Beef released Robert with the slightest push—a baby bird thrust from the nest—and time spun away. Robert grabbed for Beef, but Beef stepped nimbly to the side. And then . . . And then I was in the air, launching myself at Robert’s torso before I knew I was doing it. I flung myself around him, propelling us as hard and as far as I could.
Limbs flailed. My shin scraped stone, and the pain was like fire. Eons later, we smacked the cold water, and it slapped the breath out of me. We went down. Down and down, and scrawny Robert grasped and twined around me like the laurel tree branches on the bank, the twisted lovers. I shoved at his warm flesh. It made him cling harder. His face in the murky water was the face of a river fairy. The bad kind of fairy, not the fairies I made gardens for once upon a time. Robert had bulging eyes, and he wanted to pull me down and keep me down, forever.
My vision blurred, and I felt my lungs bursting.
My feet touched bottom. They sank into cool, wet river mud. I bent my legs, and with my strong thighs, I shoved us up. The water grew lighter. Sun glinted on the surface, and we burst through, gasping and coughing. Snot dribbled from Robert’s nose. He was a baby clinging to my chest, but I fought the weight of him and got us to the log.
“Let go now,” I told him. He wouldn’t. “Let go, Robert.” I pried his arms off me. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”
He threw himself over the log, arms stretched long and cheek pressed to the bark, and he let himself sob.
I sobbed, too. I couldn’t believe we’d done it. I’d done it. I’d propelled us over the death ledge below.
Six inches away, the water jumped. I jerked my head reflexively. What the . . . ? There was another spray of water, and almost simultaneously, the sound of the first shot registered. Still, my brain couldn’t process it. Was Beef . . . was Beef shooting at us?
I looked up and saw Beef standing at the edge of Suicide Rock. His feet were planted wide, his arms rigidly extended. His face wasn’t his own.
He aimed his Colt, and my senses shot into overdrive.
“Robert, get down,” I cried, tugging to get him off the log. He blinked, not making sense of what was happening. I threw myself at him and pulled us both underwater, fishtailing my legs to get us deeper. Robert struggled. His face was green, with seaweed hair—my hair—twining around him.
He fought free, bursting back above the surface and coughing out water. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”
I could see Beef. Robert couldn’t. Behind Beef, I saw Christian wrestling to get the gun. He was arguing with him, and his voice seemed to alternate from loud to not loud as it bounced off the rock. Beef shrugged Christian off, his eyes fixed on me and Robert. His mind was no doubt racing overtime with meth and rage and a single-minded compulsion to shut us up for good. He probably thought he could deal with Christian later, if he thought about it at all.
A bullet kicked up the water right behind Robert’s shoulder. He turned at the splash, and once again I shoved him under, which was why I, and only I, saw Christian grab Beef by the shoulder and spin him around, so that Beef’s back was toward the water. Christian was after the gun, that’s all he wanted, and as he reached for it, Beef jerked it high over his head. The movement was violent, throwing Beef off his center of balance.
If I’d looked up two seconds later, I wouldn’t have seen. If I’d ducked back under, if I’d let the dark water hide me . . .
It didn’t matter, did it?
Beef was shooting at us, and then he wasn’t. He struggled with Christian. His hand flew up, and the momentum made him take several steps backward, to the lip of the cliff. His spine arched. His arms pinwheeled. He cried out, a stunned and terrible howl.
Patrick once took a nasty fall on the steps outside our high school. Someone tripped him, maybe Tommy. The smack of his head against concrete made my insides curl.
The sound of Beef hitting the rocky ledge was a thousand times worse. It was as awful as the crack of a bat against the skull of someone you loved, I imagined. Maybe more so.
There was a great, long stillness. The world was suspended. Then Robert was yanking my arm, wanting to know why I’d screamed. I stared at him, unaware that I had.
“And why do you keep pushing me under the water?” he demanded. “I don’t like that. I don’t like being dunked.”
“I know,” I told him. “I won’t anymore.” I locked my eyes on his so he wouldn’t glance over his shoulder and see my brother retrieving Beef’s pistol. It had flown from Beef’s outstretched fingers, but not far enough. Christian wiped it off with his shirt, then flung it into the middle of the swimming hole, where the water was the deepest. He knelt to gather the bullet casings. He threw them down, too.
Robert turned at the sound of the splashes, but the water had already swallowed everything up.
“I’m sorry I dunked you,” I told Robert. “I guess I was just scared.”
He considered staying mad, but he must have decided it was too much work. He wiped the snot from his nose and said, “Well . . . I guess I was, too.” A more fragile expression furrowed his brow. “But you saved me.”
“Yeah, and you know what that means?” I said. “It means you owe me.”
He laughed.
Bluebirds called from the trees. Water bugs sploshed. Christian climbed carefully from Suicide Rock to the ledge below, stepping around the thing that was there. He sprang off the jumping rock and landed cleanly in the river.
He swam to us, and when he reached the log, he shook his hair out of his eyes that way boys do.
“Where’s Beef?” Robert asked him. His bony shoulders tensed. “That wasn’t nice, what he did. He was playing mean.”
Christian looked at me, and in his eyes I saw what saving us had cost him. Beef was Christian’s friend, just as Patrick was Beef’s friend, and more. We lived in a small town. Almost everybody was a friend, if you let them be.
Robert shook Christian’s shoulder. “Where is he? Is he up there still?”
Christian swallowed. “He . . . he . . .”
“He slipped, honey,” I told Robert.
The last time I was sweet with him, he threw a fit. This time, he said, “On the rock?”
I nodded. “You and I made it. We were lucky.” My voice grew thick. “Beef wasn’t.”
Robert looked up at Suicide Rock. Then he dropped his gaze to the deadly ledge below. From where we were, there was nothing to see, which was a blessing.
“Was that the sound I heard?” he said.
“Yeah.”
His eyes brimmed with tears. Mine did, too.
From the highway, we heard sirens. Jason must have gotten the Malibu turned around. I could just imagine him pushing it down the road, one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the open door, then jumping in and popping the clutch to the engine. He must have called for help as soon as his phone got service.
We swam to the pebbled beach of the swimming hole. Sheriff Doyle and his brother, Deputy Doyle, tramped down to us, and we told them what happened.
“Beef fell,” Robert said. “He was being all crazy, and then he fell.”
“Being crazy?” Deputy Doyle said. “Meaning what?”
“You know Beef,” I said. “Always being a goofball, always taking risks.” My throat tightened. “Always having to be the life of the party.”
A shadow crossed Sheriff Doyle’s face. He and Roy were drinking buddies. “What’d he do? Try to jump from that damn rock?”
I nodded. My tears ran down my face, a waterfall of sorrow.
“And now he’s dead,” Robert said. “He’s up there on those rocks, ’cause he wasn’t lucky.” His expression changed, and he looked very young. “But I was real brave, and so was Cat.” His hand found mine. “She took real good care of me.”
I looked over Robert’s head at my brother. I didn’t have to say anything for him to know what I was thinking, which was that he’d taken real good care of me as well.
BEEF’S FUNERAL WAS LAST SUNDAY. EVERYONE sho
wed up for it, even my daddy. Beef’s mama was there, too, looking older than I remembered. Her eyes were sunk deep in her uncomprehending face, and I wondered what she could possibly be thinking. She’d missed out on her son’s entire life, practically, and now he was gone.
It was a closed-casket service, but a framed picture of Beef sat on top of the coffin, showing Beef after a wrestling meet, his arms thrust up triumphantly and a grin splitting his face. Tommy’s grandmother made sure there were flowers: a vase on either side of his photo.
People said nice things about the boy Beef once was, and no one said a word about his gun, which was buried in the muck and decay at the bottom of the swimming hole. Nobody was sniffing around for it, because no one but me and Christian knew about it.
“Beef fell, and that’s that,” Christian had said to me the day it happened, making sure we were out of Sheriff Doyle’s earshot. “No reason to complicate things.” He was protecting himself, yes, but more than that, I think he was protecting Beef’s reputation. Taking a fall, though awful, wasn’t as awful as the truth.
As for Robert, he seemed muddled about the whole incident, and he didn’t talk about it, except occasionally to me. He wanted to erase it from his mind, I suppose. Maybe, rarely, that was the best thing to do.
During the service, Pastor Paul talked about how sometimes bad things happened and we couldn’t see the bigger picture, because only God saw the bigger picture. He said that grief had the power to transform us, because when our hearts were hurting, we often let God in. We were imperfect, every one of us, but through God’s love, we could be healed.
Aunt Tildy was sitting next to me in the church pew, and at that part of the sermon, her hand found mine. She focused on Pastor Paul, but she gave me a squeeze. After a moment, I squeezed back.
Later, at the burial, I stood by Gwennie, who’d stepped away from Roy and her shell-shocked mama. I knew there were certain sadnesses a person had no choice but to live through, but I put my arm around her anyway. I decided a hug did make a difference, and even if it was the tiniest difference ever, it was better than nothing.
When Beef’s coffin was lowered into the earth, I bawled like a baby. I hoped that wherever Beef was, he was himself again, free of pain and pure of spirit. I squeezed shut my eyes and silently uttered my favorite benediction, sending it to Beef with all my heart: The Lord bless you and keep you. May He lift His face to shine upon you.
Since then, I’d been spending my days going back and forth between Patrick’s house and the hospital. At Patrick’s house, I pulled out their old push mower and mowed the lawn. I cut back the trumpet vines with their huge orange flowers, and I used a broom to sweep the cobwebs from the eaves of the porch. I also climbed on top of the porch railing and carefully lifted Mama Sweetie’s wind chimes from the screwed-in metal hook. The nurses, who decided I was as close as Patrick had to a relative, said it was fine to hang them in his room, so now they dangled near his open window. The hospital had air-conditioning, but fresh air was good for a person’s health. That sweet nurse, Kelly, agreed.
Often when I visited Patrick, Jason accompanied me. Christian came once, standing over Patrick’s thin frame and looking at him for a long time.
“Get better, buddy,” he said in a husky voice, and he lightly punched Patrick’s shoulder.
Today Christian was off with Tommy, probably riding their motorcycles or shooting at traffic signs. I’d asked Christian why he’d kept being friends with Tommy all these years, and he’d quoted one of our old teachers who always wrote famous sayings on the blackboard: “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
I looked at him like oh please, and he added, “We can’t all be like you, Cat, needing no one but yourself. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there aren’t all that many people to choose from when it comes to having friends in this town.”
I thought about that now as Jason sat beside me in one of the plastic hospital chairs Kelly had let me haul into Patrick’s room. Jason was reading, and just his presence made me feel warm inside, and I thought how untrue it was, the idea that I needed no one but myself. When I looked back at who I was two and a half weeks ago, I hardly recognized myself. I’d been a ghost girl who cared about nothing. I existed, but just barely.
When I almost died trying to save Robert, I realized I did care, about everything. And I didn’t die. I was still here. I still existed.
Now I saw the world through new eyes. I saw people through new eyes, especially. People like me, and people who were completely different from me. Maybe they lived in Black Creek, or maybe they lived in Atlanta, or maybe as far away as New Mexico. As far away as India, even.
I once read that in India, cows roamed freely in the streets and did whatever they wanted. I thought that was downright strange. But then, an Indian girl would probably find catching crawdads in empty Pringles cans strange.
I guess what I’d decided was that looking only at people’s outsides—what they wore, what they did, how they regarded cows—wasn’t good enough. I needed to think about their insides, too. I needed to remember there was a difference. For a while there, I think I forgot there was one, and so I spent a lot of time comparing my insides to other people’s outsides, which made me feel broken and didn’t get me anywhere.
Had Beef done that, too? In his mind, had he come up lacking?
My sadness about him sat dark and heavy in my heart, but I think it would have been worse if it didn’t. It was right to be sad when sad things happened.
I swiveled my head and looked at Jason. He must have felt my gaze, because he looked up from his book, which was To Kill a Mockingbird. He’d never read it, and which blew my mind, so I’d given him my copy. Judging by how quickly he was moving through it, I figured he liked it.
I smiled at him. He smiled back. He must have seen that I was feeling melancholy, because he put down his book, leaned toward me, and cupped my face with his hands. He kissed me, and his lips were soft against mine. Our souls mixed. Something passed between us, an invisible but glowing light.
He drew back, his expression a question. Had his kiss helped? Had he made me feel better?
I pushed my fingers through his soft hair. “Go back to your book. I’m fine.”
“We can talk if you want,” he said.
“It’s okay. Really.”
I was lost in my thoughts, anyway. Thinking about Beef. Thinking about my brother and my aunt and Robert. Thinking about just all of it.
“Cat,” Jason said in a hushed voice. I blinked and was back in my plastic hospital chair.
“What?” I said.
He nodded at Patrick’s bed.
I followed his gaze, my skin tingling. Patrick’s eyes were open. When he saw me, he smiled.
“Hi, Cat,” he said, his voice hoarse from lack of use.
I was too stunned to talk. I was too stunned to breathe, so I just soaked him in. His lips were so chapped they’d split open in places. He’d grown a scraggly beard, with unruly hairs sprouting above his jaw line. He’d shave it off, I was sure, because Patrick was so not a beard guy. I liked it, though. He looked handsome. He looked like a man instead of a boy.
He quirked up one eyebrow in that way of his that drove me bonkers. “What’s the matter?” he said. “Cat got your tongue?”
My mouth fell open. Patrick loved throwing those dumb sayings at me: Cat got your tongue? Or When the Cat is away, the mice will play. Or his favorite—and the one I detested the most—Curiosity killed the Cat.
Not this time.
I ran and just about threw myself at him before remembering his still-healing body. I hugged him, carefully at first, and then tighter. I hugged him like there was no tomorrow. Except there was. Tomorrows and tomorrows and tomorrows, and who knew what was in store for any of us? What I did know—maybe all I knew—is that we got to play a role in deciding.
I pulled away. A smile shone on his face, and I smiled back.
Then my gut clenched as I thought about the fl
ip side of endless tomorrows. The nurses would come running in soon, and they would call Sheriff Doyle. Sheriff Doyle would drive to the hospital. Maybe not right away, but soon, and he’d ask Patrick the hard questions.
Gently, I hip-bumped Patrick to make room for myself on the narrow bed. It was so familiar being with him, and so easy, that I couldn’t believe I’d punished myself by staying away from him for so long.
I took his hands. His monitors were singing a glad song, which told me the nurses and probably Dr. Granville would be bustling in any minute. We didn’t have much time.
“Beef’s dead,” I told him, because there was no other way.
Patrick’s smile fell away. “What?”
“He’s dead. Beef’s dead.” I’d have the chance to go deeper later, but right now my job was to lay out the bare bones of the story, because Patrick had a decision to make, even if he didn’t yet know it.
I stumbled over the words: Robert, Suicide Rock, my brother. The gun. Patrick’s confusion turned to shock, then anguish, and then to a bottomless sorrow. I went there with him, and I willed his grief to flow into me, so that I could bear it on his behalf.
From the hall came the sound of footsteps and excited voices. I glanced anxiously at Jason, who rose and went to the door. Hopefully, he could buy us some time.
“They’re going to ask you what happened at the Come ‘n’ Go,” I said to Patrick in a low voice. “They’re going to ask you to tell them who hurt you.”
Patrick furrowed his brow. “They don’t know?”
I bit my lip, feeling horrible about telling Patrick that Sheriff Doyle and Deputy Doyle hadn’t gotten anywhere with their investigation. I felt as if Black Creek had let him down.
“Well, they’ve been looking into leads and everything,” I said. “They’ve been trying real hard. They just . . .”
Ah, screw it, I thought. Anyway, only some people in Black Creek had let him down. Not everyone.
“They’re saying it was a truckful of out-of-towners,” I told him. “They’re probably ready to close the case, unless you tell them otherwise.”
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