5
“Are you sure you want to do this today?” Birdie asks me as we pull up to the house. She whips the Skyline into the driveway and leans over to pop the latch on the glove box and her fingers wrap around the butt of the gun she has hidden inside.
“Seriously?” I hiss. There’s been too many secrets told over the last twenty-four hours and my head is spinning as I try to process it all. What had Koa gotten them all into, and why had he kept everything a secret?
We grew up together, I knew how hard our lives had been because I lived it with them.
Illegal electronic shipments and guns… I swallow hard as Birdie checks the chamber.
“I’m not walking into that house without it,” she says to me.
“We don’t know what’s waiting for us.” She’s not wrong.
We don’t know if they’re inside, and I’d rather not get anyone else hurt.
She pulls a black knife from the thigh pocket of her wide-legged jeans and flips it out so the curved blade clicks into place.
Spinning it in her hand she pinches the blade, extending the handle to me, “just in case.”
I take it from her and let the weight settle in my hand.
“Ready?” she asks, tugging her hair up under her hat before she climbs from the car. She stares at the house like it’s haunted, and maybe she's right.
He was there that night… you saw him clear as day…
The storm was playing tricks on my mind.
“Cress?” Birdie’s voice is gentle, like she’s coaxing me out of the cage I’ve put myself in.
“Yeah, sorry.” I nod. “Hey, do you have any gum?”
“Middle, “she points.” You still do that?”
“Keeps me from vomiting everywhere,” I confirm, grabbing the blue package from the center and unwrapping a piece to put between my teeth. “Let’s do this.”
Both of us climb out of the car and the only thing holding my nerves together is the hot, tingling sensation of the peppermint gum on my tongue as I panic chew it and we walk up to the back of the house. The back door is still open and I scowl at the state of the storm door’s dented metal frame.
Birdie inhales tightly.
“It wasn’t me that made that dent,” I say.
“And that?” She points quietly to the pool of drying blood on the kitchen floor on the other side of the frame.
“Not mine.” I swallow.
“You’re a badass.” Birdie says as she lifts the gun and wanders into the house.
It’s a strange thing to watch her move so technically, like she’s been taught to guard her back while keeping her feet moving and her head on a swivel.
When, though? By who? I eat the upset I feel as if it doesn’t taste like motor oil and watch her work.
She clears each destroyed room with a holler before returning to me, still frozen in the back door. “It’s empty.”
My body relaxes a touch as she shoves the gun in the back of her pants before surveying the mess of the kitchen.
“I stabbed him,” I confess. I blurt it out and Birdie’s eyes grow.
“You what?” She clears her throat and steps around the blood.
“One of them, not fatally… unless they were stupid enough to ignore my advice.” I explain to her and start to kick around at the contents of my kitchen that they dumped on the floor.
“You did that nurse thing, didn’t you?” she asks, and I look at her a little confused. “You know, when you start rambling technical terms at a person in pain.”
“I don’t do that,” I swallow tightly. “He might have bled out… but they would’ve been stupid not to take him to the hospital.”
“That’s good, I’ll text Murphy.” She pulls out her phone.
“What’s he going to do?” I shrug.
Murphy, the quiet, goofy and ill-timed youngest brother of the Monroe gang.
He came out of his mother, Yuna, with a dorky smile on his face and it’s never faded.
But the last time I saw him he was still trying to figure out how to get through most of his classes without falling asleep.
My confusion must be palpable because Birdie looks up from her phone with a soft chuckle.
“He’s sort of a super-genius when it comes to computers,” she says. “Where did you stab the guy?”
“The shoulder,” I tell her, knowing that much for sure.
“He can use that,” she types away, “to check hospitals, drug stores… basically anywhere with a camera and an internet connection. Murphy will find them.”
“That’s kind of scary.”
“It’s terrifying,” she’s quick to confirm. “He knows everyone’s secrets.”
“Right.” I clench my jaw. I’d allowed myself to push them all away after Koa’s death, even before that, and I’d missed them growing up into these careful and intentional, very dangerous people.
“It’s okay,” Birdie says, shoving her phone away. “We’ve been okay.”
“Have you?” I ask in disbelief, my eyes trailing downward as I remember the knife in my hand. I shake my head and hand it to her, watching as she expertly snaps it closed and shoves it back in her pocket.
“It’s survival, Cress. We did it to provide.”
“Is it?” I start to argue, then close my mouth again. “You jumped at the chance to come over here with me, pushed for the races… it’s like you crave it. That’s not survival.”
“You’re wrong.” She starts to move around the chaos, not really looking for anything.
We came for the book and nothing else. Some clothes, what things they didn’t destroy…
Riggs argued that staying here was dangerous and they all agreed without my input.
“It’s going to save your life,” she corrects me.
“It’s not my fault if I have fun while we do it.
” The smile that forms on her face is mischievous and wicked.
“I shouldn’t have come to you at all,” I mumble and hear her boots cross the glass and destruction. “Now it’s not just my life at risk.”
“You’re family, Cress. No matter what,” Birdie whispers. Even through death. “Koa made a vow, and we’re here to uphold it.”
2021
“Are you ready?” Birdie tugs on the zipper at my side and closes up the dress. It’s simple, quiet, and delicate. I didn’t want anything fancy, it’s just a renewal. Koa begged, and begged until I was at the point of insanity to have it in the back yard.
It’ll be like a housewarming. I just get to remind everyone how much I love you.
That’s what he’d said, and Koa always got what he wanted.
Birdie’s in a silky black dress that shows off the tattoos she’s starting to collect. At first it made me scowl, to watch her mark her perfect, pale skin. But now, she’s growing into a work of art. “Hopefully I don’t trip in these,” she laughs, backing up from me to grab her heels from the floor.
“You’ll do fine.” I stare at myself in the mirror in the master bedroom, trying to tell myself the same thing. “You’ve come a long way since learning how to walk,” I laugh and she gives me a funny little dirty look in the reflection.
I can see the backyard from the window and he’d out done himself.
The entire back yard is covered in soft petals and dark blue linens, so fancy for something so intimate.
Today is just for us, for our family but it feels right.
It’s been years since Koa and I got married on a whim,his love exploding and consuming every rational thought I had about not getting married at nineteen.
But it didn’t matter, not then, not now.
Nineteen or twenty-nine, his love is the same. Burning and everlasting.
“Pretty as ever, Birdie.” Riggs breaks the distant thoughts as he enters the room and plants a hand on her back. “Go help Murphy, he’s struggling with his tie and he’s got two more minutes before we find him hanging by it.”
Birdie giggles, low and knowing, before she slips from the room.
“Hi.” I don’t turn from the window but I can see him push a hand into the pocket of his dark jeans out of the corner of my eye.
“Hi,” he grumbles, always the same. “Here.” He holds something out to me and I almost cry at the small blue foil package.
Gum. I undo the package and pop it between my teeth and Riggs takes the foil, doing a soft turn, taking in the bedroom as he folds it between his fingers until it resembles a clumsy origami heart.
I have hundreds of little folded gum wrappers.
All laying around the house. I chew the gum to help my nerves, he folds the foil to help his.
He looks handsome. His dark, shaggy curls are longer and curl around his ears as his blue eyes search the room, landing on everything but me. His jaw tenses and he sniffles, the bridge of his broken and healed crooked nose scrunching up gently. But he’s not dressed for a wedding.
“You’re not staying?” I ask as he drops the heart onto the dresser.
“We can’t all be here to watch you two do this all over again. Someone has to be at the garage,” he lies, his excuse as flimsy as his cold expression. He’s hurt. I can see it in his eyes.
“It’s been ten years, Riggs,” I whisper. “It’s time to let go.”
“Not everything is about you,” he’s quick to snap.
The cracked supports around our family waiver in the storm that Riggs creates every time he’s moody.
Still sour that he lost the girl to his best friend.
“I came to give you this.” He pulls out an envelope from his jeans pocket and hands it to me. “It’s from Koa.”
I take it gently and Riggs shoves his hand back in his pocket. “I’ll be back for dinner. Don’t trip.” He backs away from me, but his eyes never leave mine. Somewhere deep inside my heart the love for Riggs still rumbles, long blanketed by Koa’s affection and care, but warm nonetheless.
PRESENT DAY
“You had a run that day.” I pause, staring at her, so close but still so far away.
“What?” Birdie breaks her concentration.
“The renewal we did, the housewarming that Koa made a huge deal about. Riggs left that day,” I say, and it takes her a moment to think about it, but she sighs with a tiny nod.
“Westfall doesn’t take no for an answer. Uh—Riggs took Jesse so that we could all be here for you and Koa.” Her answer hurts more than I expect it to. For you.
“Why did you leave?”
She swallows tightly. “I didn’t. I was there all day.”
“No, after the funeral,” I correct.
“Oh,” she exhales a deep breath and avoids looking at me.
“I missed him,” she confesses in a heartbreaking tone.
“He wasn’t here, no matter how much I looked for him in the pictures and in his scent.
He was gone. He—” she clears her throat.
“I’m only here because of him and I couldn’t find him in these walls anymore. ”
“I’m sorry,” I choke out.
“I can feel him at the garage, being around cars, I stole his room in the house. I can see him in the corners of that rust bucket shop. I just needed to be somewhere close, I’m sorry I left you.
” Birdie apologizes and I can’t help but forgive her because she’s just a kid that lost the only person she considered a father.
“Let’s get you that book,” I say, ignoring the deep pang of sadness that lingers. “If Murphy is as good as you say, maybe he can decipher what it all means.”
“Oh, Murphy is good with code, but Rafe is all about the numbers.” Birdie laughs.
“Which, I know, is shocking, but it’s some fucked up mind trick voodoo, I swear.
It’s like he sees something the rest of us don’t and the numbers just shift around on the page for him.
He doesn’t even have to ask nicely,” she winks.
“I have a lot of catching up to do,” I sigh.