For This Life Only (16 page)

She studied the steering wheel, rubbing her thumb along the edge of it. “I mean, you don't have to see me tomorrow. You don't have to do anything, it's not like we're—”

“I'll see you tomorrow,” I said, grinning.

“All right.” She ducked her head slightly with a pleased smile. “I'll send you a pass.”

Thera's headlights lit my way on the uneven and slippery sidewalk, and she waited until I made it to our driveway before pulling away from the curb.

After fumbling for my key in my backpack, I managed to get the front door unlocked and open. As I walked inside and elbowed the door closed behind me, movement from the shadows in the living room made my heart catapult into my throat.

Sarah walked into the hallway, Patsie under her arm and a snack bowl in her hands.

“Jeez, Sarah, you scared me. What are you doing down here in the dark?” The lights were on in the kitchen, and blue flickers of the television came from the family room. “Where's Mom?”

She held a finger up to her mouth, her eyes big in the darkness.

I listened for a second and then I heard it. Voices upstairs, rising and falling, in an argument. My parents fighting, louder this time.

Tilting my head, I caught a few words.

“. . . not my fault . . .”

“. . . have to pay attention to what's going on around you, Micah! . . . needs help.”

“. . . other crises at the moment, in case you haven't noticed . . .”

Not good.

Sarah shifted her snack bowl to her other hand, caught my fingers, and then pulled me toward the kitchen.

“Did something else happen?” I whispered.

I expected her to shrug or just look at me, but instead she said, “Mrs. Percy showed one of my drawings to Mom, and she took me to the doctor. An emergency.”

Mrs. Percy was her teacher. “A doctor?”

“Not the kind that gives you shots,” Sarah added firmly, with the conviction that could only come from being told that exact information, word for word, multiple times. “I talked. And drew some more pictures.”

A therapist. I couldn't believe Mom had actually done it.

“But Daddy's mad,” she said in a small voice. “He came home early when Mommy told him.”

Yeah, I bet. “He's not mad at you,” I said. “He just feels bad that he couldn't help you.”

Now that we were in the kitchen, I could see her more clearly, the red puffiness of her eyelids where she'd been crying, and . . .

I frowned. “Why is your face all orange?” Her mouth and cheeks were smeared with a sticky-looking orange dust and crumbs. “What are you eating?”

She smiled and held the bowl out. “I invented it. I was hungry.”

I looked in the bowl to find cheese puffs and . . . Reese's Pieces? She must have been raiding deep in the cabinets to find my mom's secret stash of junk food. Which meant she'd been down here alone for a good while.

A mix of guilt and frustration made my chest pull tight. Sarah was too little to be caught up in all of this.

“That's disgusting, Sares,” I said, keeping my tone light. I took a handful of her “invention” and tasted it to confirm, making an exaggerated face. “Yep, really gross.”

She giggled. “No, it's not,” she insisted. “It's good. It matches. See, orange and orange?” She rattled the bowl. “And the peanut butter and the cheese go together.”

“Super gross,” I said, ruffling her hair. “Good job. Come on, I know where Mom hides the emergency frozen pizzas.”

“Can we have pepperoni?” she asked, surrendering the bowl to me.

“Sure, if there's one left.” I put the bowl down on the island.

She hopped up on a breakfast stool and rested Patsie on the next one over while I shrugged out of my coat and dropped my backpack on the floor.

“Can I see what you drew?” I asked, once I had the oven preheating and the pizza on the pan.

She pointed to the manila folder on the other side of the island. It had her name written on the outside in careful teacher penmanship.

I flipped it open to find a series of crayon drawings on plain white paper.

The first one was pretty clear. Even if I hadn't recognized
the red car turned upside down in a blue stream, there was no mistaking the blond-haired figure lying in a pool of blood while a similar-looking person floated upward with a yellow halo over his head.

I rubbed my face. No wonder her teacher had called Mom.

The second one was worse, a big angry face with red glowing eyes and sharp teeth. The head was oversized for the much smaller body, which was dressed in a white robe of some kind, with lightning bolts coming from one hand and what appeared to be a list in the other. Sarah's name was written at the top of the tiny list.

But in case there was any confusion, she'd labeled that drawing with a caption that read, simply, “God.”

“Sarah . . . ,” I began, not sure what to say.

“That's the one Mrs. Percy didn't like,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

I flipped to the last page. Two tall smiling people held hands with the small blond girl between them, on a bright green lawn in front of a crooked house with black shutters. Our house. Off to one side, a person held what looked like either an oversized sub sandwich or a baseball bat.

No, it was definitely a baseball bat. Because that was me. Or it was supposed to be.

Crayola Jace was smiling.

At the top, the blond figure with the halo from the
earlier drawing stood on a cloud, beaming out at me. Light, as depicted by sharp yellow lines, radiated from his halo.

Eli.

I cleared my throat. “What's this one?” The picture looked normal compared to the others.

“The doctor who doesn't give shots”—clearly this was a big thing for Sarah—“told me to draw what I wished were true instead. I can't make Eli come back, though, so he had to stay in heaven.”

“It's nice,” I managed. She'd tried to give baseball back to me and our parents back to her. Everything about this drawing made me want to cry.

The oven beeped, and I turned away to open the door and slide the pizza in, keeping my back to Sarah until I got my shit together.

“She said it was okay,” Sarah said. “She said it was okay that I was glad you're alive. She said Eli would understand, that he wouldn't be mad.”

She didn't phrase it as a question, but I could hear her asking, nonetheless. And I didn't know what to say, at first.

Then I thought about everything Thera and I had been talking about the last couple of days. I didn't know what had happened to Eli, whether he was around or not, but I knew my brother. And I knew that if he were here, he wouldn't have wanted Sarah torturing herself this way.

So I made a choice.

“Yeah,” I said. I turned to look at her so she'd see I meant it. “Eli would be all right with that. He wouldn't want you to be sad or hurting if you didn't have to be.” I hesitated, then added, “You know he might have been upset about the toothbrush thing, if he'd found out, but he loved you, Sares. That's why he was hard on you sometimes, I think. He didn't mean to be, but he was trying to help.”

I waited, expecting her to have more questions. But she was busy studying her orange fingers.

That was fine. It was better than before. She'd obviously been a little volcano about to burst from angst and despair. It had only taken the right prodding from someone outside the family to get her started on speaking up.

I handed her a napkin to wipe her fingers. If she'd gotten that crap on the white living room sofa, my mom was going to flip out.

“Is the pizza ready yet?” Sarah asked, scrubbing her hands.

A door slammed distantly upstairs.

Sarah and I eyed each other uneasily.

“Not a microwave,” I reminded Sarah, trying to shift the conversation back. “The oven takes longer.”

She heaved a sigh like I'd informed her she'd be eating asparagus and broccoli for dinner instead.

But it was so Sarah, so how Sarah used to be, that I had to smile. “Yeah, I know, life is tough. Come on, we'll go watch TV while we wait.”

“
My Little Pony
?” she asked.

I groaned, but decided that in the name of distraction, I'd make the sacrifice. “One, that's it.”

“Is your homework done?” she asked in a perfect imitation of my mom as she slid off the stool.

“Who's asking?” I demanded in mock seriousness.

“Me,” she said.

“Then yes, absolutely.”

“Mommy will check,” Sarah warned, before scampering off for the family room sofa.

I looked up toward the ceiling and the heavy silence that seemed more ominous than the controlled shouting that had gone on before.

Yeah, I was pretty sure I was off the hook for a homework check tonight, no matter how much TV we watched.

THE NEXT MORNING, MY
pass from Thera arrived almost as soon as the bell rang for the start of Exempt. And I was ready, moving toward the front of the room before Mr. Sloane even called my name.

My palms were sweaty, but the rest of me felt light with anticipation and eagerness. I wanted yesterday all over again. I wanted that feeling of being less alone, but more specifically, I wanted that feeling of being connected to
her
.

I couldn't stop thinking about that moment in the car, her skin soft under my fingers and her breath in my ear.

When I walked into the library, Thera was reshelving books not far from the entrance. But I saw her before she saw me, so I had a moment just to look. She was scowling as she wrestled a stubborn book into place. Her dark hair
was tucked in the back of her hoodie to keep it out of her way. But I knew what it looked like when it was loose and wild around her face. I knew what she looked like just before a kiss, her expression soft, her eyes half closed, her cheeks flushed with color. I
needed
that again.

“Hey,” Thera said when I approached, her face lighting up, and I grinned in response.

But then her smile faded. “You look . . . Are you okay?”

I hadn't realized my sleepless night showed so much. “It's nothing.”

Last night, my mom had made an appearance downstairs an hour or so after Sarah and I had eaten, her face white and her lips pinched. She'd said nothing about the frozen pizza or Sarah's lack of vegetables with said pizza. She'd just wrapped up the leftovers, loaded the dishwasher, told Sarah to get her pajamas on at eight, and then disappeared back upstairs, claiming a headache.

It was only when I heard the garage door going up a few minutes later that I realized my dad must have come down as well.

Sarah didn't notice Dad's departure, wrapped up as she was in her fourth episode of
My Little Pony
.

I let her stay up until nine, figuring it would be better if she was too tired to ask questions or notice that neither one of our parents was coming in to say good night.

My dad hadn't been home when I'd gone to my room
at ten thirty. So I'd left my door open, to listen. He'd rolled in close to midnight, as far as I could tell.

Not good.

“Family junk,” I said to Thera.

Thera's forehead furrowed as she glanced from the book in her hand to me. “Did they say something to you about me dropping you off? I didn't think anyone was home.”

“No,” I said. “Nothing like that. They're fighting.” I lowered my voice, years of training hard to break. “My mom took Sarah to a therapist and my dad's pissed. Dirty laundry or whatever.”

“As if no one else has any,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The stories I could tell you . . .”

I was sure she could. For all the fuss and drama around Psychic Mary from Riverwoods members, particularly from the conservatives in the congregation, the rest of town didn't seem to care as much. Cars came and went pretty regularly from her driveway.

“We're not allowed to,” I said simply.

“Yeah. I get it.” She bobbed her head, keeping her focus on the shelf in front of her. I wanted to move closer, but she seemed more distant today. Maybe it was being at school, or maybe it was because she was working.

Or maybe she'd decided yesterday was a mistake.

The thought made me feel a little shaky. I leaned
against the next shelf over to take the weight off my leg. “So, I was thinking, you took me to one of your favorite places yesterday, maybe I could return the favor this afternoon.” I'd planned it out last night, while I was lying awake.

But Thera hesitated, avoiding my gaze.

My heart sank. “What's wrong?”

She shook her head. “It's nothing.”

Except it clearly was. “Did someone say something to you?”

“No. It's fine.” Thera waved my concern away and then slid another book in place with a solid
thunk
.

I didn't quite believe her, but she obviously didn't want to talk about it. After a moment, she took a deep breath, pushing away whatever was bothering her, and turned in my direction. “So,” she said with a smile. “What did you have in mind for this afternoon?”

I grinned. “How do you feel about drive-ins?”

She blinked at me. “Like the movies?”

“Nope, like the food. There's this place in Richmond, Dog 'N' Suds. My friends make fun of me, but it's one of my favorite places to go. Hot dogs and root beer in glass mugs and they bring it to your car and everything.”

Thera raised her eyebrows. “Like . . . a drive-through?” she asked, in a tone of mock astonishment.

“Shhhh!”

The annoyed voice came from somewhere behind us, and it was immediately followed by a fit of giggles.

Thera rolled her eyes, and then, with a quick look back at the main desk, she abandoned her cart and took my hand, pulling me across the library.