Even If I Fall

by Abigail Johnson

  Mom and I haven’t really talked since Saturday, but fresh off the heels of a phone call with my brother is not the time to do that. When I can tell the conversation is winding down, I tiptoe quietly up the stairs as quickly as I can and into the office to grab the handset before retreating to my room.

  I press the button to enter into the call when I hear Mom laughing, hoping it’ll cover the sound from the phone.

  “Good, Mom. That’s good,” Jason says. “I just wanted to make sure everyone is okay.” It sounds like he swallows. “And Brooke?”

  Mom doesn’t miss a beat; she never does when she’s talking to Jason. “Of course she is.” And then, it’s so faint I’m not sure I hear the tremor of uncertainty weave into her voice. “Why wouldn’t she be?”

  Jason passes off this question with an aplomb he could have only inherited from Mom. There are no more pauses and no more wavering words, my heart tries to break in two different directions as they say goodbye.

  “I’ll see you next week.”

  “You will.” Mom’s vow is steel. “I love you, Jason.”

  “You too. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  I say his name as soon as I hear the click from Mom hanging up. “Jason?” There’s a pause, and I think I’ve waited too long.

  “Brooke?”

  A sigh of relief slips past my lips. “It’s me. I thought you already hung up.”

  Another pause. “I’m still here.” But by the sound of it, he’s ready not to be if I say the wrong thing.

  “I just—I heard Mom on the phone with you and I wanted...” Deep breath, don’t cry. “I wanted to say I’m sorry.” I bite my lips, hard, as soon as I say the words. I’m not as good as Mom at hiding my emotions from him and the last thing I want him to hear is the anguish clawing at my throat.

  “Sorry?”

  “For Saturday,” I say. “I don’t know why I jumped all over you the way I did. I know—I know it’s hard for you to deal with me pressing you for answers and explanations that you won’t give me. I wanted there to be something you could tell me that would help me understand.” My voice cracks a little, but I go on. “I hope you’ll tell me one day, but I won’t... I’m not going to push you or anyone else anymore.” My eyes roam sightlessly around my room, seeing nothing as I wait for Jason’s response. It takes a while, and I can’t tell what he’s feeling from his voice when it does.

  “Yeah, okay—Wait, what do you mean anyone else?”

  My hand tightens on the phone. “You. I’m not gonna push you anymore.”

  “Brooke.” There a low, alien current in my brother’s voice, a warning to tread carefully here. My heart stops and starts in the pause before he says, “What did you do?”

  “I couldn’t get it out of my head,” I say, rushing to get it out and over as quickly as possible. “You said you ran after someone.”

  There’s a sound from Jason’s end of the phone, a strangled word that might have been my name again.

  “And—and I suddenly realized there was only one person who’d have been there with the two of you, so... I went to see Allison.”

  I think he hangs up. I don’t hear the phone slam down or a dial tone, but he’s so silent... “Jason? Jason?”

  Then a breath, a harsh and ragged one fills my ear. “You. Stay. Away. From. Allison.”

  My lungs seal shut, not letting a breath in or out.

  “Do you hear me?” my brother says, and I can tell that his lips are barely moving.

  I nod, though he can’t see me, and then flinch when I hear something bang from his side of the call.

  “DO YOU HEAR ME? YOU STAY AWAY FROM HER!”

  I recoil from the roar that comes through the phone, dropping the handset in the process, then scrambling to pick it up again as soon as it crashes to the floor. As though from a distance, I hear a squabble and inaudible commands shouting in the background, a grunt that sounds like Jason.

  “Get off me! I said get your hands—”

  And a dial tone.

  I sit on the edge of my bed with the phone lying limply in my shaking hands, the dial tone still wailing dimly up at me. That wasn’t my brother. Denial rings over and over again in my head. That wasn’t my brother. I couldn’t see his face; I can’t even imagine what it would have looked like in those last few minutes. My brother’s sweet, smiling features wouldn’t know how to contort and scream at me. He’s never—he’d never—I half convince myself that another inmate must have taken the phone from him, because Jason would never act like he hated me. Like he would hurt me.

  My thumb moves to end the call and silence fills my room. I slide down the side of my unmade bed until my back rests against it and my knees are tucked to my chest. The phone weighs my hand down to the wood floor.

  Every time my brain starts to turn in one direction, the gears grind to a halt. I try another and again they refuse to turn. Nothing makes sense. Nothing.

  CHAPTER 36

  I slip out my front door and into Daphne the next afternoon. I know where I’m going—there’s only one house at the end of Mulberry Street, but I don’t know what I plan to do once I get there. I just need to see his face. Maybe I won’t even get out of the car.

  But, of course, I do.

  I’m smarter about it this time than I was before. I call him first instead of just bursting inside.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m outside,” I say when he answers his phone.

  A moment later, his front door opens and Heath steps out onto his porch. I feel my heart lurch toward him a second before my feet follow suit. I slow as I reach the bottom steps, not because my longing to be near him has lessened any, but because he hasn’t taken even a single step to meet me. His hand is still resting on his screen door.

  I thought no one else would be home. He told me before that he usually has the house to himself for an hour or two in the afternoons, and I made sure there weren’t any other cars parked out front beside the truck when I called, but now I’m not so certain. I want there to be a reason he’s keeping his distance besides the one I gave him last time we were together.

  I stop before ascending the steps, looking at the house behind him with uncertainty. It’s a nice ranch house, the kind that looks so much a part of the surrounding landscape that one could imagine it growing from the earth alongside the honey locust trees heavily shading either side of the porch. The shingles on the roof are lifting and the stone-gray paint on the siding is cracked and faded in places. There’s space though, enough land that the nearest neighbor is little more than a smudge in the distance.

  I’ve never been here before. I had no reason to come before I met Heath, and after...

  It suddenly strikes me as every kind of foolish I’ve ever been to come to his house like this, worse even than bombarding him unannounced at his work. Then, at least, he’d still had reason to want to see me. I may need him now, but that doesn’t mean a thing has changed for him.

  And this is his house. The home his brother lived in.

  “I wanted to see you,” I say, feeling the need to at least try to explain myself, though it’s as plain as the expression on his face that he doesn’t feel the same way. I stand still, my heart high in my chest as though awaiting a pardon or an execution.

  Heath’s eyes never leave my upturned face. His brows are drawn together, as unmoving as the rest of him, but then they relax. Just a little, but I see it.

  “Come on.” He steps back, holding the door open for me to follow.

  There’s a TV on somewhere in the distance. Heath leaves my side and disappears down the hall to shut it off. I start to follow, but stop when I see all the photos. So many I can barely make out the paint color of the wall behind them. They span floor to ceiling, photos that look to stretch back generations, many of which appear to have been taken in front of this very house. My eyes scan
faces that must belong to Heath’s great-great-grandparents all the way down the hall to Calvin in his cap and gown at his high school graduation.

  “My family is big on photos,” Heath says, making me jump. I don’t look away though, I can’t. I remember Cal, but distantly, the way you remember a face you saw only a few times and didn’t realize at the time it was important. And it was impossible not to see his face plastered online and on TV, but it was usually the same one or two photos. I never watched long enough to see more. I don’t have the option to look away now, and I don’t think I’d take it if I did.

  Instead, I look my fill, and Heath lets me, offering commentary when I stare longer at one photo or another. He speaks stiffly at first, then with greater ease the longer he talks, as though warming up a muscle long out of use. The more comfortable he becomes, the more uneasy I grow.

  Heath doesn’t act embarrassed when his voice cracks, and he doesn’t turn away. It’s the most naked I’ve ever seen a person and it’s hard to watch, hard to hear. Cal has always been a person to me. I never tried to pretend him away for the sake of my brother. I know he had a family, parents, plans for his life that were cruelly cut short. But that knowledge has always been in the background, deeply and profoundly sad, and yet, hard to focus on when Jason occupied so much of the foreground. The perspective is changing now.

  Heath and I are standing at the end of the hall now. I can see that the pictures continue around the corner, but these are the last ones of Calvin. High school graduation, one of him standing in front of his red truck, loaded for bear on his way to college. As with many of the photos, Heath and their older sister are in it with him.

  “That’s the last one of the three of us. My mom was certain we had some from Christmas and her birthday, but—” Heath shakes his head and taps one finger against the glass “—there’s just this one.”

  I turn, watching him watch his brother as he recounts that day, smiling a little here, voice catching a little there. He doesn’t jerk away or even start when I slip my hand into his. His thumb grazes over the back of my hand and he keeps going. The story ends, not when it’s over, but when Heath is too choked up to go on. His face is a blur in my tear-filled eyes when I tug him toward me, rise up and brush my trembling lips to his.

  It’s only meant to be a small kiss, a light gesture of the heart when neither of us has words left. But when I would have dropped back down on my heels, Heath’s arms encircle me, holding me to his chest while his mouth presses more insistently against mine and I taste our mingled tears.

  All the hours I’ve spent held in Heath’s arms practicing lifts, and even the first kiss we shared pale in comparison to this. This kiss is still forbidden, but unlike the hesitancy that accompanied our first kiss, this one is bold, reckless. All the pent-up desire and longing we’ve both been feeling is unleashed and poured into each other. It’s almost frightening how tightly he’s holding me, or it would be if my grip on him were any less fierce.

  I give in to this kiss and the tears that won’t seem to stop. I taste them on his lips. I hear them in the soft sounds of my breathing and his. The rise and fall of my chest and his is the only movement between us as we break apart and our eyes meet.

  We’re still pressed against each other and every breath I take comes from air leaving his lips. Heath’s hands slide up my sides, ghosting over my rib cage, and trigger endless tremors to pulse through my body.

  “I’m sorry I hurt you,” I say.

  “I hate that I hurt you. I’ll never do it again.” One of his hands breaks free to trail over my shoulder and leave goose bumps along the supersensitive skin at my neck. It takes almost no urging to lift my chin and meet his lips again. To taste, not tears this time, but something infinitely sweeter.

  I lose all awareness of time and myself in this kiss, in Heath, in the way I feel in his arms. It goes on forever, flaring up then burning low, but never dying out.

  My first sense that something is wrong doesn’t come from anything I hear but from something I feel. Heath jerks in my arms as though whipped. His head lifts from mine, and my emotion-fogged vision clears as panic shoots wide in his eyes. I have just enough time to crank my neck around to see two women striding in the front door. One in her early fifties and the other in her early thirties. Heath’s name dies on the younger one’s lips as she sees us.

  “What on earth? Heath Christopher Gaines, who in—” His mother’s words end in a strangled choke as Heath drops his arms from me. He doesn’t look at me, and an icy cold sensation eats the last trace of our heat away.

  Heath doesn’t look at me, but his mom and sister do.

  I thought I knew that look, the one that curls lips and ensures a wide berth. What I see in Mrs. Gaines’s eyes and that of her daughter, Gwen, is filled with so much more than distaste and anger. Mrs. Gaines’s arm shoots out to clutch her daughter’s when I shift my feet. I thought it was to steady her from the shock at finding me in her house with her son, but I quickly realize my mistake. She’s not holding herself up; she’s holding her daughter back.

  “Her? You’re with her?” Gwen is looking at her brother like she just walked in on him making a bomb instead of making out with a girl. And she’s looking at me as though she could detonate me herself and not blink an eye. “Her brother murdered Cal!” Cal’s name tears out of her, a twisted, pained screech, the sound almost makes me cover my ears.

  Beside me, Heath says nothing, does nothing. He holds his mother’s gaze and I can practically feel the shame seeping from his pores.

  “Allison wasn’t enough for you? First it’s your brother’s girlfriend, and now the sister of his murderer!” Gwen chokes. “In our house, in Cal’s house!”

  “Gwen—”

  Gwen slaps away her mother’s whispered word along with the hand restraining her and starts toward her brother. “Get her out. Get that fu—” the rest of her words are muffled with the wild blows she rains down on her brother when he walks forward to intercept her and I back away. He barely tries to block them, letting her hit him as she screams.

  I can’t think and I can’t look at Heath. I flatten myself against one wall as Mrs. Gaines moves to the other. Our gazes meet. She doesn’t scream profanities at me, but there’s no hiding that she wants me out of her house just as desperately as her daughter.

  I run out the front door, chased by the sounds of a broken family and nothing else.

  CHAPTER 37

  Clouds of rich red-brown dust billow around Daphne’s tires as I hit the brakes harder than normal and throw the car into Park in front of my house. Laura is on the front porch and she stands as soon as she sees me. For once, I barely notice her as I hurry to get inside, numbness keeping all but one thought at bay.

  Allison was...Cal’s girlfriend?

  But I stop on the top step at a sight that I haven’t seen in I don’t know how long. Laura on the porch swing is common enough, but Laura without her earbuds, without her phone?

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, my brain skidding to a halt along with the rest of me. “Did something happen?”

  “No, nothing. I just—” Without her phone to hold, Laura doesn’t know what to do with her hands. She wrings them to the point that I half expect her to draw blood. “I wanted to talk. We never talk anymore.”

  I blink at my sister. I’m not the reason we never talk. I’m the one who has tried over and over again to restore some semblance of the relationship we used to have, and she’s shut me down every time. It didn’t matter how I cried or pleaded, she always turned away.

  And right now, with my stomach churning in sickening knots, I’m the one turning away.

  I say something to her as I pull open the door. Not now, or We’ll talk later, I don’t even know the words that come out of my mouth and as I hurry up the stairs, I don’t look back to see if my dismissal wounded her half as much as all of hers wounded me. I can’t think about my si
ster right now. I can barely think at all.

  My urgency to flee and hide deserts me when I reach the hall. She can’t be right about Allison and Cal. My steps grow slower, heavy as fresh dread hits me from inside and out as I approach the door to Jason’s room, fully shut this time. I reach for the knob then flex my fingers before grabbing it and opening the door. My mind has been showing me what I’ll see since I left Heath’s house, I know it, yet I need to look at it again before I let the final piece lock into place.

  Not wanting Mom to notice it missing, I’d returned the photo of Jason with a laughing Allison on his back to its proper place the other day. It’s tacked up over the desk, both of them seeming to smile at me as I approach.

  Jason adored this photo even though the top of Allison’s head is out of frame and there’s some random guy photobombing in the background. But I never asked him why. It was something in her smile, in the way her hands curled around his shoulders and the tilt of her head against his. A stranger could have looked at that photo and known with complete certainty that she was in love.

  Only, she’s not looking at my brother, she’s looking at the person taking the photo. My eyes start scanning the other photos, searching for—something that itches at the back of my mind. Not quite a memory, more like a space where a memory should be.

  There.

  It’s a tiny corner peeking up from behind his desk. I inch the desk forward then bend down to pick up the fallen photo.

  It’s the same day. Allison is wearing the same sky blue bikini, and the same white-and-yellow daisy is threaded through the braid in her hair. She has one arm over Jason’s shoulder as he holds the phone out in front of them and the other around Cal.

  She’s not looking at my brother.

  Her expression is the same. It’s exactly the same.

  And the picture’s been ripped in half, severing Cal from Allison.

  I start shaking all over.

  “Brooke?”

  I don’t answer my sister; I don’t even turn to look at her. I can’t look at anything save for the two photos in front of me, photos that might finally explain what seemed impossible to me.