Chapter Ten:
About Taking Risks
“Cameron?” I was so confused, and I was so tired. I was sure my eyes were playing tricks on me, making me see what I wanted to see most.
After a dazed second, I turned the switch of my ballerina and confirmed the apparition.
“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he whispered.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” I confessed.
A rush of joy—and relief—filled me. I was suddenly wide awake and energized, but I kept my composure, as far as I knew.
Cameron stood on the threshold, debating. When he made up his mind, he advanced to my bedside. He looked like he had been dragged to hell and back. His clothes were crumpled and he had dark circles under his eyes; he was his other, older self.
We stared at each other for an awkward while. I gazed up, he gazed down. His lips were pressed together tightly, and his face was hard, unreadable.
It upset me to see him like that. Whatever he found in my face displeased him too.
“You haven’t been sleeping,” he accused.
I shrugged innocently and wiped my hair away from my face. A speckle of warmth reached his eyes.
He brought his hands to his face and rubbed it with exhaustion. When he reappeared, the warmth had spread to the top of his cheeks, and his shoulders had seemed to relax a bit, like he was slowly defrosting. I exhaled.
“Is everyone back?” I asked him, listening for the shuffles and banging of doors.
The house was dead quiet.
“No. I came back early,” he admitted. “It’s just me.” He gave me a tired smile. The square of his jaw and his dark eyes stood out under the shaded light of my ballerina.
A radiant smile escaped me before I had time to measure it and scale it down to normal, then I took a gamble … and scooted over so that he could sit down.
Fatigued, he took me up on my offer without hesitation. Embarrassed silence fell upon us.
My head was propped up on my elbow, my eyes watching him; Cameron sat with his back to me, his head veering from one side of the room to the next, resting with interest on the bedside table. When he reached over, I followed his movement. My gaze reached my brother’s ID card before his hand did.
It was too late to try to hide it, so I had to anxiously await his reaction. I was expecting to get in trouble for snooping around.
He glanced over the picture, chuckled, and shook his head as if he remembered some private joke. I exhaled again.
“I see you kept yourself busy while I was gone.” His voice was calm. He put the card back where he had found it and turned to me.
“You were gone a long time,” I reminded him.
“Yeah. Things took longer than I thought they would.”
My arm was too tired to hold up my head. I grabbed the pillow from the other side of the bed and folded it under my head. “What kind of things?”
“Just business stuff,” he said with a yawn.
“Like what?”
“Inventory, orders, negotiating prices …” He sighed. “You know … normal business stuff.”
“I know that whatever stuff you’re involved in, there’s nothing normal about it,” I blurted. “I mean, I know that your business,” I amended with emphasis, “involves some or maybe a lot of illegal stuff.” It didn’t sound any better the second time around.
“Oh?” He arched his eyebrows and took interest. “How do you know this?”
In my mind, I replayed what Griff had noted to me, and tried to make it sound like it was something I would have come up with all on my own. “I’m not blind. I see the armed men walking around.”
“That just proves that I’m taking every measure possible to keep everyone safe.”
“From what? Lions? Tigers?”
“… and bears,” he finished for me.
“What about your lineup of fancy cars in the garage?” I probed. “I imagine that most of those cars were probably stolen.” Again, this was Griff talking through me.
“Actually, none of those cars are mine.” He smiled faintly but his eyes were tensed.
“Whose are they then?”
He seemed to consider this. “Well, I guess they’re your cars, now.”
“Mine?” Maybe I had misheard.
“As next of kin,” he confirmed. “They used to belong to your brother. They’re all yours now.” He smirked and added coldly, “Bill bought those cash, special order. Nothing here is stolen.”
I flushed, realizing that my insinuation had insulted him, more than he was letting on. “So, you’re saying that you’re not involved in any illegitimate business.”
His face became somber. “No, that’s not what I’m saying.”
“You deal with things like drugs, guns—” I prompted.
“Emmy,” he implored before I could get too carried away, “please don’t take offense. But I really don’t want to talk about that with you.” His eyes locked with mine, begging.
“Okay,” I agreed gently. I wasn’t offended. I was just happy that he had put a limit on that, and not everything all together. “How does one get into that … profession?”
I was treading lightly, unclear as to what was off limits.
He closed his eyes and rolled his neck and shoulders. “You mean, why didn’t I become a lawyer, or a doctor?”
“Or an astronaut, or a philosopher,” I assisted.
His russet eyes flashed to me. “Philosopher?”
I bit my lip and looked away. “For example.”
“Is philosophy even a profession?”
I frowned and glared.
“A lot of important people have made philosophy their life’s work.”
“Yeah, like ten thousand years ago,” he chuckled, then stopped. “Aren’t you pre-law?”
I didn’t remember telling him that, though I tended to be too self-conscious around him to remember anything I told him.
“It was just an example,” I insisted.
“There isn’t much money in that,” he told me in a protective kind of way.
“Are you going to answer my question?” I fumed.
“Don’t philosophers spend their days sitting around and thinking about life while they starve to death?”
I sighed with annoyance, waiting for the prolonged rant to be over. I couldn’t expect him to understand. I was pre-law because it was the only full scholarship I could get at Callister U. I didn’t mind my law classes, my grades were good, but my father was a lawyer, and so was his father before him, and his father’s father before that. One way or another, I would be forced to follow in the Sheppard path of rectitude. That didn’t mean I had to like it.
Cameron kicked off his shoes, lifted his legs on the bed and slid next to me. He laid his head on the pillow, laced his hands behind his head and gazed at the ceiling. “Philosopher,” he mused to himself with a chuckle.
His closeness was enough for me to forget my aggravation. I took a deep breath, his scent becoming familiar to me. “Did you pick your profession solely based on money?”
This brought him back to reality. “Yeah. I did.” His face was bleak.
Oh. I blushed.
“Do you like what you do?”
“What do you think?”
I wasn’t sure what I was thinking but I was thrilled that he was taking part in the interrogation. “Well, I suppose you make a lot of money doing it.”
“Money isn’t everything.”
He was full of contradictions—I was confused. “I thought you said you chose to do this for the money?”
“I said I did,” he repeated. “I think you and I both know that I have more money than I know what to do with. If it were still only about money, I would have quit a long time ago.”
“So why don’t you just stop doing it then? Take your money and get out?”
He hesitated and looked at me with worry.
I took a breath.
“I’m just curious,” I whispered.
“I know.”
He sighed and stared at the ceiling. “I can’t just run away from it. Once you’re in, you’re in it for life. If you try to leave, people become suspicious. They think that you’re either talking to the cops or you’re changing your affiliation.”
“Who cares what people think?”
“People who talk, who leave, get hunted down and killed.”
I tried as best I could to hide the shudder that was fermenting at the nape of my neck.
Cameron yawned and swept his hand over his face again. I wondered if his weariness made him more tolerant of my questions, made him answer them without editing or sugar-coating. I felt like I was taking advantage of him—a small tinge of guilt lingered—but my thirst for information overpowered.
“Why don’t you just run away? You have enough money to hide yourself, protect yourself, don’t you?”
“Because they won’t just kill you. They’ll kill your family, your friends, everyone you know … then they’ll kill you. There’s no such thing as running away.”
I gulped. “Who are they?”
“The people I work with.” He turned his head and looked at me pleadingly. “Change of subject?”
I let it go out of guilt but also out of relief to leave this line of questioning. Even I had to admit that it was too much information—more than I could swallow.
I took a second and continued the interview, “Tell me about your family.”
He smiled but his eyes were cautious. “What do you want to know?”
Everything. “For starters, what does your mother do for a living?”
“She drinks,” he answered promptly.
Okay. “What about your dad?”
He cringed and stalled. “I don’t like to talk about my father.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s … not a very nice person,” he said, struggling.
“Neither are my parents,” I said.
“It’s not the same thing. My father’s a con artist.”
“Can you tell me about him?” I murmured. “Please?”
He closed his eyes. “When I lived with my mom, my dad would come strolling in every couple months with his expensive suits and big cars, while my mom and I lived in dumps. The small amount of cash my dad did give to my mom she drank away. When I went to live with my dad, I thought that things were finally going to get better. But my dad was … he wasn’t who I thought he was. His money was not his own. He hung out with rich people, pretended he had money so that he could swindle old ladies out of their money …”
His tired voice had started trailing.
“He must have had some money to put you through private school,” I pressed for more.
“When I first came to live with him, he didn’t know what to do with me. Eventually though, he figured out that he could use me too. He put me in that private school and showed up once in a while with some woman who’d have money but no husband. Then he’d put on the rich, father-of-the-year act. It worked like a charm; they trusted him … he stole all their lifesavings and disappeared. The payments to the school would stop after that.”
His voice was so faded, I could barely hear him. “What happened then?”
“The school sent me to live in a group home.”
“Wow.” This made me angry.
Cameron plunged his head deeper into the pillow. “He always came back sooner or later, usually when he was getting low on cash. He’d put me back in school so that he could start the show all over again. When I got older, the cops assumed that I was his partner in crime, ’cause he kept coming back to find me, and I was the only one the women could identify. I turned fourteen, my dad disappeared again, and I got thrown in juvi when I couldn’t tell the cops where he was hiding. That’s when I met Spider, and we cooked up a plan to sell drugs to the rich kids I went to school with. Within a month of getting back from juvi, I was making my own payments to the school and never had to depend on my dad’s stolen money again.”
“What happened to your dad?”
“I don’t know. He came back once with some woman. I didn’t want to be associated with him and get thrown back into juvi. I told him to stay away; I never saw him again after that.”
His breathing had become slower, deeper. I took another second.
“Cameron?” I called out softly.
“Hmm … ?”
“Was my brother happy?”
He considered this. “Most days …”
I held my breath.
“Do you think he knew he was going to die?”
There was a long pause.
“Cameron?”
“ … I really wish I knew, Emmy …” he said with a long sigh.
After a minute, he was asleep.
He snored, just a little bit, like a subdued Darth Vader.
I carefully reached over him, feeling the heat that radiated from his skin, and clicked off the lamp. I lay there for a while, next to him, listening to his calm, even breaths, watching his chest rise and fall in the shadows. I was exhausted. Having him there, so close, was strangely peaceful, but it didn’t help me relax. I could feel every muscle in my body tiredly tingle. When half an hour had gone by, I started to wrestle with the sheets again. I was afraid of waking him.
I considered … decided, listened vigilantly. When I was sure he was in a deep sleep, I extended my hand … and very slowly slid it under his. I clasped our fingers. In an unconscious reflex, his hand squeezed mine. I inhaled and I exhaled, and finally, finally I fell asleep.
We were woken up in the morning by the commotion of incoming guards downstairs. I had awoken a few seconds before Cameron, carefully peeling my hand away from his before he realized what I had done. My hand suddenly felt cold, unnatural, like it was missing a finger.
The front door slammed shut.
Cameron shot out of bed like a bullet and stood, disoriented, panting, every muscle of his body tightly clenched, like body armor.
“It’s okay, Cameron,” I gasped. I was scared of him, for him.
He turned abruptly toward my voice. His face was ominous.
I smiled softly and waited for him to come back.
He kept his eyes on me. He blinked. His fists loosened. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, ran his fingers through his hair, and scratched his head, breathing with purpose. After a long second, he turned. A forced smile had crept across his face.
“Good morning.” My voice croaked a little. I swallowed the sadness of him away.
“Mornin’,” he answered gruffly. His cheeks flushed, and his hair went every which way. He was beautiful again.
I sighed with gratitude.
“I thought you said that you don’t sleep?”
“I don’t … usually,” he replied with a sheepish smile.
The bedroom door was still ajar, the way Cameron had left it during the night. Meatball was already downstairs, likely taking on the routine of his food inspection duties.
Cameron and I stepped down the stairs together. Spider and Carly were walking in through the front door. Spider grimaced as soon as he saw us. Carly turned to him. “Told you he’d be here,” she muttered loud enough for us to hear.
Spider wasn’t laughing when he turned to Cameron. “Is there a reason why you weren’t answering your phone? You could’ve at least left us a note, man. We had no idea where you went.”
Cameron cleared his throat, looked like he was about to respond, peeked at me, and flushed a little more. Guards carrying boxes were lining up at the doorway, and being halted behind Spider and Carly, who were blocking their procession. Carly moved ahead to let them through. Spider followed her, ensuring to throw a glare at me before he disappeared through the kitchen.
Some of the guards’ gaze flashed toward the stairs in our direction as they walked through.
Cameron sparked a small discreet smile my way and ran down the rest of the stairs. He walked out the door, passing Griff on his way out.
“Hey, Ginger,” greeted a chipper Griff. He peered at me over the box of frozen dinners he was carrying. He paused at the door to take off his shoes, balancing the box at the same time. Cameron was walking off the front stoop. His head momentarily spun toward Griff, but he kept walking to the awaiting vans.
Griff eyed me top to bottom. “Did you just get up?” he asked in passing and continued into the kitchen. I realized with mortification that I was still wearing my pajamas—my uncool Mickey Mouse flannel pajamas.
Back in Cameron’s room, I was walking on air, setting a new record for my morning routine. Then I bounced back down the stairs and into the kitchen where Rocco was busy putting the groceries away. Cameron, Carly, and Spider were sitting at the kitchen table, murmuring over paperwork. Cameron, who was also freshly showered and dressed, snuck a look as I walked into the kitchen. He grinned very quickly, and bent his head back over the documents in front of him before Spider and Carly ever noticed the momentary lapse of attention. I smiled to myself and helped Rocco put the groceries away, tucking them in whatever free space we could find.
I fixed myself a bowl of cereal, even if it was already past lunchtime. Not wanting to disturb the business meeting and feel Spider’s resentment, I strolled to the back deck, where I sat to eat breakfast alone.
The sky was gray. The air was still and muggy. A storm was brewing.
I watched the dark clouds billowing above, threatening rain for the day. Under them, the far-reaching forest was harshly calm, and a thin layer of fog draped the treetops. I closed my eyes and took a long-winded inhalation; the smell of the mossy dampness of the woods that surrounded me was a newfound reassurance, as if the blanket of greenery was keeping the storm from ever really reaching me. An uncanny reaction for a city girl, I thought.
When Cameron came to sit next to me, he put his feet on the table, and we watched the dark sky, while the clouds debated whether to burst or keep moving.
He was next to me, but he was far away.
I turned to glimpse him just as a drop splashed against his forehead.
“Why didn’t you listen to me?” he asked, his voice distant. He rolled his head and kept my eyes. “When I told you to stay away from the projects, why did you still come back?”
If his eyes hadn’t been locked with mine, if my brain worked when he was near me, if I was able to lie to him, I could have come up with a million plausible excuses. Except that I couldn’t lie to him, but I couldn’t tell him the truth either. Was I even sure what the truth was, exactly? I broke the dazzle and practiced pulling on the thread that was unraveling from my shorts while my cheeks turned a deep shade of red.
When I looked up, Cameron had turned his attention back to the sky. He was far away again. My lack of response had been enough of an answer for him?
After a short while, steady droplets of rain started coming down.