Every Other Weekend

by Abigail Johnson

  ADAM

  It should have bothered me that I was about to cry in front of the girl who had my heart, but it didn’t. That had as much to do with Daniel as it did Jolene. He clapped me once more on the shoulder and then pulled back. And just as quickly as I’d been about to cry, I was laughing. It was so good to see him. It felt like going back in time, and I half expected to see Greg walk up behind him.

  Daniel didn’t join in my laughter, but he did smile.

  “What are you doing here?” I hadn’t seen my brother’s best friend since Greg’s funeral two years ago. My laughter faded with that realization.

  “I’ve been gone some.” Daniel had tossed his coffee into a trash can before reaching me, and he shoved both hands into his pockets, but not before I noticed that the knuckles on his right hand were split.

  He and Greg had been friends for as long as I could remember, and we all knew how messed up his home life had been. He was old enough now that he must have moved out, but things were apparently still bad. Growing up, my parents had called the police more than once when Daniel had shown up hurt on our doorstep. It had never gone anywhere, because Daniel’s mom refused to press charges even when it was clear that her husband was beating her, too, and Daniel cared too much about her to contradict whatever stories she invented to explain their injuries.

  As he’d gotten older and bigger, Daniel’s injuries had become less frequent, but I doubted his mom had fared as well. I knew that, for Daniel, his mom getting hurt was worse than getting hit himself. But she wouldn’t let him help her, would even blame him for making her husband angry in the first place.

  I think that was why he’d helped Greg rescue injured animals. He couldn’t help his mom, but he could help them.

  “How’s everyone?” he asked, drawing my attention away from his hand. “Your mom?”

  I’d never been jealous over the close relationship Daniel had developed with our mom. She’d taken him under her wing as much as he’d allowed and had been the only one he’d take any comfort from when things went more wrong than usual at his home. When Greg was alive, Daniel had spent more nights at our house than he had his own. Mom had been talking about turning the attic into a bedroom for him until Daniel made it clear that he couldn’t leave his mom. Still, I remembered plenty of nights when I’d woken up to find the two of them talking over tea in the kitchen, and once, when he’d been much younger, he’d even let her hug him while he cried. Greg had been like a brother to him, but I almost think he loved Mom more.

  “She’s, um... Yeah, she’s okay. We’re okay.”

  Daniel didn’t nod. He knew me well enough to know I was lying.

  “How’s your mom?” I didn’t ask about his dad, because while I hoped he was dead, there was a new scar splitting Daniel’s left eyebrow that told me all I needed to know. Daniel’s hands tried to push deeper into his pockets. His silence was answer enough.

  Jolene joined us then, glancing between us with a cautious smile on her face. “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess you guys know each other?”

  I had to stop myself from reaching for her hand. I felt so overwhelmed by seeing Daniel again that I needed something to ground me, and I suddenly felt nervous and proud all at once that she’d get to meet Greg’s best friend. She’d never know my brother—and one of these days, I was going to tell her everything about him—but having her meet Daniel, who’d been like a brother to me, too, somehow made it feel like I was getting to share a part of Greg with her.

  “Yeah, this is Daniel. He was Greg’s best friend.” Daniel flicked a glance at me when I said Greg’s name without having to include the fact that he was my brother, and I saw him turn back to Jolene with more interest than before. “And this is my—this is Jolene.”

  “Hi,” she said, and Daniel returned the greeting.

  “I haven’t seen Daniel in a while,” I explained.

  “I guessed that, too,” Jolene said.

  Right. I didn’t exactly go around launching myself at strangers.

  “So, are you going to college somewhere or...?”

  Daniel ran a hand—not the one with the busted knuckles—through his hair. “No, I’m actually getting ready to move. My mom... She’s in the hospital and, um, when she gets better I’m taking her... We’re leaving. She always wanted to go somewhere warm, so we’re gonna try Arizona.”

  I swallowed. I was more sorry than I could say that his mom was hurt. I glanced toward the hand still concealed in his pocket, and I prayed that he’d busted each one of the knuckles on his bastard of a father. Greg would have been happy, too.

  “Arizona sounds good,” I told him. I would have said something more if Jolene hadn’t been there, but he met my gaze and nodded, understanding.

  Jolene glanced between us, then made a show of shivering. “Wow, I am cold. I think I’m gonna head back to my apartment.”

  “I guess we have been walking for a while. We can go.”

  Jolene put her hand on my arm. “Stay,” she said in a soft voice. “It’s not like I don’t know the way by myself.”

  Daniel ducked his head. “Actually, I have to get going. But I can give you guys a ride.”

  I was glad for the excuse Jolene’s presence gave me not to explain about the apartment I had Daniel drive us to. He’d assume Jolene lived there and I was hanging out with her.

  We climbed into Daniel’s Jeep, me in the back, Jolene in the passenger seat, and I felt such an overwhelming sense of déjà vu that I couldn’t breathe. How many times had I sat back here with Daniel and Greg in the front? Greg had never minded when I wanted to tag along with them. Or, I don’t know, maybe sometimes he had and I couldn’t remember. A lot of the time, Jeremy had been there, too, and the two of us would push at each other, fighting to lean forward between the front seats.

  Jolene and Daniel were talking while I drifted back to the past, and I liked the sounds of their voices mixing together.

  Greg would have liked Jolene. I knew it with such a strong bolt of conviction that my heart skipped a beat. And then it skipped another as I realized that moment was the closest they’d ever come to meeting each other.

  Jolene glanced back at me, took in the moisture I could feel in my eyes, and went back to talking to Daniel. Without being obvious about it, she extended a hand between the seats and found mine.

  The whole drive back to the apartment she held my hand, releasing it only when Daniel parked.

  “I’ll meet you inside,” she told me before saying thanks and bye to Daniel.

  We watched her go. Well, I watched her go. Daniel watched me.

  “So that’s your girl?”

  “Yeah.” I nodded, still staring after her. “I don’t know if I’m hers, but she’s definitely mine.”

  “I like her,” he said. And I knew he was telling me Greg would have, too.

  “I’m sorry about your mom.” And because I couldn’t help asking, I said, “He won’t be able to hurt her anymore?”

  Daniel’s jaw locked and his injured hand tightened on the steering wheel. “No, he won’t ever hurt her again.”

  I nodded, not caring how or why Daniel knew that. His mom would be safe, and though I’d never met her, I was glad for his sake almost more than hers. “When do you leave?”

  “It depends.” He swallowed. “On when she gets released and how soon she can handle the move. Few months.”

  “But she will—heal, I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  Daniel pushed the passenger seat forward for me to climb out. When my feet hit the asphalt of the parking lot, I turned back to him. “I know my mom would like to see you. I think... I think it would help her to see you.”

  The way Daniel lowered his gaze told me he didn’t agree.

  “Daniel,” I said. “She knows it wasn’t your fault. We all know that.” When he didn’t respond, I sa
id, “I’m glad I got to see you. I’ve missed you.”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Daniel said, meeting my gaze again. “It’s good to see you finally growing into those ears.”

  I laughed, and it hurt only a little knowing that I was probably laughing with him for the last time.

  “Be good to Arizona,” I told him.

  “Be good to your girl,” he said. “And tell your mom—” He pressed his lips tight together. “Tell your mom that I’m sorry, okay? Tell her it should have been me.”

  Then he was gone, and I waited a long, long time before going inside.

  SEVENTH WEEKEND

  December 18–20

  Jolene

  For the first time in months I felt nervous about seeing Adam. He hadn’t said much after Daniel left on our last Saturday, and on Sunday all we’d done was watch movies. I’d had to bite my tongue, literally, to make myself stay silent.

  We’d texted a little over the past two weeks, but he was busy finishing a project for school that he’d been working on with Erica, but...yeah. I guessed they’d decided to finish individually.

  My weeks hadn’t been any more fun. Between dodging my mom and her edginess over Tom’s increasingly less frequent appearances at the house, I’d been staying up late to work on the idea I’d finally gotten for the footage I’d captured of Adam and me, one that I wanted to finish while it still seemed good. I’d also been at Cherry and Gabe’s filming the music video.

  I’d been hoping to see Cherry and that her latest reunion with Meneik would have run its course, but no such luck. We’d said hi and everything, but otherwise she’d been out with Meneik as much as her parents allowed and on the phone with him every second they didn’t.

  Those whole two weeks between seeing Adam had sucked, and because we’d talked so little, I had no idea what kind of headspace he was in. It wasn’t like I could be mad at him for not opening up about his brother. I couldn’t imagine what losing Greg had been like, what it still was like, but I wanted to. I wanted to know about the person he loved so much that, even years later, mentioning Greg’s name or running into one of his friends physically affected Adam.

  He and his brother weren’t talking when they entered the empty lobby, and Jeremy’s shoulders slumped as he saw me sitting on the second-floor landing.

  “Give him a break, would you? He’ll come find you when he wants you.”

  “Now,” Adam said, shoving his bag at Jeremy as he took the steps—two at a time—to reach me. “Now’s good.”

  I tried to disguise how happy that made me by shrugging at Jeremy. “Why don’t you go on up? He’ll come find you when he wants you.” Then I caught Adam’s arm and we sped not down the stairs but up. In the past, we’d encountered a few too many neighbors on lower levels, but the last flight didn’t see a lot of traffic even when there wasn’t a blizzard outside to detract people from the roof.

  “I feel like we need to hurry,” I told him.

  “Hurry with what?”

  “Anything. Everything.” He was acting like Adam again, there and present with me instead of lost in thoughts he couldn’t share. “What is the most awesome thing we could possibly do in this stairwell?”

  “You’re looking at me like there’s an obvious answer to that question.” And then he half frowned, half smiled at me. “Are we going to make out?”

  It was a teasing, throwaway comment, and it made me grin even as my heart thumped. “Better.” I pulled a deck of cards from my jacket pocket and dropped it on the stair between us.

  He looked at the cards, then back at me. “So we’re not even going to talk about my idea?”

  We didn’t end up talking about his idea, but we did talk about a lot of other stuff, mostly movies, because with me it’s always movies.

  I growled when he told me he’d never seen The Godfather. “We’ll both be dead before I can show you all the awesome movies you haven’t seen.” Then I leaned against the wall and drew one knee up, my cards forgotten. “Doesn’t that depress you? If we watched one movie every night for the rest of our lives, we’d never see them all before we die. And I’m not even talking about all the new movies they make every year. It drives me nuts. I’m doomed to ignorance about so much of something I love.”

  “Would you really want to do that?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to see every movie ever made, but even half, the good ones, would take more years than I have left.”

  “You’re talking about a medium that’s only a century old. Think about all the books you’ll never read or the songs you’ll never hear.”

  “You’re not helping me,” I said.

  “You brought up the movie thing. I’m pointing out that there are a lot of other things you won’t get to experience. No one will.”

  “That’s my point. Doesn’t it bother you?”

  He shrugged. “Not really.” He leaned toward me. “Look, if you only see the world as a list of things you’ll never get to do, then you’ll never enjoy any of the things you do get to do. You’ll always be thinking of something else, wanting more, when maybe what you have, what you’ve seen or read or heard or whatever, is pretty great. You’ll never appreciate anything.” He sat back against the opposite wall. “Now that’s depressing.”

  “You sounded really wise just now.” I tilted my head at him. “You figure all that out on your own?”

  “I had some help.”

  “Who?”

  “My brother... Greg.”

  I picked up my cards again, casually shifting them in my hands so he wouldn’t see how much I wanted him to keep talking.

  Sometimes I could tell it surprised him when he brought up his brother. He’d go all tense afterward, like he was bracing for pain that I couldn’t see, much less imagine. But it wasn’t there that time.

  “You could tell me about him if you felt like it. I know you loved him a lot. And don’t let it go to your head when I say this, but there’s no way he didn’t love you.”

  I lowered my gaze when he stood, both because I didn’t want him looking at me while I basically told him that everyone loved him, including me, and because I didn’t want him to think I was trying to force him into doing something he might not ever want to do.

  With my head bent, all I could see were his feet. They’d been pointing away from me when he stood, but then, then turned back.

  He started talking about Greg.

  ADAM

  I hadn’t meant to bring up Greg. I’d promised to tell her about him sometime, and it wasn’t like he was a secret. Most of my friends had been my friends back before Greg died, so I’d never needed to try to explain how amazing he was to someone who’d never know him. It felt like an impossible task.

  But seeing Daniel again had made me realize that, with Jolene, I wanted to try.

  “Greg was five years older than me and three years older than Jeremy, but we were close—closer than I’ll ever be with Jeremy.” That was a sad thing to admit even though it was true. Having the role of oldest thrust upon my remaining brother didn’t suit him. Or me. Jeremy never knew the right thing to say or when to say it. He couldn’t get away with half the stuff our brother had without even trying. He wasn’t Greg, and it was a toss-up on any given day which of us felt his lack more keenly.

  “He died a week shy of his eighteenth birthday. My brother was—” I broke off, because no matter what I said about Greg, it wouldn’t be enough.

  “What did he like to do?” Jolene asked, giving me a place to start when I couldn’t find one on my own.

  “Animals,” I said. “He rescued animals, ones that were hurt and would have died without help, and not just the cute, cuddly kind either. He’d get Daniel and they would come home bleeding from scratches and bite marks, barely hanging on to some filthy, furry monster that was still trying to claw their faces off...and Greg would laugh.” I laughed,
too, at the memory, and it felt good to be able to remember something that didn’t hurt. “He’d promise the little—and often not-so-little—terror that he was going to take care of them. Daniel wasn’t as lighthearted as my brother, but he never complained about the injuries he got rescuing a hurt and scared animal. They were never as bad as the ones he got from his—” I closed my mouth, and Jolene pretended not to notice. She’d met Daniel, but she didn’t know him. Plus, I was supposed to be telling her about Greg, not Daniel.

  Mimicking Daniel’s favorite pose, I shoved my hands into my pockets. “Anyway, Greg always kept his promises. He’d get the animals clean and fed, pay vet bills with money he got from hustling pool with Daniel, and he’d set up places for them in our barn that looked more comfortable than my bed. He even slept out there next to some of the more hurt and skittish ones.”

  Jolene’s face lit up as I talked about my brother. She laughed when I told her how Greg had stolen our dad’s truck once when he was fifteen because he wanted to pull a buck out of a sinkhole, only he ended up falling in himself as he tried to get a rope around its antlers.

  “He had to call home for Dad to get him out. Our dad was so mad, and Greg didn’t even care how long he was grounded, because they pulled the buck out, too.”

  “How long was he grounded?” she asked.

  “It was supposed to be a month, but I think my parents let him off after a week. He was hard to stay mad at.” My smile slipped, but I kept talking.

  Jolene watched me break apart piece by piece from the inside as I told her about the best person who’d ever lived. I heard the step squeak as she stood and moved toward me. My heart didn’t race like it normally would have when she slipped her arms around my waist and rested her head against my chest; it slowed and steadied.

  Later, I’d care that she saw me like that.

  Later, I’d care that she was pressed that close to me.

  Later.

  “The last one, a wolf-bear-hybrid-looking dog that Greg dubbed Fozzie, took such a big chunk out of his leg that my parents had to take him to the ER. Nobody but my brother could have convinced them—while he was bleeding and limping across the kitchen—that Fozzie just needed a little TLC instead of a call to animal control. To this day, I don’t know how he did it, but when they got home from the hospital, Mom was carrying a chew toy and Dad had a bag of dog food in his arms.”