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Twenty-Four
Andrew
I didn’t come up to bed right away.
Jayne and I barely spoke through dinner. Tyler was uncharacteristically agreeable, asking if he could get anybody anything when he got up to refill his glass with water, even clearing the table when we were done.
I almost responded sarcastically, wanting to ask him who he was and what had he done with the real Tyler. But instead, I placed my hand lightly on his back at one point and said, “Thanks, man.”
“No problem,” he said.
The miracles didn’t end there. As we were heading to the living room, Tyler said he was going upstairs to do some homework, some assignment that was due on Monday. This time it was Jayne who thought of making a quip, but she didn’t stop herself.
She looked at me and whispered, “Homework? On a Saturday night?” And then, as Tyler mounted the stairs, she called out, “Who are you?”
But Tyler was taking the steps two at a time and didn’t bother to reply. Jayne quietly told me she believed he was on his best behavior because she’d told him earlier in the day that she was pregnant.
“I don’t expect him to tiptoe around me for long,” she said. “But even a couple of days would be nice.”
We started watching one of the movies from the Bourne trilogy—I don’t even know which one, but they were the kind of movies you could drop into at any point and just let your brain go—but before it finished, Jayne said she was heading up to bed. We hadn’t spoken through the movie, and I knew she was not only trying to get her head around all that she’d learned about me today, she was annoyed I’d spoken to Greg about the supposed reappearance of Brie before I’d talked to her about it.
When I made motions to follow her upstairs, she held up a hand.
“It’s okay, finish the movie.”
I got the message.
Over the next hour, I puttered about, finally finding myself in the kitchen, staring into the fridge at a bottle of red. I wanted to pour myself a large glass, and then another, and another after that, but as much as I needed to deaden my senses, to round the edges of the day, I also needed a good sleep, and alcohol was not the way to go about it.
I finally went upstairs and entered our room quietly, figuring Jayne would be asleep. Her bedside light was off, and she was under the covers. But she was awake, eyes wide open.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she replied, the light from my side of the bed casting half her face in shadow. “Did I hear you on the phone earlier?”
“Nope,” I said. “Must have been the TV.”
“I thought maybe you were talking to Greg. Because clearly you talk things out with him first.”
“I’m sorry. He’s my friend. We made shitty business partners, but on a personal level, he’s always been there for me.”
I started to unbutton my shirt.
“I’m worried about Tyler,” Jayne said.
Of all the things she might have said, I wasn’t expecting that. “Okay.”
“He lied to me. He and his friend were hanging out in a cemetery last night, and there was a story online about some vandalism there. Graves knocked over.”
I didn’t have to ask her how she knew her brother had been there. She had told me about how she kept tabs on him.
“But tonight at dinner, I thought, maybe he’s trying to turn things around. He’s finally starting to settle in here, willing to give it a chance, but now …”
“What?”
“I asked you if he could come live with us because, first of all, I believed you’d be a good influence on him and that we could provide some stability. But now, well, this feels like a house of cards. Like it’s all going to come crashing down at any moment.”
“Because of me,” I said. “So this is about more than Tyler. It’s about you and Tyler.”
