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“Don’t make me do this, Hil,” he said calmly.
“Leave me alone!” I shouted, praying that he would.
When silence followed, I held my breath. It wasn’t until I exhaled that my door burst open and my intimidating brother entered.
“Doesn’t feel so good, right?” he said, justifying what he had done.
“If you had locked your door, I would have respected it.”
“You mean for the first time?” Remy retorted with a smirk.
He wasn’t wrong. No one in this house respected locked doors. The only thing that ever kept us out is the fear of what we would find when we entered.
For example, both Remy and I learned early that when my parents were in their bedroom, we did not want to see what was going on. Those were images that no amount of alcohol would ever erase.
Walking in on Remy while he was enjoying porn was another story. Sure, it was nothing that I wanted to see. But our parents, who couldn’t keep their hands off of each other, had created an environment where sexuality wasn’t something to be afraid of. So, if I wanted to get back at Remy for being an asshole big brother, I would wait until everything got really quiet in his room and then pick the lock and throw open the door.
What can I say? I spent my entire life locked in this penthouse. I got bored. Watching a teenaged Remy rush to close this computer while pulling up his pants was entertaining.
“I told you to leave,” I insisted, not backing down.
“And I told you to tell me what happened there. Would you prefer that I told father that there’s something going on? How do you think he would respond to that?”
“You would rat me out to father? Aren’t you gangster type supposed to have a code?” I said trying to think of anything I could to get him to drop it.
“We do have a code. It’s called, keep your family alive even when they’re trying to get themselves killed. You should try it sometime. Maybe start with yourself,” Remy said, slowly breaking down my defenses.
When I continued to refuse to answer, he took a different approach. Instead of being the demanding, asshole brother, he crossed to my desk chair, turned it towards me, and sat leaning forward with his fingers intertwined.
“Hil, if you tell me what’s going on, I promise not to tell father. You know you can trust me, right?”
“Considering you just took me from my only chance at happiness, I think trust might be the wrong word. Loathe? Hate?”
Remy’s lips tightened in frustration.
“I’ve never broken my word to you. And it’s been a long time since I’ve lied. I found you because father is dying. We don’t know how much longer he has left and he wanted to say bye to his son.
“I figured, once you knew, you would want to see him too. I also knew that father didn’t want to tell you that. He doesn’t like to look weak. Not even to his own kids.
“So I needed you here, I couldn’t tell you why, and I didn’t want to waste the little time father has left negotiating. There you have it. Right or wrong, that’s what went down. Now, what is it that you’re not telling me?”
I considered everything Remy had said. It was true. He had always been very straight with me. In a weird way, he was the one I trusted the most. He had always protected me and he had always been honest, even when I didn’t what to hear the truth.
What had upset me was that he knew how unhappy I was. I had thought that even if our father had asked him to find me, he wouldn’t. I was mad because his retrieving me felt like a betrayal. But listening to his explanation, maybe it wasn’t.
“Father is dying?” I asked as it sunk in. “How long do the doctors say that he has?”
“It could be days; it could be a few weeks. Anytime you talk to him, it could be the last thing you ever say to him. That’s why I brought you home. I couldn’t let him die without giving you the chance to say goodbye.”
Remy’s words were a punch in the gut. It took everything in me not to cry. I had a lot of mixed feelings about my father, but I loved him. He wasn’t a good person. He wasn’t a trusted businessman. But he did love us, and he told us every chance he got.
“What happens to us when he’s gone?” I asked, starting to spiral.
“I have come up with a plan. There’s a way that we can get out of all this. We won’t have to worry about looking over our shoulders everywhere we go. There’s a way we can go legitimate.
“But if something happened to you that I need to know about and you don’t tell me, it could derail everything. We’ll all be stuck in this world for the rest of our lives. And some of our lives might be shorter than others,” Remy said with empathetic conviction.
I stared at Remy considering what he had said. Could it be true? Was there a chance that we could escape this world? We certainly couldn’t do it while my father was alive. For him, all of it was a game that he loved too much to quit. This was his reason to get up in the morning. As much as he loved us, we could never compete with it.
