She folded her arms across her chest and continued to give me a death stare.
“Okay,” I said. I wiped my face with both hands, careful not to touch my bruised eye. “Luco is not a good guy. I figured that out like ten seconds after I smoked a joint with him in tenth grade. He’s a loser, Susannah. You didn’t miss out on anything.”
Frankie spoke up. “I told Ethan not to smoke with him.”
I gestured toward Frankie. “See? I was stupid and didn’t listen. Now Luco is pissed at me because he thinks I dissed him, so he wants to mess with me. How’s he going to do that, Suze? How’s he going to try to hurt me?”
I stopped and waited for her to figure it out. I didn’t wait long. Susannah’s expression went from sullen to angry to flushed and back to sullen again in the time it takes to turn a light on and off. She wasn’t used to being played.
“Look,” I said in a gentler voice. “You showed guts just hanging out with the dude and his two boys. You probably would’ve stuck that pipe in his eye the second he tried to do anything.”
Susannah’s face darkened. “Don’t try to handle me, Ethan.” She walked away, then looked back over her shoulder. “Sorry about your shirt, Frankie,” she said, then kept walking.
Frankie stood beside me as we both watched her walk past the baseball field back toward school. “What’s wrong with my sister, Frankie?” I said.
Frankie shook his head. “She’s too damn smart, and too damn angry,” he said. “And she isn’t scared of anything.”
Susannah reached the parking lot and stepped between two cars, vanishing from sight.
“That’s what terrifies me,” I said.
* * *
TWO DAYS LATER Luco and his friends grabbed Susannah after school and drove off with her. Another kid told us, and I called Uncle Gavin. “He’ll hurt her,” I said, my voice breaking.
“Go home,” he said. “I’ll find her.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“Go home, Ethan,” he said, and hung up.
Instead, Frankie and I broke into the school’s yearbook office and found an old address for Luco. It was in the Bluff, a neighborhood west of downtown that, back in the day, was basically an open-air drug market. Frankie and his dad both had smartphones, so Frankie texted the address to his dad, and then we turned off our phones so we wouldn’t hear any calls from his father or my uncle. We got in Frankie’s car—the ’71 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am his father had taught him to rebuild and that I called the Frankenstein—and drove to the Bluff.
I don’t remember much about the drive, except for the fear rising up in me like a dark tide. Luco had taken Susannah and I didn’t know where she was, and dear God in heaven I was scared. I was more scared than I had been when two men came into our house and blew my family and my childhood into dust. And I didn’t believe in God, but driving to the Bluff in Frankie’s car, I told Him that I would do anything, anything to get my sister back; I would switch places with her right now, let Luco do whatever he wanted to do to me, just please don’t let my sister be hurt or die, because if there was an afterlife I did not want to meet my father beyond the grave and tell him I had failed him.
It was night by the time we reached the house. The street was hedged in by trees, many overgrown with kudzu, so despite the asphalt and power lines and the Trans Am, the street felt like part of an old civilization being reclaimed slowly by a jungle.
The house was clearly abandoned, the walls tagged with graffiti and the windows boarded up. We snuck into the house through a hole in the back wall covered in plywood. Inside, we found Susannah, sitting in the dark against a wall, eyes closed, face bruised, a fresh needle mark in her arm. Then Luco stepped out of the shadows and cracked me over the head with a pistol before holding us at gunpoint. He had been embarrassed in front of his boys, frightened by a girl with a tiny gun, and now he was relishing his revenge. He had shot heroin into Susannah’s veins, and now he was going to shoot both of us and leave Susannah alive so she would know what had happened to us.
There was an electronic squawk from outside, like a klaxon burst. A police car. Uncle Gavin had called the cavalry. Luco turned toward the sound, and Frankie jumped him, causing Luco to drop the pistol. They fought while I scrabbled around on the floor, head still reeling from being hit over the head by the pistol I was searching for. Luco threw Frankie off him and grabbed me just as my hand closed on something—a syringe, maybe the same one he had used on my sister. Luco drew back a fist, and I swung and jabbed that syringe straight into his ear. He shrieked and dropped me, stumbling away and out the front door, then fell down the outside stairs, breaking an ankle.
That’s the moment when it should have all gone right, the universe rebalanced, justice served. Frankie and I had gone into the dark cave, fought the ogre, and rescued my sister. We would go home, bruised but alive and victorious. But I should have known, more than anyone, that the universe does not work that way.
Someone stepped into the doorway, blocking the light. It was Frankie, looking out. Blue and red lights flashed beyond him. I could hear Frankie talking with someone. He raised his hand as if he was pointing at something below him. Then a sharp crack. Shouts came from outside, and a bright light shone on the front door, revealing Frankie in silhouette, dropping to his knees, hands empty and up over his head.
* * *
UNCLE GAVIN PULLED out all the stops, hiring a defense attorney for Frankie and calling in favors. But there were no magic phone calls for Frankie, no councilman in Uncle Gavin’s back pocket who could make this go away. Frankie had purposefully shot a man to death in front of two police officers. He was charged with voluntary manslaughter. Later, when he was out on bail, Frankie told me that when he found the gun and stepped to the front door to see Luco writhing in pain on the steps and two police officers getting out of their patrol car, Luco had told him that when he got out of prison he would find and kill all of us. And so Frankie had lifted the pistol and shot Luco in the head, then dropped the gun and raised his hands so the two cops wouldn’t shoot him. “It was like you would kill a snake,” Frankie said, but his voice trembled when he said it.
When Susannah got out of the hospital, she slept late every morning. Hibernating, she said. She went to outpatient therapy at Birchwood every afternoon, Monday through Friday, for two weeks. In the evenings she slogged through whatever school work she had been sent. She wasn’t attending classes, with the school’s permission, but Uncle Gavin, who otherwise treated Susannah as if she were made of glass, insisted that she keep up with her work.
One night after dinner I knocked on the door of her room. She was sitting on her bed, doing geometry. “I hate proofs,” she said. “I mean hate them. When in my life am I going to need to prove that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle equals a straight angle?”
“Mrs. Markham says geometry is good for sharpening logic and developing your argumentative skills,” I said, referring to my English teacher.
Susannah scowled at her textbook. “Mrs. Markham can bite me,” she said. “No offense.” She wrote something in her notebook, then looked up at me. “What?”
The doctors had told us that they had given my sister Narcan to counteract the heroin in her system and that there had been no permanent damage. They had also told us that Susannah had been raped.
“Nothing,” I said. I walked around her room, glancing at her empty desk, the poster of Munch’s The Scream on her closet door. “Just wanted to see how you’re doing.”
“I’m even more committed to not becoming a mathematician,” she said.
“You know what I mean.”
“Worried I’m using heroin?” She turned out her forearms for inspection. “No needle marks, see?”
“Jesus, Susannah.”
“If you want to make sure I’m not shooting up between my toes, I can take my socks off.”
“All right, enough. God.”
She sighed and set her notebook off to the side, then crossed her legs. “I’m fine, Ethan,”
she said. “I’m pissed off at the world in general and really pissed off at Luco, but I’m okay. Really.”
“How can you just … say that stuff so easily?”
She shrugged. “Hours of therapy. And not giving a shit.” She considered me. “Thanks, by the way. For coming to rescue me.”
“You’re welcome.”
She tilted her head. “You okay?”
“Me? Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh,” Susannah said. “Your best friend might go to jail for killing someone. You’re stellar.”
I wanted to wrap my arms around her, but I was torn as to what I would do after that—give her a hug, or strangle her to death. “I worry about you,” I said. “Deeply.”
“Snafu,” she said. I stared at her. “You know,” she said, “situation normal, all fucked up.”
“I know what snafu means.”
She punched me in the arm. “Don’t worry, big brother,” she said. “Ernest Hemingway said we’re all broken. That’s how the light gets in.”
“Hemingway also blew his own head off with a shotgun.”
Susannah laughed. “Are you worried I’m going to off myself?” When I continued to stare at her, she got serious. “I won’t ever want to kill myself, because I wouldn’t give Luco the satisfaction,” she said.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“And I’m not,” she said. “Winning.”
* * *
FRANKIE GOT A plea deal from the DA—ten years, with the possibility of parole after serving three years of his sentence. He took it.
Having my best friend go to prison was devastating. Strangely, aside from Frankie, the person I missed most at that time was Fay, Uncle Gavin’s old girlfriend. She would have known what to say to Ruben, or to Frankie. But she had never returned after walking out of the house that night. Uncle Gavin had dated a few women after Fay left, but they rarely stayed at the house—Uncle Gavin would spend the night with them somewhere else—and none of them ever lasted more than a few weeks, let alone showed any genuine interest in me or Susannah. And none of them could cook. We had not had a truly good dinner since Fay left. Even the house missed her, if the state of the windows and the wood floors and the kitchen counters was any indication, but Uncle Gavin and Susannah and I had somehow muddled through. Now, though, it felt as if some black hole of dread had opened up beneath the foundations and was drawing everything into it.
One evening about a week after Frankie began his prison sentence, Uncle Gavin appeared in my bedroom doorway. He rarely came up to the second floor, where I would hole up and do my homework or read or play games on my laptop, a refurbished model that Uncle Gavin had gotten me for school. I was sitting on my bed, blowing off studying for exams and playing Skyrim instead, when Uncle Gavin knocked on the open door. I closed the lid of the laptop. “Hey,” I said.
Uncle Gavin came in and sat on the one chair in my room, which was at my little-used desk. He glanced around as if taking in for the first time the bare walls and the piles of mostly clean clothes. “You all right?” he asked.
Since Frankie had gone to prison, I had not talked to my uncle other than saying what was necessary in order to live in the same house. I had not talked to anyone, really, aside from him and Susannah.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”
He nodded, appraising me with those damned dark eyes. “I learned something today,” he said.
When it became clear he was waiting for a response, I said, “Okay.”
Now my uncle’s gaze didn’t waver but focused on me. “I told you before that if the police couldn’t find those men, I would.”
Distracted by Frankie’s incarceration, it took me a moment to understand what my uncle was saying. Those men. As if from the end of a long corridor in my memory, I heard my father shouting, my mother’s scream, gunshots. Something in me stirred, unseen and on the verge of waking. My voice was a dry rasp. “Did you? Find them?”
It was now dark outside, only a streetlamp down the road shining weakly, unable to even cast a shadow across my window. The lamp on my nightstand gave the room a warm, comfortable glow, but I shivered at my uncle’s single, affirmative nod.
“Where are they?” I said.
“In Jacksonville,” he said.
I shook my head in disbelief. It was so mundane, as if he were telling me where some former neighbors had moved to. My parents’ killers should be in prison, or dead. Not in Jacksonville. I tried to imagine what they were doing in Jacksonville, then decided it didn’t matter.
“What … what are you going to do?” I asked, a bit breathless.
Uncle Gavin considered me for a few quiet seconds. “That depends on what you want,” he said finally.
I stared at him. Deep in a cave at the center of my heart, that unseen thing was yawning and about to open its eyes. I knew what my uncle meant. He was asking me if I wanted him to do something about those men. If I wanted him to see to it that those men never left Jacksonville.
In my mind, I saw them both, the one with the goatee and the acne scars who had fought with my dad, and the other one, Ponytail, the one with the gun, and they were both lying on the deck of a boat, bags over their heads, hands tied behind their backs. It was midnight and the boat was speeding out into the open ocean, where under a moonless sky the faceless crew would toss the two men overboard, and they would kick and flail and scream but eventually slip beneath the waves, water filling their mouths and noses and lungs as they sank down, down through the ink-black sea …
The scene in my mind was so clear, so visceral, that I gasped and came back to myself a little, sitting on my bed and staring at the dark-blue comforter in front of me. I looked up at my uncle, and he must have seen the horror on my face.
“No?” he asked in a quiet voice.
I couldn’t speak, but I shook my head. Uncle Gavin replied with a curt nod and stood, then walked out of my room. The thing in my heart curled itself into a ball and went back to sleep, and I leaned back against my pillows, on the verge of tears and trying to decide if my reaction had been the correct one, and whether or not Uncle Gavin had looked disappointed.
Eight days later, I found a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on my bed. It was folded back to a short article in the Metro section, about a drug bust. I dropped my backpack to the floor and sat cross-legged on my bed to read the article. Two men in a van with Florida license plates had been stopped in College Park on an anonymous tip. In the van, under a false floor, police found a kilo of cocaine. The two were being charged with drug possession and trafficking. A third person was being sought for questioning, according to police sources.
Small photos of the two arrested men accompanied the article. One of them, Jay Gardner, with a buzz cut and a block-shaped head, was unfamiliar. The other one had a goatee and acne scars, the same ones he’d had when he fought with my father in our house, before Ponytail came through the front door with a gun. His name was listed as Samuel Bridges. I looked at his face as he stared insolently at the camera. The article said the charges could bring sentences of five to thirty years in prison. Longer than what Frankie has, I thought, and then felt disgusted that my measure for judging jail time was Frankie. Beyond that, though, I didn’t know what I felt, or how I should feel. I had a good idea that the same person who had called in the anonymous tip had also left the newspaper on my bed, and was probably at Ronan’s right now, talking with Ruben about unreliable vendors or the price of liquor. Should I feel thankful? Pleased that justice had been done? Upset that Ponytail had apparently not been nabbed and was still out there? Angry with and perhaps frightened of my uncle?
Something else bothered me about the newspaper. It felt like an apology, as if my uncle was trying to make amends for failing to keep Frankie out of prison. If that’s what it was, I understood the gesture, but it also upset me, my uncle delivering these men, so to speak, to atone for what had happened to Frankie.
In retrospect, it was at that moment, I think, that I realize
d I had to leave. Not just leave for college, but leave my uncle’s house, leave him and his dangerous, shadowy life. I wouldn’t be going far away, though. My teachers and a school counselor had told me about college opportunities out of state, with scholarships and financial aid. My AP art teacher, Mrs. Jacobs, had gone to Laguna College of Art and Design in California and knew some of the faculty, and she had offered to write a recommendation for me. “You have an intelligence and a sensitivity that is a gift, Ethan,” she had said to me. “Please don’t be that boy who wastes such a gift.” But as much as I wanted to escape, I couldn’t just move to the other side of the country. Later I would weigh that loyalty against a growing sense of regret. But going to California would have meant leaving Susannah as well, and I couldn’t do that, not then, not when my sister was trying to put the broken, jagged pieces of herself back together. I would be going to Georgia State instead, right in the heart of downtown Atlanta. But I would not be living with my uncle anymore. I could not unlearn what I now knew about Uncle Gavin and the world he worked in. It frightened me, and especially as Uncle Gavin had been unable to keep Frankie out of jail, I told myself I wanted nothing to do with it. But even worse, a small part of me was drawn to that world, fascinated by it, its rejection of simple morals and right versus wrong.
And so, out of mingled fear and revulsion, I would leave it behind me.
At that moment, though, I did not think all of this out so clearly. Instead, I just sat on my bed, the newspaper in my hand, looking out my window, for a long time.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The hall to the kitchen in my uncle’s bar has not changed. There are the same bathroom doors, the same private rooms, the swinging door that leads to the kitchen and the stairwell up to my uncle’s sanctum sanctorum, the same smell of grease and cleaner and chicken tenders and the loamy undercurrent of Guinness, as if there is a secret river of it flowing beneath the floor. And when I step into the kitchen, I stop so quickly that my shoes squeak on the tile floor, because there is Ruben standing in the middle of the kitchen, in dark slacks and a red dress shirt, although he has misplaced his fedora. But Ruben is dead—he had a heart attack three years ago, right after Frankie’s mother died. And then my heart leaps and dies in the back of my throat, because it isn’t Ruben but Frankie.
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