Complicit (8 page)

Turning it rotten.

 

 

“Aaaagh!” a fourteen-year-old Cate screamed. “How dare you!”

“Do
not
raise your voice at me, young lady.” Angie stood in the second-floor hallway with her hands on her hips.

“I want them back! Now! You can't do this. You can't invade my privacy.”

“This is a home, Cate. There's no such thing as privacy.”

“You
bitch.
”

Angie's face turned red. “If I ever spoke to my mother the way you're speaking to me, I would have been put out on the street.”

“Yeah, well, I don't care about you. Or your dipshit mother. Give them back!”

“Calm down. You're hysterical.”

“Give them back! They're
mine
!”

Malcolm and I both stood watching them, mouths open in shock. I thought Cate was going to hit Angie the way she'd hit me, but instead she kicked an antique table, tipping some expensive-looking vase so that it shattered on the floor. Then she collapsed to the ground in a puddle of tears.

“Come on,” Malcolm whispered in my ear. “Let's go downstairs.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes, let's let them work this out.” He put his arm around my shoulder and pulled me with him. He led me into the kitchen. Sat me in a chair. Pulled out his secret stash of chocolate-covered almonds he thought no one knew about.

I squirmed. Through the floorboards, I could still hear Cate crying, wailing. “What was that all about?”

“I don't know.” He looked down at me. “Is it upsetting you?”

I rubbed at my stomach. “I want to see Cate.”

“Not right now.” He handed me some of the candy.

“They've been fighting a lot recently.”

“Mother-and-daughter relationships can be complicated.”

“Yeah, but Cate said Mom
stole
something from her.”

Malcolm frowned. He put his arms on the counter. “I'm sure you've noticed a change in Cate's behavior over the past few months. Maybe longer.”

I thought about it. What had I noticed? There had been a lot more tension in the house lately. Snapping and yelling and slamming doors. Swearing, too, and breaking rules. Most of the conflict revolved around Cate, it was true. My previously warm and happy sister was changing. Becoming angry. Unpredictable. Wild.

“Your mom's just worried that Cate might be … experimenting.”

Experimenting? “With what?”

“Look, Jamie. I know we've talked about the danger of using drugs before. Especially given how little we know about your genetic history, right?”

I stared at the counter, cool swirls of marble, and felt queasy. Yes, we'd talked about this before and, yes, I understood the implications. My mom had probably been a drug addict. She probably came from a whole family of drug addicts and alcoholics and people with Issues. That meant Cate and I had those same horrible tendencies racing through our blood. Our own biological time bombs.

Tick tick boom.

I looked up at Malcolm. “Are you saying Mom found drugs in Cate's room?”

He bowed his head. Patted my hand gently. “Let's just let them work it out. Okay?”

 

 

Two weeks later, Cate lay panting on the floor of my room. I sat at my desk. I was listening to Mingus and reading Percy Jackson. Or trying to.

“They're sending me to that bitch doctor,” she growled.

“What doctor?”

“Yours! The head shrink.”

I put my book down. “You're going to see Dr. Waverly?”

“Yeah. Angie says I have to. Or I can't ride Cricket anymore.”

I turned to look at her, all sprawled on the floor like some helpless sea creature.

“Are you doing drugs?” I whispered. Then I held my breath.

Cate sat straight up, like a vampire rising from a coffin. Her eyes were bloodshot and wild. “Why are you asking me that? Who said that?”

“Cate—”

“They're starting rumors about me, aren't they? They're trying to set me up. They don't want anyone to know the truth. Selfish bastards.”

“Angie and Malcolm?”

“Who else?”

“Cate, I can smell stuff in your room. I can smell it right now. I'm not stupid.”

She scooted toward me on her hands and knees, then grabbed my pants so that I had to face her. “Look, I smoke pot to
relax.
Otherwise I'd be a fucking paranoid mess, living here.” Her nose wrinkled. “With
them.
”

“They're not that bad.”

Her lip curled. “Oh, you would say that, wouldn't you?”

“What do you mean?”

Cate rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Like you don't know. Mr. Scared to Rock the Boat. Mr. Four point oh GPA. You're even worse than they are.”

“Maybe seeing Dr. Waverly is a good idea. You know, if you have trouble relaxing.”

“Why? So she can put me on pills like you? So I can turn into a goddamn trained seal? Arf arf arf.”

What on earth? I couldn't believe her. “You just said you smoked pot to relax! How is that any different?”

She waved a hand. “It just is. You wouldn't understand.”

“Well, I like Dr. Waverly. And I'm not even taking any pills anymore. I haven't in a long time. Not since—”

“Not since what?”

“Not since that day at the barn … when I was with you and you made me ride Cricket.”

Cate sat back. Her face softened. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. She said I didn't need them anymore.”

My sister didn't say anything. She just stared at me.

“Cate?”

“What?”

“Do you remember Mom? Our real mom?”

“Yes,” she whispered as she reached up to run her hand through my hair. A gentle caress that made me shudder. “Do you?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I mean, I have a few memories, but they're so faint, it's hard to know if they're real or if I just think they are.”

“Are they good memories?”

“Yes. Mostly.”

Cate's chin quivered. “Then maybe … then maybe that's all that matters.”

“You think?”

“I don't know.”

“Are your memories good?” I asked her.

Cate wiped her eyes. “Not really.”

“Then don't be like her, Cate. Don't do stupid things. Don't die when you're twenty-four.
Please.
”

Cate started to cry.

“Oh, Jamie,” she said. “I'm trying to do the right thing. I am. But—”

“But what?”

“But it's so hard!”

EIGHTEEN

I stand next to my Jeep after Cate hangs up on me. I don't move. I'm too stunned. Our first conversation in years and it's like nothing's changed. She's still as maddening as ever, although I suppose it's not reasonable to expect Cate would come out of being locked up any
more
sane than when she went in. I still don't know if seeing her on the streets of Berkeley was a random accident or not. Is she following me? Is that what's going on? Or did my subconscious somehow put me in a position where I'd be likely to run into my own sister? The latter's possible, I guess, but I don't really like to think like that, since it sort of cheapens the whole fate thing.

The chirrup of my phone breaks me out of my dark memories and out of my dark mood. I look down and see a text. It's from Jenny. This warms me. Hearing from her is exactly what I need right now.

We go back and forth for a bit.

Her:
Thanks for the movie. I had a great time.:)

Me:
Me too.

Her:
There's a party tonight. Rock City. Going?

Me:
Wasn't planning on it. Might reconsider.

Her:
You should definitely reconsider. I'd really like to see you again. <3

I hold the phone to my chest after her last message. Everything inside of me says to play it cool, but I don't feel cool. Not when a girl I like is texting me with hearts and smilies. I was honest with Dr. Waverly about my inexperience. Not just with sex, but all of it. I mean, sure, I did some of the high school party make-out thing when I was a freshman, but sloppy rounds of Spin the Bottle don't teach anyone anything about social interaction except that old-fashioned voyeurism's alive and well.

After Cate's arrest, though, people stopped inviting me to their parties. They stopped inviting me anywhere. And not that it makes up for my loneliness or for anything, but I've sort of been okay with that. Cate changed me, too. Most people at my school knew her. Knew what she was like. So it's like we've all been tainted by her and her power. I hate that and maybe that's part of my attraction to Jenny. Moving here so recently, she never got to know Cate.

Maybe she never will.

Not if I have anything to say about it.

 

 

When I get home, the house is empty. There's a note from Angie that says she and Malcolm have gone to a holiday fundraiser for the opera all the way out in San Francisco. Charity and the arts are a big deal to them, which I guess is what happens when you have a lot of money—giving it away becomes more important than how you got it in the first place. Though maybe that's also what happens when you lose your children. Other than altruism, I can't imagine there are a lot of places to find hope after something like that.

For my part, I'm just glad they're not home. It'll make it that much easier for me to get out for the party later if I don't have to come up with a believable excuse for why I'm not staying in on a Saturday night the way I usually do. The less pressure, the better, since I'm already a little freaked about someone starting up with me tonight. Over Cate. It's happened before and it'll happen again. But seeing Jenny will make it worthwhile. Won't it?

I was hungry when I stepped through the door, but now a lump's formed in my throat, making it seem like it might be hard to get food down. So instead of eating, I cruise the downstairs of the empty house. I end up sitting at the Steinway in the formal living room, and I tap out the intro to Hancock's “Maiden Voyage,” just to say how I'm feeling.

Pretty soon it feels good, so I keep playing. A little louder, a little freer. I have a keyboard in my room that I can practice on, but when I'm in the mood, there's nothing like filling a whole house with my music. Cate used to tease me all the time about the whole piano thing, saying I did it in order to be like Graham, but I could have said the same thing about her riding. We both spent our childhood years competing with the shadows of ghosts. But that doesn't mean I want to
be
Graham or that Malcolm only sees me as a replacement for his dead son.

At least, I don't think it does.

Sometimes I'm confused as to exactly how my adoptive dad sees me. I guess I could say he
loves
me. But I have no way of telling if it's a true fatherly love, or more of a familiar type of love, the way you can love anything you own for a long time because not having it would feel like a loss. Nobody likes loss. But nostalgia doesn't make an object any more valuable.

It's a matter of perspective, I guess.

But I'll take what I can get.

NINETEEN

After a few of those early breakdowns and tantrums, Cate's mental illness roared in like a flip had been switched. Like a runaway train. Like an animal unleashed. There was no more doubt or uncertainty or
what if?
about it. Angie spent all her time trying to smooth over the trouble Cate got into, but her efforts were the proverbial Band-Aid over the stab wound because Cate never went down for the count. Nope, she kept running around town, bleeding her madness and hate over the world like it was her sole purpose in life.

There was no reasoning with Cate back then. There was no appealing to her sense of common decency. By the time she was fifteen, she slept all day and stayed out all night. She drank. She did drugs. She broke hearts. She broke rules. The only person Cate didn't set out to drag down into her mire of insanity and misery was me. And that was because we stopped talking. Right out of the blue. She never again invited me to the barn to watch her ride. She never came into my room to complain about school or Scooter or our parents. She didn't even bother teasing me.

I'd been dropped.

So I didn't know what she was up to with those girls. The things she was doing.

I had no idea.

I had to hear about it secondhand. From
Scooter.

 

 

“Your sister scares me, man.” Scooter and I stood side by side during eighth-grade lunch period. We were both thirteen at this point. A fence ran between Sayrebrook's middle and high schools, although they shared a common campus, so we leaned, rapt, against the chain-link fence and stared out at the older students, including Cate, who was in the tenth grade.

I picked at the flowering of acne that had sprouted along my chin. “What's so scary about her?”

“Look at her. She rules this place.”

“How's that?”

“There's no
how.
She just does. Hot girls have it made in this world. And your sister's the hottest of the hot.”

“I don't want to hear about how hot you think my sister is. In fact, it's the last thing I want to hear about. Ever.”

“Damn, Jamie, you're tough. It's like one of your balls dropped this week or something.”

I stepped back from the fence. “Trust me, Cate doesn't have anything made. And she definitely doesn't have the one she wants.”

Scooter grinned. “You're talking about me, right?”

“I am so not talking about you.”

Scooter didn't follow my gaze but I squinted back through the fence and into the afternoon sun. Through a grove of trees, on a wooden bench in the cool dappled California shade, sat Cate's longtime crush Danny Ramirez. He had his arm around his girlfriend. His petite blond girlfriend. Gwendolyn. A surge of resentment washed through me, deep as the ocean, but even I knew it was simple male jealousy. Danny was the lucky one. Damn lucky.