Brother/Sister (22 page)

And that’s when I saw the Eagle parked haphazardly across both lanes of traffic, the door still open, and the interior light faintly glowing inside.

But disturbingly, no Will.

I seized up with terror. For all I knew, he was watching me right that minute, planning some ambush. I’d betrayed him. He must have realized this by now. And he’s not the type of guy to forgive people who’ve betrayed him.

I crept low to the ground, clinging to the shadows along the high stone wall that lined the road, slipping from entryway to entryway like a soldier trying to avoid sniper fire.

Every minute or so, I’d pause and listen for a footstep, a breath, some sign of Will’s location. But there was no sound, just the waves in the distance.

Slowly, slowly, I inched up toward the Eagle.

Something moved in the shadows, at the edge of my vision, and I jumped. I let out a yelp. A lizard. Just a lizard. But for a moment there, I couldn’t even breathe.

I crept forward. The Eagle was right in front of me now—two more driveway nooks to go, then I’d be there. I bent to the ground to see if Will was lurking on the other side, but nothing. Nothing I could see.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Will had fallen asleep in the back of the Eagle, was hunkered down in there hidden from my view. There weren’t any bushes for him to hide behind, just the stone pillars that marked off the driveways.

I stood up. I relaxed just the slightest bit, thinking I knew where he might be and where he might not, thinking Dad’s house must be right up ahead here, and the best thing to do now was get quickly to it.

Speed-walking, I darted past the Eagle, glanced inside—no Will sleeping there—and slipped around the pillar of the next driveway. This one was closed off by a heavy whitewashed iron gate, and I didn’t even have to look at the number to know that this was absolutely Dad’s house. It was uncanny how much it looked like our house—like our house transported off to paradise.

And suddenly, Will had my arms locked behind my back, one hand clamped over my mouth to muffle my scream. I bit his fingers. I kicked at his knees with the heel of my foot. Spinning and lurching, trying to throw him off of me.

“Ash,” he was saying, his lips right up to my ear. “Ash, why did you run? You need to trust me. No one else can help you.”

It was no use. He was stronger than me. I went limp.

Yeah, I mean, right at that moment, I had no idea what he would do. I thought he might try to . . . this is hard to, you know? To think of my brother in this way . . . sexually assault me, is what I’m trying to say. Like he had in the hotel room. Or he might try to kill me. If he thought I’d turned on him, I was afraid maybe he’d break my neck, leave me there to die, and. . .

No, of course not.
No way would I have hurt her. I was there to protect her.

This whole thing—all of it—I didn’t care what happened to me. I’m scum. I deserve whatever I’ve got coming. The whole point was to keep Asheley from being hurt.

I loved her.

Don’t you understand that? I didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered to me was her.

The more I twisted and turned
in his grip, the harder he squeezed my arms tight behind me. He kept whispering in my ear, “Don’t do this, Ash. Just, please, don’t do this. Remember? Wonder Twins? We don’t need Dad to save us. We can save ourselves. The rest of them, Dad, everybody else out there, they’ll tear us apart.”

He was right. But he was wrong too. We couldn’t save ourselves. The only way either of us would be saved was if someone—Dad—interceded and pried us away from each other.

My arms were twisted so tightly behind me. I don’t think he realized his own strength.

“You’re hurting me, Will,” I said, and he let up a tiny bit, just enough for me to yank one arm away. I took the opportunity while I had it, lunged for the buzzer built into the wall, and jabbed at it with all my strength, praying that Dad would forgive me, once he heard my story, for sounding the alarm at this time in the morning.

And then something totally surprising happened. I couldn’t believe it. Will let me go.

There were tears in his eyes. He was pleading with me. “Ash, no,” he said, “Really. You don’t want to see him.” But he wasn’t doing anything to stop me anymore.

“I do, Will. I have to,” I said to him.

And something changed in him. The hope inside him went dead. It was weird. I could see it. His heart was breaking, and his body sagged a little on his bones. His eyes lost their fight. He slumped down and leaned back against the pillar. I’d just hurt him so bad. It was horrible.

But being here. Seeing Dad. I’d longed for this moment my entire life.

A lamp came on in the window way up at the top of the house, where Mom’s room would have been in our house.

Another light came on, this one on the ground floor.

Then nothing.

My heart surging, I waited and waited and waited.

I rang the bell again. I couldn’t stop myself. And a light came booming on from above my head. The intercom crackled. “Who’s there?”

“Daddy, it’s me. It’s Asheley,” I said. “I made it. I’m with Will . . .” But I don’t think he heard me. The intercom had gone silent. Nobody responded.

I waited some more.

I wondered for a moment if I had the wrong house.

Some more lights came on inside the house. Isolated windows, lighting up then going dark again.

Finally, finally, the front door opened a crack and a silverhaired man in a plush bathrobe stepped outside. He was bigger than I’d expected. Taller. And broader. He had the wide chest of someone who’d luxuriated in success for many, many years, and a graying beard that he’d let grow wispy down around his neck. As he walked toward us, though, I knew—I just knew—it was Dad. It was there in his eyes. In the arc of his eyebrows and the slope of his earlobes. I’d studied my photos of him for so long I think I could have recognized him from his fingernails.

My lower lip started quivering. I had to keep telling myself not to cry.

When he got to the gate, he tightened the belt on his robe, and held himself up against one of the iron rods with a stiff arm. He didn’t say a word. He just stared at me. There was action behind his eyes, cognition, a glimmer of recognition, but his face betrayed nothing. There was no emotion seeping out of him.

I was breaking down, though, so overwhelmed with emotion that I almost couldn’t speak. The few words I managed to get out seemed so small, so useless compared to what was going on inside me.

“Daddy,” I said. “Dad, it’s us. We came. You called us, and we came right away.”

I was four years old again. It was like my life had been frozen in time since the day he had left, and now finally I could live again.

He ticked his finger against the pole he was leaning on. I noticed there was a gold chain hanging around his neck and I wondered who’d given it to him and what it symbolized. What was the size and shape of his life now?

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean,” he said.

“On Sunday, when you called us, we came, right away,” I said. “It’s me. It’s Asheley. And this is Will.”

I nudged Will with my toe, and glanced down at him sitting there, watching intently, muttering silently to himself.

“I never called you people,” Dad said.

Will stood up. He placed a hand on my shoulder, just resting it there, not tight.

“Well, we came anyway,” I said. “We . . . I needed you. Daddy, I . . . I’ve been wanting to meet you my entire life.” Will’s hand pulsed on my shoulder, tightening slightly. I wasn’t understanding yet what was going on. Or I wasn’t willing to understand. I thought, somehow, if I explained myself clearly enough, Dad was still going to open the gate and let me in. Even though the look in his eyes had hardened. Even though I saw little heads behind him, two of them, children with long straight black hair, peering around the corner of the open door. They were just about the same ages Will and I had been when he’d left us behind way up there in California.

One of them asked him a question in halting Spanish and he turned and waved them back inside the house.

“Nobody,” he answered, in English.

“Why are they here in the middle of the night?” the child asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Go back inside. Let’s not wake up your mother.”

That’s when it sunk in. That’s when I lost it. He’d left Will and me behind over a decade ago and he had no intention of letting us back in to his home, to his heart, to his life in any way. He didn’t want us. Not Will. Not me.

“It’s four thirty in the morning,” he said. “You’re disturbing my family. I’d like it if you people got in your car and headed back to wherever you came from.”

I went a little crazy then. I guess, yeah, I overreacted. I threw myself into the gate. Pounded at it with my fists. Crying and screaming, “Let me in, Dad! Let me in! You know where we came from! You know! You know! We came from where you came from! Let me in! Dad! Dad! Please!” until I couldn’t shout anymore. I was just all sobs and spasms.

The only thing keeping me from falling to the ground was Will holding me up, trying to calm me down.

And Dad just stood there, watching me. I thought, he must think I look pathetically stupid in my Stanford sweatshirt, so embarrassingly obvious in my love for him.

“Stop it, Ash. Stop it. Let it go,” Will said. He held me tighter, wrapped his arms around me. Like he thought he could comfort me. As if that were possible.

“Daddy,” I said. “Please. Do one thing for me. Only one. And then I swear, I’ll never bother you again. You can forget I exist.”

“I’m listening,” he said, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him.

That’s when I realized he was crying too. He was trying to hold it in, but I could tell. Tears were welling in his eyes.

I reached my arm through the gate and held my hand out to him. Just to touch him. To feel close to him, just for a moment. And he let me do it. He held my hand in his. He acknowledged me. He said my name out loud. “Asheley.” And Will’s, too. I mean, Will hung back, he refused to get too close, but Dad looked at him and said, “Will. My little man.”

He seized up then—the tears choked off his words—and he shook his head a few times trying to knock the tears away. “I messed it all up with you guys, didn’t I?”

We didn’t answer. Neither of us. I think we were too overwhelmed. Confused. Sad and happy, both. Not just me, Will too.

“I wish . . . I don’t know what I wish,” Dad said.

His tears came surging back, and he just stared at us, his eyes so glassy and wet that he must not have been able to see anything.

It was like he was begging us to release him.

“Just please, Daddy, please, we need help,” I said. “We need the police. We need you to call them.”

Dad pondered this request for a moment. Then he bowed his head and walked slowly back up the driveway. When he got to the front door, he looked back at us. I think he nodded. It was hard to tell. He brought a finger to his lips, like he was kissing us goodbye, saying a little prayer for our safe passage.

I couldn’t process at all what had just happened. What I was was tired. So, so, so tired. I slid down the gate and let myself relax onto the blacktop at the lip of the driveway.

“They’ve got something called extradition, Asheley,” Will said. “You know what that means? That means they’ll send us home. We’ll be arrested. We’ll be . . . they won’t let us be together anymore. Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know, Will. I don’t know what I want. I just want this crazy thing we’re doing to stop.”

Neither of us said anything for a while. Then he touched me on the shoulder.

“What are we going to do?” he said.

“You can do whatever,” I said. “I’m going to sit here and wait for the cops.”

He thought about this for a second or two. “I guess I will too, then,” he said finally, plopping himself down next to me.

So, that’s what we did. We sat there and waited for you guys to show up and you know what happened to us after that.

You understand, though, right? I’m not some bloodthirsty psychopath. I wish I’d known some other way to go about it. To keep Ash safe.

But I didn’t . . .

And she needed . . .

I had to do something.

So . . . yeah, do whatever it is you’re going to do to me. I understand. I really could care less what happens to me. Just . . . our deal. Asheley. She’s going to be okay, right? You’ll go easy on her? She deserves a lot better than what I’ve put her through.

I’m not saying
I’m entirely innocent. If that were true, I wouldn’t feel so horrible about all the little compromises I’ve made. What I’m saying is, he’s my brother, you know? I love him. Even when he’s wrong. Even when he’s totally out of his head. I understand him. He needed me. He still needs me, I’m sure.

And I let him down.

I let everybody down. Him, Craig, Naomi, Keith.

And it’s too late to change what happened, or to say sorry to any of them. I know that. I just wish . . .

You know what I keep thinking about? That day, playing softball and circling the bases, coming home safe. Everybody cheering and clapping me on the back. It was all so simple. I’d done something good and they appreciated me for it.

I want to have that feeling again sometime in my life. If I can earn it. I want to earn it. I want to know I can do something good. And I promise, I swear, if things work out after they transport me back to Morro Bay, I’m going to try to get past all this. I owe myself that much. And I owe it to Will. I mean, he’s sort of a victim in all this too—can I stand up? I’m going to stand up now, okay?—I relied a little too much on his love for me. I wish more than anything that I could go back to that party we threw, that moment when Craig called and I dragged Will outside with me to go find him—I mean, no. I mean, that’s not what I mean. I—