Your father is a professional too. He has helped many, many people. Who he is at home is not who he is at the office. Can’t be. He doesn’t mess with his clients’ heads the way he messes with yours. Right? Because they pay him.
“I’d have to find his name and number, though,” Antoine says.
“You don’t already know his name?”
“My mother just says ‘my therapist.’ She probably told me; I can’t remember.” Suddenly Antoine catches his breath. “Caleb?” His gaze slides sideways for a second to meet yours. “The brakes aren’t working,” he says. “Don’t panic.”
Ellie Mae is going over fifty miles an hour.
Antoine’s hands are tight on the wheel. “I’m off the gas now. Once we’re at a low enough speed, I’ll steer us onto the shoulder.”
“Okay,” you say as you note that there isn’t much of a shoulder on this part of Route 22, approaching the McDonald’s intersection with its traffic light.
Its traffic light that is currently yellow.
You will have sweating nightmares the rest of your life about the next few moments.
The traffic signal blinking from yellow to red.
Ellie Mae inexorably speeding up on the road’s downhill slope toward the light.
The traffic—including a small truck belonging to Carabella’s Fine Fruit and Produce—beginning to come through the intersection in the other direction.
You see what is going to happen.
You shout to Antoine: Jump!
In the same moment you fumble for the car door handle.
The truck brakes screech.
Your body hits the road, curled, rolling.
You hear the smash of metal on metal.
Chapter 18. Saralinda
Around bedtime that night I think again about Kenyon and how she refused to hear Evangeline and I decide to find information on Huntington’s disease online and send it to the printer so I can show her tomorrow. Also I find a copy of the obituary of Antoine’s father. She will understand that this is not the background of somebody who plays jokes. She will admit that she might be wrong about the fraternity, or that at least she should open her mind about Antoine.
Maybe it is true that when you think about someone they are often also thinking about you because at the very moment I click Print I get a text from Kenyon.
—Where are you?
—Home, I text back. Where does she think I would be at this hour? I consider having the conversation with her now. I could call, but I would rather talk to her about this in person.
—Are you okay?
—Yes, I say, puzzled. Why?
—No reason. You’ll be at school tomorrow?
—Yes of course.
—Text me RIGHT AWAY when you get here? I want to talk.
—Sure. What’s going on?
—It can wait. Good night!
Probably Kenyon also wants to talk about Antoine, which is good. Unless she has found some information about her own theory in which case I will listen because I do have an open mind.
At this point I remember the stuff I sent to the printer for Kenyon so I go out to the living area. It’s dark in our apartment except for the yellow light burning in the crack under my mother’s door and a pulsing red light on the printer, which has run out of paper in the middle of my print job.
I kneel to get more paper and see that a couple of my pages have fallen to the floor, so I fish them out, then load the printer and wait for the rest of my pages. I take everything back to my room.
Now it is time to check my blood sugar before bed and take more insulin if necessary, and while I do that (I do not need to give details, trust me I know what I am doing) I think about a doctor’s appointment when I was maybe twelve. The doctor’s eyebrows stretched high when I explained I wasn’t allowed to carry my own supplies, and he turned to my mother (he was angry). “Saralinda is old enough to start taking care of herself. It’s dangerous not to let her.” My mother fumed all the way home and I felt insulted and stung too, and naturally we never went to that doctor again but now belatedly I realize that yes of course I should always carry supplies. So I decide to put together a kit—glucose meter, insulin, needles, glucose tabs (my mother insists I eat them instead of candy when I am low). There, my body my responsibility.
When my kit is done I start to sort the papers for Kenyon, which is when I see that some of them are my mother’s and I glance at them—quite natural and not snooping, who wouldn’t?
Right away I see that the pages are not about the grant; grants are all research, plans, and budgets and also the background of scientists.
This is the picture of a little girl.
She seems to me maybe three years old and she is Asian and adorable all plump fists and nervous smile and flyaway strands from awkwardly ponytailed hair.
There is also a letter.
Dear Ms. de la Flor,
We are pleased to inform you that your formal paperwork is now complete for Tori’s adoption. The next steps will be easier. Congratulations! We’ll start with a home visit . . .
I read the whole thing and then I read it again and again oh my God.
I am going to have a sister!
Chapter 19. Caleb
You are in a heap by the side of Route 22.
Not twenty feet away, Antoine is slumped over the wheel inside a smashed Ellie Mae, which has spun around to face the wrong direction on the road. Cars have pulled over to the side.
Across the street, people pour out of the McDonald’s.
A small man swings out of the cab of the Carabella’s Fine Fruit and Produce truck, which is not much damaged. He has taken only a few steps toward Ellie Mae and Antoine, when Ellie Mae’s engine explodes.
Chapter 20. Saralinda
Tea parties and hair ribbons and coloring and playing My Little Pony!
Of course I shouldn’t presume what my new little sister is going to like doing, maybe she will want to build LEGO star stations or run crazily in a circle until she’s dizzy, wheeee—whatever she wants is fine with meeee!
As God is my witness, I am going to be the best big sister there ever was.
“This is Tori,” I say to Georgia and hold up her picture.
I read the letter again. Tori is a bright, cheery girl, who smiles often and is very loving.
I imagine myself on my knees, hugging her close.
The letter also says that Tori is partly deaf, and possibly has some learning disabilities also. Because of this apparently the agency had trouble finding a home for her, there was a three-month trial placement that ended in disappointment—my heart twists, poor Tori, can you imagine how horrible for her?
But then my mother stepped up. My heart swells with love for my mother, if anybody can take loving excellent care of a child with disabilities it is she. That is an absolute fact, and I will be present to moderate things when necessary if she overdoes it. Maybe she won’t. I understand that overprotective parents often calm down after the first child.
Tori and I will have looks in common too although in a weird way, simply that neither of us looks very much like our mother. In my case I have brown eyes and hair and my skin always looks tanned. My mother is paler than me and she has blue eyes. She dyes her hair reddish, which is unconvincing to be honest, but she is gray underneath, her hair was brown originally like mine. She keeps saying she wants us to do that genetic test where you get detailed information but we have not done it.
I want to rush to her waving the letter and screaming with happiness (and also demanding to know why she didn’t tell me this was happening). But I soon realize I must allow her to surprise me as she obviously intends.
I am so excited. Georgia and I walk around and around and around my room I cannot keep still, and I am having another reaction too. Shock disappointment anger at being excluded, and als
o a sneaky nasty thought about being replaced which is totally unworthy and disrespectful of my mother, I am after all very much loved like I said.
Still her secrecy dismays me until I have a chance to think more about why and then I kind of get it. Adoption takes a long time and might not work out and my mother wanted to spare me from the uncertainty.
Then I realize something else which is a small but fun thing: that the cold sesame noodles truly were a celebration, and maybe my mother would have told me about Tori tonight except for the grant. It is just like my mother to decide to focus on the grant and celebrate with me later.
Also for Tori’s sake we now need more money obviously, children are expensive, worth it but costly especially if they have issues like me and Tori. Issues are expensive.
Obviously I must learn sign language, and luckily Rockland Academy offers it. I wonder if it is too late to swap it in and drop French.
More ideas come to me such as the realization that in the future my mother will focus mostly on Tori. The lesson is this:
My mother was working the same problem as me, in her own way, about how things had changed in our family now that I am a teenager. If I had trusted her more and been open and compassionate, she might have told me about trying to adopt and then we could have hoped together and today we could have received the good news about Tori together.
Instead now I am stuck with waiting until my mother tells me herself.
Which means I need to put the papers back under the printer like I never saw them, which I do.
But I take a picture of them first so that later I can look at my phone and know it is not just a dream.
Oh my God such good news!
Chapter 21. Caleb
You stay in the woods where you crawled, adjacent to the McDonald’s parking lot. You see no point in moving. You see no point in doing anything at all. You clutch Antoine’s copy of Dracula. You must have grabbed it on your way out of the car. You don’t remember reaching for it.
You saved a book. Not Antoine.
Time passes.
People and vehicles come.
People and vehicles go.
You stay where you are.
Hours pass as you stay shrunken down in the scrub and the dirt.
Sometimes you think: In a minute I will get up. In a minute I will go to the police. There they are, right there. In a minute I will tell them I was with Antoine. In a minute I will tell them about his mother. I will say that the brakes stopped working. I will ask them to investigate.
Antoine’s mother must have done something.
But she was in her house. And how would somebody engineer what happened with the light changing and the produce truck?
They couldn’t.
In any event you do not get up, you do not move, as the police shut down the McDonald’s and shoo away the shocked crowds, and the police go too, and the ambulance with the body bag. Only one body bag. Nobody but Antoine has been killed or hurt.
Antoine would be glad about that.
At least Ellie Mae is still nearby, still with you, pulled off the road into the McDonald’s lot. She is a skeletal, smoking husk. Beneath glaring lights, a tow truck and four men work over her. One of the men strokes Ellie Mae with a gentle gloved hand in a spot where a defiant orange paint patch remains. Then he attaches a hook and chain.
Antoine would want you to stay with Ellie Mae until the end.
Maybe you will stay here until you die.
Your phone buzzes with a text. Again. Again again again. When it buzzed the first time, a long time ago, it said: This is Evangeline. Where are you guys??? You have not read her other texts. This is bad, you know. She is worried. You will respond in a minute. You will.
The tow truck pulls away with Ellie Mae.
You could get up now.
You don’t.
Evangeline calls, a call not a text, but you don’t answer, and then after some time passes, Kenyon texts you (you know it’s her because she says so), and you don’t answer her either. You want to, or at least you want to want to. But your hands won’t do what your brain tells them. You are alone now, alone with Antoine’s copy of Dracula, which is now your copy of Dracula. Alone in the dark. Alone, except for the traffic.
Alone is what you like. Alone is where you belong.
Antoine said, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you, Caleb.
You wish you could believe it.
You pull out your knife that Antoine mocked. The blade is sharp and strong, though small. You test the blade against your fingertip. Your blood is warm.
Antoine should be alive, not you.
What if you had grabbed him when the brakes first failed, opened your car door, and yanked him out after you?
A beat-up Kia pulls into the now-deserted McDonald’s lot and stops beneath one of the lights. Two girls get out, both medium height. One of them cups her hands around her mouth and shouts your name.
Kenyon. Distantly, you recognize her, and then Evangeline.
“Caleb!” Kenyon calls again.
“We know you’re here!” Evangeline shouts. “I tracked your GPS signal!”
If anyone could and would figure out how to do that, you think, it would be Evangeline.
“Unless you’re dead too, get out here!” Evangeline calls.
Well, you were going to have to talk to her eventually.
You wipe your bleeding finger on the inside of a pocket and shove the knife away. You lurch to your feet. You stumble out into the parking lot.
At least you don’t have to tell them about Antoine. You read enough of Evangeline’s texts to know that she already knows.
You come to a stop in front of them. In front of Evangeline.
You blurt, “I should have saved him.”
She stares at you with a frozen face.
“I should have found a way. If I’d thought faster. There should have been something I could do.”
“Oh, God,” Kenyon murmurs. Her eyes close for a second and she puts a hand on your shoulder.
You shake it off.
You say to Evangeline, “You told me to take care of him. You told me.”
Evangeline’s face remains still. Then she shrugs, like she doesn’t care.
“So when he died?” she says. “At that exact moment, or at least near to it? I was looking at summer frocks.” Her voice is filled with self-loathing. “My stepmother sent me the link. Spencer’s thoughtful like that. Always trying to bond. Frocks.”
The three of you stand there, Evangeline leaning on the Kia, you clutching Dracula, and Kenyon with her arms crossed in front of her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t answer your texts,” you say.
“We figured you were dead too,” Kenyon says.
“Just in case you care what we were thinking,” says Evangeline.
You never thought anyone would worry about you. “Oh.”
“Only there wasn’t any mention of you on the news,” Kenyon says. “Just Antoine. Didn’t you talk to the police?”
You explain what happened. You add, “Then I just—I sat. I knew I should get up but . . . but I didn’t. I couldn’t—I couldn’t.”
“Like maybe if you didn’t move,” Kenyon says softly, “it wouldn’t be real after all.”
You give her a startled glance. Then you keep going.
“The brakes failed,” you say. “In the car. That was what happened. Then we ran a red light and a truck hit us and—and then the explosion.”
“The brakes did not fail.” Evangeline shakes her head. “Antoine took care of his car like a baby!”
“They did,” you say. “Antoine said so.”
“The car was old,” Kenyon says. “Accidents happen.”
“Really?” Evangeline snarls. “Caleb, what about Antoine’s mother? Did you s
ee her? What happened?”
They are both looking at you.
“We saw her,” you say finally. “But not to talk to. She wouldn’t let us in. She didn’t touch the car, though. I know what you’re thinking because I was thinking it too, but she didn’t leave her house. She’d changed the locks. We stood outside, and Antoine shouted at her.” You pause. “Sometimes brakes fail, right?”
Evangeline shakes her head. “Not on Ellie Mae.” Her eyes burn. “It was his mother. It was Gabrielle. Somehow she did it, just like she did the carriage house, and we have to figure out how, and we have to do something about it! She can’t be allowed to get away with it. She can’t!”
Her hands fist. “Promise me. Promise me you guys will help me. Help me get her. She almost killed you two, after all. Even if you won’t do it for Antoine, do it for yourselves!”
Do it for yourselves.
“I’ll do it for Antoine,” you say.
Chapter 22. Saralinda
In the morning my alarm jolts me awake, I am stunned that I slept because what I remember is my eyes wide in the dark and my brain total chaos. I stagger into the shower and grip the handicapped rail. My brain is all Tori Tori Tori and also what I learned yesterday about Antoine having Huntington’s which my mind wants to wince away from (too painful), but I breathe it in with the steam of the water because it’s real. Also real: Evangeline who is not simply shellacked perfection and knifelike brain the way I thought, her veneer thick but intended to protect vulnerable insides, it turns out. I get that.
After all, life is hard sometimes, also surprising shocking unfair sweet—all beauty and terror. Our hearts need to be brave however, and what we have to do is put ourselves out there even if it means we could be crushed.
I hope I can be brave like that I don’t know.
Anyway, for now I have other concerns too, I am going to have a sister and help Antoine all I can and tentatively I can now say that I have two friends, Kenyon and Evangeline. Which wow.