Even If I Fall

by Abigail Johnson

  “Did your brother ever display homicidal tendencies before he killed Calvin Gaines?”

  “Did your brother torture animals?”

  “Your uncle is a convicted felon. Did he play a role in the murder?”

  “Did your brother talk about planning to murder his friend?”

  “Were you ever afraid your brother might harm you or your sister?”

  “What do you say to those who are demanding the death penalty for your brother?”

  Once Jason confessed, that was it. There was no safe place, no safe person. Too many of our so-called friends were suddenly all too eager to give interviews revealing that they always secretly knew how unhinged Jason was. Not unhinged enough for them to say anything to anyone, but just enough to cash in on their fifteen minutes of fame afterward.

  Mom never said she was asked to leave her job at the library, but Dad had some choice words for the branch manager when she called to say that Mom didn’t need to put in her two weeks.

  We didn’t stop going to our church all at once. Heath’s family were members of the massive Southern Baptist church while my family attended the smaller United Methodist church. Otherwise we would have stopped right away. Our church numbers swelled in the weeks following Jason’s arrest; the new attendees ranged from gawkers to gossips to reporters waiting for us in the parking lot. The brazen ones even sidled up next to us during Communion. Mom actually kept going for a full month after Dad, Laura and I stopped, but even she couldn’t hold out forever. I think most of the congregation was relieved. They tried not to be, but what do you say to someone when their child is a murderer?

  At our old church, Pastor Hamilton used to preach about forgiveness and the grace of God being greater than all our sins, but Telford was still small enough that most of the people outside the walls of our church were either unwilling or uncertain how to extend kindness to my family without spitting on the Gaineses. The ones who didn’t keep their distance on their own weren’t given a choice.

  And I know they were relieved.

  Now we drive an hour and a half south to Odessa once or twice a month to attend Uncle Mike’s mega church, which is so big I’ve never seen the same face twice, and where the rotating pastoral staff preach sermons with titles like God Wants You to Win the Lottery.

  Slowly but surely we all withdrew from everything and everyone in Telford. It was almost too easy. I’d been homeschooled briefly before due to my ice-skating training, so it was simple enough to transfer Laura and me to an online school. We don’t live in town, and once Dad took an ax to our mailbox, it became a lot harder for reporters to find us. He picks up our mail—and the groceries Mom now orders online—from the post office once a week. Apart from Dad handling that unavoidable task, I’m the only one who still ventures beyond our property on a regular basis.

  I wouldn’t even do that if it weren’t for the ice rink.

  And now Maggie.

  Which is why I’m riding shotgun while she drives Daphne to Keller’s Creamery for frozen custard on an early Monday afternoon. Keller’s fresh frozen custard is so rich and so creamy, I didn’t put up a protest when she called earlier begging me to make a run with her. She thinks I have a mild form of agoraphobia. She hasn’t forced the issue with me, since she openly prefers the online world to the real one herself, but she’s not wrong about Keller’s frozen custard being worth a little potential discomfort.

  I’m hoping it won’t be too busy. It’s barely noon and the people who grew up in this town know to wait until after one, when Ann Keller herself comes in. She’s seventy-eight years old and almost as revered as Willie Nelson around these parts. Whatever she does when she serves the custard makes it infinitely more decadent than it already is.

  I have my excuse ready for why I’ll need to stay in the car while Maggie goes inside, but I can’t speak when we pull into the half-empty parking lot.

  A silver SUV is parked not three spaces from us and Mark Keller, grandson of the beloved Ann and Mitch Keller and the guy I gave my first and last kiss to—the guy who even now has his initials carved next to mine near the top of Hackman’s tree—is making his way to his vehicle. He stops when he sees me, but whereas I try to slink down to hide, he only pauses to swallow before heading straight for me.

  “No, no, no, no, no...” I mutter as he approaches. Maggie is too busy shimmying while singing the frozen custard song she made up as she digs through her massive purse for cash to notice until he raps on my window.

  “Oh, sweet, they do curbside now?” Maggie asks. “Tell him I just need one minute.” She then proceeds to empty half the contents of her purse into her lap.

  I don’t answer her; instead I take a fortifying breath and open my door. Mark steps back to let me stand, but not nearly enough to be polite. As I shut the door behind me I’m praying Maggie stays in the car long enough for me to get rid of him.

  “I just came to get a custard,” I say, keeping my gaze on a spot just over his shoulder. “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

  Hands in his pockets, he leans forward. “Hi, Brooke. It’s nice to see you too. Me? I’m good, thanks for asking.”

  I shift to meet his eyes. I used to think they were the perfect shade of chocolate against his lightly tanned skin, warm and flecked so slightly with gold that you had to be only inches away to notice it. Seeing them now, I feel nothing save for a desire not to. I try to move to the side but his hand shoots out to block me. A second later I hear Maggie’s door open and then she’s bending down to retrieve some of the items that spilled from her purse.

  “Don’t say anything,” I whisper, clutching his wrist.

  Mark flicks his gaze to Maggie before returning it to me. “What am I not supposed to say?” he asks, not bothering to lower his voice. “’Cause it’s always what you want, right?”

  “If you ever cared about me, you’ll leave now. Please.” I have to force the last word through my teeth.

  “If I cared about you? If? You’re the one who ended things, not me.”

  My hand flinches at my side, the urge to slap him almost overwhelming me. “What you did to me was unforgivable.”

  “But I thought you were big on forgiveness—or is that only for certain people?”

  I blanch, and he drops his hand and softens his voice.

  “I said I was sorry, Brooke.” His hand shifts to brush my forearm. “When is it gonna be enough for you, huh?”

  I yank my arm away from his touch, my eyes boring into his, and lean into his space. “I trusted you. I won’t make that mistake again.”

  “You know what, whatever.” He pushes off from the side of the car and stalks to his SUV.

  I’m still shaking when Maggie appears at my side.

  “You okay?”

  I nod. He’s gone, so I am. “He’s—he was my boyfriend a while ago. We had a bad breakup.”

  “No kidding,” Maggie says, flinching along with me when his tires squeal as he tears out of the parking lot.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Maggie asks.

  “A lot,” I say, hoping Maggie won’t press me for details. He did care about me, I know that. Otherwise seeing me wouldn’t affect him the way it just did. He did his best, at first, to support me when everything happened with Jason. I should have ended things after he tried to show me that leaked crime scene report, but he was so convincing when he said he didn’t care about Jason’s crime as long as I still loved him.

  I can’t believe how stupid I was.

  “It’s a small town,” I tell Maggie, swallowing a bit of guilt for the half story I give her. “And people tend to hold grudges when you break the heart of Ann Keller’s grandson.”

  “Ann Keller as in...” She points to the Keller’s Creamery sign.

  I nod. “It’s fine though.” Through the window I see a small group of girls. I recognize a couple from my chemis
try class last year, including my former best friend, Tara Hudson. They all look harmless, the type to introduce themselves to, say, a stranger their own age if they happened to spot them alone. I know Tara would. I glance at Maggie and shift in front of her, blocking her view of the girls and, more important, their view of her. “You know, I’m suddenly not in the mood for custard at all. What if we just go back to your house and make Coke floats. You have vanilla ice cream, right?”

  Maggie gives a longing look at the store, but then notices the girls I spotted, and her expression softens. “You know, I’ve seen people looking at you kind of weird. I didn’t understand it.” She shakes her head. “I don’t have to ask if you did anything cruel to your ex-boyfriend. I know you didn’t, so why should you be the one to hide? If people want to suck, then I’ll be right there next you. Maybe a few’ll even surprise you and not suck a little. My mom would be happy if I made a few more friends—not best friends, that’s all you, but just, you know, people I could sit with at lunch when school starts, since you won’t be there. We could try...”

  But I had tried. After Jason confessed, I made the mistake of trying to reconcile with Mark, mostly because I’d never felt so alone in my life. I let him in through my window one night just to hold me while I cried.

  The next day, cell phone pictures of pages from my diary showed up on an online news site.

  My chest feels tight and panicky at the memory, the private, broken words I’d let pour out of the deepest recesses of my heart that were stolen from me and dissected for the whole world to see. Maggie feels like the only person who hasn’t seen them, who doesn’t know.

  “Brooke?”

  I whirl around at the voice, not incredulous like Mark’s had been, but no less surprised. Tara is standing less than twenty feet from me, her hand holding open the creamery’s door for the other girls to spill out into the parking lot with her. My face warms when two of the girls see me and start whispering.

  “Wow, I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever. Not since—” She cuts herself off and her cheeks flush.

  Tara’s dad is the sheriff and one of the elders at our old church. He helped my parents find a lawyer for Jason. He also stopped letting Tara come to my house, and limited our other interactions so much that there was very little friendship left to lose once that awful summer ended and I didn’t return to Telford High.

  I know she only did what her parents made her do, and I’m certain that she felt really bad about it. Looking at her now, with the added color still flushing her pale face, I can tell she still does. It doesn’t fix anything between us though, and it hurts to see her and feel like we’re strangers.

  “—and Mark was just out here with her,” one of the girls with Tara whispers none too quietly. “I hope he’s okay.”

  Tara steps toward me just as I back away from her. She rocks to a halt. “I’m really sorry about everything, but—”

  The girl who mentioned Mark—I think her name is Shannon—pulls at Tara’s arm. “We’re gonna miss the movie. Let’s go.” She looks askance at me and then transfers that same disapproval to Maggie.

  “We have to wait for Emily,” another girl says, pointing back inside. With jolt I recognize Dawn Beckmann, another former friend I went to school with since kindergarten. She used to have the biggest crush on my brother, and when the news first broke about Cal’s death, she was my staunchest supporter in believing Jason was innocent. Now she can’t even bring herself to look at me. I don’t know whether that’s from guilt over deserting me, or if she’s still freaked out because he was guilty.

  I don’t care. Tara looks like she’s considering doing something awful, like inviting me and Maggie to go with them, and the other girls look like they’re trying to psych themselves up to start interrogating me about having a felon for a brother.

  “Please,” I say, to Maggie. “Can we just go?”

  We leave, because Maggie isn’t as selfish as I am.

  The sky opens up as we drive back to her house, pouring enough rain down on us to wash the earth clean.

  CHAPTER 15

  My unease chases me home, up the steps of my porch and through my front door. It snaps at my heels when I hear the muffled sobs coming from the closed pantry. My footsteps slow, but I forget to step over the one creaky floorboard in the hall. The crying cuts off midsob.

  A moment passes.

  Another. I have to lift my foot again to move, but the second I do the floor creaks again.

  “Brooke?”

  I force my voice to be light. “It’s me, Mom.”

  She clears her throat before speaking again, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that she was crying and has been for a good long while. “I was looking to see if we had any of those canned tomatoes left, but I’m suddenly not feeling very well. Would you heat up the leftover lasagna for you, Laura and Dad?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Brooke?”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “There’s fixings for a salad in the fridge too.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mom slips out of the pantry and upstairs while I’m getting the food ready. When I call that dinner is ready, Dad and Laura come, but not Mom. The shower is running upstairs and it will keep running until long after the hot water is gone.

  “Jason called?” I ask no one in particular once our silent meal has begun. It’s not that Mom cries only on days that he calls, but she always cries when he does.

  Dad swallows the bite he’s chewing and fills his fork with another. “Yes.”

  One word, no more.

  I glance at him, the mere effort of holding my fork up suddenly beyond me. I let my arm lower to the table. Had Mom been with us, her hawk eyes would have immediately noticed that I’d stopped eating and she’d give me a gentle admonishment to finish my dinner, her gaze never moving from me until I complied.

  Dinners—really all meals—were a big deal for her, always had been. Growing up dirt-poor in a house with more bellies than food to fill them meant that gnawing hunger was a near daily reality for her as a child. I never knew that getting sent to bed without dinner was even a thing as a kid, because Mom would have sooner driven bamboo skewers under her nails than let her children know the sensation of an empty belly.

  How many splintered meals had we shared since Jason went away? Breakfast, lunch and dinner for a year...a thousand maybe? Would we ever all sit at this table again? I glance at Mom’s empty chair then at the space where Jason’s used to be. It was empty sometimes before he left for college. Not often, but it happened.

  Once, right after Jason turned sixteen, he’d gotten into a fight with Dad over wanting to spend the summer with Uncle Mike instead of helping to replace the roof. As soon as we all sat down to dinner, Dad started talking about the material they’d need to pick up for the project. Jason swallowed a single bite before announcing that he was driving up to visit Uncle Mike after we ate.

  “Can I come?” Laura asked. Jason rarely denied her anything, so she was already half out of her seat on her way to pack when his no stopped her.

  “We’ll get started on the roof as soon as you get back then,” Dad said, slicing into his steak and making a noise that had Mom blushing.

  “It’s a good cut,” she said, trying to dismiss the wordless compliment.

  “It’s never just the cut,” he replied, holding her gaze.

  “Why can’t I come?” Laura plopped back into her chair. “Uncle Mike’ll let me, and Ducky loves driving.” She made kissy noises at the cockatiel on her shoulder before offering him a piece of broccoli to nibble.

  “Leave Ducky,” Mom said, adding more broccoli to Laura’s plate and giving her an excuse-me face until Laura stopped scowling at the growing pile of vegetables. “Brooke’ll take care of him.”

  “Sure,” I said, distracted by the largely untouched steak on Jason’s pla
te. Normally he inhaled his food. Mom noticed too and frowned at him.

  “You can’t come, because I’m not just going for a few days.” I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “I’m going for the whole summer.”

  “No,” Dad said, without looking up from his plate. “I need you here. That roof isn’t going to survive another winter.”

  Mom and Laura weren’t paying attention as they argued over whether or not Laura could bring Ducky to Uncle Mike’s, but there was something beyond his full plate that kept my attention tethered to my brother.

  “Mike’s got a job lined up for me at the rig,” he said. “I’ll make more money in two months than I have the past two years at Tom McClintock’s ranch. And before you say anything, I already talked to Tom about it and told him I won’t be working for him.”

  Dad resumed eating. “You’re not going off to work an oil rig at sixteen. I’ll call Mike after dinner and—”

  “I’m going, and you can’t stop me.”

  “Jason smash,” Ducky squawked.

  Dad’s gaze slid to the bird on his youngest daughter’s shoulder before catching Mom’s eye. She gave her head a slight shake—this was the first she was hearing about this too.

  Dad leaned back in his chair, giving his son his full attention. That alone should have been reason enough for Jason to backpedal. It always was in the past when he and Dad clashed over something, an occurrence that was becoming more and more frequent of late.

  “I’m sorry about the roof, but there are plenty of guys you can hire to help or—” He glanced at Laura and me and cut himself off. I was skating religiously at that time, and Laura was only ten—a small ten at that.

  “No,” Laura said. “You can’t go all summer. We’re supposed to go swimming every day and to the movies and stay up all night and—”

  Jason looked pained. “You and Brooke can—”

  “All she does is skate, and you promised!”