Chapter 15
FIFTEEN
Emmett
Sitting outside of my window in my boxers, I pull in a lungful of bitter smoke and hold it for a few seconds before trying – and failing – to blow rings of smoke out of my lips and into the crisp breeze which signals that summer is nearly over.
I pull the pipe to my lips again, flicking my lighter over the bowl, and I ready myself to take another hit.
“God, that stuff stinks,” Rowan gripes as she sticks her head out of the window. “It’s like you ran over a skunk…and then poured gas on it.”
I choke on the smoke and my laughter, pounding a fist against my chest a few times to clear it up. “Sorry. Why are you still up?”
“Sarah,” she answers, pulling herself through the window enough to sit on the edge of it, keeping her legs inside. “Why are you?”
I shrug. “Thinking, I guess. Trying to figure something out.”
“Wanna think out loud?” She asks, angling her body more toward me in an effort to show that she’s interested. “Sometimes that helps.”
“I—” I sigh. “I thought that something was a fluke, but it wasn’t, and now I don’t know where that leaves me.”
She considers for a second, pinching her lips together, before she finally says, “Maybe you don’t have to know. Maybe you just…be. Let whatever happens, happen.”
“I think letting it happen is part of the problem,” I chuckle. “It was never supposed to in the first place, and now I’ve let it happen again. And I was glad that it did.”
“Well there’s your answer, you big dummy,” she says, reaching over to smack my arm. I jump in response and she scrunches her brow at me. “If you weren’t stuck in the dark place, you wouldn’t be second guessing something you were glad about.”
“It changes everything I know about myself,” I tell her.
“So let it.”
As if it’s that easy. Just uproot everything that I ever knew and flip it all on its ass, then go about business as usual. She acts like I’d just be changing my order at the drive thru, not my entire identity.
“Invite the good thing in,” she pushes. I turn away from her to take one last hit from the nearly-spent bowl and blow the smoke away from where she’s sitting. “Even if it scares you.”
“So wise in your youth,” I tease, picking up my supplies. “Come on, I gotta take a shower.”
She hops back into the room with the baby monitor in hand, and I climb in through the window after her, moving to put my stuff back in its not-so-hidden-anymore hiding place.
The monitor crackles to life with the sounds of my sister fussing, and for a second, I consider offering to handle it; but I really don’t want to pick her up with smoke clung to me.
“I have to go get her, but,” Ro lifts herself up on her toes and wraps her arms around my shoulders, locking me into a crushing hug, “promise me you’ll try to invite the good in.”
“Okay,” I concede, and her hand whacks into the back of my head because I didn’t promise her.
I just can’t promise that I’ll do something that I don’t understand. I can’t promise to do something that terrifies me.
·
I wrap a towel around my waist as I step out of the shower, and I grab another towel to scrub away the excess water still in my hair.
‘Invite the good in.’
I scoff at the thought.
There’s nothing good about Nash Montgomery, and that is just one of the many problems here. If any one of us were on fire, he’d be the first in line with marshmallows, ready to roast them.
The only reason that he’s even remotely interested in me – and I use that term very loosely – is because somehow, he keeps getting the upper hand, and the guy likes control.
Having control over the son of someone he’s hated for years is like handing him the keys to the goddamn city and calling him God.
Maybe he sees what everyone else around me sees when they look at me lately: just some broken little boy, eager and ready to please because he’s shit scared of being left behind again.
And maybe they’re all right.
I slip into a clean pair of joggers and quietly move down the hall to the stairs, around the banister and through to the kitchen.
The clock over the stove tells me that it’s past three in the morning; I should just go to bed, but I grab a filter and throw it into the coffee maker before filling it with grounds and firing it up.
As soon as the little red light on the machine goes green, I grab the carafe and pour a generous cup into a mug that says ‘if it requires pants or a bra, it’s not happening today,’ then I head to the dining room table, where I left my laptop earlier in the day.
I flip the screen open and scan over what I’ve already gotten written, making sure that I know where I left off before I start back in on my paper. This is the last thing I have to do to confer my degree and I really don’t want to screw it up.
I spend the next three hours chugging caffeine and typing like my fingers are on fire, cranking out a handful of pages and only stopping when Dad comes into the dining room with his own mug of coffee in one hand and my baby sister in the other.
Sarah looks wide awake and Dad looks like if he blinks, he’ll fall asleep where he stands.
“Hey, Jellybean,” I coo to her as I stand and pluck her from his arms, giving her a big kiss on the cheek and following with a raspberry that makes her giggle.
Dad inclines his head toward my laptop as he sits, asking, “Paper?” I nod. “How many pages?”
“Up to ninety-seven,” I answer. “Almost done.”
“I’m really proud of you, bud,” he tells me as he sips from his mug. “We’re going to embarrass the hell out of you when you walk that stage.”
I laugh as if he’s joking, but a quiet part of my heart warms at the thought, and I really kind of hope that they do just that. I want all of them to be there; Dad, Ro, Uncle Davis, the girls. Everyone.
I want to hear them shout and scream and cheer for me, because if I make it across the stage with my hood, I will have properly accomplished something entirely on my own, all because I wanted more for myself than just being the rich kid who uses his money and his dad’s name to accomplish his goals.
As the rest of the family files into the dining room, Rowan passes out plates and we all dive into breakfast and conversation. For a while, I forget how much I’ve been wanting to go back to my own place; I forget that I even have my own place.
Shit, I should probably check on that.
·
I’m hit with a stench as soon as I open the door, mildew and rot finding their way to my nose, and I grimace as I walk toward the kitchen to open the windows.
My eyes fall on the island counter, where several grocery bags have been sitting untouched, some of them off-kilter as if they’d been tossed rather than set down and all of them filled with now-rotten food that only serves to contribute to the odor.
I hadn’t even realized that Dad had brought more stuff over that day.
I slide my gaze forward, the island lining up to give a perfect view down the hallway, and I sigh, pressing my palms to the counter as a pang of guilt stabs through me.
The bathroom itself is the worst of it. The mats never got any air, so the bottoms of them stayed soaked for god knows how long, and it shows in the mold growing on the bottoms of them. I pick them up and toss them into the trash, but I’m going to have to get professionals in here.
Grabbing a bag, I stuff more clothes inside along with my earbuds, the rest of my pot stash, and anything else I’d rather not leave behind for however long it is that I’ll be away.
My eyes land on the coffee table as I head for the front door, the camcorder sitting abandoned on top of it, and barbed wire squeezes itself around my insides. I pick up the device as if it’s radioactive and I stuff it into the bag as I head out to my car.
When I get back home – well, to Dad’s - I take the bag up to my room and drop it near the bed, reaching in to grab his camcorder, and I trek back downstairs with it.
I find Dad snuggled up on the couch with Rowan, the two of them watching some cheesy movie together that I am almost certain was Ro’s choice. I quietly set the device down on the table in front of them and move to head for my room again.
“Did you watch it?” Dad asks, stopping me with a hand at my wrist.
“Uh,” I stammer, “yeah, part of it.”
“How far did you get?”
“Far enough.”
My dad pulls the camcorder toward himself and flips the screen open to pick up where I left off, listening to himself prattle on about the six-month-old on his lap, and his face falls.
“You stopped here,” he sighs, not finishing his thought, but he doesn’t need to. I know what he’s thinking. You stopped here, and then you wound up in the water. “Emmett, this is why I— you missed the good parts.”
I let out a doubtful huff. There are good parts? From where I was sitting, it seemed more like a testament to how I singlehandedly destroyed their lives and stole their joy, my dad’s especially.
Ro scoots to the side, giving me room to sit between them, and I do while Dad fast-forwards through a chunk of the video as if he’s watched it a hundred times and has the timeline memorized, starting at toddlerhood and working our way through my childhood, watching birthday parties, family get-togethers; any moments Dad just thought needed to be captured for posterity’s sake.
As my twelfth birthday party comes onto the screen, I look at the kid being celebrated: head shaved almost to the scalp and fingernails colored black with a Sharpie I stole from my dad’s office.
Rowan keeps her eyes glued to the screen, and Dad and I exchange a look with each other as realization comes to him, and I confirm it without having to say anything: this is when it started.
If memory serves me right, I fell into the pool the week before that party; then I jumped in the week after that, and the week after that.
There were a few chunks of time I was going in every day, choosing the terror over words: I’m really sad, I’m scared, I’m hurting, I feel so alone.
I want my mom.
That kid knew who he was, but not where he belonged or where he came from.
Never that.
My life continues to move in fast forward on the camcorder, from getting braces, to the embarrassing cracks in my voice as puberty morphed it into the baritone sound that it has today, to the single lacrosse game that I played before deciding that lacrosse just wasn’t my thing.
Through all of those changes - the clothes, the houses, Dad’s one serious girlfriend coming and going – Uncle Davis and my dad were always around. My grandparents, too, at least until they died.
“That’s why I kept this,” Dad says quietly after a too-long silence between us. “Because of all of the good parts. I didn’t want you to watch it because I didn’t want you to see the hard parts.”
“I still don’t know anything about Anna, though. Or why she left me,” I tell him.
“I wish I could give you that answer, bud.” He offers a gentle pat to my leg. “But nothing that she did or didn’t do made you who you are. You did that. Your mom contributed genetics and a middle name, and that’s it.”
“You picked my first name?”
He nods. “We couldn’t agree on a first and middle for you, so we finally decided to pick one each and call it fair.
” Tapping his finger against the camcorder, he tells me, “The day we started filming this, actually. Emmett, I was proud of you through every clip on this tape, and I’m proud of you now. Nothing will ever change that.”
Even if I tell you that the man you hate gave me a hand job in the mens’ room?
Even if I tell you that I liked it?
Would you be proud of me then?
I stuff the thoughts down and give his arm a firm, grateful squeeze. He’s doing the best he can, just like he always has.
I make a promise to him in my head that I won’t scare him like that again. I can give him that, if nothing else.