Even If I Fall

by Abigail Johnson

  “Brooke, don’t.” There’s a choked quality to his request that normally would have silenced me, but I can’t stay silent anymore.

  “It’s not just about Mom, Dad and Laura.” The hand I’m resting on the table strays a few inches toward him. “I hate the thought of leaving them like this but I can’t bear the thought of leaving you at all.”

  I know he’s crying. His head is lowered and he’s barely moving, aware even now of drawing that kind of attention to himself in this place, but I know my brother.

  “Allison made it sound like—she thinks you planned it—I can’t believe she’s right, so you have to tell me. Please, Jason. Please.”

  Slowly, so slowly, Jason lifts his head. His eyes are glassy wet, but open. There’s no scowl, no anger. There’s something else, something that quivers in his chin as he holds my gaze, willing me to see a truth he can’t bring himself to say.

  “Jase—” I wait for him to say something, to blink or breathe in a way that means anything other than what his face is silently telling me, but he doesn’t.

  “I died when she told me, when they told me.” His voice is like broken glass, sharp and so cutting that I flinch. His hands flex again, drawing my eyes to the scars left from breaking the windows of Cal’s truck. “I couldn’t believe that she’d do that, that he’d do that. For days it was like living in a nightmare that I couldn’t wake up from. Nothing I did helped. I even went to the tree, you know, and cut out our initials with a knife.”

  My heart pounds, remembering the brutal attack on that tree, the one I’d briefly thought Heath responsible for. It was so savage, full of so much hate, but not for my brother like I’d thought. For Allison’s initials linked with his.

  “That’s where I was when Cal called. He was drunk and said he was leaving but wanted to see me first.”

  “No, Jase,” I say, my lips trembling. He keeps looking at me, so I say it again, quieter. “No.”

  “I didn’t think I’d do it, Brooke, I thought he’d fight back.”

  Tears run down my face. “You brought the knife, Jase. You could have left it in the car but you brought it with you.”

  Jason says nothing.

  Sickened and destroyed, I stand to leave, but stop to ask the one question that has been plaguing me. “Who was it that you ran after that night?”

  Jason’s face goes white. “I didn’t know she was there. I swear I didn’t know.” Tears are thick in his throat. “I didn’t see her until after, until it was too late...”

  I can’t say her name and I silently beg Jason not to say it either.

  “She hid in my car,” he whispers.

  I’m shaking my head now endlessly, feeling my heart break over and over as my brother continues his confession. Laura had followed him. She was always following him. Off bridges, on dates, everywhere.

  She was there the whole time, she watched him. She ran when he saw her. All four miles home she ran, and he couldn’t catch her, he kept slipping from all the blood.

  I let out a sob and Jason reaches for my hand. Before he can touch me, the ever-present guards bark a warning. Fingers, just inches from mine, draw back.

  Another sob slips from my lips.

  “Please, Brooke, please.”

  I turn my back and all but run from my brother.

  CHAPTER 41

  I’m early getting home, so early that Mom isn’t even expecting my call yet. I slip inside the house and go upstairs without anyone noticing.

  Straight to Laura’s room.

  When I open the door, she looks up from where she’s sitting on the bed with Ducky in his cage between her outstretched legs. I don’t give her a chance to react before I’m sliding onto the bed in front of her. I cried myself out on the drive home. All I feel now is broken. Laura moves Ducky’s cage to the floor.

  “I didn’t know,” I say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  Laura stiffens when I reach for her hand.

  “No, no, please don’t,” I whisper. “Not anymore.”

  I didn’t think it was possible to hurt more than I did after Jason’s confession, but looking at Laura, thinking about what it must have been like for her to have witnessed Jason kill someone and then have to endure it all alone, I do.

  “I’m so sorry, Laura. I didn’t know.” I just keep repeating the same words until with a full-bodied shudder, she goes limp, no longer holding herself rigid and away from me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I reach for her hand again, and this time, she lets me take it.

  She lowers her eyes, but we’re not doing that anymore. I’m not letting us.

  “Laura.” I say her name softly, but firmly and she looks up.

  “It wasn’t like he said.” Her eyes move between mine, measuring my response. “They didn’t fight. Cal—he—” Her voice breaks and her chin trembles.

  And then she tells me.

  * * *

  It was only a week into summer, so hot already that she’d been begging Jason to take her swimming every day since he came home from college. He’d told us that Allison had gone to visit a friend and would be coming down in a few days, so Laura knew her time to have her brother all to herself was limited. After putting her off for the third day in a row, never letting her come along wherever he went each night, she decided to go anyway.

  It was easy to sneak into the back seat of his car before he came outside, and she was still small enough that she could curl herself into an undetectable little ball on the floor behind the driver’s seat.

  At first he’d just driven around. He’d pick up his phone as if to call someone then throw it down in the passenger seat. And he drove fast, fast enough that even her thrill-seeking heart grew worried. At last she felt him pull off the road, bumping along an uneven path until he slammed his brakes and threw open his door all in one motion, not even shutting it behind him when he got out.

  She twisted enough to see from her hiding spot and recognized the tree by Hackman’s Pond. She was about to call out and reveal herself, sure that he’d have to go swimming with her now that they were just feet from the water’s edge, but something stopped her. It was more than the glint of the knife springing open in his hand—that was a common enough sight at that tree—it was the way he held it fisted tight as he stalked to the tree. And then she jerked as he made the first blow, not to carve but to destroy. She knew the place he focused his attack on and the names he hacked at again and again, even if she wasn’t close enough to see them.

  His and Allison’s.

  And she heard wretched sobs tear from his throat.

  She started when his phone rang on the front seat, curling even tighter in on herself as he came back to the car and answered it. She didn’t recognize the voice that came from him or the stream of hatred that spewed from his lips when he said Cal’s name. She couldn’t make out Cal’s side of the conversation, only that her brother kept telling him to stop, that nothing Cal could say would ever be enough. But then his voice changed so suddenly that she chanced a small peek through to the front seat. She could see only the side of Jason’s thigh and the knife in his hand as he slowly turned it over and agreed to meet Cal and talk in person.

  She felt cold and sweaty when he started to drive again, not speeding this time, and he kept the knife open in his hand until he parked again. Rather than toss it back in the glove box, he slid it into his back pocket and kept his hand over it as he walked into the woods.

  She didn’t want to watch anymore, but as the minutes passed in silence, her fear of something she didn’t even have a word for pulled her from the car and into the woods and the clearing she was too young to have ever been to yet.

  The heated, raised voices she’d been expecting based on the earlier phone call weren’t there. Instead, Cal and Jason stood just feet away, talking, not fighting. Cal was the one talking with real animation, r
epeating an apology that she could tell he’d already tried to make before. Jason didn’t accept it right away, shaking his head and raising his empty hands whenever Cal took a step toward him. Only once did Jason lash out verbally.

  “How could you take her from me like that? You always took everything else, but she was mine!”

  Whatever Cal said in response was too quiet for her to hear, but the earnest way he placed his hand to his heart and kept his eyes locked on Jason made her think he was making some kind of promise. And after a minute, Jason nodded. His whole body remained stiff, but he raised one arm to clasp Cal’s back when his friend moved in to hug him.

  Jason was facing away from her, so she saw him slide his free hand into his pocket and pull the knife out. She claims she heard the sound it made when the blade sprang open, though Cal didn’t jerk away, not until Jason plunged the knife into his back.

  The details grew hazy after that. She remembers Cal stumbling as Jason pulled the knife free, then his whole lower body just gave out. She heard him gurgling as he collapsed facedown in the damp earth. Then she didn’t hear anything except her own silent scream as her brother followed his friend down to the ground and drove the knife in again.

  Cal’s hands were digging into the earth, clawing, as Jason stabbed him a third time. Cal looked up then, caught her gaze and lifted one hand toward her before Jason’s knife came down again.

  Then she screamed.

  Jason saw her.

  And she ran.

  CHAPTER 42

  I want to throw up. I want to throw up. I want to throw up.

  My skin has gone clammy and I can’t swallow fast enough to keep splashes of bile from scalding my throat. Only it’s nothing compared to the tremors racking Laura’s slight body.

  “I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. Not when I saw the knife, not when—”

  I half expect Laura to stiffen when I move to embrace her, the way I did yesterday with Mom, but she goes willingly into my arms, like she’s been as starved for me all this time as I’ve been for her.

  “It’s not your fault,” I tell her, my tears falling onto her unwashed hair as hers drip onto my shirt. “It was never your fault.”

  Over and over I repeat this to my sister, trying to hold still and be strong for her, to make her hear the conviction in my voice rather than the bleeding in my soul.

  It could be an hour later when she stops crying, not, I’m sure, because she’s done, but because she’s too physically exhausted to shed more tears. For the past few minutes all she’s done is tremble as I stroke her hair and murmur wordless comfort. When the shaking fades but I know she’s still awake in my arms, I rest my cheek on her head and softly I say, “We need to talk to Mom and Dad.”

  “No!” Laura flinches away from me, shaking her head almost violently.

  I reach for her, pulling her grief-weary body back into my side with only a little resistance. “Laura, you need help.” My voice cracks on the last word. “We all need help.” I’m so gut-sickeningly ashamed that I could be so blinded to one sibling’s pain by the other’s. That I tried to guilt her for staying away from Jason when she witnessed it all.

  Not the fight or blind-to-reason fit of rage I’d always tried to imagine. Not the shock and horror that trickled back to him and sent him to his knees trying to staunch the blood. Not even him running home for help when he couldn’t.

  I shudder, and Laura lifts her head to look at me. “I’m afraid.”

  I want to pretend I don’t understand, but I do. From the very instant I knew what Jason was being accused of, I recoiled against it, vehemently and vocally. My brother wasn’t a murderer, and woe to anyone and everyone who dared say otherwise. I was terrifying back then, especially those first few weeks, I know I was. And even after he confessed, when not even I could deny that Cal’s life had ended by Jason’s hand, a part of me still sought to minimize it. I’d been trying ever since to imagine circumstances and provocations that could drive him to kill.

  And I’d ignored and suppressed anything that might so much as hint otherwise.

  It was true we rarely spoke about Jason at home, but at least with Mom and me, there’d been this undercurrent of denial and sense of injustice, however little we allowed ourselves to look closely at that belief. It had grown more difficult since Heath came into my life, since I was forced to think of the true victim and not just the one I imagined Jason to be.

  It’s excruciating to let go of something I clung to so fiercely for this long, but as I clutch Laura tighter to me, the pain shifts. It doesn’t lessen, I don’t know that it ever will, but it becomes distant and far removed from the flesh-and-bone girl in my arms.

  “It’ll be okay,” I tell her.

  * * *

  Laura trails behind me like a wraith as we go downstairs and into the kitchen. She’s so silent that I have to keep looking back to make sure it’s her hand I’m holding and not just my imagination.

  Mom is sitting on a stool at the island, her eyes unblinkingly focused on the rooster-shaped clock on the wall instead of the pot threatening to boil over on the stove. Uncle Mike is on the stool next her, his hand making circles on her lower back as he speaks softly to her. He stills his hand when she starts at seeing us—even after all the time I’ve spent with Laura, she isn’t expecting me home from the prison yet—and Uncle Mike drops his hand like Mom’s back suddenly caught fire. For a moment it’s all I can do to stare at him.

  He twists away and stands, putting a good six feet between him and Mom, as though the distance now will make anyone forget how close he’d just been to her. “Hey, kid. We weren’t expecting you home for a spell yet. Your mom and I were watching the clock.”

  Mom was watching the clock, he means. We both know exactly what he was watching. And somehow, there’s room for that to hurt too.

  Laura shifts closer behind me as Mom starts firing questions at me. “Why did you leave early? Is Jason all right? Is he hurt or sick? Why didn’t you call?”

  Instead of answering, I turn my head to the stove. She follows my gaze and then leaps off her stool to turn off the burner and clean up the soup that started boiling over. Uncle Mike makes to help her, but I catch his eye and he wisely stays back. I grab a rag to help Mom and nod at Laura to go down and get Dad.

  “Everything’s gonna be fine,” I tell her when she hesitates, and I see a flicker of her former strength spark in her eyes before she disappears downstairs.

  “So,” Uncle Mike says, and I can hear the effort behind the lightness in his voice. “Your mom is real anxious to hear about your brother.”

  “He’s fine,” I say, turning to put my rag in the sink so I can have a moment without seeing Mom’s worried face. “I’ll tell you everything when Laura and Dad come up.”

  “—I’m in the middle of something,” I hear Dad say as he thuds heavily upstairs. “What’s so important that your mom needs me—”

  “Not Mom,” I say. “Me. Me and Laura.”

  Dad frowns, seeing me, not in anger or annoyance at having been interrupted, but in surprise. His gaze shifts to the clock too, noting the time and the fact that I’m home early. “Is it your brother?” His voice is even, but the muscles in his face twitch when he asks, telling me he’s as inwardly afraid of the answer as I am.

  Beneath Dad’s calm exterior there’s always been a despair that shakes me whenever I glimpse it. His only son, the boy he raised to be good and kind, brutally murdered his friend. Mom may have been the one crying in the shower, but Dad has been grieving no less deeply. And for him, feeling impotent to make it better for any of us when he felt it was his job to safeguard us had made it all the more acute for him.

  I’ve always struggled more with Mom. I don’t know why but I have. Dad’s and Laura’s behavior makes sense to me—their guilt and remorse caused them both to withdraw, because they didn’t know what else to do. I
n contrast, Mom threw herself into the futile task of forcing us all together and ignoring our efforts to stay apart, even Jason’s. For her it was like nothing changed when he admitted his crime and was locked up except his location. She acts like he’s innocent, and I can’t help but think I might have seen the truth, seen Laura’s suffering for what it was sooner, if she hadn’t.

  I glance at Uncle Mike, who keeps glancing back and forth between my parents, between the one he so nakedly longs to comfort and the one who’ll never let him. He sags when Dad does what he can’t, moving to Mom’s side and tucking her under one arm.

  I’ve never felt sadder for Uncle Mike.

  But then Laura is next to me, and I don’t have any pity to spare for him.

  My mouth opens and then closes and opens again. I don’t know how to say any of this, to explain something that parts of my brain are still railing against.

  And that’s when Laura does it for me.

  She tells them the story she told me about sneaking into Jason’s car that night, following him into the woods and witnessing him kill Cal. She doesn’t soften the details. She doesn’t stop when Dad’s knees buckle, not even when she has to raise her voice to be heard over Mom’s sobbing.

  Somehow it’s worse, hearing it the second time, when I can anticipate her words and the blood-chilling horror they’ll spawn. And this time I’m afraid, because even though the redness on my cheek has long vanished, I can remember Mom slapping me.

  I promised Laura it would be okay, that they wouldn’t blame her, but I know with sickening certainty that she’ll carry their response from this day to her grave.