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“I’m sorry,” I say, reaching out to touch his shoulder. He flinches, and I pull back. “I guess I’m just used to it. It does get better, or at least easier. I promise. You learn how to separate yourself from it, to lock it away in a box and not look at it.”
“I don’t want it toget better,”he says, dropping his head into his hands. “I don’t want to get used to it. How can you say that?”
“I’m sorry. It’s nothing new for me, that’s all,” I say. “I used to freak out like this, so I totally get it. I’m not trying to minimize what happened. I’ve just learned to act ‘like this’ because I can’t be falling apart all day every day. Life goes on. I have to go on with it. The world keeps turning, and I keep dancing.”
He sits motionless for a minute before he speaks, barely above a whisper. “I don’t know if I can do that.”
My heart breaks for him when his voice cracks, and my throat tightens like I’m the one crying. I stare out the windshield, trying to leave him his dignity and pretend I don’t notice.
“I’ll sit here as long as you need me to,” I say as gently as I can.
“Why would you do that?” he asks, wiping his nose. “After what—after I—”
“You didn’t do anything,” I say flatly. “Not anything more than I did to you. So I’m going to sit here until you’re okay to drive home. And then you’re going to put tonight in a little box, and lock it up tight, and leave it there until you’re ready to deal with it. It doesn’t matter if that’s tomorrow, or when you graduate, or if you never do. It’s your box. Only you have the key, and only you can decide. Okay?”
He nods, and then he sits there crying for a while. When he’s done, and he says he’ll make it home okay, I climb out of the car and slip into my house. It’s late, and everyone’s asleep. I sit on the side of the bathtub and fill it with cold water, then undress and slide under the cold surface. I lay there until I’m shivering so hard I can barely move, and my fingers are stiff as icicles, and when I climb out, my lips are blue. But it did the trick.
I’m completely numb.
eleven
Rumor Has It… Willow Heights is still waiting for the rightful queen to take the throne, but one thing is for sure. The snake who usurped it for the past few years is never going to be anything but the laughingstock after debasing herself so openly. The only question is, when is she going to figure that out? It’s getting hard to watch, am I right?
Colt Darling
“We should spend Christmas together,” Dad says one evening in early December as we sit in the den after dinner, each of us with a drink in one hand. “As a family.”
I groan and drop my head back on the recliner. “Dad, we’ve been over this. There’s no point.”
“I understand that you’re angry with her,” he says. “But you can’t avoid her forever, Colt. She’s your mother.”
“Thanks for the advice,” I say. “But actually, Icanavoid her forever, seeing as how there’s no other reason I would ever go to Cedar Crest. At least not until they build a wing for old folks and y’all dump Grandpa Darling there.”
Dad winces. “I didn’t dump your mother there,” he says. “She needed round-the-clock care.”
“I know,” I say, holding up a hand. “Sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean that. It was a shitty thing to say. I know she’s getting the best care there. But it’s not somewhere I want to spend Christmas.”
There’s not really anywhere I want to spend Christmas. This season is supposed to be the hap-happiest time of the yearand all that bullshit, but it sucks the positivity right out of me. It used to be a big deal for our family, and now it’s not, and I can’t help but think about the first sixteen years of my life, when the Darling Christmas wasn’t just a party, it was anevent. When we had visitors and guests and friends over for days on end, parties and dinners and gift exchanges and tree lightings. There was a huge, organized caroling group that met at the square and caravanned all through town, a parade of others following to see the lights on all the houses. They started at Grandpa Darling’s house in town and hit up all the founding families before ending at Grandpa’s estate north of town.
We were the center of everything, the heart of Faulkner. I loved every part of it from the time I was a kid until I was in high school, when I could finally attend the annual New Year’s Eve party, the most exclusive party of the year, at Grandpa Darling’s.
That wasn’t a family party. It was a wild party with no parents, where we hand-picked guests and delivered their invitations in secret code after an incident where someone bought an invitation to try to sneak in. Everyone wanted to go, and they’d clamor for our attention leading up to the holiday break, trying to win favor with us in hopes of landing an invite. There were more fist fights at school in December than the whole rest of the year combined as girls fought over us and guys fought to be included in our circle. Anyone who went was granted an elevated status for the next semester at school. That’s how much influence we had.
At the party, scantily clad waitresses served not just alcohol but marijuana cigarettes and edibles, lines of cocaine, and psychedelics. Pole dancers and acrobats and other entertainment performed while people danced around them in the ballroom. Select attendees signed non-disclosure agreements and paid for access to the most exclusive anddebauchery-filled room in the party, the Den of Iniquity, where sex workers let people indulge in their most forbidden fantasies.
Now, it’s all gone. We barely dare to have dinner together on a random weeknight in September, when no one would suspect a gathering. We’d never risk it on a holiday. No one wants to have dinner with us, let alone have us unveil the enormous tree in the square. No one on our side of town dares be seen with us because it would endanger their livelihoods or worse. No one invites us to parties, and if we invited them, they would hide their invitations out of shame and fear, not to protect them.
Sure, a lot of the traditions were silly and a bit absurd, but that was half the fun. The over-the-top nature of it all was built into the tradition. But we’ve gone from over-the-top to under-the-table. Dinners are clandestine affairs with security hired from another town. I could still throw a party at Grandpa Darlings for New Years, but besides my cousins Preston and Magnolia, the only person who would accept an invite is Dixie. On top of the fact that no one would come, it’s not a night I want to party. It’s a night I want to forget—the night Devlin died.
The night a part of all of us died. Preston lost an eye and a cousin. I lost a cousin and a brother. And though we didn’t know it at the time, we all lost the fight that night, when Crystal Dolce died with him.
I can’t tell Dad all that, can’t tell him that the reason I don’t want to see Mom isn’t because I’m pissed at her for swallowing a bottle of pills. It’s because it’s too fucking sad. I’ve been to see her, and she doesn’t even know her own son. She probably doesn’t know she’s alive. Sitting with her in that place only reminds me that she’s one more person we lost.
I already have to get through this month, this season, in a quiet house with a Christmas tree where only Dad and I put presents. I have to hear about the fancy ball the Dolces willhave on New Year’s Eve at the Hockington Hotel, and though it doesn’t hold the same allure that ours did, it’s the big event now. Obviously I’m not on the guest list.
I wouldn’t go anyway. How could I celebrate the day my brother died?
My phone rings, and I set down my drink to fish it out of my pocket, relieved for the interruption. Harper’s name flashes on the screen.
