could tell he was frustrated. Was he trying to correct Dad?”

“A big house?” I said.

Derek looked at me and said, “Yes.”

“The hospital? We’re in a big house?”

He sighed. “No.”

I tried like mad to figure out what he was saying, or even if he was…well, all there. If he knew what he was talking about at all or just saying words. He seemed to be trying to tell us something.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re trying to say.”

His eyelids drooped and he smiled sleepily. “Okay.” He was so pale and thin.

“He’s going to sleep a lot for a little while,” Mom said, her mouth smiling but she had the worry wrinkle. I knew why.

None of us wanted him to go to sleep because he might not wake again, but apparently it was all right. Maybe.

James looked up at Dad. “Will he wake up again?”

“Yeah. He just needs a lot of rest.”

James watched as Derek’s eyes closed. “Okay.”

The four of us sat there, no one wanting to leave, maybe until we could see his eyes open again, looking at us, with that peculiar bewildered expression that seemed permanent.