Wake (47 page)

“Yes.” Willa stands up and shakes her limbs out, dislodging stray blades of grass. “You want to know how messed up?” she says as she stretches her arms over her head.

“Probably not.”

She chuckles darkly. “Trust’s a scary thing like that. Not to have it and want it drives you crazy. To have it and not want it will cost you.”

I’m not entirely sure I understand what she means. I sit up on my elbows and study her face. She looks so relaxed. Happy, even.

“Do you trust me?” she asks.

“Maybe.”

“I know you want me to trust you. The surprises. Al this give-and-take philosophy. The one-on-one time at lunch, and making me talk to you when I get my head all caught up in thinking.” She shakes her head and smiles. “You sure you want all that? I’ve got weighty baggage.”

“I do too.”

“But you don’t trust me with it.”

Willa crouches down to be eye-level with me again. She grabs me by the side of the neck and holds my head against hers, cheek-to-cheek and temple-to-temple. I put my hand around the side of her neck and hold her just as close.

“What’s your deepest, darkest secret?” she whispers.

That I prayed for Elise to die
.

I can’t tell Willa that. I can’t tell anyone that. But I know the secret she really wants to hear—the one she’s been asking about for months. I angle my head just slightly to whisper directly into her ear.

“Acute myeloid leukemia.”

“Damn,” she says lowly. “That was my second guess.” The fact that she had a list is annoying as all hell.

Her turn to put herself out there. “What’s your secret?”

Willa presses her lips against the spot in front of my ear. “I killed Tessa.”

Willa: May 3 to 7

Wednesday I pull back from our mutual headlock to find Jem wide-eyed and confused. “Don’t tell me you thought you were the only one who had dark shit hidden away?”

“You mean you…?” He leaves he question hanging and cocks his head, gaping at me. Then he starts to pull away. “You helped her OD?”

“Yes.”

Jem shakes his head stubbornly. “Bullshit. You’d be in jail now if that were true.”

“You have to get caught to get punished.”

“You fucking
lied about it
too
?”

I wonder if he can hear how loud his voice is. Jem stands up and walks around aimlessly, rubbing the back of his neck.

“I don’t understand.”

“She asked me for help. You ought to know how little privacy the sick have—I hoarded the spare pills in my room. There was medication all over the house. Every second day I stole one of her painkillers out of the bottle. I had a little bundle of them in one of her antique handkerchiefs, tucked under my bed.”

Jem starts to slowly shake his head like he knows where this is going.

“We talked about it a lot beforehand. Mom and Dad didn’t want to talk about the possibility that she could die, but some things
have
to be said. I used to drive her to appointments whenever she was fighting with our parents and didn’t want them around.”

Jem is still pacing restlessly. I throw a dirt clod at him. “Will you stand still and listen?”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“You think I care what you want? You think
anybody
cares what other people want in this world?”

Jem gives me a dirty look. “If she
wanted
to die peacefully she should have gone to a hospice, not home. Haven’t you ever heard of snowing a patient?”

“It wasn’t my idea,” I tell him through clenched teeth. “You think I had a vote in this shit? I was sixteen, for fuck’s sake.”

“Old enough to know better.”

I smile to keep from biting the inside of my cheek. “You know you’ve considered a contingency plan too. And if Elise was the sick one, you’d have done the same as me had she asked. Tessa had lymphoma, and then it showed up in her liver and small intestine. Would you have taken those odds?”

Jem stares at me blankly for a few seconds. He turns away very carefully with a pinched look on his face and holds up a hand as if to say ‘quiet.’ Jem vomits on the tall grass. I get up and pass him a bottle of water.

“Don’t fucking say anything,” he tells me. He rinses his mouth and asks me to go back to the blanket. I just sit there and wait, watching him stand with his hands on his knees, slowly getting a grip on himself.

When Jem finally stands upright his attitude toward me has gone from hostile to cold. “Did she die quickly? Peacefully? Was she even conscious?”

“Do you really want to hear this?”

“Answer the fucking question.”

I blow out my frustration on a long breath and consider refusing to say any more. I want to say it, though. This is the first time I’ve admitted the true events out loud. My parents always suspected, of course, but I always denied everything.

“Right before dinnertime she started bleeding in her gut. Mom was in the room with her—there was blood and diarrhea all over the bed.” Jem looks a little green at that and swallows with difficulty. “I stopped making dinner and carried her to the bathroom while Mom stripped the bed. Put her in the bath.

Washed her.”

Jem very carefully sits down on the beach. He looks a little clammy, but he’s still too upset to even share a picnic blanket with me.

“After I got her clean her stomach was still upset, so I put her on the toilet. She asked for the pill s. Mom was going to insist on going back to the hospital because of the bleeding. Tessa didn’t want to go back.

She was ready to be done.”

Jem is slowly shaking his head again.

“I gave her the bundle of pills and took another bottle out of the bathroom cabinet. There was enough between the two. I gave her water. Helped her swallow. She was in pain and shaking too badly to hold her own cup or put the pills on her tongue.”

Jem hangs his head in his hands. He knows exactly the kind of pain I’m talking about.

“Tessa didn’t want me to watch, and she was worried about me getting in trouble. She told me to go back to the kitchen as soon as we said goodbye. It would look like she died from the bleeding.

“So I left her there. Mom tried to go into the bathroom and I said, ‘Give her a little dignity,’ and suggested calling her doctor.”

Jem finally interrupts. “You could have let your mother say goodbye.”

“If she wanted to she could have said it any time in the last year, or when Tessa refused treatment.”

“You’re cruel,” Jem murmurs.

“I know. I warned you.”

We’re silent for a time, and when I tug gently on Jem’s shirtsleeve he startles badly. “Look.” I peel off my left glove. The people who have seen my bare hands are few and far between. I’ve kept them covered in public for years now.

“What did you do?” Jem whispers—disgusted or awed, I can’t tell . The deep, thick scar on my hand runs from the area between my thumb and forefinger, down the back of my hand and around the side of my wrist. It was a nasty wound to begin with, and infection made the scarring worse. A thin, secondary scar runs parallel to it, where doctors had to cut me open to clear out the necrotic tissue. I came within an inch of losing my left thumb.

“I went back to the kitchen. Back to making dinner.” I mime holding a knife and carrot in my hands, chopping neatly. “I was distracted already, and when Tessa hit the floor Mom freaked out. She let out this shriek…. The knife slipped and I sliced my hand wide open.” At the time I hadn’t even noticed the bleeding. Al that mattered was Mom’s frantic pounding on the locked bathroom door. Dad kicked the door in, and the force of it gave my dead sister a nasty head wound. If she hadn’t already been lifeless on the floor, that blow would have ended it for her.

I put my glove back on but Jem continues to stare at my left hand. “Any deeper and I would have lost the thumb.”

He looks up at my face with a probing stare. “How the hell did they not catch you? There must have been a shit-ton of pills in her stomach.”

“They only did a partial autopsy. The big concern was whether the head wound was a sign of foul play.

Everything else just looked like a death from cancer—not worth the time and money to investigate.

Besides, she hadn’t eaten in days because of the pain, and an IV kept her hydrated, so no one expected to find anything in her stomach.”

“You should have let her die naturally.”

“I did what she wanted.”

“You should have said no.” Jem’s voice is steadily rising in volume. Shock and disgust are beginning to lapse into anger. “You don’t take advantage of someone in a vulnerable moment and make a permanent decision like that.”

“She was clear-headed; it was her decision.”

“You still should have said no.”

I stand up and gather the blanket into my backpack. I don’t need a lecture from Jem. “We’re not having this conversation. I took enough shit from my parents; I don’t need it from you too.”

“So your parents do know?”

“Mom suspects. I was the last one with Tessa, and the empty pill bottle was still out on the counter. She couldn’t prove that Tessa hadn’t opened it herself, though.” I shoulder my backpack. “She didn’t turn me in. Maybe losing one daughter was enough.”

When I walk away I don’t care if Jem follows me. He can find his own way home if he doesn’t move his ass back to the car fast enough. I’m almost disappointed when he catches up to me, but then he has to grab my wrist and yank my left glove off. He turns my wrist like he’s inspecting a dead animal. I try to pul my hand back and he says, “If there was any justice you would have lost the thumb.”

I slap him across the face with my mutilated hand without pausing to think. Jem reels a bit, though I didn’t hit him very hard.

“You are an asshole,” I tell him slowly. “I accepted all your bullshit and baggage when everyone else just wanted to ignore you. Some fucking friend you are to not even
try
to do the same for me.”

“I’ve bent over backwards to accept your bullshit,” he yells back. “But this takes the fucking cake, Kirk.”

“Fuck you.”

“What do you want me to say?” he demands. “‘Great job, you killed a sick, helpless woman. It all makes sense now.’ Come on!”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve to think that I expect congratulations for killing her.”

“well what do you want?”

“I want you to fucking listen! God damn, Harper, I wasn’t always a heartless shrew.”

He snorts incredulously. Asshole.

“I regretted it immediately, alright? I should have found a way let her go more peacefully, or stayed with her. I should have told Mom and Dad what we were up to.” I throw my hands up. “That’s some heavy shit to deal with when you’re sixteen.”

“I’m sorry you’re a lousy murderer,” he says condescendingly. I wish I hadn’t told him. I walk away, angry at myself and at him. My self-directed anger is nothing new, but the anger I feel for Jem is of a different breed. I accepted him and his demons before I knew what they were, and as soon as I share mine, he insults me and passes judgment.

“If it makes you feel any better, the whole experience wrecked me,” I tell him bitterly.

“Why would that make me feel better?”

I shrug. “Justice. I didn’t get off scot-free, even though I did keep my thumb.” I don’t know why I bother, but I flex my hand in demonstration. My thumb joint doesn’t move like it should. “I can’t grip stuff properly anymore.”

“What a fucking tragedy.”

“I got in trouble a lot after Tessa died; racked up a few citations in a couple of months and ended up with some community service and probation.”

“Some justice,” Jem scoffs. “You fuck up that hard and you get a few weeks of picking up garbage along the highway? That’s bullshit.”

“She died in August and I got a psych detainment just before Christmas.”

Jem gives me a look that I’ve seen a hundred times before—like I have a second head or a bomb under my shirt. “A psych detainment?”

“I tried to kill myself.”

Jem doesn’t say a word.

“I missed Tessa’s funeral because I needed surgery to repair the ligaments in my hand, and I missed Christmas because I was in a mental hospital.”

“You think she would have wanted you there?” he says sourly. How good of him to consider that this isn’t easy for me to talk about.

“I don’t know.” I resolve not to let him make me cry. “I know you don’t care, but those three weeks in the psych ward were where a lot of my issues began.”

“Uh, I think they began before that,” he says dryly. “That’s how you landed in a psych ward in the first place.”

“What the fuck do you know?”

“Did your parents kick you out when you turned eighteen? Is that why you’re living with Frank?”

“I left voluntarily.”

Jem snorts derisively and looks the other way. “Do you have any more water?” he asks moodily.

“Piss off.”

“Seriously, I need to take my meds.”

I laugh humorlessly. “You want my help to take pill s? That’s rich.”

Jem grabs my arm and makes me stop. He glares at me and reaches into his messenger bag, pulling out bottles of pill s. He shoves these into my hands and pulls out more. There are nine bottles in all. I don’t recognize the names on half the labels. I’m guessing those are transplant-related.

“I’m just gonna dump my baggage on you all at once whether you like it or not,” he snaps. “There. You want to help me sort through dosages? Listen to every fucking thing about what each drug does to me?

Let’s see if you can get it right this time or if you kill someone else, you reckless bitch.”

I take a deep breath through my nose and try to respond civil y. “I get it. I’ll shut up. Forget I ever trusted you.” I dump the pills against his chest. He catches some and others drop to the ground.

“Willa!” he calls after me as I march away. I don’t stop. Jem frantically packs up his bottles and jogs after me. The short distance is enough to wind him.

“Just let me take a bottle.” He grabs my backpack and I throw him off.

“No. You don’t treat me like that and then ask me for favors.”

“
Please
.”

“Why should I?”

“Because,” he yell s, out of patience, “it fucking hurts!”