I walk straight past him, past my mother, wringing her hands next to Nana on the couch, and Maddie, still in her puffy winter coat from her flight. They’re all shouting at me, but I don’t hear them. I grab the key from the file cabinet in the mudroom off the kitchen.
In the garage, I stab the key into the cabinet lock.
Where my mother hid everything. Everything that could hurt Joey, tempt him, break him.
But it was always outside this house, waiting for him to falter.
In the living room, Daniel is murmuring to my dad. They all get quiet when they see me, just standing there.
I hold up the bottle of Vicodin. “I’m going to take some of this now, okay? Because my knee hurts like shit. It has for months. But I’m not going to take three, or four, or twenty. Just two. Because I hurt, and I need something, and because Joey isn’t coming back. I saw him. He’s not coming back.”
* * *
—
I pop two pills and swallow them, dry, and let the bottle fall to the floor.
It is beautiful, like wings, like Joey said. On my bed in my dark room, staring at the ceiling. I feel like warm air. I feel like ocean water on the most beautiful of days, soft and drifting and perfect. Untouchable. I get it now, I do.
How glorious it is to drown.
* * *
—
When I wake up, Maddie is next to me, stroking my cheek.
“Daniel told us everything,” she says. “Listen, Mom and Dad don’t care. The jewelry, all that. The Oxy at the dance. They’re just glad you’re safe, okay?”
Her fingers feel nice on my skin.
“That little shit. Luther Leonard,” she says. “I could kill him. I might.”
I shake my head. “Maddie.”
“What?”
“It was Joey’s idea. For me to take the jewelry. Not Luther’s. He said so.”
“What?”
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad. That would kill them, I think. Right now.”
“That was a ballsy move, sister. Robbing your own parents to get your brother back.”
I roll away from her. Joey’s shadowed face swims before my eyes, so I close them. I just want to sleep.
I don’t dream of Candy. I don’t dream of Joey. I dream of the ghosties, on the rocky river beach. The way their empty soup cans rattle against pebbles and stones. The way they stack spent cigarettes in small piles and clench together when they sleep, a human mass of sadness trying to stay warm. The way my father and I visit them with offerings, like you do with the dead. Flowers here, a candle there, a can of beans here, a pint of gin there.
* * *
—
My mother holds my forehead. “You aren’t warm.”
“I don’t feel well,” I lie. “I feel sick.”
I’m still in my clothes from Halloween night, even my jacket. I’m too hot and I’m starting to smell, but I don’t care.
“You’ve missed three days of school, Emory.”
I shrug, rolling over and pulling the covers over my head.
“Emory, please.”
Emory. Emory. Emory.
Her voice is like knives in my ears.
45
“GGET UP.” SHARP FINGERS, poking my shoulder through my duvet.
“Get up, or I will stand here and sing ‘Seventy-Six Trombones’ until your ears bleed, Emory Ward.”
Simon Stanley is in my bedroom. Simon Stanley is trying to pull my duvet off me.
I peek up at him. I live in a weird world now, a world where brothers go missing and drama teachers show up in your bedroom.
“That’s better. Now, up, up. We’re going for a drive. And I’m not taking no for an answer. Also, I’m your teacher, and I will fail you. Wait, we don’t have grades. Drama Club is voluntary. Shit. Just get up, Emory Ward.”
* * *
—
He drives us to the Mill Haven Cemetery in his crappy little Honda （“courtesy of my illustrious teacher’s salary, enjoy,” he told me when I got in）， spread out on the high hill. The pathways are slippery, and he holds on to my elbow as we walk. “Aging is not the most fun thing in the world,” he says. “In fact, it downright sucks.”
“I don’t understand why we’re here,” I say tiredly. “I really just want to go home.”
“We’ll just be a little bit. To say hello. To say goodbye,” he answers. “I come here quite often to see my mother. She’s over here.” He points where we should walk.
He bends down, groaning a little, and brushes leaves from her gravestone. He sighs.
“My mother was a pained woman,” he says. “My father was an alcoholic. A charming one, like something you’d see in some old black-and-white movie. Always jolly, laughing, a joke when you needed it. But a terrible sadness inside that he tried to drown out. But we loved him. We cleaned up after him, we put him to bed. We called his work when he wouldn’t wake up and said he wasn’t feeling well. And then he died. One day, he just didn’t want to be alive anymore.”
“Oh,” I say. It kind of sounds like what I’ve been doing for Joey for years, except for the dying part, but after what I saw in the woods, maybe that’s not far off. I breathe in deeply, trying to stuff down the hurt that thought brings me.
Simon Stanley blows on his hands in the cold air.
“My mother was never quite the same. A suicide, especially, does that to you. It was a long, long time ago, and back then, when that happened, people liked to shame you. Said she should have been a better wife, a better woman. This town didn’t treat her very well and she changed. Closed herself off from everything. From me. I couldn’t wait to get out of here, to tell you the truth. The day after I turned eighteen, I took the first bus to New York City, thirty-seven dollars in my pocket and a suitcase full of dreams, as they say. That’s the beauty of youth. You don’t need much if you just have a dream.”
“I’m getting really cold,” I say, wrapping my arms around myself. “And I feel like you’re about to break out into song.” It’s also a little scary, what he’s saying about his mom and dad. I like to think of Simon Stanley as permanently cheerful, even though he told us that thing about people being full of layers, like onions, and that you have to peel them back to truly get to know them.
He laughs. “Well, I do teach theater, so that might happen. But shut up and listen anyway.
“I wanted to find my people,” he goes on. “Bright lights, big city, dreamers like me. Gay, like me, because that was not a thing in Mill Haven back then, at least not openly. And I had the time of my life, to tell you the truth. I fell in love, I was in plays, I lived in a disgusting walk-up with four other people and we lived on bags of rice and bottles of wine and grew our hair long and fell in and out of love and were broken and alive all at the same time and it was glorious. But then my mother got sick and I came home. To take care of her. She was difficult to the very end, but that’s what you do. You get up every day and try to love your people, even if they make it hard. Because what else do you have, in the end.”
He tugs on the sleeve of my coat. “Come, let’s walk.”
We make our way up the path, surrounded by gray stones and marble crypts. Tiny little plaques in the ground, flat, for babies. The air is sharp and cold and part of me wishes I’d brought a scarf. I pull up the collar and hood on my coat.