Baby, Be My Last (The Fairfields Book 3)

by Piper Lennox

  “Our mom,” Levi explains, “kind of, uh…separated herself from the Fairfields, before we were born.”

  I look between them. They’re both in nice clothes, but nothing fancy like the suits Tim and his colleagues sport. Throughout dinner, they made jokes and pulled faces whenever something particularly elaborate was served, especially Cohen. If they hadn’t been introduced to me as Fairfields, I never would have guessed they were.

  “So you guys,” I say slowly, piecing it together, “didn’t grow up with...all this.”

  “Nope. Totally normal life,” Levi shrugs.

  Cohen laughs to himself, scrubbing resin off his palm. “Oh, yeah, so normal. A trailer in a nudist colony. The complete American dream.”

  “What?”

  Levi waves his hand at Cohen like he’s spouting nonsense, pulling my attention back to himself. “The point is, no, we didn’t really grow up with this...’Fairfield’ way of life.” He studies me a moment. “And we used to hate that, missing out on it all. I think we both resented our mom a little bit, for taking it away from us. But she didn’t see it that way—she was taking us away from it. So we could be....”

  “Normal,” Cohen laughs again.

  Levi taps my leg with the back of his hand. “Being a Fairfield, like, one of the Fairfields? It’s a lot more than being rich. It’s publicity, it’s connections...it’s keeping up appearances. So that’s what Cohen means. We love Tim, but you’ve got your work cut out for you, being his kid.”

  “I didn’t think of all that,” I mumble, shaking the chill from my fingers. “I always told everyone, growing up, ‘Oh, I’m not one of those Fairfields.’ But...now I am.”

  “I’d much rather be one of the other Fairfields.” Cohen lies back on his seat, a chaise that digs into the frozen earth like a stake when he flops into place. “No pressure.”

  “I used to think....” I pause and push back my hair. In the shafts of light in front of us, half moonlight, half from a flickering security light on the house, I see our breath clouding and colliding. “I used to think about this, finding Tim and—and finally being a Fairfield, you know? Feeling like I was part of his family.”

  Levi waits. “Do you?”

  “No,” I breathe, laughing through my nerves. “No offense, I mean...you guys are nice, everyone is, but...but maybe it’s going to take more time.” And more than taking this job, I think. A whole lot more.

  We stay out there a few minutes longer, until we hear women’s voices calling from the kitchen.

  “Duty calls,” Cohen groans, dragging himself out of the chaise and dropping his bowl into a baggie from his coat. Levi claps my shoulder as he passes me, and I follow them into the house.

  Cohen’s wife hands him their daughter with a noticeable wince. “Your turn. I told you these training pants wouldn’t work. She thinks they’re diapers.”

  “Good God.” Cohen coughs dramatically and carries the girl at arm’s length into the next room, while everyone else laughs.

  The wife smiles at me, an understated one. It’s a nice break from the effusive greetings I’ve been getting tonight. “Nervous? I just saw a reporter pull up, Channel Eight. Very big deal around here.”

  My nausea is all too similar to the day I got wasted. I’ve got to talk to Tim, before a camera gets shoved in my face.

  I excuse myself and pick a door, eventually finding the hallway with Caitlin-Anne’s school pictures that I remember from before.

  Actually, what I find is Caitlin-Anne and Knox, a glass of wine in each of their hands, looking at the photos and laughing.

  “Shut up.” Caitlin-Anne swats his arm. He catches her hand, holding it in his a moment.

  “I’m serious. You totally look like a young Martha Stewart in this one. Don’t get mad, she was hot as hell in her day.”

  “I had a perm,” she scolds, still smiling, until her eyes glance past him and spot me. “Oh—Silas.”

  They step apart a little, like I caught them in the middle of something. “Just, uh...passing through,” I assure them. Knox actually blushes, which I’ve never seen in my life. It makes me wonder if I really did almost catch something.

  Bigger things to focus on, I remind myself.

  It’s strange: a few weeks ago, I walked through this house and felt a burn in my stomach. Anger. Envy. I wanted these winding halls and high ceilings more than I dared admit to anyone, especially myself. But not anymore.

  Tim calls, “Come in,” when I knock. Sure enough, there’s a journalist and photographer flanking his desk.

  “Silas, this is Bethany and Roderick. They’re with Coastal Business Review. And I think the girl from Channel Eight just arrived, she’ll join us shortly.”

  I shake their hands, glancing at Tim. “I, uh...I didn’t realize this was that big a deal.”

  “Of course it is!” he laughs. “My son’s joining the family business.”

  “Right,” I mutter, taking my seat and thinking of what Cohen and Levi said outside.

  I’ve been thinking about it nonstop for the last five minutes, actually: sitting between them, strangers with as much blue Fairfield blood as me in their veins. The same last name. The same jawline, same height.

  The same background: mothers who chose something different for us. Something they believed was better for us, even if it was harder.

  Sitting with them, I felt more like a Fairfield than I ever had in my life.

  But it wasn’t me who had changed. Just my idea of what a Fairfield has to be.

  “Tim,” I say, interrupting his spiel to the reporter, “I have to talk to you. Before...all this. The interviews, the announcement.” I lean my forearms against the desk and go into Unflinching Eye Contact mode, his specialty. “Just us.”

  He freezes, mouth still open and buzzwords at the ready, but blinks and nods. “Sure.” We both look at the reporter and photographer, who slowly make their way to the door.

  When it closes behind them, Tim sucks his teeth. “Why do I get the feeling this isn’t good news?”

  “Not good or bad,” I shrug, as a weird relief washes over me. “It just...is.”

  27

  I don’t sleep.

  It’s not much different than the last few days, except that instead of lying in the darkness and tossing through replays of my fight with Silas, I sit in the recliner, bathed in the light of the television, and relive the afternoon with Brynn.

  It wasn’t for nothing.

  I think of Mom and Dad in that stupid, stinking RV, instead of the home where he carried her across the threshold. The house I’ve known since birth, the place we’ve all spent years fighting to save. All those payments, for nothing.

  I think of Mom’s leg: all the chemicals pumped into her body, bruised veins and days spent retching into sinks and toilets to kill the cancer inside her. And after all that, cutting the cancer down to nothing, instead, was basically the only thing that worked. All the chemo and sickness and suffering, for nothing.

  I think of Silas. The sigh of my name on the ceiling when I touched him. The stretch of my body as it accepted his, and the dry heat of a crackling fire when I gave him that piece of me I’d never realized was so important.

  The word I felt for him, but didn’t say.

  All for nothing.

  My drink sweats in my hand as I grab it from the windowsill and swig. It’s god-awful: all Brynn had in the kitchen was Cointreau, cheap rum, and a bottle of flat Sprite. I combined it into this, a citrusy abomination nobody should have to endure, even as a sleep aid. Should’ve stuck to straight rum.

  When I turned twenty-one, my mom made a cake and covered it with airplane bottles of alcohol: Hpnotiq, Burnett’s, Svedka, Firefly, Beefeater. There was barely any room for the candles; Dad stood nearby with a fire extinguisher in case the cake became, in his words, “a small bomb.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I told her—and the video camera—before blowing out the candles, explosion-free. We removed the little bottles one by one, crying with
laughter when we realized there was almost no cake left to speak of when we finished.

  “It just looked like such a cute idea!” she wheezed, before another wave of laughter took us down.

  It was the first birthday cake she’d made for me in years. Not that I’d ever complained: store-boughts had been fine. But when I licked one of the bottles and tasted it, the cookies-and-cream cake she used to make for me every year, until the cancer...I realized how much I’d missed it.

  No—not the cake. Not even the fact she’d made it.

  Just her. Just this: laughing ourselves stupid at the kitchen table over a magazine idea gone awry, while Dad stared at us like we were both crazy.

  I’d missed my mother. The real one, who could laugh and be creative, who had the health and time now to spend birthdays with us.

  I take another drink and feel myself smile, oddly enough, like the memory is right in front of me.

  In the years after her leg was removed, my mother slowly returned to who she’d been before. My birthday wasn’t the start. It was just the first time I’d really noticed the change.

  She was depressed, first. We all were, and we didn’t know why. The cancer was gone, so we should have been happy.

  It felt kind of like that cake, though. You had to remove the bottles. You had to remove the cancer.

  But you couldn’t help but wonder: what were you left with, when it was all over? Was it even worth the trouble?

  The remains didn’t look like a cake, but there was something left, when we finally stopped laughing and took a closer look. Frosting, some clumps of cookies, a little cake here and there: it wasn’t pretty. But as soon as I picked up my fork, I knew I didn’t want my birthday cake any other way. It was perfect, precisely because it wasn’t.

  My mom wasn’t who she’d been before she had cancer. Her missing leg was the ghost of everything she’d given up—everything the three of us had sacrificed. And there was still no guarantee the cancer wouldn’t come back, anyway.

  Our lives weren’t pretty. You could barely find any life at all, it was so messed up.

  But when you looked closer, the pieces were all there. We had love. We had each other. And, for the first time in years, we had at least a little hope.

  It wasn’t for nothing.

  The ice cubes in my drink rattle as I finish the rest and shut my eyes, a fuzzy peace settling in. I don’t think it’s the alcohol.

  Yes, I’ve worked my ass off my entire adulthood, and couldn’t save my parents’ home. I skipped hangouts and parties. I burned myself out until I wasn’t sure how much of me was really left.

  But the harder I worked, the harder Mom worked to get back to her old self. If she got her life back, she knew I would eventually live mine again, too.

  The RV is hideous—but it’s been years since I saw Mom so excited about anything.

  Her leg is gone. But she’s still here.

  I gave Silas so much of me, and when he changed—when I thought he changed, at least—I was angry I couldn’t get that part of myself back.

  But maybe it was me who changed, or both of us, in the same trial-and-error way that people choose careers, change houses, beat cancer: the way people live. And maybe it isn’t a bad thing. Maybe…it just is.

  I set my empty glass on the windowsill too hard when I reach for my phone. The clunk wakes Arrow on the sofa; he stumbles off and presses his forehead to the door, making a “boof” sound under his breath.

  “Arrow,” I hiss, “shush—it was me. Nobody’s here.”

  He barks again, louder, and scratches the bottom of the door. It rattles, loose in its frame.

  “Arrow, stop. Go lie down.”

  Another bark. I sigh, put my phone in my sweatshirt pocket, and get up. His tail wags when he sees me grab his leash from the hook.

  “Nobody’s here, you stubborn boy,” I whisper. In the half-darkness, I click the leash to his collar and open the door. He’ll wake Brynn and half the block before giving up, so I might as well let him see for himself. The fresh air will probably do me some good, anyway.

  When I call Silas, I want my head clear. No liquor fogging my words. I’ve got too much to say—too many apologies to sputter and hope he accepts.

  Arrow strains against his leash as soon as we’re on the porch. I stuff my feet into some of Brynn’s old Crocs on the steps and let him inspect every shrub on the property, growling under his breath the entire time. It’s snowing; I feel the heavy flakes melt into my hair as we walk, even though I can’t see them in the darkness.

  “See?” I scratch his ears. “Told you. Let’s go back in, it’s too cold.”

  Music starts in the distance. Girls are arguing on someone’s lawn. Arrow growls again.

  “It’s just a party, bud.” I try and lift him. He digs his paws into the frozen earth and yips when I touch his chest, like I stepped on him or something.

  At the party house, a guy shouts, “Yeah, catfight! Hit her, hit her!” I can only assume, from the screams and jeers that follow, one of the girls decided to listen to him. The music gets even louder.

  “Assholes,” I mutter. I miss Mom and Dad’s quiet street and well-mannered neighbors. Brynn warned me her neighborhood had a rougher edge than I was used to, but I’d waved her off. This was where twenty-somethings were supposed to live, right? Loud music and drunken idiots fighting in the yard before dawn were part of the experience. It’s about time I paid some dues.

  I just didn’t count on Arrow losing his mind over it.

  “Treat? Let’s get a treat! You want some cheese?” I coo at him, but he’s planted himself in the middle of the yard like a steel post. Not even the promise of a Kraft Single will get him inside now.

  I grab the leash and pull. His neck moves. He doesn’t.

  “Arrow, don’t do this to me,” I whine, and wrap my arms around his midsection. I’m careful not to touch his chest again, or his bad hip, but as I drag him back toward the porch, he whimpers like I’ve done it, anyway.

  “If you would just walk,” I huff, “I wouldn’t have to do this.” When we reach the steps, I manage to lift him just enough to balance him against me and waddle my way up. He’s still straining, growling between little noises of pain.

  “Cheese,” I remind him, and fumble us both back through the door. The screen slams behind us, but I don’t hear Brynn stir.

  In the kitchen, he presses his head to the backdoor and whines.

  I unwrap the cheese and wave it beside him, eye-level. He growls at the door and barely glances at my offering.

  “Fine,” I groan. He charges out onto the deck as soon as I let him out. I hear him barking, occasionally throwing himself at the chain-link fence that borders Brynn’s backyard. I toss the slice of cheese toward the sound. When he’s worn himself out, he’ll find it and come looking for more.

  I shut the door and start a pot of coffee. No sleep for me tonight. At least now my insomnia will be from rehearsing what I’ll say to Silas, instead of replaying all the horrible things I said before.

  “I miss you.” His last text was a knife in my gut, when I first read it. Now it makes me feel better than I have all week.

  Texting him back, finally, is one option; I can let him know I want to talk, and give him time to prepare whatever he has to say to me. I’m sure there’s plenty.

  For the next ten minutes, in between sips of scalding coffee to steel my nerves, I draft message after message. Some start with the apology. Others ramble about God only knows what, long after my head clears and the caffeine kicks in.

  Tires squeal outside. It’s not uncommon on Brynn’s street. Actually, it’s about as common as music blasting past one a.m. and women fighting on lawns. I wait for Arrow to go ballistic at the sound, but the backyard is silent. Guess he found the cheese.

  I look at my phone again and take a breath. This shouldn’t be this hard. Not long ago, Silas was the one person on this earth, besides Brynn, that I could tell anything.

  “I miss you too,”
I type, and send it before I can overthink, edit, or regret. Maybe simple is best.

  The snow is heavier now. When I flip on the back porch light and click my tongue for Arrow to come in, all I can see is a blur of white flakes and the wet wood under my feet.

  “Arrow, come on,” I groan. He’s been in a mood lately—defiant. I’d call him a teenager, if he weren’t limping so much and sleeping more than a newborn. Moving here was hard on him, too.

  I feel my way down the deck stairs, Brynn’s Crocs thwacking back against my feet, slick with melted snow. “Arrow,” I call. My whistle echoes back to me like a birdcall from the trees.

  Nothing. No twigs snapping, no excited panting. No leaves sliding under paws, a tap dance in the dark.

  Then, suddenly, I do hear something: voices.

  It’s a murmur, traveling in that way sound can only do when there’s snow on the ground. I curse at myself for not grabbing my boots as I slog through the frost and dead leaves piled in front of the gate.

  The open gate.

  My heart ticks up a little, but not much. Not yet.

  “Arrow?” I call, wedging myself through the same gap he somehow barreled through. I can see a wash of light on the front lawn, around the side of the house. As I get closer, I realize they’re headlights, and a car is idling by the curb.

  “Can I help you?” I ask the people standing in front of the lights. It’s a couple, my age or a little older. The woman covers her mouth when she sees me.

  “Oh, God,” the guy says, then sighs and looks behind him. “Is he yours?”

  Every caffeine molecule enters my bloodstream at once. My heart thunders, but my limbs stay ice-cold.

  “We didn’t see him until....” The guy lowers the phone by his ear as I step off the curb, into the arc of light from the car. Snow and exhaust fog are everywhere, swirling around us when the woman covers her mouth again and says she’s sorry, they’re both so sorry.

  I touch the blood matting down Arrow’s fur. I pick the gravel stuck there and hold a piece in my palm, wondering, for a moment, if I fell asleep after all. I have to wake up.

  I feel air scrape its way down my throat when his chest rises.