by Sidney Bell
With a notepad and pen from his glove box, Sullivan started making notes, keeping one eye on the sidewalk so he could catch the Russians if/when they showed themselves. He’d recorded Tobias’s tag numbers earlier, so he wasn’t worried about not being able to find him if the phone number or address proved to be fake.
He allowed himself exactly one minute to imagine what Tobias would do if Sullivan said more nice things to him, encouraged that trust to go a little further, a little darker, into something closer to obedience and pain. Would Tobias enjoy it? Was he a good boy down to his core, or was this a case of still waters running deep? Sullivan’s chest twisted with guilt the whole time, but he liked what his imagination came up with.
He liked it a lot.
Then he tossed his phone onto the passenger seat and slumped in his seat, camera at the ready, and thought about everything that’d happened today.
What was a guy like Tobias doing hanging out with someone like Ghost? What was the point of buying a condo in a dead chick’s name?
And what the hell did a young male hooker and a couple of pissed-off Russians have to do with a ten-year-old girl who’d gone missing twenty years before?
Chapter Five
The foyer was knee-deep in shoes and backpacks when Tobias got home, and he added his own to the pile before heading toward the kitchen and the sound of voices.
All but one of his younger brothers and sisters sat around the table eating papayas and string cheese. Mirlande, now twenty-two and living at home while taking classes in hospitality at DU, was listening as fifteen-year-old Darlin discussed his upcoming soccer game. Sitting beside her, Guy, who was sixteen, had temporarily lost his habitual disaffected teenager sneer in favor of explaining to twelve-year-old Ruby why the kids should pool their Christmas lists to ask for a PlayStation 4 for the family instead asking for individual gifts. Because of their parents’ anti-spoiled-kids protocol, Christmas teamwork was the only way Guy would be getting his hands on a console unless he saved up the money on his own, and even then, there was a good chance their parents would demand that the cash go into his college fund.
“But I don’t like video games,” Ruby said, for what was probably not the first time, judging from Guy’s groan of frustration. “I want my present to be summer camp. Like on Bunk’d.”
“Where’s Marie?” Tobias bent to steal a bite of Ruby’s papaya and got a halfhearted smack on the arm in return.
“Upstairs listening to Lemonade for the millionth time.” Guy rolled his eyes.
“I know you didn’t just roll your eyes at Queen Bey,” Mirlande said mildly.
“I’m rolling my eyes at Marie!”
Ruby shot her older brother a dirty look. She put her hands together like she was praying and intoned, “Forgive him, O Queen, for his shortsighted maleness.”
“He knows not what he does,” Mirlande added, and one of them must’ve kicked Guy, because he made an outraged noise and turned to Tobias for help.
“Leave me out of this,” Tobias said quickly.
Like Tobias, his siblings were all adopted. Unlike Tobias, they were all black. Mirlande, Darlin, and Guy were Haitian, while Ruby was Jamaican. They primarily spoke English at home—Guy and Ruby still needed practice for school and Ruby’s grasp of Kreyòl wasn’t great anyway.
His manman was at the stove, transferring boiled pork shoulder to a baking dish, and the letter tucked inside his textbook in his backpack—forgotten in the drama at Ghost’s place—came to mind. His appetite vanished, despite the fact that griot was one of his favorite dishes, even when Manman chose to go the healthier route and broil rather than fry the meat.
“Hi.” He gave her a kiss hello on the cheek. She smelled like that same rose cream she always wore, and he wanted so badly to not be this angry with her.
“Home late.”
“A bit.” He tamped down the instinct to bristle at the way she checked up on him as if he were a child, reminding himself that it was only because she loved him and worried. And it wasn’t like she was wrong to worry. He had spent the afternoon breaking in to Ghost’s place. Not that he could say that, so he went with a small lie. “I went to see Church.”
She paused, the knife hovering in the air over the cutting board. She didn’t entirely approve of Tobias’s ongoing friendships with guys he’d met at Woodbury, but neither she nor Papa had pushed him to end the relationships. He was grateful for their circumspection. Church and Ghost were his closest friends, crucial to his happiness, and cutting off contact with either of them would be unbearable. He wasn’t sure how he could avoid hurting his parents if they asked him to.
Her tone was politely distant. “Oh? How is he?”
“Good.”
Manman nodded and resumed her preparations. The subject was closed.
He considered claiming that he needed to study—it wasn’t untrue, because he always needed to study—but it would make her worry. He wasn’t antisocial by nature, and if he didn’t make at least a token effort to interact with the family, she would notice.
“Want me to start the pikliz?” he asked finally. He was the only male in his family allowed to help cook because he was the only one with enough patience to do everything exactly as Manman demanded. She was very particular about her kitchen.
“That would be very helpful, cheri, thank you.”
He went to the sink to wash his hands. When he’d dried them, he pulled cabbage, carrots, and peppers out of the fridge before ducking his head into the pantry. “We’re not out of vinegar, are we? I can go to the store.”
“Behind the olive oil,” she said, with an air of why can’t men find things in her voice. It made him smile despite his mood, especially since the vinegar was exactly where she’d said it would be.
“Success.” He got out a large bowl and grabbed a cutting board.
She nodded distractedly, focusing on the pork, which he could smell from where he stood—faintly citrus, slightly sour, entirely delicious. “How was your day?”
He wondered what she would say if he told her that he’d broken in to someone’s house and hidden in the closet with a tattooed, mohawked private detective. “It was fine. How was yours?”
“Good.” She slid the pork into the oven, then stood there staring at the knobs. She’d worked at the clinic today, but she’d changed out of her slacks and white coat into one of the bright dresses she preferred, the rich green a pretty contrast against her obsidian skin as she stood barefoot on the red Spanish tile. She usually put her hair up in a bun while seeing patients, but that was always the first thing to go when she got home, and now her twists elegantly framed her face, though they did nothing to conceal the tension of her pressed-tight lips.
Angry as he was, as much as that letter had him burning on the inside, he loved her, and he couldn’t ignore her unhappiness.
“Hey,” he said gently, and she startled. “Ou byen?”
“Wi. I’m fine.” She kept her voice too low for his siblings to hear, not that they would’ve over the raucous conversations taking place. She put the cover back on the pot she’d boiled the pork in, keeping it warm for later, when she would make the sauce. She didn’t look up at him. “Dr. Thornton mentioned that you never called him.”
Tobias wished that he’d escaped to his room after all. Or that he’d gotten a place of his own this afternoon. Or vanished from the surface of the planet. Anything but this, where he felt more like a bumbling infant instead of a grown man. “No, I didn’t.”
“You said you would.”
Because it had been the only way to escape that awful lecture last week before he ended up shouting at his parents, not because he needed to be back on meds. And that was what she was getting at—Dr. Thornton was a friend of the family, he knew the history, he knew what Tobias’s parents wanted, and he would pull out a script pad, and that would be that. In normal circumstances, it might not even be
a bad solution; clinical depression frequently came back, so going unmedicated could be risky for some people who’d been diagnosed with it.
The problem was that Tobias hadn’t been diagnosed with it. The ER doctor had mentioned depression as a likely cause for his cutting that long-ago day in the hospital, and his parents had accepted it at face value. Tobias had never corrected them, even when the psychiatrist at Woodbury had decided that the cutting hadn’t been the result of depression so much as a cry for help from a teenager trapped in an overwhelming set of circumstances that he had no clue how to escape on his own. It had shocked Tobias how fast his mood and thoughts had turned around once he’d gotten away from school and all the expectations and the little voice that said what you’re doing won’t be enough. In fact, once Ghost had come into his life and kept the bullies at bay—seemingly just by breathing—Tobias had been almost happy at Woodbury. The months in treatment had given him better coping skills and a break to bolster himself, and since he’d never felt the need to cut since then, he figured his psychiatrist had been right.
Unfortunately, she’d wanted him to make a lot of big changes in his life to ensure he didn’t wander into the same situation twice, something he’d never quite managed to do.
Regardless of that last point, neither Dr. Thornton nor his prescription pad could help Tobias now. Not that he could explain any of that to his manman. So he said, “I’ve been busy.”
“Not with schoolwork.”
“Yes, with schoolwork.” It chafed that he was expected to explain this. His parents had always been deeply involved in his and his siblings’ lives, and it had never occurred to him to mind when he was growing up; his aunts and uncles were the same with their kids. It was normal. But he was much older now, and he couldn’t help thinking that the dynamic should’ve shifted by now. His parents didn’t treat Mirlande with such kid gloves. How much longer would he have to pay for a single mistake back in high school?
“Your papa said you haven’t taken him up on his offer to arrange an internship at Cancer Care.”
He forced his breathing to slow. “That’s because I’m not sure that an internship with a parent will look good on my applications, not because I’m not taking care of it.”
That was a lie. He hadn’t submitted a single internship request anywhere. He had a stack of half-completed ones in his desk, but he couldn’t—he hadn’t had time.
“It wouldn’t be with your papa. It would be with one of the other practitioners. It’s not like they won’t judge you as strictly as anyone else—”
“Manman.” He ground his teeth, trying to choke back the roughness he’d spoken with, not liking the way her expression twisted when he snapped at her.
“Is it like before? Is it happening again?” Her fingers clamped around the lid of the pot so tightly the beds of her nails went white. “You’re so far away.”
“I’m right here,” he gritted out. Bondye, he wanted to walk out.
“I love you. We both love you. We only want to help. We only want you to be happy.”
That was the problem. That was the root of all of it, the good and the bad. Their desire to help, to protect, even when it meant taking things that weren’t theirs to take. But she was watching him with such awful worry, such...such fear, and most of his anger drained in the presence of it. All but the small, hard kernel behind his sternum which remained where it’d been for weeks now.
“I’ll call Dr. Thornton.” He knew when he’d been beaten. “I’ll set up the internship. It’s not happening again.”
Her shoulders didn’t loosen. “Tobias.”
“It’s not,” he insisted. “I’ve got everything under control. I’m busy, not broken.”
“You’ve never been broken.” Her stiffness vanished. She took his hand, squeezed it, and he squeezed back. “You’ve fought so hard to get your life on track again. You’re so close to the next step. We just want to help.”
He nodded and pulled away, going back to slicing up cabbage, careful to keep his attention on what he was doing so he wouldn’t cut himself.
After a moment, she murmured, “I will do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
He put the knife down and wrapped his arms around her. She leaned into him, and he was tall enough that her face pressed against his collarbone. He could feel her breath, warm against the fabric of his shirt as her fingers pressed hard into his back, as if she meant to hold him so tightly nothing could ever harm him again.
God, he loved her.
God, he wished he could get far, far away from her.
* * *
Midnight came and went, and Tobias finally set his books aside. Premed meant a difficult course load, and the expectations of his professors were high. Tobias was smart, but some of his foundational high school courses—those taken at Woodbury, anyway—had been lacking in content and challenge, so he constantly felt like he was playing catch-up. Summer courses were more intensive than regular ones, too, but if he wanted to graduate next spring, it was necessary.
He got into bed. His eyes felt heavy, but his thoughts began whirling again the second he had nothing else to concentrate on. He lay on his back, one hand pressed flat on his belly to remind it to calm down.
His desk was invisible with the light off, but he glanced in its direction anyway as if the letter tucked away in the top drawer might be somehow visible behind the wood. He should read it, shouldn’t he? Even if it was twenty-four years too late, he couldn’t simply ignore it. And what had been the point of digging it out of the trash where Manman had dumped it if he wasn’t going to read it? To do anything else was like admitting she’d been right to keep it from him.
Hell, maybe she had been. Here, in the nighttime dark, it was harder to hide from that old fear, that old certainty of his own weakness. Broken, he mouthed into the silence of his bedroom.
Is it like before, she’d asked.
No. He remembered that dull, cold flatness too well to mistake it for anything else. A near-constant sense of suffocation, his body leaden and slow, his thoughts as trudging as mud sliding down a drain, when they moved at all, all of him weighed down by the inevitability of his own future, of the expectations he couldn’t possibly meet. He’d been as aware as a scarecrow, and about as useful.
This was something else.
These past eight months since the whole thing had gone down with Church and Ghost and the favor, ever since that terrible day when he’d almost lost Church, when he’d been miles away from what was going on and unable to do anything but send a series of stupid texts—it was all sharper and meaner and brighter than before.
Tobias had never told Church about it, not wanting his friend to feel guilty, but he’d had a monster panic attack once everyone was safe. It’d taken his knees out from under him. He’d been on the floor of a dingy bathroom in the Tivoli Student Union, vision narrowing to a pinprick, the voices from the food court a distant buzz in his ears, and all he could think was I can’t do this again. I can’t be this powerless again. It’d started some process that’d only been amplified by finding the letter, amplified further by Ghost’s absence, a process that he couldn’t define or get a grip on, but which made it increasingly difficult to be polite, to accept only what was offered, to wait and endure and put up with what was left over.
Before had been the numbness at the bottom of a gray ocean.
Now was red and boiling and—at times—impossible to contain.
His breathing was too fast, and he concentrated on slowing it. He forced his hands to uncurl out of the fists they’d formed. This creeping electricity buzzed inside him all the time these days, an incessant itch beneath his skin, poised to burst through.
And a small part of him that he didn’t want to acknowledge liked how it felt.
* * *
Tobias was up at 6:00 the next morning, early enough to sneak into the bathroom before
Guy, a necessity if he wanted to get to his 8:00 class on time, because Guy had recently entered a phase in which he had to stare at his zits for ten minutes a day as if he could will them away. Still better than the girls’ bathroom, though; between Ruby, Mirlande, and Marie, that one was a nightmare from dawn until dusk.
Manman shoved a bagel in his hand on the way out the door and Papa called after him that they would need to talk internships when Tobias got home. He made the long drive down to the Broadway light-rail station, where he parked and caught the train. He spent the time trying to concentrate on his biochemistry study guide while actually thinking of how to find Ghost.
His classes passed with their usual interminable dullness, the numbers and theories slipping sideways in his head despite his rigorous note-taking. His hours in the writing center went by more quickly; he liked tutoring other students, liked imagining all the fascinating subjects that other people got to study.
On his way back to his car, he got a text message from Church: still no word from ghost?
He paused halfway through the parking lot in the congestive August heat, sweat prickling between his shoulder blades, and considered how to respond. If he explained about Ghost’s phone and meeting Sullivan, Church would flip out. He’d tell Tobias to come over and explain everything so that Church would know how to handle it.
At twenty-three, Edgar-Allen Church was almost a year younger than Tobias, and they’d been best friends ever since he’d come to Woodbury on his eighteenth birthday, fresh from a year’s stint in juvenile detention for committing assault. He was tall and lanky, black-haired and mahogany-skinned, with a dorky sense of humor, a loyal streak a mile wide, and a temper like a match flame—quick and hot, but short-lived and soon forgotten. Tobias loved Church’s fierce goodness, but his friend’s impulse to protect the people he cared about meant that he had a tendency to act like Tobias could barely tie his own shoes.
Once armed with an explanation, Church would probably browbeat Sullivan into a meeting, and the two of them would put together how Ghost’s absence and the whole debacle with the Krayevs meshed with whatever Sullivan’s actual case was, and Tobias would be left on the sidelines, begging for scraps of information.
