Page 6 of Promise Me Nothing
At least to me.
So I’d practically jumped through the window when her hand moved in my direction once or twice on the seven-hour ride.
Now, as I sit in my window seat, my eyes staring through the glass unseeing towards the platform while everyone waddles off this beast of a bus, our bodies tired from having to sit uncomfortably for so long, I’m starting to have second thoughts about my decision.
Fears that I made the wrong choice. That I gave up too easily and took the simple way out.
I gave Frost the middle finger and darted down the pathmoretravelled the second I saw an indicator that maybe the branches had been trimmed back and the fallen trees cleared away.
Does that make me weak? That I don’t want to be on my own anymore? That carrying around the weight life has handed me is starting to buckle me at the knees?
I close my eyes. Count to ten. Pull in a long breath. Hold it. Let it out slowly.
And then I remember Lucas’ voice over the phone.
God, he’d sounded just like my dad. I’d had to mute the damn thing so he didn’t hear me trying not to fucking cry. I haven’t really cried in – I quickly try to do the math – nine years. Since the day I watched as Joshua’s body was lowered in to the ground.
My brother was many things to me. My best friend. My secret keeper. In some ways, he was my guardian, even if not legally. It was just the two of us against the world. After our parents died, we both went in to the system. Being eight years older, he aged out within a year and tried to get custody of me.
It didn’t work. He might have seemed so strong and mature to me when I was so young and unsure and filled with grief. But an eighteen-year-old with almost no money was too young to take care of a squirrelly elementary school student, at least in the eyes of any Child Protective Services representative he could get to listen to him.
But that didn’t stop Joshua from being involved in my life. He was always kind-hearted, thinking of other people, trying to make our lives better. He helped me with homework and made sure my foster parents were doing right by me.
Which is why his death was so startling. So unfair.
I’d already lost enough, hadn’t I? What had I done to deserve this new cruel twist?
Rationally, I know now that life just happens, and you can only control how you react to it. But when you’re just about to turn ten and you lose your parents, and then the center of your universe is ripped away less than three years later... it’s hard to think the worlddoesn’thave it out for you.
I’d lost my breath, nearly keeled over, dry heaved. The woman from CPS that came to tell me about Joshua’s death tried to be empathetic, but if I could have killed her in that moment, I would have.
She promised me everything would be okay. But I felt so small. And so lost. I’d just lost the last person in the world that mattered, and it was hard to believe anyone who promised me anything.
It wasn’t hard to believe Lucas though, a voice whispers in my mind.
It’s been an awkward month and a half, trying to get to know the brother I’d never known about.
Well, I guess that’s not entirely honest.
I might not have known about Lucas, but finding out about him allows some of my memories to make a lot more sense.
Like the fact that dad always took a ‘business trip’ to California every summer, even though he mostly worked at a local hardware store that probably wouldn’t have sent him anywhere.
Or that one time when I was seven and he disappeared for a few months. My mother cried at the sink as she did the dishes. Joshua, typically a jovial and friendly teenager, changed into this moody and sullen creature that slammed doors and stayed out past dark with friends even though my mom told him not to.
Eventually he came back. And I guess I just blocked some of those things out, or at least pushed them aside. Because it wasn’t until my first email exchange with Lucas that any of that even popped back in to my mind, a written indicator that I’d known something was amiss all along.
And then there’s the fear that I’ve been somehow complicit in covering it up. I wonder how much Joshua knew about Lucas. If he’d known anything more than what I did.
The only real and true thing I know about this whole fucked up situation is that now I have a brother who is two years older than me, but would have been four or five years younger than Joshua. Which means my dad had an affair.
“I’m the bastard child,” Lucas joked when we talked on the phone for the first time, sounding way too relaxed when everything inside of me was squirming with discomfort.
We’ve talked a few times. Well.Hedid most of the talking. I responded awkwardly in fits and stammers and one-word answers.Are you in college? Yes. Have you ever been to the beach? Never. Do you know what you’re doing for the summer? No clue.
“Come to California,” he’d said, surprising the hell out of me the second time we talked on the phone. “You’re in between things and there is more than enough space for you here. And I’d love toreallyget to know you. There’s only so much you can understand about someone on the phone, you know?”
I’d sat on my bed, legs crossed and head leaning back against the wall, thinking it all over while Lucas rambled on and on. About what his house was like and how I could have my own room and bathroom and he’d help me get a summer job if I needed one. All the ways we could make it work.
