The Way We Are

by Shandi Boyes

  The playful glimmer in his eyes is dowsed, replaced with a more thoughtful one. “Oh, sweetie. Thorn hasn’t left his room in years. Didn’t you know that?”

  I shake my head. “No. Savannah and I lost contact for a couple of years.”

  My brows scrunch when he suddenly grips the top of my arm to yank me away from the wall. “Ahh... you’re Ryan. Savannah was right, you do have a mighty fine ass.”

  “Thank you?” I don’t know why my reply comes out as a question; it just did.

  I lick my dry lips while contemplating how to ask my next question in a non-rude way. My pause is pointless when I blubber out, “Is Savannah moving?”

  The still unnamed man’s Adam’s apple bobs up and down before he mumbles, “Not as far as I am aware.”

  “Then why don’t they have any furniture?”

  He coughs to clear the nerves from his throat. “Ah... umm... uh...”

  He is saved from further interrogation when a loud, “Goddammit!” bellows down the hall.

  His dark eyes lock on Thorn’s door before they drift back to me. “Maria left him with the orange juice again, didn’t she?”

  Even though he's asking a question, he doesn’t wait for me to reply. Thorn’s grumbled, “Stupid liquid. I spilled it on my pants,” answers on my behalf.

  With a roll of his eyes, the male nurse heads for Thorn’s bedroom, taking on a saintly nurse role. It's a pity I know the real reason he's fleeing; he was uncomfortable with my interrogation.

  More confused than ever, I begin to descend the stairs, knowing there's only one person who can answer my questions: Savannah.

  “Hey, Ryan,” the nurse shouts, stopping my steps down the stairs midstride.

  He waits for me to pop my head back into the hall before adding on, “My business card is in the top drawer in the kitchen. I know I’m technically here for her dad, but Savannah is my friend. Can you keep me updated on her condition?”

  “Sure,” I reply, easing the worry on his face with one simple word.

  “Thank you.” After adding a dip of his chin, he enters Thorn’s room.

  28

  Ryan

  After putting away the bag of groceries the nurse thrust at me, I drop my eyes to a line of drawers extending from one side of the kitchen to the next. Savannah’s kitchen has more drawers than it does cabinets.

  Grumbling a curse word under my breath, I yank open the first drawer. Even if the drawers are as empty as the cabinets stacked above them, it's still using up valuable time I’d rather spend pacing the hall outside Savannah’s hospital room.

  I find the nurse’s card in the sixth drawer I open, but his name isn’t the only thing I uncover. An old-fashioned accounting ledger book is stashed beneath Willis’s card. Usually, I’d pass by any book without a second glance, but the name scrawled across the top in elegant scroll begs not only a second look, but a third one as well. Petretti.

  Confusion piqued, I tug the thick book out of the drawer and flip it open. The first few pages look like regular everyday accounting, but the last dozen or more pages capture my interest. They are filled in with handwriting I know all too well, the same writing in the letter I found stashed in my mother’s jewelry box weeks ago. It's Savannah’s handwriting.

  Although I’ve never been a fan of accounting, basic math isn’t a problem for me, so I quickly catch on that the columns where Savannah’s handwriting is introduced don’t add up to the tally shown at the bottom of the page. It isn’t just missing one or two digits—it's missing many.

  Ignoring the warning alarms sounding in my head, I snap the ledger closed and hotfoot it back up the stairs. By the time I’m knocking on Thorn’s door, sweat is glistening on my skin.

  Thorn greets me with a smile. “Hey. You’re... ah...”

  “Ryan,” I fill in. The similarities between our first exchange and this one are hauntingly similar. “I’m a friend of Savannah’s. Your daughter.”

  “I have a daughter?” Thorn asks, his eyes dancing between Willis and me.

  “Yes,” Willis answers on my behalf, his tone friendly. “Look at her. Isn’t she pretty? She looks just like you.” He hands Thorn the same photo he grasped earlier before joining me at the side of the room.

  “What is it? Is it Savannah?”

  I shake my head. “No.” I hope. “It’s Thorn. If I were to ask him a business question, could he answer me?”

  Willis grimaces. “Thorn is in stage six of dementia: severe cognitive decline. There are days when he can’t count backwards from ten. You could ask him, but if he becomes frustrated, he will lash out violently again. His inability to solve problems is one of his biggest triggers. This disease took his brilliant brain and turned it into mush. There's no guarantee he will understand what you're talking about.”

  “But I could try?”

  Willis smirks. “I like your optimism, but I don’t like your chances.”

  He waves his hand in front of his body like he's introducing me to his Royal Highness, granting me permission to approach Thorn.

  “Isn’t she pretty?” Thorn appraises when I stop to stand next to his bedside.

  Glancing down at Savannah’s photo, I smile. “She is. She's very pretty.” My praise adds an extra twinkle in his eyes, one I’m hoping not to erase with my next set of questions.

  “Can I show you something, Thorn?”

  “Sure,” he answers, his mood positive.

  I open the ledger at the section that confused me earlier before placing it across his splayed thighs.

  “Thanks,” I murmur, accepting a pair of reading glasses from Willis.

  Some of the confusion wrinkling Thorn’s forehead smooths when I place his reading glasses on his nose. Needing to help with something so simple adds to the wrongness of his disease. Thorn is young; he only turned fifty a few months ago. He shouldn’t be tackling a disease like this so early in his life. I didn’t even know it was possible for someone so young and healthy to have Alzheimer’s. It's truly devastating, and my heart is breaking for both Thorn and Savannah.

  Thorn runs his hands down the paperback like he's stroking the fur of a cat. A trickle of hope thickens my veins when he scans the pages left to right. But when he continues the same routine long after his eyes have fallen from the pages, my hopes fade to nothing. He doesn’t have a clue what he's looking at.

  Smiling to issue my thanks for him at least trying, I carefully remove the ledger from under his hand and snap it shut.

  “Sorry,” Willis mouths as he replaces Thorn’s juice-stained pants with fresh ones.

  Too disappointed to reply, I dip my chin in farewell before heading for the door.

  Just before I exit, Thorn asks, “Were they angry?”

  I take a step back and peer at him in confusion.

  “The people who lost all that money. Were they angry?” he clarifies, noticing my jumbled expression.

  When I turn my eyes to Willis, he shrugs his shoulders, as lost as me.

  “Umm... No. They weren’t angry,” I reply once my eyes have returned to Thorn.

  His lips purse as he huffs noisily. “Huh. I’d be mad if I lost that much money. That’s a lot of money someone is trying to hide.” He lowers his eyes to the account ledger tucked under my arm. “I’d be real mad.”

  “How much money is missing?” I ask, my tone hopeful.

  Willis moves closer to Thorn when the thoughtfulness on his face switches to anger faster than I can click my fingers. His eyes flicker repeatedly like he's calculating each column by using nothing but his memory, but it also builds his frustration.

  “It’s okay if you don’t know the answer,” Willis assures when Thorn’s fists clench into tight balls, his frustration apparent.

  “I know the answer!” Thorn roars, his voice loud enough to be heard three blocks over. “I know it. I just... I just can’t get the words out of my head.”

  He clutches his hair at his temples as moisture rushes into his eyes. “I know it...I do! I swear I
know it. They just won’t come out!”

  He throws his hand across his bedside table, sending a handful of Savannah’s photos sprawling onto the floor. As tears flow down his face, his eyes dart around the room. “Ruth! Ruth! Where’s Ruth?!”

  “She’s here. She’s right here.” Willis hands him an oil painting of Savannah.

  Thorn doesn’t react in the same manner he did earlier. His anguish remains as strong as the guilt strangling me.

  “That’s not Ruth. She isn’t Ruth! Where is my Ruth?” The absolute terror in his eyes cuts through me like a knife. I can see the man he used to be hiding in his brilliant green irises, dying to break out.

  “Please help me. Please,” he begs, staring straight at me.

  Incapable of ignoring the guilt engulfing me for a second longer, I hightail it out of his room and gallop down the stairs. Gravel crunches under my feet when I charge to my truck, throw open the door and clamber inside. I whizz out of Savannah’s family estate so fast, I’m certain my tires leave imprints on the pavement.

  I don’t know where I am going; I just drive until the haze in my eyes becomes too great to ignore. With a roar, I yank my truck off the road.

  “Motherfucking cunt!” I scream out in frustration as my fists pound the steering wheel on repeat. “I hate you! I fucking hate you!”

  My frustration isn’t directed at one person. It's for the entire universe. What Savannah went through last night, what she’s been dealing with the past few years with her dad, my family situation. Our fight. My dad. Everything.

  It’s too much—it's all too much.

  By the time I stop my onslaught on my steering wheel, my fists are bloody, and my cheeks are wet. I can’t remember the last time I cried—actually, I don’t recall ever crying—so I’m glad I reserved it for a time I don’t have witnesses.

  After inhaling three big breaths and clearing away evidence of my breakdown, I pull my truck back onto the road. I need to keep it together. Not just for me but for Savannah also.

  Seeing Thorn like that... fuck, how can I describe it? Horrible. Cruel. Terrifying. Those are just a few words I can use to describe seeing a man I admired cut down like that. How is this fair? Men like my father and Axel walk the planet as if they are gods, but a brilliant man who did nothing but love his daughter is handed a horrible disease that not only weakens him, it also makes him forget. That's just fucking cruel. And it's even more cruel that Savannah has been handling this alone. God, what I wouldn’t give to turn back the clock, to go back to the day our argument began and fix all the mistakes I made—all the mistakes we made. Maybe then things would be different.

  I’m distracted from my thoughts when the early morning sun beams off the white pages of the ledger I threw onto the passenger seat during my escape. It only stops blinding me when I take a right on Coultor Avenue. When the shadows of the large apartment on the roadside filter over its creamy cover, a glimpse at a name gains my attention. It isn’t a name written in the ledger that has my truck swaying dangerously into oncoming traffic. It's the one hidden on the cover. Axel Monroe.

  “Hey, watch where you’re going, you moron,” a driver shouts when I abruptly pull into his lane, correcting my truck before I smash into a looming sedan.

  I wave my hand out my window, silently apologizing for cutting him off before pulling into the emergency lane. My heart is beating so wildly, I shouldn’t be sitting upright, much less operating a vehicle.

  With my heart pounding in my ears, I snatch the ledger off my seat. I have to hold it at a forty-five-degree angle to confirm the name I spotted during my inconspicuous gawk is legit. Axel’s name is etched into the cover of the ledger. It’s not there via ink; it's from someone using the ledger like a table, someone with identical handwriting to Savannah’s.

  Ignoring the stream of cars rushing past my truck so fast they rattle my windows, I trail my finger along the digits scribbled below his name. I’m not one hundred percent confident, but I’m fairly sure they are account numbers.

  Why would Savannah have Axel’s bank details? Unless she's depositing money into his account, why would she need them?

  I sit in silence for several minutes, giving my brain a chance to sort through all information I’ve been handed—not just today, but the past several months.

  “She looks at you that way because everything she sees in you, she wishes she saw in him. Until you unearth her true motives for staying with him, lowering yourself to his level won’t do you any favors. Not in her books anyway.”

  “Were they angry? I’d be mad if I lost that much money.”

  “That’s a lot of money someone is trying to hide.”

  My spine snaps straight when a disturbing notion pops into my head. I flip through the pages of the journal like a madman, only stopping once I reach the section when Savannah’s handwriting took over.

  “Fuck,” I breathe out heavily, my one word unable to hide my torment.

  Savannah’s entries are dated a little over two years ago—right around the time her mom moved to Hawaii.

  The swirling in my stomach grows more rampant when I hold the open ledger at the same angle I did when I discovered Axel’s name scribbled across the front, so I can read an amount not written with ink.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ.”

  The invisible tally imprinted on the paper reaches the figure my quick calculations attained earlier: a neat three million dollars. It could just be a coincidence that the exorbitant amount went missing on the same month Savannah’s mom left town, but my intuition is warning me not to be so gullible. A cool three mill would cushion the most eccentric relocation, and Savannah’s mother has never been conventional.

  Bile scorches my throat when my eyes catch sight of the name written in thick black ink at the top of the ledger: Petretti.

  Not only is Savannah hiding a miscalculation of three million dollars; she's hiding a miscalculation of three million dollars belonging to a mob boss. That's ludicrous. That’s punishable. That’s a death sentence.

  The more secrets I unravel, the more the fog clears from my brain.

  “If I drive out of here alone, I’m driving straight to him.”

  Does Axel know? Is that the hold he has over Savannah? He also reached the conclusion that Savannah’s mom stole from his family, so he's seeking restitution directly from Savannah?

  I want to say “no” to all of the above, but the twisting of my stomach is too great to discount. When you add two and two together, you always reach four. This can’t be a coincidence.

  It takes a few moments for my muddled brain to come up with a solution. It isn’t a good one, but when it's all you have, you must work with it.

  While seeking an opening in the stream of cars surrounding me, I grab my cell phone out of my pocket. It takes me several attempts trying to fire it up before I remember it was bogged down with bucket loads of sea water last night. It’s fucked.

  “Goddammit,” I roar, throwing it onto the dash of my car.

  Too impatient to wait for an opening, I jerk my truck onto the road with the same aggression I used to remove it. Car horns honk, but they soon become a distant memory when I plant my foot on the gas pedal, leaving them for dust.

  I weave in and out of the traffic like a madman, my mind on one thing and one thing only: hoping the money I have saved up will be enough of a down payment to get Axel off Savannah’s back.

  It's nowhere near close to three million dollars, but it’s a start, and every negotiation has to start somewhere. If money won’t win him over, I’m sure I can come up with something just as lucrative. He’s facing three charges of attempted murder—he’s got plenty to work with.

  I make the trip across Ravenshoe in a record pace, twenty minutes sliced down to eight. My truck barely mounts the curb outside my home when I rocket out of the driver side door and climb the stairs of my front porch.

  “Ryan?” my mom shouts from the kitchen when the screen door gives out a creak.

  “Not n
ow, Mom.” I make a beeline for the stairs.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  The unease of her words slows my pace, but it doesn’t fully stop me. If I had spotted my dad’s keys on the entranceway table, I would be more inclined to stop, but since I know his shift doesn’t end for another two hours, my legs keep moving.

  “Just give me a minute to grab something out of my room; I’ll be down in a sec,” I advise, incapable of overlooking the urgency in her tone. I’ve protected my mom for years, so I can’t simply ignore her because I’m juggling an additional three balls.

  My mom replies to my comment, but with my feet thudding the warped stairs, her words are drowned out. My long strides down the hallway are cut in half when I spot two suitcases braced against my parent’s bedroom door. I stare at them in shock, certain they aren’t my mother’s.

  Ever since my plans to leave Ravenshoe resurfaced weeks ago, I’ve asked my mom a minimum three times a week to come with me. She never discouraged my wish to leave, but she never accepted my offer either. Now I’m beginning to wonder if she has finally seen sense.

  Is that why she wants to talk to me? Is she finally going to leave him?

  Deciding to tackle one task at a time, I throw open my bedroom door. The wind is knocked out of my lungs for a second time in under thirty seconds when a flurry of honey-colored hair is the first thing I notice when entering my room.

  “Savannah?” I ask, certain my eyes are playing tricks on me.

  29

  Ryan

  When Savannah spins around to face me, the trousers I dumped on the bathroom floor of her hospital suite swish around her bare feet. She has my black belt cinched tightly around her waist, pleating the material so much it looks like a skirt, and the watermarks on my white dress shirt aren’t as obvious from the large knot she has twisted in the middle of it. For the ordeal she went through only hours ago and the fact she's wearing my clothes, she looks so unbelievably stunning, I’m certain I’m dreaming.