Crash (32 page)

“Yes, you do,” I said, going against every instinct screaming at me to go embrace him. “You need the details so you know how to cure it. Let me help you,” I said, reaching for him again.

“Dammit, Luce,” he said, pacing around the room. “I’m not one of your pet projects. I’m not some dog you can rescue from being euthanized. I don’t need to be saved and I sure as hell don’t want to be saved.” Pausing, he finally looked at me. “So stop trying so damn hard.”

I knew this was the point I should back off, but I couldn’t.

“No,” I said firmly.

He glared at me. “I don’t want to be saved.”

I bit my tongue to keep any signs of tears away. “Yes, you do.”

His eyes flamed. “No,” his voice shook, “I don’t.” Backing away from me, he hit the edge of my dresser, knocking over a storage box I’d pulled down from the attic yesterday.

It crashed to the floor, its contents spreading across the carpet. I was out of bed and collecting the items before he turned around.

Jude’s head fell back to glare at the ceiling before crouching down to help me. His eyes latched onto something in my hand, his face falling. Snatching the photo from my fingers, he rose, looking at the photo like it wasn’t real.

“How do you know this guy?”

A deep breath. “He was my brother.”

“Your brother was John Larson?” he said, not blinking.

Now I was crying. This morning had just become too much for the woman of steel to keep the tears at bay. I looked up at the picture between Jude’s fingers. My brother’s senior year football photo. Only seven months before he’d been murdered. Five years ago today.

“Yes,” I said, wiping my face.

The photo dropped from Jude’s hand, his face blanching. “And your dad’s first name is Wyatt?”

I nodded, grabbing the photo that had fallen to the floor.

Jude spun around, throwing his fist into the wall. It shattered through the drywall, as a cloud of white dust erupted. “How could you keep something like this from me?” he shouted, turning on me, his whole body trembling.

I was so confused, so upset, I didn’t know which one I felt more. “I told you my brother died,” I said, settling John’s picture in my lap. “Sorry if I didn’t provide the gory details.”

Pacing over to the window, Jude stared out it, his shoulders rising and falling with his breath. “Details would have been nice in this situation,” he said, his voice about to break.

“What the hell are you talking about, Jude?” I whispered. Everything was falling apart, unraveling around me, and I didn’t know what had pulled the thread.

“My full name is Jude Ryder Jamieson,” he said, turning to look at me.

That name hit me like a train. The impact was so sudden, so powerful, I couldn’t speak.

“My dad,” he said, gripping the window sill, “went to jail for shooting and killing a young man.”

I shook my head, whipping my hair back and forth. “Stop,” I said, choking on the word. Everything was spinning out of control and I wanted off this ride.

“My dad’s name is Henry Jamieson.” He paused, looking through the window like he was either going to escape out it or drive his fist through it. “My father murdered your brother.”

The picture I held slid from my hands, flipping face down on the carpet. I felt like sobbing, my body needed the release of sobbing, but I was too numb to move. I kept repeating to myself that this wasn’t real, it wasn’t possible. I had not fallen in love with the man whose father had killed my brother. God wasn’t that cruel.

“Your dad,” I began, not sure if I could get it out, “ruined my family.”

Jude pounded the window sill. “And your dad is the one to blame for setting in motion the whole damn string of events!” he shouted, turning around. “After working for one of your dad’s companies for ten years, my dad got randomly selected for a drug test, failed it, and big Mr. Wyatt Larson got the final call. He fired him.”

“Jude, he had coke and meth in him. He almost killed a man on the job site,” I said, remembering every word that was spoken, every image portrayed during the trial. My parents were too gone in their loss to reason that letting their thirteen-year-old daughter sit in on her brother’s murder trial wasn’t the best thing to allow, but I wouldn’t stay home. Hiding beneath a blanket when my brother’s murderer was being tried felt wrong. I had been there for him, even in death.

“Because my mom had just bailed!” he shouted, the sinews of his neck popping to the surface. “He was going through a rough patch, but he would have come out of it, and as a reward for a decade of service, your dad fired him. The bank foreclosed on the house two months later and we were homeless. He dropped me off at the boys’ home the same day he shot your brother.”

I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t. I was still waiting to wake up from this nightmare to Jude’s sleeping body draped over mine. “He murdered my brother,” I repeated, the words acrid and wrong in my mouth.

“It was supposed to be your dad!” he exploded, everything draining from him. His shoulders rolled forward, his head falling. “It was supposed to be your dad,” he said in a whisper.

“No,”—my tip trembled—“it was supposed to be me.”

Jude froze, looking down at me like I was his enemy. “What the hell do you mean?”

I scooted against the wall, needing its support. “Mom had asked me to take Dad’s lunch down to him that Sunday—he was working around the clock to get that project done on time—but I was being difficult and said I didn’t want to. The job-site was close to our home and I could have biked.” I closed my eyes as everything played back in my mind. “So John said he would, and that was the last time I saw him alive. That’s who your dad put three bullets into when he showed up at the worksite that day. It should have been me, waiting inside dad’s mobile office, twirling the chair, when Henry Jamieson—who was so high on meth he wasn’t able to make out who was in that chair—shot and killed my brother.” Everything inside me deflated. I was nothing but the shell of a balloon, falling to the ground. “It was supposed to be me.”

It was silent, but a silent that was so loud I wanted to cover my ears.

Finally, Jude walked past me, stopping right before he walked out. “I’m sorry it wasn’t,” he said, his voice low. “Because I really could have done without all this shit.”

Slamming the door behind him, his footsteps thundered down the stairs, out the door, and out of my life for good this time.

When the screen door slammed, I cried the flood of tears I’d held onto for five years.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I stood in front of the mirror, studying the girl reflecting back. She looked like me, but she wasn’t the same girl I remembered. Something had broken loose in the hours since Jude walked away, and it must have been vital to who I once was.

I felt flat, unable to muster any kind of emotion, and I felt lost, like everything I’d worked for and achieved had led me to a dead end. For the first time in my life, I wondered if the world around me I’d been trying to save wasn’t worth saving.

“Lucy in the sky?” a gentle knocking sounded outside my door. “You ready?”

No,
was my answer, but that’s not what came out because when it came to my brother, I never said no. I hadn’t when I’d been asked to speak at his funeral, and I hadn’t every year on the anniversary of his death when dad and I visited his grave. It was the only way I could still show him I loved him and I thought about him every day.

I took one last glance at the girl in the mirror before shaking my head and turning away. That girl was no longer me.

“Hey, dad,” I greeted, opening my door. Like the four prior, dad was in his black suit and had even managed to get his tie almost right. “Just the two of us again?” I asked, looking down the hall. My mom never accompanied us to John’s grave, and for all I knew, she’d never revisited after the day he’d been lowered into the ground.

“Your mom deals with this in her own way,” he said, wiping his palms on his jacket. “We deal with this in our way.”

Most days I wished I could deal with it mom’s way.

“Come on, it’s getting late.” He turned and headed down the stairs. I grabbed my purse and followed.

“You’re driving,” he said needlessly as he locked the front door. The last time he’d been behind the wheel of a vehicle was the day John died.

The cemetery was about an hour’s drive from the cabin, but when you were sitting next to your father in total silence, it seemed more like an entire day without pit stops. This would be my sixth time to the cemetery. I came once a year because it was the right thing to do, but I couldn’t do it any more than that. Besides, nothing of what I loved of John was buried beneath that gravestone.

Dad looked out the side window, thinking whatever the thoughts of a man who had ceased to live were, and I stared at the road ahead, trying not to think because my thoughts only led me down one road.

Like every other cemetery, it was empty. Rolling to a stop, I looked over at dad. He was frozen, still staring out the window.

“Dad,” I set my hand on his shoulder, “you ready?”

He flinched, his eyes clearing as he came back to life. “Ready.”

I slid out of the car and walked around the front. I waited.

And waited.

It was a practice in patience I’d learned five years ago. One I’d perfected.

Dad stood outside the passenger door, fidgeting and fighting with his demons. It took a lot out of me to come see John, but the kind of torture dad experienced to spiral him into a semi meltdown was the kind entire mental illness books were dedicated to.

I’d never timed it, but I’d guess fifteen minutes was about average. This time, he rolled his shoulders back and smoothed his coat into place after only five. Walking up to me, he looked over. “Let’s go say hi,” he said, adjusting his tie for the fiftieth time.

John’s headstone wasn’t far and, about fifty paces later, we were kneeling beside it. Dad looked close to fainting, but I knew he’d hold it together. He always did.

We never said anything, but I always sensed John heard what I wanted to say. The birds chirped, the sun shone down, I pulled my favorite memories of John to the surface, I tried to file the ones of Jude away for good. Life was slowly becoming one giant mess, and I wasn’t sure if this was because I was somehow cursed or if life just blew by nature. I’d been buying into the whole one person can make a difference thing this whole time only to discover that, in the end, the world sucked.

“Would you like to tell me what’s wrong?” Dad asked quietly, resting his hand on my lap.

I startled, whether more from his touch or the broken silence, I didn’t know. “I’m fine.” How was it so hard to make my voice sound normal?

“Lucy, I’ve never heard you once say you were fine. You’re either wonderful or awful or exhausted or rip-roaring angry or anything else but fine,” he said, gazing off into the horizon. “You’re a passionate person. You take after me in that department,” he said, a smile shadowing his face. “Or at least the person I used to be.” He stopped, taking in a couple of breaths, then shifted to face me. “What’s wrong?”

“How did you know?” I asked, thinking of all people on the planet, my dad would be the last person to detect something was going gangrene below the surface.

“When you stop letting yourself feel your own emotions like I have, there’s more room to feel those of others,” he said. “It’s one of the many down sides to becoming a silent shut-in.”

This was the first conversation of meaning my dad and I had had in five years, and the day and place it was happening on made me feel that John had his hand in it. “It’s about Jude,” I said, playing with the grass edging surrounding John’s gravestone.

“I thought you weren’t seeing each other anymore?” Dad cleared his throat; he was really doing this. Having a concerned parent conversation with his teenage daughter.

“We weren’t, but we kind of stumbled into each other last night.” My dad might be exhibiting a margin of strength, but I feared that telling him about the event leading up to Jude’s and my reunion would send him into another five years of absenteeism. “We worked things out and then, this morning, we found out there was something between us that we could never work out.” I also knew this information might send my dad into a downward spiral, but he was sitting before me looking so much like the beacon of strength I remembered as a little girl. Like a man that nothing could take down.

He nodded. “And what was that?”

I blew out a breath, the letters etched into John’s gravestone going blurry. “Jude’s last name is Jamieson.” Even as I said it, I still couldn’t quite believe it. I still didn’t want to believe it.

Dad sighed, rolling his shoulders. “I know.”

My head snapped up. “What?”

“I know, baby,” he repeated. “I’ve known from the beginning.”

Okay, dad was having a moment. Another break with reality, but this one led him to lie through his teeth.

“Are you saying you knew from the first night I brought Jude home that his dad was Henry Jamieson?” I spelt it out a little clearer.