“It doesn’t matter—you’re not supposed to automatically assume I’m a whore! I’m your child! Or do you forget that you have more than one of those?”
“Shh!” Josh cuts in. “Shh, everybody. Calm, remember?” He squeezes Mom’s shoulder. “Why don’t we ask Levi himself about all this tomorrow? Then we can see if he wants to go at all. Why don’t we let his wishes guide this?”
Mom nods. “We might not even need to have this discussion at all.”
“Well, we’ll let Levi decide,” Josh corrects her.
Mom stands and goes to the kitchen, where she starts dinner, pots and pans banging together more than necessary. Josh catches me on my way back upstairs and gives me a smile.
“I’ll keep working on her,” he says. “I promise I’ll get her to consider this fairly. I think it’s a great idea, and I know it comes from a good place.”
I search his face to make sure he’s telling the truth. I can’t tell for sure, but he wants me to feel comforted, and that’s more than I can say for my biological parent.
“Thanks, Josh.”
“No problem, kid. Love you.”
“Love you, too.”
For the hundred thousandth time, I thank the god of stepfathers for sending Josh.
CHAPTER FIVE
Mom and Josh go to the treatment center gift shop, saying they needed to buy Levi some cough drops, and I go up to his room. He’s watching cartoons with an irritated frown, ignoring the nurse trying to get him to take a cup of pills.
“Come on, Levi. You know you have to. I’m not going away until you take these.” She turns when she hears my shoes on the linoleum. “Oh, this must be your sister. Here for a visit?”
I smile. “Yup. Hi, Lev.”
He grunts and finally reaches for the pills, downing them without the glass of water the nurse hands him. She makes him open his mouth and lift his tongue before she walks away, satisfied.
I sit down next to his bed. “How’s it going today?”
“Good. Looney Tunes is on. With Road Runner.”
“Oh, cool.” I turn to the TV and we watch for a few minutes. “Remember watching these cartoons at Grandma’s when we were little?”
Before I started my job at Safeway, Mom would drag us to her parents’ house every Sunday. Grandma and Grandpa made French toast with sticky syrup, blueberry pancakes, and the greasiest sausages imaginable. Levi and I would watch cartoons, eating our breakfast off those wooden TV trays old people always seem to have. We’d fight the whole time—over the pancakes with the most blueberries, the crispiest bacon, Looney Tunes or Scooby-Doo. Mom would always turn from the adults’ conversation and snap at me to let Levi have his way. Looney Tunes was fine, since Levi liked it so much. But there were so many Sundays I was dying to know what Scooby and the gang were up to on the other channel.
“Hmm,” Levi says. “Are Mom and Josh here?”
“In the shop.”
He grunts.
“Hey, Lev … I have a question for you.”
“What.”
“You know about my trip.”
“Yeah.”
“I was wondering if you wanted to come. We could make it smaller if you don’t want to go all over Europe, maybe just France. What do you think?”
He looks at me. Well, not at me. But his eyes are fixed on some point on my face, kind of near my chin. “Come to France with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm.” He looks back at the TV and purses his lips, sliding them back and forth across his teeth. “Do you have enough money?”
My heart starts to beat a little harder. If he was totally uninterested, he would ignore me or tell me to fuck off.
“Yeah.”
His fingers with their bitten-down nails start to pick at his blanket. He pulls it over his lap and frowns as he arranges it just so. When it’s tucked around his feet, he pats it all down. He looks like a caterpillar making its cocoon.
“Did Mom say it’s okay?”
“She’s … not thrilled. I think Josh is on board. They want to ask the doctors what they think, though.”
“The doctors might say no.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
A second passes, then two, then three, then …
“We should go. Soon. Preferably two days after I get home.”
“Yeah?” I try to control my smile. “So I should buy our plane tickets, then? We’ll fly to Paris?”
He nods and scratches his nose.
Paris. After all this time, Paris.
“Okay, so,” Levi says. His voice is relatively light. Still monotone, but he sounds almost content. “I’ll probably come home in a week. You should buy the tickets for the twenty-fifth.”
“Okay.”
Mom and Josh come up then and we spend the afternoon watching TV and laughing, Levi pointing out the many things he finds ridiculous. I can barely concentrate. Paris and possibilities burn a hole in me.
In the car on the way home, I break the news.
“He said yes!” I say, trying to rein in my excitement. “He wants to come to Paris! He wants to leave on the twenty-fifth!”
Josh smiles. “He actually wants to? That’s great!”
“I know, I can’t believe it.”
Mom says nothing. Her eyebrows furrow in the rearview mirror. She really looks her age when she’s worried. Forty-five. Josh could be the son she had in high school instead of her husband.
We pull into the driveway at home, and when Josh gets out of the car and we’re alone, she asks, “Does he really want to go?”
“You know how stubborn he is. If he didn’t want to go, he wouldn’t even talk about it.”
“You aren’t bending Levi to your will, are you?” she whispers, looking down into her lap.
Resisting the urge to freak out, I measure my words with a teaspoon. “No, Mom. I wouldn’t do that.”
She lets out the longest sigh in the world. “We have to consult Dr. Pearson,” she says. “But if it’s what Levi wants … maybe we can find a way.”
And it is. It is, it is, it is.
CHAPTER SIX
While Mom meets with Dr. Pearson, I wander the house all day, wringing my hands. When she gets home, she slams the front door and shouts, “Dr. Pearson gives the green light!” before kicking off her shoes and stomping to the kitchen.
I do a happy dance in my room, and once I’m calm, I spend the night stepping up my plane ticket research game.
Levi comes home three days later, but his plan to leave for Paris exactly two days after returning home is dashed. Mom insists that we spend two weeks at home before leaving. On Levi’s first night back, I sit with him in his room and he complains, “Two weeks of dealing with Mom. Yay, exactly what I wanted.”
“She’s just worried about you,” I tell him.
He grunts and plays with the hospital wristband he’s still wearing.
“At least we have Josh on our side,” I say. “He’s a lot more rational than Mom.”
“Because he’s not our dad,” Levi says.
“Come on. He is our dad by this point.”
“He isn’t our blood.”
Every couple years, we have this argument. It’s always the same.
“Blood means nothing. Josh acts like a better dad than our real father ever did, even when he was around. That counts for more.”
Levi shakes his head. “No blood relation. Not our dad.”
I roll my eyes. I hate when Levi talks like this. He always favors the guy who walked out on us over the guy who walked in, sat down, and stayed. It’s not fair. I give our birth father exactly what he deserves: nothing, not so much as a thought. I’ve worshiped Josh since the first time he cooked us mac and cheese with cut-up hot dogs in it, but Levi barely speaks to him. I once had a nightmare where Josh heard Levi say he hates him. I woke up in tears.
Our huge, fat, white cat, aptly named Snowball, waltzes into Levi’s room and plants himself in my lap. He looks up at me like “what are you goi
ng to do about it?” Levi chuckles and slides off his bed. He shuffles closer to me and pats Snowball’s head.
“I wish we could bring Snowball to Paris,” Levi murmurs.
I hear that for what it is: I hope the trip will be okay.
“It’ll be fine, Levi,” I tell him.
He grunts.
The two weeks at home, I quickly learn, are so Mom can let me know just how much she doesn’t trust me. I’m eating breakfast one day when she walks in, shuffling a stack of index cards.
“What are those?” I ask, slurping my cereal milk.
She holds the first one up in response. There’s a picture of a small, white pill, and the words ONE PILL, TWICE DAILY.
“They’re flash cards,” Mom says. “With all of Levi’s medication on them.”
I manage to refrain from rolling my eyes. “You couldn’t just tell me all this? You had to make flash cards?”
“This is how you learn,” she says, flipping to the next card: red pill, ONE PILL, THREE TIMES DAILY WITH FOOD. “This is no different from your times tables.”
“You don’t think it’s a little condescending?” I point out. “Seeing as I’m eighteen, not eight?”
She says, “Until you can recite all this information, you’re not going on your trip. I need to trust that you can take care of Levi.”
“You could just give me a list.”
She shakes her head and flips to the next card. “You need to know this backwards and forwards.”
I knew she was right—of course I needed to know Levi’s meds schedule, I was the adult on the trip—but she flipped the cards so aggressively, holding them right in my face. I had to grit my teeth and bite my tongue, but I eventually played along.
It only took a few minutes before I could tell you how many of the blue pills Levi needed every day, and whether or not he needed to take the orange capsules with food, but Mom ran me through the flashcards every day leading up to our departure. She wrote me a final test a few days before we left.
“See, I was right,” Mom said when I passed that test with flying colors. “You do learn best with flash cards.”
The night before we leave, Mom pops her head into the bathroom while I’m dabbing a clay mask on my face.
“We don’t want you to get arrested for kidnapping,” Mom says, presenting me with an envelope, “so I wrote you a letter of parental consent to travel as his guardian.”
Wow, thanks for not wanting me to get arrested and charged with a felony, Mom. But I manage to accept the envelope with a smile.
“But this isn’t just a free-for-all,” she says before launching into stuff she’s repeated hundreds of times this week. “We want you to be in constant contact. Text us every day with that app Josh made you download. Every day, got it?”
I nod. “Got it.”
“Tell us every little thing about how Levi’s feeling. And …” She takes a deep breath. “Keira, it’s your obligation to make sure he’s taking his medications. If anything, anything at all, goes wrong …”
She’s all but telling me it’ll be my fault. I want to reply with a metric ton of sarcasm—“Nooooo, Mom, I’m going to make sure he gets super depressed and jumps into the Seine!”
“Of course,” is all I say.
“And,” Mom continues. She holds out a folded piece of notebook paper. It trembles in her hand. “I want you to have a look at this. It’s—it’s Levi’s note.”
His suicide note? I stare at the little slip of paper. It looks so innocent, but who knows what could be written there?
“No,” I splutter. “No, Mom, I can’t. I don’t want to know what it says.”
She still holds it out to me. “I really think you should.”
What could he have said when he thought he was about to die? Our last interaction before he wrote that letter was horrid—what if he mentioned it? There’s no way I can read anything he could say about that. Why would she push this on me at the last minute? Is she trying to scare me? To make me change my mind about the trip? If that’s her goal, if she’s using fear to manipulate me into doing what she wants … that’s a new low.
“No, Mom,” I whisper. “I can’t.”
She exhales loudly, flaring her nostrils. She retracts the note, pulling it in close to her body. “Fine.”
It’s not fine. My heart pounds as I wash off my face mask; panic prickles at the edges of my vision as I stare myself down in the mirror. I completely lost my chill. Did Mom want me to be so distraught I’d call off the trip and check myself into Levi’s treatment center? Does she hate me that much?
Our flight leaves at 11:30 a.m. on a bright, sunny Tuesday. I wake up at six; I couldn’t possible sleep any more. I shower, dress, all the while thinking in a matter of hours, I’ll be in Paris and internally freaking out. Levi wakes early, too, packing last-minute things into his suitcase. Extra pairs of socks, his iPod, his alarm clock.
“Why are you bringing that?”
“So we’ll wake up?” Levi says with a duh kind of tone.
“The hostel will have alarm clocks, y’know. Cell phones have alarm clocks.”
He zips up the suitcase, alarm clock still inside. “I would rather have my own clock so I know for sure how to use it.”
I smile secretly. “Okay, whatever. Ready to go?”
He nods.
Mom stays out of our way as we lug our suitcases downstairs and out to Josh’s car. We’ve arranged this: Josh will drive us to the airport, and Mom will say good-bye at home, to minimize her stress. And mine.
When we’re ready, she hugs me for like three seconds and clings to Levi for what feels like hours. After patting her back once, he just stands there awkwardly.
“Be safe,” she whispers when she finally pulls back.
I swallow my sarcasm, smile, and wave.
It’s a forty-minute drive to the airport, through downtown Seattle. I’m nervous like I’ve never been nervous before. The song on the radio is too fast; it sets a bad example for my heartbeat.
We’re actually on our way. Paris, the city of my heart! And I’m going there without Jacques. I never thought I would’ve been happy about that, but I close my eyes for a few seconds and imagine what it would really be like to have Jacques in the back seat right now instead of Levi. I would have painstakingly loaded up my face with makeup this morning, and subsequently worried about it staying pristine, even on the transatlantic flight. I probably would have bought an entirely new wardrobe for the trip—told myself I’d compromise on souvenirs and experiences in Paris to balance out the money I was blowing on clothes. I would spend the whole trip worrying about how I looked or reining in my excitement to match Jacques’s cool detachment.
No, thank you. Without him, I can be comfortable, practical, and I can be myself. I can safely geek out with Levi; he wouldn’t judge me or laugh at me. I mean, no more than he usually does. He is my little brother, after all.
I glance at him in the backseat. He’s gazing out the window, eyes actually shining.
“Excited, Levi?” I ask him.
He nods and scratches his nose, his face scrunched up. I go back to quietly freaking out.
Finally, we arrive at SeaTac. Josh pulls the car to the curb at Departures like I tell him to.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to park and walk you guys inside?” Josh asks.
“No, it’s okay.” I flash a quick smile. “We’ll be fine, Josh.”
I’m partially saying it to reassure myself, but apparently I convinced him. He gives me a quick hug. Levi climbs out of the car without a word of good-bye.
“Good luck,” Josh says. “You guys will be fine, I know it.”
I can’t speak around the lump in my throat. I just nod. We unload our suitcases and Josh gives us a wave before he drives away, disappearing into the airport traffic.
Then it’s just me and Levi against the world.
We’re stupid early. Our flight isn’t even on the board yet, so we sit in the banks of plastic seats an
d … do nothing. Levi stares at the floor, where he taps his taps his rubber boots incessantly. I look everywhere else. We face this huge, massive wall of check-in stations, where people are being greeted by overly friendly airline representatives and having their luggage weighed before they walk off into the Great Beyond. Or someplace.
“Want to go check out the shops?” I ask, pointing down the long row of storefronts. “Looks like they have books and magazines and stuff.”
Levi shakes his head. A tiny crease appears between his eyebrows.
“What do you want to do?”
“Just sit.”
“Why don’t we walk around or something?”
“No, Keira, God …”
“Okay, jeez! Forgive me.”
“You can go walk around.”
“I don’t want to go by myself!”
He gives the most exaggerated eye roll I’ve ever seen.
“Fine,” I snap. “Watch my suitcase.”
My feet carry me down the line of shops, but none of them interests me anymore. I wanted to look through them with Levi. I wanted to laugh at the creepy stuffed anthropomorphic Space Needles, to pick out a dumb magazine like Trucker’s Monthly and read it together. I wanted us to read the backs of crappy romance novels using our dramatic movie trailer voices. Once we spent hours in Walmart, Levi deadpanning titles like A Man for Keeps and Her Wild Cowboy, and I laughed so hard that, like the old days, I peed. Luckily, Walmart sells underwear.
That was … God, almost two years ago.
I glance over my shoulder. Levi’s tousled head looks up at the ceiling and down to the floor, turns sideways as he scratches his nose. He seems so small from here. He looks so lost.
I dart inside the newsagent’s, buying two Cokes and the silliest romance novel on the shelf.
“Here.” I pass him his Coke as I sit next to him. “I got you a little reading material for the plane.”
His eyes lose a bit of their glassiness when he sees the book cover. Two wind-blown models stare at each other lustily, the man pushing the woman up against a horse.
Maybe in Paris Page 4