THE EARTH DIDN’T SEEM AS firm under my feet that day. That should have been my first warning.
After wiring the six hundred thousand dollars to Nina’s malnourished bank account, she texted me the name of a café across the road and said that he would be there at noon. It allowed me plenty of wiggle room to get to the Hamptons on time. Even if the traffic was insane, the roads were blocked, and the weather was against me.
“I’m taking the rest of the day off. If anyone asks where I am, just say hell,” I said to Sue, shutting my laptop and walking past the reception area. I shouldered myself into my Valentino tropical print coat. Sue gave me a sidelong look, and flashed me a smile of the eat-shit variety.
“Have a good weekend, Mr. Cole.”
“You too, Miss Pearson.” Fuck her. She wanted to do last names, I was game. Nothing bothered me anymore. Sue was nothing but white noise at this point.
I powerwalked my way to the café across the street. The rain was PMSing that day. Furious as fuck. Not half as much as I was probably about to be, but yeah. The minute I pushed the door open and the overhead bell rang it took me back to The Black Hole and to Rosie, so I managed to draw in a deep breath. I was optimistic about Nina not joining us. She got what she needed and had nothing else to coerce me with. She probably forgot my name by this point. Wishful thinking, and all.
The café was crammed with businessmen and women trying to grab a sandwich on their lunch break, so at first, I skimmed the room through skeptic eyes, wondering how in the hell we were going to recognize each other. Maybe I should have mentioned that I was big on eccentric designer clothes. There was no overlooking my sick jacket.
I walked past the bar and started looking into people’s faces, plates, phone screens, desperate to catch someone who might resemble me.
Three young men in suits. Nope.
Two students sipping coffee with their MacBooks. Next.
An eighty-year-old guy in a three-piece-suit. Like hell. He wasn’t Nina’s taste.
A thirty-something woman who returned a gaze and smiled red and bright at me. Sorry, sweetheart. Happily taken.
My eyes were frantic, begging to find a suitable suspect, and my heart was doing that thing it did when Rosie took off her clothes before we got into bed.
Then I recognized a head of thick gray hair that made my eyebrows dive down and a chuckle leave my lips.
“Dad?” I walked to a small table at the corner of the room. My dad, Eli Cole, sat there, staring into a coffee cup. “Jesus. You’re in town? Why didn’t you say? Is that about the Farlon case?” I asked.
He looked up from his coffee and stood up, but didn’t say a thing.
Not a goddamn thing.
No.
No, no, no, no, no.
I took a step back.
“Where’s Nina?” I asked. I was crazy, right? The kind of sick, twisted shit that went through my mind when I assumed Rosie was cheating on me when she was actually at the hospital. My dad was happily married to my mom when Nina got knocked up. Maybe my biological dad bailed at the last minute, and Eli was here to pick up the pieces.
“Sit,” he said.
“No.” I couldn’t feel my face. “Tell me why the fuck you are here and where is Nina.”
“Language, Dean.”
“Fuck your language, Dad.” I righted myself using a back of a chair. “What’s going on?”
Panic ran in my blood. This couldn’t mean what I thought it had meant. Dad inched closer and put his hand on my shoulder. His squeeze wasn’t as firm as it usually was.
“I wanted to tell you when you were in Todos Santos for Thanksgiving…”
“No.” I laughed, embarrassed. I pushed him away, feeling like someone punched my nose from the inside of my head. His back hit the wall, and his shoulder bumped into a woman who stood in line and gave us a pointed look. “My life is not a fucking soap opera, and you didn’t fuck Nina while you were married to Mom.” I said that as a statement, but obviously, this too was wishful thinking. He put his hands up in surrender. “There’s a lot to talk about, son. You should sit down.”
“Stop telling me to fucking sit down!” I raised my voice, smacking his table with both palms.
Eleven years ago, Donald Whittaker was finally admitted to the ER after two days of excruciating pain to help him get over the broken nose, two fractured ribs, and several cuts I had caused. He wasn’t insured, so Owl and Nina had to pay a ton for his hospital stay. What he didn’t know was that the only thing that separated him from death was the preacher’s daughter, Tiffany.
Eleven years later, and I wondered who would be the designated Tiffany to save me from doing something to my dad. Something I couldn’t take back. Because I wanted to fuck something up real good. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to use my girlfriend’s body as an outlet this time.
“There’s an explanation for all of this.” His voice was so low he almost whispered. People stared at us through rims of coffee cups. Dad grabbed me by the bicep and tried to pull me into the seat in front of his chair. I didn’t budge.
“Tell me it’s a mistake, Eli.” The coldness in my voice sent goosebumps down my body.
“It is not a mistake.” Eli narrowed his eyes, still composed, still firm, still himself. “You were not a mistake.”
I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to feel. I didn’t know why my mom was still married to him when he obviously fucked her older sister.
And then it hit me like a speeding truck. I was him.
I was the douchebag who did this. Who came between two sisters. That asshole I flipped the hate switch on? I had all the potential to be him.
“This is how you break it to me?” I spat.
“You shut me down every time I tried getting through to you.”
Jesus Christ.
“You’re dead to me.” And in that moment, it was the truth. “Fucking. Dead. Don’t call me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t even think about me. I won’t be thinking of you.” Then I stormed to the door and slammed it behind me, bolting to the nearest bar on the block.
I tapped my fist three times over the counter.
“Bartender. Brandy.”
And blacked out.
My eyes fluttered open and I groaned, reaching with my hand to touch my temple. There was an annoying sound buzzing in my ear. It sounded like an old car trying to pull through a journey it wasn’t meant to do anymore. That was when my eyes grew wide, and I realized I had tubes tucked into my veins. IV drops next to me. Bright room. Fluorescent lights. The whole big hospital show.
Story of my life, and I’m getting tired of the angsty plotline.
“What’s going on?” I coughed, even though I had no indication that someone else was there. My fuzzy vision got clearer with every blink. The room was scorching hot, and I wondered who tampered with the thermostat. It was hot and humid enough to fry bacon on my forehead. Mmmm, bacon. I was hungry. That was a good sign, surely.
The machine. It kept on doing that noise that seemed to scrape on my nerves.
Phhhhhhsttttt. Phhhhhhsttt. Phhhhhhsst.
Someone seriously needed to turn it off before I went all Hulk on it.
“You’re at the hospital.” I heard my sister’s voice before I felt her warm hand on mine. Even though I was sweating, my skin still felt bitter-cold against her flesh. I lolled my head to the side, squeezed my eyes shut, and opened them again so I could look at her. My parents were sitting by her side. Three wide-eyed faces, inspecting me like an animal at the zoo.
Her lips came down to my cheek, fluttering over it. “How are you feeling?”
“Better than I look, I’m guessing by your stares. Why am I here?”
I remembered most of what happened. I remembered pounding on the door to that house in the Hamptons until the skin on my knuckles split open. I remembered calling and texting Dean. I remembered hailing a taxi while shivering in the rain. But I don’t remember what happened next. My anxiety attack came back in full swing and I must’ve fainted or something.
“Who brought me here?” I coughed out every word.
“The taxi driver.”
Oh. I felt like a complete idiot for asking the next question.
“Where is Dean?”
Millie looked at Mama, Mama looked at Daddy, and Daddy looked out the window.
“We don’t know.” Millie munched on her lips. “Vicious is trying to get ahold of him. We flew in the minute we heard.”
I looked around me. I didn’t recognize the room, which meant that it wasn’t Lenox Hill Hospital. We were more than two hours away from Manhattan. And in Manhattan, they didn’t have that machine, with that terrible, terrible noise.
“You have a serious lung infection.” Mama pushed Millie aside and sat on my bed. She took my hand in hers. I almost whimpered at the gesture. I pressed my fingers to her palm, enjoying this brief moment of intimacy. Her face remained tortured. “Your infection has spread, and the fact that you caught a cold didn’t make things better. Your system is weak.”
I patted her hand and mustered a smile. “Don’t worry, Mama. I get lung infections all the time.”
“This time your liver and pancreas are affected, too.” Millie licked her lips, blinking fast. Daddy walked over to the window and pressed his forehead against the glass. Rain pounded on the other side of it, and maybe he did it because he didn’t want us to see him cry.
“We told you the boy was trouble.” Daddy sighed. He wasn’t angry anymore. Exasperated, maybe. Drained, mostly.
“Now’s not the time,” Millie scolded him.
“You should’ve just come back to Todos Santos.” Mama wiped the tears from her face, and it occurred to me that maybe my biggest problem wasn’t that I didn’t know where Dean was. Because Mama rarely cried, and my father never did. And Millie…? I chanced another glance at her. She nibbled on the dead skin around her finger, fighting tears, too.
“Can someone turn off that machine?” I changed the subject, trying to lighten the mood. “You know? The one that sounds like it’s about to explode in a second,” I barked out an awkward laugh.
Millie looked up from her round belly and inhaled before she opened her mouth. “That’s your lungs, Rosie.”
I clamped my mouth shut and listened carefully. Crap. It was my lungs. They wheezed every time I drew a tender breath.
Phhhssssstttt. Phhhhsssstttt. Phhhssstttt.
“I don’t get it,” I muttered. “I’m fine. Really.”
Was I? I tried to sit up in bed, but my back ached and my lungs burned. Millie darted up and helped me, rearranging the pillows behind my back as Mama held me by the shoulders so I wouldn’t fall backwards. My eyes zoomed to my feet, and I swallowed, thinking back to what Dr. Hasting told me in one of our very first meetings.
“You can live a fulfilled, happy life, Rosie. If you play your cards right and take care of yourself. Most cystic fibrosis patients die of long-term lung complications and become disabled as time goes by, but if you do your exercise, intensive physiotherapy, and take your medicine, you should be fine.”
Was my health taking a wrong turn? Riding the road to lung complications, taking a curve in the direction of disability? I definitely didn’t feel like I held the power over my body. That scared me, even more than the idea of death.
When Mama released me to sit on the bed with my back against the pillows, my eyes darkened. I no longer tried to pacify them. It was time for them to pacify me.
“Can we get you anything, Rosie-bug? Maybe chocolate?” Mama’s contrived smile felt like an insult. It was painful to see her try so hard. No wonder they begged me to move back to Todos Santos. It took me exactly four short months to let myself deteriorate since Dean and I happened and find myself pounding on locked doors in the middle of the pouring rain, waiting on Ruckus to open up his heart.
Stupid girl. The words floated in my mind, just like they did all those months ago, after we had sex for the first time. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
“I’m good, thanks,” I said, just as Vicious swaggered into the room. The fact that he was there in the first place took me by surprise. My health really was in the shitter if Vicious dropped by to say goodbye. He tucked his phone into his dress pants and leaned down, kissing Millie on the forehead. My heart squeezed.
“Dr. Hasting is on her way. She’s cutting her vacation short,” he said to no one in particular, but we all mumbled our thanks. I thought she was out of town on a family emergency, but maybe the emergency was taking a break from people like me.
Vicious looked up and asked, “How are you doing, Rose?”
“I’ll live.” I laughed bitterly. “I mean, you know. Or not.”
“Dean’s MIA,” he admitted, raising one eyebrow and looking at Emilia, as if asking for her permission to continue. She gave him a faint nod.
“You can tell me. I’m a big girl.”
Even if I don’t look like one. Even if I didn’t act like one by recklessly standing in the rain waiting on Dean.
Vicious rubbed the back of his neck and blew out air. “No one’s heard from him since Friday morning. So, a little over twenty-four hours.”
Good. I hoped he was dead.
No. No, I did not.
Worry gnawed at my gut. What happened with his father? What happened with Nina? Why did he slip under the radar, and at what point was I going to shake myself off of the loyalty I had for him and focus on myself?
“No one cares about Dean.” Millie bared her teeth, standing up and holding the back of her chair. “And if he shows up here, I will give him a piece of my mind.”
“Dude.” I coughed, and everyone stopped and looked at me, waiting for me to finish. My whole face reddened before I managed to stop the flow of dry barks. “Make sure he’s okay first. Find out that he is healthy, and then give him a piece of your mind.”
“And if he wants to see you?” she asked.
“If he comes here walking, no, thank you. On a stretcher? Yes, please.”
“Glad you still have your sense of humor.” Her nostrils flared. “Now quit joking around and get some rest.”
She didn’t need to ask me twice. Ten minutes later, I was fast asleep again, tucked securely in the arms of unconsciousness and painkillers. And even though the voices around me were muffled and the light in the room didn’t keep me up, the sound of my life slipping away played in the background as my lungs fought for air.
Phhhhhhhsssttttt. Phhhhssssssttttt. Phhhhhssssssttttt.