by Mila Gray
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For Karthi
Please be aware that Watch Over Me includes the following content:
Gun Violence
Domestic Violence
National Domestic Violence Hotline Thehotline.org
1-800-799-SAFE (7233)
1-800-787-3224 (TTY)
The End ZOEY
I see the decision get made—the resolution crosses his face, and in the same instant I move in front of Tristan to shield him.
There’s a deafening bang, followed closely by a second bang, and I fly sideways and hit the ground. Tristan falls too.
Pain shoots through me like comets streaking across a black sky. My vision turns starry.
I look up and see the monstrous shape of my dad looming over us. He blinks, seemingly astonished. Maybe it’s shock at what he’s done. Maybe it isn’t. Light bursts around him in a dazzling halo. I can’t breathe—the pain is almost as bright as the light.
I’ve been shot, I realize. But what about Tristan? Is he okay? Thoughts dart like eels through my mind so fast and so slippery I can’t grasp on to them. The only thing I can hold on to, like a beacon in the darkness, is the thought of Tristan. Please let him be okay. I don’t care if I die. Just let him be okay.
My dad drops to his knees in front of me like a dark avenging angel. For a moment, I think he’s about to beg forgiveness for what he’s done. I stare up at him, but his expression shows no remorse, not an ounce of sorrow. He’s baring his teeth like an animal about to shred his prey.
My ears are ringing so loudly that all other sounds are dulled. Time has slowed to a near stop. My heart seems to be following suit.
Tristan is all I can think of as the light starts to fade. I led him here. This is all my fault. Where is he? I desperately want to see him. I can feel something behind me. Something heavy and unmoving. A body? His body? I want to roll over and reach for him, but I’m paralyzed.
I desperately need to know that he’s okay.
But what if he isn’t?
What if he’s dead?
What if I’m dying too?
The Beginning ZOEY
There’s no dark in Las Vegas. It’s the brightest city on earth, and I haven’t seen the stars in three years because of it. So bright, in fact, the city can be seen from outer space.
There’s no quiet in Las Vegas either. Even out where we live, miles from the strip and its herds of tourists, there’s constant noise: the roar of traffic sliced with sirens, thumping music; arguments interspersed with cackles of laughter and the incessant drone of TV chatter drifting through open windows.
I miss quiet, but I don’t miss the dark.
I finish the washing up and tidy Cole’s homework away into his backpack. His notebooks are covered in colorful cartoon doodles, but as I shove one into his bag, I pause, realizing they aren’t cartoon doodles at all. Underneath his name—COLE WARD—written in big block letters of uneven sizes, he’s drawn a man holding a gun. Bullets are flying from it, and half a dozen stick figures lie sprawled across the page, tongues lolling, limbs severed, and red marker used for blood.
My hand shakes a little as I study the picture. Why is a nine-year-old boy drawing pictures like this? Is it normal? Perhaps all nine-year-old boys who spend time playing video games draw pictures like this. But even as I try to excuse it, I know deep down that it isn’t normal.
I sink down at the scarred kitchen table and debate what to do. I can’t tell my mom, that’s for sure. It’ll be too much for her to deal with. She’s finally managed to get on a good track, and I’m anxious not to do anything that might send her plummeting back into the dark place.
The best thing to do, I decide, is to speak to Cole. The violence could be Will’s influence. It makes sense, given that our older brother is a marine and Cole hero-worships him. Or it could be he’s just copying something he saw on TV or online. I try to police his screen time, but I’m not always home, and my mom isn’t great with discipline. She doesn’t like conflict. Maybe I should speak to his teacher, even though last time she made it very clear that it’s my mom who should be taking responsibility for Cole—not his teenage sister.
I shove the book in Cole’s bag and make a mental note to talk to him tomorrow before school—if I have time, that is. I have an early shift at work. Which reminds me that I need to get moving so I don’t end up too late to bed. There’s still laundry to do and lunches to prepare for tomorrow.
I stick my head around the bedroom door and see Kate isn’t yet asleep. She’s sitting cross-legged on the top bunk wearing the unicorn onesie I gave her for Christmas. She’s texting on her phone, her fingers flying at five hundred emojis a minute. I swear that phone is glued to her hands, and not even a crowbar could remove it.
“Hey, it’s late,” I say to Kate, but she’s wearing her headphones and can’t hear me. “Kate!” I say louder, and she glances up, her hair blazing around her head like a fiery sunset. “Bedtime.”
She rolls her eyes as though I’m just one big annoyance, put on earth to end her Snapchat streak, but miracle of miracles, she stops texting and yanks out her headphones.
“Good night,” she says, and reaches for the little unicorn reading light by her bed, twisting its horn to dim the brightness. When we first moved here, I tried making the room nice for her. She was unhappy about the move and even more so about having to share a room with Cole. The books on the shelf are gathering dust, though, because the only thing she reads these days are texts and Instagram stories.
She shoves her phone under the covers, and I know as soon as I’m gone she’ll be back to texting. I make Cole’s bed on the bottom bunk. He sleeps there normally, but he and Kate had a screaming argument earlier, so he went to sleep in Mom’s bed.
As I close the bedroom door, my phone rings. It’s another call from an unidentified number, the third one today. The first one I answered, hoping it was about a job I’d applied for at a restaurant closer to home, but it wasn’t—only silence greeted me on the other end. I hung up fast, before it rang again a few seconds later. And when I finally answered, all I could hear was someone on the other end, breathing loudly.
There was no answer when I said hello, just more breathing. Whoever it was proceeded to call a few hours after that.
And now, at ten o’clock at night, they’re calling again.
My breathing hitches, and my heart beats abnormally fast. It’s not him, I tell myself angrily. If it were him, I’d hear the pip-pip-pip of the federal inmate phone system and then an automated voice asking me if I wanted to accept a call from a prisoner at the Penitentiary of New Mexico. I know this because a few years ago he tried to call me. This was when I still had my old phone number. I rejected the call, then changed my number.
It can’t be him, I repeat to myself. There’s nothing to be afraid of. I switch off my phone and put it down on the table, trying to shake off the bad feelings slinking over me. Without warning, memories lunge out at me from the darkness, where I’ve tried to bury them: Cole’s screams, Kate’s sobs, my mother’s face bursting under a flurry of punches, the fridge door hanging on one hinge. Then the blue and white and red flashing lights outside; my dad’s angry roars. You bitch! I’ll fucking kill you.
The phone rings again. I startle. How long have I been standing here staring into space, r
emembering things I’d rather forget? It’s the landline this time. I walk toward it, debating whether I should answer. Something tells me not to, but another voice in my head, a belligerent one, demands that I do. I grab the phone. “Yes?” I say.
Silence greets me.
“Who is this?” I whisper, heart hammering furiously.
There’s another second’s silence, and then I hear the click as whoever is on the other end hangs up. As I stare at the phone, there’s an enormous BOOM. The window shatters, and glass flies across the room. A wall of heat rushes toward me as a crackle and a deafening roar fill my ears.
Shielding my face, I squint through the broken window. Oh my God. It’s my car, parked just outside on the driveway in front of the house. It’s on fire.
* * *
I stumble back from the window, chased by smoke and heat, and run to the bedroom, throwing open the door and screaming at Kate to get up.
“Fire! Move!” I yell before rushing out and into my mom’s room to wake Cole. I come to a halt in the doorway. The room is empty.
“Cole?” I shout, ducking down and looking under the bed. He’s not there. And he’s not in the closet, either. I ransack the room looking for him.
Smoke is now billowing in through the broken window, and I start coughing. I push past Kate, who has staggered from bed and into the living room.
“Call 911!” I shout at her.
The front door is the only exit, and we can’t get out, thanks to the fact the car is parked right in front of the door. Behind me, I can hear Kate on the phone to the dispatcher. “F-fire,” she stammers. “Th-there’s a fire.”
“Cole!” I scream, turning every which way, trying to figure out where he might be. I check the bathroom, the kitchen, the closets—everywhere I can think of—but he’s nowhere to be found. Coughing, I yell his name again, but he doesn’t answer. The smoke is so thick and choking we can barely breathe. I grab Kate by the arm and drag her back into Mom’s bedroom.
“Come on,” I say to Kate, pulling her over to the window. “We need to get out of here.”
The neglected courtyard outside is shared by the two dozen or so houses that back onto it. It’s meant to be a communal meeting area with grills, concrete picnic tables, and a play area for little kids, but the play area is taped off because the rusting climbing frame and broken swings are a liability, and the only people who use the picnic tables are drug dealers.
Someone in the courtyard runs over and helps Kate out of the window, catching her as she stumbles. The person then helps me. I recognize him as a neighbor, a guy in his fifties, who I think works as a bus driver. His name is Winston.
“Have you seen my brother?” I ask him as he helps me down.
He shakes his head as panic ripples through me. I scour the crowd of a dozen or so neighbors—some in pajamas—rushing out of their houses to see what’s happening. There’s no sign of Cole. In the distance, I can hear the sirens of the fire truck.
I take Kate’s hand and pull her around the side of the house, to the street. The car is still burning furiously, and the flames have started to stroke the roof of the house and melt the guttering. As I watch, sparks dance through the broken window and land on the curtains in the living room. They burn so fast and so brightly that they incinerate in seconds, and now the flames, hungry for more, leap toward the sofa.
Two fire trucks screech to a halt in front of the house, and we watch as firefighters go running past, carrying a hose. One team douses the car, and in less than a minute the blaze is under control, sputtering and finally vanishing with a hiss and a billow of black smoke.
The other firefighters have turned their hose on the house—sending the spray through the window and on the flames consuming the living room, while two others have taken an axe to the front door. They smash it down, then rush inside. I sink to my knees on the sidewalk, Kate collapsing beside me, sobbing. What if Cole’s inside? What if he was hiding?
The fire in the living room is quickly put out, but it feels like we wait hours until the firefighters exit. One of them approaches Winston, who I see point me out to him. He walks over with a solemn expression on his face, and my heart starts to hammer. Kate grips my hand tight. The firefighter kneels down beside me. He’s about fifty years old with a bushy moustache and blue eyes. “My name’s Lieutenant Franklin,” he says. “This your house?”
I nod. “D-did you find … ?” I stammer. “My brother. I don’t know where he is.”
He frowns and shakes his head. “There’s no one in the house.”
I let out a sob of relief. Kate does too.
“How old is he? Can you give us a description of him?”
I turn back to Lieutenant Franklin and try to focus. “His name is Cole. He’s nine. He has brown hair, brown eyes, freckles. He was wearing Spider-Man pajamas.”
Franklin repeats all of this into his radio, and the dispatcher confirms it.
“Is that all?” Franklin asks me. “Any other identifiers?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. How else to describe my little brother? I haven’t done him justice. He’s smart as a whip, I want to say, even though he hates school. He loves to make up jokes, really bad ones. He’s currently obsessed with Genghis Khan and LeBron James and Lionel Messi and he wants to be a race car driver when he grows up, unless of course he can be a famous soccer player. None of this information is going to help them find him, though. But how many nine-year-old boys in Spider-Man pajamas must there be walking around Vegas at this time of night?
“When did you last see him?” Franklin asks me.
“I put him to bed around seven thirty. I went to look for him after the explosion, but I couldn’t find him. I don’t know where he is.”
I’m fighting back tears. I want to go and look for him—I should be looking for him—but Kate is gripping my arm, holding me firmly in place. She hasn’t said a word this whole time. She seems to be in shock. Someone has placed blankets—those foil ones—over our shoulders. “Please,” I whisper to Franklin, “you need to find him.”
“Don’t worry,” he tells me. “All the patrol cars in the area are looking for him. We’ll find him.” He nods at me reassuringly.
“Where’s your mother?” Franklin asks.
“She’s at work,” I tell him. “She should be home soon.”
He frowns at that, and I sense he’s making a judgment. He’s probably thinking, What kind of a mother leaves her children at home to work a night shift? It irks me. I’m almost nineteen, and I’m not a kid. There are no laws being broken. Besides, he doesn’t know anything about us. He doesn’t know that my mom’s job is the best thing that’s happened to her in a long time, that it’s given her back a sense of purpose and self-confidence. She might not be earning very much money, but she’s earning something—enough to put a roof over our heads and get us off food stamps. This is what I want to say to him, but I don’t.
“And your father? Is he around?” Franklin asks.
I shake my head. “No.”
“You should call your mother,” he says to me.
“My phone’s inside,” I say, nodding at the house.
“Okay, I can have someone contact her. Where does she work?”
“The Luxor,” I tell him. “She has a job doing hair and makeup for the show there.”
“That the aerial one? With the acrobats and the trapeze people?”
I nod. My mom got us tickets for Kate’s birthday a few months ago. Special-rate ones. It was one of the best nights we’d ever had. Afterward, Cole spent two months swinging off every pole and rail he could find, until he fell leaping from a wall and took a chip out of his elbow.
“What’s your mom’s name?” Franklin asks me.
“Gina Ward,” I tell him, mumbling it, my mind back on Cole. Where did he go? And more important, why?
“Does she have a car?” he asks.
“No. She takes the bus.”
Franklin nods. “I’ll have someone pick her up
.” He steps away, and I watch him talk into his radio, and then I just sit there on the curb, trying to comfort Kate and not to think about what might have happened to Cole.
Ten minutes later, as we watch the firefighters roll up their hoses and wait for my mom, Franklin returns. He crouches down beside us. “They found your brother,” he tells me.
The relief bursts out of me. Beside me Kate clutches my hand. “Oh, thank God—where was he?”
“A few blocks away. A patrol car spotted him. He ran. They had to chase him down.”
“What?” I ask, stunned. Why would he run?
“They’re bringing him here,” Franklin tells me. “Do you mind … ?” Franklin says, gesturing with a nod of the head for me to follow him a few feet away, out of earshot of Kate.
I prize my arm out of her grip and follow him. He gestures toward the car. “It looks like arson. It burned with the kind of intensity we normally see when an accelerant is used.”
Arson. I say the word in my head as I stare at the smoking, mangled ruin that was once a Toyota Camry with 175,000 miles on the odometer.
“You’re lucky,” the fireman goes on to say. “If you’d had more fuel in the tank, it would have been an inferno. It could have taken out the entire block.”
“Oh my God,” I whisper, my heart clanging in my chest.
“Know anyone who might have a grudge against you?”
I open my mouth to say no, but then stop. Yes. I do know someone with a grudge against me. Someone who threatened once to kill me. But he’s in prison. And he doesn’t know where we live. It can’t be him. But that’s the second time I’ve thought that tonight, and I’m not a believer in coincidence.
Franklin shrugs. “Might just be bored kids. It happens.” His eyes drill into mine as he says it. “Young boys in particular often go through a phase where they get interested in fire, playing with matches and things.”
I don’t understand what he’s implying at first, and then it hits me with a jolt. “You think it was my brother who started the fire?” I ask, a note of anger in my voice.
