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And because their focus was on me, and because I was distracted by the fact that my brother had saved me while simultaneously brutalizing our sister, none of us saw Sammy raise herself off her cement platform. None of us saw her move the five feet to the edge.
I only noticed her when she moved up the three-foot-high wall, standing atop it.
And there was really only one reason for her to be up here.
"Sammy!" I screamed even as her legs leapt.
My heart leapt as well.
And sank.
So low I felt it leave my body.
Just as my sister left my vision.
There was a thump and screams from below, sounds I would hear in my nightmares for years after, sounds that would haunt me.
Sounds that signified my sister's death.
Her choice not to live with the aftermath of her brutalization.
"Fuck. We got to get the fuck out of here!" the leader screamed to his men, all of them running past me, their shoulders brushing mine.
Monty was last, his face a blank mask, one I didn't even want to dig under.
"I will make you pay for this," I promised through the tears streaming down my face, but the words were steel. "Every last one of you," I promised.
He said nothing, just rushed away to the sound of sirens.
I sank to my knees right there, hands cradling my face, sobs I never knew I was capable of racking my body as my heart and soul and body tried to purge the pain.
But there was no purging it.
Not when the cops came and questioned me.
Not when my parents picked me up at the station, sobbing themselves.
Not a week later when Sammy was laid to rest, and my father had a heart attack behind the wheel on the way home, wrapping us around a tree. The doctors said he was dead before we made impact.
They said my mother had ten stitches to her temple, a busted nose.
They said I had a broken arm and whiplash to go with the concussion my brother had given me the night of the incident.
The doctors fucked up that day though.
The day they released us.
The day they sent us home like it was perfectly normal, like our lives hadn't been torn apart.
"They gave my mom pain medicine," I told Adler, the ache in my chest making my hand cross my body, rubbing over my heart like it could ease it. I knew better, of course. Nothing eased it.
"Fuck, duchess," he hissed, his hand squeezing my thigh.
I couldn't claim to be shocked when I walked into her bedroom the following morning when she had slept through her alarm that screamed loud and insistent until you shut it off.
I did so as I walked in on numb legs, something within me knowing, some part of me understanding that there was no way a family could survive this, that maybe none of us should.
I would never know if the overdose was accidental or a result of her inability to live with the pain that had shook our lives.
I guess it didn't really matter either way.
All I knew as I moved toward her, looking so much like Sammy that it hurt, her nightgown a filmy white around her still body, making her look angelic, sleeping, beautiful, her little medallion around her neck, a saint that hadn't saved her in the end, was that her body was already cool to the touch.
I remembered reaching for the phone on her nightstand, dialing the numbers, everything about me in a sort of daze.
My mother killed herself.
That was all I remembered saying, but I must have given an address because they showed up about half an hour later.
There was pity.
There was nothing but pity in all their faces.
The cops.
The coroner.
The detectives at the station.
The receptionists.
The lady from Child Services.
Just fucking pity.
Maybe they felt I deserved it.
But I didn't.
And I didn't want it.
I wanted their anger, their derision, their understanding that this was all my fault, that Sammy had gone through the horror she had gone through before killing herself, that my father's poor, kind heart couldn't handle the breaking, that my mother found solace in the end of her pain... that was all on me.
For being selfish.
For wanting a stupid fucking milkshake.
I couldn't bring myself to have one ever again.
"Where did ya end up, Lou?" Adler asked, wanting everything like he had given me.
"I had an aunt on my father's side," I told him.
I hadn't known her well. She was from Vermont. I knew her by cards with cash on my birthdays. And I was sure she was at Sammy's funeral, but I had few recollections of that day aside from her closed casket surrounded by flowers in the church, then being lowered in the ground, dirt falling on it.
Aunt Tulla was a mirror image of my father with huge, round, black glasses, a wardrobe that went the way of oversized men's shirts and jeans.
