Spectacularly Broken (22 page)

“I wish I could have met him,” I said without thinking. Then I flinched and glanced at her. “Sorry, I hope that isn’t—”

“It’s all right.” Her smile became a little more real. “I wish you could have too. He was wonderful. They were quite something, both of them together. Cai…he hasn’t been the same.”

“Did he mention me?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

She shook her head. “He’s barely said anything at all.” Her voice shook. She pressed her fingers to her mouth. “I’m sorry. As I said, I haven’t slept.”

She looked like she was going to keep apologizing, and I opened my mouth to tell her it wasn’t necessary, but at that moment, two men entered the living room. One of them was clearly Cai’s dad and the other a stocky, broad officer of the law, who seemed to be trying his best to reassure the two.

“We’re getting the word out there, Jim,” he was saying. “We’ve already—”

His phone rang, and he excused himself hastily. Cai’s father—Jim—threw a questioning look our way.

“Laurel?” he asked.

“They’re here to help,” his wife told him.

“Thanks,” he said curtly. He seemed to have no energy left for enthusiasm, and I couldn’t blame him in the slightest.

“So what are we gonna do?” Jarett glanced at me. “Just go out there and start looking?”

“If you’d like, you could help with calling people,” Cai’s mother suggested. She glanced up and froze. The police officer had finished his call and was holding up his phone.

“We just got two leads. A gas station clerk from Millcreek thinks he checked out Cai early this morning, and there’s a cleaner working at the South Valley Airport who says he saw him shooting up in a bathroom late last night.”

There was a collective flinch in reaction to his words, which I wasn’t immune from. Thinking of him being this lost was killing me, and I fervently wished I could have been there to prevent it from happening. Once Cai was found, I would be hard-pressed not to cover him in bubble wrap, stick him in a hamster ball, and handcuff myself to the damn thing.

If he let me.

“We’re working on getting ahold of surveillance tapes from both places right now.” The officer turned to look at Laurel and then back to Jim. It didn’t escape me that his focus hung worriedly on her drawn face for a moment. “Why don’t you ride to the station with me, Jim, and you can help confirm whether it’s him. There’s not much for us to do until we follow up on this, and your wife could probably use a bit of peace and quiet.” Then his gaze landed on me, and he looked surprised, as though he had completely forgotten to include in this grand plan of his the two random guys who had crashed the party.

“We can stay and answer the phone,” I offered.

“I’ll cook something,” Jarett proposed.

I turned to him in mild surprise. “You can cook?”

“Dude, yes,” he responded. “Well, sort of. A bit.”

When Laurel swayed where she stood, I gently grasped her by the arm and led her to the couch. Her knees buckled frighteningly fast. For lack of anything more productive to do, I sat next to her, awkwardly patting her arm as though that would do a damn thing to make her feel better.

“It’s all right,” Jarett assured the two men. “We’ll, uh, hold down the fort.”

They left reluctantly. Laurel leaned back and stared at the ceiling in a peculiar way, blinking hard. I wasn’t around women much, apart from Sheri, so it took me some time to realize that she was trying very hard not to cry. I nervously patted her arm some more. This was so not my area of expertise.

“Why don’t we make some lunch?” I proposed in a fit of desperation.

Even though Laurel made an attempt to turn to the stove as soon as we entered the kitchen together, I insistently led her past it, to the table, and sat her down. I was pretty sure it was what Sheri would have done for someone in this condition. Keeping this in mind, I tried my best to channel our housekeeper.

“Tea?” I offered.

“In the cabinet.” She pointed, and I set upon the task of making tea, which turned out to be an educational experience because I had never in my life made tea before. I’d watched Sheri doing it plenty, however—pretty much every time I’d dragged myself into the kitchen after a particularly intense night and demanded something to take away the roiling nausea of my hangover. Boil water, insert herb pouch, steep. Not exactly rocket science.

“I’m going to make pancakes,” Jarett announced confidently.

I approved. Pancakes, after all, were food for the soul. “Let me know if I can help,” I said after I’d filled the kettle and placed it on the stove.

“That’s electric,” Jarett pointed out.

“Huh?”

“Electric.” He grasped the cord I had failed to notice and waved it in front of my face. “As in, plug into outlet.”

“Why? There’s a perfectly good stove right here.” I pointed with a sure hand. Sheri put our kettle on the stove. I remembered that clearly.

“Yeah, but that’s not how this works.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

He didn’t answer but placed the kettle on the counter and, after plugging it in, flipped a switch I hadn’t noticed either. Fine, whatever. If he insisted.

“Your funeral,” I muttered petulantly. Then I realized that Laurel was watching me with considerable interest. I supposed that at least I was distracting her from darker thoughts, so that was something.

“Did Cai…did he tell you anything about what happened?” she asked when I had sat down opposite her and was facing her across the table. Her smile was still very obviously forced, and by the time she had voiced the question, it had slipped away completely.

“He did, yes.” I lowered my eyes to the salt shaker in the middle of the table. “He had a hard time getting it out, but he did, eventually.”

“You must have gotten to know him pretty well, then.” Once again the shaky smile made an appearance. She was trying so hard. “I’ve never heard him talk about the accident. Not since it happened.”

I froze in the middle of trying to figure out how to phrase our complicated relationship. Shit, was Cai even out to his parents? He had always seemed comfortable with his sexuality, but we had never actually talked about it. I’d simply assumed.

“Yeah,” I replied eventually, tentatively. “Yeah, we’re…we were close.”

“He’s been a lot of help to the rest of us too,” Jarett mentioned while cracking eggs. “In group therapy, I mean. He’s very insightful.”

Her smile broadened a little. Looking encouraged, Jarett kept going.

“He frightened me a little at first, you know, because he looks tough, and he acted it too, but he turned out to be really different from what I expected.”

“Cai and I started a bit of a feud on the very first day,” I added. “And then, um…” I tried to ignore Jarett’s knowing grin. “And then we became friends,” I finished lamely.

“After he dunked your head in dishwater,” Jarett reminded me cheerfully. Upon Laurel’s look of indignant shock, he explained, “They were fighting about who had to wash up.”

“Well, it worked,” I pointed out smugly. “I never did have to get my hands dirty.”

That put a hint of amusement on Laurel’s face.

“Sounds like you guys had some fun out there, at least.”

“Tons,” I said and realized with some surprise that it was actually the truth. I had enjoyed myself during those two weeks, more than I could remember ever doing before. And I wanted to tell Cai’s mom that, but I realized quickly that most of the highlights of my stay probably weren’t things she wanted to hear.

Your son and I screwed on a roof and in a pantry, and we got collectively drunk one night, and Cai and I cuddled a lot, and I made everyone sexy T-shirts.

Yeah, no.

“We won a scavenger hunt together,” I finally thought to mention and tried not to cringe at this lame-ass statement. The whistling of the kettle saved me from having to elaborate. I jumped up and grabbed mugs. Then I belatedly tried to pick tea bags from the selection in the cabinet, which was something of a process. Berry? Apple? Peppermint? How the hell was I supposed to know which one was best?

Chamomile was supposed to be calming, wasn’t it? With a decisive nod, I put tea bags in the mugs, poured boiling water over them, and then proudly placed my creations on the kitchen table.

I, Lysander Shepherd, had just made tea. Before I could spend too much time basking in my newfound glory, the phone rang. Since Jarett was busily stirring batter, and Laurel needed to relax, I figured it was up to me to answer.

“Fields residence,” I chirped into the receiver. There was a moment of silence that made me feel awkward.

“Hey, uh…who’s this?”

The voice, I was fairly certain, belonged to Cai’s father.

“Lysander.” I waited through several more seconds of confused silence while I made a face at the empty air, wondering how to better answer the question. “The blond one,” I added.

“Oh. Right. Listen, could you tell my wife that they showed me the airport footage, and that poor kid someone saw in the bathroom is definitely not Cai. It’s not good news, exactly, but I think it would set her mind at ease a bit.”

It did the same to mine. Cai hadn’t been found, so I wasn’t cheering just yet, but knowing that he hadn’t been doing drugs in an airport bathroom, at least, was a relief.

There was more silence before I realized I should probably say something.

“Yeah, great.” I cringed and gripped the receiver more tightly. “I mean, not great, but…good. No, not good, uh… I’ll…yeah, I’ll let her know.”

Jesus fucking Christ, my brain had turned into pancake batter.

Face hot, I returned to the kitchen. Jarett had put a pan on the stove, and he poured a few spoonfuls of batter into it as I relayed Jim’s message. Fat hissed, the kitchen starting to smell nice. I dropped into the chair next to Laurel and took some deep breaths.

A little of the tension seeped out of her. She gave me a nod of thanks and spent the next few minutes staring into the mug of tea in her hands. Silence descended upon the kitchen, interrupted at regular intervals by a fresh sizzle of pancake batter on hot oil. The atmosphere was a strange mixture of tension and worry and tentative shreds of hope none of us could quite grasp on to.

“It’s hard to explain how difficult it’s been.” Laurel’s raspy voice startled me. She was speaking quietly, as though to herself, staring into her mug of tea with bleak, tired eyes. “To be forced to watch him give up.”

She looked so terribly forlorn, and I had no choice but to look at her and see all that pain.

“The first week after they discharged him from the hospital, I kept catching him sitting by the mirror. He told me if he turned his face away and just looked from the corner of his eye, he could almost convince himself his brother was right there with him. He stopped doing it when he started taking double doses of his pain medication. But I’ll never forget the look on his face, that desperate, wild hope that maybe, just maybe, he’d been having a nightmare and Cassiel really would be there when he turned around. It killed me to see it. We’ve tried all we can to help him function without Cass. It isn’t in his nature to be alone. But he’s been so lost. He’s stopped fighting.”

Laurel lifted her shaking hands and buried her face in her palms. She looked just about ready to drop. Jarett and I exchanged a mute look.

The noise of the phone ringing made me jump so hard I nearly knocked over my tea.

“Oh, not again,” I groaned. I was so not up to doing this.

“Chill, I got it.” Jarett pulled on my arm until I rose from my chair, and shoved me in front of the stove. “You flip the pancake.” He thrust his spatula at me, and I took it, nonplussed. Then he hurried to the phone, leaving me feeling abandoned.

“I’m so sorry,” was the only thing I could think to say while I watched the batter slowly solidifying. Laurel’s smile was weak and sad.

“I know,” she said.

I turned back to the stove just in time to keep the pancake from blackening. Jarett returned several minutes later.

“He was at the gas station,” he reported, causing my heart to beat in my throat with renewed nervous anxiety. “Buying energy drinks at around five in the morning. The clerk remembers asking him why he needed so many and chatting about college parties with him. They’re following up on that now. The police guy I talked to said they’re working as fast as they can. They’re worried about losing his trail.”

“Oh, man.” I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Okay, so…good news.”

“Yeah,” Jarett said, sounding pensive rather than excited as he stared blankly at me. He shook himself, grabbed the spatula from me, and proceeded to lament my treatment of his culinary masterwork.

Four hours later, we stood in a forest. It certainly was not how I’d expected the day to go when I had gotten up that morning.

Cai’s trail had gone cold shortly after he had left the university campus. One of a group of girls who had tried to entice him to stay and drink had confessed to encountering him, as soon as she had realized he was the one the police were asking about. He’d been glassy-eyed, she had reported, and a little out of it. He’d been mumbling about a forest before wandering off.

Salt Lake City happened to be surrounded by an enormous amount of national forest.

Because trying to search the entire forest would have been an utterly ridiculous idea—I mean, we’re talking something like a million acres, and for once, that’s not an exaggeration—they had narrowed it down to the areas where the Fields family had gone camping in years past. The psychologist who was working with the police seemed to think there was a very good chance Cai had gone somewhere familiar, so now we were all praying she was right. And searching a forest.

The Fields twins had been popular, that much had become clear as soon as I’d seen the amount of people willing to help in the search effort. Half of Riverton had shown up.

Jarett and I made up one of quite a lot of two-man teams who were now wandering through the forest. We’d been outfitted with GPS and flashlights and mosquito spray and fifty other things that were supposed to guarantee our survival in case we got lost or hurt. I thought that was overkill up until the point where Jarett and I suddenly stood alone between weeds and ridiculously tall trees. No hint of civilization in sight. Holy crap, that was unsettling.