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“Hope not.”
I should probably pay closer attention to what’s happening. If the cops don’t have a handle on my general presence, it’s up to me.
Not that I’ve been stellar at that lately.
Paperwork shuffles nearby.
“You’re allowed one phone call,” Pearson says. “Phone’s behind you.”
“Don’t need one.”
He narrows his eyes. “You don’t?”
“Nobody to call.”
Officer Pearson doesn’t look like he believes me, but I stare at him until he shrugs his shoulders and takes me to the holding cell. Home, sweet home until they pick out a more permanent one.
An hour goes by.
A cop I don’t recognize comes by and runs through a checklist. He wants to know if I’m a danger to myself. That’s funny, but I don’t laugh. It doesn’t seem like it would go over well. I give him the shortest answers I can and watch him tick boxes on the form. He’s wearing too much cologne. If he stays here too long, I’ll forget the scent of Lily’s skin.
I’ll probably forget that anyway.
Two hours.
I spend most of it staring at a frosted window. The light from outside is colorless. From inside this room, it’s impossible to tell it’s summer.
Seasons are about to be irrelevant, too.Alldates are about to be irrelevant.
Ah, fuck. I’m going to miss the anniversary.
I’m going to miss the annual trip we take to the cemetery to put flowers on our parents’ graves and talk to them. Mason and Gabriel and Remy will do that without me.
A pang of guilt slips between my ribs like a blade that’s been rusted to shit.
I’m torn, because I’ve never missed the anniversary before. I was there on the first one, when Mason lost it and his knee locked up on him and it was a long time before we could leave. We sure as hell didn’t have the money to spend on flowers that year.
Gabriel came up with it anyway.
I knew, by then, how he earned enough to pay for decent bouquets for each of us. I’d known almost from the beginning. I can still feel the paper crinkling around the stems in my hand, and the sun beating down, and how my jaw hurt from gritting my teeth. Our parents would have been fine if he skipped the flowers, but I couldn’t say that.
It would have given away that I saw him come back into our shitty apartment pretty much every time. I saw how he shivered, even when it was hot out. I heard him spitting into the sink like he’d been sick in the street outside. I felt like the world’s most useless asshole when all I’d done was convince Remy to go back to sleep.
The least I can do is be available for the anniversary, given all that.
On the other hand, maybe I’m doing my siblings a favor. Since I’m in jail—and will be, for the foreseeable future—they can concentrate on missing our parents, who actually had qualities that made them deserving of being missed.
“You got three good ones,” I point out to the empty cell. “Can’t beat yourselves up about a seventy-five percent success rate.”
Nobody answers. Not that I was hoping they would.
Temperature control in the jail isn’t great. The concrete slab-bed is cool, but the air’s lukewarm. Not much circulation, either. Even the oxygen is resigned.
Can’t deny it—I’m tired. Lily forced me to sleep for the better part of a day. I’m not sure she knew all that sleeping and fucking wouldn’t energize me. All it did was remind me of the existence of decent sleep, which isn’t something I can get on my own.
New goal: stay awake.
It’s not easy when there’s nothing to do. The noise of a past-its-prime air conditioning unit fades in until I recognize it for what it is and slap my cheeks until there are only jail sounds.
