Page 62 of Rebel

He chuckled, clearly happy to finally be able to talk about her with someone. “She was also small for her age and delicate, I guess she got that from her father’s side.”

“I know it’s not polite to ask, but did she have learning disabilities, like your parents said?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe she had some problems, but as a kid I didn’t really notice. She was smarter than me in a lot of ways.”

I quietly asked, “What happened around the time you were eleven or twelve, Richie?”

“They said she had an accident and passed away. But I knew that was a lie because there was no funeral, no gravesite, and I overheard my stepfather arguing with someone on the phone that there was no use visiting because she was never going to amount to anything anyway. He said she was deformed, and my mom couldn’t handle seeing her anymore.”

“Did you tell him that you wanted to continue visiting her?”

“Yeah, I told him that I heard the conversation he had with her doctor, and he called me a liar, and said I was weak for getting attached to cripple, a girl one step away from being a vegetable.”

“Holy shit! Wasn’t that the summer your mom ended up in a psychiatric hospital? I’d forgotten about that.”

“Yeah, when nothing I said changed his mind, I tore the house apart in a fit of rage. I broke anything I could get my hands on. My stepfather tried everything to get me to stop. He grounded me to my room, but I trashed it too. Every time he let me out to eat or go to the bathroom, I kept raging. He tried bribing me, begging me, and finally guilting me by saying that I had driven my mom crazy.”

“Do you know where she is?” I asked with bated breath. “If you do, we can go get her.”

“They moved her. I went there half a dozen times as a kid, until they finally showed me her empty room. I begged them to tell me where she was, but they said they weren’t allowed. After that, I just lost interest in living for a while. As a teen, I drank toomuch, took drugs, did anything to make me forget I had a sister that I loved, and that my parents made her disappear.”

“Jesus, Richie. I’m so sorry.

“So am I. My mother died thinking I was a bad apple, a drug addict, and that I didn’t love her anymore.

He looked down and picked at a scab on his arm. “Anyway, that’s why I broke into your house. A long time ago, I got word from one of our cousins, Sarah, that my mom had left a letter for me with your parents. It was supposed to be delivered to me if anything happened to her, only that never happened because by then most of the family had disowned me.”

“This makes a lot of sense. I thought it was weird that you broke in but didn’t steal anything. Why did you wait so long to look for it? Come to think of it, why didn’t you just ask my mom for the letter? She probably would have given it to you.”

“My poor little innocent Lacey. You still have such a good view of the world. Me? I didn’t ask because I didn’t think she’d give it to me, since she’s been holding onto it for like eight years.”

“Why go looking for it now?” came a gruff voice from the far side of the room. It was Eric and he’d laser-focused on our conversation.

Richie turned to gaze out the window. “It started to feel like I was growing closer and closer to dying and I wanted to die knowing that I did everything I could to find Debbie.”

I suggested soothingly, “Maybe she got adopted by a nice family and has been living a good life?”

“I’d like to think that’s true, but every time I visited her in the facility, the place smelled like urine and her room looked like no one was cleaning it or taking proper care of her. The part that’s been driving me mad is worrying that she’s all alone with no one to care for her in another shitty care home or someplace worse.”

Turning to look at me, he said, “The situation makes me so damn mad, and I feel powerless to do anything about it. I think my stepfather talked crap to everyone in our family so no one would want anything to do with me or believe a word I had to say about my sister.”

I patted his hand, feeling unable to do anything else.

Eric stepped forward. “Come on, dude. We’re gonna take a nice walk.”

“What? No way. They said I couldn’t leave. I have to wait for the cops to take my statement.”

“Did you ever wonder why they left you here all alone, and you’re not cuffed to the bed?” Without giving my cousin time to respond, he answered his own question. “It’s because in California if you OD, and require emergency medical treatment to survive, they can’t arrest you on any drug charges. It’s a new law meant to encourage people to come to the hospital instead of just dying wherever they happen to drop.”

I got up and grabbed his clothing and started putting it on him. “Yeah, let’s do like Eric said and go for a little walk.”

Richie glanced from one to the other of us, “You two are breaking me outta here, right?”

“Are you stable enough to leave?” I asked.

“Hell yeah,” he whispered as he pulled on his pants.

When we came out of the room with him the nurse frowned. “If you’re taking him for a smoke, he can only smoke in the designated smoking area five hundred feet from the front door.”

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