Chapter Twenty-Three. Rowan
TWENTY-THREE
Rowan
We drive.
Much like we did that first night we slept together, when confusion reigned as prevalent as our desire did. But this time we drive to abate tempers and digest the crap that Rhett just said.
Or at least that’s why I needed to escape.
How could my brother think such total bullshit?
Revitalization is not razing a whole city.
It’s not disregarding a whole subset of citizens because they are less fortunate than we are.
Where were the plans for them after their displacement?
For creating more jobs for them? For bettering their lives?
There weren’t any.
I glance over to Holden. His face is a mask of indifference but that muscle pulsing in his jaw and the grip of his hands on the steering wheel say all that needs to be said. He’s just as pissed—even more so—and I hope to learn why.
We’ve slept together. We’ve worked side by side together. I even would like to think we’re in a relationship together, but there is so very little that I truly know about who he really is and what makes him tick.
My thoughts from the diner parking lot the other day come back. Holden is the master of keeping secrets.
And something about what my brother just said clearly made him, and those secrets he holds close, tick.
I struggle with what to say, which I never do when it comes to Holden. And for some reason I ask the one question I told myself I wasn’t going to.
We drive in silence over the bridge toward the town my brother just disparaged.
A look across the river highlights the silhouettes of Westmore and the buildings I’ve walked in the shadows of numerous times.
The same silhouettes I can imagine the kids in this neighborhood look over at and aspire to live by.
The thought makes Rhett’s campaign promises even worse and the citizens of Westmore who were clapping even more disturbing.
My thoughts run rampant as Holden drives what seems to be aimlessly.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask as he takes a left off the main drag.
“No.” One syllable. That’s all I get.
But he’s angry. I can sense it. Can feel it. And for the first time, I finally ask. “Did you grow up in a town like Fairmont, Holden?”
He tenses momentarily. It’s slight but there, and he doesn’t answer. I nod softly and give him the grace not to have to answer me.
I know in the past he mentioned he had family who lived in Fairmont, but I never stopped to wonder where he grew up. And now, by his response to Rhett’s bullshit and my question, I can assume he did grow up in a similar fashion.
I stare at the surrounding area he drives us through.
We’re in the town neighboring Fairmont, but it’s much the same.
Run-down buildings with laundry hanging on lines and construction-paper art taped to windows.
Kids sitting on stoops, fanning themselves from the heat, and people working on cars in the parking lots.
Graffiti on walls and hopscotches drawn on sidewalks in chalk.
Signs of life lived to the best of its ability when life deals you a shitty situation.
Nothing less.
Nothing more.
I grow angrier at my brother and his callous, unfounded comments.
“Yes,” Holden says softly, causing me to shift my focus back onto him. “I grew up in a place similar to this.”
I know better than to say I’m sorry, than to ask more. “Clearly it’s not a toilet bowl or whatever bullshit he said, huh?” I murmur as I look out the windshield as he veers around a sizable pothole.
He grunts in response.
“I don’t think like him. Just in case you’re wondering.”
Holden glances over at me, his foot easing up on the gas in the middle of this residential street. Our eyes lock and I know there is more there. More behind that mask he wears like a second skin. In this moment, I know whatever my brother said hurt him ten times more than it hurt me.
I’ve lived my whole life with the sheen of privilege and affluence, not the invisible scars and scratched psyche of someone who has struggled or done without.
Sure, I thought I had them—struggles—but I’m astute and selfless enough to know I had nothing hard in comparison to those who grew up on this side of the river.
To those who grew up like Holden.
“I don’t want my brother to win,” I say eventually, noticing our surroundings are becoming more familiar.
“Yeah, well, you Rothschilds seem to get everything you always wish for, so don’t act so surprised.”
“Not everything,” I say, uncertain why I feel the need to rebut against the anger that emanates off that statement.
Another grunt followed by a long stretch of silence as we turn onto a street even more familiar to me. We must be near the Sanctuary, then. I try to picture my brother’s vision here: warehouses, restaurants, chic apartments for urban types. Is a revitalization necessary and could it work?
Yes and yes.
But not at the cost of displacing all these people. Sure, some of the people in this town can be classified as bad in one way or another—theft, drugs, crime—but for the most part all the people here are simply hardworking and trying to provide for their families.
The same could be said for Westmore or any town on the other side of the river for that matter. Good people with a sprinkle of bad.
In fact, I venture to guess there are more bad people in Westmore than Fairmont. The difference is in my town people have the money to pay off their crimes and hide behind their fancy gates to pretend they never happened.
“There are other ways to defeat him,” Holden murmurs.
His words stay with me long after he says them and continue to as he turns in to the parking lot of what appears to be a cemetery.
One of my least favorite places in the world.
And yet, Holden navigates the parking lot before finding a space beneath the only tree in the entire section of plots. He puts the car in park, cracks the windows some, and stares intently ahead at the sea of grave markers out there.
Headstones are few and far between, the grass struggles to stay green but is winning the fight, and pinwheels or fake flowers dot the different plots. There is love here. It’s a weird thought, but you can feel the peace and the love.
I glance over to Holden. His posture has relaxed some but he is still quiet in his intensity and silent with his thoughts.
“I never knew this was here.”
“Why would you?”
“Don’t be a dick. I’m not my brother.”
He shifts, moving his knee so that he can turn and look at me better. He paints quite the stunning picture in his silver dress shirt and strikingly good looks. But he just studies me with his head angled to the side and a whole world I can’t begin to understand behind those eyes of his.
He told me in the diner that night that he’d lost a younger sibling too. His brother. He knows the weight a place like this holds. He understands, more than most could, why it’s hard for me to sit here. And still he decided to stop here.
“Do you sit in cemeteries often?” I ask, glancing around as a car pulls in to our right and begins to drive the slow loop through the far end of the block that takes you closer to the plots.
I shiver, nerves suddenly eating at me. And then I begin to ramble, needing to eat up the silence with words.
“I hate everything about them if you want to know the truth. What they stand for. What they hold. The depth of emotion they make you feel every time you set foot in one. I sometimes think I prefer to be numb, not to feel, and then I remind myself how boring life would be without any feeling, you know?”
“Mmm,” he murmurs.
“Part of the reason I hate them is because I feel horribly guilty for not going to visit Cassie more. And if I’m not going, does that mean I don’t love her?
Does she know I don’t go? How is your love measured for someone after death?
In how often you visit their headstone? I mean, the questions are endless and the guilt that goes with every single one is just as ridiculous and unfounded …
and yet they’re there. Every single time, like clockwork.
But then, so is death.” I emit a shaky laugh. “Sorry. I’m rambling. I’m—”
Holden reaches over and places his hand on top of mine before lacing our fingers together. He squeezes, a silent show of support that for some reason hits me so very hard in the feels.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been thinking about Cassie so much since the other day, or perhaps I just needed to know there is a human being in this godforsaken place who is kind. Regardless, it means more to me than he’ll ever know.
“I hate them too.” His voice is a quiet rumble in the car.
“For all the same reasons as you. Sometimes I think I visit them to ease the guilt over why my brother was the one who had to die. Sometimes I do it as a punishment for being the one still here.” I squeeze his hand back.
“My mom. God, she … she spent the first few nights after he died sleeping at his gravesite with him. She was afraid that he was going to be lonely and cold, and so I think I force myself to visit the cemetery to remind me of that pain and why I need to keep going.”
I swallow over the lump of emotion lodged in my throat. The visual he paints is so visceral and heartbreaking. And real.
“It’s not fair. They deserved to be here with us. To get to experience all of this with us.”
“Hmm,” he says, opening his mouth and then pausing as if he is reconsidering what it is he was going to say.
“You want to talk about real guilt? If he hadn’t died, I don’t know that I would be who I am.
My success. My life. It was like his death created a path for me that I never would have been on.
And that’s a hard pill to swallow and an even tougher reality to navigate. ”
“Guilt upon guilt upon guilt.”
“Hmm.” He looks back out toward a woman who is tending to a gravesite. She’s placing flowers and pulling some weeds. But my focus is on him. I have so many questions. How did his brother die? Why did it change his course in life? Why does he punish himself and wish it had been him?
So many questions … but none of which I think a private man such as himself would answer.
“I dream about my gran sometimes.” I chuckle nervously.
“I don’t know why I told you that, but I do.
It’s like she visits me in dreams to tell me things but it only serves to make me feel crazy.
” I run my hands up and down my thighs and feel like an idiot for the confession.
“I don’t dream about Cassie though. Maybe because it was forever ago. Do you dream of your brother?”
The muscle in his jaw pulses as he reins in the emotion swimming in his eyes. “No.” The word sounds as tight as the tendons in his neck look.
“Tell me about him. I mean, if you want to.”
His sigh stutters in response and the flicker of a smile at the corners of his mouth is more bittersweet than anything.
“Ma—” He clears his throat and shock flashes over his features that I don’t know how to read.
“He was in middle school. It was just him, my mom, and me. A neighborhood much like Fairmont. He was a good kid, typical in that he hated homework but loved looking up to me. The life of our family. God.” He chokes on the word and the broken sound of it guts me.
“You don’t have to say any more,” I murmur and place my other hand on top of our already joined ones.
“There’s not much more to say, really. The rule was he couldn’t go outside unless I was watching him—bad neighborhood and all that. I was doing homework and he talked me into letting him just out front. I let him. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Oh, Holden.”
“Yep.” He nods and purses his lips. “I heard the screech of the tires. I couldn’t get there in time or do anything or save him. Classic hit-and-run. He died at the hospital.”
“Jesus. I’m so sorry.”
“Isn’t everyone when your sibling dies?” he says callously but I let the comment slide as he’s clearly hurting. “Sorry. That was uncalled for.”
“But true. Did they ever catch the person who hit him?” I ask.
His whole body tenses as he struggles with some intangible but utterly visceral emotion.
He clears his throat and when he looks at me there is a darkness to his eyes.
A blackness to their depths that has shivers running down my spine.
“Yes, but no charges were pressed because he knew someone who knew someone. It was ruled as an unfortunate accident.”
Bitterness coats my tongue at the thought. “There’s nothing I can say that can make anything right about that statement at all.” I’m dumbfounded.
Cassie’s death was devastating in all aspects but it was her fault. Her cell phone records showed she was texting when she hit the telephone pole at seventy miles per hour. No one else was hurt. No one else was to blame.
Holden, on the other hand. Jesus.
But there is something else about this moment that hits me—Holden opened up to me. He trusted me with knowing who his brother was. It’s not much in the scheme of things, but Holden is a man who doesn’t share often and he did just that.
He let me in when I’ve worked so hard to try to shut him out. My chest swells with the thought.
“What was his name?” I ask softly.
“Put him on, will you?” Holden asks, thoroughly confusing me as he starts the engine and puts the car in gear.
“Him?”
“Clayton. Put him on.” He points to the stereo. “You said he helped you. Who knows, it’s looking like today I need all the help I can get.”