Burn Down the Night

by M. O'Keefe

  I caught a familiar lyric in a voice from my childhood and scrolled back, searching for it.

  The thunder rolls…

  Garth Brooks.

  “Yes!” I cranked the volume and unrolled my window so the hot wind whipped my hair into a frenzy and the smell of the highway overpowered the smell of bleeding biker.

  Jennifer was all about country music. She’d had posters of all those guys in tight Wranglers and ten-gallon hats. Countless CDs and playlists. She’d had cheap, pink cowboy boots that gave her blisters.

  I’d spent more of my life calling radio stations trying to get free tickets to country music concerts than I cared to remember. For every one of Jennifer’s birthdays, every holiday, every chance I could, I tried to be lucky caller number ten or whatever. It didn’t matter the show, Jennifer loved them all. Jennifer had more luck than me, which was a radical truth in my life, and she got us tickets to festivals in Wisconsin before Dad died. And one in Florida when we were with Aunt Fern and then another one in Georgia during the good years before she left school and while I was with Hector (Good Boyfriend #1).

  Every concert, we’d dressed ourselves up and danced on the lawns and in the aisles for hours, splitting beers and counting our change to buy nachos.

  And here’s the thing—I would have sworn under oath that I hated country music. It was for Jennifer, the dancing and the radio station calling. I cared nothing for those earnest lyrics, the back-slapping good old boys, and the women who’d been done wrong.

  I rolled my eyes when she wasn’t watching. Changed the radio station when she wasn’t around. But in the last seven months, there had been no music. None. The world was silent without my sister.

  The thunder rolls and the lightning strikes.

  But here I was—screaming the lyrics. Every single word to a song I would have sworn I didn’t remember.

  That song ended, but it was a Garth block and “The Dance” came on and I knew every word to that song, too. I sang along and laughed. I felt like crying so I sang louder.

  My one gift, remembering every word to old country songs I didn’t think I liked. Well, I had two gifts, really. The second was being attracted to a certain kind of guy who only brought me orgasms and heartache.

  Max in the backseat seemed proof of that.

  Clearly, in the gift lottery I got total duds.

  Jennifer, on the other hand, won that lottery. She was the gifted one. Super smart. Like off the charts smart.

  When she was nine, Dad loaded us all into his truck with the crappy heater and the broken passenger door that had to be tied shut and drove us three hours into Madison to one of the swankier taverns for a trivia night.

  Jen—even at nine years old—had been a total world geography ringer, and we went home with five hundred dollars.

  The fall after Dad died, I tried to get Jennifer into the gifted charter school in Wilomet.

  That’s how we got found.

  “Hey, what the hell with that noise?” It was Max in the backseat and I turned down the music.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”

  “You can’t sing. In case you were wondering.”

  “Not true,” I said. “I am a karaoke champ and I have the medals to prove it.”

  Another thing Jennifer loved. Karaoke. Well, I loved it, too.

  “Where are we?”

  “Middle of nowhere. On our way to Aunt Fern.”

  “Tell me about this Aunt Fern.”

  I haven’t spoken to her in seven years and there’s a chance she won’t let us in.

  “She can take the bullet out of your leg, what else matters?”

  “Can we trust her?”

  “Like will she turn you in?”

  He was silent, and I glanced in the rearview mirror to meet his eyes. He wasn’t scared; I wasn’t sure Max could be scared. That part of his humanity might have been burned right out of him. Removed at birth by the Skulls. Who knows how that shit worked.

  Not scared, no. But worried.

  “She won’t turn you in.”

  “What about you?”

  That was a surprise. “What about me?”

  “I wasn’t the one with the bombs.”

  “Yeah, I’m not planning on telling her about that.”

  “You planning on telling her about your sister and Lagan?”

  Shame tore through me, so fast and so hard I couldn’t suck in a breath.

  Anger was a predictable comfort and I dove into its arms.

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t. But if someone is calling the cops, I don’t want to be around.”

  She wouldn’t turn me in. Aunt Fern wasn’t like that. She was stern and judgmental and she didn’t like me much, but we came from the same place and that mattered.

  “Fern won’t go to the cops.”

  “Good.”

  I thought he’d fallen asleep again it was so quiet and I was about to turn the music back up, when I heard his croaky, beat-up voice.

  “Listen. You need to promise me something,” he said. “If anything goes wrong—”

  “Like what?” I was being obtuse. Willfully. It was a habit.

  “Joan.”

  “Nothing is going to go wrong.”

  “There’s a shit-ton of stuff that could go wrong and you know it.”

  I probably knew a few ways that things could go wrong that he didn’t even know about. Because of Fern. Because of me.

  Because he was my Plan B.

  “Just…keep me away from my brother. Keep all this shit away from my brother.”

  “Max—”

  “Promise.” I was silent and he punched the back of my seat. “Don’t fuck me on this!”

  “Jesus. Fine, Max. I promise.”

  I was shit at promises. The worst.

  I broke them all the time. I made them knowing I was going to break them.

  Over and over again in my life, I had told Jennifer we were going to be okay. Practically from the moment she was born to the day I drove off and left her in that devil’s camp.

  It’s what I had told her that September after Dad died when I loaded her into the truck, that at that point had no brakes and broken windshield wipers, and drove her right to that spanking-new gifted school in Wilomet, telling her to trust me. Promising her we were going to be fine.

  Stupid. A lie. I’d known it the second I walked through the fancy doors. But I crossed those marble floors anyway, pulling Jen along behind me. Because she was smart and she deserved these marble floors and something had to change for us, or we would die out there in the scrap heap.

  Jen, though, knew it was a bad idea. She begged me to forget it, telling me that the shitty school we went to was fine. She dragged her heels making her shoes squeak across that floor.

  But I was stubborn and stupid, so I filled out the admissions paperwork under the secretary’s narrowed eye. She pretended to be kind, but she was watching me watching her. I’d put on some of my mom’s old clothes that Dad kept around, trying to look older than fifteen.

  I think about it now and cringe. How stupid must I have looked? How desperate and scared? I didn’t know anything about the cost. You had to pay tuition to go to that school. And Jen needed to take a bunch of tests to even be considered.

  I didn’t know shit.

  Before I finished with the form, the secretary called some service and we were swarmed with social workers and police and everything changed.

  Our mother died when Jennifer was a baby which left us in the not-so-tender-care of the system but after a few weeks in a foster home, they finally tracked down Aunt Fern. We’d been stunned she was real. We’d thought she was just a story Dad told us, like Santa Claus or Paul Bunyan. This magical, mystical sister who’d gone off into the army and was too busy saving the world to write or call or visit.

  But if we were shocked she was real, Fern must have been blown away to find out we existed at all.

  But she took us in
. Kept us from being separated. Two things I did not appreciate enough when I was a kid.

  So, on my sixteenth birthday we left the woods of Wisconsin and moved to Florida.

  At the time, Fern had been the worst thing that I could imagine happening to us. I had too little experience with blessings to recognize them when I landed on their doorstep. To appreciate them when they tried to be kind.

  And she had tried—in her super weird way.

  Why wasn’t I kinder to her?

  It never occurred to me to wonder why she wasn’t kinder to me.

  The country music was once again, too earnest. The happiness those singers claimed felt like one of my broken promises.

  I changed the channel and found some miserable classic rock station with songs I didn’t know at all.

  “Everything is going to be fine,” I told the passed out, bleeding biker in my backseat.

  The sun came up over the orange trees. Alligators crawled out of the drainage ditches beside the highways.

  Killer shadows just waiting.

  Chapter 6

  Aunt Fern lived in a coral tower between the main drag and the beach, side by side with a dozen other coral towers, each one nearly indistinguishable from the other. I knew this because once a year I got an email from her saying,

  Sitrep: unchanged. You?

  Which I took to mean she was the same rigid woman living in the same condo complex.

  At least, I hoped to God that was what she meant. If she’d moved, I was in serious trouble.

  I was exhausted but shaking from the amounts of caffeine I’d been pouring down my throat—my front seat was littered with cans of Red Bull, coffee cups, and those little red bottles of five-hour energy shit.

  My heart was racing in my chest. I was probably going to have a heart attack any minute.

  Giddy and slap happy, I laughed at the thought. I would survive the bombs and the shoot-out only to die of a heart attack in front of a retirement condo in Florida.

  Sweet, sweet irony.

  I slowly rolled down the main strip, amazed that nothing had changed much in the nearly seven years I’d been gone.

  At the top of the strip, just off the highway, there was a big hotel. Something fancy. That hadn’t been there before. There’d been a cheap motel and I’d had a thing with Jared, who worked the desk. He and I and a few friends of his would party in the rooms that weren’t rented out. Bad Boyfriend #1.

  Along the strip were a few more coffee shops than there had been before. A lot fewer donut places, which was a shame. The nice seafood restaurants were all still there: the Lobster Pot and Sweetgrass. The dive bars; Frankie’s still had its peel and eat special and dollar drafts at happy hour.

  A few of the old condos had gotten facelifts. Paint jobs.

  But all in all—unchanged. Like nothing had happened.

  Time moved on in other parts of the world. Not in Indian Shores, Florida.

  What a weird relief.

  I found her condo because I remembered it was across the street from the gas station with the night shift guys who never carded me during those few years I lived here. All the smokes and beers I wanted for the small price of a little flirtation. It had been cheap currency back then.

  I pulled into the circular parking area in front of the building feeling utterly conspicuous. Like I was driving the bloodmobile.

  Exhaustion made me buzz. And it seemed possible that I could just evaporate in the humidity. And that would be fine. A relief even.

  Putting the car in park was an epic act of will.

  The engine of the car hummed beneath me and I was so tired, even my cellphone felt heavy in my hand. I was so tired that I took a second to make sure this was my real cellphone and not the one that would make bombs go off.

  Real.

  Thank God.

  I pressed in the number I knew by heart even now. It was like I knew somehow I would need it. Some dangerous day ahead of me would require Aunt Fern.

  Fern answered her cellphone on the third ring.

  “Hello?” She said it like “yel-lo” and I smiled despite the fact that there was something like a sob rising up in my chest.

  I closed my eyes and concentrated on the burn I felt. The pain gave me a little strength.

  Grounded me to this shitty car with its sticky velour seats, the scent of blood that filled it, and the soft breathing of a possibly dying man in the backseat.

  Jennifer. I thought of Jennifer. And I swallowed the sob. And my pride.

  “Aunt Fern?”

  “Jesus…Olivia?”

  That name again, it was so weird to hear it. It was like Fern was talking about a different person. Some stranger.

  “Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “It’s me.”

  “God. You gotta lot of nerve, kid, you know that?”

  “That’s what you always told me.”

  “It’s been…it’s been years.”

  “Seven. It’s been seven years.”

  Since Jennifer turned eighteen. Jen went to college and I took off with Jared (Bad Boyfriend #1) like an asshole in the night. Stupid. God, I was so stupid coming here. She was not going to help. I’d never given her any reason to.

  “Seven years and no word.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Fern laughed that throaty laugh of hers. It was surprising, that laugh. Surprisingly happy. And Fern never seemed very happy.

  “No you’re not,” she said. Which wasn’t exactly true. At this moment, alone and desperate, I was sorry for everything. “Where are you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  I laughed and used the neck of my shirt to wipe at my eyes. “I’m out front.”

  “Out front where?”

  “Here. I mean. Your condo. Indian Shores—”

  “You’re outside my condo?”

  This is where she tells me to get lost. It’s where I’d tell me to get lost. The water under our bridge was totally indifferent. She did not care enough about me to take on all this drama.

  “I am.”

  She hung up.

  I’d been expecting it in a way. Her refusing to see me had been a looming shadow in the back of my head for the last seven hours. The boogey man in the closet I refused to check because I didn’t know what to do with it if it was real.

  I put my head down on the gummy plastic steering wheel. If I stayed here long enough the cops would come and then…then it would be over. Everything would be over.

  I’d go to jail. Get myself a girlfriend and a couple of prison tattoos. Max would…Max would go to the hospital and then to jail where he’d be raped and then stabbed in the shower. And Jennifer…

  I’m sorry, Jennifer. I’m so fucking sorry.

  There was a heavy thump against my window—the sound I imagined a cop’s fist would make. I gave myself one more second, one more breath in this pre-jail life of mine and lifted my head.

  In a black silk robe, tied tightly around her slightly thicker waist and beneath her still impressive rack, was my aunt Fern.

  She was staring at me over the edge of her half-glasses, and I couldn’t read anything in those dark eyes. Not one thing. The infamous Aunt Fern poker face.

  Fern had been an army nurse and served two tours of duty in Iraq. Completely hardcore. And she’d had no idea what to do with us when she picked us up at the bus station. Like none. So she just tried to like…sweep us up into her life. Bridge games on Wednesday. Church on Sunday, and every Saturday we went into Tampa to give volunteer medical care at homeless shelters.

  At first it had been kind of cool. The weird spots under freeways. A bus depot that had been turned into a shelter. The guys who slipped me a few joints when Fern wasn’t looking. But then it got scary. We got mugged. Aunt Fern got assaulted. Some fucking tweaker lunatic bit me.

  Fern stopped taking us after that.

  And our Saturdays just turned into battlegrounds.

  Her knuckles rapped against the glass again and behind me Max murmured in his concussed stu
por. I made sure not to glance back at him, so as to not draw Aunt Fern’s attention to him. I cracked open the door.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “I’m sorry I stopped. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Get out of the car, Olivia.”

  I was too exhausted to be dressed down by her right now. I deserved it, I totally understood that, but I was too damn tired. And time was running out. I needed to get Max to a hospital. It was time to stop pretending I could fix all my mistakes.

  “Aunt Fern,” I sighed. The messy pile of her bright red hair—never her natural color—was listing dramatically to the left. It needed to be shored up. I imagined a crew of mini-engineers with toothpicks and hair ties.

  Oh God. I’ve lost my mind.

  And then the car door was ripped out of my hand and I was pulled up into the sunshine and the hot smell of asphalt and plumeria. It was hot. Hot all over. Even the wind was hot.

  She held me in her strong hands. Aunt Fern wasn’t a big woman, but she had that former military bearing that, when I’d been a teenager and spinning with grief and hate, had been the perfect dartboard for all my teenage-girl barbs.

  And she smelled like coffee and Obsession for Women body powder.

  Still.

  But she was my height exactly and her hazel eyes met mine squarely.

  All these years later, making my own mistakes, being a full-grown adult, and I still couldn’t tell what she was thinking. What she saw when she looked at me. How awful I must appear to her, sweaty and ransacked. Bloody and exhausted.

  I held it in for as long as I could, tried as hard as I could to keep myself together. But it was no good. Seven long hours after seven long years.

  And her level stare broke me.

  I sobbed. One hard sob that jerked my whole body.

  She didn’t wrap me in her arms. There was no soft embrace for me to fall into. And I would have killed for that right now. A little comfort. Some kindness. But that was not Aunt Fern’s style. Nope. She just gave me a little snap-out-of-it-shake. My head bobbed on my neck.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, wiping my eyes, trying to pull myself together. “Sorry.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I’m in trouble.” I took a deep ragged breath, trying to pull myself together. “I’m in so much trouble. And I don’t have anywhere else to go.”