Blood on the Chrome (Ashes & Iron MC #3)

Prologue

Sunday

There were twenty-two people in my grandmother's living room the day I turned twelve, and by the time the candles were lit I knew how every single one of them was going to die.

It didn't happen all at once. That's the part people get wrong when I've tried to explain it, which is twice, and both times went badly. They imagine a light switch. A curtain going up. Something with a sound effect.

It was more like a room slowly filling with water.

The first one was my uncle Ted, who was standing by the sliding door with a paper plate, complaining about the Cubs.

I looked at him because he said my name.

That's all. He said, "Sunday, come here and settle something," and I turned my head, and instead of Uncle Ted in his golf shirt I saw Uncle Ted on a bathroom floor in a house I'd never been in, with the tap running and one shoe off, and his face had gone a color faces aren't supposed to go.

I remember thinking, very calmly, that's not right, he's wearing the wrong shirt.

Then I blinked and he was back by the door with his paper plate, and he said, "Well? Are you coming or not?"

"No," I said.

"Suit yourself." He ate a chip.

I was twelve. I assumed I was tired. I had been up since five because it was my birthday and I'd wanted to be awake for all of it.

The second one was my cousin Danielle, who was fifteen and had gotten very beautiful over one summer in a way that made all the aunts talk about her like she'd done it on purpose.

She grabbed my wrist to drag me toward the cake and I looked at her and saw a highway at night, and a windshield, and her hands still on the wheel at ten and two like a good girl, like someone who'd passed her test on the first try, and then I saw the part after that.

I sat down on the carpet.

"Oh my God," Danielle said, "are you okay? Aunt Peg, she just sat down."

"She's fine," said Aunt Peg, who was going to go in her sleep at ninety-one and never know a thing about it, which is genuinely the best one I've ever seen and I've never told her.

"I'm fine," I said, from the carpet.

They lit the candles anyway. Somebody turned the lights off, which helped, because in the dark I couldn't see faces, and by then I had figured out that faces were the problem.

Twelve candles. Everyone singing. And in the little orange light of the cake, twenty-two people leaned in around me in a circle, and I looked up, and the water came all the way to the ceiling.

Heart. Heart. Car. Stroke. The long slow one with the hospital bed and the daughter who doesn't get there in time.

The fall down the basement stairs. The one where the machine beeps and somebody signs a form.

The other car. Cancer, and then cancer again in a different person, in a different year, in a different room with the same beige blinds.

My grandmother, who was holding the cake, in the same chair she was sitting in at Christmas, with the TV on, having gotten up to get a blanket and not made it.

And my father, standing behind me with his hands on my shoulders, in eleven years, in the rain.

"Make a wish, Sun," he said.

I made a wish. Obviously I'm not going to tell you what it was. It didn't work, so it doesn't matter.

I blew out the candles and everybody clapped and my mother said, "Somebody get the lights," and I said, very fast, "No."

There was a pause. In the dark, the pause felt enormous. In the light it probably lasted a second and a half.

"No?" my mother said.

"I like it dark," I said. "It's my birthday."

And because it was my birthday, they left the lights off, and we ate cake in the dark like a family of raccoons, and my uncle Ted told a story about a fish, and everybody laughed in the direction of everybody else, and I looked at my hands the entire time.

That was the last party I went to.

My mother found me at eleven that night sitting in the bathtub with my shoes on and all the lights off.

"Sunday."

"I'm fine."

"You're in the tub."

"There's no water in it."

"That's not the part I'm stuck on, bud," she said, which is a thing my father's whole family says and which I would not understand the origin of for another twenty years.

She sat down on the closed lid of the toilet in the dark, which I want to give her credit for, because she could have turned the light on and she didn't. "Was it too much? All the people?"

And here's the fork in the road. I want to be fair to twelve-year-old me, because she was working with nothing.

I said, "Uncle Ted's going to die on a bathroom floor."

There was a pause.

"That's a horrible thing to say."

"I know."

"Where did you hear that?"

"I saw it."

"On television?"

"Mom."

"Sunday, if somebody at that party said something to you—"

"I saw it," I said, "I saw it when he asked me to come settle something about the Cubs, and Danielle's is a car, and Grandma's is her chair with the TV on, and Aunt Peg gets to be ninety-one, and Dad's is eleven years and it's raining—"

I heard her stand up.

I have thought about the sound of my mother standing up in that dark bathroom more than I have thought about almost anything. It wasn't anger. It was the specific fast movement of a woman getting away from something, and I have gotten it out of a hundred people since, and hers was the first.

"That's enough," she said. "That's enough, Sunday."

"Okay."

"You don't say things like that. Not about your father. Not ever."

"Okay."

"Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

And she turned the light on, which meant I had to look at the tile, and she said, "Get out of the tub and put on pajamas," and went out, and that was the end of the only conversation I have ever had with my mother about any of it.

We still talk every Thursday. I face my window and she faces hers and we discuss her knee.

I don't blame her. I want that on the record too.

She was thirty-four years old and her kid had just handed her a list of everyone she loved with dates on it, and there is no correct response to that, and the response she picked — we don't say things like that — is the response about ninety percent of people would pick, and I know because I've tested it about four more times since.

Here is what nobody tells you about knowing things: the knowing is not the hard part. The hard part is Tuesday.

Because the world does not stop. There's still school.

There's still a bus, and the bus has a driver, and the driver turns around to yell at the kid in the back and now you know about the driver too.

There's a lunch lady. There's a substitute teacher with a clip-on tie.

There's a boy named Marcus Weller who asks you to the winter formal and you say no, not because you don't like him but because you'd have to look at him for four hours, and he tells everyone you're stuck up, and honestly?

Fair. From where he was standing, that's exactly what it looked like.

So I learned to look at chins. Chins are safe.

Chins are the great unsung heroes of my life.

Also hairlines, shoulders, the little triangle of throat above a collar, and — this one took practice — the exact spot on the bridge of a person's nose that reads as eye contact from three feet away but isn't. I got so good at it that in high school my English teacher wrote Sunday is very attentive on a report card, which my mother put on the fridge, and which I looked at every morning for a year while eating cereal and not looking at my mother.

You want to know the joke? The actual joke?

It's that I was a very cheerful kid. Ask anyone.

Loud, even. I had a laugh that got me in trouble in church.

And that didn't go away, exactly, it just went sideways, the way a river goes sideways when you drop a mountain in it.

I still think things are funny. I think more things are funny now.

I think it's hilarious that people say "I could get hit by a bus tomorrow" as a way of being carefree.

Sir. Ma'am. Do not tempt me. I know a guy.

I've got a mouth on me and eighteen years of nowhere to point it.

By fourteen I had a system. By sixteen I had a rule, which was: no eye contact, no exceptions, not for anyone, not ever, not even for a second, because a second is all it takes and then you have it forever and you can't give it back.

And by seventeen I had a nickname at school, which was Nun, which is funny because I was neither religious nor especially chaste, but teenagers work with what they've got.

At eighteen I moved out and got a job on a phone.

That part was strategy, not accident. Voices don't have faces.

Voices are the safest thing in the world.

A voice can be crying, screaming, drunk, dying — I've had all four in one shift — and it can't hand me anything I have to carry.

I dispatch tow trucks now, nights, out of a cinderblock building with a coffee maker that's been broken since the Bush administration, and I am extremely good at it, and my boss thinks I'm a shut-in, and he's right, and we've made our peace.

Uncle Ted died on a bathroom floor when I was nineteen.

Wrong shirt. He was wearing a blue one. I'd spent seven years bracing for the golf shirt and it turned out that detail was just what he happened to have on when I looked at him, and the shirt in the vision was the true one, and I'd had it backwards the whole time.

That's the sort of thing you learn as you go.

There's no manual. There's no old woman in a shop who explains it to you.

There's just you, at nineteen, in a funeral home parking lot, working out a rule of thumb about shirts.

Danielle made it to twenty-six. I told her not to drive at night.

I told her every year, on her birthday, on my birthday, at Thanksgiving, until she stopped answering, because there is a limit to how many times you can hear please don't drive at night from your weird cousin before you start screening calls. She was driving at night. Ten and two.