Chapter 15
JULES
There’s a small audience gathering outside our tent to ogle the spectacle—me receiving butterfly bandages to hold my gaping eyebrow closed, and Teague being loaded onto a stretcher. The EMT gathers he has a broken wrist and nose, and a fractured eye socket. One or two of the lower ribs on his left side are probably cracked as well. I hear my cousin groaning in pain. I stare at the tracks left behind in the sand as he’s wheeled away. I should be upset that he’s suffering, that Rowan hurt him, just like I should have been upset that she shot Gino. But I’m not. Gino was an unintended casualty of our family feud. I know how heartsick Rowan is over her actions, and how deeply she wishes she could get a do-over. Teague is a casualty of… being a sexist douche who solves everything with brutality, of thinking he could take a woman half his size without a problem.
I’m sitting in one of the recliners. Rowan is standing beside me with her arms folded, gnawing on her bottom lip, shifting between looking at her freshly cleaned but battered knuckles and following the gurney with guilt-ridden eyes. This life of violence is too much for her. It’s too much for me, also, but I haven’t lived through it first-hand until today. Thinking of how this is routine for her makes me sick to my stomach. Thinking of how Teague would have shot her, and maybe me, in hot blood, and felt zero remorse for it, makes me furious.
An EMT is leaning over me, checking my forehead for fractures. I shoo her away. “Please stop touching me, I’m fine.” She pulls her gloved hands back as if I’m holding a knife and demanding she give me all her money, then packs up her bag and heads for the ambulance. “Do you still have my phone?” I ask Rowan.
She grabs it from her rear pocket. The first thing I do is turn off location sharing. The second thing I do is open the FaceTime app.
“Calling your dad?”
“Not him. My mom. I have to tell someone about this insane shit.”
“I’ll give you some space.” She turns toward the tent, but I reach for her elbow to stop her.
“I want you to meet her. Through FaceTime, where your life isn’t in danger because of the psycho men in my family.”
“Are you sure?”
“She needs to understand you’re not the bad guy in this situation. And if she sees what Teague did to me, she will.”
“Alright.”
The line only rings once before my mom picks up; Dad must not be around. “Hi Jul—what in Christ’s name happened to your face?”
“Teague.”
“Excuse me?” Her voice drops half an octave.
I don’t know what to say, how to phrase it. There are no words on the tip of my tongue; I’m drawing from an empty well. It was unfathomable. It shouldn’t be; I know Teague’s temperament. Still, we’ve been so close our entire lives. He truly is the nearest thing I have to a brother. I feel that way about him in my heart; it wasn’t a line I fed him to get my way. And because we love each other I never thought he’d hurt me. Turns out his love comes with terms and conditions.
Rowan sees how much I’m struggling, mouths I’ve got this, and pops into the frame. “Mrs. Calloway, your nephew showed up to where we’re staying. He tracked Juliet’s phone. When he found us together, he got aggressive. He drew his gun. We fought. Jules tried to stop him, and he hit her with it. On purpose. I reacted very poorly to that because I love your daughter. I couldn’t stand to see her hurt and I was worried that he would… do something to her that wouldn’t heal. Teague is on his way to the hospital. He’ll be fine, but it’s gonna take a while. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep Jules from getting injured, and I’m sorry that I let my anger get the best of me and hurt Teague so badly. I’m not a violent person, but I do a violent job.”
My mother’s lips are squeezed in a thin, tight line. That’s not anger, it’s rage. The question is, over what?
“My nephew struck my daughter with his gun.” Oh. It’s not in any way an interrogation. She’s sorting through the facts.
“Yes, he did.”
“And you gave the little shit the whooping he should have gotten ages ago from his father.”
Rowan is so taken aback her eyebrows look like they’re climbing up her face to hide in her hair. She clears her throat. “Yes, ma’am, I did do that. Yes.”
“And you love my topolina.”
“Mom!” Never too old for your mom to embarrass you.
Rowan glances at me, confused.
I mumble, “It means little mouse.”
Rowan’s grin lets me know she thinks it’s endearing. “Yes, I do. Very much.”
“Well then. Thank you for taking care of Juliet even though it meant putting yourself at risk, and making some hard choices.”
“I’d do it again. Although I’d prefer not to have to.”
“Yes, I think we would all prefer that.”
“Definitely,” I chime in.
“This is only going to escalate. We may need to come up with an exit strategy for you both.” There’s a sly glint in my mother’s eyes as she says it, like she’d been plotting this course for a long time.
“An exit strategy.” Rowan mulls. To me, she says, “You take after your mom a lot.”
“I like you,” my mom tells her.
“Honestly? Same, Mrs. Calloway. None of this was something I chose. I was born into it, and my dad is?—”
“I understand. I do.” Mom frowns. “Give me some time to think, girls.”
“Rowan had an idea. A good one. Although, it might be extremely hard and expensive to pull off.”
“Let’s not discuss it on the phone. Was Teague conscious on his way to the hospital?”
I nod. “Yes, but not in any shape to talk.”
“I hate to say it, but that’s beneficial. If he can’t talk about what happened, it’ll give us time.”
“Should I come home?”
“No. Gino’s wake is tomorrow. His parents are burying him Saturday.”
Oh, no. Teague is going to miss it. That’s something I do feel bad about. Rowan sighs, rueful. “I want—” she starts, stops, considers. “It’s not enough, nothing I can do would be enough, but I want to send a funeral spray. Anonymously. Is that crass? I… I don’t know.” Her voice trembles and her eyes are glassy, shining with a hint of tears.
“It’s a lovely thought, dear,” my mother says. “I’ll text Jules the funeral home details.”
“Thank you.”
“You should leave wherever you are. Teague might have told someone where he was going.”
“I thought that, too,” I add.
Rowan agrees. “For sure.”
“I’ll let you know when we’ve heard about Teague through official channels. Until then, stay hidden.”
“We will. Thanks, Mom.”
She hangs up. A few seconds later a text notification pings. It’s the address to O’Keefe’s Funeral Home in Cambridge. Rowan nods and nods, then goes to retrieve her phone from her bag. I’d asked her to leave it this morning so we could be together without distraction. Hilarious, karma.
She returns and collapses into the second chair, opens a browser, and finds a local florist. “I’ve sent a few funeral arrangements before, but those were always easy. Not personal, just whatever ornate thing popped up in the search and looked expensive. I can’t do that this time.”
“We can choose one together.”
She scooches her chair closer to mine and starts scrolling through the options—bouquets in vases, casket covers, standing arrays. We decide on the latter. “There’s a build-your-own option. Did he have a favorite color?”
I smile at the memory of Gino in middle school, explaining to Teague and me why he loved autumn; the trees turned his favorite color. “Orange.”
“Asiatic lilies, orange roses, and white chrysanthemums,” she says. “That’ll be perfect.”
I’m not shocked that she knows about flowers. She knows a lot about a lot, especially things she likes. She likes sharks and fast cars and books and flowers. Hard and soft. Balanced.