Tap-tap-tap.
Trevor’s grubby little fingers menacing the nervous blennies.
Trev, are you tapping on the aquarium like I told you not to?
No, ma’am.
The bus gave off another low hiss, slithering to another stop. Callie watched passengers getting off and on. She allowed herself a brief moment to think about the man Trevor Waleski had grown into. Callie had met her share of rapists. Hell, she’d fallen in love with one before she was out of middle school. From what Leigh had said, Andrew was not big and obnoxious like his father. You could see that much from his website photo. There was none of the stalking, angry gorilla in Buddy’s only child. Andrew sounded more like a stargazer, a fish that buried itself in the sand in order to ambush unsuspecting prey. As Dr. Jerry would say, their spiteful reputations were rightfully earned. They had venomous spines to poison their prey. Some had weird, electrified eyeballs that could shock an unsuspecting invertebrate on the ocean floor.
Leigh had certainly been shocked last night. Andrew had scared the shit out of her during the meeting with Reggie Paltz. Callie knew exactly what her sister meant by the cold, dead look in his eyes. When Andrew was a kid, Callie had seen flashes of his burgeoning psychopathy, but of course Andrew’s transgressions had been in the order of snack-stealing and pinching Callie’s arm while she was trying to fix dinner, not being accused of sadistically raping a woman and slicing her leg the same way that Callie had sliced Buddy’s.
She shivered as the bus revved away from the curb. Callie forced her thoughts away from Andrew’s current crimes and put her focus squarely back on Leigh.
It was painful to watch her big sister flounder around, because Callie knew the worst part for Leigh was feeling like she had no control. Everything in her sister’s life was kept neatly sectioned off. Maddy and Walter and Callie. Her job. Her clients. Her work friends. Whoever she was screwing on the side. Any time there was an intermingling, Leigh lost her mind. Her burn-the-motherfucker-down instinct was never stronger than when she felt vulnerable. Aside from Callie, the only other person who could talk her off the ledge was Walter.
Poor Walter.
Callie loved Leigh’s husband almost as much as her sister did. He was much tougher than he looked. Walter had been the one to end their marriage, not the other way around. There was only a certain number of times you could watch someone set themselves ablaze before you stepped away. Callie assumed that growing up with two drunks for parents had taught Walter to choose his battles. This made him particularly understanding of Callie’s situation. It made him even more understanding of Leigh’s.
If Callie had a needle fixation, Leigh had a chaos fixation. Her big sister longed for the calm normalcy of life with Walter and Maddy, but every time she reached a certain level of tranquility, she found a way to blow it up.
Over the years, Callie had watched the pattern play out dozens of times. It started back in elementary school when Leigh was in line for a spot at the magnet school and ended up losing her slot because she had gone after a girl who’d teased Callie about her hair.
In high school, Leigh had qualified to take special courses at the college, but she’d gotten caught slashing her sleazy boss’s tires and ended up with two months in juvie. Then there was her meltdown with Buddy less than a month before she was due in Chicago, though admittedly Callie had laid the dry powder for that particular explosion.
Why Leigh continued the pattern into her adult life was a puzzle that Callie could not solve. Her big sister would have these bursts of joyful wife-and motherhood where she’d be carpooling Maddy and going to dinner parties with Walter and writing white papers on crazy smart shit and doing speaking engagements at legal conferences and then, eventually, something trivial would happen and Leigh would use it as a reason to self-sabotage her way out. She never did anything bad with Maddy, but she would force an argument with Walter or yell at a room mother or get sanctioned by a judge for mouthing off or, if the usual routes failed her, she would do something incredibly stupid that she knew would send her back to purgatory.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot of daylight between what Leigh did with her good life and what Callie did with the needle.
The bus bristled against the curb like an exhausted porcupine. Callie pushed herself up from the seat. Her leg immediately started to throb. Navigating down the stairs took an inordinate amount of concentration. She already had issues with her knee. Now, she had added the burgeoning abscess to her list of maladies. She hefted the backpack onto her shoulders and, suddenly, her neck and back moved up to the number one and two slots. Then the pain radiated down her arm, her hand went numb, and, by the time she turned onto Phil’s street, all she could think was that another bump of methadone was the only way she was going to get to sleep tonight.