Caleb
Somewhere in the middle of things that morning, I stopped trying to live.
Didn't matter that my dad was hurting and hollering, sold cold that I'd killed the loves of his life. Didn't matter that I couldn't see him from where I was, or that he couldn't see me, ‘cause I heard the threats in his cries. The fire in the promise that somebody was gonna pay for what happened and that somebody was me.
The two-bit cop standing in my kitchen couldn’t hear that anger like I did—he didn't know how to listen. He picked my dad up off the floor, like there was something to be sorry for, like he was a guiltless old man with a tragedy on his hands.
There wasn't anything on those dirty old fingers but his sons' blood. His were no different from mine.
Jack left without a fight. Limped out the door and crumbled into the back of a cop car like he didn't care where he was going. I stood in the hallway and listened to the tires tear up the gravel driveway ‘til there was nothing left to hear.
It was just me and the quiet for a while, and when we're together for too long things get bad. This time was the worst. All I thought about was Marcus, didn’t matter how much I wanted to stop, I just kept thinking ‘til I damn near drove myself crazy.
Even in the middle of all my sadness, he would’ve told me to get my head out of my ass and keep going. But dead people can't talk, and living people don't listen, so I gave up on trying.
A cop walked into my house and ten minutes later I didn't have my brothers anymore. It was that quick, that easy, and I was just supposed to keep going like it would fix things. The police put half my family in the ground and I was supposed to keep going.
My dad wanted me dead, and I was supposed to keep going. A girl I didn't know twenty-four hours ago was ruining me, and I was supposed to keep goddamn going.
But when it came to her, I thought I could. I thought by just being around her things could be better somehow, but I was wrong about all that.
Marcus tried, Cillian tried, everybody tried to warn me about her, but there's been something wrong with me for as long as I've been breathing, and I’ve never been good at listening to anybody.
But I listened to her. I chose to follow her and left Marcus alone. He bled and died so I could keep going. Now, I was bleeding out my eyes for him. Crumbled on the hallway floor, digging my nails into my face ‘til everything turned red.
After a while, when the quiet tugged its noose nice and tight around my throat so I couldn’t cry anymore, I lost who I was. It was that easy, that quick. Like my soul snapped clean into pieces smaller than diamond dust.
Dad used to tell me that he could pick out the weak men in this world by looking at the lines in their faces. Softies didn't have any 'cause all they did when it came to trouble was cry to somebody who'd listen.
But the tough guys, the real gritty kind, they had trouble in their blood. They kept quiet and let it run through ‘til it scarred and carved stories in their faces.
So I hung up my soft skin and all the bruises I’d painted it with, strung up my weakness, and left it to choke. I wouldn't cry or talk to anybody anymore—just let my blood poison me ‘til I earned my scars. I felt them coming, and they'd be deeper than graves.
***
I went looking for Hailey. Didn't matter that I was bleeding through my shirt just trying to get to her, 'cause the new, dead, me had some things to settle with the girl who'd screwed up everything.
I passed my Ma's room halfway down the hall—still locked, still smelled like those lily flowers that did nothing else but make me sad. Just thinking about her was enough weigh me down so I blocked her out before her memory buried itself deeper than my bullet wound.
Second to last door on the left was mine—ours—a room that belonged to more ghosts than people now. Standing at the door, something between my heart and stomach twisted around ‘til it ached.
If I gave into that quicksand sadness again, I'd end up on the floor again drowning in salt water. Dad was coming back soon, and I'd be dammed if he saw me like that twice.
Hailey didn't see me come in but she heard me there. The second I saw her tied to the bed like some kind of animal, I grabbed Liam’s old pocket knife out from under his mattress and cut her loose. As much as she deserved, she didn’t belong tied down to a bedpost.
She sat up and smoothed out the kinks in Ma's clothes like she knew to be careful with them. She could be as careful as she wanted, it didn't change the fact that I couldn’t stand anybody touching Ma's things. Even her.
"What the hell are you doing?" I asked.
She backed away from me further into the bed, like fear had finally found its home in her. She looked terrible, like she’d been crying as much as I had and sleeping about as little.
"Where’d you get those, Hailey?"
Her eyes darted down to her clothes and back up to me.
"Your dad."
She gave me this look like she saw my Dad standing in front of her instead of me.
"Caleb, I’m sorry."
"Those are my Ma's,"
My voice jammed in my throat. I couldn't stand seeing her eyes spilling over with pity like she knew everything was going wrong. I didn't want her to. I didn't want her feeling sorry for me. I just wanted her to let me be, but from the looks of it, she didn't have any plans to.
"Are you deaf or something? Give her stuff back! I’ll turn around if you want, just take them off!"
"Okay, I will and I’m sorry. I didn't know these were her’s, I never would’ve worn them if I had. Just calm down or you'll hurt yourself."
"You think I don’t know that? Just stop talking and give them back, please."
I turned my back to her so she wouldn't know I was quietly losing myself, quietly breaking down into the old me— the guy who cried about everything.
Why’d she have to be in those clothes? Why’d she have to ask so many damn questions? Every time she opened her mouth her words ate away at the half of a heart beating inside me.
I leaned into Marcus's bunk when the world tilted and spun out of control. Bullets couldn’t kill me, but she could’ve if she’d wanted to.
I'd planned on coming in and hollering at her ‘til I felt better—picking at her a piece at a time so I didn’t have to be the only one falling apart. I wanted somebody to blame. I needed somebody else to hold on to the hurt hanging heavy on my shoulders.
But seeing her in Ma’s clothes killed even the worst motivations in me. Remembering Ma was a lot like living through losing her all over again.
She’d left us all of a sudden—alive one minute, gone the next, and hearing about Marcus the way I did, wasn’t any different. But things weren’t supposed to go that way for him.
He was supposed to be an old man with kids and grandkids before he went. Now, he’d never see thirty. If I got what I wished for, neither would I.
“You know something, Hailey? Your old man’s killed just about all the family I have."
The old wooden beams of my bunk bed creaked to life as she got up off the mattress. If she’d known what I planned on telling her, she would’ve stayed sitting.
“What are you talking about?”
“The truth. I figure if you’re wearing my Ma’s clothes, you might as well hear about what happened to her.”
I didn’t need to see her face to know how she was looking at me. Those billboard-brown eyes of hers, wider than a Texas plain, staring at me liked I’d flipped her world on its head.
“You hear anything about that big asbestos case in Manassas your dad got involved in a couple years back?”
She shook her head and stayed quiet like I needed her to.
“My Ma used to work in one of the public schools he shut down. She taught kids, she loved it too. I wouldn’t have gotten through school without her.”
That same old ache flared up again, so I sat down on Marcus’s bunk before I fell into it.
“So your dad shows up, being the great Virginia senator that he is, and tells the poorest schools in the district they were getting shut down. My Ma and the other teachers thought it was budget cuts or something political. He promised that everybody working in those schools would keep their jobs and transfer somewhere else. So Ma came home, and waited by the phone for the district to call her and tell her where she’d be teaching next.”
I hated thinking about that day. She’d never cried so much in her life. Dad thought she was stupid for getting all torn up about her students. “She had her own brood, she didn’t need anymore”. That’s how he thought about it. He never understood anybody, not even himself.
“After the first couple weeks, she started worrying ‘cause nobody called. So she reached out to the other teachers, the district, but nobody had any answers. She started looking tired, and awful all the time. I thought it was ‘cause she worried too much. Turns out she was sick.”
Hailey got so quiet that I couldn’t even hear her breathing.
“That’s when the phone calls started coming in. The district told teachers who’d been at my Ma’s school to get checked out, something about asbestos in the walls. Me and Liam took her in to the doctors. My Dad wasn’t even around when they told us she was dying. ”
Nobody ever heard this story before. My brothers and I just lived it. Didn’t know why I was telling her. Maybe I wanted her to feel guilty about something that wasn’t her fault. Maybe I just needed somebody to tell.
“After Ma died, all these court cases popped up against the state and school district ‘cause they’d known about the poison in the walls for years and didn’t tell anyone. By the time they called her to give her job back, Ma couldn’t even get out of bed.”
My throat closed up so fast it got hard to talk.
“Your dad paid off the teachers trying to sue him, gave them new jobs, built new schools, and everybody thought he was a hero. Nobody paid attention to the cover up, or the people who died, they just kept on going with their lives. My family couldn’t, Hailey. Sometimes people just can’t. ”
I thought she would’ve said something—called me a liar or told me to stop crying, ‘cause I couldn’t keep it together anymore. But she didn’t.
She stepped in close and slid her hands slow and soft around my waist. Then her skinny little arms, all bruised up, locked around me ‘til I could feel her against my back. She pressed her body against me, ‘til I dissolved into something other than sadness. She didn’t have to say a word for me to hear her silent “I’m sorry’s” loud and clear.
She held onto me tight and filled some part of the emptiness kicking around in my chest like she had something I needed, something I was missing. She didn’t ask questions, she didn’t want answers, she just listened to me struggle to breathe out my sorrow.
I slid my hands over hers and they fit together like we were cut, bruised, and broken in all the right places so neither of us could hurt each other. I pulled her tighter to me ‘til I believed she wouldn’t run, that she wouldn’t leave me lonely like my family had.
She let me cry and didn’t make me feel small for doing it. Hardly anybody else in my life gave me that grace, but I kept my gratitude a secret.
We stayed stuck to each other ‘til I came a little too close to losing track of the world caving in around us. Trouble was coming, it creeped underneath my skin like the rats beneath the floorboards.
Dad would be back soon and the cops would too if they planned on searching the place. I listened for tires on the driveway. The walls were so thin you could hear copperheads slithering through the woods if you paid attention. Nothing moved, not yet.
I dug through the closet to find Hailey some clothes while she changed out of my Ma’s. Cillian used to sneak girls over sometimes, so I figured I’d find something. Never knew how he did it, but he'd cut outta work early on afternoons when nobody was home and do his thing.
The girls always left some piece of themselves behind and he kept their mementos in our closet like sports trophies. Cillian wouldn't have even wanted Hailey in the house, much less in our room. But as easy as it was to blame Hailey for her dad double-crossing us, she hadn’t done anything wrong.
Anderson was the enemy, not his little girl. We made a deal with the devil, and we’d paid for our mistakes.
But Liam had his mind made up that I was the mistake, that I’d messed things up for all of us by picking the wrong side. My brothers believed in him more than they did me, but I’d spent more time than anybody paying for things I shouldn’t have.
Dad beat the blame into me—for Ma, for my brothers leaving, for my brothers dying, for his whole life going wrong. It was always me. I used to think I deserved it—just did what I was told, and took his punishment like it would fix things. It never did.
So running into Hailey was like running into me. Everybody blamed her for things she didn’t do. I wasn’t gonna be one of those people, even if my family condemned me for it.
I dug up a pair of shorts and a t-shirt for Hailey to put on. The shorts belonged to a stranger but the t-shirt was an old one of mine. I cracked a smile the second she’d changed ‘cause she looked so different—like a country girl with country grit.
She cocked her head to the side and bit down on her lip like she couldn’t figure out what I was thinking. I didn’t want her to. A man’s entitled to his secrets.
“What’s wrong?”
I figured she’d ask that. Why do girls think that every time it gets quiet that something’s wrong? Sometimes thinking works better than talking.
“Nothing. Just trying to figure a way out of here,” I said.
She didn’t buy it.
“You smiled. You never smile. You grimace a lot, but there’s hardly any teeth involved and never crinkly eyes and raised cheekbones.”
She was right. Life never gave me much to smile about, so I forgot how to after a while. I shouldn’t have been smiling on a day like this. There wasn’t anything funny about all the bad news I’d heard, but there was something funny about her.
At least, smiling ‘cause of Hailey meant not crying about everything else. She probably thought I was delirious. Maybe I was. Maybe it was the morphine.
“You just look different, that’s all. Like you’re not too good for everybody anymore. You look—good,” I said.
In my head that made sense, but everything turned out sounding real dumb when I said it. Best bet was to sit down and shut up before I made myself look like more of an idiot. I tried getting back over to my bunk, but wasn’t steady enough on my feet to do it alone.
Hailey caught me before I fell into anything. Didn’t matter that I wanted to get two of us outta my Dad’s house and back on the road, I didn’t have it in me yet.
With the cops steps behind us, we’d have to work twice as hard to stay off the radar. I’d left so much of my blood all over the house the dogs would sniff me out easy if I tried hiding here.
I wanted to give her answers, a solution, a way out, but I didn’t have one. But Hailey looked more worried about me than an escape route. She laid me down in Marcus’s bunk, sat on the edge of the mattress, and stared at his pictures on the wall.
“Did you guys build this?” She asked.
Hailey pointed out an old Polaroid of me, Marcus, and Liam sitting with Dad’s toolbox on the floor of our old tree house. We built that thing years ago a good couple miles into the woods so we could hide out on the nights Dad came home angry.
Cillian hated heights so he always complained about climbing up, but the four of us loved it so much we’d sleep there sometimes. We got trapped in dad’s house during the winter ‘cause it was too damn cold to spend the nights out in the woods, but the place did its job in the summer. As long as dad hadn’t figured out our secret, it was safe.
“Yeah, it’s a couple miles out from here. I’m the last one who knows about that place aside from Liam.”
“You think you can make the walk?” She asked.
“I’m sure as hell gonna try.”
I pointed Hailey over to my brother’s first aid kit and told her to grab as much as she could fit in her pockets. We’d need it. At best, I’d get her home in three-four days on my dad’s morphine. I would’ve gotten her back sooner but the cops put a bullet in that idea.
Hailey stood up out of the blue and all the color drained out of her face. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to, ‘cause I heard them coming—the copperheads slithering through the woods, and cop cars slithering down the driveway.