If they only knew … that the lucky one is me.
Chapter 59
Emmett
“How long does shehave to do that?”
Tristen looks at me across my mother’s body, a tube of something that he’s injecting into her IV in his grip and a softness to his eyes.
“It’s just for a little while.”
I nod and nibble on my lip, watching him as he goes about checking her over with a steadiness to his hands and a deliberateness to his movements.
Would he be as gentle with her if he knew the truth?
I’m not sure why I bother to watch him take Mother’s blood pressure, how he times her pulse despite the machine hooked to her finger. Just like I can’t explain that I know he doesn’t need me to hover, to observe him the way that I am … I just don’t know what else to do. Where else to be. How to …feelabout it all.
Looking at her now, I see some of the color has come back to her face, just enough to stop looking grey beneath the low lights. But otherwise, my mother already looks like a corpse.
Just like she has since I was four.
It was just a walk to the playground, something we used to do when she didn’t have to work, and I wasn’t with whatever random sitter she could find. But that day was different than any other before we even left the house. For the first time, she’d had the TV playing one of her shows, my aunt laughing in her ear over the phone. It was so …light. Joyous. The first and only memory I have of my mother beinghappy.
So, when she asked me what I thought about one of the characters in the show I can’t remember, I was honest.
I’d said he looked beautiful.
I don’t think that’s what she meant to ask me, or was expecting me to say, but I was never good with understanding people.
She agreed.
Sheagreed.
With a smile and laugh.
We went for our walk after that instead of doing my homeschool lessons. To the neighborhood school playground where I found a boy with broken wings and a busted arm. He laughed, too, even though he should not have been. I remember seeing the bone poking his skin in a way that almost made me throw up all over him and the mulch that covered him.
But he was beautiful, too, and alone like me.
It was the perfect day. One I wanted to relive forever.
Until it wasn’t.
“Bub? You okay?”
The whole-body jerk feels like I’m being slammed back into my body, to the here and now, and I snap my sight up to crash with Tristen’s.
“Huh? Yeah. No.” I shake my head and swallow hard. “Yeah.”
His brows climb up his forehead, his head cocked. “You didn’t hear a single word I said, did you?”
I pull my hood tighter around my head and something on his face falls.
“I’m so—” I yank my sleeves over my fists and bury my covered hands in the kanga pocket of my hoodie.Tristen’shoodie.
I’m still wearing his hoodie.
The breath I draw is shaky. “I’m listening now?”
