This is What Goodbye Looks Like (37 page)

“Is it her?” Seth asks Brie, his voice toneless and hollow.

“Yeah,” Brie says, but she sounds almost confused, like she doesn’t quite believe it’s really me standing there.

I want to start spewing apologies, but nothing comes out of my mouth when I open it. Seth stalks toward me, and for a second, I think he’s just going to stride right past me and leave. But then he brushes against my shoulder, and as soon as he touches it, we both freeze.

Koda nudges at Seth’s leg, her tail tucked between her legs as she silently asks for reassurance. I wait for Seth to take care of his dog, like he always does, but he’s still frozen.

Then he slams his hands out against the sides of the door jamb. He fills the doorway like that, boxing me outside of his room, and then leans down until his face is just inches from mine. This close, I can see he’s trembling.

“Leandra Alessio.” He spits out my name in a low growl, every word pure rage, every syllable a stab to my chest. “You’re sick, you know that? Just
sick
.”

“It’s... it’s not what you think,” I choke out.

He shakes his head slowly. “No. No, none of it is, is it?”

He doesn’t give me time to respond before storming past me, heading out the door and down the hallway.

One moment he’s there, the next he’s gone. It’s that simple and that painful.

“I’m sorry,” I say, but my voice is broken, and there’s no way he’ll hear me. I turn back to Brie and Landon, swallowing hard. “I...I’m sorry.”

“I trusted you,” Brie murmurs, her eyes wide with pain. “We all trusted you.”

I gulp in a breath, trying to stop the tremors creeping across my hands. “How did you find out?” My voice sounds strangely flat, emotionless. Empty.

“My flight time got changed, and they were playing the local news when I was waiting to board at the airport,” Brie says, her voice nearly as choked as mine. “Some senator is trying to modify DUI laws in San Diego. So they showcased Parker’s accident, and when they played some of the scenes from in front of the courthouse, I saw you were there and—”

“You don’t have to explain to her what happened,” Landon snarls, and the ferocity twisting his expression makes me flinch back. He leaps up from the bed and stalks toward me, but then pauses and puts a comforting arm around Brie’s shoulders. He nods to me. “The little bitch already knows exactly what happened at that courthouse.”

Brie bites her lip and stares at me, clearly waiting for some sort of explanation to take away the sting of my betrayal. When I don’t offer one, she takes a shuddering breath and says, “I had to tell him. Seth had to know.”

I nod. “I understand.” A long silence stretches between us, and then I murmur, “I was going to tell him the truth. I swear.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Brie says. She sniffs and wipes at a tear, then says in a surprisingly firm voice, “You need to leave.”

“I should apologize to him.” I take a step back, ready to go after Seth and try to explain things.

“No,” Landon snaps, and he tenses, like he’s ready to haul me away if I try to follow Seth. “Leave him the
hell
alone.”

Brie shakes her head, the motion slow and final. “He’s right, Lea. You just need to go.”

Part Three

Manual Focus

Chapter Thirty-Seven

I haven’t had one of Mom’s hugs in over six months, and the feel of her arms around me is shockingly comforting. She still hugs the same. Her voice is hollow, her frame too skinny, and her expression belongs to a person trapped in a perpetual nightmare. But she hugs just like she used to, her arms strong and reassuring.

I know I should be crying, but my ability to shed tears seems to have completely disappeared since I last saw Seth. I’m shaking with a mixture of exhaustion, guilt, and despair, and I just don’t have it in me to resist Mom’s embrace. So I let her hold me, listening to her babble on about how much she missed me while we block foot traffic in the middle of the airport hallway.

The plane ride back to San Diego is a complete blur in my mind, and the short drive to my house is even fuzzier. Really the only thought in my head is that I’d rather be going to the hospital to visit Camille instead of heading to our house. But as soon as I voice the idea, Mom quickly shoots it down, saying I should wait a few days since I’ve just been sick.

I know she’s right—I’m almost positive Landon and I just had food poisoning, but there’s no way of knowing for absolute certain that it wasn’t a case of the stomach flu. And I can’t risk exposing Camille to any sort of sickness, not when she’s in such a fragile state. But that fact does little to quell my urge to see her, and I mentally promise to visit her in a couple days, as soon as I know for sure it’s safe.

We manage to get to our house walk inside. For a split second, I actually expect to hear Camille’s voice calling out a hello, her cheerful tone echoing off the hardwood flooring of our entranceway. But there’s only silence to greet me.

Technically, I guess not much has changed. The bold colors still say, “fashionable,” the elegant vases say, “tasteful,” the hardwood floor says, “wealth.” But nothing manages to break through the stale silence and say, “welcome home.”

Dad comes out of his home office and stoops to give me a hug. He looks like he’s aged ten years since the accident, still tall and slim, but now with more gray creeping into his blond hair and bags under his eyes. We bumble through an awkward greeting, and then he walks outside to get my bags from the car.

It’s an SUV, just like the one ruined in the accident, but it’s also a slightly older model. Maybe Dad thought that if he replaced the smashed car with something from before the accident, he could pretend we never needed to buy a replacement. Or maybe his law business is starting to crumble along with his home life, and he couldn’t afford something brand new.

I don’t know which it is. I think I should care, but I don’t.

I sleep. Somehow I manage to make it into my room, and then I just stop trying to keep my eyes open and let darkness wash over every part of me. Time is only marked by the calls from Jeremy I keep sending to voicemail, and after I turn off my phone, it seems to disappear all together.

The world is broken, frozen. Some part of me whispers that I shouldn’t be wasting time in bed, that I should be up and trying to help Camille. But the rest of my exhausted body disagrees, and I can’t get myself to move off my mattress.

Every time I wake up, I’m on the verge of screaming, my chest growing hotter and hotter as the sound stays trapped there. I can’t let it out, because that means breaking the silence permeating my house. Right now, that silence is the only thing keeping me from completely losing it. If I concentrate hard enough, I can almost convince myself that I died in Parker’s place, and Mom and Dad are in the kitchen sipping their morning coffee, and Jeremy’s in the living room watching TV, and Camille’s just down the hall dancing around her room, and everything’s right with the world.

It’s Friday when Mom finally drags me out of bed. The only reason I know is because she puts a newspaper in my hands, steers me over to the kitchen table, and tells me to do the crossword puzzle with Dad. We used to do this every single Friday morning, but the decade-long tradition just feels wrong. If the blank stare Dad gives the paper is anything to judge by, he thinks the same.

The only part of the paper that interests me is the date in the corner. March sixteenth. Fifteen days before Camille’s taken off life support. Fifteen days to work a miracle and stop it. I was an idiot to spend so long in bed, but now that I’m up, everything still seems just as hopeless.

Dad and I manage to solve three of the problems, and then he mumbles some excuse and leaves to get ready for work. Mom gives a half-hearted apology for him, but I’m too busy shrugging it off and retreating back to my room to really notice what she says.

As I close the door behind me, I turn on my phone, figuring I’d better answer Jeremy’s messages before I start working on Camille’s campaign. But as my phone powers on, a bunch of new email notifications pop up on my screen. If I’m reading them right, I have almost forty new emails, all of them forwarded from the crowdfunding site. For a moment, I’m completely confused. But then I remember that I gave Maddie my email address to set up the crowdfunding account with, so that must be how I’m getting the messages.

I flick open my email app and tap on the first message, opening the whole thing. It’s from some guy named Colin Hoyt, and all it says is,
“happy 2 back this. good luck.”
I scroll to the next message, which is from a lady named Julia Wu. Hers says,
“I’m glad for the opportunity to donate. Can I get your permission to write about this in my church’s bulletin? Spreading the word seems like the key here.”

I blink a few times, not believing what I’m reading. Maddie set up a draft version of the crowdfunding webpage, but I haven’t made it accessible to the public yet. Some of the details and pages are still blank. Unless...

With shaky fingers, I scramble to open the email Maddie sent me a couple days ago, the one with the account link. I tap on it. Earlier this week, most of this page had been blank. Now it’s titled,
“Help Save Camille Alessio,”
and the top of the page displays the grinning picture of Camille that circulated around the media when the accident first happened. In the description box under the image, it says,
“Last year on May 4th, Camille Alessio suffered a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. Her chances of surviving her coma are nonexistent without your help.”

I blink a few times, re-reading the description. I didn’t write that, so who did? My breath catches as I see the donation stats in the corner. “
$735 Dollars Raised of $40,000 Goal.”

Holy shit. Just... holy
shit
. How in the hell...?

I refresh the page, waiting for the numbers to disappear, because it’s obviously a glitch. Instead, the donation amount changes to $750.

Oh my god. This is real. Someone back at Harting must be managing the page, and they’re obviously doing some serious social media mojo, because there’s no other way it could have gotten so many donations this fast.

I take a shuddering breath, waiting for tears to take over my vision. But they’re not there. I think somehow my body knows that I can’t give into any weakness right now. This is Camille’s last chance, and if I’m going to make anything happen in only fifteen days, I need to get to work.

I click through the site, examining the mission statement that’s been posted—it gives a bunch of details about the accident and Camille’s coma and encourages people to donate towards the medical costs of keeping Camille on life support. Whoever is running the page has also posted lots of links to news articles about the accident and trial, making it easy for people online to familiarize themselves with the events.

I set down my phone and boot up my laptop, logging into the campaign’s account from there, and then I start sifting through the other messages. So far, 42 people have donated, and 16 of them left messages to go along with their donations. I try to make my replies as personal as possible for each one, although my spinning mind makes it hard to focus on the details. The basic message is pretty simple, though: Thank you. Thank you for caring about my sister. Thank you for giving her the fighting chance she deserves.

I’ve just finished the replies when there’s a knock at my door. It’s tentative and soft, and even though it’s quieter than how it used to sound, I recognize Mom’s knock right away.

“Come in,” I call, quickly clicking open a new internet tab so Mom can’t see the campaign page. I have no idea how she’s going to react to it, but now isn’t the time to find out. I’ll have to tell her about it soon, but I want to wait until I get a few more donations and the campaign grows large enough to make it impossible to simply pull down.

Mom opens the door slowly and hesitates in my doorway.

I raise an eyebrow. “Did you need something?”

Mom clasps her hands behind her back and straightens her shoulders, the position Jeremy used to jokingly call her “doctor pose.” But it’s different now. Back when we were little, it was a pose of authority, the sort that told us we were in deep shit and had better listen to every word she said. Now it looks like she’s just trying to keep herself from collapsing.

“I want to talk to you,” she says.

I turn so I’m actually facing her. “So talk.”

“It’s about your school.”

Not exactly what I was expecting, I’ll admit. I was waiting for some serious conversation about Camille.

Mom sighs and walks over to my bed. I can’t help but watch her steps, slow and labored, but perfectly balanced. They’re doctor’s footsteps, just as calculated and steady as her doctor’s hands have always been. I cross my arms and grip my elbows, desperately trying to keep myself from chucking something at her feet. I want to trip her, to give her a taste of what it feels like to not have control of her own legs.

Mom seems to somehow know what I’m thinking, because she suddenly averts her gaze. I realize I’m glaring at her, but I don’t bother to reign in the expression.

She sits on the edge of my bed and smooths the sheets, tracing the soft creases with her palm. “We need to figure out what you’re doing for school for the rest of the semester.”