For This Life Only

by Stacey Kade

  After that, I found copies of the letters sent to Thera and Mary from Riverwoods and then the city. The first offer from Riverwoods had been $80,000, and the last one from the city, in December, had been $45,000. That last letter also included the information that if they chose not to accept the offer, McHenry Hills would move forward with a vote to take their property.

  What was this? There was no bombshell in here anywhere. It was a bunch of research and stuff Thera already had or knew. The only sign that it might be something significant, as far as I could tell, was that Eli had hidden it.

  Confused, I turned to the back, where I’d glimpsed Eli’s handwriting.

  The last page in the folder was a single sheet of notebook paper covered on the front and back with Eli’s notes in neat paragraphs, labeled by date, starting in October of last year.

  The beginning was a few lines that indicated that he’d heard Mr. Hauer, Mr. McKinney, and Mr. Greeley, all Riverwoods members and, apparently, council members for the city, discussing expansion plans and the need for land on multiple occasions while he, Eli, was at church, working. He even listed other witnesses to the conversations: Delores and Carol.

  As I continued reading, noting the formality of his language, pieces began to fall into place. Eli was building a case. I’d seen him do this hundreds of times before, usually with index cards, when he was creating an argument for debate team.

  In November, according to his notes, he’d asked Mr. Hauer about the city’s offer to the Catouluses. That must have been when Thera and her mom first received the letter; she said Eli was there when they got it. And, of course, Eli had plenty of opportunity to talk to Hauer about it, given that he was Leah’s dad and Eli had been over there almost every night.

  “I was told that everything was well in hand and that, as he’d reassured my father, they would be ‘killing two birds with one stone,’ eliminating ‘a stain on the community,’ and building a better future for Riverwoods.”

  That didn’t sound good. Wasn’t the government supposed to be impartial or whatever?

  It clicked then. That was exactly it. Mr. Hauer and the others weren’t impartial, and that was the point of all of this. Eli had started investigating what was happening to Thera, seeing it as an injustice, and discovered that there was some level of corruption in the process.

  Corruption, I realized belatedly, that included my dad.

  Was that why Eli had backed off and told Thera he couldn’t go through with it? And why he hadn’t told me about it?

  Now I couldn’t decide which was less Eli-like: that he’d taken on a fight that put him in direct opposition to Riverwoods, or that he’d walked away before finishing it. This was exactly the kind of ethics debate he loved arguing. Eli liked nothing more than to set up camp on the moral high ground.

  I flipped the page over to continue reading. In December, Eli had written that he’d “witnessed the meeting of the same Riverwoods members and city council officials at the Hauer house in a discussion about the Catoulus property, while visiting my girlfriend, Leah Hauer.”

  Was he trying to make it sound as professional as possible, or was he actually worried about his relationship with Leah? From the sounds of all of this, he was aiming to bring trouble of some kind down on Mr. Hauer and the others, so maybe it wasn’t that big a leap that he would have been concerned about his future with Leah once it all came out.

  The next line, the second-to-last entry, was simply a note with the date in December, indicating that the Catouluses had received a final offer from the McHenry Hills City Council. About three days after Mr. Hauer was holding that private meeting in his house.

  He’d rigged it. After Thera and Mary turned down Riverwoods’ offer, Mr. Hauer had pushed it through the city council to take their land.

  I sat back, springs in the mattress creaking beneath me. There was no way Eli could ignore that—not even with his love for Riverwoods and Leah.

  Except he had. Because the process was still going on.

  The final paragraph was written in a different color pen—blue rather than black—and his writing seemed slanted and hurried. It was on December 27, a week before he died, and those last lines were very likely the last piece of writing Eli had done.

  “While visiting the Hauer house, I contrived to be alone with Mr. Hauer momentarily. I intended to hand over the information I’d collected to Thera Catoulus for her to pass along to a lawyer. It seemed only fair to give Mr. Hauer a chance to address the facts and change his course of action before it was too late.”

  Eli. I shook my head.

  I could have told Eli that Mr. Hauer wouldn’t go for it. I didn’t know the guy nearly as well as Eli did, but obviously, Leah’s dad had way too much invested in doing what he considered “right.” But Eli wasn’t one to let things go, especially not something like this.

  “Mr. Hauer was displeased to hear the details I’d assembled as well as my intention for them. He explained how it was all for the good of the church and the community. ‘Sometimes you have to bend a few rules to make the world a better place. You know that, son.’ ”

  My palms began to sweat. I could see the train wreck coming, Eli and Mr. Hauer heading straight for each other at full speed on the same track.

  “Mr. Hauer proceeded to discuss the outcome of my potential action. ‘Think of the damage to your legacy. Your family has been essential to Riverwoods from the beginning. But then again, I guess nothing lasts forever. And as the church council president, sometimes I’m asked to make difficult decisions.’ Though he did not directly say, I believe this veiled threat was meant to indicate that he would seek to remove my father from his position as head pastor at Riverwoods.”

  Holy shit.

  “As if fearing that would not be enough, he then threatened more personal consequences. ‘If all goes as planned, it’s only a few more years before you’re back here to minister in this community that your father and grandfather have worked so hard to build. It would be a shame if that didn’t work out. I know Leah would be disappointed.’ ”

  Riverwoods. His future. Leah. Everything Eli cared about. Hauer knew him well enough to read every page in his book.

  Fury on Eli’s behalf crashed through me, making my hands clench around the edges of the folder. Mr. Hauer had no right to threaten him like that. If I’d been there, the conversation would have gone differently. I didn’t have nearly as much to lose in telling Mr. Hauer to shove it.

  The last line was almost illegible and tilted halfway down to the blank line below it: “This is wrong. But I have no proof, other than my testimony of what I’ve witnessed.”

  To anyone else, it might have looked like a simple statement of fact, a summing up of the previous entries.

  But to me, despair and frustration screamed from every loop and slash of his handwriting in that sentence. It was an acknowledgment of Mr. Hauer’s position and power, and Eli’s lack of it. Not to mention the potential consequences if Eli kept going.

  Then, six days after this conversation, according to Thera, Eli had come over to her house and told her that he couldn’t help her.

  He’d given in and walked away, abandoning Thera and her mother, people who needed help.

  I sat back, my head spinning. My brother, the “good twin,” had faltered. That conversation in the Jeep that last night wasn’t about Thera and her house, not specifically. It was about Eli, about him trying to justify the decision he’d made.

  In our family, I was always the selfish one, the short-sighted one, the superficial one.

  But apparently, I wasn’t the only flawed one. Eli had messed up. He’d gone against everything he believed was right because he was afraid. I didn’t know how to reconcile that information with the brother I knew.

  But if I didn’t know who Eli was, who was I, really? Then and now? We were supposed to be opposites, two halves of a whole. But if I was wrong about him, it was like losing track of the ball in the sun. I was blind and lost, without a point
of reference.

  What shook me more than anything, though, was that he’d never said anything to me about any of this, other than that one cryptic conversation on that last night.

  Why not? Did he think I would judge him, like Kylie had said at lunch today? That I wouldn’t have listened or tried to help?

  Maybe . . . Maybe I wouldn’t have. Not back then.

  But I was changing, growing without him here. Did I want that? Did I have a choice?

  I had to get out of here. I couldn’t handle this right now.

  I slapped the folder shut and reattached it to the bottom of the drawer, using the floppy and sagging pieces of tape. Then I stood and put everything back in the drawer as quietly as I could and replaced it in the nightstand.

  Before stepping back, I pushed at Eli’s comforter, trying to straighten out the dent from where I’d sat on it. It needed to look like I’d never been here.

  I needed to never have been here.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  * * *

  I WAS IN A familiar hallway, doors lining both sides in both directions as far as I could see. I could hear the rush of wind from somewhere and the rustling of the papers at my feet. The pages, which were blank, covered the dark red carpet in thick patches, like fallen leaves in perfect white rectangles.

  In front of me, the closest door stood open. I didn’t remember it opening, but I also didn’t remember finding this particular door among the many. It was just here, and so was I.

  And when I looked through the doorway, my twin was waiting in the otherwise empty space. He grinned at me and held a hand up in greeting. He was wearing his stupid church camp T-shirt beneath his open button-down, like when I’d last seen him.

  “Eli, hey,” I said in relief, a sense of well-being flooding through me. He would fix everything. Life would go back to normal now. I didn’t have to figure anything out.

  I started toward him, but his eyes widened in alarm and he pointed down at the threshold between us. His mouth moved rapidly, but I couldn’t hear him.

  Not like before, when I could hear him but couldn’t find him.

  Before.

  Wait. Had I been here before? When?

  I frowned, trying to remember. I realized I didn’t even know for sure where I was.

  Eli raked his hand through his hair in frustration, drawing my attention back to him. He took a deep breath then, as if working for patience, and I could see his chest rise and fall with it.

  You. He mouthed the word carefully, pointing to me and then to the papers on the ground, giving me a significant look.

  “You want these?” I asked, bending to scoop up a handful and hold them out to him. It was an easy movement, pain-free and smooth in a way that I’d not experienced in months.

  I stared down at the pages in my left hand. My elbow was fully extended, and it didn’t hurt. There were no tremors or shooting pains. And when I turned my arm to see the underside, the surgery scars were gone.

  It was like the accident had never happened.

  The accident. I’d been hurt and Eli . . . Eli had been killed.

  Reality came rushing into this space that seemed to exist outside of it, or alongside.

  “What . . . ,” I began, not sure how to ask. “How are you here?”

  He looked at me, his expression sad but knowing, like he was waiting for me to catch up.

  And then I did.

  “You’re dead. This isn’t real,” I whispered.

  After a pause, he gave a single bob of his head in acknowledgment.

  My eyes burned with tears, and my lower lip started to tremble. I covered my face with my good arm. “What are you doing here? What is this?” I choked out. It was bad enough that I had to live my awake-life without him—now I was being tortured in dreams too?

  A noise came from in front of me, like the odd sound a handsaw makes when you bend the blade. My grandpa used to do it to make us laugh.

  I lowered my arm. Eli was still there, his fists pressed against an invisible barrier in the doorway. But he was scowling at me now, the way he used to when I took too much time in the bathroom or when I turned off the Jeep and left the fan on high.

  Eli shook his head and pointed at the papers on the ground and in my hand.

  I stared at the pages and then back at him, in confusion. “What do you want me to do with these? They’re all blank.”

  He gave me a strange look.

  I held up the fistful I’d gathered a moment ago to show him. But as I watched, a thick black scrawl appeared on the pages, filling every inch of the blank space. Only, I couldn’t read any of it. The words were jumbled and out of order, or weren’t words at all—at least, not in a language I recognized.

  When I tried to read one of the pages anyway, the squiggles and letters shifted and reordered themselves, making it impossible.

  Panic flooded my chest, that tight, squeezing sensation that made it feel like all the air was being pushed out of my lungs. I had to be able to read these pages.

  “Eli, how am I supposed to . . .” I glanced up and found him several feet farther back from the doorway than he was a moment ago.

  And he was slowly walking—no, being pulled backward—away from the door. Away from me.

  “No!” I lunged at the door, only to be pushed back by an unseen force.

  “Wait! You have to stay,” I called after him, desperate. “You can’t leave me here with these. I don’t know what to do!”

  Growing more distant by the second, he smiled and waved at me, as if he couldn’t hear or understand what I was saying. Or he didn’t care anymore.

  “No, Eli, wait!” I shouted after him. “Wait, please. Eli, you have to tell me—”

  I woke up abruptly, heart pounding, mouth dry, my eyes gritty with sleep and filled with unshed tears.

  It took me a second to process where and when I was. In my room, Friday, no, Saturday morning.

  I turned my head on the pillow to see my alarm clock. 8:47 a.m.

  Closing my eyes again, I tried to slow my breathing and my heart rate.

  I shouldn’t have taken that second pain pill before bed last night, no matter how much I was hurting. That, in combination with what I’d found in Eli’s room, had obviously—

  No. I wasn’t going there.

  I didn’t know what to do about that folder, couldn’t even think about it. It made me feel like my skin didn’t fit quite right when I did.

  But lying there, trying not to think about it, or anything else, I remembered what Thera’s mother had said yesterday. He wants you to finish what he started.

  I pushed myself out of bed and scavenged a pair of basketball shorts from the floor to pull on over my boxers.

  When I opened the door to my room, the smell of bacon and coffee floated up, making my stomach growl. I’d retreated to my room early last night, exhausted from the day and the fight and also not sure I could face my mom and my sister without them noticing something was wrong.

  But this morning, the tempting scent of food combined with the demands of an empty stomach forced me to try. I made my way down the steps, listening to the clank of pans and the sizzle of food in the kitchen.

  I expected the low murmur of voices, my mom talking to my dad or the two of them talking to Sarah.

  Instead, I found Sarah curled on a stool at the island, picking at her eggs and looking half asleep.

  “Oh, good, you’re up.” My mom turned away from the stove and grabbed a plate from the island. “I was just going to try to wake you.” She squinted at me. “I think the swelling in your nose is down, but your eye is certainly more colorful.”

  I made a face. “Thanks.” I took a seat on the other stool, next to Sarah.

  Mom picked up a spatula and began loading my plate with scrambled eggs.

  “Where’s Dad?” My voice came out sounding rusty from disuse.

  Her hands stilled. “He came home for a few minutes this morning to shower, and now he’s at church, writing and re
hearsing his sermon,” she said.

  Uh-oh.

  She resumed filling my plate, plucking bacon out of a glass dish on the stove top.

  “When’s he coming home?” I asked, pushing back against the scrabbling claws of unease. I didn’t particularly want him home yelling at me. But neither did I want to lose another piece of my already fractured and disintegrating family. We were like shards of a shattered mirror, hanging in the frame by the form we used to have but slowly falling out, one by one. And the longer my dad was gone, the more it would start to feel like a real absence, something that couldn’t be glossed over or forgotten.

  “I want to see Daddy,” Sarah added. “For real, not on the phone.”

  My mom turned to hand me the plate. “We’ll see, sweetie,” she said to Sarah. “It depends on Daddy’s schedule. You know how busy it is during Lent.”

  “But I want to—” Sarah began, working herself up to a full whine, only to be interrupted by the doorbell.

  For a moment, the three of us just looked at each other in surprise. Who would be coming over without warning this early on a Saturday?

  “Maybe Daddy forgot his keys,” Sarah ventured.

  Mom winced. “I’ll get it. It’s probably Lolly from down the street. I ordered some cookie dough for a fund-raiser,” she said. “You stay and eat.”

  “Sares, do you have an extra fork over there?” I asked.

  “I have my fork,” Sarah said, licking the utensil in question. “But I’m done. You can have it.” She held it out to me.

  I made a face. “No, thanks.”

  I slid off my stool and headed for the silverware drawer.

  “Jace.”

  Turning, I found my mom at the threshold of the hallway and the kitchen with an odd expression on her face. “Someone’s here to see you.”

  “Who?” Immediately my mind conjured the last visitor I’d had. “If it’s Leah, I can’t—”