If I Die Tonight

by Alison Gaylin

  The thing was, Connor had never gotten into a physical fight before; neither of her boys had. Well, maybe a playground scrap here and there. But nothing like this. Over the phone, Cindy had told Jackie, “I may have to take Noah to the hospital,” which, okay, was an exaggeration. But Jackie could see how Cindy would have been thinking that way, her son whimpering the way he was as she held the towel full of ice to his eye, Jackie’s own son at the other side of the room, staring at the floor with clenched fists and breathing deep, his face purple-red and furious. How could he hurt someone like that?

  Jackie started up the car, pulled out of the Westons’ driveway. “Noah just what?”

  “Huh?”

  “Noah. You said, ‘He just.’ What did he do to make you that angry? How could you . . . Connor, what was running through your mind?”

  “Mom.”

  “That’s it? You beat the crap out of your best friend and all you can say is—”

  “Mom. Please.”

  Jackie pulled over to the side of the road. Stopped the car with a screech and shifted back into park. The house she pulled in front of was a tidy ranch house much like Noah’s, and she was aware of a dog barking at them from behind the big street-facing window, the curtains moving.

  “Who are you, Connor?”

  “What?”

  “What kind of a person are you turning into?”

  Connor stared straight ahead, eyes boring into the glass. She wished she could figure out the look on his face. “We . . . we just got in a fight,” he said. “It was no big deal.”

  “All right,” she said, and started up the car. It wasn’t all right, of course. Nothing was all right. She’d only said it in order to fill the dead air. “You’re going to have to figure out a new science project.”

  “Mom . . .” Connor was watching her now, tears sliding down his cheeks, lower lip trembling.

  She shifted the car back into park, trying to remember the last time she’d seen Connor cry. Over a skinned knee maybe, when he was a little boy. Something inside her started to crumble.

  “What?” Jackie said. “What is it? Tell me, Connor. Talk to me.”

  “I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  His face was wet. Jackie pulled him into a hug, and he began to sob, his head on her shoulder. How small he felt in her arms. How helpless. “I’m sorry,” he said again and she knew he meant it.

  Her thoughts traveled back to earlier this morning, the policeman at their door. A boy was in the hospital, in critical condition. Hit by a stolen car, the policeman had said. He hadn’t given details, but she’d felt as though she could see it. A young boy, alone and lost on one of these quiet, dark streets, wheels speeding over him, crushing him, headlights blaring. A stolen car. It hadn’t even slowed down.

  Could have been one of my own, she’d thought. That boy. That poor, lost boy. As she’d spoken to the policeman, she’d squeezed Connor’s shoulder tight and fast—the way you do when you’re in the dark with someone and you want to make sure the other person is still there.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered now as Connor’s sobs subsided. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  ONCE THEY GOT home, Connor’s mom made him call Noah’s house and apologize. No one picked up the phone, and he was grateful for that because he really wasn’t sorry. If he had to lie, it was easier to do it into somebody’s voice mail than with them live and on the other end of the line, breathing at you.

  After he was finished leaving the message for Noah, Connor’s mom made him write out a formal letter to Noah’s parents on the thick, cream-colored stationery she kept in her desk drawer, next to the pile of checkbooks and the half-finished romance novel manuscript she thought Wade and Connor didn’t know about. She dictated the letter, Connor writing down the words as neatly as he could. She made him start off with “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Weston,” even though he’d been calling them Cindy and Dave since he was five, but he didn’t say anything about that. Just wrote down her words. Somehow, it felt good to do exactly what his mom told him to do.

  Once he was done writing the letter, Connor’s mom announced he was grounded for the next two weeks; then she left the house to go to work, taking his phone with her.

  The house felt quiet with Mom gone. Not a nice quiet either. That panicky type of quiet that roars in your ears and makes your heart pound. His room was perfectly still, Arnie asleep in his cage. Connor took a look at him, made sure he had enough water and that he was still breathing. Connor had asked his mom for a rat for his birthday, but rats grossed her out, so he was stuck with Mr. Narcolepsy here. A hamster’s life expectancy—he’d looked it up—was three years, tops. Why bother living at all if you’re going to spend your entire life sleeping on the floor of a cage?

  Connor opened up his laptop, jammed his headphones in his ears, went onto Spotify, and called up his favorite playlist. “King Kunta” was playing. He loved that song. “What’s the yams?” said Kendrick Lamar, and then the backup girls repeated the line, Connor’s face twitching into a smile just as it always did when they said that, a reflex. He’d introduced Noah to “King Kunta” a few months ago, and Noah loved it too, to the point where he was always texting What’s the yams at Connor.

  Well, not always, Connor supposed. Not anymore.

  Connor sighed. Skipped the rest of the song. “Forrest Gump” by Frank Ocean was next. He could get lost in that one and so he did, leaning his head back and just listening for a few minutes, listening and breathing and thinking about how, someday, things would be normal again. He tried not to think about Wade’s face last night, or the cops on his doorstep, or the kid who got run over by a stolen car, just half a mile away from their house. Maybe it wasn’t even true, the part about the kid. Maybe the cops were just trying to catch whoever stole the car, so they made up that a kid was in the hospital in order to scare people into spilling whatever secrets they had. Cops made stuff up all the time, didn’t they?

  He went onto Facebook and wrote a group message to his friends, letting them know not to text or Snapchat him, his mom had taken away his phone. No huge deal, he wrote. I’ll tell you about what happened later. For a few seconds, Connor thought about including Wade in the message; strange, since he and Wade never texted. Hardly ever talked, really, outside of last night.

  When he was a little kid, Connor would spend whole afternoons with Wade, following him around, watching him draw. Make a spaceship for me, Connor used to beg him. Make a monster truck. And Wade would. He drew anything Connor wanted him to. But sometime around when Connor was in fifth grade, Wade’s artwork started getting weirder and Wade started getting weirder too. “He’s growing up,” Mom would say. But that didn’t seem like the right thing to call it.

  Connor went ahead and sent the message to his friends. He listened to Frank Ocean sing “I won’t forget you” and then wrote a separate message to his brother: Mom has my phone. He couldn’t think of anything else to say, so he sent it, just like that.

  On the other message thread, Connor’s friends started replying, asking him what happened, what he’d done to make his mom mad. They weren’t trying to be nice; they were just looking for something to talk about. Bored, like they always were. Like everybody in Havenkill was most of the time. He didn’t owe them an answer, and anyway, Noah would tell them all soon enough. Noah gossiped like a girl.

  Connor was going to close the laptop when another private message came in, this one from his friend Jordan: Did you hear about Liam Miller?

  Connor typed, No.

  Liam Miller was a senior. He dated Jordan’s older sister, and for that reason alone, Connor knew him well enough to say hi. Once, though, he’d given Connor a ride. It had been raining and Connor had been walking home from soccer practice when Liam pulled up. “Try not to get my car wet,” he’d said. A joke, because Liam’s car was a real beater. A Ford Taurus from the 1990s with a cracked headlight and a chipping paint job. Liam had stretched a towel over the front passenger seat to make up for the ripped
upholstery, and sitting on it, Connor had felt as though any minute he might fall right through to the floor.

  They’d driven the whole way to Connor’s house in silence, but it hadn’t been uncomfortable. The crappy car had made Connor feel more equal than he would have felt if he’d gotten a ride from a different senior. Liam’s best friend, Ryan Grant, for instance, drove a sweet red Mustang. And Jordan’s sister, Tamara, had a convertible Beetle. Brand-new. Anyway, before he’d let Connor off, Liam had said, “You know what, Reed? You’re not a bad kid.” And though he hadn’t said anything more, Connor had known what he’d meant. As opposed to your brother.

  Connor had thanked him—for the ride, not the compliment. Though if he was going to be honest, it had been for both. Most of those older kids couldn’t see him past the weird specter of Wade, which was why Connor had been walking in the rain for so many blocks in the first place. Before Liam had stopped, at least three seniors had sped by, pretending not to notice him, even when he waved.

  Connor stared at the screen. Jordan’s reply was such a long time coming. And the longer the screen said that Jordan was typing, the more nervous Connor got. There was a rising feeling inside of him—an actual physical sensation that he couldn’t give a name to. No, no, no, he told the feeling. Go away. Stop.

  When Jordan’s response appeared, Connor’s stomach seized up. His throat felt tight. For several seconds, it was as though he’d forgotten how to breathe. “What took you so long,” he whispered finally. Stupidly.

  And then he started praying for Liam to come out of his coma.

  MAYBE JORDAN WAS wrong. Maybe he was confused. Connor refreshed his feed, though, and the pictures started appearing. Liam and his best friend, Ryan, in their football uniforms. Liam with Jordan’s sister, Tamara, at junior prom. Liam with a group of friends, head thrown back, laughing. Liam as a baby. Liam as a little boy, holding a puffy red baseball bat, huge smile on his face. Shared posts, spreading like a rash through his feed. A disease. Connor scrolled down, half reading the words that accompanied the pictures, his head light and fuzzy. He pulled the headphones out, the silence crushing him, blood pounding in his ears. Praying for you . . . Love you, man . . . You can’t read this now but . . . My best friend . . . My cousin . . . Hang in there, hero.

  Connor’s gaze rested on the word. Hero?

  The kitchen phone rang, and Connor went to it. His brother’s cell phone number in the caller ID. “Wade?”

  “Mom’s at work, right?”

  “Yeah,” Connor said quickly. “Did you hear about Liam Miller?”

  Wade breathed, in and out. “The bag in your closet. I need you to get rid of it.”

  “What?”

  “Connor.”

  “What are you—”

  “Just do it. Not in our trash can, though, okay? Walk to the Lukoil. Throw it in their Dumpster.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t have time for this.” Wade’s voice sounded tense. Desperate. “I showed you last night. Were you, like . . . were you asleep the whole time? Jesus.”

  Connor swallowed hard. “I remember a little . . .”

  “Never mind. Just . . . just do it. It’s in there. The bag. Get rid of it.”

  “Wade?”

  “I have to go.”

  Connor stared at the phone, his mind wandering back . . . Wade in his room last night, turning to him from the closet: I can trust you, right, buddy? You won’t say anything? And he could remember nodding, sleep still clinging to him but nodding anyway, thinking, What is Wade doing in my room? And then the thunderclap and Wade’s eyes on him and, for a few seconds, Connor was five years old again, wanting to follow his older brother anywhere, everywhere . . . “I’ll help you,” he had said. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

  Connor put the phone back in place, left the kitchen, and walked to his room. As he made for his closet, he heard a scurrying, the squeak of Arnie’s hamster wheel. Awake. “Whatever you want, Wade,” Connor whispered.

  Three

  They’re mysteries,” said Helen Davies. “We think we know how they’ll turn out, but they’re always full of surprises.” They were at work, Jackie and Helen, Jackie on floor time as they say in real estate, a somewhat glamorous-sounding way to describe sitting behind a desk and waiting for customers. Helen was early for a client meet. She had a listing up on her computer and she was taking notes on it, scribbling into a small leather-bound notebook and barely paying attention to the conversation Jackie had started, which was about children, of course. Raising them. “Sure, they’re open books,” she’d said earlier. Helen, who’d never met a metaphor she didn’t like. “But you have to consider the genre.”

  Jackie adjusted the flowers in the vase on her desk—stargazer lilies. The pasty scent was starting to get to her.

  Helen said, “Any reason why you asked about Stacy?”

  Jackie said, “Um . . .” While she had asked, out of the blue, if Helen’s perfect gem of a daughter had ever behaved rebelliously, she was hesitant to say why. Truth was, Jackie hated confessing her troubles to Helen—particularly those having to do with money or child rearing. Not so much because of the way Helen might respond (she wasn’t judgmental; her advice was always sound) but because it always pointed up the difference between them, the paths they’d taken since high school: Helen’s straight and smooth and perfectly landscaped, Jackie’s full of obstructions and detours. Now who’s overdoing it with the metaphors? “Connor got into a fight,” Jackie said.

  Helen glanced up from her computer. “What?”

  “I know. It’s . . . Well . . . talk about surprises, right?”

  “Connor? Little Connor? With who?”

  “His best friend, Noah. Connor gave him a black eye.”

  “Why?”

  “Boys,” she said. “Go figure.” Jackie turned to her computer, called up the office Web site to check inquiries, but her mind wasn’t there. What she was really thinking of was the phone call from Cindy Weston when she was on her way to work. She was remembering seeing Cindy’s name on her screen and debating whether or not to answer, scolding herself, Don’t be a coward, and putting Cindy on speaker because she still couldn’t figure out the Bluetooth on the used Subaru she’d bought three months ago so Wade could have her old car.

  Cindy’s voice. How strangely apologetic it had been.

  “Hey, Jackie. Listen. Noah told me what started the fight, and you know I don’t condone violence, but of course I can understand why Connor was upset with him . . .”

  Jackie said to Helen, “He was sticking up for his brother.”

  “Connor?” Helen said. “Little Connor was protecting Wade? From another thirteen-year-old boy?”

  “No,” she said. “No, Wade wasn’t there. He was . . . Well, his friend said something insulting about Wade.”

  Helen’s face relaxed. “Ah.”

  “Yes.”

  “He loves his brother.”

  “Apparently.”

  Helen gave Jackie a smile. “You know what? I’d say you raised him right.”

  Jackie tried to smile back, though she didn’t feel like smiling at all. Thirteen-year-olds were saying insulting things about Wade. That was what she’d taken away from the story Cindy had told her. That, and the sweeping desire to blacken Noah Weston’s other eye. “You’re nice, Helen,” she said. “You’re so much nicer than me.”

  Helen went back to the listing. “That’s not true,” she said, pencil scratching at the paper. “That isn’t true at all.”

  INTERESTING THE WAY nostalgia worked—the way it could lie in wait, lodging itself in something as innocent as a key ring. The key ring was a ceramic calico kitten with moss agate eyes, a pretty little thing that Wade had given Jackie at the end of the summer. “I saw it and thought of you,” Wade had said, flush with lawn-mowing money, part of what Jackie had called the Summer of Odd Jobs. She hadn’t been sure where it had come from, that sudden desire to mow lawns and clean gutters and help with au
to repair for their neighbors. But she had welcomed it without question. The Summer of Odd Jobs had transformed Wade, however briefly, into a boy with a wallet full of cash and a smile on his face, his sandy hair streaked blond by the sun. A normal, happy boy. He would disappear for hours and come home muscled and glowing, passing out gifts and making jokes.

  It had been less than two months ago. But reaching into her purse in the office bathroom, going in for her lipstick and finding that key ring instead, Jackie felt as though it could have been years ago, decades. She ran her finger over the carefully painted whiskers. Handmade, Wade had told her. Must have taken somebody a long time.

  The door opened and Helen came in, trailing fresh perfume. “The Courtneys changed their minds about the new property. They want to see the house on Riverview again,” she said. “I think we may be closing in on an offer.” She applied frosty pink lipstick. Smoothed the arch of her brow.

  Jackie pulled her lipstick out of her purse and dropped the key ring back in. “Good luck.”

  Helen’s soft eyes sought out Jackie’s in the mirror. “Connor is going to be fine,” she said. “He’s a boy. Boys get into fights. It’s the way of the world.”

  But Jackie wasn’t worried about Connor. Connor had never been the problem. “Helen?”

  “Yes?”

  “Does Stacy ever talk about Wade?”

  “Wade?”

  “Does she ever tell you things about his friends? Or who he’s dating? You know. Gossip?”

  “No, honey. Stacy really doesn’t gossip about Wade,” she said. “Different circles and all.”

  “Right,” Jackie said. Though it didn’t used to be that way. Stacy and Wade had been inseparable as children, to the point where she and Helen had once caught them dressed as bride and groom, a lacy pillowcase arranged on Stacy’s head like a veil, her stuffed bunny rabbit apparently performing the ceremony. “Remember when they got married?”