You'd Be Home Now (3)
The one thing that’s changed is the sound of our house.
It’s quiet.
It was never quiet with Joey, especially last year, when things got bad. So much yelling and fighting with my mom about his grades. His attitude. Slammed doors. Joey burying himself deep into his hoodie when my dad would try to talk to him. I did whatever I could to make things better. Woke him up for school, even if I had to pour cold water on his face to do it. Did his homework, just enough to get his grades up, make it look like he was trying, but not enough to raise suspicion. I just wanted the noise to stop.
Next to me, Maddie rolls over, her knee knocking into mine. Little flares heat my knee, but not too much, because of the pill. I bite back a little gasp. Maybe I need another one? But I don’t want to wake her up. I don’t want any more fights about taking pills. I don’t want noise anymore.
Because this quiet? Even though I love Joey, he’s my brother, how could I not love him?—this quiet is peaceful.
It’s finally peaceful now that my wild and troubled brother is gone.
And I feel guilty about loving this peace.
5
“IT’S A MESS UP there,” Maddie says. “But I think I got most of it cleaned up.” She drops a milk crate on the living room floor and flops down on the couch next to me. Her hair is in a ponytail and her neck gleams with sweat. The stairs to the attic are steep.
Even sweaty and with no makeup, my sister is beautiful. I shouldn’t feel jealous, but I do.
“Mom really tore Joey’s room apart. I don’t know if I told you. Maybe you don’t remember. You were so out of it in the hospital. But we came back here a couple of days after the accident to shower and change clothes and went up there. You know? To see what he’d been hiding, and she just…kind of lost it.”
She leans forward and shuffles through the milk crate. “I don’t think she found much. Maybe a bong and some weed. But look what I found.”
She hands me a stack of papers. Joey’s art. Gold-winged dragons with orange fire spilling from their jaws. Hulking creatures with sharp talons and red eyes. A whole world he created in the attic when our parents let him move up there when he was thirteen. He could sit for hours at his drafting table, immersed. My mother turned his old bedroom into her exercise space.
“I don’t think he draws anymore,” I tell her. “Maybe he will now. When he comes back. When he’s better.”
Maddie looks at me carefully. “Emmy, I’m not sure there’s going to be a ‘better.’ He took heroin. That’s some serious stuff. That’s not something you can just…brush off. I mean, I had no idea. Did you?”
I arrange the papers into a neat pile on my lap, avoiding her eyes. “I thought…I don’t know. It was hard. I was just trying to take care of him. I thought it was just…being stoned and stuff. You don’t know what it was like, last year. You were gone.”
I start to cry, tears spilling onto my T-shirt. I haven’t taken a shower in days and I’m wearing the same clothes I came home from the hospital in, the crutches are giving me sores under my arms, and I feel awful and rank sitting next to my beautiful sister with her hair up in a messily perfect ponytail.
And I feel guilty about Joey, like part of this is my fault, for keeping his secrets for so long.
And then there’s Candy.
It’s too much, everything bubbling inside me at once.
“Oh, Emmy,” Maddie says, wrapping her arms around me. “It’s okay. Don’t cry. It’s not your fault. I swear, it’s not your fault.”
But somewhere, deep down, I think it is.
Because if I hadn’t tried to hide Joey’s secrets, maybe Candy MontClair wouldn’t have died.
6
WHEN I LIMP INTO the kitchen, my mother flips over the newspaper she was reading and sets her coffee cup on it.
“Well, hello,” she says brightly, turning to the stove. She slides scrambled eggs onto a plate for me. “It’s a big day. You need to eat. You haven’t been eating much. I’m getting a bit worried.”
She sniffs the air delicately. “Did you shower?” She pulls her hair back and weaves it into a stylish, casual bun. She’s wearing a lovely cream blouse, dark gray jacket, pants that flare elegantly over her crisp black shoes. Her work clothes.
“You’re going to work?” I ask, my heart sinking. I thought she’d want to come with me when I finally got my leg brace off. It’s been five weeks. I don’t know why I got my hopes up.
She frowns. “Of course. I can’t miss today. We’ve got a deposition. Maddie’s here. She’ll take you to your appointment.”
I take a few bites of egg and then push the rest around on the plate while she busies herself with wallet, keys, purse. My mother is a lawyer and my dad is a doctor in the ER, which means they’re both always pretty much working, but I thought at least one of them would want to be there the day I got my leg brace off.
“Don’t pout, Emory. Blue Spruce isn’t covered by insurance and Daddy and I can’t take the time away.” Blue Spruce is the place in Colorado where they sent Joey.
I look back at my plate. Once in the third grade when my mother dropped me and Joey at school, one of the mothers on the sidewalk whispered, “That family is richer than sin, I’m surprised they don’t have a chauffeur for their precious babies.”