Angel (5 page)

“Jade, what he means is, if you ever ne
ed help, call me. Anything. Anytime. You call
me,
okay?”

“Or me. If Kiernan can’t make it . . .” My chest pinched, knowing the only reason why that would be. And again, knowing she
didn’t
know. “For any reason, you call me. Kiernan will give you my number. One of us will always be around.”

Kiernan peered at me over Jade’s head and, though silent, his gratitude was loud and clear.

Jade lifted her head from Kiernan’s chest and sniffled back her tears as she swiped her damp cheeks against his shirt front. “Thank you. Both of you.”

Her words were so sincere that they made me ache. She looked at not only Kiernan, but
me
with . . . awe? As though she couldn’t believe we were there. Helping her. As though no one ever had before. And a sickened part of me was afraid that was exactly right.

“I mean it.” Kiernan pressed a chaste kiss to her forehead, and I couldn’t stand there any longer.

Even watching them from inside the car, I could feel that sickness growing. I told myself it was because he was still lying to her. I told myself it was because she still needed to learn the truth and face the pain that came with knowing it. I told myself it was out of fear for
them
. That’s what I told myself.

Kiernan stood on the sidewalk, watching as
Jade crossed the lot and disappeared inside another building with his hands shoved deep in his pockets to keep from reaching out and pulling her back. I knew this because my hands were shoved in my pockets, too.

Neither of us spoke as he slid behind the wheel and backed from the spot. Bathed in the
unforgiving glare of our headlights, the crumbling foundation of the brick building looked even worse.

I stared out the side window, taking in as much depressing detail as I could from the poorly lit grounds of the dump Jade lived in. “It’s bad, isn’t it? Her situation. Worse than I thought.”

“Yeah.” Kiernan’s made a right out of the complex and slumped, exhausted, back into his seat. “It’s worse.”

What a mess. I knew her mother was a grade-A bitch, but this girl had it coming at her from every angle. Her mom, her neighbor, some ex-boyfriend issues at school I didn’t know much about, other than it was enough to get Kiernan into a fight. Something he’d never done before.

No wonder she was as timid as a field mouse half the time. Always hiding and shaking. The people who were supposed to protect her were the ones doing her the most harm. But she had a backbone in there somewhere. I’d caught a glimpse of it tonight. Everyone did. It was how we protected ourselves. But hers was buried so deep, I wondered if she even knew it was there. She reminded me, oddly, of a declawed cat. Deprived of her ability to defend herself and tossed out into the wild.

“Dammit.”

Kiernan flicked a glance in my direction. “Yeah.”

I felt the pressure growing in my chest. The vice-like tightness, threatening to crush my rib cage.
Not now. Not here. Not like this
. I’d been hiding my panic attacks from everyone for over a year. I sure as hell wasn’t about to have one in Kiernan’s car.

Anchoring my hand in the hair at the back of my head, pulling hard enough at the roots to ground me in the present, I bent my neck and stared at the floor boards, forcing a few deep breaths into my lungs. “What are we
gonna do?”

“What
can
we do? She’s seventeen. It’s not like we can kidnap her.” Kiernan kept his tone casual, but the glow from the dashboard gave away the white knuckled grip with which he was strangling the wheel.

There had to be something I could do. For Jade. For Kiernan. For everyone. There were people in my life who needed me, counted on me. The number was only growing and I was failing them. All of them. Just as useless to help the new
as the old. What good was I if I couldn’t protect the people that mattered most to me and my family?

“We’ll find a way. There has to be something we can—”

“We can’t get her out of there. Trust me, I’ve looked into it. Any legal avenues would take . . . Might as well just wait for her birthday. Besides, she wouldn’t leave. Her mother’s heaped on the guilt so heavily, it’s trapped her there. She’s buried alive, Cal. The best we can do is help her find a way to survive it.”

That wasn’t good enough. I didn’t want to help her weather the blows. I wanted to shield her from them. I knew my brother. He wanted the same. And yet there was one blow he could offer her some protection from, but he refused.

“You want her to survive? Then you
have
to tell her the truth. I get that you’re afraid. I get that you have a lot to lose. But you want to do something for her? You want to protect her?
That
is where you start.”

Most of Kiernan’s face was concealed in shadow, but in the silence of the car I could hear the acceleration in his breathing. “I know. I will.”

The same answer I’d been getting for weeks. I wanted to push it, remind him how unfair he was being. The longer he waited the worse it would be. But it had been a long night and we were both exhausted. She’d find out one way or another, soon enough. I just hoped it was the
right
way.

Six

“No. Chapter
seven
.”

Tom slapped his textbook shut and glared across the oversized, round table at Alex, the fifth and final member of our study group. “He said chapter
six
was going to be on the test.”

We’d been meeting together every Wednesday night since the beginning of the semester and it occurred to me that I didn’t know a single one of their last names. Or anything about them outside of the fact that they were studying Intro to the Human Body.
Pathetic
. Other than Beth, I didn’t even know what they were majoring in. The classic college icebreaker question and I hadn’t even bothered to ask it.

“Guys.” Beth sighed and rubbed at her forehead. “Did we cover chapters
six and seven
in class? Then they’re
both
going to be on the midterm. We can’t concentrate on just one chapter. We have to review them all or we’re never going to pass.”

She wasn’t wrong. This exam was going to be a nightmare. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the professor asked his middle
friggin’ initial. He wouldn’t even give us a study guide. Apparently, if we’d been paying attention in class, we shouldn’t need one. Well, I’d been paying attention—mostly—and let me tell you, I
needed
one. Fourteen chapters on the anatomy and functions of the human body were not something the human brain naturally stored, I knew that much for sure.

“Why don’t we just start at the beginning and work our way through?”

No one was pleased with my suggestion, Marjorie groaning out loud. Beth was the only one who seemed to get that not
wanting
to do it and not
having
to do it were two entirely different things. She flipped to the front of her book and opened it to page one.

Only four-hundred-and-seventy-six more to go.

***

Ulna, radius, collarbone . . . My pencil drifted over the lined paper, giving shape to the source of all my troubles: the human body. Trachea, epiglottis, mandible, maxilla. Long, thin nasal bone. High zygomatic arches. Orbital eye sockets filled with eyes so blue they—

I jerked my hand away from the image, leaving a long gray streak, and stared at the page. My mockup of the human skeleton had taken on a life of its own. Fleshed into a person . . . A girl.

Jade
stared back at me from my notebook. She was in black and white, but I could see the color of her eyes, her hair, her pale pink lips. Right down to the tiny dent in her nose.

“Shit.” Slapping the book closed on her image, I shoved it in my laptop case.

Beth glanced up from her own notes. “Everything alright?”

“Yeah. I . . . uh . . . I just realized there’s somewhere else I need to be.” Throwing the case over my shoulder, I headed for the door as quickly as my legs could carry me.

This wasn’t working. My mind was in so many different places, I couldn’t concentrate on any of them. Even engulfed in the calming silence of the campus library, surrounded by people doing nothing but studying the same boring crap as me, I still couldn’t focus.

My brain felt like one of those mirrored funhouses. Every time I turned around I saw something else. Sometimes the images mixed and warped together, but none of them ever came through clearly. I was losing my damn mind.

“Somewhere else? Caulder . . .” Beth left her books and papers behind to scurry after me, bringing me to a stop just inside the doors. “You know this test makes up half of our grade, right?”

“Yeah.” When I wasn’t dealing with doctors, and nurses, and
drug dealers
, it was absolutely my first priority. “I know.”

Beth was a smart girl. She worked hard and studied harder. It made sense that she’d have trouble understanding that anything else could come first. Besides my particular set of circumstances, I really couldn’t think of much else. Unfortunately, my circumstances were my circumstances, and that was life.

“Alright, well, we’re squeezing in one last study session tomorrow night. Maybe we could grab coffee, beforehand? Pull an all-nighter?”

“I don’t know.” I scrubbed at my face, trying to find a blank slate to work from. “Maybe.”

“Maybe? Caulder, this is serious.”

I knew it was serious. Everything, my whole damn life, was serious.

“I
know
that!” The intern behind the desk hushed me and I dropped my voice. “Sorry. I know. I’m just . . . tired. I can’t concentrate. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder and nodded. “Get some sleep. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

Try again tomorrow
. The theme of my life. Every morning I’d wake up thinking, ‘time to try again’. And every night I’d go to bed, telling myself, ‘maybe tomorrow’.

Seven

Phones were a necessary evil in our lives. Necessary in case of emergencies. Evil for pretty much the same reason. Every damn time that phone rang my heart seized. A year and a half of mini-strokes at the sound of the bell. I learned really quick not to use a song I liked for a ringtone. I still couldn’t listen to Maroon 5 without feeling residual tightness in my chest.

So when I answered it
the following afternoon and Mom was in tears, I had to grab ahold of the counter for support.

“What happened?” I wasn’t quite able to get a grip on the slight quiver in my voice, but it was concealed by Mom’s sniffling as she tried to get control of herself long enough to communicate in something resembling a human language.

By the time I had the story, or most of it, I was already in my car. The hospital was the preset destination in mind and one of the reasons we chose the house we did. It wasn’t far away. A quick shot on the highway and I could be there in less than ten minutes.

If I sped. A little.

Or a lot.

A seizure. It wasn’t the first time I’d gotten that call. Kiernan had suffered seizures twice before, both minor. As minor as a
seizure
could be, anyway. But this time was different. This time Jade was involved.

Thumping the steering wheel with impatience, I nearly missed the ambulance passing me on the right as I sat in the turning lane. It swerved around me, cutting a gap in traffic with its flashing lights and blaring sirens to pull into the Emergency lot. Using the momentary pause in the endless stream of cars to my advantage, I swerved in behind it and pulled into the first available parking space I laid eyes on. Not giving a damn if it was handicapped or anything else.

A blast of air washed over me as I stepped through the sliding glass doors. Mom was hard to miss, giving hell to the poor woman in pale blue scrubs behind the admissions desk. I almost felt bad for her. Mom was a good person—the
best
—but when it came to her kids . . . You really didn’t want to stand in her way.

I was on my way over to try to tame the beast when the doors on the opposite side of the room whooshed open and Jade shuffled through. She looked like she was in some kind of trance. Blank face, scanning the room with glazed eyes until they settled on Mom. She took one step and then another on shaky legs.

I don’t remember telling my feet to move, but somehow I was right there, catching her in my arms when they gave out.

“Whoa there. You alright?”

It wasn’t just her legs that were shaking. Her entire body trembled against mine and she was as white as a sheet. If I had to guess, I’d say she was bordering on shock.

“I-I don’t know what happened. We were talking and one m-minute he w-was fine and the n-next . . . H-he just . . . I don’t
kn-know what happened.” 

“
Shh. It’s okay.” Dammit all to hell. I knew something like this was going to happen. Something I’d been trying to avoid for months, but Kiernan refused to step up. She deserved better. “Dammit. I
told
him. I told him to tell you before something like this happened.”

“Tell me what?” Jade sucked her lower lip into her mouth to stop the quivering and my gut clenched. “You knew this was going to happen?”

This wasn’t fair. She deserved the truth. All of it.
Now
. “Take a walk with me. We need to talk. This shit has gone on long enough.”

Mom was still having no luck with the woman behind the desk. “Ma’am I already told you, the doctor will come out to see you when—”

“I understand that, but I don’t want to see the doctor. I want to see my
son
!”

“Mom?”

Immediately dismissing the nurse’s response—a textbook answer she’d probably delivered a thousand times, herself—Mom swung her attention around to the second best thing she could get. Her
other
son. Her bloodshot eyes shifted from me, to Jade, and back again. She knew what had to happen.

“I’m taking Jade for a walk. I’m telling her. Everything.”

Mom’s tear stained cheeks almost changed my mind. She needed me. But so did Jade. So did Kiernan, for that matter, but I was only one person. I couldn’t be everywhere for everyone, all the time. I needed to prioritize. Shoving aside the inevitable guilt that came with my decision, I led Jade out onto the busy sidewalk. Wheelchairs carted patients to and from cars, a young girl struggled with crutches beside an older man carrying a ‘Get Well’ balloon. Horns honked, sirens wailed, babies cried. It wasn’t exactly the ideal spot for a leisurely stroll. Or the ideal weather. I hadn’t even noticed the icy wind on my way there, or the fact that I’d neglected to bring a jacket, but now it whipped around us, tossing Jade’s hair in her face and numbing my fingers.

Luckily, we had other options.

“I thought we were walking?” Jade blinked up at me as I held open the back door of my car for her.

“Too damn cold. Get in. We can sit and talk here.”

She shimmied over and I contorted my body in order to fit between the front seats to reach the ignition. It took a few blind jabs, but I managed to plant the key and get the heat flowing from the vents in the dash. A few minutes, some serious fiddling, and a possible hernia later, the warm air was blowing steadily into the back.

When I’d run out of excuses to stall, I collapsed into my seat and tried to figure out how the hell I was supposed to do this.

I could still remember the doctor who first told us that Kiernan’s tumor was inoperable. I remembered everything about him, from the crooked shape of his nose, to the exact shade of brown of his eyes, to the mole on his upper neck just below his left ear. I doubted I’d ever erase his face from my mind. The way his lips moved around the words that destroyed all hope. And I hated him. It was completely irrational. None of what he told us was his fault, but I hated him for being the one to tell us. For being the one to cause that kind of unbearable pain.

I didn’t want to be the one to do that to her. I didn’t want Jade to hate me. As selfish as it made me, I wanted Kiernan’s face to be the one attached to this god-awful memory, not mine.

“Dammit. It should be Kiernan telling you this. You deserve that much from him, but enough is enough.” I don’t know where I found the strength to look at her, but it was the least I could do. Look her in the eye as I tore out her heart and stomped on it. “I don’t want to be the one to do this, but you need to know. Jade . . . Kiernan’s sick.”

Jade arched one narrow brow and cast a pointed look at the Emergency Room sign standing not more than ten feet from where I’d parked. I wasn’t being clear.

No, I was being an outright coward.

“I’m not talking flu sick. He’s . . .” Hearing it was going to wound her.
Deeply
. But saying it out loud wasn’t much easier. I steeled myself for the impact and then let the truth tumble from my lips. “He’s terminal.”

I expected her to cry. Or scream. Or, who knows, hit me maybe? Any one of them would have been understandable reactions. She did none. Stronger than I gave her credit for, she fought back the natural tears that wanted to escape and locked them away. But she was using that strength in all the wrong ways.

“No.”

“It’s okay, Jade.” She had to know that she didn’t need to hide from me. That I could take whatever she needed to dish out.

“No. No, it’s not.” Despite her best efforts, a few rogue tears managed to overflow and trickle down her flushed cheeks. She scrubbed roughly at her soon to be raw skin.

“Stop.” It broke my heart to break hers. To watch her try so hard to take all of that pain I’d caused her and bottle it up. Cuffing her wrists, I tugged until she relented and allowed me to lower them from her face. “It’s okay
to cry
. He is dying, Jade. Kiernan is going to die. Sooner rather than later. You can deny it all you want, but it’s going to happen. You need to be prepared for that.”

She needed to know—not only that, but
accept
—the truth. It was the only hope she stood of defending herself. So, I pushed her. I pushed her mercilessly toward the harsh reality, feeling every bit the bastard I was along the way. I pushed and pushed . . . until she broke. Absolutely shattered in my arms.

And, because I wasn’t already a big enough asshole, I held her.

She clung to me like a life raft in a storm, but she was wrong. I wasn’t the life raft, I was the hurricane. Destroying everything in my path. In the face of her grief, my own resurfaced. Raw and bitter. Forced into submission for so long that I could barely contain the outpouring of it, now.

Long overdue tears streamed silently down my face as I clutched her tightly to my chest. I was five-years-old again and she was my stuffed bear. I was playing the big, bad protector, but the truth was, I was drawing my strength from her. She stayed there, allowing me to fill my ro
le. Supporting me. Alleviating not one ounce of the guilt that weighed heavily on my heart.

My own tears had dried by the time her sobs turned to hiccups and eventually quieted altogether. Still, she made no attempt to move. I could have held her like that forever. Some small place inside of me seemed to quiet with her near. A measure of peace I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. But that was wrong. My brother—her
boyfriend
—was lying in a hospital bed, waiting for us.

I cleared away the lump in my throat and tilted my head to get a better look at her. “You ready?”

She nodded. Dark hair whispering softly against my chin, rubbing against the day-old stubble, making it itch.

“Alright.” Removing my arms felt like trying to pry open a padlock with my bare hands. I didn’t want to let her go.

Bitter wind stung my cheeks the moment we climbed out of the car, cluing me in to the fact that they weren’t as dry as I thought they were. I ducked into the front seat to grab my keys and watched Jade take a steadying breath as I used a shirt sleeve to clean up my own face.

“Jade?” My finger came dangerously close to getting shut in the door, but I barely noticed when she turned to look at me. The oceans of heartache churning in her eyes were enough to make me want to crawl in a hole somewhere. I could only imagine what that look would do to Kiernan. Seeing her in that kind of pain was going to gut him.
“Kiernan’s scared. I know he doesn’t look like he is, or act like he is, but he’s my brother and I’m telling you,
he is
. And I think what terrifies him most is hurting you. He’s going to need us to be strong for him. Do you understand?”

She understood. Her head came up, shoulders back, and she rearranged her facial features into that perfect mask I knew oh-so-well. The thing about knowing that mask was that I was painfully aware of exactly what kind of hurt lay hidden underneath.
The staggering amount of agony that could be concealed by a smile.

“I just want him to find peace, Jade, and he won’t be able to do that if he doesn’t think you’ll be okay. If he thinks he’s making you suffer.”
 

“I understand.” She turned to go, but I couldn’t let her leave. Not yet. She thought she understood, but she didn’t. She couldn’t.
I
didn’t even understand.

I felt like I was being torn in two. Incapable of choosing a side. Half of me wanted to shield my little brother from anything bad, which included Jade’s pain. He was my brother. That was my job. But that meant forcing her to bury that pain. To do what I’d been doing for months, keeping it locked away inside, slowly eating at you, decaying chunks of your soul, while the outward shell remained intact.

The other half of me was disgusted at the thought of doing that to her. To this beautiful angel with far too much pain already tearing her down. How could I ask her to bear more? Suffering silently, alone, in the dark, the way I did?

“Wait.” I snatched her wrist before she could get away. Such a tiny wrist. I could feel all of the bones. It felt almost fragile in my powerful grasp, like if I squeezed even a little, I’d crush it. That’s what it felt like I was doing to her. Crushing her. Standing that close, it was hard not to notice how small she was. In every way. How . . . vulnerable. Why did this have to be so damn hard? “I . . . I want you know
it’s okay to hurt, though. Just not in front of Kiernan. Being strong for someone when you’re falling apart inside is one of the hardest things there is. Believe me, I know. It’s not fair to put this on you, and I’m sorry. If you ever need to talk, or cry, or wail on something with a baseball bat, come find me. Any time. Call me in the middle of the night when it really hits you, because it will. I’ll be there for you. I promise. We’ll get through this together, okay?” 

She took a moment to collect herself and this time when she nodded, I knew she was ready. I knew she could do it for the same reason I could.

Because we
had
to.