“I didn’t want Mom to worry.”
But Hank’s voice just kept getting tighter. “Did it occur to you that it might’ve been useful for us to have this information?”
“The threat level was very low,” I said.
“It was an abundance of caution,” Jack said.
“You knew you were in danger,” Hank said, much louder now, “but you came here, anyway.”
“I wasn’t really in danger.”
“But now you are.”
“Even now—” I started.
But Hank wasn’t really interested in what I had to say right then. He turned to Jack with his eyes as dark and hard as obsidian. “Your selfishness really knows no limits.”
Jack stood up fast, so they were facing off. “Don’t call me selfish. You have no idea.”
Doc, Connie, and I stayed seated at our end of the table—out of the line of fire—as Jack and Hank faced off.
“There were a million reasons I didn’t want you coming down here,” Hank said then, his voice shifting up toward yelling, “starting with the fact that I’d be perfectly happy to never see you again. But I confess that you getting us all killed did not cross my mind.”
“I didn’t get anyone killed!” Jack shouted—so loud that the silence afterward felt as brittle as crystal.
“Well,” Hank said next, downshifting to a low tone that was somehow a hundred times more menacing. “I think there’s one dead person in this family who might disagree with that.”
At those words, Jack grabbed his dinner plate and smashed it to the floor so hard I half expected it to leave a crater. Then he shouted, “I didn’t kill Drew!”
“Really?” Hank shouted back, his voice saturated with bitterness. “You’re giving yourself a pass?” He held up fingers as he counted off: “You got in the car—drove too fast—hit the bridge going eighty-five—spun out on the black ice—crashed through the railing and plunged yourself and our baby brother into an icy cold river! Which part of that didn’t kill him?”
“The part”—Jack shouted—“where I wasn’t driving!”
The room fell quiet.
Jack blinked at the floor, like he couldn’t believe he’d actually said it.
Hank took a step back and shook his head, like he was trying to clear it out.
“Honey, you…” Connie said, looking up at Jack utterly bewildered.
“I wasn’t driving the car that night,” Jack said again, quieter. “Drew was driving.”
Hank’s voice was quiet now, too. “You’re saying…”
“I’m saying I didn’t realize Drew had been drinking until we were already on the road. And when I told him to pull over, he went faster. I’m saying that the whiskey bottle they found in the car was Drew’s.”
“But Drew didn’t drink anymore,” Doc said, squinting up like he couldn’t make it all fit. “Not since high school. He was in AA. It had been years.”
Jack let his eyes rest on the floor. “I guess he was having an off night.”
Connie’s face was now bright with tears. “Why didn’t you tell us, sweetheart?”
“Because,” Jack said, “Drew asked me not to.”
Everybody waited.
“When we crashed through the railing,” Jack said, “and hit the water, we floated at the surface for a minute. I was rolling down the windows and popping our seatbelts, but all Drew could do was shake his head and say, ‘Don’t tell Mom and Dad. Don’t tell Hank.’ He said it ten times—maybe twenty? Over and over. And I was just trying to get him focused and get him out, so I just kept saying, ‘I won’t, buddy. Just roll your window down.’ In the end, when the water came in, I pushed him out of the window. And when they found him drowned, all I could think was, That was his last request. That was the last thing he wanted. To not let them down.
“And so I honored it. It seemed like the least I could do for him—for all of us. To not make things worse. Even after the rumors started that I was the one who’d been drinking, I didn’t feel like I could break that promise. I was going to take it all to my grave, whatever it took. But I guess I couldn’t even do that much.”
He pushed out a sigh like he was disappointed in himself.
For a minute, we all just stared.
I thought about how, in his dream, it was always Jack who had to drown and not Drew. Maybe Jack was still trying to save him. Or, maybe he wanted to take his place.