Chapter 37

Haley

54 days

 

I’m sitting in an Adirondack chair on Laney’s front porch, wrapped in a quilt, listening to her and Mom talk. It’s cold out. We don’t usually come for vacation until school gets out so we’re never here when it’s this chilly. I’m wearing a green polar fleece Laney loaned me. It’s not in my noncolor scheme, but it’s warm.

We each have a chair; I’m on the end with Laney next to me and Mom is closest to the door that leads into the house. Izzy and Garret have gone to bed. I’m trying to give Izzy some time to get to sleep before I go in the bedroom we’re sharing and make things awkward. I haven’t minded sitting out here with Mom and Laney, though. I like listening to them talk. When I was younger, I used to fantasize what it would be like to have Laney for a mom, although Liam swears she can be every bit a bitch as my mother.

Laney’s telling this funny story about a kid in her third-grade class who keeps bringing her mother’s underwear to school.

“So is it just the lacy stuff?” Mom asks, giggling. “Or does she bring in granny panties, too?”

“Oh, she’s an equal opportunity undergarment snatcher.” Laney is cracking herself up.

They’ve been drinking wine and I think they might both be a little drunk. It’s kind of funny to see Mom like this; I don’t know that I’ve ever seen her tipsy before. If I have, I was too young to realize what was going on.

Laney takes a sip from her wineglass. “Sometimes it’s a sports bra, sometimes a thong. One day she brought a pair of high-waisted black Spanx.”

My mom is still laughing. “But why?”

“I had the same question. I’ve talked to her mom. We think it might be a security thing.”

“Like Linus’s blanket?” Mom asks.

“Maybe. But the thing is, she won’t just leave it in her backpack. I wouldn’t care if she brought underwear to school if she just left it in her bag. No, she has to hang it on her coat hook. Over her coat.”

Mom sniggers.

I hear a phone ding. Incoming message. Which reminds me how much I miss my phone. It’s so weird to be without it. A week ago, it was my lifeline. But a week seems like a million years ago now. Like another lifetime. I think about the person I was last Friday, locked in Dodge’s bathroom, and it’s kind of disturbing because I don’t feel like that person. I haven’t decided yet if that’s a good or a bad thing, although I’m definitely more stable. I have to give Mom credit. She was right. I needed to get out of our house, out of Vegas. For the first time since Caitlin died, I feel like I can actually take a deep breath. Maybe it’s just the clean Maine air.

But I still miss my phone.

I wonder what’s going on in my friends’ lives. I wonder if they’re wondering what the hell happened to me. Did anyone text Todd to ask him if he’d heard from me? Did he bother to text Marissa or Cassie and tell them my mom kidnapped me? And I don’t just miss my iPhone because I miss being connected to my friends, but I miss being able to listen to my own music, too.

I want to ask Mom if I can use her phone just to access Spotify, but I have a feeling she’s going to say “no way.” Just in case I have any ideas about getting Todd to come to Maine to get me, which I don’t. That loser never even texted me back. He just never showed up. I bet he never even left Vegas. I bet he never left his brother’s couch. He’s probably still sitting in the same place with a stupid game controller in his hand.

I hear another ding.

“Don’t look at me,” Laney says to Mom. They’re both wrapped in quilts too. The porch lights on each side of the door are on, casting soft shadows over us. I’m almost in the dark, I’m so far from the lights. Which is fine with me. It’s like I’m here, but I’m not here. Neither of them is bugging me, asking me if I’m okay or expecting me to reveal some deep dark secrets.

Mom fumbles around on her lap. “I don’t know where it went,” she says. “It’s here somewhere.”

“I’ll be right back.” Laney gets up. “Anyone want anything?”

I almost tell her she can get me a beer while she’s up, just as a joke, but I decide against it. Laney might laugh, but I’m fairly sure Mom won’t.

Mom’s still looking for her phone. She knocks over her empty wineglass with her foot. “Aha!” She holds up her phone, rights the glass on the porch floor, and then holds her phone up so she can read her text.

I sit back in my chair and stare out into the dark. The street is quiet. A man walks by with a black and white dog. He waves. I wave.

We’ve never had a dog. Dad’s not into them. I think I’d like a dog. A big one, like a lab, but not a black one. A chocolate lab. Laney used to have one, Zeus. But he got old and died.

My gaze settles on the house next door. The porch light is on there, too, but I know no one’s home. An old man used to live there, but he went to live with his son in Vermont. It’s for sale or rent or something. It’s a cool gray and white house with a two-story porch.

I glance at Mom. She’s texting an entire book.

“That Dad?” I ask.

She nods.

A second later, he texts back. She reads it, stares at the screen for a minute, and texts back just one word.

Laney comes back out onto the porch, carrying a bag of organic blue corn chips, and walks in front of Mom.

“He’s coming,” Mom says, pulling the quilt she’s sitting on up tighter around her. She doesn’t look all that happy.

“Ben?” Laney plops down in her chair and opens the bag. “That’s good, right?” She offers the bag of chips to Mom.

Mom shakes her head that she doesn’t want any.

Laney turns to me. “Come on,” she says. “You know you want some.”

I take a couple of chips because it’s easier than saying no.

Laney turns to Mom again and munches on a chip. “You didn’t answer my question. It’s a good thing Ben is coming, isn’t it?”

“Of course,” Mom says so quickly that it doesn’t sound like she really means it. “He needs to come.”

I sit back in the chair and put my feet up on the railing. I think about going inside so I don’t have to listen to this conversation. I feel bad for Mom. She thinks Dad has let her down. That he should be helping her with me—whatever that means. And I guess he has let her down, in a way. But not really. He’s not been any less a part of our lives since Caitlin died than he was before she died. He started working long hours and not asking how our day was years ago. I guess Mom was too busy with us to notice. I wonder if that makes it her fault too.

“Jules?” Laney says.

Mom looks pointedly in my direction.

“Oh for Pete’s sake, Julia.” Laney sits back in her chair, but is still looking at Mom. “She’s almost eighteen, and after what she’s been through, she’s probably the oldest one sitting on this porch.”

“Thank you, Aunt Laney.” I nod to her. “Will you be my mother?”

“I will not,” she tells me firmly. “You have one, a damned good one.” She turns back to my mom. “You were saying?”

Mom seems to be gathering her thoughts. “I do think Ben should come. He should come,” she repeats. “I’m just not sure I . . . I don’t know. That I want to deal with him right this second. You know?”

“When’s he coming?” Laney asks.

“He’s not sure. Midweek.”

“Good, so we’ll have a few days together. And we’ll have time to do something with your hair. How long’s he staying?”

“I don’t know that either.” Mom is holding her phone, just staring at the dark screen. “I need to get Izzy home, I guess. She’s missing school.”

“Izzy could miss the rest of the year and still be ahead of her class next fall,” Laney says. She looks at me. “How about you? You in a hurry to get back to Vegas?”

“To get in that car again? With that cat?” I shake my head. “No hurry.”

Laney turns back to Mom. “You’re here now. There’s no need for you to turn around and go right back. You need to rest and regroup. You all do.”

Mom exhales. “I should call him.”

“You should,” Laney agrees.

Mom slowly gets up. I guess she wasn’t really drunk. All that silliness I saw a few minutes ago is gone. Nobody sobers up that fast.

“I think I’ll get ready for bed.” She looks in my direction. “Need anything?” she asks me.

I shake my head. I feel bad that she was having a good time and now she’s sad again. Thanks, Dad. Like you couldn’t have waited until tomorrow to rain on her parade?

Mom smiles at me, but it’s her sad, tired smile. “You’re going to stay here, right? You’re not going to . . . go anywhere?”

I open my arms. “Where would I go, Mom?”

She picks up the quilt from her chair. “That’s not an answer.”

I look out over the porch rail at the streetlights. I like the way they glow and cast light in a circle that gets fainter the farther the light travels. “I’m not going anywhere, Mom.”

“Good. Because if you do, it will break my heart.” She smiles again. “Love you. Night.”

A lump rises in my throat. I can’t remember the last time that Mom said that. I mean, I know she loves me, but . . . it’s nice to hear her say it.

“I’ll be in in a little while,” Laney says. “So don’t hog the blankets. Call Ben. See what’s going on in his head.”

Mom’s standing in the light, now. She raises her brows as if to say who could possibly know what he’s thinking, but she doesn’t say anything. I watch her go into the house.

Laney picks up her wineglass. Mom’s not gone two minutes when she turns to me. “Okay, so tell me what the hell’s going on with you, Haley. Your mother’s worried sick and so am I. Why are you hell-bent on self-destructing and taking your family with you?”

I just sit there for a second, seriously considering getting up and going inside. Who does she think she is, bombarding me with something like this? Doesn’t she realize how fragile my psyche is right now? Doesn’t she realize that’s why I’m here?

But I can’t help admiring how ballsy she is, just blurting it out like that. Most people are too scared to ask screwed-up people why they’re so screwed up. Caitlin and I used to joke about how when we grew up, we hoped we had the cojones Aunt Laney has.

“I’m not trying to ruin everyone’s life,” I say, not even bothering to try to hide my annoyance with her.

“Okay. So how about your life? Why do you want to ruin yours? Drinking, drugs, dangerous sex, cutting yourself with a razor blade.” She ticks the things off like she’s making a grocery list and puts another corn chip in her mouth.

I press my lips together, trying to hold on to my annoyance, trying to find some anger to go with it. It’s a lot easier to feel angry than to feel the kind of sorrow that sucks you down into the kind of hole you can’t climb out of.

“I killed my sister, Aunt Laney,” I say. “I killed the pretty, smart one and I didn’t kill myself.”

“You caused an accident,” she responds. “Your sister was killed in that accident. It’s not the same thing.”

“That’s what Mom keeps telling me.” I pull the quilt tighter around my shoulders. It’s not just chilly out here now. It’s freakin’ cold. I expect to see snowflakes fall from the sky any second now.

We’re quiet for a couple of minutes. Talking about sororicide usually puts a damper on conversations.

But then Aunt Laney folds up the chip bag and says, “Tell me about that night.”

“What do you mean?” I turn my head to look at her.

“Tell me about the night Caitlin died. When I came for the funeral, we didn’t talk about it.”

I haven’t talked about it with anyone. My friends asked, but I just couldn’t talk about it with them. I wasn’t sure why they wanted to know; it seemed too close to sick gossip. Mom and Dad never asked. What they know is what the cops told them.

“You both went to a party that night, right?” Laney presses.

“No. Is that what people told you?” I stare out into the darkness. “Caitlin went to a party; I dropped her off. I was at a friend’s house. We had a project due in English class that following Monday.” I think about the PowerPoint presentation about women’s rights during Shakespeare’s time that we never finished. It had been really good. Not just the visual look of the presentation, but the information we’d found was interesting, especially about marriage in the sixteenth century. “I told Caitlin it was a bad idea to go. Mom thought she was going to this girl’s house who was on her cheer squad, but the party was actually at that girl’s boyfriend’s house.”

Laney takes a sip of wine. I have her full attention.

“They were drinking.”

“Of course,” Laney says.

“Of course,” I agree. “But not like just some beers. The girl’s boyfriend was older. His parents were out of town. A college party.” I squeeze my eyes shut. I haven’t thought about this since she died. I just couldn’t. It hadn’t seemed like such a big deal, her going somewhere without Mom’s permission, at the time. I mean, it had. I was really pissed at Caitlin. But she’d just broken up with her boyfriend. Mom and Dad didn’t even know she had been going out with him. And she was upset.

I press my lips together. “We were supposed to be home at eleven thirty, so I texted Caitlin at ten thirty and told her I’d pick her up at eleven. She texted me back with a different address than where I dropped her off.” I shake my head, remembering. I was so angry with her.

“Anyway, I get this bad feeling. I call and her voice sounds . . . strange. So I leave right then and when I get there, Caitlin’s the only girl there except for this one slut.” I press my lips together and wonder where my lip balm is. “Caitlin’s with this whole house full of guys and—” I feel myself tearing up. “When I walk in, these two guys are—” I start feeling a little shaky. I look at Aunt Laney. “She was pretty drunk. If I hadn’t gotten there when I did . . . I think they would have . . .” I meet her gaze in the semidarkness. “Let’s just say it wouldn’t have been consensual.”

“Oh, sweetie.” She reaches out and squeezes my hand. It’s just a quick squeeze. Then she lets go. Like she understands I can only take so much touching before it . . . it just hurts too much.

“I grabbed Caitlin’s arm and I dragged her out of that house. I really chewed her out. She was such an innocent, Aunt Laney. She had no idea what I was talking about when I told her those guys could have hurt her. I don’t know how she could have been so smart and so dumb.”

“So you got in the car?”

I nod. “She was pretty drunk.”

“And you never told your mother any of this. Did you?” she asks.

I cut my eyes at her. “To what end?”

“Right,” she says softly. She thinks for a minute. “But they didn’t do a tox screen on Caitlin after the accident?”

“Why would they?” I ask. “I was the one driving. They did one on me. I was clean.”

“Right,” she murmurs.

“So, anyway.” I lean forward. “We get in the car and we’re kind of arguing. She’s telling me to mind my own business.” I look at Laney. “But she puts her seat belt on. I tell her to put her seat belt on.” I look away. “And I tell her she can’t be hanging with people like that. I don’t care how nice her friend is. The boyfriend and his friends, they’re losers and they’re dangerous. But she’s all sloppy drunk so she’s hollering at me, telling me I’m not her mother and crap like that.” I squeeze my eyes shut for a second. I’d certainly done a little bit of drinking, smoking a little pot, and going to parties, but I never ever let myself get in a situation like that. But Caitlin was just . . . dumb about some things.

I take a breath. Exhale. “So she’s being obnoxious and she’s telling me she’s getting out of the car. And I’m telling her she’s not. And the whole time she’s running her mouth, I’m driving and the seat belt thing is dinging.”

Tears well in my eyes again as I try to remember the exact second when the car stopped dinging. When it stopped telling me Caitlin didn’t have her seat belt on. When I forgot she wasn’t seat-belted in anymore.

“I was trying to figure out what to do. Did I call Mom and lie and tell her we were going to be late because, I don’t know, some friend got wasted and we were driving her home? Or did I try to sneak Caitlin in? I might have gotten away with it. I could have hurried Caitlin down the hall to her room, then gone in to Mom and Dad’s room and like sat on the edge of their bed and talked with Mom for a minute. She didn’t usually wait up for us, but she always knew when we came in. We had to tell her we were home. And if we were five minutes late, she knew it.”

“And then—” My voice catches in my throat and I feel Laney’s warm hand on mine. And this time she doesn’t pull it away. “I just . . . I missed the stop sign.” I still can’t believe I did it because I’m a good driver. Was a good driver. I didn’t even have any speeding tickets. “I don’t know what happened, Aunt Laney.” I look at her and she has big fat tears running down her cheeks. “There was this horrible sound like you can’t imagine. Glass shattering, metal bending and twisting and . . . it was so loud.” I pull my hand from hers, grab the edge of the quilt, and try to pull it tighter to me. I’m so cold, I’m shivering.

“And you didn’t tell your mom any of this?”

I shake my head. “Caitlin just made a mistake. It’s not like she was going to start getting in trouble or anything.” I sniff and rub my face on the quilt. “I wouldn’t have let that happen.”

We’re both quiet again.

“You were a good big sister to her,” Laney says.

“I wasn’t. I let her unhook her seat belt and I didn’t tell her to put it back on. If she’d put her seat belt back on—”

“Oh, Haley. It was a mistake.” She looks into my face. “Like one of the hundreds, thousands we make in a lifetime. It was just bad luck. Bad timing. Whatever.”

I stare out at the street in front of the house. I like Laney’s house. I like her street with all the grass and trees, and in the summer there are flowers everywhere. I like how quiet it is here. People are friendly, but they’re not like, I don’t know . . . nosy.

“You have to let the guilt go, Haley,” Laney says quietly.

I think about that for a minute. “Because I’m hurting Mom and Dad and Izzy?”

She stares at me, and even though I don’t want to, I look at her. “Because you’re hurting yourself.”

For some reason, I don’t know why, I laugh and rub my forearm that I’m still keeping bandaged. It hurts when I push on it, but I realize this is the first time I’ve done it in hours.

“You’re so smart, Haley. And you’re funny and you’re a good person—”

“Don’t forget beautiful,” I quip.

She’s smiling even though she still has tears in her eyes. “And beautiful. You have so much to give the world, but you’re in a place right now where you have to make a choice. Are you going to give to the world, or are you going to take from it? Are you going to give the world mostly sadness, or mostly happiness? It’s your choice. We each have it. I truly believe that. You know—”

She’s quiet long enough that I glance over at her. Her eyes are full of tears and she’s staring out over the railing. “You know, when Sean was killed in Afghanistan, I—and don’t you dare repeat this, not even to your mother . . . but I considered committing suicide.” She shakes her head. “I was in that much pain. But then I looked at my boys and I thought about what Sean would want and I knew that I couldn’t do that to him or my boys . . . or myself. I didn’t want to put more pain in the world. I want to give good things. I wanted to raise my boys. I wanted to teach. This probably sounds silly, but I wanted . . . I want to make the world a better place.”

I think about that for a minute. I think about all the things Caitlin and I used to talk about doing. She wanted to be some kind of environmentalist. She wanted to make people aware of how they were messing up the planet and teach them how to take care of it instead.

“I know this is hard. I cannot imagine what it must be like for you, but . . . Haley, your mom and Izzy love you so much.”

I notice she doesn’t mention Dad. Which is weird because I never got the feeling she didn’t like him or anything.

“Izzy’s so mad at me,” I say.

“She’s ten years old. She’ll come around. You just have to keep being there for her.” She reaches out and pats my knee. “You know what?”

“What?”

“I think we should go to bed,” she says, getting to her feet and taking the quilt with her.

I look out over the rail. “Is it okay if I stay out here for a little while longer?”

“Sure.” She starts for the door. “Just lock the door when you come inside.”

I watch her for a second. “You’re not worried I’m going to try to run away?”

She catches the doorjamb with her hand as she steps inside. “Nah. Because if you run away, I’ll come after you.” She waggles her finger at me. “And you know it. And when I catch you, it won’t be pretty.” Then she smiles. “Night, sweetie.”

“Good night,” I say. And then I take Caitlin’s pink ball out of my pocket and I hold it and just sit there in the quiet darkness.