Crash Into You (32 page)

Chapter 75
Isaiah

I SLIP MY WALLET INTO
my back pocket and watch as her father murders the clutch. The ache in my chest is enough to kill me, but I hold on to the words I said to her: I swear we’ll be together. Rachel knows I’ll never break my word. This love between us—it will never stop.

Noah places a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“I love her,” I say. “And she loves me. She’ll be eighteen in less than a year. Graduate in less than a year and a half.” Then no one can keep us apart.

“And you have me.” Abby appears on my other side. “Maybe my cover will work, and I can keep you connected. You never know.” But she doesn’t say it like she believes it.

Abby stares after Rachel as if she lost her best friend. I place an arm around her. That’s because she did. “We’ll get her back.” I don’t know if I’m trying to convince her or me.

She wipes at her eyes. “This is why I don’t do relationships.”

At the intersection leading out of the dragway, the police officer turns right. The brake lights release as the Mustang rolls forward on a yellow and a tightness overwhelms my throat. The sensation that I dread, the tingling between my skin and muscles, crawls over me. I release Abby and take several steps. Terrified that if I lose sight of Rachel, I’ll lose her forever.

The light switches to red and the Mustang stalls in the middle of the intersection. I hear the attempt to turn over the engine, and my feet move faster as I watch the tractor trailer move into the intersection—speeding. My world goes into slow motion as my legs pump hard to reach the car, to protect Rachel.

There’s a sickening crunch and the white pony flips onto its side and rolls again and again. Like a ball hurling down a hill. From the other direction another car hits, and I scream out Rachel’s name. Brakes screech, glass shatters, more cars collide. The carnage lies in front of me as her car comes to a rest. The entire body smashed beyond recognition.

Buzzing fills my head as I continue to scream her name. I push my body harder, faster, but I can’t reach her. A few wisps of smoke puff from the hood.

And then fire.

I jump onto the hood of a sandwiched Civic. “Rachel!”

People are crying. Others screaming. Glass falls to the pavement. “Rachel! Answer me!”

The windshield of her car is a spiderweb, allowing me no visual access. Noah joins me on the hood of the Civic, and both of us use our arms as shields when a burst of flame shoots in our direction. Heat warms my arms. My eyes flicker, hunting for her exit. She’s wedged in. Both doors blocked by other vehicles. “Rachel!”

“We gotta move this car,” Noah shouts.

Her car is on fire.
The thought races in my head. We slide off the hood and run to the back end of the Honda Civic. “Pick it up.”

The driver of the Civic joins us. Blood stains his cheek. “It happened so fast.”

Noah and I say nothing to him as we raise the back end with our bare hands. We both yell as the end lifts. My fingers scream in agony, but we keep going until we create a space. The Civic slams back on the ground. The gap isn’t much, but enough to wedge through. I cough as I inhale smoke and open the driver’s-side door. Blood soaks her father’s white shirt, but his eyes are open and he blinks. Beyond him, Rachel lies completely broken.

“Get her out,” her father coughs. “She’s not responding.”

Panicked adrenaline surges through my body. She can’t be dead. She can’t. “Noah!”

“Pull him out!” Noah says on top of the Civic. “Hand him to me.”

I squat down, in order to get a better grip. “Can you stand?”

He tries to move and groans instead. “Get her out!”

Smoke rises from the dashboard, and my heart rate increases. Using my shoulder, I lean into her father and yank him out of the car. He yells in pain and screams again when Noah pulls him up. The second his body is off me, I dash into the car.

“Rachel.” I say her name calmly, hoping she’ll answer. “Angel, I need you to open your eyes. Come on. Talk to me.”

I place my arm behind her back and the other beneath her legs. She flops like a rag doll. “You’re not fucking doing this, Rachel. I made a promise, and that means you made a promise to me. We’re going to be together. Do you hear me?”

I tug and Rachel’s body jerks back toward her seat in response. Readjusting my grip, I yank harder, and her body resists. My lungs burn from the smoke, and I wave at the air, trying to see the problem.

My hand reaches to the floorboard, exploring, and the world halts. I swear. No, no, no, no. The floorboard collapsed up and the side smashed in, metal twists around her legs. I cradle her sweet face in my hands and talk to her as if she can hear me. My voice breaks. “Your legs are stuck, angel. Your legs are stuck.”

I’m going to lose her. Please no, I’m going to lose her.

“Isaiah!” yells Noah. “You’ve got to get out! Get out, get out, get out!”

Chapter 76
Isaiah

May

I SPENT A GOOD PORTION
of my life trying to figure out where I would get my next meal or how to avoid physical pain. In other words—how to survive. I never had a reason to contemplate death—too busy worrying about living.

Standing in this cemetery, it’s hard not to think about the end of life. Noah told me that his parents are buried in the section across from here. Echo’s brother’s final resting place is on the other side of the massive graveyard. No one is immune to mortality.

A light misty rain makes the warm spring day humid, causing my shirt to stick to my skin. I stay motionless, staring at the plot. There’s a heaviness inside of me that could produce tears. But I push it away. I’ve got too many emotions running rampant.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

My mother squats and touches the tombstone. “Yes. I knew he was your father the moment you walked into that visitation room. You look exactly like him, Isaiah.” She glances at me with a weak smile and glassy eyes. “He was handsome, too.”

My father. Unable to stand anymore, I sit on the wet grass. James McKinley. “I’m Irish?”

She laughs. “I guess. We never discussed family trees. He was a good guy. Decent. He died before I knew I was pregnant. So I crossed him off the list of possible fathers. Once again, a stupid mistake on my part.”

We’re not close—me and Mom. She wants to bond. I’m okay with knowing she’s alive. She pressures me for more, but I tell her she should be happy that the anger I feel for her is receding. Too much time passed between six and seventeen. Too many hurts. Sometimes it’s best to forgive someone and keep them at arm’s length.

“James had a big family. A little odd, but great people. I wish I had known then that you belonged to him. They would have taken us both in.” She goes silent. “Or at least you. You should find them.”

I scratch the back of my head. Somewhere in Kentucky, I have a big family. “I’m not sure I’d want to go through a paternity test.” And be proved wrong.

“I can’t say they wouldn’t ask for one, but one look at you and they’d know. You’re all him. Right down to the earrings and tattoos.”

The thought makes me smile. “No shit?”

She laughs again. “He would have said that, too. James was good to me. We were friends, and I got stupid and took advantage of him. I never forgave myself for hurting him, and I feel awful that he never knew you existed.”

“How’d he die?”

“Car accident.” She stares at the tombstone as if he’d appear if she focused hard enough.

“Will you tell me about him?”

Mom relaxes back on her bottom. The rain mats her dark hair against her face. “I don’t know much, but I’ll tell you everything I do know. James loved motorcycles...”

* * *

At the McDonald’s across the
street from the cemetery, I wait in a corner booth. Courtney slips me a container of vanilla ice cream before sitting across from me with her own. She opens her purse and produces a bottle of multicolored sprinkles. She shakes some on hers and pours a whole shitload on mine.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Buying you ice cream.” Courtney drops the bottle into her purse and digs into her soft serve. “Don’t tell me that at eight you didn’t wish someone would have bought you ice cream with sprinkles.”

Courtney can do this now. Extract a memory buried within me with scary ease. There are times I think she’s a mind reader, then I remember she’s not. She was a foster kid, raised by the system, just like me. A pang in my chest makes me think of being eight and watching families buy ice cream. Courtney smiles when I take a bite.

“Do you feel like you ratted by becoming a social worker?” I ask.

She’s silent as her forehead furrows. “I choose to think about how I can help other kids in ways no one helped me.”

Fair enough.

“You and your mom talked a lot today.” Courtney observed us from her dry car.

“Met my dad.” So to speak.

“Sort of figured. How are things going with her?”

I shovel the ice cream in my mouth so I don’t have to answer. My eyes narrow at the way the sweet sprinkles roll on my tongue. Courtney giggles. “By the way, gummy worms on ice cream are way overrated.”

“Noted.” I mix the ice cream. “I can’t give her what she wants.”

“You don’t have to,” she says. “I never said a relationship with her is healthy, just that you should talk to her. From experience, you eventually would have had an ache to see your mom. I thought it would be better to deal with her while you’ve got me to buy you ice cream afterward.”

“You should have told me when we first met you were system-produced.”

She squishes her lips together. “I was once pissed-off-seventeen. You weren’t ready to listen.”

True.

“Congrats, by the way. Heard you aced the exam.”

“Thanks.” I passed my ASE...again. My internship and job secured. I nudge the ice cream away and relax back in my seat. Lately, I feel like I’ve been drifting. I’m back in foster care at Shirley and Dale’s. Noah lives in the dorms. We still talk, but not nearly as often. There are times I feel...alone.

“I know people who have families,” I say. “They graduate from high school and they get a job or go to college and if they fuck it all up they go back home.” I pause, tapping my finger on the table. “What do I do if...” I fuck it all up. I clear my throat and my eyebrows move closer together. “Where do I go?”

Courtney shoves her ice cream away, too. “Foster care sucks, but so does aging out. It’s weird. You spend the entire first part of your life fighting to get out and then one day...you are out. Then you want to scream at the closed door that you’re still a kid, but everyone is pretty damned insistent you’re an adult. I cried a lot when I first aged out.”

My lips quirk. “I don’t think I’ll be crying.”

Courtney snorts. “Or whatever boys do.”

I swallow and find the courage to say the words. “I don’t want to be homeless.”

“You won’t be.” She waggles her eyebrows and pulls a folder out of her bag. “I have a plan. You don’t turn eighteen until this summer, so we have a couple more months before you age out. I can teach you how to budget and help you find a place to live and all sorts of fun adult things. And here’s the cool part. I’ll still be around when you turn eighteen. I may not be mandatory, but I don’t disappear.”

The alarm on my phone rings, and Courtney smiles, knowing why I’m ready to bolt. “We’ll start this next week.”

I stand. “Thanks. For everything.”

“No problem. And next week we’re getting hot fudge.”

Chapter 77
Rachel

I DREAM A LOT. FOR
the past three months, I’ve been sleeping more than I’m awake. Between surgeries, hospital stays, pain meds and rehab, I always seem tired.

I see Isaiah in my dreams. Giving that rare smile. Laughing that deep chuckle. Every now and then, I dream of his kiss. Those are my favorites.

Someone whispers and I open my eyes. The specialist appointment wore me out physically. My therapy appointment with my counselor knocked me out mentally. I stretch my arms on the bed and hear crinkling to the side. I turn my head and see a Mustang magazine with a note:

Tell me which one you want. I love you—Dad.

My fingers brush the note before I toss the magazine onto my bedside table. I don’t want to think about cars, not yet.

“Told you she wasn’t ready,” whispers a deep voice from across the room.

Propping up on my elbows, I lift my upper body. West and Ethan sit on the floor, both with controllers in their hands. Their eyes locked on the video game they play with no sound on my flat screen. The two of them practically moved in here when I came home from the hospital. Most of the time, I don’t mind the company.

Ethan glances over his shoulder at me. “Finally.” He tosses the controller on the floor, and West follows his lead.

“Field trip, baby sis,” says West. He flips his hat so that it’s backward.

I flop back on the bed. “I’ve got rehab in two hours.”

“That’s why we’re going now,” Ethan says. “You’ll be too tired later. How do you want to do this?”

It’s a question I’m used to, and one they’ve learned to ask. It’s been weird between my family and me. My entire life I never wanted to be the family weakling, and now there’s absolutely no doubt that I’m the physically weakest one under the roof. The casts are off, but both of my legs are in a full brace.

While it’s apparent to anyone that I can’t run as far as my brothers or dance like my mom, what can’t be seen by the naked eye is the real miracle. It was hard to ask for help at first. I made everything a million times harder by my need to do it all myself, and it was a zillion times harder for my family not to do things for me. But I learned to ask. And they learned not to jump in. And so my weakness has made me stronger.

“Let me swing my legs off the bed.”

My brothers both take two steps back and watch as I use my upper-body strength to readjust myself so that my legs are near the edge. My face goes red and my teeth clench, but inch by fought-after inch, both of my legs hover over the side.

I release enough air to move the hair hanging in my face. The small smile tugs at my lips. I did it. “Your turn.”

“Grab her wheelchair,” says Ethan as he slips his arms around me and lifts me into the air. West goes out the door of my bedroom first, and Ethan follows. The workmen in what used to be Colleen’s room stare at me, then at my legs, before returning to installing the custom-made shelves and desk. Mom is being paid to fundraise now and announced she deserved an office.

At the bottom of the stairs, West sets up my chair, and Ethan settles me in the seat. They gesture for me to follow and I do. Down the hall, through the kitchen, down the ramp, and I pause when they head to the unconnected garage. “I don’t have time to go anyplace.”

West walks backward. “Come on, slowpoke. You got wheels, use them.”

“You’re such an ass.”

West smacks Ethan’s arm. “She called me an ass.”

“You are an ass.” Ethan opens the garage door.

“Yeah, but
she
called me an ass.”

I blink when I roll into the garage. There’s a contraption with a plank of wood covered by a cushion. “What is that?”

“It’s for you.” West stands next to it and shoves his hands into his pockets with straight arms. “It’ll help you navigate the car.”

I raise a questioning eyebrow, and West holds out his arms. “Can I?”

I nod, and West lifts me from the chair and places me on the cushion. He motions to two cranks and begins to turn one. “This one moves you up.”

Surprised by the momentum into the air, I flinch and grab the sides. He continues to turn the crank until I’m level with the open hood of his SUV. “And this one will bring you closer.”

The plank extends forward and for the first time in three months, I can touch the inside of a car. As if it’s a dream, I sweep my fingers across the engine. Even from this position, I won’t be able to do much, but it’s better than doing nothing.

Feeling a little speechless, I pop open my mouth and say the mundane. “Thanks.”

“West built it for you,” says Ethan.

West sheepishly raises a shoulder. “Ethan helped. Besides, who else is going to change my oil?”

A wetness invades my eyes. I’m touched that they would invest time and energy into something for me...not just anything...they created something to help me return to what I love.

“Dad wants to get you a new car,” says Ethan.

“I know.” But that part is more complicated. I won’t lie. It hurts that I won’t be able to drive—for a very long time.

“All right,” says West. “Wasn’t joking on the oil change. Tell me what to do and me and Moron will do it.”

An adrenaline rush tickles my bloodstream. “Get me that rolling board and help me down. I’m going under the car.”

* * *

Gloriously covered in grease and
oil, I sit on the top of West’s contraption and hover over West as he tries to figure out the oil filter. “This isn’t rocket science.”

“Says the car genius,” he mumbles.

A clearing of a throat grabs our attention and we all pause when we see Mom in the garage door frame.

West and Ethan share a guilty glance. “Mom,” Ethan says. “We were just about to bring her back to the house.”

“Will you boys give Rachel and me a second?”

West wiggles his grimy hands in front of my face and wipes one particularly greasy finger across my cheek. Ethan squeezes my wrist before he leaves. I readjust myself and lean over to inspect West’s work. Not too bad.

“What are you working on?” Mom asks.

I shrug. “Nothing.”

Mom’s dressed in a pair of gray dress pants and a blue sweater. Dad took me to my appointments this morning while Mom visited Gavin in rehab. Because of the accident, my father’s original plan for Gavin and rehab tanked. But a few weeks ago, Gavin finally entered treatment. “How’s Gavin?”

“Good. He’s worried about you.” Mom peers into the hood. “Your father said your appointments went well.”

“Yup.” It feels odd being here with Mom after lying about my love of cars for so long.

Mom looks at me. She does this now—actually stares at me with her blue eyes and sees me. Not being used to it, I always glance away. Mom tucks a wayward strand of hair over my shoulder. “Gavin and I had a group-therapy appointment today. He promised to not keep secrets like his addiction from me anymore. I thought about it on the way home. I think I want a promise like that from all of you. Secrets have come too close to ruining this family.”

I pick at my flaking thumbnail. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Gavin.”

Mom shifts her weight. “I care that you didn’t tell me about you.”

Confrontation has never been a strong suit for either of us, and I wonder if the silence is killing her like it’s killing me. “You didn’t want to hear it. You wanted me to be Colleen.”

“Rachel—”

Preferring not to hear her deny it, I stare straight into her eyes. “I spent a good portion of my life overhearing you tell people that you dreamed of me becoming like Colleen. It’s true, so please don’t pretend it isn’t.”

Mom touches her wedding ring and turns the band. “I wish I could tell you that you weren’t the replacement, but we’d both know that would be a lie. Regardless of what you think, I have always loved you.”

I fidget with the tools my brothers left on the board. Over the past three months, Mom and I have danced around this issue. “You loved her more.”

“Not true,” says Mom. “But I do miss her. Too much. I’ve thought about it and think there’s some truth to what you said that night. I loved you, but I don’t think I ever saw you. For that I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” And it is.

“In my defense, you never gave me the chance to
know
you.”

I open my mouth to protest, and she waves it away. “Rachel, the problem in this family is that no one gave me credit. Instead of changing to make me happy, do you ever wonder what would have happened if you had told me what I was missing?”

And I snap my mouth shut. Part of me thinks I could have screamed until I was blue in the face, but there’s another part that wonders what would have happened if I had truly tried.

“So what’s going on here?” Mom leans over the engine like it might bite her and I realize that
she’s
trying.

“I was teaching West how to change his oil filter.”

“Is it hard?”

“I could teach you.”

Her mouth contorts. “How about you explain and I’ll listen.”

It’s a start. “Deal.”