The Best I Could

by R. K. Ryals

  He shrugged.

  Throwing him a soft, weary smile, I mumbled, “Quit drinking, rich boy.”

  He flicked his cigarette over the side of the building, his body leaning against the parapet, his gaze on the street below.

  Jet motioned me inside the hospital. The doorway was a monster waiting to swallow me whole. Rather than run, we stumbled straight into the belly of the beast.

  TWO

  Eli

  I was a magnet for emotional baggage. It didn’t matter how fast or how hard I tried running.

  It began when I was a toddler sitting next to my weeping mother. Running her manicured nails through my hair, she’d whisper, “Everything is going to be okay.” Over and over again. Broken, wheeze-tainted word-sobs. I didn’t know whether she was trying to convince me or herself, but ever since then, I’d been that boy, the one who was there when shit went down. My mother primed me for it. I’d been bred to keep Kleenex everywhere; my car, my room, and my pockets.

  As soon as I graduated high school, I developed a new motto: see tears, hand over Kleenex, run, and repeat.

  With my mother, the tears had always been over inane things. A temper tantrum over a piece of jewelry or a pair of shoes my grandfather wouldn’t buy her, a wailing fit over a new wrinkle on her face, or a sobbing mess over one of her numerous failed affairs. Mom wasn’t just good at crying, she was good at falling in and out of love very quickly.

  There were two kinds of tears in the world—the kind that mattered and the kind that didn’t.

  The girl on the roof, I think that tear mattered.

  One look, and I’d had her mentally pegged a misguided, unfortunate disaster, my irritation growing the longer she stood on the roof. There wasn’t much to her. A slight frame. A wrinkled, hooded T-shirt hanging over a pair of cut-off shorts. A diamond stud winked at me from her nose, and her eyelids were lined in smeared kohl, highlighting her emerald irises. Her short brown hair was jagged and layered, the strands overwhelmed by screaming red highlights. Random, unprofessional, chunky pieces.

  “This spot is taken,” I said.

  Upon closer scrutiny, everything changed. Her face was a grieving landscape born more of regret than sadness. A connoisseur of tears, I thought I knew how to read them all, loss included, but hers spoke a new, disturbing language.

  The talking threw me, not because words kept coming out of her mouth but because I actually stayed to listen. I didn’t do personal small talk, and she wasn’t my type. The girls that tempted me were tall, curvy, and older. Even if I had been persuaded to offer a shoulder hoping I’d get laid, she wasn’t my modus operandi, and since sex was off the table, there shouldn’t have been anything left to keep me there. After all, I had women issues. My mother and former fiancée had made sure of that.

  With a sigh, I pocketed the last two cigarettes I’d bummed off of a visitor in the hospital and made my way off the roof.

  The stairwell and the halls it led to all had the same sterile smell—a scary, antiseptic odor that promised more than healing. It promised pain. Pain and death.

  Cringing, I ducked onto one of the floors, located the elevators, and sped the rest of the way down. A middle-aged woman at the front desk stayed glued to her computer as I swept past. Electronic doors swished open, blowing in humidity and city smells. Atlanta, Georgia. Distant sirens wailed.

  “Eli!” My younger brother, Jonathan, waved wildly from a red Porsche in the parking lot.

  Shoving my hands into my blue jean pockets, I hunched my shoulders, and wove past a group of nurses, my tennis shoes thudding against cracked pavement. Car horns honked.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a man cried. “You can’t park here!”

  More voices. More car horns.

  Pulling the passenger side door open, I climbed inside.

  Jonathan grinned, ignoring the shouts from outside. “And I’m supposed to look up to you?” he asked, as if we’d just spoken yesterday. As if the world wasn’t a honking mess waiting for him to move his ass. “Man of the house and all that.” He laughed, inclining his head at the hospital. “Guess after that last resort-like place you were in, Pops figured you needed a low maintenance environment.”

  Inhaling the Porsche’s leather interior, I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. The world disappeared. Not the sounds—those were getting louder—but the ugliness of it all. “It’s my job to take the hits so the rest of you can fly under the radar.”

  “Sure,” Jonathan snorted. “How are you, Eli?”

  Jonathan was only sixteen. At twenty, I was the oldest of three siblings. None of us had the same father, but we shared a mother and a grandfather. I was the product of Mom’s first marriage. Our eighteen-year-old sister, Heather, was the product of husband number two. Jonathan had been born out of wedlock, an affair Mom had after she remarried my father, making Dad her third marriage. It was after her fourth marriage—a fiasco which only lasted two months—that she swore off matrimony. But not men. Never men.

  “I’m just ready to get back in my apartment,” I muttered.

  My space. My music. My punching bag. My cup of permanent markers, red and black, waiting to scribble words on the bag, words I wanted to remember, others I wanted to forget. Things I wanted to beat into my memory, and others I wanted to beat out of it.

  “Your apartment?”

  At the hesitant question, my eyes flew open. The world reappeared, the screaming outside suddenly matching my mood.

  Honk, Honk! “What the hell, you idiot?” a man cried.

  “Yeah, my apartment,” I growled. “You know, the one I moved into last summer?”

  My brother, whose red hair and sudden blush-infused freckles definitely came from his father, winced. “About that …”

  “Spit it out, Jon!”

  “Pops let it go. You’re staying with him now.”

  The world stopped.

  “You’re fucking with me,” I breathed. When Jonathan didn’t say anything, I slammed my palm against the dashboard. “Damn him! He’s sending me to the orchard, isn’t he?”

  Telling silence.

  “Every single time,” I snarled.

  “It could be good,” Jonathan murmured. “It helped Heather a few years back after she ran away from home for the fifth time.”

  Falling back into the seat, I pulled my seatbelt on and glowered. “I don’t know what’s worse … having my kid brother chauffeur me, or being ripped out of my life.”

  “You did it to yourself,” Jonathan pointed out, pulling the car into morning traffic.

  A collective cheer went up in the parking lot behind us, cars honking in victory.

  “Yeah, well, it won’t happen again,” I promised. “I’m done with all of it. Women, especially.”

  Pain crossed his features. “You might be done with Mandy, but she’s not done with the family.”

  I stiffened, my former fiancée’s name making my skin crawl. “I was only gone a few weeks, Jon. Tell me it doesn’t get worse.”

  He grimaced. “That guy she was cheating on you with … it was Lincoln.”

  My body ceased doing anything, as if it wasn’t sure which emotion was appropriate.

  “Our cousin,” I whispered, feeling everything and nothing. “She wanted money that bad, huh?”

  “She’s pregnant,” Jonathan blurted. “They’re getting married.”

  Maniacal laughter seeped out of me, bleeding out of my mouth and skin. “All because I told her I wasn’t interested in doing what Pops does. Brilliant.”

  I needed a drink.

  “None of us wants to do what he does,” Jonathan admitted. “Except Lincoln.”

  My jaw muscles jumped, my fists clenching. What I wouldn’t do for my punching bag and permanent markers. “Maybe the orchard isn’t such a bad idea.”

  Lockston Orchard was an apple orchard. My grandfather—Pops to the grandkids—had bought the property for my grandmother two years before she passed away from breast cancer. She’d l
oved the orchard; the dusty lanes, lines of trees, and lingering bees. Even though no one in the family really knew what to do with it, we’d kept it after Grams’ death. It wasn’t a typical working orchard. Pops hired people to harvest and take care of the apples, but the rest of the place was simply landscaped lawns, weathered buildings, and a large, whitewashed colonial house with too many rooms and too few people.

  It had become a place of convalescence, a place where we went—sent in my case—to lick our wounds and heal.

  Lockston Orchard was the perfect place for either falling in love or hunkering down to think about all of the reasons why you shouldn’t.

  “You’re better off, you know that, right?” Jonathan asked.

  I stared at the passing city, the bumper-to-bumper traffic, and high rise buildings. Sun glinted off of glass, blinding and brilliant all at once. It reminded me of a messed up painting or a patched up pair of pants.

  “Knitting,” I murmured, laughing. “She likes knitting.”

  Why she came to me now, I had no idea, but she was suddenly there in my head; the girl on the roof, the splatter of blood on her toes, and the eyeliner smeared at the corners of her eyes, making them look bigger than they were. Wider. Darker. Tragically beautiful.

  “What?” Jonathan asked. “Who are you talking about?”

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  “It’s not mine,” she’d said about the blood on her foot.

  She’d seemed too young to look so … old. Very different from my mother, who at thirty-eight, still had the eyes of a child.

  A memory assaulted me, an angry one from the summer before when I’d moved out of my mother’s house.

  “She needs a reality check!” I yelled. “She never grew up, Pops. She’s too busy seeing how much money she can spend and how many hearts she can break to give a damn about anything else.”

  “She’s had three children,” Pops argued.

  I snorted. “And? Goes to show going through childbirth doesn’t make you an adult. It just makes you a parent. In her case, a damned bad one.”

  Pops stared, a look I’d never seen before crossing his face. “There’s more to you than you give yourself credit for, Eli.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not going to find it here.”

  Picking up a packed bag, I walked out of the house, the door slamming behind me.

  “Ugh!” Jonathan cried, laying on his horn, the sound shattering the memory, sending it spiraling into sun-glinted glass. “This traffic is ridiculous!”

  “You in a hurry to get rid of me?”

  Jonathan grinned. “I’m not female, and I don’t need one of your Kleenexes.”

  My mouth twitched. “Don’t knock the Kleenex, buddy. They come in handy.” Outside, the city kept moving. My gaze slid to the sky. The clouds were bunched up hankies swollen with water we couldn’t see. “There’s always someone crying somewhere.”

  “Yeah,” Jonathan murmured. “There’s that.”

  Again, my thoughts strayed to the girl on the roof. Not because I had a sudden insta-obsession, but because there’d been no real tears. Not the kind I understood. A single tear and a lost look, but no maelstrom of emotion. Only regret and, strangely, relief.

  What were you thinking, Tansy?

  THREE

  Tansy

  We were a few miles away from the hospital when Deena started crying angry tears, the kind that said “Fuck off!” not the kind that said “Hug me through the hurt”.

  “I hate him!” she sobbed. “I hate him so much!”

  “Deena,” my grandmother cautioned from the driver’s seat, her fingers gripping the steering wheel.

  “You don’t know!” Deena continued. “You weren’t there, Nana! You didn’t watch him kill himself.”

  “Deena!” Jet growled from the passenger seat.

  I stared out the window, my gaze on the passing city. There was no reason to go home. The rented house we’d lived in was two months behind on payment. After Dad’s admission into the hospital, our landlord told Hetty it was either pay now or go elsewhere. She’d gathered our things, packed what she could into the back of her van, shipped what she couldn’t, and told Mr. Yarbrough we wouldn’t be back.

  It was all so fast. A single blink. Our house. Dad. All gone. Everything I’d spent the last three years focusing on. Now, it was like I was floating in the middle of an ocean with nothing around me.

  Boats. Maybe I should have asked the guy on the roof for a ship. One I could knit a sail for. Away, the pattern would say.

  A knitted sail. The thought made my lips twitch with the urge to giggle.

  “You’re hella blind if you can’t admit Dad committed suicide!” Deena bellowed.

  Jet whirled in his seat, his face red, his eyes flashing.

  I was so tired of the screaming, the accusations, and the fear. “Stop!” I choked out. “Just stop, okay?” I glanced at Jet. “She’s right. There’s no use denying it.” My eyes slid to Deena. “But the anger … is it really helping you any?”

  “What is this whole suicide talk?” Hetty groused. “He died because his organs failed.”

  “Because he’d been pumping his body with pain meds, sleeping pills, alcohol, and anxiety medications, Nana,” I pointed out. “Anything to keep him sedated and not here. We might as well get it out in the open. Otherwise, it’s just going to fester. After Dad lost Mom, he just couldn’t do life.”

  “He gave up on us,” Deena argued. Crossing her arms, she fell back into the seat. “This van smells like dog shit.”

  “We’re going to work on that mouth, missy,” Hetty advised. “Your mama would have had your hide if she heard you speaking like that.”

  “Do you see her here?” Deena asked.

  Jet sighed, his gaze meeting mine before he faced forward, defeated.

  Hetty glanced in the rearview mirror. “I miss her, too, Deena.”

  Nana was our maternal grandmother. Mom had been her only child. When Mom passed away, Hetty, a well-respected veterinarian in Atlanta, had retreated to the countryside, to a small animal clinic.

  “I should have come back,” Hetty went on. “I shouldn’t have stayed away all of these years.”

  Deena snorted. “It’s a little too late now, isn’t it?”

  Too much blame. Too much time between all of us. “In all fairness, we didn’t contact you,” I pointed out. “Maybe we should have said something.”

  “It wouldn’t have helped,” Jet muttered. “Dad was determined to join Mom. We can’t blame ourselves.”

  My sister hiccupped. “Then we can blame Mom. He left us to be with her.”

  “Deena!” Jet and I cried.

  “Stop it!” she screamed. “I hate them! I can do that! I can hate them, damn it! I’m not either one of you!”

  Hetty hit the brakes on the van, throwing us forward against our seatbelts. “You’re allowed to be angry, Deena, but not if it makes you hate the world.”

  “Screw all of you!” my sister yelled.

  Other than Deena’s tears, there was no desire to cry. We were beyond that. We just wanted to bury our father, to let his soul join our mother’s on the other side. We wanted to move on. Deena’s anger, however, held us back. It kept us stuck in a place none of us wanted to visit.

  My eyes met the road beyond, my nose wrinkling. Deena was right, the van stank. It smelled like wet dog, old blood, and piss. Outside the window, you could just make out the words Refuge Animal Hospital scrawled in green down the side of the tan exterior.

  A Porsche pulled to a stop at a traffic light next to us, and I found myself staring down at a young, red-haired driver. He glanced up, caught my gaze, and grinned. In the passenger seat, a vaguely familiar guy looked up, his gaze following his friend’s to my face.

  I stiffened. Eli, the roof guy.

  We stared. I need a boat, my eyes beseeched, to sail far away from this place. This mess. My family.

  The red-haired boy’s lips moved. Eli answered, his eyes narrowing on m
ine.

  “Is that the guy from the hospital?” my brother asked from the front seat. “The one you were talking to on the roof?”

  “Yeah,” I murmured.

  “Who?” Deena asked, leaning over me. “The redhead or the brunette?”

  The light changed, and the van lurched forward, breaking my eye contact with Eli.

  No, he’s mine, I thought. Not in a romantic way, but a frantic, escape route way. Which was crazy. Completely crazy.

  “The brunette,” I said finally. “He was just some guy on the roof.”

  “Oh,” Deena breathed, disappointed. “And here I was hoping something interesting had happened today.”

  My throat worked, misery choking it.

  Our dad’s death wasn’t enough for you.

  Anger at my sister detonated inside of me, but I shoved it down. Maybe she was right to be so hateful. Maybe it was the rest of us who were wrong.

  I wanted to hate Dad, but I couldn’t. I pitied him. In the end, before he’d gone to the hospital, I’d sat next to him, my fingers entwined with his.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be stronger, Tansy,” Dad whispered. “I did the best I could. I just don’t know how to be here without her. You get that, don’t you?”

  A tear slipped down his face, the pain of it slicing an excruciating trail down my heart and soul.

  “Yeah, Dad, I get it. It’s got to hurt, huh? To love someone that much?”

  “You have no idea,” he answered.

  My feelings were split in half. On one hand, I envied my dad his love for my mother. What would it be like to love someone so much?

  On the other hand, I felt like he was a coward. Wouldn’t it be braver to keep their love alive? Wouldn’t it be braver than letting it die with him?

  No resentment. Only pity and disappointment.

  I sighed, words spilling forth with the exhale, “Say hello to Mom, Dad.”

  If anyone in the van heard me, they said nothing. Even my sister. Love wasn’t tearing Dad into pieces anymore, and I couldn’t be angry about that. Not that part. That part relieved me.