You'd Be Home Now (11)

    Parents don’t make any sense. My dad works to save people, but he can’t even stop smoking. My parents send Joey to rehab, but my mother can’t sleep without a pill.

“What did Goldie leave for dinner?” He slides onto a stool.

Last spring, my dad’s hair was still thick and dark and wavy. Only a few threads of gray.

In June, after the accident, I swear it turned white overnight.

I hand him a fork and a warmed Tupperware of cauliflower and lentils.

“Maybe I’ll watch a little television and turn in,” he says, like this is a novel idea and not what he does every night when he comes home.

He’ll take his dinner to the den, fix a large tumbler of something that will make him fall asleep before it’s even finished, the television still running the British baking show, all airy pastels and fusty judges.

I wait, like I always wait, like I’ve waited for years maybe: Hey, you, let’s go roller-skating?

Hey, you, how about a movie?

Hey, you, how’s about we head out for some cupcakes?

Hey, you, how you doing?

Or even, The weight of that girl dying must be heavy in you and I am sorry.

    I wish people would ask about that. How it makes me feel, Candy dying.

Or even how it feels about Joey, which feels like a different kind of death.

But all my dad says is “Bad night in the pit, kiddo.” That’s what he calls the ER, the pit. It makes me think of piles of bodies and blood and my father picking his way through them, which I guess is really kind of what it must seem like.

He must see something in my face then, because he suddenly says, “Things are going to be better now, Emmy. It’s been so hard on all of us, but it’s really up to Joe now. All we can do is love him.”

It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it. “But we always loved him and still—”

“Emmy.” He takes my hand. “It’s all we can ever do. It’s the one thing we cannot stop doing.”

I turn away, to the sink, pretend to move some dishes around.

“Emmy, you will be okay, too. I promise.”

I don’t want my dad to see me cry.

When I turn back, he’s gone, the Tupperware still on the counter, untouched.



* * *



—

I should be sleeping, but I’m floating again instead. Night is my favorite time to float and soon, when fall comes, it will be too cold.

I should be in bed, resting, getting ready for Joey to come back tomorrow. I miss him. It feels like forever. Once Maddie left for her summer session, the house became eerie. We’ve been three ghosts floating inside the whole summer.

    In two weeks, school starts.

My heart begins to pound, that flippy feeling where it feels like you can’t breathe.

I don’t want to go back to school. See Candy’s friends.

I will never forget the rain that night, heavy and cold. The way it kept pouring through the broken window and washing away the blood that streaked down Candy’s face. The way the blood just kept coming back. The way she panted in the backseat, her body twisted, her eyes staring back at me in the cracked rearview, Joey across her lap, trapping her. The world was upside down and smashed in a billion pieces.

I’m sixteen. According to the apps on my phone, all the kids in Mill Haven are out doing the last of summer partying, red Solo cups and beer bottles lifted high, music pounding. Crackling bonfires and beer pong. Bongs and whatever else. That’s what kids do, right? This is the best time of our lives, or so everyone keeps telling us.

And for one rainy night in June, I tried to be one of them. I really did.





9


I WAKE UP EARLY, LIKE I always do these days, and get in a good float before I take another awkward, slow shower and make my way carefully down the sixteen steps to the kitchen, where I look at my mother’s list again.

1. Empty the dishwasher

2. Fold the laundry

3. Clean out Maddie’s drawers; bring J’s clothes down

4. Give Sue her check/therapy 9–11 am

5. Feed Fuzzy

6. Daddy’s meal is in Tupperware labeled Daddy

7. Clean your room

8. Clean your bathroom

9. J needs school clothes; sizes and styles attached; credit card in file cabinet; the key hanging inside spice cabinet

10. Clothes for you; sizes and styles attached

11. Thank you!



I guess my mother is hiding everything now, including the key to the file cabinet, where she keeps the clothing credit card. We hide pain medication, jewelry, and credit cards now, as though Joey is a black-masked thief and not some messed-up kid.

    I fold the list up and slide it into my purse.

I am less my mother’s daughter than her staff member, somewhere between Goldie the housekeeper and the silent guy in the wide-brimmed hat who comes to trim our hedges and mow our lawns every few weeks, or the stone-faced father and son who show up every Friday at nine a.m. to tend our pool.

At the end of our driveway, I allow myself one quick look at the Galt’s house. At Gage’s house.

The blind is still drawn in his window. He’s been gone the whole summer, pitching camp and traveling with his buddies. But he’ll be back. Soon. And I need him back, because maybe, just maybe, a little part of me is like Joey.