Chapter 35
THIRTY-FIVE
Nash
The manor is all but silent as I step back through the front door and remove my overcoat, handing it to Orla. She drapes the coat over her arm with a bow of her head and follows close behind me as I step toward the imperial staircase which leads to the second level of the house.
My head whips behind me at the sound of a sniffle coming from her nose. “Don’t you dare cry,” I order her.
“I’m— of course, Mr. Montgomery. I apologize.”
“Go do something else,” I tell her. “Don’t follow me.”
I head straight for my grandfather’s office; a space which I was only allowed to visit with him present, never alone. I was never to touch anything, never to read his private papers. I wasn’t old enough, prepared enough, trustworthy enough.
Dropping into the chair behind his deep rosewood desk, I run my hands over the smooth leather, bringing them to my face as a quiet sob escapes me.
I’m all alone now. My grandparents are interred together in their shared mausoleum, some poetic display of their love for each other, and I’m left here with no one. I have no family, I have no friends, I have no one that I can call on.
“You stupid old man,” I say under my breath. Someone knocks on the office door and I sniff, scrubbing a hand against my eyes to dry them. “What?”
Orla carefully steps into the room, her ginger hair slicked back into the same bun that I’ve seen it in every day since the moment I moved into this house. Her uniform remains as unchanged as her hair, which has been dyed to hide the greying pieces that beg to show through.
I’ll miss her when I leave here, I think, but I can’t stay. Not without them here.
The people who held me together when my world came crashing down around me are gone. Every dinner will be alone. Every breakfast. Every birthday and every gala. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do about that. Orla may be able to fix many things, but she cannot fix this.
“Flowers were delivered for you, Mr. Montgomery. From a Colt Fowler?” She looks at the card in her hand. “He writes that he’s very sorry for the loss of your grandfather.”
I reach inside of myself in search of one of the many masks that Henry had helped me to carve out over the past nine years.
Only one seems to fit me anymore, and it’s the only one that I carved out all on my own, during my first week in prison.
It’s the mask that’s kept me safest, and it’s molded itself to my shape. We belong together, this mask and me.
I pull it over my face in a cold display, shutting off any emotion and keeping my housekeeper from seeing the pain that I tuck deep down beneath it.
“Get rid of them.”
“Mr. Montgomery—”
“People die all of the time, Orla,” I tell her as I stand from my seat. “It isn’t a big deal.”
·
Present Day
I can’t sleep.
‘I just wanted to hear your voice, I guess.’
I reach to my nightstand for my cell phone, pulling up Emmett’s voicemail to play it one more time.
I listen to the unease in his voice, to the hesitation behind every word that he speaks, and dread settles into my gut like a two-ton weight.
He’s left me plenty of messages since that night in my living room, and he’s gone through plenty of emotion throughout the course of them; anger, pettiness, hurt and defeat.
This one is different; this one makes my skin crawl.
Without meaning to, I tap his contact page and call him, sitting up to leave my bed. The line trills and trills and trills for painfully long moments while I move to my closet to slip on some clothes.
“Hey, you’ve got Emmett Fowler. I’m not able to take your call, but leave your number and I’ll get back to you.” As soon as he stops speaking, he laughs and starts to say something – presumably to someone else in the room with him – just before the message cuts off. It’s a beautiful laugh.
The last time that I heard that laugh, he’d come over after dark, like always, and we’d sat at my piano for two hours while I tried to teach him to play Chopsticks.
When he’d finally given up after the both of us laughed so hard that we were turning red in the face, I played him Beethoven’s Für Elise and Schubert’s rendition of Ave Maria.
His hand rested at the nape of my neck and the smell of his cologne enveloped me in a rich blanket that had come to feel much too much like home to me.
I hang up as the message tone sounds and I dial again, repeating the process as I move to the SUV waiting for me in my garage, and as I climb in, I order the car to call ‘pretty boy.’ When I hear his answering machine play out for what has to be the ninth time, my foot presses more weight against the gas pedal.
“If you don’t answer the phone right now and tell me that you’re okay,” I warn him, “I’m going to show up at your house, and then you’ll really be angry with me.”
I call again. Another voicemail.
“Answer the fucking phone, Emmett.”
I push far beyond the speed limit, weaving through traffic with my own words to him echoing in my mind.
Parasite.
Desperate to be loved.
Tragic.
I’m terrified that I poisoned him.
I’m afraid that I killed him.
The words were so much more cruel than I’d intended to be when I spoke them; I think a part of me was accusing him of the things that I’d done, the things that I’d been.
If anyone was tragic, it was me. If either of us were desperate for the other to love them, it was me.
If there was a parasite present…it was me.
I latched onto him and drained something from him when I approached him in that washroom; and I just kept draining him, because it felt good and because he let me.
I’m two minutes away from his house when I reach his voicemail for the thirteenth time. My voice shakes when I speak and my knuckles grip the steering wheel as if it’s a lifeline.
“Pretty boy, please pick up.”
The SUV squeals to a halt on his empty driveway and I fly out, heading straight for the front door. My fist pounds against the panels of the door while I call out his name to no answer other than the muffled sound of barking from inside the house.
“Come on,” I hiss as I move toward the fence which separates his front yard from the back.
After vaulting over the sturdy vinyl, I let myself into the house using the spare key that he keeps hidden behind a planter near the back door – the same one that I’ve told him to move at least ten times.
I’m vaguely aware of the presence of a dog as I float through the house in a panicked search for Emmett; I think it bites me on the ankle.
I check the bathroom, the bedroom, even his closet and garage before I move back to the main area of the house, the only thing remotely out of place being an empty beer bottle left on the coffee table and a stack of envelopes on his desk.
Slipping my phone from my pocket, I dial his number again as I exit the house, heading once again for my car.
I’m not sure how many more calls I make or how many miles I drive before I find myself on a quiet one-way street lit only by two businesses and a few dim street lights, most of which have seen better days.
I’m about to call Emmett’s number again when I see his Mercedes, easily identifiable courtesy of the pair of bumper stickers he has on the back of it; symbols of those screaming bands that he likes to listen to, one on either side of the license plate.
I’ve told him at least four times that they depreciate the value of the vehicle and I’ve told him even more times that they look tacky on a nice car, but I’ve never been so happy that he didn’t listen to me.
That relief is quickly extinguished when I step out of my vehicle to approach his. The air leaves my lungs as Emmett comes into view, his body sprawled out on the cold asphalt.
“Shit.” Dropping to my knees next to him, I turn his body and force him to face me, giving a gentle shake to his shoulder. “Emmett, get up.”
I pat his cheek and brush his hair out of his eyes.
He’s so fucking pale. So cold. The only movement in his body is a shallow rise in his chest. I unzip my sweater and pull it off of me, wrapping it around his body instead as I pull him into my lap, and I reach for my phone to call for an ambulance.
Salt burns my eyes as I relay the address to the dispatcher on the other line and I bend to press my lips against Emmett’s too-cold forehead as my hand rubs harsh circles against the wall of his chest. His arms droop on either side of my legs, limp and unmoving like the rest of him.
My eyes flick toward the glass door of the bar next to us, where I can clearly see several people standing around a pool table, each taking turns pulling back their cues and whacking the balls across the top of it.
They can see us.
Why aren’t they helping?
Why did nobody fucking help him?
“Come on, I’ve got you,” I tell him stroking his hair away from his face. Looking at the patrons inside the building, one of whom is now using their phone to take pictures of us, I scream, “Get out here and fucking help me!”
I beg and plead with Emmett, doing everything that I can think of to try and wake him up; I slap his face hard enough to redden his cheek, I shake him, I kiss him, I grind my knuckles into his chest with every ounce of force that I can muster.
When none of my efforts pay off, I make the sign of the cross as if on instinct and I hold tight to the crucifix around my neck – something that, for all of these years, I have kept close to my heart as a reminder of what I had lost, what I had come from, and the God who forsook me - and I do the only other thing that I can think of.
For the first time in twenty-four years, I pray.