Rock N Soul (40 page)

I shook my head hard. “No, I can’t, I . . .”

“Please. I want you to have it. It’s yours now, okay?”

I took a deep breath and looked down at the ring in my hand, the Celtic symbols and the woman’s name engraved on the inside. “My name isn’t Emma,” I said, looking up at him with a weak smile.

He laughed at that, one of those sounds that’s half laugh and half something that resists labeling. “God, Tyler, I love you so fucking much,” he said, smiling and leaning in to kiss me again.

I let him kiss me, and I tried my hardest not to wonder if this was going to be the very last one. “This is so goddamn unfair,” I muttered once he’d pulled back.

“I know,” he said. “But it is what it is.”

I stepped back and held up the ring. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said, nodding for emphasis.

My hands were shaking. I slid the ring onto my finger. It lay there, warm against my skin, and I grabbed his shirt and pulled him to me. “Stay as long as you can after,” I whispered fiercely into his ear. “Swear you’ll try and let me have a few more minutes with you. Okay?”

“I swear,” he said. “You can be the last one.”

We clung to each other for what felt like hours before I finally pushed myself away from him. “Okay,” I said, forcing a snarky smile onto my face. “That’s enough sappiness for one evening. Pinky Vow expired. Let’s go talk to your sister.”

“Does that mean I can give you shit again now? About how you said you’re going to pine for me forever?” His eyes were twinkling and only part of the twinkle was salt water.

“Um, no. The Pinky Vow covered the whole conversation and now we can never give each other shit about it.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “And I wouldn’t push it, Mr. I Won’t Go Through the Pearly Gates Without You.”

He showed me his stupid dimples again, and I kissed him one more time. “Let’s go,” I said, walking over to pick the guitar case up and then looking toward the house.

We walked up to the porch, and I rang the doorbell. I would have known that the woman who answered was Chris’s sister even if he hadn’t told me. They had the same dark-brown eyes and the same nose, and I was pretty sure that their hair would be identical too if his were longer and hers didn’t have highlights in it. I smiled at her.

“Can I help you?” she said, holding the door mostly closed.

“Her husband, Joe, is deployed overseas,” Chris murmured. “She’s nervous when he’s gone.”

“My name is Tyler. I’m here to talk to you,” I said. “And I know this is going to sound crazy, but hear me out.” Not that it had worked so far, but there was a first time for everything.

Unfortunately, that was not true of
this
time. She started to close the door.

“Wait!” I said. “Give me two minutes, and then if you still don’t want to talk to me, I’ll leave. I promise. No questions asked.”

She didn’t open the door back up, but she also didn’t finish closing it. “What do you want?”

“I’m here with a message from your brother.”

“Chris is dead,” she shot back. “Are you another reporter?”

“No,” I told her. “This is where it’s going to sound crazy. I have his ghost here with me and—” The door slammed in my face.

“Shit,” I said under my breath. I pressed myself against the door and tried to speak through it. “He loves you,” I called. “He loves you and he’s sorry.”

There was no answer, so I looked at Chris and raised my eyebrows in a “What now?” gesture.

He stepped through the wall and then came back outside. “She’s still by the door. She’s listening.” He knitted his brow. “She’s crying.”

“Can you touch her?” I asked him. “That worked with Eric.”

Chris paused for a second, tilting his head. “I’m sure I can.” He took a deep breath and went in the house again.

I pressed myself back against the door, putting my lips close to the seam, and called out, “He really is here. He’s going to touch your arm, okay? So you know he’s real.”

There was a moment of silence, then a soft squeak. The door opened again, and I stumbled backward so I wouldn’t fall through. “How did you do that?” she demanded, the tears already drying on her cheeks.

“Chris did that,” I said. “He wanted you to know he was really here.”

She glared at me. “Even if that was true, I have nothing to say to him.”

“Fuck,” Chris said. “I told you she hated me.”

She did look pretty pissed, but she wasn’t closing the door, so I decided to continue. “Okay, he made some mistakes, but he always loved you. He missed you. And he wants to tell you that he’s sorry and that . . . well, that he loves you.”

“And Abigail,” Chris said. “Her daughter. My niece.”

“And he loves Abigail,” I repeated.

“If he’d loved us, he wouldn’t have done the things he did,” she said. She glanced back inside the house, then stepped all the way out on the porch and closed the door. “Abby doesn’t even know he’s dead. I didn’t tell her. Because I don’t want to lie to her and I don’t want to tell her that her Uncle Chris was a narcissist and an addict who didn’t care about anyone but himself.”

Which—okay, granted, the narcissist/addict part was true, but geez, surely his
sister
should know he was more than that. “Lady, he’s dead,” I snapped. “Can’t you cut him a little slack given that he’s paid his dues now?”

“He’s not sorry,” she countered. “If he’d been sorry, then he would have stopped a long time ago. If he’s sorry now it’s only because he’s dead. Not because he really saw the error of his ways.”

“Welcome to my life,” Chris said. “This is how she always is with me.” He put a hand on her shoulder, and she jumped again.

“Well, he’s dead now,” I said. “And you’re his unfinished business. So at least hear him out.”

“Who
are
you?” she said, narrowing her eyes.

“Nobody,” I said, then rolled
my
eyes when Chris glared at me. “Okay, I’m not
nobody
. My name’s Tyler Lindsey. Chris’s ghost is attached to me, and I have no idea why. But I’ve been helping him say his good-byes so he can . . .” I waved my hand at the sky since I wasn’t sure I could say it without my voice breaking.

“And he wanted to see
me
.” She seemed skeptical about that, which was kind of weird. “The last time I saw him, he told me he was never coming back here again and that I was a terrible sister.”

Chris looked down at the wooden slats on the floor of the porch. “Yeah, well, she told me I wasn’t welcome anymore anyway, so there’s that.”

I sighed. “He says you said he wasn’t welcome anymore.”

“Yeah,” she said, “
after
he told our mother in great detail about how he was a degenerate, then tried to shoot up in our bathroom, and
then
had sex with one of my PTA friends in our guest bedroom. At a
children’s birthday party
.”

“
Chris
,” I gasped, raising my eyebrows at him. “You didn’t.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t try to shoot up in the bathroom. I didn’t have anything with me even if I’d wanted to. But the rest of it . . . yeah.”

I looked back at Allison. “He says he didn’t try to shoot up in the bathroom. And he’s sorry for the rest of it.” Which he hadn’t said in so many words, but I figured he must be, and he didn’t contradict me.

“It’s too late for that now,” she said, her shoulders slumping.

I sighed again. “Look, you guys had problems. I get that. But it sounds like you were on really bad terms when he died and surely you want to resolve some of that, right? Not everybody gets a chance like this, you know.”

The corners of her mouth tightened, but she gave a tiny nod. “I don’t know what you want me to say. I begged him to get help. I tried so hard to convince him. He wouldn’t listen.”

“Yeah, he’s a stubborn jerk sometimes,” I agreed. “But he really does love you.”

“Why didn’t he stop, then?” Her eyes were a little shiny, and that made me pretty nervous because I am
not
good at dealing with crying.

Chris sighed. “I don’t know what to tell her that would make it better.”

I looked back at Allison. “There was a lot going on with him that he thought the drugs were helping him cope with. He was wrong about that, and he knows he was wrong. But that’s not what’s important right now anyway. He just wants you to know that he’s sorry for everything.”

“That doesn’t help,” she said. “I’m really sorry, Chris, but that doesn’t help. I’ve got nobody now. Do you realize that? No grandparents, no father, no brother, and a mother who only knows me on good days—and I can’t even remember the last good day.” Her voice broke a little on the last word, and she took a second to regroup. “You left me alone in the world and thank God for Joe because if I hadn’t met him . . .” She didn’t attempt to finish the sentence.

Chris ran his hands through his own hair. “I was alone too. We sort of left each other.”

I met Allison’s eyes. “He missed you too. And he really is sorry about everything. He felt alone just like you did.”

“I can’t forgive him,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t. There’s too much to forgive and not enough reason to do it.”

Chris winced, squeezing his eyes shut, and it made me want to gather him up in my arms and tell him that everything was going to be okay. But this wasn’t really the time for that, so I replied: “If he was alive, he could prove it to you. But I don’t know how he can do it when you can’t see him and talk to him and tell how sincere he’s being.”

“And you can tell he’s being sincere,” she said, not sounding particularly convinced about that. “How?”

I shrugged. “I’ve gotten to know him really well. He’s been with me for a while now.”

“
With
you?” She raised an eyebrow.

Jesus, she was going to make me come out to her. I glanced at Chris for help.

He made a face. “She knows. About Eric. I didn’t ever tell her, but she figured it out.”

That was all very interesting, but it didn’t exactly help me decide how to answer her. Finally I sighed. “Yeah, with me.”

“Meaning . . .?”

“Meaning what you think it means,” I said, then tried to make my peace with my maker quickly just in case she killed me right there on her front porch. “But that’s a pretty recent development.”

She wrinkled her nose but didn’t make a move to murder me, which I took as a good sign. “I was hoping he was past that sort of thing.”

Chris took a step closer to me and slipped his arm around my waist. “If she starts insulting you, I want you to walk away. Being bitchy about Eric and my one-nighters was one thing, but I refuse to let her talk smack about you.”

I turned to him, mostly so Allison would know he was talking. His fingers pressed firmly into my side, and fuck, I wanted him to stay around long enough for me to let him be the first one inside me. Probably the only one. I couldn’t imagine letting another guy sneak his way into my circulatory system like this, so yeah. The only.

But it wasn’t the time to be thinking about that, so I just nodded and gave him an almost-bashful half smile. “Thank you,” I said to him, then turned back to Allison. “Well, he seems happy. With me. And that’s what’s important, right?”

She shrugged. “That’s between him and God, I guess. But I was hopeful about that girl he was dating.”

Then it was my turn to wrinkle my nose. “He didn’t love her. And they really weren’t a good match for each other.”

“And the two of you are?” she asked, and it sounded a lot more like a challenge than an honest question, so I bristled and narrowed my eyes.

“Yeah, we are,” I answered, trying to keep the bitchiness out of my voice.

She didn’t say anything for a second, then shrugged again. “Fine, I suppose. The homosexuality was never the big problem, anyway.”

“What was?” I asked. “The drugs, you mean?”

Allison shook her head. “The drugs were a symptom of a bigger problem.”

I gave her a moment to elaborate, but she didn’t, which kind of pissed me off because I hate taking the bait like that, but somebody had to keep the conversation going. “Which was?”

“I don’t think he had a heart,” she said flatly.

“Oh, fuck her,” Chris bit out.

I shot him a warning look and then turned back to Allison. “That’s an awful thing to say about your brother.”

“You don’t know how he was,” she snapped. “You didn’t see him after Dad died. You didn’t see him the day we took Mom to the nursing home. You don’t know how it felt to hear he’d given up on rehab and then how it felt to buy a cemetery plot for him and pick out a headstone for a man in his twenties. He never cared about any of us, just himself, and I hated him for it. I know that’s wrong, but it’s true. I hated him.”

Chris flinched and then closed his eyes. I moved my hand up to my waist and laid it over his. “It wasn’t that he didn’t have a heart,” I told her. “Not about your parents, anyway.”

“He didn’t care,” she insisted. “He just stood there with that blank, kind-of-annoyed look on his face and shut everybody down if they tried to talk about anything meaningful.”

“I’m sorry, did you
know
him?” I asked her. “Because I’ve only really known him since around Thanksgiving and I can already tell that that’s his coping mechanism.”