Alex moves a couple of boxes around and ignores the ruffly lace from Kate’s
Swan Lake
dance costume from second grade—yeah, it was hideous to watch seven-year-olds attempt that.
But when he emerges from the dance costumes, the backpack is behind them, and we pile the boxes back up. If you don’t know they’re sticking out a few more inches than the rest of them, you’d never be able to tell.
And that works for me.
“What now?” Alex says as we’re leaving.
“Now I have to go home before Struz has a task force out looking for me.” And I suppose I should come up with some story about what I took from the office and where the hell I went. I’ll have to admit to taking the gun and everything in the safe. Struz would try my and Jared’s birthdays first, even if he doesn’t already know the code.
Alex nods and locks up the pool house again, sliding the key back under the mat.
“Do you know any of the details?” he asks.
I shake my head.
Alex reaches over and squeezes my hand before letting go. “We’ll find them out,” he says, and his voice has the same determined edge Struz had to his when we were standing on my porch.
I nod, not trusting my ability to form words, and I notice the curtains of the dining room window in Kate’s house are open wide and someone blond is standing there watching us.
The noise that comes out of my mouth is neither intelligible nor anything close to English, but it’s enough for Alex to realize there’s something I need him to pay attention to, and he looks toward the house.
I know the moment he sees her, because his body tenses. She didn’t do anything malicious to him; she just stopped acknowledging his existence, and I’m not sure which is worse.
He turns to me, and his voice has a hard edge to it. “I’ll take care of it.”
“You’re going to go talk to her?” Like that will solve anything. She’ll probably call the FBI out of spite.
“I’m going to get her off our backs,” he says, already moving toward her house. He tosses me the keys. “Here, get the bike in the car. I’ll drive you home when I get back.”
I have the urge to kick something, but my ankle still hurts a little, and I doubt hurting the other one would really help.
It’s when I get the bike in the car and slide into the passenger seat that the memories press down and threaten to strangle me. For a minute I can’t move. I can’t even shut the door. I’m paralyzed by the knowledge that my dad is gone. He’s just ceased to exist.
My body jerks as my mind decides it can no longer use the focus of some other task to keep from breaking down.
He’s gone.
The tears come, and I have to hold a hand over my mouth to keep from letting loose some kind of wail. My face is too hot, my nose runs, my whole body convulses and shakes, and I lean forward, resting my forehead against the warm leather of the dashboard.
Gone. Completely. He’s not here anymore. And nothing will ever bring him back.
M
y mom wasn’t always crazy. Or at least she was only as crazy as the average twentysomething girl in love with an older guy just back from serving in the Gulf War.
Bipolar is the kind of disorder that’s late onset. You don’t realize you have it until you crack. And most people crack somewhere between age eighteen and thirty.
My mother was twenty-seven.
It was after Jared was born. She spiraled down into this insane depression, and the first doctor my dad took her to thought it was because of the pregnancy. Maybe it was. But she didn’t get out of bed for months. And when she ultimately did, she was different. Different enough that even I could recognize it.
While she was in bed, my dad tried to play the good husband and father—and he did. He made us dinner every night—we ate every different kind of pasta he could find. And every night, as he laid Jared down to sleep in his crib, we would go into my bedroom with the baby monitor and he would read to me.
But the children’s books I had bored him. So he read
Ender’s Game
by Orson Scott Card. And he read the whole Ender series. Some nights when it was early and Jared was still awake, we’d all pile into my bed and read until baby Jared fell asleep.
When my dad finally finished after months of reading, he closed the last Ender book and asked what we should read tomorrow.
“
Ender
!” I said.
“But J-baby, that’s the end.”
I shook my head. “Read it again.”
Thus began my obsessive personality. It’s all gone downhill from there.
I was three.
T
he funeral is closed casket. And outdoors.
It’s warm and typical San Diego weather—about eighty—but the marine layer set in last night, so it’s overcast. Not a speck of sunlight anywhere.
“I overheard a couple of guys talking,” Alex says, his voice breaking as he comes to stand next to me. He’s in a black suit and the jacket is a little too big. He looks like one of those kids who dresses up in his dad’s clothing. My dad would be teasing him about it if he were here—my eyes burn at the thought.
After a few deep breaths, Alex squares his shoulders and steadies himself. “It sounds like he was shot three times. Once in the arm and twice in the chest.”
I nod and flick my eyes to the sky so I don’t lose it right here in front of everyone. I don’t tell Alex now isn’t the time for me to talk about this, because everyone I know is struggling to get through this however we can. This is how Alex is dealing with the loss—he’s hurting and he’s focusing on what happened as a coping mechanism. I get that. It’s what my dad would be doing.
I’ve been going back and forth between taking care of Jared and trying to make sure none of the arrangements fall apart.
But every once in a while, the emotion seeps in, and right now at his funeral I don’t know if I can keep myself together.
Once in the arm and twice in the chest
.
He probably died within seconds.
Alex opens his mouth, and I have a split second to wonder if I’d piss him off and hurt his feelings by telling him to just shut up about it, but I don’t have to. He closes his mouth again, his gaze falling over my shoulder.
Cecily stands there. Dressed in all black, her shoulder-length milky-blond hair and light blue eyes make her look like a character out of a fairy tale. She comes up next to me, and she doesn’t say she’s sorry for my loss or that she knows how I feel or that my dad was a great man. Instead she just looks up into my eyes and says, “This sucks.”
I remember that I’ve heard Cecily lives with her aunt and uncle, that her mother died a few years ago before she moved to San Diego.
I nod because it does suck. In fact it sucks so much and yet no one—except Cecily—actually says that, and I have this ridiculous urge now to just scream as loud as I can. To announce to the world how I really feel about all this. That it sucks. That it’s not fair. That I’m not ready to say good-bye.
The three of us stand there for a few minutes while several other people come over to offer me their condolences, and before she leaves, Cecily just squeezes my hand.
When she’s gone, Alex is staring at me. It takes me a moment to figure out why, but then I remember what we were talking about before Cecily came over, and I say, “Let’s compare notes tomorrow?”
He nods, and I notice how glassy his eyes are. I put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Alex looks away, half laughing, half snorting. “You shouldn’t have to worry about comforting me. He’s your dad.”
I lean into Alex, a hug without an embrace. “I shared him with you a little,” I whisper. “You’re allowed to be devastated.”
Because the truth is my dad was like another parent to Alex, or at least like the cool uncle or something. His dad works a lot and his mother is, well, his mother. If I were Alex, I would have loved my dad too.
I move to take my place front and center, standing next to my mother, who has to stay seated because she’s so full of drugs she’s practically catatonic, and Jared, who’s been only slightly more than a zombie since I found him in the kitchen four days ago. Tears leak from my eyes, even though I’m putting all my energy into being the strong one, into not thinking about it, into keeping myself together.
Because my father is a war veteran, the service has full military honors, complete with the flag-draped coffin and seven armed service members who will each shoot their rifle three times and a bugler who will play “Taps” when it’s all over.
And because he’s been a pretty visible and upstanding member of our community, everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life is here. Classmates and their parents, my dad’s entire team, neighbors, relatives, swim coaches, even some of my teachers, they’re all here. And then there are the people I don’t know too.
I try to be glad that this many people will remember him, that he made a difference in this many lives—that he mattered. Those things were important to him, and I try to focus on that.
But even the good things hurt.
Like someone is holding me down, pressing something heavy against my chest.
Because I shouldn’t have to be
trying
at all.
Kate and her parents are here, too. She had the nerve to come talk to me when she first arrived and tell me she was so,
so
sorry for my loss. I took one look at her bloodshot eyes and tearstained makeup and had to keep myself from punching her.
When the ceremony starts I try to pay attention, to look at the faces of the soldiers honoring my dad for the commitment and service he put in twenty years ago, before I was born. For some reason it bothers me that they don’t know him any more than what they might have heard from someone here—how hard he worked and how many hours he put into his job. That they don’t know him like I do. They don’t know the only thing he could cook was pasta, or that he thought everything emotional could be solved with chocolate ice cream, or that he’d memorized half of the dialogue in
The X-Files
, or that his favorite novel was
Of Men and Monsters
by William Tenn, or that he always bought tickets to San Diego Comic-Con even though he didn’t get to go half the time because something would come up at work.
Or that Jared and I loved him.
The wind picks up and whips my hair around, and I have to pull it back to keep it from getting into my eyes. I glance over at Jared and the lifeless way he’s standing. I don’t think he’s cried yet, and I’m not sure what to do about that, but I know letting him follow my own attempt to deal with the grief isn’t a good idea.
I wonder if Ben can heal people who are emotionally stalled, if there’s some way to reorganize molecules so people don’t feel sad or empty inside anymore.
Somehow I doubt it.
As if thinking about him conjured him into existence, when I look back at the coffin draped with the American flag, I see Ben, the concern written on his face somehow different from everyone else’s pity. It makes me wish he was closer, or that the service hadn’t started yet, that I could feel him next to me. But he’s next to Elijah, standing with Reid and his parents. They’re standing respectfully among the crowd, like everyone else.
But all three of them are looking at me.
A
US Army lieutenant general who apparently served with my dad right out of basic brings us the folded American flag and hands it to me.
My eyes sting and my vision blurs.
I look up at the sky when they lower the casket into the ground. There’s just something a little too final about it.
I can’t watch.
S
truz corners me on the way to the car. “Janelle.”
I hate that he uses my full name. “Struz.”
“J, I need those files you took from your dad’s study,” he says.
“What files?” I ask, even though my heart throbs that I’m putting him through more hell. He’s obviously feeling beat up and lost without my dad—his hair looks like he hasn’t brushed it in days, his suit is wrinkled, and his tie is crooked. He needs a wife, but by now he’s probably too absorbed with work and weighed down by responsibilities to find one.
“I don’t know what you took,” he admits. “But I know you, and I know you took
something
, and I need you to bring it back.”
I nod, because I know he’s right. Who do I think I am, pretending that I can run around like Jack Bauer and try to solve a case that the FBI is working on? After all, the FBI has a thousand times more resources than I do. What was I even thinking by taking them?
I’m about to offer up the files and tell Struz they’re in the closet of Kate’s pool house when out of the corner of my eye, I see Barclay. And I remember he owes me. With everything else going on with Ben and then my dad, I’d forgotten about Taylor Barclay.
“J?” Struz says, bringing my attention back to him.
This time I don’t think about how hard this is for him too. This time I think about how much he’s kept from me because I “don’t need to know.”
“Maybe when you deign to tell me the details about my father’s death, maybe then those mysterious missing files will turn up.” And I don’t even try to keep the bite from my voice.
It’s bullshit that no one will tell me anything—that I have to ask Alex to spy on people at the funeral in order to find out the details.
I’ll just do my own digging first. I’ll get the information out of Barclay. I don’t think Ben’s involved, but I’ll find out what he isn’t telling me, just to make sure. And then I’ll tell Struz everything.
Struz sighs, and his shoulders sag a little. He hasn’t given up—he’s not like that—but he is giving it a rest. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to take my mother and brother home and attempt to take care of them, and then I might get really drunk,” I say, forgetting for a second that Struz isn’t just a family friend, he’s also a law-enforcement officer.