Twenty minutes later, Steven"s little car-a blue Toyota Corolla that he shares with his older sister Sarah-pulls up next to the Lemon. His brakes squeak as he comes to a stop. He rolls down the window.
"Do you want me to try to jump you?" he asks.
"Don"t bother." I want him to expend as little effort here as possible. "I just need to get home."
He leans to unlock the pa.s.senger door and clears a bunch of books and papers off the seat so I can sit down. He waits while I put my seat belt on, then clears his throat and backs us out of the parking lot.
We head north on O Street. It"s fully dark now, and a light snow is falling, catching the street lights. We make small talk for a while: the weather (cold, as always), Ms. Mahoney (awesome, as always), and college plans (still waiting to get our acceptance letters). Then we hit Wyuka Cemetery, its heavy black iron fence stretching along the edge of the road, the graves, old trees, and mausoleums looming beyond it.
Steven and I stop talking as we pa.s.s. He clears his throat again, his expression suddenly clouded.
"Lex . . . ," he starts.
I say, "I know I shouldn"t have called you, but there was n.o.body else. I"m sorry. Won"t happen again."
"Of course you should have called me," he says sharply. "We"re still friends, aren"t we? I thought we were still friends."
"I don"t know," I admit. If the definition of the word friend is someone you"re comfortable with, someone it feels good to be around, then Steven and I are definitely not friends.
"I"d like us to be friends, Lex," he says.
But even coming from him it sounds like a lie.
"Do you want to get something to eat?" he asks as we turn onto 27th. "There"s the Imperial Palace coming up."
My favorite Chinese place.
That"s where we went out to dinner that night. Does Steven remember?
"No," I say quickly, before he can turn into the parking lot. "I have dinner waiting for me at home." An obvious lie. "Plus I have a ton of homework I need to get to," I throw in for good measure.
He doesn"t call me out on it. We drive for a while, past the restaurant, past a video arcade we always used to go to, past the flower shop where he bought my corsage for the homecoming dance and where we got Ty"s funeral flowers. It"s so quiet I feel like my head is going to implode.
Steven reaches for the radio dial but pauses before he turns it on. "Music?"
Oh G.o.d, yes. Music.
"Yes, please."
We"re flooded with Yo-Yo Ma"s cello playing Bach"s Suite No. 1 in G Major. I close my eyes and let the notes wash over me. This was a bad idea, I think for the thousandth time. But at least we"re more than halfway home.
"So," Steven says, just when it feels like I might survive this little joyride. "You still won"t call your dad, huh?"
My eyes open. He"s looking at the road, the light from the oncoming headlights moving in lines across his face, but it feels like he"s looking at me.
"No, I don"t call him. Nothing has changed on that front."
"That"s too bad. I thought maybe, with Ty, it might bring you two together," he says.
"I don"t want to be together with my dad," I snap.
We stop at a red. Steven looks at me. The Bach is suddenly not enough to drown the silence.
"Why not?" he asks.
"If my dad hadn"t left us, Ty would still be alive." It surprises me when I say it. I didn"t know I actually believed it-not in such simple terms, anyway-until the words left my mouth. But I do believe it.
"You don"t know that," Steven says.
"I don"t need you to be my therapist, Steven," I say, my sudden anger welcome against whatever else it is that I"m feeling. "I have a therapist."
"Then what do you need me to be?" he asks, and pins me with those well-meaning brown eyes. "Tell me what you need, Lex, and I"ll do that. I"ll be that."
I look away. "It"s green."
"What?"
"The light"s green."
"Oh." He steps on the gas. Then he reaches up and turns off the music. Sighs.
"I wish you"d talk to me," he says. "Tell me what"s going on with you. I know we"re not together anymore, and I respect your wishes about that, but that doesn"t mean I"ve stopped caring about you. I-"
"I"ll tell you what I don"t need," I interrupt. "I don"t need sneaky love poems. I don"t need you calling my house to check up on me. I don"t need to feel like you"re always there breathing down my neck. That"s what I don"t need."
He looks confused. "What?"
"I don"t want to talk about it," I say. "I need a ride home. Okay?"
His jaw tightens. "Okay."
We go the rest of the way-ten long minutes-without saying another word.
I jump out before we"ve even fully stopped in my driveway. "Thanks for the ride."
I"m gone before he can form a response. I duck through the first door that"s available: the side door to the garage. But I don"t close the door behind me all the way. I leave it open a crack and watch Steven as he sits for a while, his eyes closed, his hands gripping the wheel.
I"m hurting him. Still.
I was right to hesitate, when Steven asked me to go out with him. Of course I was right. We were destined to break up, the way all early romances are doomed. And now things are awkward with our friends. And we are hurting each other.
I was right.
He opens his eyes and backs the car out, then drives off fast, spraying snow and gravel.
I close the door.
That"s when I realize that I"m in the garage.
I gaze at the spot.
Where my brother died.
They cleaned it up after, some company that does that. There"s no blood here now, no dark stain to mark the place, but there is a chip in the cement. I can"t remember if it was there before, or if it was created by the bullet after it pa.s.sed through. Which makes me immediately start considering angles and trajectory and velocity, and I don"t want to think about that.
I look around at the last things Ty would have seen: the rusty rakes and shovels lining the wall, the gra.s.s-encrusted lawn mower, our broken s...o...b..ower, the old wheelbarrow with a flat tire, the barrel of dog food that"s still here even though our dog died a year ago. It smells like dust and motor oil and plants decaying.
It"s a depressing place to die. Dark and cold and dingy.
I imagine the shot, how it must have filled this s.p.a.ce with its noise, how it must have deafened him in those few seconds he could hear. I imagine the gunpowder, curling in the air. The smell of blood. The chill of the cement against his cheek as his vision faded.
He would have felt so alone here.
I go inside to the kitchen. I stand for a few minutes staring into the refrigerator, which is like a barren wasteland, it"s so empty, but that"s fine because I"m not hungry anymore. I take out a bottle of Mom"s mandatory Diet c.o.ke-which I"ve been trying to get her to quit on account of the nasty chemicals-and I chug it. The bubbles burn my nose.
I"m almost finished with it when I think I see, out of the corner of my eye, a figure in the reflection of the kitchen window. A flash. Ty.
But when I lower the bottle, when I turn, he"s gone.
Of course.
I toss the bottle in the recycling bin and put my back to the window. From here I have a view of the top of the stairwell. The empty frame of Dad"s graduation photo gleams at me, like it"s trying to get my attention.
Oh, that"s right, I think. The mystery.
How would Sherlock Holmes go about solving this case?
Well, I reason, first it might be a good idea to check to see if there are any other photos missing from where they ought to be. Or if the hunting picture and Dad"s graduation picture are the only two. That"d be a start.
I do a quick mental rundown of where there are pictures. Then I check the mantel over the fireplace in the living room, but nothing"s out of order there. I try Dad"s office, where there"s still a silver framed photo of him and Mom on their fifteenth wedding anniversary. Dad didn"t take it when he left. Mom"s never taken it down. It"s still there, a dusty example of the kind of parental units I used to have. I try the guest bathroom, where years ago Mom framed several photos of Ty and me taking baths together as toddlers, all the private places covered with bubbles but humiliating nonetheless. All those pictures are still in place. Outside of the mother lode in the stairwell, I can"t think of anywhere there are framed photos.
Nothing else is missing. Back to square one.
Clearly I"m no Sherlock Holmes.
But who says they have to be framed photos? it occurs to me suddenly. That sends me to a particular shelf on the bookcase in the bas.e.m.e.nt den, where there"s a row of photo alb.u.ms. Mom and Dad"s wedding. Their honeymoon. Family vacations. And then our baby books, mine and Ty"s both.
Mine is full and well maintained. Mom carefully filled out the family tree and all the details about my birth, like that I was born at 9:46 at night after eleven hours of labor, and I had excellent Apgar scores, and the first three months of my life I spent approximately three and a half hours a day crying for no good reason at all, which is just under the clinical definition of colic. She has the dates and times of all my first accomplishments: my first bath, my first smile, my first steps and words (Da-da, then dog-gy, then Ma-ma, which totally offended my mother), my first teeth, my first haircut, my first friend, where it says Sadie McIntyre in Mom"s perfect cursive. As if I really want to know that stuff.
Ty"s baby book is slimmer. By the time Ty came along, Mom had her hands full with me and no time to spend lovingly doc.u.menting every moment of his life. The second kid always gets shafted in the picture department. He"s lucky, I suppose, that he has any photos in his book at all.
It"s hard to thumb through it, but I do.
Ty as a fat and purple sleeping lump.
Ty as an adorable chubby toddler.
Ty on a camping trip, wearing Dad"s Jeep baseball hat, drinking a can of grape Fanta with a straw.
Ty petting Sunny.
Ty in bed, on Elmo sheets, with his dimpled hands clasped and his eyes closed, saying his prayers.
Now I lay me down to sleep.
I skip over the pictures of Ty and me, because something in my chest twists when I look at them, all this carefully archived evidence of what we"ve lost.
His first word was Ma-ma, incidentally. Kiss-up.
It doesn"t take long for me to realize that there are photos missing in this book, too, not just places Mom was too busy to fill in, but empty s.p.a.ces with the residue of double-sided tape still marking the page. But unlike the framed photos that are MIA, his baby book photos aren"t something I have memorized. I don"t know what"s gone. All I can do at this point is make an educated guess here and there and count the spots where I conclude that a photo has been removed.
Eight photos, in all. Which brings us to a grand total of ten missing photos.
I"m still no closer to understanding what"s going on here. Or why.
I hear footsteps on the floor above me. Part of me freezes for about three seconds, until I recognize the sound of Mom"s jingling keys. She has a rhythm when she gets home: open the coat closet by the door, hang up her coat. Walk to the kitchen and set down the mail in the tray on the kitchen counter. Open one of the cabinets and stick in her purse and her keys. Make herself a cup of instant coffee-or, more recently, a wine cooler or gla.s.s of wine.
I"m starting to fear for her liver.
I glance at the clock on the cable box near the bas.e.m.e.nt TV. 6:07.
Mom shouldn"t be home yet.
I take the stairs two at a time. Mom yelps when I pop up at the top.
"Hey," I say. "Get off early?"
"How was your day?" she asks me, sliding by my question.
Oh, you know, Mom, I think. Fan-freaking-tastic.
"The Lemon died," I report. "I don"t know if she"s coming back this time. She"s still in the parking lot at Dave"s."
"Oh no," Mom exclaims. "How did you get home?"
"I had to get a ride with Steven."
"Oh." This has got to be the most loaded "oh" a person has ever uttered.
"Yeah," I affirm. Awkward city.
Her expression softens. Mom understands breakups. She gives a stilted laugh. "That car of yours definitely has the right name, doesn"t it?"
I nod.
"If only we had some-" she starts to say, and then stops herself.
If only we had some money. To buy a new car.