Page 1 of Plain Sight

1

JAMESON

Bridal suites are bullshit.

Cathedrals are bullshit. Who needs this many people in one spot to worship a god who doesn’t exist in the best case scenario and is purposely dooming his creations to hell in the likeliest one? I run forever just to get to the doors of the nave, and it’s a solid hundred miles to the bridal suite.

I pass a huddle of pink dresses on the way. Lily’s seventeen bridesmaids. Sunshine. My sister. Elise. Her youngest sister Lydia. Her middle sister, Catherine, who isn’t in the wedding. Hades and Zeus and Poseidon’s wives. My main impression is of wide eyes.

The door to the bridal suite is open.

Lily isn’t there.

I knew⁠—

I knew she wouldn’t be. I didn’t think Remy was lying. I just hoped⁠—

I hoped there was a god, this time. I hoped that this one time, he or she wouldn’t have taken someone from me in the sickest, most fucked-up joke of my life.

Lily. On our wedding day.

Footsteps pat pat pat on the carpet.

“Jameson,” Remy gasps. “She’s not—I told you⁠—”

“I know.”

“Jameson, stop. She’s not here.”

“I know, Remy, I⁠—”

I’m searching for her. Digging through purses and coordinated lounge sets one-handed because Lily’s note is crumpled in my right fist and I can’t let that piece of her go. I can’t put it down for an instant, otherwise I’ll lose her, too.

I know, but I can’t stop looking.

The bathroom door swings open under a push that’s more of a punch, and⁠—

“Look.” I hold up the purse like I’m proving something.

Remy puts her hand to her chest. She’s still breathing hard, having run all the way up to the front of the nave with Lily’s note and then chased me back down here. My sister’s hair is coming loose from its delicate updo, tendrils hanging around her face. Her eyes go to the purse, then return to mine.

She changes right in front of me. The pink of her bridesmaid dress—Sunshine laughed about how it was called dusty rose—brightens into a bubblegum shirt with ruffled sleeves and a ruffled section at the hem that she loves because it’s like a skirt without the hassle of being a skirt, and she’s not grown up at all, she’s six years old, wearing stretchy capris that look like jeans but aren’t and that bubblegum shirt and saying Jameson, what are those lights? with the hint of a lisp she still had, because the red and blue flashes from the cop car are shining into the foyer, reflecting on the hardwood, and we don’t know it but we only have fifteen seconds before Gabriel shouts Jameson, why are there cops here? from upstairs and thirty seconds before he comes down saying I’ll call you back in a second, there are cops in the driveway, I’ll tell them they have the wrong house to whoever he’s on the phone with—it was always someone like Jacob Chambers, someone who Gabriel loved and who loved Gabriel in the simple way you can love people when you’re not fucked up yet—and one minute before Gabriel opens the front door and I watch him absorb the news that the three of us will need to come with the police officer because our parents are in the hospital and so is our brother Mason because there’s been an accident.

And Gabriel will ask a car accident?

And the cop will say I think it’s best if you speak with someone at the hospital, son.

And Gabriel will turn around and look at me, and he’ll say we’ll talk to them at the hospital, and even then—even though we haven’t walked through the strange emergency entrance of the hospital and followed the cop down a maze of hallways, even though we haven’t been met by the doctor who will look at Gabriel like he’s the only adult left in the situation and Gabriel will become the only adult left in the situation by virtue of the doctor looking at him that way and because I’m holding Remy in her little stretchy capris and her bubblegum shirt and her Velcro shoes and she’s got her face buried in my shoulder, and she’s heavy and terrified—even then, I know we won’t be talking to our parents at the hospital. I know, because the cop wouldn’t be standing on the front porch if they could call.

And I’ll still hope. All the way to the hospital, I’ll hope like a stab wound through the chest. I’ll hope like I’m sure someone will come to save me. For the last time in my life, I’ll hope like a little kid with parents who loved him and siblings who’d grown up in the same brilliant halo and who still trusted the world or god or fate or whatever it was to handle him carefully, if not gently.

That version of me dies in a waiting room with Remy passed out on my shoulder and Gabriel shaking in the next seat and Mason sleeping, not screaming, but only because the doctors had sedated him as heavily as they could without killing him.

That version of me claws its way up from the grave with bony fingers and latches them around my throat. Fuck me. Does anything stay dead? Will anything stay in the ground where I put it? I don’t have time to grapple with the nature of hope and cruelty and assorted other bullshit.

“—purse,” Remy says.

Her bubblegum shirt is gone, turned back into her dress. She’s not six anymore. We’re not there.