thirty-five

Caleb

Two days after the frolf game, I’m standing in front of my sister’s bedroom door. Lenny and Julio went out, and my dad is at work. It’s the perfect time to have it out with Leah.

I knock on the door and wait. She cracks it, but doesn’t let me in.

“Do you need something?”

“Yeah,” I say. “We need to talk.”

She opens her door wide and sits on the edge of her bed. Her room used to have posters of guys in boy bands, but now she’s got pictures of skulls and crossbones and posters that remind me of death.

It’s too fucked up for words.

“You’ve got to come clean to Mom and Dad.” There, I said it. “I’m done taking the fall. It wasn’t just telling the cops I was the one driving. It wasn’t just pleading guilty and being locked up in jail for almost a year. Our lie is like a fucking cancer that’s spread to every single area of our lives.” I point to the posters on her wall. “You do realize this is your cry for help. It’s sick shit, Leah.”

The more I look at those skull pictures staring at me with their empty-holed eyes, the more I want to rebel against it. I’m not dead. I don’t want to be dead. I don’t want my sister to be dead. And I sure as hell don’t want to be haunted by the past anymore.

“You promised,” she says in an eerily calm voice. “When I told you about the accident, you said you’d take care of it.”

“I was drunk, Leah. I hardly knew what I was doing, and by the time I realized I shouldn’t have lied to the police, it was too late.”

“I was scared.”

“And I wasn’t?” I snap. But maybe she didn’t know how I was feeling, because I masked every emotion I had after I got arrested. I take a deep breath and try again. “It’s time to tell Mom and Dad.”

I look up and see a picture of a skeleton with its teeth sunk into a heart and I can’t take it anymore … I rake my fingers across the wall and rip them all down. “I’m done with you looking like death warmed over. I hate what you did to Maggie. I hate it, and I hate you for making me promise to take our secret to the grave and then paying me back by being a fucking recluse.”

“Caleb, lay off her.”

I turn to see Julio standing in the doorway.

“Stay out of this, Julio,” I growl.

Instead of listening to me, Julio walks into the room and stands next to my sister. “I said lay off.”

Is he kidding me? “This doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“Yes, it does,” Leah murmurs. She looks up at me with tear-filled eyes. “Because last night Julio and I stayed up all night and talked. He convinced me to turn myself in.”

Huh?

I didn’t expect that. I expected a lot of things to come out of my sister’s mouth, but not that.

Relief floods all my senses, followed by worry and fear. What will happen when she turns herself in? Will she have to serve time? Those questions have been running through my head every time I thought about what would happen if Leah confessed.

How was it Julio who convinced her to come clean?

“Leah’s tougher than she thinks,” Julio says as he puts his arm around her shoulder. “She can do this.” He squeezes her shoulders and looks into her eyes. “You can do this.”

“You’ve known my sister all of three days, Julio.”

“Yeah, and I bet I know her better than you.”

Just when I’m about to laugh at that ridiculous comment, Leah says, “Julio’s right. For the longest time I wanted to tell you how I felt, but I couldn’t. You were sad or angry or pissed off … and I was afraid of hurting you again.”

My sister chokes back tears and runs into my arms. “I’m so sorry about what I did to you. Julio told me how it was in jail for the two of you, and I’m just … so sorry.” She swipes at her eyes and says, “I think we need to call Dad and have him meet us at the rehab center. Whether Mom realizes it or not, she needs her son back.”

An hour later I’m sitting in the waiting room of New Horizons Recovery Center. My dad didn’t really want us to have this meeting because he thinks my mom’s emotional status is too fragile, but when Leah and I said we were coming to see her with or without him, he agreed to meet us.

A woman with the name Rachel on her nametag greets us, then has us go into what’s called a group therapy room to wait for my mom. It makes me feel stiff and uncomfortable, because we had mandatory group therapy sessions when I was in jail. I have to remind myself that this isn’t jail. My mom wants to be here. She could leave on her own, but has chosen to stay because she doesn’t trust herself not to use prescription drugs as a crutch when things get tough.

“You can have a seat, Caleb,” Rachel says in a soft voice probably meant to calm me.

I try not to pace back and forth in the room like a caged animal, but I can’t sit because I’ve got a bunch of pent-up nervous energy. “No, thanks.”

The chairs are situated in a circle. My dad is sitting in one chair in his three-piece suit and tie. My sister, surprisingly, isn’t slumped in her chair. She’s sitting straight up and has a determined look on her face. If Julio was the one who talked her into facing all this crap head-on, he’s a fucking genius.

My sister doesn’t know it yet, but I’m not abandoning her. She’s not the only one who made mistakes the night of the accident.

As soon as my mom walks in the room in grey sweats with the New Horizons logo on the front, I realize she’s different. Her face is drawn and her spirit seems somehow
… lost.

My first instinct is to go up and hug her but I figure out, by the way she has her hands folded on her chest, that she doesn’t want any affection from me or anyone else in the room.

Mom stops in her tracks when she sees me step toward her. “Why are you here?”

My veins are pumping hard and I’m so damn tense my arms are stiff at my sides. This is already a billion times harder than I imagined. “I came back. Maggie told me you guys needed me. At first I didn’t want to believe her …”

“You left me. A good son doesn’t leave his mother.”

Her words cut deep. Oh, man, I should never have left. I thought it would be best, that everything would be okay if the “Caleb Quotient” was out of the equation. I was wrong. I’ve managed to screw up so much in such a short amount of time.

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

Deflated, I sit in the chair next to Leah.

“I’m sorry, too,” Leah says. “I need to apologize to everyone in this family.”

My sister turns to me and puts her hand on my knee. I put my hand on top of hers.

I feel her hesitation and fear as if it’s my own. But I also feel her determination to set the wrongs of the past right.

“Mom, Dad,” Leah says after I nod to her, giving her silent support. “I was the one who hit Maggie the night of the accident.”

Watching the expression change on my parents’ faces is pure torture. At first they cock their heads to the side as if they’ve heard the words wrong. When Leah doesn’t say anything else, the reality of what she said starts to sink in.

“No,” my mom whispers, shaking her head. “No. No.”

“What are you saying, Leah?” my dad asks, his voice about to crack. “What. Are. You. Saying?”

A stream of tears start flowing down Leah’s face. “I was at the party. I’d had maybe two beers. When I was driving home, I swerved to hit a squirrel. I didn’t mean to hit Maggie.” She’s choking on her tears now, and I look up at the ceiling in an attempt to hold myself in check.

It’s not working.

Dammit.

Tears start forming in my eyes. I try to blink them back, but it’s no use. Seeing my sister so upset, seeing my dad and mom frozen in shock, and knowing that one fateful night destroyed my family and permanently damaged Maggie’s leg is just too much for me.

I dab at my own tears and attempt an explanation.

“When Leah came back to the party all freaked out, I told her I’d take care of it,” I tell them. “I was so wasted that night, I wasn’t thinking straight. When the cops asked who was driving, I said it was me.”

“Oh, God, Caleb, I’m so sorry,” Leah cries out. “I don’t know how you could ever forgive me. I don’t deserve forgiveness for the hell I put you through.”

She buries her head in her hands.

“I can’t believe this is happening,” my dad says. “This can’t be happening.”

“No,” my mom says again.

I look over at Rachel. I think she was expecting a regular family therapy session, and from her deer-in-headlights look I think we’ve shocked her into silence.

I nod. “It’s true.” Man, I feel a sort of freedom I haven’t felt in a long time. I want to share this with Maggie. I guess now is as good a time as any to say the other piece of news I’ve been holding back.

“I know this is another bomb I’m dropping, but Maggie Armstrong and I are dating. I didn’t mean for it to happen. I denied it for a long time, then hid it for a while … and I’m not gonna do that anymore.”

“Does she know …” my dad says, his voice trailing off. I know he’s on the brink of breaking down. I can see it in his trembling lip and shaking hands.

“Yeah, she knows.” I look over at Leah. “Maggie knows everything.”

My mom looks at me. It’s the first time she’s looked at me without contempt or scorn since I was arrested. She keeps shaking her head, as if she’s trying to wrap her brain around this new, totally unexpected information. “Leah, how could you?” Mom asks, her words coming out slow. “How could you stand by and let your brother go to jail for something you did?”

“I don’t know, Mom. I don’t know. But I’m going to make it right.” Her puffy, bloodshot eyes meet mine. “I’m turning myself in tomorrow.”