I Am Grey

by Washington, Jane

  I walked back down the hallway with the gun in my hand, past the rows of photographs lining the wall. I imagined that they were all turning away, pretending not to notice. My mom was still on the couch when I returned, but I realised something different when I got back. There was a knife in her hand from the kitchen. She had been holding it down against the couch the first time I walked into the room, but now she picked it up, resting the handle against her bouncing knee. Her lids were half closed, but she wasn’t acting sleepy.

  “I told you to come here,” she ground out, her green eyes holding mine.

  I loved my mother, but I hated seeing her when she was coked-up.

  “Why do I need the gun?” I asked them both. “Who’s here? Why were you screaming my name.”

  “We need to do this as a family,” she said calmly, the screaming already forgotten.

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “Mika.” my father pulled my attention over to him. “Tell her to drop the knife.”

  I turned back to my mom, still slouched against the couch, still jiggling the knife on her knee.

  “He said we were broke,” she told me. “Do you remember, baby?”

  My mouth was dry, my hands clammy. “Yes,” I croaked.

  “Well, we aren’t. He’s been saving it all up, hiding it away from me. From us. That’s not right, is it, baby?”

  “It was about money,” I told the window, no longer even talking to Spencer. I was numbly recounting now, shielded from any further reaction to the story, as a dull, thudding pain started up in the front of my head. “My dad was pretending that we were broke so that mom would stop spending all the money on coke. There was a huge fight that night, I stayed in my room the whole time but the next day, dad’s whole forearm was burnt. Covered in bandages. He told me he didn’t realise the stove was on when he leaned on it. A month later, she realised that he was lying about the money. He had a second bank account. She demanded access to it, but he refused. She started threatening him with a knife. When that didn’t work, she screamed for me to wake up.”

  “Mika.” My dad was pleading with me now. “Make her put the knife down. Make her.”

  I didn’t have to wonder how I was supposed to do that. It was obvious. Dad had been training me to use a gun all this time to protect me from my own mother … not her ‘bad friends’.

  My hand twitched. She stood up.

  “I’m your mother,” she told me. “You’re not going to shoot me. You need to be on my side now, baby. Your father needs to give us that money. We’re his family. He needs to take care of us.”

  She was walking toward him as she spoke. He stood his ground, watching me with pleading eyes. My tongue was lead, too heavy to form words. I wasn’t sure what to do—he didn’t seem sure what to do, either. He looked like he might run, but she was before him already, brandishing the knife in front of her.

  “You need to give me those account details, Henry—”

  He surged forward, knocking the knife out of her hands, and they both crashed to the ground. I couldn’t breathe through the panic gripping me, but I managed to stumble forward a few steps, completely forgetting about the gun as I held my hands out—pleading for them to stop fighting.

  Mom saw me and lunged at me, but dad caught her by the legs, dragging her back. He sat on her, grabbing one of the couch cushions that had been knocked to the ground, pressing it over her face to smother her outraged screams.

  “Stop,” I cried, stumbling forward another step. “Dad stop, you’re going to hurt her. Please.”

  He was crying, the sobs heaving through his entire body. His arms were shaking violently.

  “Shoot her,” he begged me. “You have to shoot her, Mika. You have to end this before she kills us both.”

  The body beneath him began to spasm, and he rolled off, curling into a ball against the side of the couch. “I can’t do it, Mika. You have to do it.” His words were almost incomprehensible, choked out by the sorrow that shattered him.

  Mom was gasping in air, tears streaking her face. She lunged at me again, her eyes on the gun, and I reacted without thinking. I threw it. It landed on the floor, and she turned away from me, making a grab for it.

  It was too late.

  Dad had picked it up, the deafening sound of a gunshot echoing through the suddenly silent house. He wasn’t even crying anymore. He was staring at the gun in complete shock, his eyes finally turning to her. His wife. My mother. She collapsed against the ground, and he moved forward, drawing her into his arms. The silence broke then, and I turned away from the sound of one man’s heart breaking and another woman’s life ending.

  I wasn’t sure who fired the second shot, because I wasn’t watching. As soon as it happened, I ran to them, pulling them apart, trying to find the gun. It had fallen to the floor between them. I picked it up, staring at the two forms before me as they bled out around my feet.

  “It wasn’t just her.” When I finally spoke the words, my voice was hoarse. “I think they killed each other. They must have thought it was me—we were all too covered in blood to get a proper swab on the gun—I remember someone saying that. It didn’t help that I wouldn’t say anything. They obviously figured it out at some point, but by then it was already too late. I was already in the institution.”

  I closed my eyes, resting my head against the glass. Spencer didn’t get up from the table or try to comfort me. After several minutes, I finally pushed away from the window and turned around to make sure that he was still there. He was. In the exact same position, though his eyes were now filled with more pain than I had ever seen on another person’s face.

  He finally opened his mouth, on the verge of saying something, but the door that Nicholai had disappeared through slammed open, shocking us both. He reappeared, his hair sticking up all over the place, the lines around his mouth hard.

  “What happened?” Spencer asked immediately, shooting me a concerned look before standing from his chair.

  I walked over to the table, the already-sick feeling in my stomach intensifying. Something was very very wrong. It was written all over Nicholai’s face.

  “She finally killed herself,” he announced. There was no expression on his face as he walked to the stairs. No tone to his voice. He paused, his hand against the door at the top of the stairwell. “I’m sorry …” he murmured, before he disappeared down the stairs.

  A moment later, I heard the sounds of the front door slamming, and I took two shaky steps toward the stairs, my hand twitching at my side as though I could still reach out and stop him.

  I’m sorry.

  He had sounded so ... final.

  “Who ...” I started, my voice still weak, my head clouded over in confusion. I was finding it difficult to pull myself out of my memories and back into the present.

  “Jennifer.” Spencer sank back down into his chair, his head falling into his hands. “Goddammit.”

  “Where ...” I took another step toward the stairs, and Spencer looked up, sympathy flashing in his eyes.

  “He’s gone, Mika.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Somewhere you or I won’t be able to find him.”

  “How do you know that?” I spun around, frightened anger riding my tone.

  He made a scoffing sound. “I’m his father. He did this when his sister died, and when his mother died. The last time he did this he enrolled in Stanford without telling me and barely spoke to me for years—sent me a damn email inviting me to his graduation.”

  Years.

  “But ...” I moved to the table as he pushed out a seat, waving me into it. I sank down, my legs unsteady, my heart racing with indecisive panic.

  “Listen.” Spencer laid his hand on the table between us. “I know you want to help, but I’m not going to chase that boy down. I’ve tried it; it doesn’t work. I don’t know what kind of relationship you two have, but trust that if it means anything to him at all, he won’t stay gone for long.”

  I nodded, tr
ying to get a hold of my sudden urge to run out of the house and track down Nicholai. He obviously didn’t want my help, and there was some part of me that didn’t blame him for running out. After all, if he thought himself at fault for Jennifer’s suicide, then maybe he also placed me at fault. Maybe seeing what Nicholai and I had done together was what finally pushed her over the edge.

  “Help me clean up.” Spencer broke into my thoughts. It seemed almost deliberate, the very sudden change in subject. “If you’re still here tomorrow, we’ll have a breakfast where we actually eat. Might even turn on the radio.”

  I stood and helped him clean without responding, but he didn’t seem to need a response. It should have occurred to me as strange that we could exist beside one another in perfect silence, each going about our cleaning tasks as though we had known each other for more than the time it took to make a ham and cheese sandwich. Then again … didn’t he now know me better than most? Didn’t I now know him better than most?

  It wasn’t until the kitchen was clean and I was heading back to the stairwell with the intention of packing up my backpack that his last words finally registered.

  “If I’m still here tomorrow?” I asked, pausing at the stop of the stairs and turning around.

  He had placed the kettle on the stove and was in the process of removing a mug from the cupboard. He set it down on the counter that I had just cleaned.

  “Yes, well …” he shrugged a little awkwardly. “You have school, right? I can drop you there tomorrow morning. Maybe pick you up after.”

  “Why.” I demanded the word.

  “Why not?” he shot back, matching my tone. “If you had somewhere to stay, you’d be staying there instead of sleeping outside, so obviously, you have nowhere else to be.”

  “That’s not your problem, though, is it?”

  “It’s pretty simple, kid. Do you want to stay here for a while, or not?”

  It wasn’t that simple at all. I knew that it wasn’t, and yet, when he said it like that …

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Then it is my problem. Do you have any clothes we can pick up? You won’t have anything to wear to school tomorrow.”

  “I don’t. The place I was living in burnt down.”

  He had been pouring boiling water from the kettle into his mug. I watched as it spilled over onto the counter. He cursed, placing the kettle back onto the stove.

  “I should have asked if you were going to burn my house down. Are you going to burn my house down?”

  “Not unless it’s full of spiders.”

  “The kid has jokes. Go grab one of Nic’s old sweaters. We’re going shopping.”

  24

  Karma

  6 months later …

  “Kid!”

  The shout travelled through the house, jolting me from my sleep. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It was ten past six in the morning.

  “Crap,” I muttered, swinging my legs over the side of the bed and grabbing my robe from where it was crumpled on the floor.

  A slight groan jolted me to a stop as I was about to rush out into the family room. I glanced back to the bed. Aaron was passed out, his broad back uncovered, his legs tangled in the sheets. I tossed a pillow at his head, and he spun over, stumbling out of bed and hitting his knee on the bedside table. He swore beneath his breath, running his hand through his sandy blonde hair.

  “What the hell, Mik—”

  I picked up another pillow, throwing it at him a little harder than I had the first. “You’re not allowed to call me that!”

  He rolled his eyes. “Fine, Grey. But what the hell—”

  “It’s past six.” I pointed to the clock, rushing around the room and picking up his discarded clothes, throwing them at him. “You need to get out before he sees you.”

  I tied my robe together over my pajamas and rushed back to the door, not even bothering to check that Aaron was getting dressed. I reached the kitchen just as Spencer was sitting down, placing a plate of pancakes onto the middle of the bare dining room table.

  “You going to eat with your hands?” I asked him.

  “Setting the table is your job,” he grumbled. “Hurry up, I’m starving.”

  “Why the pancakes?” I asked, fishing out the plates and the cutlery and carrying everything over, before taking my seat opposite him.

  “It’s a special occasion,” he told me, giving me the look he gave me from time to time. His head was tilted down, his eyebrows slightly lifted, as though he were peering at me from over the top of a pair of non-existent spectacles.

  “Oh?” My tone was casual, but there was a smile at my lips. “Does this have something to do with me graduating?”

  “Can’t I celebrate you graduating?” he asked defensively. “After the amount of time we spent arguing over your biology homework, I deserve these pancakes.”

  “Wait.” I paused, slapping a pancake onto my plate. “These aren’t even to congratulate me? They’re to congratulate you?”

  “Obviously.” He was cutting his pancakes up into precise little bite-sized pieces.

  I stopped eating for a moment to watch him. He was wearing his best shirt: a crystal-blue button-down, paired with a silver tie. His jacket was already hanging by the door. He had taken extra care to comb his hair, and I could smell the special aftershave he saved for every Monday, when he had to hold a staff meeting at the restaurant.

  I grinned. “Well. It’s your big day. Congratulations, Spence.”

  “I told you not to call me Spence.”

  “We’ve been over this. I’m not calling you dad, or Captain Dad, or the Godfather. It’s too weird.”

  He grumbled something incoherently, but there was laughter in his eyes when he shook his head.

  “Okay, fine,” I relented. “I’ll stop calling you Spence.”

  “Speaking of rules you’ve forgotten.” He pointed his fork at me, and then shifted it a little to the left, pointing at the windows. “Was that Adam sneaking out five minutes ago?”

  How many times did I need to tell that idiot not to use the back gate?

  “Wait.” I blinked. “Adam? His name is Aaron.”

  “Austin, whatever, he’s not allowed to sleep over.”

  “Not Austin, Aaron.”

  “Evan isn’t allowed to sleep over.”

  “Evan doesn’t even sound like Aaron. Can he stay over if he promises not to sleep?” I asked, helping myself to my second pancake. This one had chocolate chips in it—there was always exactly one in the stack with chocolate chips, just for me.

  “No. Jonathon isn’t allowed to come over at all.” Spencer sat back from the table, folding his arms over his chest and levelling me with a stern expression.

  “Good thing his name isn’t Jonathon, then. What if he stays on one side of the gate, and I stand on the other side, and we pass the bible to each other through the bars?”

  He sighed. “I thought you were going to break up with this guy before graduation.”

  “I know, but I forgot. I still have a few hours anyway, graduation doesn’t start for a while. You have no faith in me, Spence.”

  “I got another email from Nic last night,” he said suddenly, causing me to drop my fork. It clattered loudly against my plate.

  “So?” I picked it up again, stabbing my pancake angrily.

  “So you’re going to have to forgive him eventually.”

  “Why should I? He disappeared.”

  “He never really disappeared, he only went back to Stanford. He emailed every week to check up on you.”

  I growled out a sound. “He also told you not to tell me that he was emailing to check up on me.”

  “He thought it would be better if he gave you some space to settle in here without complicating things. Don’t you want to know what he’s been doing?”

  “No.” I stabbed my pancake again, before sighing, sneaking a look up at Spencer. “I mean ... he’s okay, though, right?”

  “He wrote a book.”
>
  “What?”

  “That was my reaction, but he did.”

  I frowned, a sick kind of nervousness swirling in my stomach. It was always the same feeling whenever I thought about Nicholai. There were too many emotions attached to my memory of him: reliance, need, anger, sorrow, loss. I understood the reasons he had left. He had lost two of the people he cared most about in his life, and had then gone on to dedicate his life to helping other people. After all of that, to be the reason that a young woman ends her life? I couldn’t imagine how badly that would have affected him. Most of my anger was directed toward myself, for taking up space in his dad’s home, basically banishing him from the place. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone all the way back to Stanford if I hadn’t ended up at Spencer’s house. Maybe he would have stayed.

  “I can’t figure out if I’m grateful to him or not,” I finally said, some of my thoughts spilling over into words. “When you told him that you were going to ask me to live here, and he decided not to come back, to give me space to settle in, to give us space to become ... whatever we are now.”

  “A family,” Spencer mumbled. “That’s what we are, just like me and Nicholai are a family. You might not be my daughter, but you live under my roof and eat my pancakes, so goddammit, we’re a family.”

  I was tearing up a little bit, overwhelmed by those words and my lingering thoughts of Nicholai. Usually, Spencer and I operated under a cloud of dry humour and mutual respect. We were very rarely vulnerable around each other. He didn’t talk about his dead wife and daughter, and I didn’t talk about my parents. Not since the first day. We simply existed together, comfortable in our choice of companion. I imagined that if I could have chosen a brand-new father—if that was possible—I would have chosen someone like Spencer. He had been scarred by life just as much as I had, and yet he existed as a pillar for people to lean on.