Crow’s Row

by Julie Hockley

  My skin pruned and a towel wrapped around my torso, I zombie-walked to my bedroom. Standing dazed in the doorway, it took me a few minutes to clue in that my room was completely empty. Apart from the sheets on my bed, there was no trace of me left in there. I remembered that my stuff was somewhere out there being hastily packed so that no traces of me were left behind as evidence of my dream and nightmare.

  I yanked the curtain closed and walked away. It would take me a while before I would be able to go in there again. I rummaged through my roommate Cassie’s room. Midway through the last school year, Cassie had decided that she was a vampire. Of the few clothes that she had left behind, all were black—good enough for walking around in my coffin.

  Dressed for mourning, I went downstairs, turned on the TV, and lay on the couch. I hid under the blanket that I had dragged off of Cassie’s bed and closed my eyes. I would stay in that spot, waiting for someone to come identify the body.

  The pain had localized to my right hand, which had crunched when my fist had connected with Spider’s face. I’d spent my time watching the two middle fingers slowly grow black and blue. I couldn’t bend them anymore. By the second morning, they were so swollen that the inflammation was starting to spread to the other fingers. All I wanted to do was sleep and forget. But the throbbing was keeping me up now. Grudgingly, I used some of Cassie’s pale Goth makeup to cover up the nasty bruise that Victor had left on my cheek and neck and headed for the school medical clinic.

  The X-rays confirmed that one finger was dislocated and the other had a hairline fracture.

  “How did this happen?” the doctor asked, scanning my face over the edge of his glasses as if he could see the bruises showing through the pound of makeup.

  “Kickboxing,” I said without flinching. I had planned my excuse ahead of time.

  “Hmmm,” he said, disbelief coloring his tone. “One more day and gangrene would have cost you a finger or two.”

  He grabbed hold of my dislocated finger and, without warning, snapped it back into place. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would, but the awful sound of bones cracking into place brought a wave of nausea. I pushed the doctor away on time to puke in his garbage can. He rushed out of the room. A first-year medical student came to finish the work.

  Though I had to painfully sit still while the nervous student wedged—tried to wedge—my throbbing fingers into metal loops, at least there were no more questions. He needed to put all of his attention on his patient … his first patient ever, apparently. He would probably remember this for the rest of his life—and I would try very hard to forget.

  I trudged back to the house, looking down, avoiding eye contact with those that I passed on the street—like these strangers knew everything, like they were judging me for having survived Cameron. My pace quickened with every person that walked by. When I got back to the house, I almost slammed into Tiny on the walkway. He ignored me and went back to the truck for more boxes.

  Carly was standing by Spider’s truck, directing foot traffic. She warily walked over to me and pulled me to the side so that the guards could finish their job and get out of there.

  “How are you?” she asked, her eyes scanning my face. Her voice had almost seemed genuinely concerned.

  I glared back and squeezed my unbroken hand into a fist, but a booming bark woke me from the shadows. Meatball was pulling at his leash, which had been tied to one of the pillars of the front porch. The sight of him made me start crying. I was amazed that I had any tears left in me—everything else inside me had seemed to run dry.

  “We brought Meatball. He should be with you,” she said softly.

  I wiped my cheeks with the sleeve of my shirt. She noticed my badly taped-up fingers. “Your hand! Is it broken?”

  “It was worth it.”

  She pressed her lips. “I don’t know what you said to Spider in the car, but he was raging mad when he got back. I’ve never seen him so upset before. He looked like—”

  “What? Like he was going to kill someone?”

  Carly stood frozen like I had just slapped her in the face. In a way, my words had done just that.

  Tiny and the rest of the guards finished bringing in my bins and were waiting for Carly by the truck.

  “You can go now,” I said with bitterness.

  She jumped, suddenly awake. “No, I can’t. I have something for you.” She pulled a folded piece of paper from the back pocket of her jeans and handed it to me. I unfolded it, and a business card fell out in the process. Scribbled on the lined paper were some forty rows of jumbled letters, numbers and dashes.

  I looked up with a blank expression.

  “That’s all of them. Cameron’s bank account numbers,” she said with confidence. “There’s a lot of cash too, but it’ll take me a bit more time to get everything to you.” I was seeing red, but she didn’t notice and pointed to the card on the ground, “That’s got our accountant’s contact information. The accounts are everywhere around the world. It can get complicated. The accountant help you get the money out. You can trust him.”

  If my two fingers hadn’t been tangled in metal, I would have torn the piece of paper to shreds. But I settled for throwing it back in her face. Carly adeptly caught it.

  “I don’t want your blood money.”

  Tiny had started making his way to us as my temperature rose, but Carly bravely held him back with the palm of her hand up. “It’s not blood money, Emmy. Cameron … would have wanted you to have this. You need the money.”

  “I don’t need or want anything from you.” My glare was meant to be demented, but the effect was lost with the angry tears that rendered me pitiful.

  “Em, please just take the money.” She tried to hand me the piece of paper, but I knocked her hand away.

  “You think that giving me money will make any of this better?” I was sobbing now. “You betrayed him, Carly, all of you did. You were his only family. He trusted you. But like everyone else in his life, you turned your backs on him the minute he showed he was human. I loved him and he loved me. You destroyed that.” My voice was drowning.

  Her lips were quivering, but the lingering tears never fell. “Don’t kid yourself, Emmy; I won’t ever forgive myself for letting this happen. I will have to live with this for the rest of my life.”

  She glanced over my face for a long second. I could see the pain in her eyes. “When Bill died, I thought I was going to die. Even after all the lies, I didn’t want to live without him. But eventually, things started to get a little brighter again.” Carly gently reached her hand to my arm and I let her. “I know you hate my guts and don’t believe a word I say, but things will get better for you too. I promise. Life goes on. You need to move on with it.” She forced a smile and then turned to walk away. The tears had finally broken through.

  I realized that Carly and I now had more in common than ever—with Bill and Cameron dead, we had both lost our brother and the love of our life. We had both lost Rocco’s light. We had lost so much. But, in that moment, I felt sorrier for her than I did myself. For the rest of her life, she would be stuck with Spider and with the guilt of Cameron’s death. For some of this, I pitied her.

  Without turning back, Carly called out as she made her way to the truck, “Keep yourself safe, Emmy, and please, stay out of trouble.”

  She proceeded to climb into the truck.

  “I’m worried about you, Carly,” I blurted out after her.

  She turned. Her head tilted to the side. “You’re worried about me?”

  “Spider is dangerous. He’ll stop at nothing to get what he wants.”

  This made her break into a smile. “I’m a survivor, Em. You don’t need to worry about me. Just take care of yourself.”

  She closed the passenger-side door, and they all drove away. I wiped my face clean. There would be no more tears, I promised myself, even though I had no control over them.

  I walked over to my new roommate and looped my arms around his thick, furry neck.
He struggled to get out of my bear hug to lick my face. After a few minutes, I sighed, released him from the porch post, and led us into our new lives.

  How do you know when you’re There, I had once wondered. Maybe you’re lucky enough to notice the moment it’s happening to you. Maybe you’re able to block out all the other stuff that is, in the end, just background noise. But, most often, you don’t know that you were There until you lose it, or until it gets taken away from you. When you look back, you clearly see that time, that place, when all the pieces of you had finally fit together to make you blissfully happy, make you your whole self. Like one of those jumbo puzzles that take up your entire kitchen table for weeks, the tiny pieces are just cardboard shapes with colors splashed on them, and they don’t make any sense until you find their rightful place among the other pieces. When you put the last piece into place and the pieces now form a complete picture, that’s when you’re There. But while you were busy thinking about gluing the puzzle together, so that the pieces would never be apart again, someone comes from behind you, destroys the last piece and throws the rest of the pieces away. Even if you could muster up enough courage to put the pieces back together, the picture would never be complete again, because of the last missing piece … which, as it turned out, was smack in the middle, or in the heart, of the picture.

  My life before Cameron was a jumbled mess: some pieces were sporadically linked together—while others, like Bill’s death, had no fit. The day I met Cameron, the pieces started to flow into place, and the night that Cameron kissed me, the day that he sat next to me and told me he loved me, that was when the last pieces of me were snapped into place. Every other second, minute, hour that I spent with Cameron after that moment, made the last piece of my puzzle grow stronger, so that it made the damaged, the broken pieces become insignificant—mere background noise.

  But Cameron had taken that last piece of the puzzle with him, and a black hole was all that was left in its stead. How do you recover from that? How do you survive? You don’t, I resolved. There’s no coming back from that permanent void left inside of you. You become a shell, going through the motions without emotion, like a robot, while the rest of me was wherever Cameron was.

  In a few days, my other roommates would herd back to the house and school—the cycle, would start again. I vowed to myself that I would play the part until the moment arose when I could execute vengeance on the people who took Rocco and Cameron away from me. Then perhaps I could find Cameron again …

  Epilogue

  I was the kid who crawled out of the womb ready to fight, fists up and everything. I lay on the bed reminding myself of this while I breathed through the pain. But bullet wounds were nothing compared to the hole that had been blown through my heart, leaving a big bleeding empty space. There was nothing Dr. Lorne could do to fix that hole. No amount of stitches would put her back in there to fill the space she had vacated.

  No, people like me weren’t built to deal with matters of the heart. Hell, as far as the outside world was concerned, a guy like me didn’t have a heart to start with. I’d lived my life trying to prove them right—until recently.

  How do you fight something that you can’t see, I asked myself. How do you get rid of the guy who’s messing with your business, when that guy is you? You turn the gun on yourself, I resolved—it’s the only way to sever the human from the gangster.

  “Looks like the bullet went right through,” Dr. Lorne announced. He was holding an X-ray image to the fluorescent light of the ceiling. We had equipped him with a full ER in his house a few years ago—everything he needed to patch us up, including an X-ray machine. It was worth every penny. We kept him busy.

  After Spider shot me in the shoulder, I let Carly drag me to Dr. Lorne’s place. This was more for her benefit than mine. If she doesn’t have someone or something to worry about, she goes nuts. Dr. Lorne was the best in his field—Harvard med, one of the top surgeons in the country, medical reviews—which he had thrown all away to follow his true passion: booze. But the best thing about Dr. Lorne was that he sobered up quick, took cash, and kept his mouth shut.

  “You’re a lucky man,” he said.

  I didn’t feel lucky. Actually, I was jinxed. But I knew what he’d meant and there was nothing lucky about it. Spider was a straight shot, even with his eyes closed and an arm tied behind his back. This had been methodically planned.

  Twenty stitches later and I was as good as new—well, my shoulder was anyway.

  Dr. Lorne took out his magic bag of pills, which we also supplied him with, and handed me two yellow ones. I grabbed the bag and took two more. Drugs are great in that way: they fix everything that hurts, inside and out. The good doctor was in no position to judge me on this. He left me the bag and walked out.

  Carly, who had been whimpering on a wooden chair in the corner while the doctor did his job, spoke up, “I don’t think I can do this, Cameron. You should have seen Emmy when she heard the shots. It was as if someone were sucking the life out of her. It was … horrible.”

  “I didn’t need to see her, Carly. I heard her,” I said dryly. I knew this day had been hard on Carly. I had heard some of the things that Emmy was yelling to her. So had Spider—his face had looked like it was going to explode. But Carly understood what Emmy was going through. She had been there herself a few years ago. She didn’t hold Emmy’s spiteful words against her—and I loved her more for it. But I also didn’t need Carly to remind me of this day either. When I heard Emmy’s howls outside, it was heartbreaking, like someone was stabbing me with a screwdriver. It was too hard to bear, more excruciating than I would have ever thought was possible. Knowing that I was causing her all that pain … I had never felt more pain than in that moment. I had begged Spider to just finish me after he had fired the last shots in dead air. “Don’t be stupid,” he had answered me abruptly, and then he quickly turned around and left. I had already glimpsed the tears that had been building in his eyes. Emmy had a way of humanizing the worst of us.

  Spider couldn’t kill me. No one could, unless the leaders decided so. With me dead, no matter what Spider and Carly did, they would be next. The leaders left no room for witnesses, no room for revenge. There was no way that Spider was going to let that happen to Carly. And there was no way that I would let that happen to either of them. As annoying as they were sometimes, they were my brother and sister—blood ties or not.

  “Why can’t we forget all of this and bring her back?” Carly said teary-eyed. “I promise to watch her like a hawk. Nothing will happen to her again. I should have never let you and Spider go through with this in the first place.” She remembered how that conversation had gone, “I wished you would have listened to me when I told you and Spider that you were making a really big mistake.”

  “It’s done, Carly. Deal with it,” I sighed. There had been a moment when Emmy looked at me in the warehouse, like she was being tortured, like I was killing her, when I thought about forgetting about our plan and keeping her with me forever. But this could never happen. I couldn’t keep Emmy caged up like an animal like the rest of us. She was too beautiful, too free for that. Even if I could lock her up behind three-foot-thick cement walls, ten feet below the ground—a thought that had crossed my mind more than once—someone would always find her. Even if Shield wasn’t around anymore—and I still vowed that I would find a way to make that happen for good without getting the rest of us killed—there were a thousand more behind him who would readily take his place. As long as I was alive, Emmy would never be safe. I couldn’t die yet, but I also couldn’t fight off all the thugs that filled the underworld. Emmy had to be forced to stay away from me. Because of her utter pigheadedness, the only way that we could make that happen was to fake my death, convince her that I was gone for good, force her to let me go and move on.

  For a long second, Carly scanned my face in a way that I imagined a mother would. I already knew what she was thinking. “Cameron, you won’t make it through this. I’ve seen the w
ay you are with her. You’re not the same anymore. You can’t just go back to the way things were. This whole thing is going to kill you … both of you,” she said.

  “Drop it, Carly.” I closed my eyes. The stupid pills were taking forever to work their magic.

  I heard Carly sigh and get up. She took a few steps and stopped. “You’re nuts to leave those two alone together without adult supervision,” she mumbled. I forced a smile. Spider was as fond of Emmy as she was of him. It was a match made in hell. But apart from Carly, there was no one else in this world that I trusted more than Spider to bring my girl home safely. A shiver still went down my spine as I wondered how the chit-chat in the car was going.

  Carly was headed out the door. “Do me a favor?” I called out to her.

  “Anything.”

  “Get my money to Emmy,” I said, and added before she asked, “All of it.”

  “That’s a lot of money,” she said exasperatingly.

  “Please?”

  “You know she won’t take it, Cameron.”

  “You can convince anybody to do anything. It’s your specialty.”

  “I’m losing my touch,” she said sourly.

  Carly exited. Silence grew around me. I knew I ought to be thinking about how I was going to explain to the leaders everything that had happened in that warehouse, explain all the favors we owed, keep our heads off the chopping block. My mind had to go back to being completely focused on the business again.

  But all I could see in my head was Emmy’s bruised and tear-soaked face while she knelt by my side, overcome with pain and grief as she begged me to stay; instead, I forced her to watch me let her go …

  She’s better equipped to deal with this than me, I told myself over and over. She’ll forget about me, move on, get married, have a couple kids, and live till she’s a hundred years old. No bullets will ever touch her skin. Emmy will survive me.

  The fact that I wouldn’t survive her didn’t matter. I had already lost my kid brother. I wasn’t about to lose her too.