Tell Me to Stay

by Charlotte Byrd

  “Nope,” Art says, popping a piece of gum in his mouth.

  He chews it slowly and deliberately, making me wait.

  “You were right,” he says, blowing a bubble.

  “About what?” I ask. He pops the bubble before answering.

  “About all of the stuff you told Olive.”

  Blood drains away from my face.

  My hands turn to ice.

  He knows about her.

  He knows what we talked about. How the fuck does he know that?

  “Owen is getting out of prison because he made a deal. We had a little chat with the parole board and sped things up a few years.”

  I clench my fists but keep my face stoic and under control. He can’t see me sweat. He can’t see me worry.

  “The guys he testified against are after him. Or rather their bosses are. His old boss. Your old boss. They're also after your girlfriend.”

  “So…what?” I ask as nonchalantly as possible.

  “Well, we need him and we need her. That’s where you come in. That fight you had with her, that’s over now. You are going to do everything in your power to make things nice with Owen. You get him to trust you. You get him to become your best friend.”

  “And then?” I ask.

  “Then I’ll be back with more instructions.”

  EARLIER THAT DAY…

  3

  Olive

  When I pick him up…

  This should be a happy day but my stomach is in knots. Nicholas and I just had a huge fight and now I don’t know where we stand. He is categorically against me going to pick up my brother from prison and I am categorically against this whole thing being any of his business.

  Why does he have to be so impossible?

  Why does he have to be so complicated?

  Why does he have to be so difficult to get along with?

  Why is this any of his business?

  I’m so angry my knuckles are white from grasping the wheel too hard. I take a deep breath and force myself to release the hold just a little.

  It’s early morning and I have gotten no sleep. Nicholas and I argued well into the night and once I did get into bed my mind continued to race.

  When my alarm went off at three in the morning, I was so awake that I didn’t even need any coffee.

  Breakfast was out of the question.

  I couldn’t force myself to eat a crumb but I did grab a power bar in case I got hungry later.

  It’s not going to be enough and I’m probably going to feast on junk food from the vending machines but at least my intentions are honorable.

  “Fuck, Nicholas!” I yell, grabbing onto the wheel again while I slow down at a yellow light. The streets are deserted and soaked from the rain.

  Don’t you get it that I need you?

  Don’t you get it that you’re being a selfish prick?

  But, how could he? I ask myself. We had talked about Owen for hours but not once did I say what I really needed to say.

  Even now, staring into the abyss of the dark street before me, I can barely admit it to myself.

  I’m afraid.

  I’m not so much afraid of Owen as I am afraid of seeing him again.

  Writing is one thing. I can express almost anything through the written word.

  But now that I actually have to see him in person? I’m terrified.

  A million ‘what-ifs’ rush through my mind.

  What if he’s not really the person who I imagined him to be?

  What if we don’t get along?

  What if we have nothing to talk about?

  What if he doesn’t like me?

  Don’t you fucking get it, Nicholas? I need you here.

  You could’ve been our buffer. You could’ve been my protector in case…in case we had nothing to talk about.

  But you had to make things complicated.

  You had to put all of these things into my head about the person I have no choice but to pick up.

  He’s getting out on parole.

  I’m his sister.

  I’m the only person he has in the whole world.

  I pull up next to the prison and park the car in the visitors’ lot. I thought I had go through security again, but the guard at the gate tells me to just wait here.

  “How long?” I ask.

  “I have no idea, but it can take a while,” he says.

  I turn up the music to drown out Nicholas’ words from my head but they just get louder.

  “Owen gave evidence against some bad people and that’s the only reason he’s getting out on parole on his first try.” I hear him say. “They are out for blood. They want revenge. They will get it from him and from anyone he cares about. There’s a contract out on your head.”

  When I first found out that Nicholas’ offer to spend the year with him was an elaborate protection plan, I was angry.

  He had lied, and then he lied again.

  But then we caught feelings.

  At least, I did.

  He said that he did, too, but what if that was just another lie?

  Ever since we have been together two people have died.

  Caitlyn, the escort, who interrupted my meeting with Dallas and the man who burst into my apartment and tried to kidnap me.

  Caitlyn was an innocent and her blood is on both of our hands. She wouldn’t be dead if I hadn’t gone there behind Nicholas’ back.

  She wouldn’t be dead if Nicholas hadn’t called the agency when he thought I wasn’t going to make it to the hotel room.

  Caitlyn is dead because of our lies.

  I feel guilty and full of regret and there’s nothing I can do about it.

  But what about the masked man?

  Who was he and what did he really want?

  Did he come because of Owen’s testimony?

  Or did he come because of Nicholas?

  Nicholas’ argument sounds plausible, but there are doubts that creep in around the edges.

  The truth is that I don’t really know anything about him.

  I don’t know anything about his past and I don’t even really know anything about his present.

  Whenever I feel like I’m on solid ground, I quickly discover that it’s actually quicksand.

  His life is a house of cards, one lie piling on another and another. And yet….

  Yet, I’m drawn to him.

  I want him. It’s not just a sexual thing.

  It’s more of a physical thing.

  I want to be in his presence. I want to be with him. I want to know more about him.

  I want to know every secret and lie.

  I want to know the truth even though I am terrified.

  But the thing that scares me the most is what if I find out something that will make it impossible for me to be with him?

  A loud knock on the window startles me. It’s a man with a shaved head and a wide toothy smile.

  “Owen!” I yelp, reaching for the doorknob.

  “No, stay there!” he yells, pointing to the rain that is now falling sideways. “Just let me in!”

  He runs around the car as I unlock it. I grab onto him before he even gets the chance to close the door.

  “It’s so good to see you,” he sobs into my shoulder and tears start to flow down my face.

  4

  Olive

  When we catch up…

  It takes us a few minutes to finally pull away from each other. Our cheeks are wet and my throat has a big lump in the back of it.

  Owen’s eyes look bloodshot and his skin is sallow. His deep set eyes are adorned with thick dark lashes.

  I reach over and wipe his eyes with my finger. He turns his face toward my open hand, kissing the bottom of my palm.

  “It’s so good to touch you, Olive,” he says.

  We have seen each other during my visits but this is the first time in years that we have actually held each other.

  When I had visited him in prison, we were allowed one rudimentary hug at the beginning
and the end of each session and no touching the rest of the time.

  “I know, I can’t believe that you’re actually here,” I say, squeezing his shoulders in another embrace.

  I run my fingers over the back of his head, feeling the prickles of his hair. I hope that he lets it grow out more now that he’s out.

  “Listen, let’s get out of here,” I say, turning on the engine.

  “You’ve read my mind.”

  I drive back out onto the highway quickly and it’s not until we are about ten miles out that a wave of relief starts to sweep over me.

  Owen is actually free and no one came to get us in the parking lot.

  Unsure as to what else to do to celebrate the occasion, I offer to take him out to a local diner.

  Once inside, he orders a large breakfast with three stacks of pancakes, two waffles, an omelet, and a refillable cup of black coffee. I opt for some avocado toast.

  Driving over here, I thought that we would have nothing to talk about but the words come spilling out of both of us. We are practically speaking over each other.

  Literacy is a big passion of his and he talks a lot about the fact that sixty percent of US inmates are functionally illiterate. They can understand some basic sentences but their reading and writing skills are basically at a seven year old’s level, making it very difficult to get any meaningful employment.

  I had no idea that Owen was dyslexic when he was a kid and our mom thought (and told him and everyone else) that he was just dumb.

  In prison, he decided to get his high school diploma and his teacher discovered that he couldn’t read. Once he learned, he consumed every book he could get his hands on and even started to work on a memoir about his life.

  He spent the last few years of his incarceration teaching others to read and write.

  I know all of this already from his emails and our conversations in the visitors’ room, but it’s wonderful to hear all of this again out in the free world. Whatever passion he conveyed earlier is only amplified out here.

  “So, what about you? How’s your career? How do you like your work?” he asks.

  I take a deep breath.

  The answer is not something that’s going to make him happy. Should I lie or should we finally talk about the elephant in the room?

  “It’s fine. It’s not my favorite thing and I don’t really know if it’s much of a career,” I finally say, chickening out.

  Owen tilts his head, biting feverishly into his waffle. “Tell me everything,” he says, chewing with his mouth open.

  “I don’t really know where to start,” I say, shrugging my shoulders. “It’s just that you know that I worked my butt off to get into Wellesley. I majored in math, probably one of the hardest majors out there. I wanted to go to graduate school but I thought I would work first and save up some money. I don’t know, I guess to get the feel of what it’s like to be out there in the workforce.”

  “Yeah, go on,” he urges me when I take a long pause to collect my thoughts.

  This is the first time I have ever said any of this out loud and it feels foreign and completely unnatural. But I force myself to keep going.

  “Well, it’s not exactly all it’s cracked up to be. Having a career, that is.”

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “I don’t know, but it doesn’t really feel fulfilling, you know. I mean, I thought that I would be doing something important. Women go out in their business suits and have their power lunches and I know that it’s not real, that it’s just television, but I thought it would be something like that, you know?”

  I try to ignore the fact that I am here talking about how shitty my life is to someone who just spent years behind bars and just keep going. But if anyone were to understand this, it would be him.

  “What is it like?” Owen asks.

  “It’s…boring,” I say with a shrug. “I don’t know how else to put it. It’s dreary. I go into the office every morning, go through my emails, and then stare at my phone for about an hour before forcing myself to get to work. Work involves making up math questions for these standardized tests they are making kids take in school. The fucked up thing is that the point of them is to not even evaluate the kids but to see whether the teachers are teaching to the tests well enough to keep their jobs.”

  Owen waves over to the waitress to refill his coffee cup.

  “Nothing about it has anything to do with real learning. They could teach kids how to do these problems the easy way but they want to sell textbooks and testing materials to schools so they came up with all of this new type of math that’s confusing even for me to write, let alone for kids to learn. The teachers are forced to just teach to these tests to keep their jobs and my job is to just perpetuate this whole cycle.”

  “So…what I’m getting from you is that you’re unfulfilled by your work,” Owen says and we both burst out laughing.

  “I shouldn’t complain about it. It’s dumb,” I say. “You’re the one with the real problems.”

  “No, that’s not true,” Owen says. “There are no dumb problems. This is your experience and this is something important that you’re going through.”

  I smile at him and reach across the table to put my hand over his.

  “How did you get so smart?” I ask, giving it a little squeeze.

  “It’s amazing what a little reading can do for you,” he says.

  5

  Nicholas

  When I watch her…

  After Art leaves, I get into my car and sit here for a while staring at the light flickering above my head.

  What do I do now? If I want to keep Art happy, I have to do what he says.

  But that means betraying Olive because Owen is her brother and they are very close.

  I don’t know the parameters of the job that Art has for me but making friends with Owen isn’t a good sign. The details aren’t important right now because I already know the storyline.

  Art needs me to get close to Owen so that Owen starts to trust me. Art needs Owen to trust me so that I can be placed in the position to betray him. This is the story of my life ever since I’d lost Lance.

  Growing up you are either the kid who thinks about his future or you’re not.

  Television would make you believe that most of us are those who do think about it, but my experience tells me that most of us don’t. Otherwise no one would be drug dealers or gang bangers or prostitutes. These professions are just one of those things that happen to people as they make choices in life that make sense at the moment.

  Planning one’s life is for the privileged.

  Or maybe not. Maybe that’s just some bullshit story I tell myself to make my life make sense, to not feel like such a stranger all the time.

  The truth is that I rarely gave my own future any thought.

  My mother was never the type to ask “Honey, what do you want to do when you grow up?” Hell, she was never the type to call me honey.

  She was too busy popping pills and shouting at one of her boyfriends to care.

  The only thing I ever thought about as a kid was how nice it would be to be rich. I had a neighbor once, a girl a year younger, and she was just as poor as I was.

  Her lights often got turned off because her parents couldn’t make the bills yet that never seemed to bother her.

  Armed with a library card, she had free access to all the books that she could read and that was enough for her.

  She seemed to exist on another plane from the rest of us.

  Kids made fun of her for not having the right clothes and for the holes her toes had worn through in her sneakers and yet when I asked her about it, she just shrugged it off.

  If it were anyone else, I'd say they were lying.

  But this girl wasn’t.

  She had her stories and that was more than enough.

  I wish I could have been like her. I wish that I didn’t crave power and wealth and a short cut to both.

  To be rich meant hav
ing people look up to you and not worrying about the heat being turned off.

  In my neighborhood, the only people who had anything like that were drug dealers and gang bangers.

  Since I didn’t want to be either, I developed a set of special skills. With my partner and best friend, Lance Bredinsky, I perfected them.

  The last job that Lance and I did was take a two-million dollar Harry Winston necklace off a couple from Martha’s Vineyard. This necklace was going to set us up for life.

  Our boss had no idea we were doing any jobs on our own, let alone anything that big. At least, that’s what we thought.

  Our plan was to sell the necklace, lay low for a few years, live within our means, and begin life under new identities somewhere out west.

  And for a bit there, everything went according to plan.

  The couple came back home and didn’t notice a thing.

  We had replaced the necklace with an exact replica made by a crystal artisan out of Roanoke and the wife was even photographed wearing that gaudy thing to some ball in the Hamptons.

  It was a win-win. We got rich and the mark never even noticed that anything was taken.

  But then a dog walker found Lance’s body in the marsh. The people who bought the necklace had just wired 1.2 million dollars to our Swiss bank account which was set up in both of our new names and we had just celebrated our feat at a low-key dinner at Denny’s.

  Who killed him and why I still don’t know until this day.

  What I do know is that I’m everyone’s number one suspect.

  I start the car and drive over to Olive’s apartment building. I find a parking spot right outside and watch her walk around her living room. I don’t see Owen but I know he’s there.

  How am I supposed to make this work?

  How am I supposed to get him to trust me again? How am I supposed to deceive the woman who I might be falling in love with?

  But what choice do I have?

  The FBI has a long file on my misdeeds and if I don’t cooperate I will be put away for a very long time.