“He isn’t taking visitors—”
“I don’t care,” I say. “I’m here. He’s here. Which button do I have to push in the elevator to make us be in the same place?”
The doctor sighs. Maybe he pities me. Maybe he sees fucked-up family dynamics every day when he comes to this room to update people about their loved ones. But he can’t possibly know about us.
In any case, the doctor doesn’t relent. He tells me that if Jeremy has a phone on him, I can call, but that he wastold I was here and refused to see me. Refused. He’s too proud to let me see him in a vulnerable state. Ever since we were kids, he’s needed to take up the role as my protector.
I wait until the doctor is gone and then I start up my phone, ignoring the red icon alerting me to several missed calls and voicemails from Waylen. I pull up my text exchange with Mr. X, a one-sided conversation of me asking him to call me and if he’s all right. Now I compose a new one:
Let me in to see you or I will go back to the house and take a lighter to everything.
He’ll know what I mean. All his research, the records he keeps of the work we’ve done, the prospective new “clients.”
Five minutes later, he texts back with his room number.
He’s wide awake when I go to him, his bed propped all the way up.
“You look exactly the same,” he tells me, at the same time I say, “You look like hell.”
For a few seconds we just stare at each other. The last time I saw him in person we were also in a hospital. Collette had just been born, and Waylen, who had been at my side the whole time, finally went home to shower and bring me clean clothes. Mr. X—my brother—stayed only long enough to hold her, and to say, “It’s better if she doesn’t know.” I knew what he was really saying—that he wanted to protect her from our past. The ugly truth about what happened to our parents. What we did. It was better for her to think that everything burned in the fire that night,and that I was the only survivor. My brother wants to protect me so I can have a clean future that isn’t marked by my past. So I can be “normal” and not “the one that awful thing happened to.”
“So, when were you going to tell me?” I fall into a chair by the bed. “That you’re dying?”
“I’m not dying,” he says flatly.
“If you thought that, you would have told me sooner,” I reply.
He looks at one of the IV bags dripping medicine into his veins, slow and ominously like the final drops of rain on an old roof about to cave in.
“I’m handling my affairs, Margaux,” he tells me soberly. “This is the last case I’m working. And then, when it was all over, I was going to make sure you received an envelope with all my passwords. The title to my house. Everything. I’m leaving it all to you, and if you want to carry on, you’ll have what you need. But if you want to be done with it, it’s yours to demolish if you want to.”
This is so unlike him that at first, I don’t know how to respond. “Demolish? You’ve made such a thing out of keeping our little business afloat. Aren’t you the one who told me I’d be wasting my potential to give it all up and be a soccer mom?”
“I wanted to believe that because it made me feel better about doing all this,” he admits. “But I wonder sometimes—if things hadn’t happened the way they did when we were kids—if we would be out there living normal lives. Time cards, day care, morning commutes, playdates—”
“It doesn’t matter.” I cut him off. “It happened, and this is who we are.”
But even as I say it, a part of me is terrified at the thought of losing him. I don’t know who I am without my brother. I don’t know what I’d do if he wasn’t always around to tell me where to go, what to say, to assure me that I’m always safe. I try to imagine being alone with Waylen and Collette, and it feels like I’m drowning in a black hole in deep space with nothing to cling to no matter how I flail.
“We’re going to get you into treatment,” I say.
“Margaux—”
“Stop it. I’ve listened to you for years, now you listen to me. I’m going to go out there and talk to the doctor. We’re going to get you chemo or—or whatever it is you need. If it can’t be cured, we can nuke enough of it to keep you going for as long as possible.”
I don’t let him argue. I’m on my feet and headed for the door before he can open his mouth.
—
It’s after midnight when I check my phone, already knowing Waylen will be steaming out his ears.
“I’m on my way home now,” I tell him. “I’ll explain everything.” I’m already coming up with a plausible story, something that doesn’t give away the truth. As Mr. X enters his treatments, he’ll need me to do more for him. I’ll have to follow up with doctors, make sure he’s actually going to his appointments. Whatever I come up with will have to be believable.
But Waylen doesn’t ask where I’ve been. He’s too angry for that. “If you’re going to explain anything, explain why you left Collette at her dance class.”
Oh shit. Collette. As though I’m looking at scenes from someone else’s life, I remember dropping her at her aunt’s. Bertram chasing me. Calling Elodie and telling her I’ll pick Collette up after her class.
Waylen doesn’t let me sit in my guilt. “She thought you must have gotten into an accident. I thought that you were dead on the side of the road. Collette called me in hysterics. Her panic attack was so bad I almost drove her to the ER.”
