The Sweetest Thing You Can Sing (13 page)

“You’re wasting away, Devin,” Mom would lecture in a weepy voice. “Do you think we don’t know why you’re never hungry? You have to eat something. Your body can’t just run on …”

Mom couldn’t bring herself to use the word
meth
or even
drugs
.

“Here we go,” Devin would say, his mouth and eyes full of disdain. “Cry,” he instructed. “
Cry
. You never stop, do you? You can’t leave me alone for two seconds?” He’d push his chair away from the table and storm off, his food barely touched on the plate.

The Devin on my screen doesn’t look sick, but that’s a lie. He’s sitting in the kitchen in a khaki striped hoodie and smiling an overly bright smile, annoyed that I’m taking his picture. I didn’t think it’d be the last photo I ever took of him. I was just testing out my new phone at the time. Snapping everything in sight.

The old man in front of me is sitting on a flattened cardboard box. He takes his time staring at Devin’s image, like he really wants to be sure. Finally he looks up at me and hands back my phone. “Sorry, darlin’,” he says regretfully. “Can’t say the fella looks familiar to me. You say you saw him around here?”

Bucky’s glossy brown eyes are suddenly alert. The dog sniffs the air as an Asian woman strides by with a pizza box in her hands. I can smell the cheese and pepperoni too, and agree with Bucky that it’s unjustly tempting.

“I thought so,” I tell him. “But I’m not positive. It could’ve been someone with a resemblance.” I tuck my phone away again. “Thanks anyway.”

“Ask around.” The man stretches his arms out to indicate the scores of people passing. “Don’t take my word for it. Someone else might have seen him.”

I thank the man and continue slowly along Queen Street, searching out friendly faces, my hand clinging to my phone in my coat pocket, ready to pull it out. Some people don’t even wait for me to finish asking the question before shaking their heads at me and striding off. I give five dollars each to the two other homeless people I ask, feeling guilty for requiring something of them when they have so little. An Arab guy in a convenience store studies the picture on my cell before advising me that I shouldn’t approach people I don’t know because someone’s liable to steal it on me or worse.

“I’ll be careful,” I assure him.

Inside a coffee shop I question a cute barista guy with spiky blond hair and a barbell through his eyebrow. In Club Monaco two employees with sleek dark hair glare disapprovingly at my cell like it’s covered in Ebola germs. Restaurant hostesses, shoe store employees, and people behind deli counters, nobody has seen Devin.

I’m disappointed, but I don’t take it as proof one way or the other. I could come back down here a dozen times and never find a trace of him, even if he’s living around the corner.

Morgan wouldn’t be happy with my undercover work. I fully expect to run into my golden boy oldest brother at any moment. He lives just blocks away himself, and the MuchMusic studio is only about a hundred feet away from where I’m standing right now, my face getting prickly as the wind picks up. Above me, a mass of grey is gathering. Soon there’ll be snow. Do Bucky and his master have someplace to go when it snows heavy?

The cry I resisted earlier rumbles around in my lungs. I think of that morning in early June when Devin left us. He’d taken my mom’s car the night before. He wasn’t allowed to drive it anymore but that didn’t stop him. I had a geography exam at one o’clock and didn’t have to be up for hours but my parents’ frustrated voices woke me. Mom was due to leave for work and Dad was pacing the kitchen, his eyes bursting with tension. By then several of Mom’s crystal figurines had already gone missing, including one of her favourites, four lovebirds perched on a branch. Money slipped periodically out from my father’s wallet and mother’s purse. Morgan’s old flat screen
TV
, which he’d left on top of the walnut bureau in his former bedroom, disappeared into the night along with a ten-speed he’d stored in the garage.

“Nobody even cares about that old thing,” Devin said when Dad raised the subject of the disappearing
TV
. “It’d just been abandoned there. I didn’t think it mattered. If it’s so important I can see if I can get it back for him.”

But Devin didn’t return things. They slipped through his fingers never to be seen again. Like the night he knocked at my door at 1:47 a.m. and said a friend of his was in trouble and did I have any money he could borrow?

I stared warily at him in the dark. “
Devin
.”

My brother’s jaw tightened. He shoved both hands into his sweatshirt pocket. “Serena, you know I’m getting help. You know that. That’s what I’m doing back here. Mom and Dad, they don’t trust me anymore and, okay, I can see why. But I’m trying to change.” His running shoe tapped up and down on my floor, the motion silenced by my bedroom carpet. “This isn’t about any of that. I have a friend with a big problem and she needs my help. You know how hard it is for me to ask you this? I’m like …” He turned and faced the wall. “Jesus, Serena. You know I’d always help you.”

“Help me get high?” I asked in a low voice. Inside I felt sick, incredulous that I could speak to him that way.

A bitter chuckle dropped out of Devin’s mouth. “Right,” he said flatly. “Because that’s all I do and all I am. Nothing’s ever about anything else and anyone I’d know isn’t worth helping anyway.” He pulled his hands out of his pocket and crossed them against his stomach. “
Thanks, Serena.
I don’t have to guess where I stand with you.”

“How can I give you money when I don’t know what you’ll do with it?” I said pleadingly.

He shook his head like he was disappointed in me. “I’m in
treatment
now, Serena.” Day treatment, but my parents and his counsellor didn’t believe it was enough so he was on a waiting list for an in-patient facility in Quebec — a place where they keep you for months. “The way you’re all acting, it’s like no one will ever trust me again anyway, so what’s the point in staying clean?”

I wanted so much to believe him, to see him as the person he used to be. If he’d shouted at me the way he yelled at Mom it would’ve been easy to turn him down.

The money I gave him didn’t make its way back to me, just like Morgan’s old
TV
didn’t make it back to his room. My mom’s car, on the other hand, arrived back in our driveway at just after nine in the morning. Honestly, I was starting to wonder if we’d ever see it again, but when Devin strolled into the kitchen he acted like it was no big thing.

“Your mother’s late for work!” my father yelled, blood rushing to his face. “
I’m
late for work! You know you’re not supposed to take the car. I’ve reached my limit, Devin.” Dad’s head bobbed aggressively on his shoulders. “This is it. One more incident and I’m locking you out, understand?”

Devin shut his eyes tight and exhaled noisily. “You have the car back,” he said, eyelids flying open again. “How is that even an incident?” He motioned with outstretched palms. “You’re blowing this way out of proportion. When Morgan had the car back late he’d get a slap on the wrist. When I do it it’s the end of the world.” He shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Do you have any idea how crazy you sound? You’re all so pathologically paranoid — it’s like living inside a loony bin.”

Mom’s hands twitched. She opened and closed her mouth, no sound escaping.

I was standing against the counter, about to load my breakfast dishes into the dishwasher. Devin’s dilated pupils homed in on me. “What are you looking at?” he asked me. “Why don’t you just go on and open the cupboard there and stuff your face with some cookies — that’s what you’re good at.”

My cheeks twitched like Mom’s hands. I turned my head, my whole face stinging.

“Where are they?” Dad said, barrelling towards him. “Where are the drugs, Devin?” He reached around Devin’s back and grabbed at his jean pockets.

“Get your hands off me!” Devin shouted, pushing him backwards.

Dad stumbled backwards towards me, his gaze never leaving my brother. “You put them up here now.” Dad’s hand thumped the counter behind him. “I won’t have any more drugs in my house and I won’t have you taking things that don’t belong to you.
This is the end of the line, Devin
. Everyone here wants you to get the help you need, but none of us can do a thing for you if you don’t help yourself.”

Devin’s laugh sounded like a coiled sneer collapsing in on itself. “It’s that easy, is it?” He cocked his head and dragged his top teeth across his bottom lip, smiling crookedly. “I just have to want it.”

“We know it’s not easy,” Mom murmured, her eyes darting between Devin and my father. “We can’t keep going on like this if you don’t try.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Mom,” Devin said snidely. “You seem to try enough for all of us.”

Dad took three heavy steps back towards Devin and stood in front of him as if to block his way. “Empty your pockets, son,” my father instructed. “Then you can go up to your room.”

“This is bullshit,” Devin snapped, jostling by him.

Dad’s arm flew out and gripped Devin’s shoulder. They pushed back and forth against each other, knocking the nearest chair to the ground. Mom jumped. I scuttled towards the stove, as far away from them as I could get. Then Devin drew his right arm back, his fingers forming a fist. He swung at my father’s jawline and sent him reeling. Dad collapsed onto the upended chair, one of its legs breaking off under his weight.

Mom rushed to Dad’s side, kneeling beside him while Devin watched. “He wouldn’t let go of me,” Devin said flatly. “You both saw. He should’ve let go.”

I stared at my brother with my mouth gaping and my face still in flames.

“Fuck this,” Devin said to himself, both hands scratching through his hair. He turned and lurched out of the kitchen, back the way he’d come. The front door slammed as Mom and I crowded around Dad and the broken chair.

I’m numb when I think of that morning now. For a long time the image of Dad on the tile floor beside the remains of a wooden chair shocked me. It’s weird how something can shock you time and time again, even though it’s already happened. I couldn’t believe that Devin would talk to me like a dumb fat girl either. Nobody cares what you think, his spiteful tone said.
No one will ever really like you
. We’d been imperfect together for all of my life. I didn’t fully realize the togetherness was over with until that moment. It was almost as much of a shock as Dad broken on the ground.

Why am I even looking for Devin?, I ask myself again. Why do I care? I shuffle along the street and into Second Cup, where I sit over a steaming hot chocolate, fighting back angry tears.

That’s what you’re good at.

Jacob told me I was good at other things, but apparently Gage Cochrane doesn’t agree, and I can see with absolute clarity how the tangled mess of my former blubber, personal insecurities, and stupid need for some kind of male approval have shaped me into a person I don’t want to be.

My coat’s behind me, draped on the chair, and I wrestle my cell out of my pocket, determined to right one of my own wrongs.

“Hello?” Gage says into my ear.

“It’s Serena,” I say in a steely voice. “Would you mind telling me what I did last night that was so horrible that we had to evacuate the area?”

At first there’s no answer; I’ve stunned him silent. “I’m at work,” he tells me after a long pause. “I can’t talk right now. Can I call you back later?”

If he ever planned to get in touch with me again, my call will have changed Gage’s mind in a hurry.
“Right, like that’ll happen,” I mutter bitterly. I hang up on him and drop my cell down next to my hot chocolate. Thank God I didn’t wear my magic dress to dinner last night. It would’ve been wasted on him.

And we gonna let it burn, burn, burn, burn.
Ellie Goulding’s voice has such ache and strength that every time my cell rings I forget everything else for a millisecond. Inhaling the sweet smell of my hot chocolate, I pause before sweeping up my ringing phone.

“You don’t know me well enough to hang up on me,” Gage says, annoyed. “What makes you think I even need to explain?”

I rub my temples with my other hand, frustration whipping through my veins. “You jumped out of the car, sped back to my place, and barely said a word. Is that the way you normally act on a date?”

“I can’t talk now,” Gage repeats in a barbed tone. “But if you rewind the whole night and play it back in your head maybe you’ll be able to figure out what went wrong for yourself.” The annoyance he heaps on that last sentence makes me want to empty my hot chocolate onto someone’s head.

“I think I actually figured it out just now,” I snap. I’m about to tell him that he’s a first-rate asshole when a woman in tall brown boots and a red coat bends to address me. I’ve had a couple of training shifts at Total’s makeup counter and I’m pretty sure the whiff of perfume I catch is by Stella McCartney.

“Is that seat taken?” the woman whispers, motioning to the empty chair across from me.

“You can have it,” I assure her, not bothering to cover the phone. She thanks me and drags the chair towards a friend at a nearby table.

“If I thought you were the kind of person who’d freak out like this over nothing I wouldn’t have asked you out in the first place,” Gage tells me.