Rebound (20 page)

A
fter seeing Alison, I regress and end up back in the chair in my room. I want night. Darkness. The sunshine offends me. But the day seems to want to continue, despite what I want.

My phone rings on the table beside me. Linda and Lucky throw the tennis ball for an hour and go home. A family I don’t know has a picnic and rides boogie boards and builds a sandcastle. Don’t understand that, building sandcastles. Why build something if it’s only going to get washed away? All of this as the sun drops lower and lower.

At six at night, my phone is still ringing and buzzing every ten minutes.

Texts come from Rhett. Cookie. Brooks.

My mother. My father.

Rhett again. Brooks again. Mom again. And so on.

Even Jazz calls. Sweet of her.

But no Alison.

And I hate that that’s the one call I’d take. The one person I wouldn’t be able to resist right now.

She didn’t
know
? Is that true? Am I supposed to believe that?

The problem is I want to. I think I need to believe her.

Yeah. I do.

I tell myself I’ll go to work tomorrow—Tuesday. Tuesday I tell myself Wednesday, and the whole week disappears that way.

It’s a shitty mindset, but I didn’t build a company from nothing to end up having a minority stake in it. But I can’t think of a way to get it back without dragging Chloe’s memory through even thicker, shittier mud.

Finally, on Friday, Grey barrels into my room. It’s maybe noon. Midday, I think, and I’ve gotten too tired to sit and drink. I can’t keep up with the waves and the sun, and Lucky’s gone and sandcastles depress me so sleep has become my new thing.

“You know what?” Grey announces. “I changed my mind. You can fail, Adam. Actually? I think you
need
to fail. I think you need to fucking fail, and I’m here to help you.” He claps his hands together. “Let’s do this. Right now.”

I lift my arm and peer at him. Jesus. He almost fills the doorway. And when did he get so ripped? With his shaved head and his tattooed sleeves, he strikes me as the kind of guy you don’t mess with. Unless he’s your little brother.

“Shut the door on your way out, will you?”

“Get up, Adam. Get your sorry drunk ass up.”

“Okay. Fine. I’m going.” I roll myself up and wait for the room to stop spinning. Then I walk past him, downstairs, into the kitchen. To the bar. “Good call,” I say, reaching into the liquor cabinet. “It was about that time.”

Grey pins me so fast, I never even see him coming.

I’m reaching up one instant, the next I’m hitting the wall and staring right at my brother’s eyes.

“I need you to fucking
listen,
” he says, jamming his forearm into my neck. “Can you do that, big brother?”

I’ve seen this side of him, but it’s never been directed at me. Never, because I know the last person Grey would ever want to hurt is me. Which means he’s scared. Scared enough to go completely against his nature. That’s a wake-up call.

I nod. “I can listen.”

“Good. Sit down.” He shoves me toward the breakfast table. Then he pours a huge glass of water and sets it down in front of me.

For a few seconds, we’re quiet, and I can almost feel us both adjusting to this new order. To the Grey who challenges me as an equal. To the fact that maybe, for once, he’s the one with the right idea.

“Here’s what I think,” he says, crossing his arms. “You did this big cover-up about Chloe, right? About what happened to her. You spend almost four years hiding it, telling a lie. Telling our family and her parents that you did it. That you were driving because you think . . .” Grey lifts his shoulders. “Shit, I don’t know. Because you’re trying to
exalt
her memory, or honor her life by keeping her rep clean or some shit. But you know what? You didn’t just do it to protect her. You did it to punish yourself. You did it because you, Adam Blackwood, can’t fucking stand that it
wasn’t
your fault, because you’re a goddamn control freak, Adam. You’re so—”

“You don’t know what you’re—”

Grey uncrosses his arms and points at me. “You said you were going to listen so let me fucking finish, okay? Jesus. Thank you.” He drops his elbows on the table. “So you cover for Chloe, then you add another layer in the bullshit cake by covering up
that
lie from the public because you’ve got this fancy company, and no one can know the truth—which actually isn’t the truth, it’s your cover-up—about
that night. So now you’re controlling Chloe’s past by rewriting history. And you’re controlling your company’s future by hiding your own lies. Are you seeing a pattern here, Adam? Mr. Puppetmaster? You’re fucking doing it with me by playing the go-between with Mom. Letting me live here and putting up with all my shit.”

Grey shakes his head and falls quiet for a moment. “You can’t make all our lives perfect. You can’t fix everything. You can’t take everyone’s bullets. You’ve got to let go, Adam. You’re going to kill yourself this way if you don’t. And if that happens . . . shit. I’m as good as dead too.”

I have to fight back tears for a few seconds. I think Grey does too. I can’t lose someone else I love.

We’re quiet for a long, long time. Just sitting. Just breathing. And when my thoughts turn to that night on Christmas Eve, I let it come. I let the images streak before my eyes in high definition, without pushing them back.

And I see Chloe, and how we fought because I just wanted a few more weeks of having her all to me.

“What does that even mean, Adam? Are you regretting this? Me?”

We were in the basement game room at home. Upstairs, the festivities continued without us, Christmas carols and eggnog and the sound of my dad’s laugh, followed by Grey’s.

“Chloe. That’s not what I said at all.”

I couldn’t find a way to explain. My parents’ marriage was so public. My mother and father had always moved in social circles. Their time together was restaurant openings and galas. Write-ups in the society pages. I was fine with that, someday. If Chloe and I both wanted it. But not yet. I wanted what we had for a while longer. The feeling of the two of us discovering the world together like we were tourists in a foreign country. Untouchable. Invisible.

I didn’t want to share her yet. I just wanted a few more months.

But no matter how much I tried to explain, she seemed to hear, “I don’t want anyone to know about you.”

“You’re embarrassed about me because I’m not rich, like you are. I don’t have a big house like this. I don’t have a goddamn pool table in a game room. I don’t have a perfect family like yours. Why can’t you just admit it, Adam? You made a mistake. You shouldn’t have married me.”

“Chloe, please listen to me. Come here.” But she wouldn’t come near me. We’d been drinking, and she was crying. She couldn’t keep still.

“You’re afraid of my moods, Adam,” she continued. “I’m not always calm and rational like you. Well, this is me! You’re stuck with this now!”

I’d seen her mood swings before. I wasn’t afraid of them. I loved everything about her. “The only thing I’m afraid of is losing you.”

“How is it so easy for you?”

“Because I love you, Chloe.”

She whirled and ran, snatching the keys off the hook.

My family went quiet as we tore through the kitchen and headed out the front door. Chloe jumped into the driver’s seat of my car and I didn’t want to tell her no
.
She was so upset. So mad at me. I just wanted her to be happy. So I took the passenger seat. As she gunned it out of the driveway, I saw Grey. Grey at just fifteen, skinny as a flagpole, standing in the driveway
.

And it was too fast. Everything was. Our words. Her tears. The car. We’d only gone a few miles when she lost control and the tree came flying. And everything went black. And then after—on the bloody ice, where I found her, where she was thrown from the crushed convertible. In the ambulance, at the hospital and the morgue and the church and the cemetery, how all I could think was that I could’ve stopped it. I made her cry, and I made her run, and I made her lose control on the ice. I made that tree fly.

I should have been driving. I deserved to take the blame.

So I took it.

I made Grey swear he’d never tell the truth, that he saw Chloe drive away. Then I lied to my parents and hers. To the lawyers, who blamed the icy roads over the alcohol level in my blood—which wasn’t all that high. Not nearly as high as Chloe’s.

No one asked questions.

They grieved for Chloe. They grieved with me, for my beautiful wife.

We packed her death away in the lies I created for four years.

And it has been destroying me.

Grey scratches his jaw, pulling me back to the present. “You’ve got to let the bad shit be what it is sometimes, Adam.”

I hear myself laugh. “Wow. That should be cross-stitched on a pillow.”

Grey smiles. “Damn right, brother.”

“You were saying I shouldn’t be the rescuer, the middle man. So what you’re telling me, Grey, is that I should kick you out?”

His eyebrows rise. “Oh, hell no. I’m not going anywhere. It was just an example.” He pushes up from the table. “Come on,” he says.

“Where to now, Buddha?”

“The water. I’m tired as shit of surfing alone.”

M
y father’s asleep in the study,
Forbes
magazine draped across a knee, and his reading glasses sliding off the bridge of his nose. I listen to his guttural breathing, watch his chest rise and fall. He seems so different to me now. His face—chapped from so much time in the sun and wind, with circles of white around his eyes from always keeping his sunglasses on—looks like a stranger’s face. His jaw looks more slack. His hands, clasped over his stomach, look like an old man’s hands.

For three days he kept himself away. On “business,” though the only business he seems to have lately is ruining people’s lives. And when he returned, he made sure to do it on an evening when we have company—my mother’s book group. Which makes me realize, as though I needed more proof, that I’ve been totally played.

A feeling washes over me—a strange, acute kind of buoyancy that makes me feel like a balloon, filling up, up, up, about to float into
the stratosphere. It’s the sensation I have when the
Ali Cat
powers away from the dock or when Zenith used to break into a gallop, the two of us in perfect sync. I feel exultant and filled with possibilities.

I go and sit down next to my father, remove the glasses from his face, close the magazine and tuck it away beside me. And then I shake him awake. Not gently.

He starts and blinks at me, slowly bringing me into focus. “Jesus Christ. You could have given me a heart attack.”

“Don’t do this to Adam.”

He sighs. “Alison, please.”

“I mean it, Dad. It’s not right to blackmail your way into owning a company. You
have
to know that.”

He sits up then, fixing me with a glare that once would have withered me on the spot. Instead, a glassy calm settles over me. I’m here with him, but I’m also gone. Some part of me has broken free for the first time, truly free, and I know he can’t sway or scare me anymore.

“Did Blackwood come to see you?” He pounds the couch between us with his fist, but it’s like the gesture of a little kid. “Damn it, I told him to keep away.”

“Of course he came to see me. He was angry, and he had every right to be. What you did was wrong.”

“It’s business.”

“It’s still wrong. To him and to me. If I’d known what you had planned I never would have gone in there.”

He chuckles, and the sound stiffens my spine like a fork scratching against china. “Which is why I didn’t tell you what I had planned.”

I know this. Of course I know this. But hearing the words, put so bluntly, still comes as a shock.

“So you used me.”

He shakes his head. “Stop being so dramatic. I
employed
you. A smart employer understands the assets at hand and makes the best use of them.”

“You’re talking about me like I’m no one! I’m your daughter!”

“
I’m
well aware of that,” he says. “Are
you
?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you need to get your priorities straight. It’s our family business. You should be happy we’ll get to guide the future of Blackwood Entertainment. I’ll put you in charge of Boomerang. That’s what family does. We help each other succeed.”

Using my crutch, I rise shakily from the sofa. I can’t stand to be close to him anymore. “I don’t want to succeed on those terms.”

“Stop being so goddamned high and mighty. You’ll have your own company to run. At twenty-two years old. Think about it. You can fire that Mia girl if you want. It’ll be up to you. Because I want that for you. Because I
got it
for
you
.”

A feeling blasts through me—sharp and gutting. It’s like my chest is suddenly home to a million prickling icicles.

“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” I say.

My father’s eyes widen, and his tone is quiet and cold.
“What did you just say?”

“This is for me? Taking over a business that someone else spent his life—”

“His life? He’s twenty-three goddamned years old. What life?”

“How does that matter?” I cry. “It’s
his
. It’s not yours. You don’t get to just have everything you want all the time. You don’t get to gobble people up and spit them out. You don’t get to lie to me. You don’t get to cheat on—”

“Stop it, Alison,” my father interrupts, eyes cutting to the doorway. He gets to his feet and starts to push past me, but I grab his arm. I’m aware of how big I’ve always thought him to be. How he towered in my imagination. And now I see he’s not that giant. He’s not very big at all.

“You’re always talking about family. But we don’t matter at all, do we? We’re just . . . We’re like your accessories.”

“I’m done with this conversation,” he says, and pulls away from me. I stagger back, hurting my ankle and struggling for balance on my crutch. I know it’s pointless. I know we’re done.

“Fine,” I say. “Just one last thing.”

“What?”

“I quit.”

My father stalks out of the room, and I stand there, suddenly weak-limbed and trembling. A voice inside me asks,
now what
? Now I need to do what I can for Adam.

I limp out of the study and head for the kitchen, where I find my mother sitting in the dining nook by the window, staring out at the scrub-covered foothills and, beyond those, at the far off sliver of surf as it pounds against the shore.

“Mom?”

She looks up and gives me a faint smile. “Want some tea, sweetheart?” she asks. Even in the dim glow of the under-cabinet lights, I can see her eyes are glossy, her posture sunken.

Sitting down beside her, I rest my crutch against the table and look at her. “Did you . . . Did you hear us?”

She gives me a faint smile. “Yes, but it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. Except that he’d involved you too.”

“You knew?” I ask. “About dad and—”

“I’m not a fool, darling.”

I’m floored and sink back in the upholstered chair, bumping my head on the frame of the picture hanging behind me. A painting my mother had done of Zenith. I don’t remember thanking her for it.

“But Mom, I don’t understand. How could you stay with him? How could you be all right with it?”

“Of course I’m not all right with it. But you and your sister were so young the first time. And I didn’t know a thing about being on my own. It sounds ridiculous, I know.” She shrugs. “But I couldn’t imagine life without your father. Even if it’s meant this . . .
this
life. And this life affords me opportunities that I’d never have otherwise. All of those charities. I can do so much good.”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. My mind carries me back through my whole life, to every missed birthday party, recital, and horse show, to every holiday filled with extravagant gifts for my mother. Furs she never wore. Bold, expensive jewelry that never seemed to come out of the boxes. My mother’s small protest, I realize, and my fingers drift up to touch the earrings I have worn every day for months.

I did what she resisted: I let him bribe me.

“He told me it didn’t matter,” my mother says, circling a burgundy-polished nail on the glossy kitchen table. “He said these were just . . . moments outside of our life together. What matters is—”

“Family,” I finish.

I wonder if somewhere along the line he and Catherine had that same conversation. If that’s why she’s so distant from all of us, because she’s been carrying around this secret, too. All of us, played against one another for my father’s convenience.

We’re both quiet. Only the sound of the dishwasher clicking off interrupts the silence. Sitting here, I feel like it’s not just the rug that’s been pulled out from under me but the entire house.

Finally, I ask, “What now, Mom? We can’t just . . . keep going like this, can we? It’s so wrong. And it’s not just us.”

She takes my hand and squeezes it. “I know.”

“So is there any way to stop him? What do we do?”

My mother pushes her chair back and stands. “We go to bed, darling,” she says. “And we get up in the morning.”

I groan and put my face in my hands. “That’s it? We just keep going like this? No one ever stops him? He just steamrolls over everything?”

“I’m not saying that,” she tells me and pulls my hands away from my face. “I’m saying we get some rest so we can get up and fight again.”

“There has to be something we can do,” I insist.

“If there is,” she says, “we’ll figure it out tomorrow.”