Lately I’ve learned something about people. Sometimes they laugh at weird times.
My mother laughed when she heard my father had accepted a plea deal that would mean spending twenty-five years at a state prison outside Syracuse. She only laughed for a few seconds before she tried to light a cigarette and couldn’t because her fingers shook too much to hold the lighter. She has filed for divorce already. She hasn’t gone to visit my father once and I don’t think she plans to.
Danny slams the car door once he’s back inside and I feel sorry for him. If Trent’s in enough trouble to get sent away for a while, then Danny will really be on his own and he’s not used to being on his own.
I turn around with the intention of reassuring him and then lose track of what I should say. I’d rather not lie and tell him everything will be all right when nothing is all right.
Jules climbs behind the wheel again and I wonder when she began looking much older than eighteen. Once she leaves for college I don’t know how we’ll manage. Maybe Danny never argues with her anymore because he understands the same thing I’ve come to understand.
Jules has become the glue struggling to keep the broken pieces of our lives connected.
Liam Cassini is speaking to the officers now and I can only see the shadow of Trent’s head in the rear window of the police car. Danny scowls in the backseat with his arms crossed.
Jules checks on me with a worried glance and smiles when she notices I’m already looking back at her. She drives away quickly so we don’t have to watch the aftermath of Trent’s arrest. Jules waits until we’ve turned a corner before she dips one hand into the slouchy black purse atop the armrest. She finds what she’s looking for quickly and passes it over.
“I almost forgot, Abigail sent this for you.”
Abigail Fisher’s impossibly bright smiles gleams up at me from the cover of Abigail Fisher’s Greatest Hits, all songs recorded many years before I was even born. Abigail Fisher speaks fondly of her Rosebriar years in interviews. She remembers my father as a little boy running amok through every corner of his grandfather’s resort. Every holiday season she sends us a colossal fruit and cheese basket. I suppose I ought to think of her as my benefactor since she’s footing the bill for my Ithaca stay.
I pop open the case and a square of white paper falls out, blue ink written in old fashioned spidery script.
“Whatever will be. Love, Abigail.”
I stare at the words. I try to picture Abigail thinking for a long and meaningful moment before scratching her ballpoint pen across the piece of stationary bordered with pink roses.
She might be saying that there’s no use in worrying over the future when uncertain events can ruin all your plans.
Or she might be trying to offer hope that all will work out in the end.
“It’s not fucking fair,” grumbles Danny and in a very un-Danny-like display of uncool temper, he punches his own seat three times.
Jules’s mouth presses into a line for a second. She’s sad and she’s worried and she has been saddled with more heartache and responsibility than any high school senior should be but she’s also lucky. At least she’ll be able to escape to college in a couple of months.
I know I’ll have to come back. And I know Jules has to leave. I don’t blame her for that.
“You’re right,” says Jules. “It’s not fair. Now put your seatbelt on.” She double checks to make sure mine is fastened.
I guess that’s what happens when you’re placed in charge of people who need you to take care of them. You become obsessed with strapping them into seatbelts.
Danny punches the grey leather upholstery one more time and I think he’s acting like an overgrown toddler but I’m no one to judge these days. He clicks his seatbelt on and grows silent, probably thinking that with all the ways he’s been kicked in the teeth lately, the sight of his best friend being marched away in handcuffs just takes the cake.
As we leave Lake Stuart behind, I flip Abigail Fisher’s Greatest Hits over and discover the name of the first song on the list.
Whatever Will Be.
Oh.
That’s what she meant by the note.
I don’t know why I have an urge to laugh.
“We’ll stop for lunch along the way,” Jules promises. She moves her head to peer at our brother in the rearview mirror. “Does that sound all right, Dan-O?”
Only our dad ever calls him that. But Jules is not trying to rub salt in the wound. She’s doing her best to substitute for the parents that none of us really have anymore. Our father is lost. And our mother never really liked being a mother in the first place. She likes it even less now.
“Whatever,” Danny mutters.
I turn around and see him back there, taking up more space than most men as he glares out the window. But his expression changes when he notices I’m looking and he tries to submit a smile of encouragement.
Then my gaze shifts to my sister. Jules squints into the sunshine, her hands tight on the steering wheel.
We’ve never been close, not any of us.
Jules was always the busy big sister who outgrew childhood games early.
Danny was the rough-and-tumble brother with no patience for sitting still.
As for me, the baby of the family…
I suppose I’ve been the immature nuisance; always nervous and far from daring.
I’m very aware of where we’re going and why. However, I’m not unhappy, not right at this second.
Because if we’re all walking through a nightmare, at least we’re walking through it together.
The three of us.
Jules tosses over another smile when I pop in Abigail’s CD. The throaty voice filling the car is made for mournful ballads of love and longing. I appreciate old music but I’m a hard rock kind of girl and love songs make me gag on all the dreamy romance in their lyrics.
Still, I like the sound of Abigail’s voice and I can almost believe she’s telling a story that I’ll want to hear and so I keep listening.
“Our past and our future.
Kissed by the moon.
Fate undivided.
Whatever will be.”
I know there is plenty to be unhappy about.
But I also know I can count on the loyalty of my sister. And even my brother.
I’m starting to hope that might be enough to help me stand tall against the storms on the horizon.
1
Trent
I don’t know jack shit about funeral manners.
Manners aren’t my priority, never have been.
Yet I can’t shake the thought that I need to pay my respects.
I haven’t been in contact with anyone from the family and this is why I’m thinking about manners and wondering if it’s a fucked up gate crashing move to go knock on a door an hour after the girl who lived there was buried far too young.
Then again, a funeral isn’t a wedding or a tuxedo event. No one is shelling out three hundred bucks a plate and mailing out gold embossed invitations. When someone dies, you’re supposed to show up. That is, if you give a damn.
And I do.
Despite the fact that I haven’t seen Jules Aaronson in a hell of a long time, I was floored by the news she’d been killed in a car accident less than two miles from here on the night I returned to Lake Stuart. I even passed the scene and cursed the forced detour with no clue that a girl I grew up with had just lost her life.