Chapter Ten
Ten
“Please don’t be dead,” I mutter.
The pseudonym Mr. X implies some sort of villainous lair.
A Transylvanian castle set against the backdrop of a haunted gothic town, or some tech lab on a submarine at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
But he is, in fact, all human. He wears T-shirts and khakis, and he gets his hair cut twice a month, parted neatly on one side in the same way he’s worn it since he was sixteen years old.
He has a boyish face but serious eyes, the look of a man who has seen things that haunt him.
And he lives in a small gray house that he bought with inheritance money, market value of three hundred thousand dollars, precisely enough to purchase and fill with appliances without having to go into any debt.
I know these things about him, but I’m the only one who does. He isn’t a trusting person, as evidenced by the five security cameras that are aimed at my car when I pull up to his home.
I drive down the long, paved driveway, then onto the grass, where there’s already a dirt path made up of old tire treads, and I park behind the shed where my car won’t be visible from the street.
It’s been years since I’ve visited—years since I’ve been invited—but I remember that he keeps this little parking spot to maintain privacy from the neighbors.
I don’t bother trying the front door. Not only will it be locked, but he keeps a steel bookshelf in front of it.
The windows will also be covered by the blackout blinds.
Instead, I try the Bilco door that leads down into the basement.
Success! It isn’t locked. This on its own is concerning, but for now I’m just grateful I don’t have to break a window.
The basement is frigid, filled with boxes and damp.
I make sure to close the door behind me, but I don’t lock it.
Something nettles me, beyond the evidence that things aren’t as they should be.
Mr. X is as reliable as they come. At all hours, he answers his messages within seconds.
It makes me wonder if he ever sleeps, and worry that the nightmares keep him up too often.
As I approach the staircase that leads to the kitchen, I can smell that something is starting to burn. By the time I turn the doorknob, I get a whiff of something vaguely sweet, like a batch of cookies—one of the only things he ever eats, though you wouldn’t know it based on his slender frame.
Even before I’ve opened the door all the way, I see his arm, sprawled precariously against the pristine white tiles.
Thin smoke is starting to billow out from the oven door, but the smoke detectors will be disabled—he would rather burn to death than allow rescue crews into his home.
Which is why he’s going to hate what I’m about to do.
My phone is already in my hand as I rush to his side.
The first thing I do is make sure he’s breathing.
Miraculously, he’s alive. Cold and pale, but alive.
He doesn’t respond when I shake him, and I’m startled by how terrible he looks when I roll him onto his back to check him for injuries.
But there’s nothing, not even a scratch.
The 911 operator is asking me what happened. An overdose? Accidental poisoning? Suicide attempt? Assault by some mystery assailant who’s still lurking somewhere in the house? But I don’t know. I’m cursing at him under my breath between the useless answers I utter into the phone.
“You can’t die,” I vaguely remember shouting at him as I turn off the oven. I shove the bookshelf away from the front door to make room for the ambulance crew. The sirens are already wailing in the distance. “Do you hear me?” I tell him. “You better not leave me. You can’t leave me all alone.”
—
Now I sit in the cold plastic chair in the waiting room at the hospital. Nobody has come to speak to me and it’s been hours since they brought him in.
After they loaded him into the ambulance and carried him away, I stayed behind to replace the bookshelf and try to put things back the way he likes them. I don’t want him to come home to the wheel marks on the carpet or the lamp that got knocked over by the paramedic trying to maintain his vitals.
I hold it together long enough to get in my car and follow him to the hospital.
He’ll be livid when he wakes up. He’ll tell me that if he ever goes dark, I should just leave him be.
I should let him die before letting anyone into his space.
What if they find out what I do? he’ll demand.
What if they find my files and realize the cases we’re behind?
He’ll tell me that it isn’t just about him—he’s protecting me, too.
Me and Collette and even Waylen, although Collette has no idea the shit I’ve exposed her to indirectly.
When the doctor steps into the room, I stand. My hands are shaking—how long have they been shaking?—and I jam them into my pockets.
It’s dark outside, the downtown lights twinkling like busy stars. But the thick glass muffles all the sound, and for now, the world is silent, as though it’s on pause.
“You’re family?” the doctor asks me.
I nod. Mr. X is going to kill me for this. I am breaking the cardinal rule between us, saying out loud the greatest secret he has, the one that I’ve never even told Waylen.
“I’m his sister.”
Maybe this is the only true thing I’ve said all day.
My phone is buzzing in my purse, and I know Waylen will be worried first and furious second. I can’t tell him the truth. “You’re lying.” Collette’s voice in my head. “You lie all the time.”
“He’s stable now,” the doctor is telling me, and I struggle to pay attention. “His white blood cell count dipped below normal, so we’re checking his CBC and looking for anemia.”
“I don’t understand.” I turn my phone off without checking it. Elodie will also be fishing for gossip about my life, no doubt intrigued by what I’ve been up to all day that I’m not sharing. “So, he just passed out?”
The doctor sits on one of the chairs and nods for me to do the same.
Oh God, nothing good ever gets said by a doctor who wants you to sit down in a hospital waiting room.
I shouldn’t. I should run away, go back to my family, go back to my pretend suburban life, disentangled from whatever I’m about to hear. That’s what he would want.
But he’s my brother. I’m all he has. So, I stay. And I sit.
“Jeremy”—the doctor says the name so easily, though I haven’t associated it with him since I was a child—“has stage three pancreatic cancer. It’s metastasized to his kidneys. He was made aware of this several months ago but has been declining treatment.”
The doctor is still going, saying more words even though I want to scream at him to stop. I stare just past him and the muted world on the other side of the window. Only, it’s not entirely muted. There’s a shrill whining in my ears. A screaming that won’t stop. That will never stop.
“I want to see him,” I blurt, interrupting something that was probably very important. “Where is he?”
“He isn’t taking visitors—”
“I don’t care,” I say. “I’m here. He’s here. Which button do I have to push in the elevator to make us be in the same place?”
The doctor sighs. Maybe he pities me. Maybe he sees fucked-up family dynamics every day when he comes to this room to update people about their loved ones. But he can’t possibly know about us.
In any case, the doctor doesn’t relent. He tells me that if Jeremy has a phone on him, I can call, but that he was told I was here and refused to see me. Refused. He’s too proud to let me see him in a vulnerable state. Ever since we were kids, he’s needed to take up the role as my protector.
I wait until the doctor is gone and then I start up my phone, ignoring the red icon alerting me to several missed calls and voicemails from Waylen. I pull up my text exchange with Mr. X, a one-sided conversation of me asking him to call me and if he’s all right. Now I compose a new one:
Let me in to see you or I will go back to the house and take a lighter to everything.
He’ll know what I mean. All his research, the records he keeps of the work we’ve done, the prospective new “clients.”
Five minutes later, he texts back with his room number.
He’s wide awake when I go to him, his bed propped all the way up.
“You look exactly the same,” he tells me, at the same time I say, “You look like hell.”
For a few seconds we just stare at each other.
The last time I saw him in person we were also in a hospital.
Collette had just been born, and Waylen, who had been at my side the whole time, finally went home to shower and bring me clean clothes.
Mr. X—my brother—stayed only long enough to hold her, and to say, “It’s better if she doesn’t know.
” I knew what he was really saying—that he wanted to protect her from our past. The ugly truth about what happened to our parents.
What we did. It was better for her to think that everything burned in the fire that night, and that I was the only survivor.
My brother wants to protect me so I can have a clean future that isn’t marked by my past. So I can be “normal” and not “the one that awful thing happened to.”
“So, when were you going to tell me?” I fall into a chair by the bed. “That you’re dying?”
“I’m not dying,” he says flatly.
“If you thought that, you would have told me sooner,” I reply.
He looks at one of the IV bags dripping medicine into his veins, slow and ominously like the final drops of rain on an old roof about to cave in.
“I’m handling my affairs, Margaux,” he tells me soberly.
“This is the last case I’m working. And then, when it was all over, I was going to make sure you received an envelope with all my passwords.
The title to my house. Everything. I’m leaving it all to you, and if you want to carry on, you’ll have what you need.
But if you want to be done with it, it’s yours to demolish if you want to. ”
This is so unlike him that at first, I don’t know how to respond. “Demolish? You’ve made such a thing out of keeping our little business afloat. Aren’t you the one who told me I’d be wasting my potential to give it all up and be a soccer mom?”
“I wanted to believe that because it made me feel better about doing all this,” he admits. “But I wonder sometimes—if things hadn’t happened the way they did when we were kids—if we would be out there living normal lives. Time cards, day care, morning commutes, playdates—”
“It doesn’t matter.” I cut him off. “It happened, and this is who we are.”
But even as I say it, a part of me is terrified at the thought of losing him.
I don’t know who I am without my brother.
I don’t know what I’d do if he wasn’t always around to tell me where to go, what to say, to assure me that I’m always safe.
I try to imagine being alone with Waylen and Collette, and it feels like I’m drowning in a black hole in deep space with nothing to cling to no matter how I flail.
“We’re going to get you into treatment,” I say.
“Margaux—”
“Stop it. I’ve listened to you for years, now you listen to me. I’m going to go out there and talk to the doctor. We’re going to get you chemo or—or whatever it is you need. If it can’t be cured, we can nuke enough of it to keep you going for as long as possible.”
I don’t let him argue. I’m on my feet and headed for the door before he can open his mouth.
—
It’s after midnight when I check my phone, already knowing Waylen will be steaming out his ears.
“I’m on my way home now,” I tell him. “I’ll explain everything.
” I’m already coming up with a plausible story, something that doesn’t give away the truth.
As Mr. X enters his treatments, he’ll need me to do more for him.
I’ll have to follow up with doctors, make sure he’s actually going to his appointments.
Whatever I come up with will have to be believable.
But Waylen doesn’t ask where I’ve been. He’s too angry for that. “If you’re going to explain anything, explain why you left Collette at her dance class.”
Oh shit. Collette. As though I’m looking at scenes from someone else’s life, I remember dropping her at her aunt’s. Bertram chasing me. Calling Elodie and telling her I’ll pick Collette up after her class.
Waylen doesn’t let me sit in my guilt. “She thought you must have gotten into an accident. I thought that you were dead on the side of the road. Collette called me in hysterics. Her panic attack was so bad I almost drove her to the ER.”
“I’m sorry,” I blurt. “I’ll be there soon. I’m coming right home.”
“Coming from where?” he demands. “She said you dropped her off at my sister’s and that Elodie Blevins picked her up? Why wasn’t she in school today? Why was your phone off?”
I hang up. I have to, because tears are starting to fill my eyes and that’s not acceptable. I can’t cry. Not when Collette needs me, and there are alibis to come up with, and murderers to blackmail, and brothers to keep alive. I can’t have emotion. I can’t be weak. There’s simply too much to do.