Brother/Sister (15 page)

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Dude. Everywhere! First I heard it was just Naomi—that was this morning. Then, just like, half an hour ago, I got a text from Ricardo that he’d heard Craig was missing too. I guess there was a note, signed in blood by both of them.”

Rumors. Gossip. It was absurd, but still, all kinds of crazy stuff flooded into my head then. The images of their bodies stuffed into those wetsuits, and what they might look like now. My sister. Her tears. The look of rage and betrayal that might cloud over her face. The other kids in town—and adults, everybody—whispering into tin cans all connected by strings about
that Will, we always knew he was no good
. Myself in shackles. Myself holding a turret gun, mowing down everyone from here to San Fran.

“Craig,” I said, spitting as I spoke. “If there’s anyone who deserves to get his head smashed in, it’s him.” I could have said anything. I wasn’t thinking at all, just battling back the rage gushing inside me.

Lewis backed up a step or two, his hands up in front of himself like he was warding me off. “Whoa, dude. That’s like total bad mojo,” he said. “I don’t know about Craig, they haven’t found him yet, I think, but, you know, Naomi’s head
was
smashed in.” The way he was looking at me, it was like he could see something under my skin, a knotted, matted rodent curled up in my chest, and he couldn’t tell if it was rabid or not.

“Oh! Jesus!” I said. “That’s horrible. You’re right. I just . . .” Trailing off, I shook my head gravely, acting like the sad news was just now sinking in. I mumbled something about Asheley, how she and Craig had been having a hard time. Then, for cover, so my face wouldn’t betray me in some way, I turned toward my ball and concentrated on putting.

“Have you gone out yet?” said Lewis. “Wanna shoot a round.”

I didn’t see how I could say no.

One thing about Lewis that worked in my favor is that he’s such a bro that there was no way he was going to interrogate me. His imagination only goes three ways: talking shit about girls, recapping the highlights off of SportsCenter, and mocking you for whatever weakness he thinks he’s found. As we wandered from hole to hole, I kept waiting for him to surprise me with a question about Craig or Naomi, or with some bit of information he’d forgotten to tell me, something that would trap me into incriminating myself, but he didn’t let me down. I was playing like shit, and through the whole front nine, the only conversations we had consisted of him making catcalls and riding me about my game.

Unless he was hiding his suspicions from me, thinking through what I’d said to him on the putting green and watching me for further evidence. Silently putting the pieces together.

By the time we’d reached the fourteenth hole—the little par three where I’d hit my hole in one during the Invitational—I was feeling like I couldn’t take much more. The pressure inside me was full to bursting. For the past three holes, I’d been sure I was about to throw up.

The fact that he was kicking my ass just made it worse.

Teeing off with my five iron, I knocked the ball long, into the waist-high grass behind the green.

“Let me show you how it’s done, son,” Lewis said. Then he finessed his ball beautifully, setting himself up for a birdie, eight feet from the hole.

Prick.

I spent the next fifteen minutes whacking at the grass in search of my ball, but I came up with nothing. It had completely disappeared. And the longer I looked and the more obvious it was that I’d never find the ball, the more bitter I became about Lewis and how he’d taken me off my game with his comments about Craig and Naomi. And this led me back to the thoughts I’d been having earlier, the images of dead bodies and destroyed lives and my total impotence, my utter inability to control Asheley’s feelings.

Next thing I knew, I was smashing my club against the trunk of the oak tree out there, just bludgeoning it, doing to it what I wanted to do to Lewis. But the tree was a whole lot stronger than me. All I ended up doing was twisting my club up like a pipe cleaner.

I’ll say this: it felt good. By the time I was done, I was calm as can be.

“Dude, you should lay off those steroids,” said Lewis.

I saw my opening and I took it. “God, sorry, man. I guess I’m all wound up. I think I’m in shock. Thinking about Naomi and Craig. What they did. It’s got me all fucked up. You know? Naomi, fine, I feel bad for her and whatever, but I didn’t really know her that well, but Craig, I mean, you know? He dated my sister. She—” Here the truth caught in my throat, but I pushed it out. “She
loved
him. And hearing he went and killed himself, it’s just gonna destroy her. Know what I mean?”

Lewis didn’t say a thing. He just stared at me, sizing up that rodent in my gut again.

“Man,” he said. “You’ve got problems.”

Like I didn’t know that.

We didn’t say another word to each other throughout the rest of our round. What more was there to say? He suspected me, and he knew I knew he suspected me. The only question was who would he tell and what could I do about it?

Unless that was just me overreacting.

Paranoia. Man, it’s a killer.

I was breaking up inside.
I knew that, eventually, I’d spill everything—I didn’t know who I’d tell, and I didn’t know when, but at some point, it was all going to come tumbling out. The guilt was just too much. And I couldn’t grieve as long as I was keeping it all a secret.

And on top of that, there was the other guilt I’d feel if I
did
tell. What would happen to Will? What would they do to him? What would he do to himself? To me?

No matter what I did, I’d end up being a bad person, somehow.

By the end of the week,
the rumors were flying all over the place, on chat sites like The Bay where everyone hung out, on Facebook, on everybody’s Twitter feeds. And even though I don’t do any of that crap, I could feel the pressure. There were all sorts of variations on what happened, but the basic idea was that Craig and Naomi had been depressed for weeks and then offed themselves. Fine. If that’s how they wanted to play it, that was fine with me.

It was destroying Asheley, though.

There was hardly any real news—like legit news, something more than kids talking—about what the cops had discovered and how they were investigating. At least in the press, the two things were being presented as unrelated. There was the story the day Naomi’s body had been found. And another one three days later about how Craig was missing—turns out his dad came up out of whatever hole he’d been hiding in and checked in on the shack they lived in.

Maybe you don’t know this: Craig’s mom had died way back when he was six and he’d been raised, if you could call it that, by his dad, a pothead surfer flake who spent most of his time floating from one girlfriend’s apartment to another. He’d stop in for a change of clothes, or to drop off some cash maybe, once every month and a half or so, but Craig was basically alone most of the time. When Surfer Dude saw the article about Naomi, he remembered,
whoa, wait, I’ve got a kid somewhere
, and he went off to try to find him. He’d made the evening news, looking tragic, and vamped it up about how his precious baby boy had disappeared.

Anyway, that was it. There was a whole lot of frothing and crying, but no news that helped me in any way. It made me wonder, what were they hiding, and how close were they to figuring out the truth? Maybe this was all some huge elaborate trap. Maybe the whole town was waiting for me to slip up. And this was a frustrating place for me to be. It was paralyzing. My brain was spinning constantly around the need to prove my innocence, but I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t take action, because if I did, that would be a sure way to get them to suspect me. Know what I mean? It would be like climbing up onto the roof of the school and waving my arms around, shouting into a megaphone, “Not it, not it! I didn’t do it,” which obviously would mean that I did.

So think about that for a quick second. Imagine how frantic that made me inside. I might have still looked pretty normal to everybody else, but I wasn’t feeling normal at all anymore.

The only thing that kept me together was that I knew I had to be strong for Asheley.

When I got home
from work on Saturday, Will was making me another dinner.

This time he’d cleared off the dining room table—the first time that had happened since I can’t remember when. He’d gotten rid of the stacks of cups from the party and scrubbed away the sticky rings of alcohol and mixer, moved the piles of CDs and game cartridges and instruction manuals, the piles of weekly shoppers and all that, over to the side table under the stairs. He’d pulled out the good china, the heavy expensive silverware. He’d even laid out the heavy burgundy placemats with the gold tasseled fringe—we never used those things; they were for special occasions and in our house special occasions usually got forgotten once Mom had a couple, ten drinks in her. And the candles! He’d pulled out the wrought iron candelabra with the curling leaf patterns running up its spines.

I swear, it was like he was trying to bribe me. To keep me happy. Like he was afraid I might turn on him now. I have to say, though, it was sort of charming. He was working so hard for his pats on the head. Except I was too jumbled to appreciate it.

Before the meal, there was San Andreas cheese and olives and a baguette. San Andreas is my favorite; it’s so buttery and smooth. Even then, though, I wasn’t hungry. I hadn’t been able to eat much of anything for days.

I tried to play along, to show my appreciation. A nibble here. A nibble there.

Salad from Keith’s organic garden in the backyard.

Fancy chardonnay from the Napa Valley. He brought that out right before the main course and he made a big show of pouring it into the glasses like he was a pro, the napkin over the arm, the little twist of the bottle so it wouldn’t drip, everything. Then he held his glass up and proposed a toast.

Did I say he was manic? He was completely manic. Jerky and bouncy, even more than usual.

“To us!” he said. He was speaking really fast. “Wonder Twin powers, unite!”

I chinked glasses with him. I tried to smile. But the joke was getting old. Honestly? I wasn’t feeling much like his Wonder Twin anymore. More like the poor cousin trapped in the attic—Harry Potter, without the magic of Hogwarts to look forward to.

He went on. “I think, from what I’ve been seeing on the news and whatever that we’re gonna be okay. It’s been almost a week since they found Naomi and they’re still talking suicide. And Craig? I mean, Craig must be shark food by now. They’ve got nothing. Nada. Right? I mean, right?”

I nodded. “Right,” I said, flatly. I couldn’t meet his eye.

“But look at me!” he said. “That means we’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay! You and me and the wide blue yonder! We got away with it. They’d be coming after us by now if that was what they were going to do. So . . . we did it!” He was hopping back and forth, grinning, this crazy, giddy expression on his face.

And then he grabbed my hands and started dancing. Actually dancing! And singing that stupid “I Got You Babe” song.

My friends were dead. My
boyfriend
. Dead. They were dead. And he wanted to dance and do karaoke. It was all I could do not to throw my wine in his face.

I’m sorry. I’m doing it again. I shouldn’t be crying like this. So, yeah. For the main course, he made this risotto he’d seen on the Food Network. Parmesan, asparagus, Italian sausage. My God. I don’t know how Mario Batalli does it, but I’m sure it’s not the same as what Will put together. Talk about salty. A deer would have cringed tasting that stuff. And half of it was burned, too. It was totally nasty. It took all I had just to swallow two bites.

“You like it?” he asked me.

“Sure.” What else could I say?

He was shoveling it down like it was the best thing he’d ever eaten. And he kept babbling, throwing back the wine, going on and on about what we were going to do now, since we were free and together and we had all summer now to do whatever we wanted.

He had this idea of the two of us taking off somewhere, going to some resort where he could play golf all day and I could lie on the beach, tanning and reading and listening to my iPod. He kept throwing the names of islands out there: Jamaica. St. Barts. Maui. Whatever.

And I nodded along. I tried to placate him. “Yeah, we could do that. Yeah, that would be nice.” Just trying to shut him up and cool him down somehow.

But whatever I did, it wasn’t enough for him. He could tell I wasn’t into this game he was playing. “Are you okay, Ash?” he asked. “Aren’t you a little bit excited?”

“Of course,” I said, but I wasn’t. I was totally freaked out by him. The Will I trusted, the one who was moody and sad sometimes because he cared so deeply for people’s fragile emotions, the one who tied himself in knots trying to do what was right, that Will was gone, and the one who’d replaced him was, like, a crazed monster. Fixated on me in all these ways that had nothing to do with the real me at all.

Seriously, I was almost wishing Mom was back from rehab so she could mock him and remind him what a small, feeble boy he was.

Or maybe not that. But I was definitely wishing Dad was around. That he knew what had happened to us since Mom had driven him away. I just knew, I was positive, that if he knew, if there were some sort of camera, or a magic bird that flew above the house and watched us, reporting back to him about every little thing that happened to us, he would have raced up to help. He would have put up his shield and held us safe behind it. That’s what I wanted. I was aching for him. Wishing beyond wish that the front door would fling open and he’d come charging in to make everything better.

Yeah right. Whatever.

After he cleared the plates and everything off the table, Will came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. He leaned in and kissed me on the cheek, and I don’t know, this terrible feeling raced through my body. I shuddered and my head knocked him accidentally on the nose. I think he was trying to whisper something in my ear, but what, I don’t know. It got lost in the sound of my body shivering.