I did nothing.
The list of things I did not do is very long, and I am going through it, item by item, in the small hours of this waiting room, which is perhaps not a useful exercise but is the only one I have.
9
THOUGHTS AND FUCKING PRAYERS
FOX
Lucy’s family came a few hours later. Dina, too. I called them, told them what happened. I told them only about the accident. Nothing else. Not my screw-up. Not the pain I caused her that led to this.
They came. They sat. They worried. They asked questions. And, finally, they left. I told them to. Her father isn’t feeling well, and at his age, hospitals are a death trap. Her mother went with him.
They asked me when I was going home. I told them I wasn’t.
Percy left for a while. He took a shower at his place and came back with a change of clothes and toiletries for me.
I’ve brushed my teeth at this point, because all that coffee and a sleepless night were making me nauseous from smelling my own breath. I even managed to eat half a croissant, but when fear and grief sit in your belly, there isn’t much room left for food.
I still look like shit despite the fresh clothes and minty-fresh breath, and my mother says as much.
Nashville is ultimately a small town, and I don’t know how my mother knows about Lucy’s accident, but she does. She comes through the waiting room door with David behind her and Caroline behind him, the three of them arranged in their unconscious hierarchy.
I stand up when I see them, out of surprise, I think.
“Archibald.” My mother crosses the room and takes my face in her hands, briefly—the Bennett version of an embrace. “You look terrible. How is she?”
The sequence of her statement and question is entirely on brand for her.
“Stable.” It’s the word the doctors have given me, and I’m distributing it like a ration.
“Oh, good.” My mother’s voice carries the same sense of relief one feels when the caterer arrives on time for a party.
She sits down and arranges herself in one of the terrible chairs with the composure of a woman who brings her own standards to any environment. I remain standing.
“How long have you been here?”
“A while.” I don’t want her here. I don’t want anyone here—well, maybe Percy, but that’s about it. My civilized persona is paper-thin right now, and it’s not going to take much for the man I hide, the one without scruples, to get close to the edge.
“Son, you have to wear the polish of stoicism at all times,” my father told me when I was six and broke a glass ashtray because I lost my temper about something.
David claps me on the shoulder with the slight excess of a man performing the correct gesture rather than feeling it. That’s also on brand for my brother.
“Hell of a thing.”
Sometimes I think David was cast as the eldest Bennett brother who’s spent his life living in the shadow of the younger one. Like Fredo inThe Godfather. He resents me—I know that—but he’s bound by our father’s code about behavior and public demeanor, so he pretends he gives a shit about me, and I do the same.
Caroline sits next to my mother. She’s the baby of the family and has been treated that way her whole life. I don’t think it’s helped her grow into a stable, well-adjusted adult. There have been DUIs I’ve had to make disappear using the Bennett name. There was that abortion she thinks I don’t know about. And right now she’s cheating on her soon-to-be fiancé, the Miller heir, with the guy who reads the news on NewsChannel 5.
She’ll marry Gary Miller, and they’ll have the same marriage my parents did—the marriage I refused to have. And yet….
“What do the doctors say? About recovery?” Caroline asks primly, like she gives two shits. She doesn’t. She doesn’t like Lucy. None of them do.
“They’re monitoring,” I prevaricate.
A pause. Caroline glances at my mother. My mother is looking at her hands.
“And in terms of—“ Caroline begins.
