CHAPTER ELEVEN
CONNECTICUT, AGE TWENTY
“Luke! I’m taking the car, okay?” I called up the stairs, pulling on my jacket and feeling more excited than I'd been in a long time.
I had a job interview down at the cemetery where my parents were buried. Luke and Melanie had thought I was insane when I applied for the position. They thought it was too weird, too creepy, too … depressing , working in such proximity with the dead—including those that meant the most to me.
But to be honest, I couldn’t have thought of a better job for me to have.
Even Dr. Sibilia had agreed when I told her about the interview.
It had decent pay. It required only a high school diploma and the ability to handle physical labor. I was overqualified academically with my bachelor’s degree, and physically, I wasn’t too worried since I’d started hitting the gym with Luke a few days a week. The thought of working very little with the public was more than appealing, but—and Dr. Sibilia had been sure to point this out—whatever interaction with people I might have would help in building my social skills.
Not to mention, I'd work in close vicinity to my parents. I'd be able to ensure their graves were cared for, I'd be free to visit them whenever I wanted, and while the thought made me feel a little nervous—I hadn't seen their headstones since the day they'd been buried—Dr. Sibilia thought it might be a little cathartic for me to have that kind of closure.
It seemed like an all-around win to me, especially because I’d finally be able to help financially. It wouldn’t all have to come down to Luke and Melanie, and I thought that, maybe, it could help to lift some of the strain off them.
With my jacket on, I checked the hook beside the door for the car keys. They weren’t there.
Maybe Luke’s pocket .
But after checking his leather jacket dumped sloppily over the back of Dad's recliner, I found they weren’t there either.
“Luke!” I shouted louder this time. “Where are the keys?!”
There was no answer again, and sighing, I rolled my eyes and began the climb upstairs when Melanie came hurrying down.
“Hey,” I said as she passed. “What the hell did Luke do with the car keys?”
She shrugged, her eyes exhausted and weighed down by the dark circles beneath them. “Who knows? He came home last night and passed out before I could even talk to him.”
I shook my head and headed back down the stairs behind her. It’d become routine. Luke went down to Tony’s to have a few beers with his self-proclaimed pals. I was glad, so far, that Ritchie never seemed to be among them—that I was aware of anyway—but still. I had yet to understand what was so appealing about Tommy and Rob, at least from what I remembered, and I had no desire to figure it out.
“So, he’s still sleeping,” I guessed out loud, checking the pockets of his jacket once more. Just in case.
“Yeah,” Melanie replied, sounding as tired as she looked. “And whenever he does wake up, he’s going to be hungover, so you know how that’s gonna be.”
Luke was insufferable when he was hungover. He was almost angrier than when he was drunk.
I checked the clock and groaned. “I’m going to be late for this damn interview.”
Melanie reached out for her keys on the hook beside the place where Luke’s were supposed to be. “Here. You can take my car.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded, passing the keys to my hand. “Yeah, I’m off tonight, so it’s not like I have to go anywhere. All I have to do is clean up around here, do some laundry, and deal with your brother.”
I didn’t like the way she’d said that— deal with your brother —as if the very thought of spending any time with him wasn’t unlike a trip to the dentist. And it wasn’t that I didn’t understand. Luke’s bad days, the ones where he’d go right to the bar from work and come home late and drunk, were becoming more common than the good ones—times when he’d come home immediately after he was done at the shop and spend time with Melanie or me or both. Dealing with him was just that— dealing . Tolerating. Trudging through one day and into the next, only to do it all over again.
But if she was unhappy, then she was likely to leave. And I wasn’t sure what I’d do if Melanie left.
Both of us really—God, would Luke have any reason to be sober at all if she left? Would he even survive ?
But … mostly me.
I'd be lost without her.
“I can help clean when I get home,” I offered. “And I can make dinner.”
Dinner was something I’d gotten decent at since the days of Amanda with a star. A gourmet chef I was not, but my meals were edible, and it left Melanie with one less thing to do some nights.
I couldn’t imagine another twenty-three-year-old working as hard as she did, and I’d kick my brother’s ass into next Wednesday for not appreciating her more if I realistically believed I could take him.
“That’d be nice,” she said, finally smiling for the first time since she’d come downstairs. “I think we have the stuff to make pasta.”
“I can grab Italian bread on the way home.”
“Oh, that sounds good. Yeah, do that.”
Her face was lit up now. A little less tired, a little more relieved, and that made me feel better. She was more likely to stay another day if she had something happy to look forward to.
“Anything else you need me to grab?” I asked, heading for the door.
She thought about it for a second with her hands planted on her hips. Melanie used to put so much effort into her appearance. She’d work out, do her makeup and hair, and wear nice clothes. These days, I couldn’t remember the last time she’d dressed in something other than sweatpants and Luke's baggy T-shirts or one of her work uniforms—the one she wore at the drugstore or the one she wore as the receptionist at her dad’s shop. And it wasn’t that she was no longer pretty. Melanie was one of the most naturally beautiful women I’d ever known. But it was her lack of desire to make an effort that left me bothered, and I wasn’t sure if it was that she didn’t have the time or that she'd just forgotten how to care about herself while caring about us.
I hated the idea that Luke could make her feel that way. I hated it even more if the reason had anything to do with me.
“I don’t think so,” Melanie finally replied. “Just the Italian bread will be fine.”
“Okay,” I said on my way out the door, already knowing I was going to also grab a pint of her favorite ice cream.
***
The interview didn’t take long, and I was given the job on the spot.
The old guy who conducted the interview—a bald man by the name of Marty—said most young guys weren’t into the idea of spending time with a bunch of ghosts, and I laughed, thinking he was making a joke, until I realized he wasn’t laughing with me.
“You don't believe in ghosts?” he asked, lifting one brow to eye me studiously.
“I didn't say that. But are there really ghosts here ?” I asked, not at all startled by the talk of an afterlife.
He looked me dead in the eye and replied, “Son, it’s a graveyard. What do you think?”
I shrugged and looked around the hallowed ground, then said, “I don’t know. I think, when I’m dead, I wouldn’t want to haunt the place where I was buried. I’d probably prefer to go wherever the people I cared about were.”
He nodded slowly with what seemed like consideration, looking off into the distance, before saying, “Maybe they just don’t have anywhere else to go.”
That comment rolled around my brain on the ride to the grocery store and all the time it took to grab Italian bread, ice cream, and a case of Dr. Pepper. Just lingering and nagging me to mull it over, to obsess about what it might be like to die and not have anyone to care about you in your afterlife, let alone haunt.
Do the dead even give a crap about things like that?
As I’d already mentioned, I hadn’t visited my parents’ graves since they’d died. I hadn’t been able to face their names, carved eternally into the stones Nana had paid for. But now that I had a job at the same cemetery and I’d have to care for the land their bodies lay beneath, a simultaneous battle between comfort and sadness crushed against my chest as I drove Melanie’s car back home.
And why hadn’t my parents haunted me? Why hadn’t they sent me any of those signs people talked about all the damn time? I figured, of all people, I’d be the most susceptible to receiving messages from the beyond, so why the hell not? Did they think I didn’t care? Or was it that they didn’t care about me or the trauma they’d caused when they died?
Suddenly, I didn’t want to cook dinner. I didn’t care about eating or celebrating the job I’d gotten. All I wanted was to go inside, crawl into bed, and miss my mom and dad while their room stood dormant down the hall, still untouched after all this time.
But when I got inside, there was Melanie, vacuuming the carpet, keeping the house clean when I knew damn well, if she wasn’t here, it’d all go to hell. I knew I’d try, but Luke wouldn’t. The house was too big, my time would be spread too thin with the new job, and sooner or later, it would become too much for me alone to handle.
What am I going to do without her?
The thought nearly left me breathless. There was a calm, knowing certainty laced between the words. Like I already knew my time with her here was limited, the way I'd known things in the past. I couldn't be sure of when or how, but I knew in that moment, one day, she would be gone.
I just hoped I'd be ready when it inevitably happened.
I'll never be ready .
“Hey!” she exclaimed when she realized I was home. “How was the interview?”
“Good,” I choked out, closing the door behind me. “I got the job.”
“Charlie!” She turned off the vacuum and ran toward me, arms outstretched. “Congratulations!”
She hugged me tightly, and I lowered my chin to touch the top of her head. It hadn’t been that long ago when I could look straight into her eyes, but somehow, in the past seven years since meeting her, I’d grown over a head taller. How did that just happen ? How had I not noticed?
“Thanks,” I said as the hug ended and she took a step back.
“Are you excited?”
Her grin was contagious, and I grinned back.
“Yeah, actually. It’s a pretty cool job, and I like the old guy I’m working for.”
She reached out to touch my elbow. “Good. I’m so happy for you.”
I nudged my head to the side toward the stairs. “Luke awake yet?”
Her happiness and excitement wilted immediately, like a flower denied rain and sunlight. “Nope. He’s out cold. Still breathing though, so I guess that’s something.” She said it with a lighthearted air, but I thought we both questioned if the day would actually come when Luke would go to sleep and simply not wake up. It was a problem neither of us ever talked about much, and maybe it was just that we didn’t know what else to say that hadn’t already been said.
How many times could you mention that someone needed help before you simply stopped mentioning it at all?
“I guess I’ll start cooking,” I said, then held up the bag. “And, hey, I got ice cream for dessert.”
There was that happiness again, lighting up the room. Her eyes twinkled as she asked, “Double fudge brownie?”
“Would I get any other flavor?” I rolled my eyes as I walked past her toward the kitchen. “Come on, Mel. You know me better than that.”
***
Luke did eventually wake up, just before dinner was ready, but he complained that he felt too much like dog shit to even think about eating.
So, he hung out in the bedroom he shared with Melanie while she and I had dinner. And even though it might not have been the first meal we shared in each other’s company, it was the first one to begin with a strange discomfort and almost-complete silence.
She set the table while I brought over the pot of pasta, and we moved around each other in an odd, practiced dance but without a single word spoken. We sat simultaneously across from each other and filled our plates.
We chewed and buttered our bread and drank from our glasses, and the whole time, I wondered, What is she thinking?
Part of me worried that she was already planning her escape from this house. That my thought of forewarning earlier hadn't been a premonition of the future, but the present.
Don't freak out. Not yet .
It would help if she fucking said something .
Then, as if she were gifted with the ability to read minds, she said, “I don't know what to do with him anymore, Charlie.”
The sound of her voice was so abrupt and unexpected at that point that I nearly jumped out of my seat as my eyes bounced from my plate to meet her gaze.
“Yeah, I know. I don’t either.”
Melanie pulled in a shaky breath as her bottom lip began to tremble. “I just …” She clamped down on that lip to stop it from quivering, even as her eyes flooded with tears. And then she just gave up altogether, allowing them to fall freely as she continued to speak. “I just miss him so much, you know?”
I did know, and I nodded. “Yeah.”
“And that’s crazy, right? Missing someone who is literally right there , right in front of you … but it doesn’t feel like him. Sometimes, it does. Sometimes, I talk to him, and I’m like, Oh, there he is. There’s Luke .” She gasped with a sob as she wiped her face with the backs of her hands. “And all I can do is hope that’s the time he doesn’t go away again, but he always does. And, God, Charlie …” She dropped her head into her hands. “I’m just so tired. I’m so fucking tired. I’m tired of missing him. I’m tired of hoping he’ll want to talk to me. I’m tired of begging him for any kind of acknowledgment. I’m tired of lying in bed, wishing he’d fucking touch me the way he used to or that sex won’t feel like a goddamn chore.”
She groaned, lifting her head and letting her hands fall to the table. “I’m sorry. You don’t want to hear about this shit.”
I didn’t. I didn’t want to hear the details about my brother’s sex life—or lack of, apparently. It was bad enough I’d had to hear them going at it down the hall all these years. The last thing I needed was for his girlfriend to confide in me about their premarital problems. But Melanie was also my friend, and it was obvious that she was desperate to talk, so I shook my head.
“No, it’s okay. I get it. You need to vent.”
“I just love him,” she stated simply. “I love him so fucking much, and I want him to come back to me—to both of us, honestly. And I think that’s what makes it so hard to leave. Like, I just think, What if he’s suddenly better after I’m gone, and I miss the chance to see him normal again? Or worse, what if, I don’t know, he … he is like this because of me? What if I did this to him?”
“No. You know that’s not true,” I insisted adamantly.
The truth was that our parents’ deaths had fucked us both up. It was just that, for me, all that had happened was the amplification of my existing issues. But for Luke, he’d been so focused on fixing me that he never stopped long enough to realize he needed to be fixed too.
Now, he was broken—maybe even beyond repair—and that was, in a way, my fault. Not hers. Mine .
If he hadn’t been so damn concerned about me, he wouldn’t have been so carefree with himself. He wouldn’t have sought a Band-Aid to patch his wounds and instead taken himself to the ER to get stitched up.
Melanie sniffled and wiped her eyes again, nodding. “I know. I just … I just hate this. I hate that I can remember a time when everything was so fun and easy, and I hate that I know nothing will be like that ever again. And yet”—she laughed beside herself, shrugging—“here I am, because I love him too much to give up.”
Nobody will ever love me like that , I caught myself thinking as I stared at the tears drenching her face.
We ate the rest of our dinner, and then I excused myself to shower and hang out in my room with some Nine Inch Nails and my sketchbook. My feelings and fears of living a loveless life felt too big to keep them stifled, so I let the Sharpie do the talking.
Big, sweeping circles and jagged lines formed the spider, standing in the middle of a field, barren of everything but countless, nameless headstones. He wore an expression as vacant as the dark, cloudless sky, save for one rogue tear clinging to his cheek.
Destined to care only for the dead because nobody alive cared for him.
I swatted a tear from my own face at the same time the door down the hall opened.
Melanie had gone to bed a while ago, and those footsteps now didn’t belong to her.
I listened as Luke quietly walked past my room and down the stairs, and I dropped the sketchbook and marker to go after him and see what he was up to, where he was going.
He was already down the stairs by the time I caught up with him, and he was heading in the direction of the kitchen.
“Oh, hey,” he mumbled, glancing briefly over his shoulder.
His eyes barely met mine for a second before looking away.
He didn’t bother to ask how my interview had gone. Didn’t even express any interest in what I was still doing awake. His lack of care for anyone else dug beneath my skin, deeper than ever before. And when he reached the fridge, opened the door, and pulled out a bottle of beer, I smacked it right out of his hand.
He hadn’t expected it. Neither had I. The glass clattered loudly against the tiled floor, but didn’t break, resounding through the otherwise hushed kitchen. Luke stared at the amber glass, nearly black in the lack of light, before turning to me. Fuming and insulted.
He took a step toward me. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Charlie?”
“What the fuck is wrong with me ?” I jabbed a finger at my chest.
“Yeah,” he challenged, shoving hard against me, sending my body backward toward the wall.
I regained my footing and shoved him back. “I can’t believe you even have the balls to ask me that fucking question when you should be looking in the fucking mirror.”
His back hit the refrigerator. The impact left him stunned, confused as to how to react. The years separating twenty and twenty-three weren’t that big. They had made us nearly the same height—I was taller now—and the hours at the gym had made me stronger. He might’ve been able to lift more than me, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t put up a good fight against him—even if I knew he was likely to win in the end.
“You stay out of my way, asshole,” he warned, pointing a finger at my face. “You understand me? If I wanna have a beer, I’m gonna have a beer. Now—”
“Yeah? And what does your girlfriend say about that? Does she have to stay out of your way too?”
Luke’s jaw tensed for a moment before saying, “Melanie has nothing to do with this.”
“Oh, no? That’s news to me. Probably to her, too, considering she was crying earlier about how much she wished you’d stop fucking drinking.”
His nostrils flared at my combative tone, and then he bent to snatch the beer from off the floor. He stomped, barefoot, past me toward the living room, as if he’d had the final word, but he was wrong about that.
I trailed close behind, and he pretended not to notice. When he dropped onto the couch, kicked his feet up, and grabbed the TV remote, I didn’t move from his direct line of sight. Instead, I stared down at him, defiant and stubborn.
“Will you fucking move?” he asked coolly.
“No.”
He used the coffee table’s edge to pop the top off the bottle before getting up and flopping to the other side of the L-shaped sectional. Then, with a smug little smirk on his face, he turned on the TV, now unperturbed by my presence.
“What the fuck happened to you, Luke?” I asked, shaking my head.
He flipped the channels mindlessly, keeping his gaze diverted from mine.
“You know, Melanie says she misses you. Did you know that? She says she’d fucking leave if she didn’t love you so goddamn much.”
“Then, she should fucking go,” he muttered, shrugging like it all meant nothing.
“You know what?” I slammed my hand against my chest. “I agree with you! She should! She doesn’t deserve this shit. And if you had any fucking decency left in you, you’d let her go. Fucking break up with her! Because she’s wasting her life on you. Do you realize that? She’s wasting her fucking life waiting for you to get your head out of your ass. And she deserves better than that. She deserves someone who loves her. She deserves—”
“Do you love her?”
He turned to level me with a narrowed glare, and I could see it there, something possessive and alive flickering somewhere within his otherwise indifferent expression. I had awakened that tiny piece of the old Luke, the Luke we—Melanie and me—had been holding out hope for.
So, I risked bodily harm by shrugging and lying. “Maybe.”
Just to see what he’d say.
Just to see what he’d do.
And what he did was get up quicker than I could blink and grab my shirt by the collar to bring his face close enough for me to feel the heat emanating from his skin.
“Look me in the eye and tell me you fucking love her, and I swear to God, Charlie, I’ll fucking beat you so hard—”
“I don’t fucking love her, you idiot,” I said, relenting easily. “Not like that. But what if I did? Why does it even fucking matter to you? It’s not like you do.”
His grip on my shirt loosened as the anger etched into the lines on his face eased, just a little. “Yes, I do.”
“Well, you have a really fucked-up way of showing it.”
He released his hold on me altogether and dropped back down to the couch, pushing his hands into his hair.
“You’ve spent years worried about me,” I said, standing over my older brother. “Now, how about you start worrying about yourself? And stop pushing Melanie away unless you really want her to go. Because one day, she will, and if it’s because you’re too busy drinking yourself to death to see how lucky you are to have someone like her, I’ll never fucking forgive you for that.”
My heart hammered wildly as I turned around and headed back upstairs, the adrenaline flowing through my veins. I’d said exactly what I’d needed to say, and I hadn’t allowed for him to reply. All I could hope was that he thought about what I’d said. All I could hope was that it’d make a difference.
And I guessed it had, even if for a while. Because the next day, Luke went to his first AA meeting. Two weeks after that, he asked Melanie to marry him.
She said yes, and I prayed that she wouldn’t regret it.
And I prayed that, one day, someone might love me as much as she loved him.