by Claire Adams
Chapter Five
Cameron
"I couldn't believe the news when I heard. I called Harris immediately to make sure I wasn't seeing things."
"It was definitely a shock—to all of us."
"And you," Mrs. Mattern said, cupping my face as she said it. She had known me and my parents since I had been in diapers, which was the only way she was getting away with it.
"I'm coping, Mrs. Mattern."
"Oh," she said sadly, tilting her head a little, the way people did when they were looking at puppies. "It is just you, isn't it?" I wanted her to stop, but my parents’ funeral wasn't the right place to explode into a fit of rage, no matter how much I wanted to. If I did, it would just be to get these motherfuckers off of me and away from my parents, so I could go the fuck home.
It was Tuesday. Four days since the accident had happened. Allegedly happened, for all I knew, I was probably asleep, dreaming or dead too. There is no way, I kept thinking. But then another person would come up to me and say they were so sorry that something so bad had happened to someone who they didn't think deserved it. Me. I didn't know how to feel hearing that. If other people were saying it, that had to mean I hadn't dreamt the whole thing. My parents were dead, and today was their funeral.
If it was true though, why didn't they just shut the fuck up about it already? I knew they were gone. All that had been retrieved of their remains were in the two rose-covered caskets that were about to be interred. Because I, like Mrs. Mattern had pointed out, was all alone now. I had made the funeral arrangements. I wanted everything to be done with as soon as possible. Brett had suggested two separate wakes, one private and one open to people who had worked with my parents, people from their respective companies and acquaintances. The thought of going through this twice made my stomach turn.
Everyone who wanted to pay their respects was doing it now, or they were never doing it. The McKenna Funeral Home was big so the volume of people that had come through over the course of the afternoon hadn't been overwhelming. The room we were in was large, like a hall. The tall double doors were open to the lawn outside. The funeral itself, which was happening in the next hour, was going to be private. Me, Brett, and close family—the aunts, uncles and couple cousins that had shown up—in the home's cemetery.
"Yup, just me," I said heavily. She and Mr. Mattern had had four children, maybe so that when this happened to them, none of their children would be in the same position that I was.
"They were great people. Fantastic," her husband said at her side.
"You aren't alone, son. Remember that," Mrs. Mattern said. I knew what she meant, but I had heard that about a hundred times already, and it no longer had any meaning. Especially for people like the Matterns whom I had seen once every three years for the last ten. Had there been a time that I would have believed them? Sure, but not now. And she was wrong anyway. I was alone, as far as family went and as far as everything else too. I'd chew off my own arm before I called the Matterns to cry about my dead parents.
I got away from them but was waylaid by yet another person offering condolences. I went through the motions, thanking them for being sorry for me, agreeing with all the great things they thought about my parents and putting on a brave face for them, playing my part as the mourning son. Some people rushed through the condolences and got straight to business, asking me about the company. As much as I hated the false sympathy from the people who didn't mean it, I hated that even more. My fucking parents had just died; they couldn't wait until I was at least back in the office before they started trying to talk business with me?
Fuck politeness. I didn't care just then. If they had spent the last several days making sure all the people who had worked for my parents still had jobs and the ones who wanted to leave got references, then I'd feel sorry for them. When they had had to sit through will readings and organize a funeral for the charred remains of the two people they loved most in the world, I'd be sympathetic. ‘Til then, they could kiss my ass.
"Cameron?"
I looked up. It was Brett. Finally, someone I actually wanted to talk to.
"Hey," I said.
"I was worried these past couple days. I couldn't reach you." I nodded. With the flood of condolence messages and calls from media people trying to get interviews, I had ignored communication almost completely.
"Sorry. I just needed some time." We stepped out of the hall, down the steps to the lawn. It was sprinkled with dead leaves from the trees, which gave the place an eerie beauty.
"You can have all the time you need, but don't make me send a search party after you."
"It isn't that bad. Not yet."
"No pressure, okay? No one's rushing you back to work. Take as long as you need." In my mind, that meant the number of days I had left ‘til I died. I had never been particularly excited about work, but now, I wanted to be as far away from it as possible. Thinking about work made me think about my dad, and thinking about him made me remember that thinking was all I'd be able to do from now on. He was gone. The worst of the grief, the screaming and the tears, had passed. Now I went between feelings of anger, self-pity, and numbness over and over in a dark, never-ending cycle.
"What happens now?" I asked, shoving my hands in the pockets of my trench against the wind.
"Until you're ready to come back to work, nothing," he said firmly. "We can talk about it later. The company isn't going anywhere." Well shit, someone who cared more about me than making money. Brett was one of the good ones, one of the few I put up there with my parents. He lived well and had a sizable fortune to his name, but it hadn't made him a robot. He had values and his eye on what the fuck actually mattered at the end of the day.
"If that’s the case, it was nice knowing you, friend," I said. He patted my back.
"Use this time to think," he said. "We aren't on a schedule, but we need you at one hundred percent when you come back." I thanked him and told him I understood. I didn't think I'd be calling him to talk it out; it wasn't really my style, but it meant a lot to know that if I needed to, I could. If I needed to shave my head and have a breakdown, I could, but after, I needed to get back to reality. He walked back inside without me, but that was fine. I wanted a break from the constant stream of well-wishers. There were almost no people on the lawn, and the cold air against my face actually felt kind of good.
"Cameron?" I heard behind me. Shit, so much for that. I turned, seeing a woman in a knee length skirt and black coat coming up to me. I relaxed seeing it was her, the lawyer; what was her name? Right, Natalie. Her blond hair tumbled down over her shoulders and chest. It was gold, like the color of spun sugar. I had never seen her with her hair down. This was the first time I had seen her outside of work at all, I realized. Was it just that we weren't under the fluorescent office lights that I thought she looked so different, or had I just never really ever looked at her?
"Cameron, hi," she started, "it’s Natalie, Natalie Cooke, from work? Legal." I nodded. I knew who she was; she didn't have to tell me. We hadn't had an opportunity to work together before, but I had noticed her. Dad had mentioned her name a lot, Brett too, but we hadn't really talked. Maybe a couple words in passing but nothing substantial. Her lips and cheeks were pink, the latter probably from the cold. The heels she had on gave her at least a three-inch lift. She was probably average height with them off. Her eyes were blue, wide, and attentive, and her mouth was full, with naturally pouty lips. She was pretty. Oh yeah, I thought, looking her up and down. I had definitely noticed her.
From the times she had averted her eyes when we passed each other in the hallway and how stubbornly she had avoided small talk on the elevator rides we had taken together, I was going to guess that she didn't particularly care for me. I would have thought maybe she just wasn't the chattiest person, but I knew the general sentiment around the office when it came to me. I was the next in line, the person who would take Grayson from them. The person who didn't really deserve what he was getting. Nobody ever said
anything to my face, but they didn't have to. It was clear in what they would say to me.
"Thank you for coming," I said, giving her the canned response everyone else I had had to talk to so far had gotten.
"I'm sorry for your loss," she said. I nodded, giving her a weak smile. "I was with Brett when I heard the news."
"It was a shock," I said lamely. I didn't know why anyone thought I wanted to hear about where they had been when it had happened. Maybe they are just trying to start sucking up early, I thought. Sure, get in good with the new boss as soon as possible, even at his parents’ funeral. To hell with common decency.
"I can't imagine."
"I'm sure my father would have appreciated your concern."
"You're probably tired as hell of everybody telling you that," she said.
"I can't exactly ask them to stop. Even if I am tired of hearing it, it's still true." She nodded and looked down at the ground before looking up at me again.
"I don't know a lot of other companies that would let their employees pay their respects like this." Usually, people stopped after they told me how sorry they were for me. I didn't know why she was still talking. Ha, the first real conversation we had ever had, and all it had taken had been my father's death to get the ball rolling.
"It's what my father would have wanted."
"I'd really like to talk when you have the time."
"Talk?" I asked. Of course, talk, I realized, answering my own question. We had nothing in common but the company we both worked for—the company I had forcibly become the head of four days ago. She wanted to talk work. Of course, she does; you weren't getting hopeful there, were you? Fucking typical. Why had I let myself think she'd surprise me?
"When you're ready. Nothing set in stone, of course not now." Not now? Why not? We were both free. My dad was still going to be dead whenever we got around to this talk, so why not just get it out of the way?
"Sounds good," I said tersely. She nodded and smiled, oblivious to my annoyance, or maybe pleased by it. Hadn't seen her do that before either. She told me one more time how sorry she was, then walked away. I watched her leave and head back up the stairs to the hall. How inappropriate was it to notice how beautiful she was at my parents’ funeral? Not as inappropriate as it would have been if I had followed her and tried to get her number. If our first conversation could have been different, maybe. I watched as she disappeared among the other black-clad mourners in the hall. In another world where I wasn’t me, and this hadn’t happened, yeah, maybe. Maybe I would have gone after her.
Chapter Six
Natalie
He hates me. He has to hate me, I thought darkly, walking away from him, up the stairs, back into the funeral home. You could have waited, bitch. ‘Til when? ‘Til the bodies were in the ground? What a world of difference that would have made. It had to be said, I thought to myself. Some people don't have the luxury to crumble when disaster strikes, as sad as that is. He was one of those people. Since he was, he probably knew that or gotten the run-down from his dad or something in the past, I didn’t know. I clearly had no idea how these people's lives worked. In their world, wealth was passed down, and you lived knowing the death of your parents meant an inheritance. That had to fuck a person up. Didn't it go sideways sometimes? Wasn't that why the Menendez brothers had ended up killing their parents?
Grayson and Evangeline Porter hadn't been killed. Okay, they had, but not in the malicious, calculated, murder way. In the tragic, freak accident way. Remembering the anticipation I had heard in Grayson's voice as he talked about getting to spend some vacation time with his wife made me feel a little sick. I couldn't imagine. I could never be the one. My parents weren't known on the scale that the Porters were, but losing them in one fell swoop and then days later being expected to appear at their funeral, I would have lost it. Whoever thought they would be able to get me to do it would have had to come get me from my bed, where I would have gladly spent the next six months bawling my eyes out.
Nobody's ready when their parents die, I thought, but this is a special kind of tragedy. I saw Brett inside and walked up to him. He finished the conversation he was having then turned to me once the person was gone.
"So?"
"I talked to him," I said. "Don't know whether it had the desired effect, but he seemed to have heard me. Nodded his head and everything."
"Be patient with him," Brett said.
"I know. He’s just trying to deal with everything. I just feel rotten that all this happened to him at once. I felt like trash telling him about work at his parents’ funeral, not even a week after he lost them."
"He's going to be okay. He's made it this far. He knows what he has to do, and he isn't going to take it lightly. What he is going to need is support and a lot of it. That is where you and I come in." I knew why he would come in, but I was still at a little bit of a loss as to why I was useful here.
He had told me over the phone yesterday that he would need my help. I should have known that he meant with Cameron by this point, but even having fair warning hadn't prepared me for what I would actually say to him. What was there at this point besides Sorry and You didn't deserve this? I had seen the little change on his face, the shift of his attitude when I had said that I needed to talk to him.
He had seen right through that; I might as well have just told him what the truth was at that point. He probably hated me. I hated myself a little, thinking about it. I didn't really have the choice to back away though. He sure didn't, and if Brett thought I had something useful to offer him, hell, I’d give it a shot.
"So you keep saying," I said, looking over my shoulder and scanning the big hall for him. He was talking to a woman several inches shorter than him who was holding both of his hands in hers. He seemed engaged with her, listening, but from where I was, his stance was stiff and wooden. His placid face must have hidden a storm of emotions running through him on the inside that he had to hide for his parents’ sake. I couldn't imagine having such a public wake. I was going to stop trying to imagine what Cameron Porter had going on behind that mask, because it was insulting to him to even try.
The bodies were being interred in the home's cemetery. The activity in the hall slowed and slowed ‘til it was time. The Porters being the people they were, of course, had tight security for the whole event, because that was what it was: an event. Inevitably, the conspiracy theories had started swirling around the circumstances of the crash and the deaths. People always wanted to make something out of nothing, in this case, something sensational and dark out of a family's horrible tragedy.
Since letting Kasey know about the story, she had been keeping me up to date on the latest bullshit the tin foil hat people had cooked up. It was the usual nonsense; the whole thing being masterminded by the other people who had a stake in Porter Holdings to get the patriarch out of the way so the easier-to-control Cameron would take over. The Porters being a ritual sacrifice orchestrated by the lizard people, all that bullshit. All I saw was their son, alone, with all this sudden responsibility put onto him and virtually nobody in his corner.
The only other times I had to be at a funeral home had been when my grandmother and one of my dad's sisters had died four years ago. The McKenna Funeral Home was family owned and, I didn't want to say beautiful, but was just that. The structure was a stately Georgian revival mansion that had been a home but had been converted; the McKenna’s lived elsewhere on the property. The grounds were beautifully manicured. I could see the procession from where I was back out on the lawn just outside the hall where the wake had taken place. Brett and I had met at the office and come together; we were headed back after this. Once Cameron came out of mourning, Brett wanted everything to be ready for him.
They walked in a procession from the home, to the cemetery, following the caskets. I didn't recognize anybody in the procession beside Cameron and Brett. He didn't have any siblings; the rest of the people I guessed were close family and friends. There had been no filming permit
ted, but most likely, someone without scruples was going to be selling the tackier publication iPhone pictures of the Porter funeral. From where I was, I didn't hear anything, but I could see well enough. Cameron looked like he was carved out of stone, standing there like it wasn't his parents being lowered into the ground.
I had made a lot of pretty unfair judgments about the guy; I could admit that. I didn't know him, but I thought I had a good enough picture from what I'd heard from the people closest to him. It wasn't like I had expected him to fall to the ground weeping, but... I don't know; it wouldn't have shocked me that much if he had. Or maybe, shown up drunk and made a scene, something.
It was over fast. The crowd that had watched the Porters being buried dispersed, leaving Cameron still standing there. He was in a suit under his black trench coat, and it was getting late. He had to have been tired, cold, too, since night was coming, but he didn't move.
"Ready to go?" Brett coming up to me caught my attention. I looked over his shoulder once more at Cameron then nodded at him.
"He isn't leaving?" I asked.
"What do you think?" he replied as we started walking.
"How soon do you think we'll get him back?"
"Hard to say. We can't exactly put a cap on how long he gets to mourn his parents, especially after losing them the way that he did."
"Did you talk to him?"
"I don't think he wants to talk to anybody right now." I looked over my shoulder and saw him, right where he had been the last time I had looked. He was so alone standing there in front of the fresh graves of the people closest to him. A new wave of sympathy for him washed over me. If we had traded places, I would have had an army of siblings behind me to lean on. He had no one. I wanted to tell him something. Yeah, genius, but what? Is that really what he needs, from anyone, much less you? No. We walked to Brett's car and left, heading back to the office.