Bad Things (Tristan & Danika #1) (50 page)

I waited.

And waited.

Five more days passed, and I let the black moods take me again, but it wasn’t because I’d given up.
 
It was only that I couldn’t bear how much I missed her, as I bided my time.
     

I thought that waiting was the hardest thing I’d ever been through in my life, but life was about to prove me very wrong.
 

CHAPTER FORTY

TRISTAN

I doubted anyone had ever had their worst nightmare come to life and not doubted that it was real.
 
And so my first reaction to the news was denial.
 
This had to be a trick.
 
It had to be some sick prank.
 
Jared couldn’t be gone.
 
He was my baby brother.
 
It was my job to protect him.
 
It wasn’t possible that something like this could have happened to him on
my
watch…

My mother was sobbing endlessly, but the noise was always somewhere in the background, as though my brain was muting it, to soften the pain.
 

I didn’t cry.
 
I just sat, blank-faced and quiet, telling myself over and over again that this wasn’t really happening.
 

A stinging slap to the face was what finally took me painfully out of my own head.
 

I blinked at my mother, who stood, furious and crying, in front of me.

“This is your fault!” she screamed at me.
 
“It was your job to look after him, and look what’s happened!
 
You shouldn’t have encouraged him to act so wild, you bastard!”

Her words hurt, each one inflicting a deeper wound, and some even opening old ones up wider.
 

I did the only thing I knew how to do under attack.
 
I went on the offensive.
 
“Me?” I asked her quietly, a lifetime’s worth of contempt in the short word.
 
“Me?
 
You were supposed to be our
mother
!
 
You fed us pills like candy, you were drinking hard liquor and smoking pot with us by the time we were twelve!
 
And you blame
me
for this?
 
You blame me for the fact that he was a drug addict, when
you’re
the one that got him hooked!”

She collapsed to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably, and I instantly regretted every word I’d said, even though it had
all
been the truth, if a hard truth to stomach.
 

I tried to comfort her, but she would have none of it, and I gave up quickly, going into a numb sort of stupor.
 

 
This isn’t real.
 

This can’t be happening.
 
Not to Jared.
 
He was the sweetest kid, always.
 
Things like this didn’t happen to kids that sweet.
 
Bad things were supposed to happen to bad people, and Jared had always just been
good
.
 

He didn’t fight like me.
 
He wouldn’t have hurt another person to save his own life.
 
He didn’t sleep around.
 
He’d been waiting for the right girl to come along, for fuck’s sake.
 
Every shortcoming I had, he had been above, and I’d always taken a deep kind of pride in that.
 

People were talking in the background, though I couldn’t have named them.
 
I wasn’t paying much attention to anything that was going on, so I only caught bits and pieces of what they were saying, little snippets here and there, and none of it made any sense to me.
     

Jared had died of a heart attack.
 
A heart attack?
 
A fit twenty-one year old didn’t just have a heart attack.
 
Did he?
 
But of course that wasn’t all of the story.
 
Even in full on disconnect mode, I knew that.
 
Drugs were the story.
 
The only question was what, and how he’d miscalculated so far that he’d killed himself.
 
Killed himself?
 
No. No.
No
.
 
That was wrong. Wrong.
Wrong
.
     

I was in my mom’s house, though I didn’t even remember driving there.
 
I remembered getting the phone call from Cory, and then I’d just been here, my mother’s hysterical cries, her shrill accusations, just background noise.
 

I’d known lots of siblings that didn’t get along.
 
Dean had a little brother, and all that they seemed to do was rip into each other.
 
Even mellow Cory and his sister hardly spoke.
 

That had never,
never
been the case with Jared and me.
 
We had always been best friends.
 
Even when we didn’t agree on something, we respected each other, always, and respect went a long way.
 
I didn’t know how to accept the idea of his loss.
 
I didn’t know how to get past the denial, and face the absolute
horror
, the utter
agony
of it.
 

I only realized that Frankie was there when she knelt in front of me, her face tear-streaked and full of sympathy.
 
She and Jared had been tight, and it alarmed me that she was so worried for
me
, because it made me realize that she was so right to be worried.
 
I didn’t have a clue how to handle this.
 

“You think it could be true?” I asked her, my own voice startling me with how it broke on the words.
 
“You think Dean is pulling some shitty prank on us?”
 

She shook her head, black trails running, and running, and running down her face, her makeup in ruins.
 
She didn’t even wipe it off, as though she hadn’t noticed.
 
“No, Tristan.
 
Cory saw him firsthand, and you know he wouldn’t joke about something like this.
 
Look at him.
 
It’s destroyed him too.”

I couldn’t.
 
I couldn’t look at anyone.
 
I looked down at my hands, my shame almost as strong as my sense of denial.
 
I knew that as soon as the first one caught up to the second, I’d be in for it.
 
“This is my fault,” I sobbed.

Frankie threw her arms around me, sobbing with me.
 

In the background somewhere, I heard my mother shout a loud agreement.
 
She’d always instilled a sense of responsibility in me, to look after Jared, and I felt it like a stab to the heart.
 
He’d been my little brother, and it had been my job, my
duty
, to watch over him, and while I’d been lost in my own depression, he’d slipped away, without me there to stop him, without me there to even hold his hand at the end.
 

That train of thought was pure masochism, and as I followed it, the denial left me, and the pain came, and I broke with it.
 
I knew, absolutely, that I could die from this pain, that I could very well kill myself just to escape it.
   

I did the only thing I could in the face of utter despair.
 
I reached out for a lifeline.
 

“Does Danika know?” I asked, pulling back.

Frankie shook her head, sniffling.
 
“I haven’t called her yet.”

“Will you call her now?
 
Will you tell Danika that I need her?”
 
My voice broke again on the words.
 
“She won’t take my calls.”
 

She patted my shoulder, standing.
 
“Of course I will.
 
I’ll go outside to make the call.
 
It’s too loud in here.”

I grabbed her hand before she could move away.
 
“Do you know if she’s listened to my messages?”

She squeezed my hand.
 
“I don’t think she has.
 
She told me a week ago that her phone has been buried in a drawer.
 
I’ll have to call Bev to get ahold of her.”

I nodded.
 
“Will you tell her to listen to them, if she gets a chance?”

“I will.
 
I’ll be right back, k?”

I just nodded, looking down at my hands, watching my tears smack against them, surprised that I could actually hear them hitting my knuckles over the sound of my mom howling.
 

Frankie returned quickly, looking even more upset than before.
 
“Bev said she’d tell her, but she’d taken the boys to run errands, and didn’t have her phone, so she isn’t sure how long that’ll take.
 
She said that, as soon as she returns, Jerry will bring her over.”
 

I tried to be okay with that, but I wasn’t.
 
I couldn’t cope with this for one more second without her, let alone some indefinite period of time.
 

I got up, then sat again, feeling totally lost.
 
Dark thoughts circled through my head, thoughts of guilt, and agony, and self-destruction.
 

I found my phone, and just stared at it for sixty-three minutes, while I waited in purgatory, counting every minute, because every minute felt like an hour.
 

When sixty-three minutes had come and gone, I knew I couldn’t wait another.
 
I got up, threw my phone on the couch, and burst out the front door.
 

It was pouring rain outside, which I’d somehow failed to notice before.
 
I didn’t care now, breaking into a run, running from anything and everything, intending to run until I literally dropped.
 

DANIKA

I knew that something was terribly wrong the second I stepped in the front door.
 
The look of caring sympathy on Bev’s face would haunt me.
 

It’s strange the things that haunted you for years and years after a tragedy.
 
The look on Bev’s face when she braced to tell me the news, the tears in Jerry’s eyes, a man who I’d never seen cry, the way the boys didn’t say a word, as though clued into what was going on as soon as they saw their mother’s face.
 

Some of it you’d expect; the last time I’d hugged Jared, the last time I’d seen him smile, the last time he’d called me for some silly reason, or for no reason at all.
 
Those were a sweet sort of haunting though.

The bitter haunting came in the form of finding missed calls from Jared weeks later, calls that I’d missed because I’d been so wrapped up in my own problems, my own dysfunctions.
 
The idea that I could have spoken to him again before he passed gave me the most acute sense of loss, because I’d thrown away something precious.
 
There was even one precious message from him that I could never find the heart to erase.
 
In fact, I kept that phone in a drawer by my bed, years after I’d upgraded, because I couldn’t bear to let the sound of his voice be erased.
 

Hand in hand with the haunting, came regret.
 

As Jerry drove me to Leticia’s house, I started listening to Tristan’s messages, as he’d asked Frankie to ask me to do.
 
As I listened, and realized that, while I’d been wrapped up in convincing myself that he could never give me what I needed, he’d been ready to give it to me, if I’d only bothered to listen.
 

I felt such regret then, because there was some chance, some strange persistent idea in my head, that if Tristan and I had made up faster, Jared might still be alive.
 
He may have been with us, instead off somewhere without us, being reckless, getting hurt.
 
Losing his life.
 

That regret taught me a lot about guilt, about how it supersedes all logic, and how it never really goes away, even with time.
 

All of the what ifs could destroy me, if I let them.
 
That made me think of Tristan, and how, if I was feeling this unendurable, overwhelming pain at the loss of Jared, I couldn’t even
imagine
what he must be going through.
 

I couldn’t get to him fast enough.
 
The idea that he was going through this without me, that he’d
asked
for me, and I hadn’t already been there to hold him, quite simply tore me apart.
 

We pulled up to the curb just as he was tearing away from the house.
 
I was out of the car, sprinting after him, before the car had come to a complete stop.
 

I screamed his name, but he didn’t hear me, or at least he didn’t stop.
 
My flip-flops fell off, and my feet pounded bare against the sidewalk, but I didn’t care.
 
I wasn’t going to let him be alone, not while I still had breath left in me.
 

I chased him in the pouring rain until I my lungs were on fire, a sense of desperation in every footfall that pounded hard against the wet pavement.
 

I screamed his name until my voice was hoarse, and I was too breathless to call out.
 
But there was no way for me to catch him.
 
He was too fast, and showed no signs of tiring, and so I found the breath to scream some more.
 

What finally slowed him was reaching a cul-de-sac, with nowhere else to go.
 
There he paused for long enough for me to catch him with a wild, desperate hug from behind.
 

He stiffened, then turned, falling to his knees, his face buried in my stomach.
 
He was as out of breath as I was, but that didn’t stop his helpless sobs.