“I’m sorry,” I whisper, again and again as she goes on. I can’t defend myself, because she’s right. I paint everyone in this town with the same brush. A lot of them have earned my low opinion, but not all, and none of them have earned Maggie’s. I didn’t set out to isolate her the way I isolated myself, but hearing her spell it all out like this...that’s exactly what I’ve done. I don’t know which is worse—all the lies, or all the manipulation.
“Stop saying you’re sorry.” She brushes first one cheek dry and then the other. “I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry.”
But I am, and I don’t know how else to tell her. “When I met you I had never been lower in my life. I had no friends, no future, and no hope for ever seeing my family happy again. Everyone in this town knows me by name if not by sight, butyoudidn’t. I got to be who I used to be with you, before everyone knew me as the sister of a murderer. I should have told you then, but every time I tried, I couldn’t get the words out. It was so nice to be able to spend time with someone who didn’t treat me like Jeff, or Mark, or my old friends, but someone who just treated me likeme. I got so scared that someone would say something to you that I did warn you off people. I didn’t lie about anyone though. I did have a bad breakup with my ex-boyfriend after he sold pictures from my diary to a news outlet. And I don’t talk to Elena because she set me up to be ambushed by reporters the day Jason pleaded guilty. The people I used to trust and care about...so many of them turned on me that I didn’t give the rest a chance to do the same.”
Maggie looks sick, and I don’t know if she’s listening to me anymore as she hugs her arms around herself.
“But you’re right, it wasn’t everyone.” Most days it had just felt like everyone. “And even if it was, I had no right to try to tell you who you could be friends with, indirectly or not.” I lift a shoulder. “The truth is I barely know who would give me a smile if I gave them a chance. It’s so easy to read hostility in someone’s expression when you’re looking for it.”
Maggie stands there when I finish. She looks ready to cry again. Like I hurt her irrevocably. She takes one shaky breath.
“You really hurt me.”
“I know.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think you do.” Then she turns and walks away. It’s only when I finish my shift and get ready to leave myself that Jeff tells me Maggie put in her two weeks.
CHAPTER 33
My family members are scattered when I get home from work, Dad in the basement, Laura in her room. I don’t know where Mom is, and I don’t feel ready to look for her just yet to give her the blow-by-blow from my visit with Jason.
I trudge up the stairs. Laura’s door is shut and so is mine, but farther down the hall, Jason’s is cracked just a sliver. It looks like someone meant to shut it and didn’t make sure the latch caught before walking away.
Mom is the only one I know who goes in there, and it’s not like her to leave the door open even a little. My brows draw together as I head to the room.
For me, Jason’s room has never been the shrine it is to Mom, the closed door to be ignored to Dad, or the land mine to be avoided at all costs by Laura. It’s my brother’s room. I haven’t tried to avoid it or seek it out, to keep it from being a space that lets me deny reality or succumb to it.
But it’s been a long time since I’ve gone inside, months, and as I reach for the knob my hesitating hand says I’m not as unaffected by it as I thought.
I push open the door. It doesn’t creak—not that I would have expected Mom to let it—and the room is just as it’s always been, though neater and better-smelling than when Jason lived there. It’s also empty. I wasn’t expecting Dad or Laura to be sitting on the bed in the throes of an unguarded emotional breakdown, but disappointment slows my steps as I enter the room. Navy bedspread, white walls, the desk and headboard Dad made. Mom had hung a couple pictures of sailboats on the walls, more to keep with the color scheme than any nautical obsession on Jason’s part. He never complained. The only real time he spent in this room was when he was sleeping. Jason was always the type who struggled to sit still. He was always moving, surging from one activity to the next, unable to stay in the same place for too long. I push that thought from my mind knowing that’s exactly what he’s being forced to do right now.
I trail my fingers over the silky smooth surface of the desk. I can feel the hours upon hours Dad spent planing and sanding the rough wood, the days of layering coats of wax onto the walnut until it gleamed. It looks as pristine as the day Dad finished it, because the only thing Jason ever used it for was holding his book bag. He and Laura were alike in that they preferred to do homework outside on the porch when they could.
Unlike my siblings, I need the quiet, distraction-free solitude of four walls to focus. From my window, I used to watch the two of them rocking on the porch swing—Jason’s long legs propped against the porch railing and Laura’s folded underneath her, their matching honey-brown heads bent over books or laptops. They wouldn’t talk, just enjoy the quiet company until Jason would slam his book shut and silently declare he was done with a grin. He was always the smartest of us and could breeze through assignments that I later learned took me sometimes twice as long. Laura struggled more, but Jason, when he finished with his homework would, without fail, move down the porch swing and slide whatever papers she was hunched over halfway onto his lap so they could finish hers together. After so many years of him figuring out ways to help her learn, she’s better now with schoolwork, but when she does struggle, watching her makes me miss Jason so much I can’t breathe.
The bedsprings squeak ever so slightly when I sit. I suck in the stale air, trying not to miss Jason, trying not to feel that sharp pain in my chest, the one that throbs endlessly like nothing will ever be good so long as he’s gone. A year ago, I thought I’d lost everything, but in the span of two days I’ve lost Heath and Maggie too—the one person who had started to give me hope for the now, and the other who had relentlessly given me hope for the future since the day I met her.
I try to smother the sob that slips through my lips, but it reaches my ears anyway, and a second later, footsteps in the hall precede Laura’s appearance in Jason’s doorway. My sob cuts off before it can take hold of me the way it’s promising to. If I’ve learned anything about my sister since Jason went away, it’s not to cry in front of her. She breaks down completely, worse even than Mom.
Laura clutches at one side of the doorframe; the toes of her bare feet almost curl back from the threshold so that not even the tiniest part of her enters Jason’s room. I wonder not for the first time how she can dismiss him so easily, decide that a lifetime of love means nothing. I know it hurts that Jason is gone, that we’re all of us suffering because of what he did, but we still have a brother. We’re still a family who should love each other, strengthen each other, not forsake each other even when everything else is telling us to.
“Why don’t you ever come visit him?” I ask her, traces of the sob staining my voice. “He misses you. So much,” I say. “You have to miss him too, Laur, I know you do.”
She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes blink faster.
“He knows what he did was unforgivable, that’s why we have to forgive him. He’s not—he’s not doing great.”
Laura’s blinking stops and I can see that her eyes are glossy wet. Barely more audible than a whisper, she says, “Mom said...”
I don’t have to tell her that Mom sees what she wants to see.
It’s a huge ask, wanting Laura to visit Jason, but maybe just coming into his room? That can’t be too much, it can’t.
I reach a hand toward her. “Sit with me?”
Laura’s eyes, which had softened, go wide and frightened now; her fingers dig into the doorframe.
The ache in my chest sharpens. “Please?”
