Friday morning
OLIVIA WAS SITTING IN THE BREAKFAST NOOK, DRINKING ORANGE JUICE. James was driving her parents and brother back to Windward.
Last night around ten, after returning from the precinct, Grant had knocked on her door. He was walking oddly because of the ankle bracelet. “This thing hurts like a bitch. But that was the condition. Otherwise the cops wouldn’t let me go back to Windward.” He sat down on the bed beside her, and after glancing over the top of her pad to see what she was sketching, leaned back against the wall. “They took fingerprints and samples of my hair to see if anything matches stuff they found in Tut’s office—or Hollins’s. Nothing’s gonna. I can swear to that, Olivia. I had zip to do with any of that.”
Olivia looked over the top of her sketchpad at him.
“You believe me, don’t you?” Grant asked.
“Yeah, Grant. I don’t think you killed anybody.”
“That’s all you’re going to say?”
She put down the pad and her grease pencil. She was about to ask how many slips he’d had the past year. But really, whether it was four or five or fifty, what did it matter? “I thought last Thanksgiving was gonna be like a turning point. I thought you’d hit bottom.” Dammit, she teared up.
He wrapped his arms around her, and she let him hug her. “I’m sorry,” he kept saying over and over. When they pulled apart, she saw he was crying too. “I dunno. I really don’t. I try to do what they say at Windward, focus on staying off drugs one day at a time. I’ve been there over a year. I mean I know I’m an addict; I’m not fooling myself about that anymore. But sometimes I wake up—I may not even be depressed or anything. I wake up feeling pretty good, but it hits me that what I want most in the entire world is to get high that day. And so I will. I’ll get hold of some coke and do a line or two and think”—Grant nodded to himself—“‘yeah, this is how you’re supposed to feel.’”
“I don’t get it, why are you that way and not me? I mean, we have the same shitty parents, the same genes.”
Grant lifted his shoulders in a “beats me” shrug. “The first time I ever tried pot, right away I knew this was something major. And just a toke or two wasn’t gonna do it. Right away what I wanted was to get stoned out of my fucking gourd.”
They went downstairs to make Jiffy Pop and root beer floats, like they used to. Then they watched a horror movie in the den. Before going to bed, Olivia hugged her brother again.
“Look, don’t give up on me, okay?” Grant said. “I don’t know what I’d do if you did.”
“I won’t, Grant. I want so much for you to be all better.”
“Me too. All I can do is keep trying.”
“I know.” Olivia held up her hand, fingers crossed. That was about all she could do—keep hoping.
Now, as she rinsed out the juice glass, all at once Olivia found herself thinking about Dr. E.’s office, the door to the garden, and something Dr. E. had said started ringing in her head. In her mind Olivia forced herself back to the morning she found Tut, trying to see everything as if it were separate frames in a movie. She was in Tut’s office…. Mr. Marshall came…. They went downstairs…. Mr. Marshall got her water…. Olivia was sitting on the couch…. The other family left—Olivia remembered the little girl’s legs wrapped around her father’s waist as he walked to the Annex entryway…. Mrs. Mac arrived all upset…. Then the two guys got there with a stretcher.
The guys with the stretcher. They’d come right in the Annex front door—that was what she’d forgotten before. It was such a little detail.
She picked up her cell and made a call. She didn’t want to go to the precinct alone.