CHAPTER FIVE
CONNECTICUT, AGE FIFTEEN
It was weird how cold it was, even for a late September day in Connecticut. It felt more like October or even November, and I tucked my hands deeper into my armpits as I curled up tighter in the wicker couch on the deck.
I’d woken up with a sick feeling in my stomach. Mom had asked if I thought I was going to puke, but it wasn’t that type of sick. It was more like an I have a feeling something bad is about to happen sort of thing. A kind of nagging in the pit of my gut that made my mind feel unsettled and my nerves feel on edge. It was a feeling I hadn’t felt in a while, not this strong and powerful, and I didn’t like it. Not at all. I kept looking for a distraction, something to make it disappear, but nothing worked.
When I’d told Mom about it, the way I’d mentioned the hurricane almost eight years ago, she had studied me for a moment. I could tell she was unsure if she should believe me or not, and I couldn’t blame her. I’d been right about that hurricane, but I had been wrong about stuff too.
Like when Luke had gotten his driver’s license and I suffered a string of panic attacks, so sure he’d die in a car accident … but he hadn’t. Well, not yet anyway.
No. Stop. No. Not ever.
“It’s probably just your anxiety, hon,” she’d said, smoothing the hair off my forehead. “Why don’t you go outside and read or draw or something? Get your mind off of it.”
So, that was why I was out here now, freezing my butt off and staring out toward the backyard with my untouched book in my lap. The dread of something bad happening had worked itself through my nerves, making my legs bounce and my fingers tap with every unsettled passing of a moment.
God, what the hell is it?
When I’d first heard about the hurricane, I had just known without a doubt that it was bad news for us. I couldn’t tell my parents why or how—I’d just known . And it was that sincerity and fear that convinced Mom to talk Dad into leaving—and look at what had happened! Our old house had been crushed by two downed trees and flooded by the creek down the street. I thought Mom had assumed I was psychic or something, and for a while, she asked me regularly if I had any feelings regarding certain things. Like I could pick the winning lottery numbers or some crazy stuff like that. But that wasn’t what it was. I wasn’t psychic, and I wasn’t told things by a foreign entity, like ghosts or something. I’d just get a feeling that something bad would happen … and it did.
And, yeah, I’d felt similarly since. I’d had a bad feeling about that party I went to with Luke years ago, but it was sometimes hard to tell what a genuinely bad feeling was and what was just my nerves and anxiety disorder getting the best of me.
But, no, this feeling … this sick, jittering feeling crawling beneath my skin and worming its way through my gut …
This wasn’t anxiety.
This was something else.
The sound of an engine rumbling down the street broke through the silence, and then it stopped. The black Dodge truck I knew well must’ve just pulled up to the house. Less than two minutes later, Luke exited the back door with Melanie following close behind. Then, through the corner of my eye, I watched their approach, their fingers interlocked all the while.
I half expected them to walk past without so much as a hello. I never knew what any particular day would bring to my interactions with my brother. Some days, he pretended I didn’t exist. Other days, nothing seemed to exist outside of Melanie and cigarettes and his part-time job at the local pizza place. But today, he dropped beside me on the white couch, then pulled Melanie onto his lap.
“Whatcha reading, ass breath?” he asked, bumping his arm against mine.
“Oh God, Luke,” Melanie scolded, smacking his chest playfully. “Don't be mean.” She wrapped her arms around his neck and rested her temple against his.
“He knows I'm kidding.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders before abruptly turning to me and asking, “Right?”
“Sure,” I muttered, still unable to calm my lungs or heart or the shakiness in my limbs and fingertips.
“Hey, Charlie,” Melanie said, her voice gentle and soft, just as it always was. “You okay?”
As it had turned out, Melanie hadn't been into me the way Ritchie the dick assumed all those years ago, and she'd become a better friend instead.
As for her and my brother … well, let's just say, they'd been together since that night. And funnily enough, it didn't irk me nearly as much as it had when I thought of him with other girls.
Maybe I’d just known Melanie was different, the same way I knew now that something was wrong.
“Yeah,” I answered, but I wasn't so sure.
My breath continued to escalate as a barrage of possibilities pelted haphazardly through my mind—both realistic and absurd.
Dad losing his job and us going broke.
A meteor hitting the planet and wiping out the human race.
Someone breaking in and stealing my computer and video games and Mom’s favorite necklace.
All of us contracting malaria and suffering a horrible death.
“Hey.” Luke laid his hand against my upper back. “What's going on?”
I swallowed and finally pulled my attention from the yard to look into his eyes. Silently, I pleaded with him to be my big, brave brother and make the bad feeling go away, but unlike me, Luke was lucky and normal, and he failed to know when I was in the middle of a panic attack or having a deep-seated intuitive feeling.
“What's wrong? Do you need, um … you need medicine or something?”
“No,” I said irritably, shaking my head. “I … I don’t know. I just don’t feel right. Something just … I don’t know.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding. “You’re, like, freaking out or something?”
He narrowed his eyes, staring at me for a moment like he didn’t know what the hell to do with me. And, hey, that made two of us. But then sudden recollection dawned on him, and his mouth fell open.
“Wait … is this like the hurricane?”
I shrugged, my legs continuing to bounce against the floorboards. “I don’t know. I just … I don’t like it.”
“Well, what is it about? What made you feel like this?”
Melanie looked between Luke and me, confused. “Can I help with anything?”
Luke lifted a hand, gesturing for her to wait a moment as he said with more urgency than I'd expected, “Did something happen? Did you, I dunno … hear something on TV? Like how you got freaked out when you heard about the storm?”
Luke had been ten when our house was demolished by the storm, and I thought it had traumatized him more than he let on that, if it wasn’t for my panic and insistence, we might not have survived that night.
He was always too cool to admit when he was weak.
“No,” I replied. “I just woke up feeling like something bad was going to happen.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged, feeling just as clueless as Melanie, who was staring at us like she wasn't sure if she should run away or stick around to see where this episode of The Twilight Zone was headed.
Luke stared into my eyes and held my gaze for several seconds, and there was that thing I couldn't read again. A message I couldn't hear, one I couldn't quite figure out. God, I wished he'd just tell me what he was thinking. Things had changed a little between us over the past couple of years. The gap between fifteen and eighteen didn't seem as vast as between a thirteen- and sixteen-year-old, and our friendship seemed to have repaired itself a bit.
But even though Luke hadn't said it, I was pretty sure Ritchie was still his best friend, and that giant, asshole-shaped boulder did nothing to bridge the gap. In fact, if anything, it kept that chasm from closing, and I was certain it'd remain open until he just wasn't there anymore.
Maybe, one day, he just won’t exist.
“Well, tell me if you figure it out, okay?” Luke asked with finality, giving my back a pat before removing his hand altogether. “We’re gonna go down to see if Ritchie and Tommy wanna hang out. See you later.”
And then he was gone, proving my point once again.
***
The topic had been dropped, and Luke had forgotten all about the feeling in my gut, but I never did.
Instead, I'd become obsessed and completely consumed by a desperation to stop anything bad from happening to the people I cared about.
Luke and Melanie, Mom and Dad, or any variation of the only four people I kept close.
Anytime any of them left the house, I'd beg them not to go. It was like I'd regressed back to preschool when I didn't want Mom to leave me alone in a strange classroom that smelled of sweat and paste and stale apple juice, minus the part where I wrapped my arms around her leg and dug my fingers into her skin to keep her from leaving.
But don't think I wouldn't have done it if I could've.
“Dad, wait. Dad!” I called, jumping up from my desk as Dad made his way down the hall and to the stairs. “Where are you going?”
“Oh God, Charlie,” he groaned, shaking his head as he made his descent. “Knock it off, will you, please?”
“But where are you going?” I pressed further, hurrying behind him quicker than my long legs wanted to take me. I tripped forward at the bottom step, and I stumbled over my big feet.
Dad glanced over his shoulder and bit back a laugh, shaking his head again. “Your mom and I are going to a concert tonight, remember?”
“What? You didn’t tell me you were going anywhere.”
My heart raced straight toward panic, just as Luke plodded down the stairs louder than a herd of elephants. He was dressed in nice clothes—his going-out clothes—and that panic I was feeling only heightened.
“Wait, you’re all going out?” I sounded shrill, so stupid and pathetic, but, God, I didn’t want them to go. I didn’t want them to leave me alone.
Dad looked around me at my brother. “Luke, I told you not to—”
“I’m just grabbing dinner real quick with the guys and Mel,” he reasoned. “I’ll bring some home for Charlie.”
Dad was quick to resign. There wasn’t much he could do when Luke was eighteen, but I could tell he wasn’t thrilled.
That made both of us.
“All right. But make it quick, okay? And you’re coming right back here. You understand? No staying out late.”
“Yes, master,” Luke grumbled, rolling his eyes and heading straight out the front door without so much as a goodbye or a mention of where exactly he was going.
“Listen,” Dad said, drawing my attention away from the door. “You have our numbers. If Luke doesn’t come back in an hour or two, give one of us a call, and we’ll get on him to get his butt home, all right?”
I really didn’t like being around people much. Strangers, Luke’s group of crappy friends, the people from Dad’s job who sometimes stopped by for a beer … I could do without ever seeing a single one of them again. But being without Mom and Dad, being without Luke—even if he was a butthead sometimes—it didn’t sit right with me.
Especially not when this urgent feeling of foreboding clenched around my gut, telling me my cozy, safe, sad little life was going to, in some way or another, be set off-balance.
“Dad,” I began, but he ignored the tension in my tone as he pulled on his jacket.
“If you’re worried about being alone, you can always go a couple of houses down and sit with Mrs. Wheeler. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
Despite the anxiety pulsing through my trembling veins, I rolled my eyes at that suggestion. Something would have to be seriously wrong for me to go down the street to Ritchie’s house and ask his mom to freakin’ babysit me. I’d never live it down.
Mom came downstairs, wearing a dress and high-heeled shoes. Her hair was down and curly at the ends; her eyes were done up in sparkling silver and black makeup. Glittering earrings dangled from her ears—so much different from the little gold balls she usually wore.
I could count on only a few fingers the number of times I’d seen her dressed up like this in my life.
She looked like someone I didn’t know.
“Oh God, it feels so good to look like a human being again,” she gushed, pulling some lip stuff out of the little purse under her arm.
She twisted off the cap and put it on her lips, making them pink, sparkly, and shiny.
“You look great, babe,” Dad said, offering her a rare compliment as his mouth curled up at the ends in a smile I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen.
My parents were always nice people. They were cool within reason, and they rarely complained about life the way other people might. But these were people I didn’t recognize—all dressed up and looking less like my parents and more like people who had fun.
It made me feel guilty, like it was my fault they didn’t look like this more often.
So, even though my pleas for them to stay home were still clinging to the tip of my tongue, I kept my lips shut as Dad held Mom’s jacket up and open while she slid her arms into the sleeves.
“Okay, Charlie. We left cash for pizza on the counter if you wanna eat,” Mom said, zipping the jacket up and smoothing its front down over her dress.
“Luke said he’d bring something home.”
She eyed him pointedly. “We’re talking about Luke, hon. He says one thing and does another. Anyway, you have our numbers, and Mrs. Wheeler—”
“Yeah, I know. Dad already said this to me,” I muttered, leaning against the wall.
I wasn’t going to ask them again to stay, but, shit, I wished they would. They said it was separation anxiety—that was what a doctor had once said a couple of years ago—and, yeah, that was true sometimes. But that wasn’t what this was, and nobody would listen.
My fists clenched at my sides as my lungs stuttered.
Mom stepped toward me with her arms outstretched, then pressed her palms to my cheeks. Her eyes widened a little with surprise as her hands rubbed against my face.
“Oh my gosh, we gotta have Dad teach you how to shave,” she said with a light laugh before leaning in to press a kiss to my forehead. “You’ll be okay, Charlie. Call me if you need anything, okay?”
I released an exhale and nodded. “Okay.”
She gave me another kiss—this one on the cheek—as Dad groaned playfully.
“Come on, Sue. Let’s leave so Charlie can throw a crazy party.” He reached out and ruffled my hair before heading to the door. “Be good, kiddo.”
“Yep,” I replied, tightening my fists as Mom followed him. “Have fun, guys.”
The door closed behind them, and I watched through the stained-glass window as they got into their car. Then, as they pulled out of the driveway and began their drive down the street, the anxiety continued to build.
***
It was nearly midnight, and I was still alone.
Luke hadn’t called, but Mom had.
Just a little over a half hour ago, she’d let me know they were leaving the concert venue and going out for a late dinner. She asked if Luke was home, and I lied, saying that he was in his room.
“Okay,” she’d said, a hint of relief in her voice. “Good. So, you’re doing okay then?”
She was worried about me. Mom usually was, and most of the time, I liked it. I liked that she looked out for me and made my comfort a priority in her life, even if it was selfish and babyish of me. But tonight, I didn’t want her to be worried. I wanted to pretend to be a normal kid, like Luke. Courageous and cool, unbothered by his parents taking a night to themselves. All for the sake of letting them be happy.
“Yeah, I’m fine, Mom,” I’d answered, and I smiled. Because I had actually sounded like I was.
But, no, I wasn’t. And now, forty minutes after hearing her voice, I was sitting on the couch, bouncing my legs and chewing on my nails while I stared ahead at some stupid show on MTV.
“Do people really like this shit?” I muttered to myself in a shaky voice as a bunch of college kids made out around a pool.
Then, the front door opened, and I jumped up from the couch to see who’d come home.
Luke walked into the living room, hair disheveled and eyes red.
“Oh, hey,” he greeted me, his voice sleepy and gravelly. “Sorry I’m kinda late—”
“ Kinda ?!” I shouted, shrill, releasing every bit of panic I’d been suppressing all night. “Dad told you to be home hours ago!”
Luke furrowed his brow and crossed his arms over his chest. “Yeah, well, Dad isn’t here, is he?”
“So?!”
“ So ”—he took a couple of steps toward me, reeking of weed and beer and Melanie’s perfume—“I went out for a while and had some fun.”
I clenched my fists and looked into his eyes. He wasn’t much taller than me now—only a couple of inches. But he was still bigger, stronger. He probably always would be. But right now, I was ready to kick his ass, and, dammit, I wanted to.
“You were supposed to be here with me!”
Luke dropped his arms and rolled his eyes, already turning to walk away. “Oh, grow the hell up, Charlie. Seriously. Do yourself and everyone else a favor and—”
I lunged at him, throwing my body against his and knocking him onto the carpeted floor. My hands slapped at his face, my fingers gripped his hair, and I got in a couple of good tugs before he shoved me off and onto the coffee table.
“Fuck!” Luke shouted, rubbing at his scalp as he scrambled to get to his feet. “God, you little asshole. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I was worried about you!” I cried, feeling stupid as my eyes welled up. I got off the coffee table and sat on the couch as I brushed the hair off my forehead. “You said you’d be home, and I didn’t know where you were. I should’ve freakin’ known you’d rather get high and have sex than be with me. Why the hell would I—”
“Charlie,” Luke interrupted, his tone much softer than before. He took a deep breath, then continued, “I’m sorry, okay? I lost track of time, and, yeah, I was smoking and drinking and …” He scratched the back of his head, then brushed the hair off his forehead. “Anyway, you’re right. I should’ve been back. I said I would be, and I wasn’t, so … I’m an asshole, and I’m sorry.”
I sniffed and wiped my eyes. “It’s okay.”
“Did you eat?”
“No,” I muttered. “You said you’d bring something for me.”
His expression of guilt deepened. “Shit, I forgot.”
“Mom left money on the counter for pizza, but …”
I didn’t need to say that the pizza place wouldn’t be open now. We both already knew. I should’ve called earlier, I realized, but I hadn’t been hungry then, too distracted by my panic. But now, with Luke home, I was suddenly aware of the grumbling from deep in my stomach.
“Come on,” he said, gesturing for me to follow him as he turned toward the kitchen. “I’m making some grilled cheese sandwiches. Want one?”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, standing and letting him lead the way. “Sounds good.”
***
We had found the censored version of a movie on cable TV— The Shawshank Redemption —and we’d been watching for twenty minutes as we ate our sandwiches. Then, we sprawled out on either end of the L-shaped sectional and tried to focus on Andy Dufresne and his escape from prison, but my eyes kept drifting toward the clock.
It had been one hour, then two since I’d last heard from Mom, and I was starting to wonder if I should call. Just to ask what they were doing and if they were on their way home.
“Luke,” I said quietly.
“Hmm,” he grunted, half asleep with his head flopped against the armrest.
“Should we call Mom and Dad?”
His chest inflated with a sigh, and then he opened his eyes to look at me on the other end of the couch. “You freaking out again?”
I shrugged, dropping my gaze from his eyes. “No. I just …” I picked at a loose thread along the couch’s seam and tried to come up with something reasonable to say, yet I came up empty. So, I shrugged again, unable to look at him.
“If it’ll make you feel better, go ahead.”
I couldn’t snatch the cordless phone from the coffee table quick enough while trying hard not to seem too eager as I quickly dialed Mom’s number. I pressed it to my ear and listened as it rang and rang and rang, but she didn’t answer.
I hung up when it went to voice mail.
“She didn’t pick up?” Luke asked.
His eyes were closed again.
I didn’t reply as my stomach ached. Pinching and gnawing around those two sandwiches I was suddenly regretting.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” Luke muttered, slurring his words a little as he wrapped his arms around his middle and drifted closer to sleep.
“But …” I swallowed, staring at the glowing screen on the phone. “What … what if they’re not?”
“Stop.” I looked up to see him open one eye. “You know that’s just your brain talking. Tell it to shut up.”
And I tried. I really, really freakin’ did as I forced my eyes to focus on the movie, but my mind just couldn’t settle, even as I wrapped a blanket around myself and felt my lids getting heavy.
Where are they?
I grabbed the phone again, quiet as to not wake Luke up, and I dialed Mom’s number. Still no answer. So, I dialed Dad’s number, and the phone rang one, two, three …
“Hello?”
I laid a hand against my chest and breathed out the biggest sigh of relief.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Charlie, buddy! What are you doing awake?”
“I, um …” I hesitated to tell him I’d been too worried to sleep. Mom, I could be honest with her, but Dad took my fears and feelings a little less seriously. But I couldn’t think of anything better to say. “I was waiting for you guys.”
“Tell him we’re fine,” I heard Mom say.
“Mom says to tell you we’re fine,” Dad repeated.
“Okay, good.” I breathed a little easier.
“We spent longer than we’d expected at the diner with Bill and Addy, but we’re on our way now.”
“Okay.” I pulled the blanket higher over my shoulder, not sure I remembered who Bill and Addy even were. But it didn’t matter. Mom and Dad were okay.
“So, get some … hold on.” His tone changed, and my eyes snapped open. “Sue, watch out for that guy. What—”
“What the hell is he doing?” Mom’s voice sounded frantic, urgent.
I sat up abruptly. “Dad, what’s wrong?”
“Oh my God, Paul! Ho-hold on!” Mom was yelling, her voice panicked and penetrating through my eardrum.
“D-dad! What’s happening?!” I was shouting into the phone now, waking Luke up.
He sat up abruptly, his eyes immediately bewildered and alarmed. “Charlie?”
“Sue! Don’t—”
Tires squealed, and glass shattered, and the faint tinny sound of the radio continued to play some stupid Michael Bolton song. But despite my cries and my pleas for my parents to answer me, I knew I’d never hear their voices again.