“Because my mom had just bailed!” he shouted, the sinews of his neck popping to the surface. “He was going through a rough patch, but he would have come out of it, and as a reward for a decade of service, your dad fired him. The bank foreclosed on the house two months later and we were homeless. He dropped me off at the boys’ home the same day he shot your brother.”
I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t. I was still waiting to wake up from this nightmare to Jude’s sleeping body draped over mine. “He murdered my brother,” I repeated, the words acrid and wrong in my mouth.
“It was supposed to be your dad!” he exploded, everything draining from him. His shoulders rolled forward, his head falling. “It was supposed to be your dad,” he said in a whisper.
“No,”—my tip trembled—“it was supposed to be me.”
Jude froze, looking down at me like I was his enemy. “What the hell do you mean?”
I scooted against the wall, needing its support. “Mom had asked me to take Dad’s lunch down to him that Sunday—he was working around the clock to get that project done on time—but I was being difficult and said I didn’t want to. The job-site was close to our home and I could have biked.” I closed my eyes as everything played back in my mind. “So John said he would, and that was the last time I saw him alive. That’s who your dad put three bullets into when he showed up at the worksite that day. It should have been me, waiting inside dad’s mobile office, twirling the chair, when Henry Jamieson—who was so high on meth he wasn’t able to make out who was in that chair—shot and killed my brother.” Everything inside me deflated. I was nothing but the shell of a balloon, falling to the ground. “It was supposed to be me.”
It was silent, but a silent that was so loud I wanted to cover my ears.
Finally, Jude walked past me, stopping right before he walked out. “I’m sorry it wasn’t,” he said, his voice low. “Because I really could have done without all this shit.”
Slamming the door behind him, his footsteps thundered down the stairs, out the door, and out of my life for good this time.
When the screen door slammed, I cried the flood of tears I’d held onto for five years.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I stood in front of the mirror, studying the girl reflecting back. She looked like me, but she wasn’t the same girl I remembered. Something had broken loose in the hours since Jude walked away, and it must have been vital to who I once was.
I felt flat, unable to muster any kind of emotion, and I felt lost, like everything I’d worked for and achieved had led me to a dead end. For the first time in my life, I wondered if the world around me I’d been trying to save wasn’t worth saving.
“Lucy in the sky?” a gentle knocking sounded outside my door. “You ready?”
No, was my answer, but that’s not what came out because when it came to my brother, I never said no. I hadn’t when I’d been asked to speak at his funeral, and I hadn’t every year on the anniversary of his death when dad and I visited his grave. It was the only way I could still show him I loved him and I thought about him every day.
I took one last glance at the girl in the mirror before shaking my head and turning away. That girl was no longer me.
“Hey, dad,” I greeted, opening my door. Like the four prior, dad was in his black suit and had even managed to get his tie almost right. “Just the two of us again?” I asked, looking down the hall. My mom never accompanied us to John’s grave, and for all I knew, she’d never revisited after the day he’d been lowered into the ground.
“Your mom deals with this in her own way,” he said, wiping his palms on his jacket. “We deal with this in our way.”
Most days I wished I could deal with it mom’s way.
“Come on, it’s getting late.” He turned and headed down the stairs. I grabbed my purse and followed.
“You’re driving,” he said needlessly as he locked the front door. The last time he’d been behind the wheel of a vehicle was the day John died.
The cemetery was about an hour’s drive from the cabin, but when you were sitting next to your father in total silence, it seemed more like an entire day without pit stops. This would be my sixth time to the cemetery. I came once a year because it was the right thing to do, but I couldn’t do it any more than that. Besides, nothing of what I loved of John was buried beneath that gravestone.
Dad looked out the side window, thinking whatever the thoughts of a man who had ceased to live were, and I stared at the road ahead, trying not to think because my thoughts only led me down one road.
Like every other cemetery, it was empty. Rolling to a stop, I looked over at dad. He was frozen, still staring out the window.
“Dad,” I set my hand on his shoulder, “you ready?”
He flinched, his eyes clearing as he came back to life. “Ready.”
I slid out of the car and walked around the front. I waited.
And waited.
It was a practice in patience I’d learned five years ago. One I’d perfected.
Dad stood outside the passenger door, fidgeting and fighting with his demons. It took a lot out of me to come see John, but the kind of torture dad experienced to spiral him into a semi meltdown was the kind entire mental illness books were dedicated to.
I’d never timed it, but I’d guess fifteen minutes was about average. This time, he rolled his shoulders back and smoothed his coat into place after only five. Walking up to me, he looked over. “Let’s go say hi,” he said, adjusting his tie for the fiftieth time.
John’s headstone wasn’t far and, about fifty paces later, we were kneeling beside it. Dad looked close to fainting, but I knew he’d hold it together. He always did.
We never said anything, but I always sensed John heard what I wanted to say. The birds chirped, the sun shone down, I pulled my favorite memories of John to the surface, I tried to file the ones of Jude away for good. Life was slowly becoming one giant mess, and I wasn’t sure if this was because I was somehow cursed or if life just blew by nature. I’d been buying into the whole one person can make a difference thing this whole time only to discover that, in the end, the world sucked.
“Would you like to tell me what’s wrong?” Dad asked quietly, resting his hand on my lap.
I startled, whether more from his touch or the broken silence, I didn’t know. “I’m fine.” How was it so hard to make my voice sound normal?
“Lucy, I’ve never heard you once say you were fine. You’re either wonderful or awful or exhausted or rip-roaring angry or anything else but fine,” he said, gazing off into the horizon. “You’re a passionate person. You take after me in that department,” he said, a smile shadowing his face. “Or at least the person I used to be.” He stopped, taking in a couple of breaths, then shifted to face me. “What’s wrong?”
“How did you know?” I asked, thinking of all people on the planet, my dad would be the last person to detect something was going gangrene below the surface.
“When you stop letting yourself feel your own emotions like I have, there’s more room to feel those of others,” he said. “It’s one of the many down sides to becoming a silent shut-in.”
This was the first conversation of meaning my dad and I had had in five years, and the day and place it was happening on made me feel that John had his hand in it. “It’s about Jude,” I said, playing with the grass edging surrounding John’s gravestone.
“I thought you weren’t seeing each other anymore?” Dad cleared his throat; he was really doing this. Having a concerned parent conversation with his teenage daughter.
“We weren’t, but we kind of stumbled into each other last night.” My dad might be exhibiting a margin of strength, but I feared that telling him about the event leading up to Jude’s and my reunion would send him into another five years of absenteeism. “We worked things out and then, this morning, we found out there was something between us that we could never work out.” I also knew this information might send my dad into a downward spira
l, but he was sitting before me looking so much like the beacon of strength I remembered as a little girl. Like a man that nothing could take down.
He nodded. “And what was that?”
I blew out a breath, the letters etched into John’s gravestone going blurry. “Jude’s last name is Jamieson.” Even as I said it, I still couldn’t quite believe it. I still didn’t want to believe it.
Dad sighed, rolling his shoulders. “I know.”
My head snapped up. “What?”
“I know, baby,” he repeated. “I’ve known from the beginning.”
Okay, dad was having a moment. Another break with reality, but this one led him to lie through his teeth.
“Are you saying you knew from the first night I brought Jude home that his dad was Henry Jamieson?” I spelt it out a little clearer.
“I knew,” he said. “It took me a while, but yes, I figured it out.”
I wasn’t sure how much farther down the rabbit hole I could fall. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Because you were happy and because Jude isn’t his father and because I knew one day, if the two of you stayed together, you’d figure it out.”
“We figured it out.” I sunk my teeth into my lip.
Dad patted my leg. “And you’re wishing you hadn’t?”
I bobbed my head.
“Because you cared about him and wanted to be with him?”
Another nod as I concentrated on keeping myself together. This day was bending my mind so far, I was bracing for it to snap at any time. “You should have told me.”
“Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. Jude shouldn’t be judged by who his father is,” he said, grabbing my hand. “What Henry Jamieson did is unforgivable, but that doesn’t mean Jude is undeserving of happiness. We lost our John, but he lost his father.” His voice wavered, but he caught it. “Everyone lost something that day, and I was glad to see one seed rise up from the ashes.”
That seed had died in the ashes. It was a seed that’d never taken root. “He blames you.”
“And you blame his dad,” he said, his eyes moving between me and John’s headstone.
“That’s because he killed John,” I said. “I have every right to blame him.” Blame was the least of it for murdering my brother.
“It doesn’t matter who’s to blame and who isn’t when it comes to you and Jude, sweetheart. What matters is what the two of you want. Both of you are looking for an easy way out of this because it scares you,” he said, looking into my eyes with actual emotion and a presence I’d thought was long gone. “Caring for someone is scary because you both know how it feels to lose someone in the span of a heartbeat. But you can’t let fear dictate your life or else you’ll end up like me. Don’t live life hiding behind your past, live for right now. When you find someone you want to spend forever with, you don’t let them go, whether forever turns out to be a day or a year or a hundred years.” He rested his other hand over John’s grave. “Don’t let the fear of losing them keep you from loving them.”
There was the Wyatt Larson who could talk to anyone about anything, the man who’d operated the largest commercial construction company in the state before his whole world came to an end, lecturing me about living for the moment and not letting the past make you fear the future. I knew he wasn’t a hypocrite, that’s what he believed; he just was incapable of living like that now.
“I have lost him, dad,” I confessed, wondering if I’d ever had Jude.
Dad looked off into the distance, his expression flattening. “It always amazes me how when we’re sure we’ve lost something for good, it winds up finding us.”
I smiled. It was a sad one, but it still registered. My dad had said the same thing numerous times when I was younger and lost a favorite toy. He’d been right. As soon as I surrendered to the fact Teddy was long gone, he somehow popped up in the most obvious of places.
“Even if we did get back together,” I said, “how could we ever hope to move on from something like that? How can I look past his dad being Henry Jamieson? And how can he look past my family being the reason he lost his dad?” That question didn’t have an answer, and I wasn’t expecting one.
“I’m fool hearted enough to believe love can conquer all,” he admitted, lifting a shoulder.
I laughed a little, but it sounded all off since I was trying not to cry. “You are fool hearted,” I said, looking over at him. His words and voice were right, but his shoulders and head still hunched forward. He was a fraction of the father he’d been. But I’d take a fraction.
“What happened to you, dad?”
He looked up, searching the clouds. Looking for shapes or answers or an escape, I wasn’t sure, but searching for something. “When a child dies, a parent loses a part of themselves,” he said. “Your whole world ceases to exist and you’re nothing but a shell of the person you once were. Your mom has dealt with it in her way, me in mine, and you in yours,” he said, lifting his hand off of John’s gravestone and rising. “Your mom hates the world, I avoid it, and you try to save it.”
“Tried and failed,” I muttered, not about to count the ways.
“I know why you try to save the world, baby,” he said, extending his hand down to me. “Because you’re trying to atone for John. To atone for the guilt you feel for it not being you that day.”
I stared down at the dates of John’s life. A life cut short because I was being a brat and made my older brother deliver dad’s lunch. “I’ve saved nothing.”
“You saved yourself, Lucy,” he said, his forehead lining. “You saved me. That first year, the only thing that kept me getting out of bed in the morning was you.”
I stared at his outstretched hand, not able to accept it. “I didn’t save John.”
“Oh, sweetheart. John wasn’t yours to save,” he said. “I didn’t save him. God didn’t save him. How much longer are you going to let the guilt of the past hinder the present?”
I looked up at him, grayed, wrinkled, and sad. He’d aged thirty years in the span of five. “I could ask you the same.”
“I know,” he said, extending his hand again. “But you’re stronger than me, my Lucy in the sky. You’re stronger than you credit yourself.”
I took his hand, letting him lift me up. “You are too, dad,” I replied, leaning in and kissing his temple. “You are too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The last couple days leading up to graduation were packed with senior breakfasts, cap and gown distribution, cruises around the lake, and yearbook signings. I’d chosen not to participate in any of it. Despite dad’s and my “pep” talk at the cemetery, I couldn’t seem to accept his words as truth. Fathers were meant to encourage and believe their daughters were infallible creatures. I knew dad believed in what he’d said to me, but it was because, as a father, he was incapable of looking at me in an impartial light.
I was his baby girl. His Lucy in the sky. That was all he saw when he looked at me; he couldn’t see what I’d become. But he was right about one thing—I couldn’t save the world. It wouldn’t change what had happened and it wouldn’t bring John back. However, having accepted that, I no longer knew what to do with myself. My life felt kind of empty and upside down, and that was no recipe for celebrating with a bunch of people I’d known less than a year and wouldn’t be in contact with in a week.
I’d been silent in my assigned metal folding chair, waiting to get this thing done with so I could put this year of my life up on a shelf and forget about it. The rest of the three hundred plus graduates were trickling in, everyone hugging and smiling and gushing about how they’d stay friends forever and would never, ever lose touch.
It was all way too much mush and bullshit for me.
A few more minutes passed and the majority of the seats filled in. I bit at my tassel. Fifteen minutes down, two hours left to go of blah, blah, blah, our future is bright, blah, blah, blah, you can be anything you want, blah, blah, blah.
Blah.
One of the last remaining stragglers weaved through the row a few in front of mine. Sawyer was moving a bit awkwardly, like something wasn’t working quite right, or something like his hand had been glued to his dick. I didn’t even try to help the laugh that burst free.
A few heads turned, including his, but as soon as he saw it was me, his head snapped away like I’d just clocked him in the jaw. I’d kissed that dirtbag. I’d done more than just kiss him. That was enough to make a girl swear off men forever. Especially a girl about to head to college where I’d heard the guys who’d been dicks in high school turned into Grade A assholes, and the few good ones were already taken by the time fall rolled around. Outlook in the man department was bleak, so I’d just pretend there was no department with that title. Better off alone and marginally happy than coupled and positively miserable.
Principal Rudolph appeared from behind the burgundy colored curtains and headed for the podium. This was going to be painful. I actually felt bad for my parents, who were both in attendance, smiling and waving at me every time I glanced in their general area.
“Students, parents, faculty,” he began, going for the whole ominous thing that just wasn’t working for him, “this is truly a time to celebrate the past, the present, and the future.”
What was it with these graduation speeches? Was there some law they all had to be the same, old, tired thing?
“I’d like to take this time to—” Principal Rudolph froze in place, his mouth open and his eyes wide. Making his way onto the stage, Jude jogged across the stage, holding out his hand to Rudolph.
He gripped the mike harder, shaking his head, so Jude snatched it right out of Rudolph’s death grip. I hadn’t seen Jude since Sunday morning, and everything about him was different. He looked like a man at peace. A man who’d uncovered all of life’s mysteries. A man who still, despite all the revelations and words, made my heart throb.