Brenna, Brat (Detroit ABCs)

Chapter 8

N icola was furious. “Now you’re absolutely on my list!” she told me, and then she turned and looked at the man standing next to me. “If this is your fault, and you put my little sister in danger…” she said threateningly, and I had to intervene.

“Stop it,” I ordered. “The firebombing at the gallery probably didn’t have anything to do with him.”

“The fact that you were just involved in a firebombing? The fact that you’re even saying the word in relation to yourself? What is happening here?” she demanded. It had seemed like a good idea to go to Nicola’s house, since I’d been slightly upset and she was the person I looked to as a mom much more than our actual mom. I was doubting that decision now.

“It could have been random, or directed at the business. I can’t believe that I was the target,” Campbell told her. “If I was, and if I led them to your sister, then I can’t apologize enough.”

“I don’t think that it was about you,” I assured him. “Someone would have had to follow you with an incendiary device in their car, driving around and not knowing where you were going to stop. That’s a very poor plan for murder, and isn’t it more likely that a disgruntled employee or investor would firebomb your dad, instead? If anyone is to blame—”

“Brenna!” Nic admonished, and I closed my mouth. “It would have been easy for someone to follow you since your car is so distinct,” she pointed out to Campbell. The police had recovered it and it was drivable, as he’d said. But there was some interesting graffiti on it now, a lot of tags in bright colors. The bumpers were gone and one of the rear doors was also missing.

“I’m dropping it off at the dealership this afternoon to get fixed,” he told her, and I wondered how much those repairs were going to cost and if he’d have to pay out of pocket. Having just gone through the process of successfully arguing with the insurance company about the damaged floors due to the melted gum, I thought I could do it again for him. Funny that I’d spent so much time dealing with the floors when now, they were all burnt to ashes…

“Holy Mary,” I said, as the weight of the events suddenly bore down on me. “The gallery is gone.”

My sister took my hand. “As long as you’re all right, that doesn’t matter. You didn’t like that job, anyway.”

“But now what am I going to do?” I asked her.

“We’ll find something else until your label takes off,” she said. “Pretty soon, we’ll all be wearing Brenna Curran designs and you’ll make money that way.”

Nic was way too practical to believe that, but I appreciated her lies. “That’s bull,” I said, but I used a kindly tone.

“Don’t be a brat,” she said automatically. “I know they’re looking for a registrar at the hospital. You could do that for a while.”

“I’m not a brat. Maybe I could do that,” I said. I sniffed the collar of my shirt, which reeked of smoke. Probably my hair did, too, and the rest of me. It was just overwhelming—not the stench, but everything. “I can’t believe this happened,” I muttered. It had been so sudden, the burst of light and the utter confusion, and then time had seemed to stop as we’d waited for the fire trucks to arrive. People poured out from the other businesses on the street, since no one knew what would go up next. The flames and smoke had been terrifying, and one of the police officers had asked about chemicals stored in the building because it seemed like there had been accelerants.

“If anyone had ever bothered to clear out the basement, there wouldn’t have been so much flammable material to burn,” I mentioned. “And if Alecta hadn’t wanted to hire one of her friends to refinish the floors, the fire could have been contained. The bomb went right into the pile of stain and stripping supplies that the guy had left in the corner and then hadn’t touched for weeks—”

“A bomb,” Nicola’s husband Jude interrupted. “Someone threw a bomb into your workplace, and this is crazy. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he told Campbell. “If you’re attracting danger like that, I can’t have you in my house with my wife and daughter.”

I jumped to my feet. “I’ll remember this,” I told him. “I’ll remember that when someone needed help, you gave him the boot instead of offering a hand! You just showed your true—”

“I understand,” Campbell said. He stood and offered his hand instead, and he and Jude shook. “I wasn’t thinking very clearly when I followed Brenna over here.” He looked over at me. “I was worried.”

“Yes, it was my idea to come,” I continued furiously, “because I had thought that we could depend on my family, but now I see—”

“You should stay, I’ll go,” he told me, and I said no way.

“I’m leaving with you,” I answered. “I don’t want to spend one more second here with this Judas.”

“Brenna!” Nicola snapped, but I wasn’t interested. She had made her choice, and so had I. I swiveled and left, and I hoped that she was happy that she’d married a person like that.

“You didn’t have to leave your sister and you didn’t have to fight with her about me,” Campbell told me when we were outside. He was looking up and down the street as he spoke, like he was checking for danger.

“I’m not going to sit there and listen to someone badmouth you,” I answered. “We’ll go to my apartment instead.”

“No way. Your brother in law was one hundred percent correct. I can’t put you in danger.”

“I’m sure that whole fire incident wasn’t even about you!” I insisted. “Dion has been getting threats for weeks, really awful, anonymous texts. And someone has been calling the gallery and saying weird stuff into the phone when I answer, which means the person knows where he works. It’s either a woman he screwed, literally, or her boyfriend, brother, husband, or other representative wanting vengeance. There’s even a history of arson there! Once, one of the artists set a garbage can on fire.”

He seemed intrigued.

“But I know that she’s in Caracas, so it couldn’t be her. It might be one of Alecta’s clients, though,” I continued.

“A disgruntled patron of the arts?”

“A disgruntled patron of her drugs,” I corrected. “Maybe I didn’t mention to you that she’s a dealer, but she could have shorted a customer or it could have been that the quality of her product was bad.”

“No, you didn’t mention that your boss is a drug dealer!” he said, and for some reason, he sounded highly annoyed. Like it had been ok for Jude to throw him onto the street, but Alecta’s secondary business was an issue?

“She hardly ever did it in the gallery,” I stated, and that was true because she had hardly ever been in the gallery at all—and when I thought about the old building, I felt a wave of nostalgia and loss. “I can’t believe it’s gone,” I sighed. “Alecta’s mom Chic owns the property but she’s never seemed very interested in it, and I don’t think she’ll try to rebuild. I don’t think that Alecta will start up somewhere else, either. She didn’t care about it, not really, and she sure doesn’t care about me or even about Dion. He’s her nephew.”

“Yeah, when she took off running down the street instead of sticking around to see if we had escaped and survived, I got the feeling that employee safety wasn’t a big concern,” he answered. “It’s a concern for me, Brenna.”

I knew that, because he’d immediately called everyone in his family to warn them and he’d called his lawyer, too. They were going to try to keep his name out of the investigation but it was almost a sure thing that someone would mention that the son of the recently disgraced multi-millionaire might have been the target of a firebomber.

“I’m sorry you were pulled into it,” I said.

“Me? I mean you!” he answered. “You could have died today. Shit.” He covered his eyes for a moment and then looked at the atrocity parked in the street, the vehicle which had once been a finely tuned example of German engineering. “I have to go drop off that car.”

“Good, we’ll do that,” I said briskly. You always felt better when you could successfully complete a task. “I’ll follow you to the dealership.”

“No, you’ll go home,” he ordered, but it turned out that neither he, Nicola, or Jude was the boss of me. I, Brenna, was the only boss and I decided that I was going to follow him, so there. He had to go slowly due to his missing door so it was easy to keep up.

He had watched me coming behind him and when we arrived, he shook his head before he went inside the service center. I stayed in my car with his borrowed sunglasses over my eyes, sniffing my hair at times and reviewing what had happened. Was it really possible that just a few hours before, I had been close to death in an inferno? It played through my mind slowly, how the door had opened and I’d seen something fly into the gallery, something on fire. I had heard Dion scream and I remembered jerking my body into motion to get us to safety. I’d grabbed Campbell and my purse, then drove into Dion with my shoulder like a football player to make him move. I could almost feel the metal key in the back door bite into my palm again, as I’d turned it to let us into the alley. After the previous garbage fire back there, when I’d struggled to get outside to extinguish it, I had taken to putting the key in the lock as one of my opening procedures. It was an item on the checklist that I’d hung in the employee breakroom/Alecta’s office, which was now gone.

The scene started over from the beginning, just like it was one of the prehistoric murder videos that we’d exhibited. I saw the front door fly open, an object hurtled in, and suddenly there had been flames…I’d described it all to the police, too, and to the fire investigators who had come to the scene. I’d happily provided them with Alecta’s home address, the place where she was probably sitting in the dark since she’d run off and left us at the burning gallery. The front door had opened, the fire had started…I sat in the car and lived it again and again.

At least I wasn’t startled when Campbell arrived at my parking spot; I had watched him walk out of the dealership and make his way over, frowning and shaking his head.

“I thought I told you to go home,” he said as he opened the passenger door.

“I didn’t want to. How long before your car is fixed?”

“Too long,” he said. “What are you still doing here?”

“I’m waiting for you, obviously! I thought you might be upset since you were just almost killed right after your car was stolen, you lost your job, came to distrust your sister, and found out that your father is a fraud!”

He stared at me. “Carrington didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“Ok, fine. Get in.” My voice was extremely loud and caught a little.

He kept staring at me. “Thank you for waiting,” he said. I nodded at him, and he did get in. We exited the dealership and I had no idea where I was or where I was going, so Campbell took over with directions and I drove kind of blindly, rubbing my eyes a lot. The smoke must have really bothered them, I guessed. The stench of it had filled my car, emanating from my hair, clothes, and skin. It was in every part of me.

“Brenna?”

I looked over. “Was I supposed to turn there? I didn’t hear you say it.”

“No, we’re going the right way. Do you want to come in for a minute? Will it bother you if the news truck is still parked in the street outside?”

“I don’t care,” I said. I put on the big sunglasses, but then realized that they didn’t belong to me. “Oh, I should give these back to you.”

“No, you can keep them. Let’s go into my house and take a breath,” he said, and I nodded.

It turned out that the news people weren’t there after all, so they must not have been clued in on the latest disaster in his life. I was able to pull into his garage, where there was space since his car was in the shop. But when we went into his living room, I didn’t want to sit down when he offered me the couch or any of the chairs.

“I smell like smoke,” I explained.

“Yeah, you keep sniffing your clothes and your hair.”

I moved my sleeve away from my face, because I had been doing that again. “I should go home and take a shower.”

“You could do that here. I probably have some clothes you could wear,” he suggested.

“I’m not going to put on what some other woman left by mistake after your night together,” I said immediately, and his eyes widened.

“I meant stuff that my sister has forgotten over the years,” he said. “I’ll go look.”

He had leggings and he gave me a shirt and socks which definitely belonged to him; I figured I could go without underwear. I had the same body type as my sister Juliet, pretty slim, except she had a great set of breasts and that feature was something I absolutely did not enjoy. So no, a bra wasn’t necessary unless I was going to run, and I was only doing that if he turned into a saber-toothed cat.

“Thank you,” I told him, and I followed him to his guest room, which was both larger and lighter than my apartment. I enjoyed the shower a lot, because the water was consistently warm, the products were great, and there was a working fan to remove the steam…of course, the clear, mistless mirror gave me an excellent view of my bare, pallid face. At least my eyelashes and eyebrows were dark and not red like my dad’s, for which I could thank my mother. I was indebted to him for my blue eyes, though. They weren’t turquoise like Juliet’s and Patrick’s but they weren’t bad, I guessed. I could also thank Mom for my nose, which was straight, and my lips, which were full. She was beautiful, pretty much perfect, but it didn’t all come together the same way on my face. As someone who was able to notice flaws more clearly than others seemed to see them, my own were very apparent to me.

That was why I didn’t ever bother to look into any mirror for too long. Especially not now, since I didn’t have any makeup to bring color to my abnormally white skin—like, even for me, I was really pale. My eyes looked crazy, too, round and wide and with oversized pupils.

“It’s due to shock,” Nicola answered briskly when I sent a picture of that issue to her. “I can’t believe how you stormed out of here.”

“I can’t believe that you married such a spineless slug,” I retorted.

“Slugs never have spines, despite what your insult seems to imply. And Jude isn’t spinless or a slug anyway,” she told me. “Brat!”

I gave up on my sister and on improving my appearance and I went downstairs, finger-combing my hair as I descended. Something smelled very good, and it turned out to be a pizza that Campbell had delivered.

“It’s dinnertime,” he noted as I walked in. “We can show off our cooking skills another night.”

“Ok,” I said. I noticed that he must have showered, too, because his hair was wet, darker with the water and slicked back. It was hard to believe that he could have been any more handsome but this new look was very nice. “Thank you. I do feel better now.” I sniffed, though, because I was pretty sure that I still smelled—

“Let me try that,” he said, and picked up a lock of my hair and inhaled through his nose. “No smoke. It smells like mint.”

“That’s your expensive conditioner,” I explained.

He was still holding my hair, kind of wrapping it around his index finger. “I thought it was straight,” he commented. “Your sister Grace has those spirals and your sister Juliet has none of that.”

Of course he had noticed. “And Nicola is right in the middle of them, perfect waves like she’s a hair model, and I have this,” I said, indicating the half-waves and almost-curls that were on my own head. “I always blow it out.” I didn’t have to battle it into submission like my sister Addie did with hers, but my hair and I were not really friends.

“When we went skating, you got little curls at the nape of your neck,” he said, and I looked at him, wondering how he’d seen that. After all, he’d been facing me in order to pull my weak, untalented butt around the ice.

“They were right here,” he continued, and used his other fingers to gently brush the skin behind my ear. I was suddenly aware that we were standing very close, and I took a sharp breath.

Carefully, he unwound my hair and smiled at me. “Good, I made you blush. You were so bloodless that you scared me a little. Ready to eat?”

I took another breath, more slowly and much more controlled. That had been a joke he was playing, just a game like when we’d first met and I’d tried to guess his name. I was Bloodless Brenna, ha ha.

Over the slices of pizza, Campbell kept the conversation to things besides the obvious: the attempt on our lives, our loss of employment, the possibility that his father would be imprisoned, my parents’ impending divorce, and other sad topics. Instead, he asked me a lot of questions about sewing, and it became clear that he’d been doing some research. He wondered about different kinds of fabrics, for one thing, and he also had some very specific concerns about types of stitches. I was prepared to talk about all of that for hours, but after a while I did understand what he was up to.

“I’m fine,” I told him. “You don’t have to pretend to be interested in how to serge knits.”

“I am interested,” he said. “And I’m very glad to think about something besides everything else.” He took another bite, chewed, and then leaned back and pointed at my plate. “Here’s a new topic. Your pizza consumption also interests me.”

“What?”

“For someone who has a lot of opinions, you ate everything,” he explained. “You didn’t remove any of the toppings I ordered. I don’t see that too often.”

“You mean, the women you have over here for dinner generally pick at their food like children?”

He smiled. “I guess that’s what I mean.”

“Do you remember how many siblings I have?” I asked him. “If I spent time removing every last piece of every last olive, somebody else would have finished my share before I got to it. I like what I like, but I’m not dumb.”

“I never had to worry about getting enough for myself,” he said, shaking his head.

I bristled. “It’s not like we were starving!” Nicola had always made sure that there was enough. “I’m sure that your sister never went after anything on your plate.”

And then he looked very serious. “Did Sophie tell you about that? I don’t appreciate hearing it batted around like it’s a joke.”

“What?”

“I’m talking about Carrington’s eating disorder,” he answered. “She’s doing better now, but it will always be an issue for her.”

“Oh, I—”

“With how she grew up, it’s not surprising that she has shit to deal with,” Campbell said, frowning at me. “You should have heard how our mother used to talk to her about being thin and pretty. She was on my sister’s ass about that like our dad was on mine about hockey and grades.”

“Ok, I didn’t—”

“Carrington is doing the best that she can but it’s always going to be hard for her. She can’t avoid triggers, like someone who had a problem with drugs could say, ‘I won’t be around that guy anymore, because we used to shoot up together.’ Everyone has to eat and food is everywhere, there are references to it wherever you look. It’s necessary and inescapable.”

“I didn’t know she had a problem with that,” I said. “Honestly, I didn’t, and if Sophie knew then she didn’t tell any of us. I was just making a comment that…” I thought about what I’d been saying. “I guess I felt like you were implying that my family was neglectful and also that I was some kind of pig who ate too much.”

Now he looked shocked. “Neither of those things.”

“Because, you know, my parents were crap at taking care of us and it makes me really angry when I think about it. Nicola had to raise us like she was our mom.”

“I didn’t know that, either.”

“I may have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder about it. I was always pretty jealous of families that functioned better than ours. And maybe…maybe I also have a little chip about how I look. With me coming right behind Juliet in the birth order,” I clarified further.

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying that I wasn’t trying to bring up anything hurtful about your sister. I mostly hate my siblings but I won’t let anyone badmouth them, either.”

He shook his head. “You don’t hate them.”

“I do,” I answered, then added, “often.” I removed one of the olives on my piece of pizza. “Sometimes.”

“How many texts have they sent to you today, after Nicola told them all what happened?”

“A lot,” I sighed, and checked my hair. It definitely smelled minty, but I really thought there was still an undercurrent of smoke. “Dion has been texting, too. He’s really scared because he’s sure the bomb was meant to kill him. And I think that’s true,” I added. “I think you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that one of his former partners wanted to burn him alive. That’s an extreme reaction to a breakup, but my sister Addie keeps telling me that we’re all entitled to our feelings.”

“She probably doesn’t mean that people are entitled to work through their feelings with arson. Yeah, maybe it was all about your coworker. I haven’t gotten any death threats,” he told me. “Not yet.”

“Why would anyone blame you when it’s so clearly not your fault? None of it is!” I insisted. “They should be blaming your father, but they also need to wait and see if the courts can claw back their money like they have with other white-collar frauds. Lately I’ve been reading about famous swindlers and how the government went after their assets.”

“Frauds and swindlers.” He closed his eyes. “That’s hard to hear.”

“I didn’t mean…” Maybe I needed to stop talking? “I’m only trying to say that I think you’re safe and I hope that your father is, too. And again, I didn’t mean to bring up your sister’s problems, because they’re none of my business.” I didn’t care about them, except that they seemed to upset Campbell a lot. I also realized that I didn’t want that woman to suffer, even if she wasn’t anything to me and even if Sophie hated her.

“Yeah, I understand.” Now he looked at me. “Long day. You know what we should do?”

“Run away to France?”

“Watch some hockey,” he corrected. “That will put us both in a better mood.”

“Will it?” I asked doubtfully, and he nodded with a lot of confidence.

“It always works for me.”

I wasn’t as convinced but I did follow him into the next room, where he had a giant television. Usually, I was opposed to gaping, electronic black holes on the walls, but I didn’t mind it here. I didn’t mind anything here. The rug was a lovely antique Heriz and he, or someone he’d hired, had chosen the couch thoughtfully. The upholstery job was more than adequate and the fabric choice—

“Here you go,” he said, and patted the heavy-weight linen. I placed myself upon it. “How much do you know about the game?”

“I know nothing,” I said, as an arena popped up on the screen. It was almost as large as an arena in real life.

“Then we’ll start with the basics,” Campbell told me. “First, hockey is a competition between two teams that’s played on ice. That means they all wear skates, which I know you’re familiar with. We should go to the rink again.”

“Sure.” He’d said the same thing about cooking together, about meeting for drinks—

“I’m not doing anything tomorrow. You?”

“Uh, since my place of employment burned down, I’m free.”

“Good. We’ll go skating,” he said. “You’ll need to wear some cheap shoes and we’ll get a locker for them.”

He kept telling me about hockey, getting more technical as the game went on, and I listened and tried to be interested as the players flew around the ice and knocked each other down. Gradually, we both got quieter, and then I saw that he had fallen asleep. Well, it had been a very, very stressful day. It had been a very, very stressful set of days for him, and there were more coming in his future. I wondered if he’d be able to keep this humungous TV or any of the other accessories of his privileged life. How would he do without them? He’d never had to go without, I thought, but it wasn’t like you had to struggle to prove yourself as a good person. He was a great person, someone who had noticed that earlier tonight, I had been losing it and had needed to be somewhere calm and beautifully appointed. I was really—

“No, a burrito,” Campbell announced.

“What?”

But he was asleep, and talking like when he’d slept over at my apartment. He muttered several other things that I couldn’t totally understand and then I clearly heard him say, “No olives. Hold the olives.” He seemed to be upset.

“Campbell,” I murmured. “It’s ok about the olives.”

“No,” he answered—maybe he was answering, or maybe he was still talking about a burrito in his dream. He moved restlessly on the couch. “No!”

I touched his shoulder, resting my hand there to calm him. “It’s ok,” I repeated, but he made a noise like something hurt. “Shh,” I murmured, and gently stroked his cheek.

“Brenna,” he said distinctly, and before I knew what was happening, he’d slid down, breathing out a heavy sigh as he rested his head on my lap. He pulled up his legs and stretched across the couch and then he sighed again, but calmly and more like…more like he was content.

“Shh,” I told him again, and rested my arm on his body. Holy Mary, he was strong beneath his shirt. Of course I knew that, because he had lifted the Ego sculpture without any issues and had also lifted me off the ice at the rink several times. But the tactile experience of his muscle beneath my hand was a different story. It was a thrilling story that seemed to make me breathe faster.

No, I was comforting him, not feeling him up. I patted his shoulder and arm, and then I let myself brush his hair out of his face. Like mine, it had a little wave to it and like he had done, I wrapped one lock around my index finger.

“It’s good.”

I froze and quickly let go. He had definitely slurred words of enjoyment, but it appeared that he was still asleep—smiling, but asleep. Well, I was glad that he was having more pleasant dreams now. I resumed gently touching him, which was simply in the way that I would have cared for a pet or a child. Although, when I considered it, I had never really taken care of Grace. She had been Nicola’s problem to handle.

And now that I was thinking of my sisters, and since I didn’t care about the hockey game, I carefully shifted around until I could reach my other hand into the waistband of Carrington’s leggings to retrieve my phone. Holy Mary, the messages had really piled up. Thankfully, no one had told my mom, and it seemed as if Nic had downplayed the firebombing—i.e., she hadn’t said that it was a “bombing,” just that the gallery was gone and I was out of work. Even with that sketchy information, the rest of my siblings had gotten worried, even Patrick and Grace.

“I’m fine,” I wrote back in our group text. “I’m with a friend and watching hockey, relaxing.”

“No way. Where are you really?” Juliet immediately demanded to know and I got so infuriated that I almost jumped to my feet. Except, there was a comfortable, warm, gorgeous man currently in my lap, so I stayed where I was.

“I’m watching hockey just like I said!” I told her. “Why are you calling me a liar?”

“She’s surprised because you’ve never been much of a sports fan,” Addie conciliated. “We’re all glad you’re ok, Brenna.”

Juliet said yes, that was right, and she was really glad. I frowned as I looked at the phone, and then a separate text outside of our chat came in from that same sister.

“I need your help.”

Well, now her concern for me made more sense. I sat and looked at her words for a moment. She needed my help, me, stupid little Brenna? The skinny, flat-chested girl that she’d claimed (for years) not to know?

Hm.

I thought of her fiancé, Beckett, and how he had looked the last time I’d seen him. I considered how she’d written, “Thanks, Bren,” because I’d asked how he was, and I thought of him helping Campbell, the guy currently unconscious on my lap, when he had needed a lawyer.

“With what?” I typed, and Juliet told me what she wanted from me. I thought about it for a while, and I figured that it just might work. I could do this for her.

Then I looked down at the man still asleep, still happily cuddling with me. Maybe this moment was all the start of something amazing. Maybe the fire today was some kind of cleansing thing, like when my mom had walked through her house with a smoldering, smelly stick as she chanted in a language that I was sure she didn’t really speak.

“Mmm,” Campbell rumbled. “Olives.”

“You’re fine,” I told him. And so was I.