“But you’ve changed,” the reporter had said. “You and your brother. The public would love to know how you’re doing—how you’re coping.”
“Hey, Coop?” I ask, lifting my head. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Did you get a phone call today?”
He looks at me, confused. “What kind of phone call?”
I hesitate.
“Chloe,” he says, sensing me backing away. He grips my arms harder. “What kind of phone call?”
I start to open my mouth before he interrupts me.
“Oh, you know what, I did,” he says. “From mom’s place. They left me a message and I completely forgot. Did they call you, too?”
I exhale, nodding quickly. “Yeah,” I lie. “I missed it, too.”
“We’re due for a visit,” he says. “It’s my turn. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have put it off.”
“It’s fine,” I say. “Really, I can go if you’re too busy.”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “No, you’ve got enough going on. I’ll go this weekend, I promise. Are you sure that’s all?”
My mind flashes back to Aaron Jansen, to our conversation on my office line—not that you could really call what we had a conversation. Twenty years. It seems like something I should tell my brother—that The New York Times is snooping around in our past. That this Aaron Jansen guy is writing a story about Dad, about us. But then I realize: If Aaron had Cooper’s information, he would have called him by now. He said so himself: He’d been trying to reach me all day. If he couldn’t reach me, wouldn’t he have tried to move on to my brother? To the other Davis kid? If he hasn’t called Coop yet, that means he hasn’t been able to dig up his number, his address, his anything.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s all.”
I decide not to burden him with this. At best, the news of a Times reporter calling me at work to get dirt on our family will piss him off enough to chain-smoke the rest of the pack of cigarettes stuffed in his back pocket; at worst, he’d call him up himself and tell him to fuck off. And then Jansen would have his number, and we’d both be screwed.
“Well hey, your groom is waiting,” Cooper says, patting me twice on the back. He sidesteps me and starts walking down the porch stairs, toward the backyard. “You should get back inside.”
“You’re not gonna come in?” I ask, although I already know the answer.
“That’s enough socializing for me for one night,” he says. “See ya later, alligator.”
I smile, picking up my wineglass again and raising it to my chin. It never gets old hearing that childhood phrase escape the lips of my nearly middle-aged brother—jarring, almost, hearing the words in his adolescent voice, taking me back to decades ago when life was simple and fun and free. But at the same time, it fits, because our world stopped spinning twenty years ago. We were left stranded in time, forever young. Just like those girls.
I down the rest of my wine and wave in his direction. The darkness has enveloped him now, but I know he’s still there. Waiting.
“In a while, crocodile,” I whisper, staring into the shadows.
The silence is broken then by the crunching of leaves beneath his feet, and within seconds, I know he’s gone.
JUNE 2019
CHAPTER SIX
My eyes snap open. My head is pounding, a rhythmic beating like a tribal drum making the room vibrate. I roll over in bed and glance at my alarm clock. Ten forty-five. How the hell did I sleep this late?
I sit up in bed and rub my temples, squinting at the brightness of our bedroom. When I had moved in here—back when it was my bedroom, not our bedroom, a house, not a home—I had wanted everything to be white. Walls, carpet, bedspread, curtains. White is clean, pure, safe.
But now, white is bright. Way, way too bright. The linen curtains hanging in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows are pointless, I realize, because they do nothing to mask the blinding sun that’s now beating down on my pillow. I groan.
“Daniel?” I yell, leaning over to my bedside table and pulling out a bottle of Advil. There’s a cup of water sitting on a marble coaster—it’s new. The ice is still frozen, the cubes bobbing on the surface like buoys on a calm day. I can see the cold sweat dripping down the side of the glass and pooling at the base. “Daniel, why am I dying?”
I hear my fiancé chuckle as he walks into our bedroom. He’s carrying a tray of pancakes and turkey bacon and I immediately wonder what I did to deserve someone who actually brings me breakfast in bed. All that’s missing is a handpicked wildflower propped inside a tiny vase and this scene could be torn from a Hallmark movie, minus my raging hangover.