In Broken Places

by Michele Phoenix

  The next day, Scott didn’t turn up for church, and I pictured him alone at home with a raging fever and no food to eat. In my picturing, he looked a lot like Trey, and that made me feel even more sorry for him. Scott wasn’t Trey. Of this much I was sure. But he was enough like my brother that he brought out the caregiver in me. I didn’t want him to feel alone and shut out because he was sick.

  So, in an as-yet-unheard-of move, Shayla and I hopped in the car after lunch and took a sample of our latest culinary creation to Scott’s apartment. It was the kind of gesture I’d heard of other people making, but had never actually contemplated making myself. Bev, I could see doing it. Or Dana. Dana would be good at it. But me? On my scale of mental clarity, this scored a one. Ten being sanity and zero being Barbra Streisand in Nuts.

  We found Scott’s apartment in a three-story building next to the market square and were let in by a grumpy gentleman who was apparently intent on living up to international German stereotypes. Shay had trouble climbing the stairs with the Tupperware of soup in her hands, so I took it from her, but only until we reached Scott’s landing. Then she snatched it back and, giggling with anticipation, reached way up to ring the doorbell. It took Scott a while to open the door, and he obviously hadn’t spent the time grooming. His hair was a mess, his stubble was out of control, and he wore sweats and a T-shirt that looked big enough for two of him. The ice-skater in my stomach did a salchow with a triple lutz thrown in, just for show. Not sure why. Maybe I was coming down with the flu too. When Scott saw Shayla standing on his doorstep with a Tupperware container in her hands, he blinked and scratched his head. When he looked up and saw me, he seemed to go through a mental checklist—brain in place, check; neurons firing, check.

  “Hi,” Shayla said.

  “Hi, Shayla.” He sounded like a laryngitic toad.

  “We made you soup.” She pushed the container at him.

  “You did?” I could tell he wasn’t putting on the surprised expression just to please her.

  “Shelby and I made it.”

  “Well—” he took the soup—“thank you.” Looking up at me, he raised his shoulders in a what’s-going-on-here gesture.

  “We heard you were sick,” I said. “And since we had some leftovers . . .”

  Apparently, it wasn’t as obvious to him as it was to me. “So you just came over to drop off some soup?”

  “I put the cawwots in.” Shayla clearly didn’t want to be left out of this conversation.

  “She did,” I confirmed.

  “I . . . Thank you, Shayla. And Shelby.”

  I had an idea for a brand-new law: disheveled, handsome men suffering from unknown illnesses and possessing expressive brown eyes would heretofore be forbidden by law from saying my name out loud. Or they’d be put in prison for crimes against hormonity. Or exiled to Africa. Which would be a terrible waste, considering the Western world was sadly lacking in disheveled, handsome men suffering from unknown illnesses and possessing expressive brown eyes. “Scott, it’s soup,” I said, and with those words, something in a remote corner of my mind triggered a verbal tidal wave of ridiculous proportions. “It’s not like we made you a turkey dinner, not that either of us would know where to start with turkey . . . or the stuffing or the mashed potatoes or the green bean casserole, for that matter. I’d probably manage to open a can of cranberry sauce, but even that might be a challenge. I mean, I’ve been cooking for all of three months, and my brother really got the cooking genes—though we both got the Davis genes. But that’s another story. . . .” I wasn’t sure who’d given the adrenaline injection to my mouth, but I couldn’t seem to stop the verbal overdrive. “He’s a chef, by the way; did I tell you that? Owns his own bakery and everything and makes the world’s best éclairs; and, man, what I wouldn’t give for an éclair right now. Shayla likes them too. Right, Shayla?”

  You know those commercials for emergency lifelines where an elderly lady says, “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”? Well, I was talking and I couldn’t shut up. I clamped my jaw shut to avoid any further verbal spillage and said, through clenched teeth, “Okay, we should probably be getting home and leaving you to your soup. . . . So . . . hope you feel better.”

  “Yeah.” He cocked his head to one side. “Thanks, Shelby.”

  “Come on, Shay. We’re going home.”

  Shayla and I flew down the stairs, out the door, and into the car. Once in the driver’s seat, I looked back at the child who was contemplating me with a frown and wondered if she understood just how kooky her guardian really was. I figured she’d sort it out soon enough, as we were going to be hanging out for a while.

  13

  I WAS FAST ASLEEP when Mom barged in. I think I’d been dreaming about touring Italian vineyards with George Clooney, so I wasn’t exactly in the mood for interruptions.

  “Shelby! Get up!”

  “Wh—what?”

  “Get up.” She pulled the blankets off me and threw me the clothes I’d left on the back of a chair a few hours earlier. I was eighteen and still living at home, which was embarrassing enough without tossing in the kind of wake-up call that reminded me of my first day of school.

  “Mom, what—?”

  “It’s Trey.”

  The air rushed out of my lungs and something thick passed in front of my eyes. The look on her face didn’t belong with Trey’s name. Not in a world where things made sense. I shook the cobwebs from my mind and dressed while Mom found her keys and grabbed her purse. I was in the driver’s seat before she was out the door.

  “Where?”

  “Memorial,” she said, handing me the keys with unsteady fingers. “Drive fast, Shelby.”

  It took us twenty minutes to get to the hospital, twenty minutes of speeding through red lights and blowing through intersections and trying not to shriek at my mom to give me more details. She knew so little, which was the way she’d always liked things, but I needed facts. I needed to know times and places and diagnoses and prognoses and anything else I could wedge into the chaos of my brain to still it. Trey was in the hospital. He’d been brought in by his roommate. We needed to get there fast. That’s all we knew.

  I ran from the car to the reception desk, unsure of where Trey was, leaving my mom to follow alone. I sprinted from there to the south wing and rushed down an endless hallway of fluorescent lights and gaping doorways and starched-white nurses with concern and boredom on their faces. Somewhere at the end of that hall was the emergency room, and somewhere in that room was my brother, the boy I loved, the man who needed to be alive. Please, God, let him be alive.

  A nurse saw me coming and intercepted my flight.

  “My brother. Trey Davis!” I would have screamed it if my lungs had allowed it, but they’d stopped doing their job back in the vines with George Clooney.

  “Are you a relative?”

  “He’s my brother. Is he okay? Is he alive? What happened to him?”

  “You need to calm down, honey.” She forced eye contact, and the connection helped me breathe. “I’ll find out where he is, and we’ll see if we can let you in to see him.”

  My world was spinning as she walked away. I braced my hands on my knees and took a few deep breaths while the lights got brighter and the sounds got clearer. I saw the nurse’s feet returning and didn’t dare look up. What if . . . ? What if . . . ?

  “We’re about to move him to a floor, but if you come with me, you can sit with him for a few minutes.”

  I straightened. He was alive. “Please,” I said to the nurse, then followed her through a maze of screaming children and drunks and bloody dressings and beeping monitors to my brother’s side.

  They’d dressed him in a hospital gown and covered him with a blue blanket. His head was turned away from the door. The nurse patted my arm and stepped away.

  “Trey?”

  He turned his head and I could see a five-year-old in his eyes. They were scared and sad and battered.

  “Trey,” I said again. My body carried
me to his bed without conscious thought. I ran my hand down his arm to the bandage on his wrist, so white and clean and terrifying. I wrapped my fingers over his and held them fast. There were black streaks around his mouth and down his chin. And in his gaze . . . It was his gaze that undid me. I sat on the edge of his bed and held his hand against my chest and raged mutely, my head thrown back, my throat clenched and convulsing, my eyes on the ceiling, on the lights, on God. . . . And when it passed—when the swollen air deflated and the sharp, crude fear abated—I held his hand to my lips and prayed. And prayed. And prayed. While his hollow eyes, torpid and spiritless, stared through me.

  They moved him to another floor, where the nurses were friendly and the bedrooms were yellow-beige. There was moaning and misery filtering through the walls, so I stayed close to Trey, hoping to absorb most of the ambient pain with my body before it got to his. Mom went off to fill out papers and talk to his roommate and arrange for follow-up care, and I sat by his bed, wiping the charcoal residue from his mouth and laying my palms across his wrists as if my desperation could speed their healing. He didn’t speak when Mom came back, nor when we tried to feed him, nor when the nurses came on rounds in the morning. A doctor asked us to wait outside, and apparently Trey answered his questions. He was silent when we reentered the room. He met my gaze when I said his name, which was the only word I seemed capable of formulating. He knew the subtext.

  “Trey.” Why did you do this?

  “Trey.” Your eyes are scaring me. Please come back. Please come back, Trey.

  “Trey.” I should have known. I should have guessed.

  “Trey.” We said he wouldn’t break us. We—said—he—would—not—break—us.

  We spent the rest of the day at his bedside. Mom tried to be chipper. She failed. I suggested that she go home after supper. Get some sleep. Maybe bake some lasagna. It was the Davis family crisis dish. She left and I pulled a large brown pleather chair up to Trey’s bed and went back to holding his hand, covering his wrists, and saying his name. After a while, I put my head down next to his arm and fell asleep.

  The nurses woke me some time later. Trey was still there, still staring, still silent. I brushed back his hair and told him his color was improving. He closed his eyes.

  The nurses allowed me to stay the night. They told me the chair reclined into a bed and wished me a good sleep. I was just about to settle down when I heard Trey’s voice.

  “Shell?” It was raspy and raw, but it was life.

  “We said he wouldn’t break us, Trey.” The words were out before I could stop them, before I could even sit up and touch his arm.

  “I’m alive.”

  “Oh, God,” I said on a sob. “Oh, Trey, you’re alive.”

  Several minutes of silence passed while I looked at him and tried to smile and searched for words. Anger, fear, and gratitude were clashing in a brutal battle above Trey’s bed, and the air was brittle with the strain. I could feel its stranglehold on my muscles, eyes, and lungs.

  Trey dozed for a while and seemed less murky when he woke. He turned his head toward me.

  “I’m sorry I scared you.”

  “Trey . . .”

  He stared at me for a long moment. It felt like he was drawing strength from me, like he was delving into my own limited supply of hope and vitality and siphoning it out for his survival. “Did Ian find me?” he asked.

  I nodded. “He said he was worried by your last phone call, so he ran home to check on you during a break in his shift.”

  “Great security guard he is.”

  I let a long silence fill in the details of the horror in my mind. “If he hadn’t sensed something was wrong . . . Trey . . .” I didn’t know how to ask, but I needed so desperately to know. “Why?” I finally blurted, fresh terror seizing my throat.

  He looked at me like I should know.

  “We said we’d get through it. No matter what,” I whispered.

  He sighed and shifted, turning his gaze on the ceiling, frustration tightening his jaw. “I’m just tired of it, Shell.”

  I felt anger at his weakness. He was supposed to be the resilient one.

  “Tired of what?”

  “Of being pissed off,” he said, his eyes firing shrapnel at the ceiling. “Of nothing making sense. Of wanting to scream or hit things or . . . whatever, all the time.” His passion made him cough, his abraded throat constricting around the failure of his act.

  “But, Trey . . .” I wanted to say something powerful to fix his world so it wouldn’t be so treacherous, but I knew that his scars—like mine—required more than words.

  “He’s supposed to be dead to me, Shell. I’ve done everything I could to make him dead to me, but he keeps . . . he keeps coming back.”

  “He’s gone, Trey. He’s been gone forever.”

  “But not in my head.”

  I knew what he meant, but my indignation and distress outweighed my sympathy. “So you tried to kill yourself?” My voice was hard with disbelief. “You decided to bail out on me and leave me alone? Thanks a whole lot!”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “You promised me! You swore you’d stick with me.” I tried to stand, but my muscles were too stunned by the past twenty-four hours to lift me out of my chair. I felt electrocuted by horror, dismantled by sorrow.

  “Shell—”

  “We haven’t heard from him in four years, Trey.”

  “I know. But he’s in my head. He’s—in—my—head,” he said again, anxiety reverberating in his voice. “I can’t get him out of my head.”

  I tried to think of something comforting to say, but nothing came to mind. It was Trey who was supposed to be the strong one, Trey who was supposed to have the answers, Trey who was supposed to convince me, as he had done so many times, that life was worth fighting for.

  “Did something happen?” I asked, desperate to know the impetus that had sent him hurtling into the abyss of self-destruction. “Should I have seen something . . . or known something?”

  He shook his head. “It’s just too much,” he said, and his voice held the forlorn emptiness of an abandoned home. “I try to hate him so much that he won’t matter anymore, but . . . it’s like he’s still watching me and forcing me to be who he wants me to be.” His eyes roiled with need and anger and pain. “But I don’t want that. I don’t want anything he wants anymore.” Tears welled in his eyes for the first time since he’d tried to end his life. “And then sometimes . . .” He swallowed convulsively, averting his eyes.

  “What?”

  He shook his head and bit his lip. I laid my forehead against his arm and listened to him breathing. After a few moments, he said, “Sometimes I look at myself and all I see is him. And when it gets really bad,” he added raggedly, “when it gets really bad, you look at me like you see him too.”

  I raised my head and opened my mouth to protest, but the honesty of his gaze halted my disclaimers. He was right. There had been seconds, fleeting seconds, when his incoherence and anger had revived the fear and guilt I’d so often felt around my father. “I know you’re not Dad,” I said quietly, stroking his arm with my hand. “It’s just . . .”

  “I know, but I could be. You know? I think I could be.” He sighed.

  I sighed too as I contemplated the tortuous journey that had led us to this place—Trey in a hospital bed, broken and confused, and me at his side, relieved and terrified.

  “I never once thought you were him,” I said again with all the conviction of my fear. “Never once—not even when you did things that weren’t like you.”

  “Okay.” It was a mechanical response, devoid of faith. He didn’t know how to trust me. His self-condemnation left no room for extenuation.

  “Never once, Trey. I promise you.” I squeezed his arm to force his attention. “And if you’d succeeded—if you’d died . . .” A sob lodged in my throat, and all I could do was continue to convince him with the passion in my eyes. I could tell he was far from believing.

  Wh
en I found my voice again, I took a deep breath and asked, “What do you think he wanted you to be?”

  It took him a while to answer. He looked toward the window and his eyes got distant. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “A world-class businessman. A soccer star. Or something else I’m not.”

  “So you did this to get even with a dad we haven’t heard from in four years?” I touched his bandages and felt a shiver ripple down my neck. I’d come so close to losing him. “I can think of simpler ways of getting the message across.” My voice was hoarse and overfull.

  “Yeah, but not as dramatic. This is the drama-queen side of me.” He managed a smile.

  “Who knew?”

  “She’s a late bloomer.” He coughed.

  “Want something to drink?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You can be whatever you want, Trey—a bouncer, a ballerina, a candlestick maker . . . Just be alive, okay?”

  I got him a glass of water and he fell half-asleep in the seconds it took me to return to his bedside.

  “Guess the muddlehood got a little out of hand this time, huh?” he said in a weary voice.

  “Yeah. And it’s probably going to take a while to unmuddle it too.”

  “I’m going to go to cooking school,” he said, eyes closed.

  “Right now?”

  “Someday.”

  I knew “someday” would come much later, only after he’d recovered from this day. “Yeah?” I said. “I’m going to become a football coach.”

  Coach Taylor was on the move, striding up the steep, uneven path like there was a mountain of Twinkies waiting for us at the top. Shayla was hot on his heels, though she took three steps for each one of his, and they were miraculously managing to carry on a conversation as they climbed. I, on the other hand, was a fair distance behind, breathing like an asthmatic heifer in a marathon and squinting up into the distance with the hope that Sausenburg’s tower would suddenly materialize out of the forest.