Breathless (27 page)

The Ghost can’t look at me while he talks.

“We weren’t just out getting Chinese food earlier,” he says. “We were at the hospital.”

“With Will? What’s the matter?”

He clears his throat. He clutches a handful of the bedspread in his fist, his knuckles white. “Early this morning, an orderly at the hospital where Will is staying was killed. In your brother’s room. He was stomped to death by someone wearing a pair of heavy boots.” The Ghost finally looks at me. “They were your brother’s boots,” he says. “They have video surveillance of the orderly walking down the hall and going into the room. A nurse found him this morning. His body was in the bathtub.” The Ghost swallows hard. “There were shoeprints all over his neck and face. Will and his roommate were fast asleep, or at least pretending to be, when the nurse started screaming and woke them up. Neither of them will talk. They both claim to have slept through the night.” Then my dad adds—and I can almost detect a note of hope in his voice, his expression strong as he gazes past me—“They wear the same shoe size.”

“Will couldn’t have done that,” I insist. “When has he ever hurt anybody? He’s never hurt anyone.”

My father puts his arms around me. He starts to cry. “Oh, baby,” he says, the smells on him—cigarettes, maybe a little booze, fatigue, and sweat—curling into my nostrils and turning my stomach. “I love you.” He looks at me with cloudy eyes. Even in the shade of their bedroom, the lenses in his eyeglasses have darkened. Maybe it’s the heat from his face. “You’re just a little girl.”

“Do they think he did it?”

The Ghost covers his eyes. Tiny splashes sound from the bathroom. “I think so, honey.”

“He couldn’t have—I have to talk to him. Daddy, I have to talk to him!” I feel a stab as I recall hanging up on those desperate collect calls last year.

My father just stares.

“
Dad.
Come on, you know he couldn’t have done anything to anybody.”

“Kathryn—”

“
No.
Nobody knows him better than I do. He wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

The Ghost shakes his head. “He did. He has. Remember, honey—last year. And the year before.”

“He didn’t hurt that cat. It was an accident, I tried to
tell
you . . .”

“But he hurt himself. He almost killed himself twice. He almost killed me.” The logic stops me, my mouth open, poised to speak. “Didn’t he?”

When I don’t say anything, the Ghost continues. “Baby, listen.” He puts his arms around me. “He’s gone, honey. He isn’t here anymore. We’ve lost him.” He strokes the hair on my forehead, tries to calm me as I start to feel panic rising in my chest. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry we let you down. We tried so hard.”

“I want to talk to him,” I whisper.

“You can’t.”

“I want to write him.”

“You can’t.”

“
Yes, I can
. I have to talk to him, there’s something I have to say to him—please tell him to write me. Please?”

There’s a click, and the bathtub drain begins to gurgle behind the door.

“Okay,” the Ghost says, reluctant. “I’ll tell him.”

My mother has wrapped herself in a bathrobe. Without makeup, her face looks like worn paper, a million tiny blood vessels burst in a flush of deep red below her skin. She has removed her contacts and squints at us from behind a pair of glasses.

My mother looks at my father and me in bed. It’s one of those high mattresses, two box springs beneath a California king. It’s so high that my mom needs a stepstool to climb in. Instead of getting into bed, she leans against the wall and slides toward the floor. She spreads her arms and says, “Come here, honey.”

We sit on the floor together for a few minutes, the fan circling above our heads, repeating its aggressive
swish, swish, swish.

My mom takes a few long, deep breaths, which the Ghost has taught us to do when we need to calm down. She says, “He had a family.”

“Who did?”

“The man who was killed. He had a wife and parents and people who loved him.”

The Ghost removes his glasses and begins to clean the lenses on a corner of his shirt. “Sweetie,” he says to my mother, “now listen to me—”

“What about us?” I interrupt. “What about my brother? What about
our
family?”

My mother grips my arm so tightly that I’ll have faint bruises the next day. “This is no family,” she says.

“Honey . . .”

“This is important,” she tells my father. “I want Katie to hear this.” She presses our foreheads together. She has the breath of someone who hasn’t slept. “I don’t know what we did wrong,” she says, “but I’m sorry. Katie, I am so sorry. We tried so hard. You kids were everything to us.”

“It’s okay, Mom.” We are all crying, and I’ve never been so thankful to have my mommy beside me.

“No, it isn’t. Listen to me. I want to tell you something.”

“What?”

She pulls back. She continues to squeeze my arm. I try to wiggle away, but it’s no use. “Never have children,” she says. “Never have babies. It will break your heart.”

Things slow down after that. I go downstairs to make myself a drink, digging through the fridge behind several half-empty varieties of all-natural peanut butter and a plastic bag full of rotting turnips until I come across a six-pack with four cans missing.

I drink one right there in the kitchen, standing in front of the open refrigerator all by myself, and have just crumpled the can in my fist and tossed it into the sink, when my mother pushes through the swinging door, nearly hitting me in the face.

She begins searching through the cabinet above the sink, where she keeps the medicine, paying no attention to me. The lights are off.

“What are you looking for?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She goes to the fridge and opens the last beer for herself, holding the plastic six-rings for a moment, looking at it with uncertainty. She opens the cabinet under the sink and pulls out a plastic garbage bag, which is half-filled with something I can’t see. She opens the bag and places the six-rings inside, laying it carefully on top of the contents.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Oh, you don’t remember? You can make a hammock out of six-pack plastic.” She smiles at me. “You need five hundred of them.”

“We never made a hammock.”

“I know. I’ve been saving them since you were little. I thought it would make a nice project for you and me and Willie some afternoon.”

“Oh.”

“. . . ”

“. . . ”

“But not anymore,” she says.

“I guess not.”

“I can always do it by myself. I think I must have more than five hundred by now.”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“Why don’t you just buy a hammock?”

She opens her mouth, as if to answer right away, closes it, opens it again. She looks like she has no idea where she even is. “I’ve been saving these for so long.” It seems like the thought has never occurred to her. She frowns, puts her empty beer can on the counter. “I have to go check on your father.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Where?”

“In the medicine cabinet.”

“Oh. Nothing. Something to help me sleep. I don’t think it matters, though.”

“Take some nighttime cold medicine.”

She shakes her head. “You can’t mix those things with alcohol, honey. It’ll kill you.”

My mother’s problem, I realize, isn’t that she’s a drunk, or that she’s cold or uncaring. I have an idea of who she is, of the kind of mom she tried to be when I was a kid. I imagine that she woke up one day, looked around at her life as a parent, and realized that it was not anything like she’d expected. It was our fault, I know. Will was so sick, and the two of us were just so
bad.

Downstairs, Mazzie is curled in a ball in the crook of my parents’ sofa, her hands pressed together as though in prayer and slid between her upper thighs. Her mouth hangs open slightly.

I stand over her for a while, just watching, and then I tap her on the shoulder with one finger.

She opens her eyes a sliver. When she begins to speak, the spit that has pooled in her cheek spills over onto her pillow.

“What do you want?”

I say the first thing that comes to mind. “I have to get out of here. Right now.”

She sits up. “What, you mean
now
? It’s the middle of the night. I was asleep.”

“We have to go back.”

She can sense the urgency in my voice. She moves slowly at first, gathering up her things, and then faster as she sees me shoving my clothes into my duffel bag, not even bothering to change out of my pj’s.

“Should we say good-bye to your parents?” she asks.

I shake my head. “It’s done.”

Since we haven’t even been gone twenty-four hours, nobody at the dorms seems to notice we ever left. We have to sneak up the fire escape and into our room through the window, since it’s the middle of the night. At least we missed Lindsey’s Halloween party.

The dorm is deserted; aside from Mr. and Mrs. Christianson downstairs, Mazzie and I are the only students left for the weekend.

While we were driving home, I told her what happened with my brother.

“Do you think he did it?” she asked.

I didn’t answer her for a while. As I was driving, the highway stretching out in a long straight line before me, I remembered so many things about my big brother: the way he trained our first dog, Wags, to sit and stay and roll over. The time Will saved a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest and tried to nurse it back to health. Will was devastated when it died. I remember my brother as such a gentle and loving child, the best big brother a girl could hope for, but I remember when I started to sense our family’s world tilting on its axis, the kaleidoscope turning, when things started to go wrong. From then on, it was like we were still ourselves, but our lives played out as though reflected back to us from a funhouse mirror. But I know it’s real: it happened, it’s still happening, and eventually it will be over. Maybe it already is.

“I think it was his roommate,” I said. “I can’t imagine my own brother—”

“Katie,” Mazzie interrupted, “that’s just it. You can’t imagine your own brother, period. You have no idea what he’s like now.”

“But I remember what he
was
like,” I insisted. “And there still must be a part of the old Will somewhere inside, right?”

Mazzie shrugged. “Whatever you want to believe.”

I expect everyone to know. I expect it to be on the news, to be the absolute talk of the school. But nobody treats me any differently. Actually, that’s not true. People are happy for me. On the bulletin board in the cafeteria, Mrs. Waugh has posted a list of all the seniors and all the colleges they’ve been admitted to so far. Beneath my name, in twelve-point font, it says, “Yale University.”

“I haven’t gotten my letter yet,” I tell her.

She gives me a wide smile. “Katie, you should be more confident. You were there for
two
summers, correct?”

I nod.

“And both summers, you went to swimming practice every morning.”

“Yes.”

“Beyond that, you have an impeccable record here, you have great SAT scores, you’re in AP classes, you’ve been scouted by coaches all over the country, and you have letters of recommendation from your professors at Yale.”

I nod again.

“Why wouldn’t you get in? How could that possibly happen?”

I lick my lips and give her the biggest smile I can muster. “You’re right,” I say. “I’m sure I’ll get in.” Apparently she hasn’t talked to Solinger lately.

chapter 15

Because it’s the last weekend before everybody goes home for Christmas break, we’ve all decided to do something really special together by heading down to Virginia for the weekend. Our plan is to visit some of last year’s seniors who go to college now at the University of Virginia. According to the social grapevine, there’s supposed to be some really superb marijuana available. Some
college-grade
marijuana.

It’s a relief to get away. Despite the letter I wrote him, which I don’t even know if he ever got, I haven’t heard from Will, and it’s killing me. My parents don’t like to talk about him, or what’s going to happen next. I have nightmares again almost every time I close my eyes for more than a few seconds. When sleep takes hold of me, I feel my insides coming undone, my whole self unglued and whirring like goo in a centrifuge. I feel a near-constant tingling in my fingertips, and I start to have difficulty breathing again—I can’t relax knowing that he’s all alone somewhere, probably scared and confused, and even if he isn’t the brother I knew, there will always be a part of him who’s still my brother, somehow, in some way.

Ordinarily, none of the boarding students would
ever
have permission to visit a college campus without an adult chaperone. Getting out of town this weekend has taken a complex web of lies—lying to Mrs. Christianson, lying to Lindsey’s parents, lying to Estella’s parents. So we are totally disregarding the Woodsdale Academy honor code in order to spend a weekend at college. I don’t feel that guilty. Seniors are
supposed
to do things like this.

Once we get to UVA, I make a conscious decision to try to forget about Will and have a good time. It’s an odd mix of people this weekend: of course there’s me, Drew, Mazzie, Lindsey, Estella—but then there’s the people we’re staying with: Stetson McClure and Jeremy Chase. Despite all the drama over Estella, they’re roommates. And this weekend the rest of their crew from high school is visiting, too.

The second I see Stetson, it’s obvious that college has only made him cooler. He takes us down the hall in his bathrobe, drinking a forty of malt liquor in a paper bag, to show us the signs that he’s made and posted all over the dorm. They say:

Do you find yourself feeling alone at college?
Is it difficult for you to make friends?
Do you feel like nobody understands you?

(And then, all the way at the bottom of the page)

IF SO, THEN YOU ARE A LOSER.

We all agree that it’s the funniest thing any of us has ever seen. Stetson catches my eye while I’m laughing and winks at me.

For a second, I don’t know how to respond—where’s Drew? Did he notice what Stetson just did?