A Matter of Trust

Chapter 3





After his mom ran downstairs and rushed to Colleen’s, Gabe sat very, very still. His suddenly sweaty hand pressed the phone against the side of his head.

In his ear was a sound like an aquarium. It was bearable if he thought of it like that. If he pictured bubbles rising through clear water filled with colorful fish and miniature plastic castles.

Not when he thought of it as a woman gagging on her own blood.

If there was one thing in the world Gabe didn’t want to be doing, it was listening to what sounded like his mom’s friend dying.

His shoulders hunched suddenly, and he shivered so hard the phone rattled against his cheek. Gabe felt like he had last winter when he had the flu. Shaky. Nauseated. Not quite real.

And this couldn’t be real, could it?

Their home phone had a button you could push to put it on speaker. He pressed it and set the phone down on his desk. The wet, almost slurpy sounds were still there, but they no longer felt like they were part of him, rattling around inside his skull.

Gabe tried to turn the sounds into background noise. Like the hum of an air conditioner.

His eyes fell on his history textbook. He should be reading it, but of course he couldn’t do anything right now. Just listen. Listen and hope that the ambulance people would get there in time to save Colleen Miller.

Three months ago Gabe would have said this was going to be a great year. High school instead of middle school. Getting a learner’s permit in the spring. Making the football team, even though he wasn’t that big. At least not yet.

But everything had changed, hadn’t it? And Gabe was just expected to suck it up and deal with it. Overnight, it seemed, his mom had become the enemy.

She was crabby all the time now. Always nagging. Always yelling. Sometimes at herself, but mostly at him. Even when she was just asking questions, it sounded like yelling. Where had he been, who had he been with, what had he been doing?

But most of her sentences began with “Why didn’t you . . .” Why didn’t you . . . finish your homework, make sure Brooke took a bath, tell me you had to bring in art supplies for class?

Gabe started when the tone of Colleen’s breathing changed. It roughened, paused—his stomach did a slow flip—then, after a watery gasp, resumed its rhythmic gurgle.

It was the most horrible sound he had ever heard. Gabe closed his eyes and tried to distract himself by thinking about how his mom wanted him to give up his whole entire life just because his dad wasn’t around anymore. Just because she had to go back to work.

It wasn’t like he didn’t love his little sister. But everyone else on the team hung out together after practice, and meanwhile he was stuck being Brooke’s unpaid babysitter. And there was dinner to start and the house to pick up, at least according to his mom.

She said they all had to pull together or they would fall apart.

But for Gabe, his new life was like being an adult without any of the good parts. He had all these responsibilities, but no money, no car, no freedom. If he were an adult, he could choose whether or not to have a kid. But he hadn’t gotten to choose Brooke.

“Taxation without representation, dude,” as his friend Tyler put it.

The only good thing that had come out of everything changing was his new phone. It could do everything, in addition to allowing his mom to call him a dozen times a day. She never texted him. She didn’t get that no one called anymore. You didn’t have to answer a text right away. Texting gave you time to think about what to say and a record of everything you had said.

From the landline phone on the desk, Colleen kept inhaling and exhaling in that strange, watery way.

He couldn’t take this anymore. He couldn’t just sit here and listen to these wet gasps.

Gabe picked up his cell and tapped out a text.

Gabe: You won’t believe what I’m doing.

Tyler’s reply came faster than he had hoped.

Tyler: What?

Gabe: Listening to some lady who’s dying. It’s horrible.

A faint groan rose from the phone lying on his desk. Bile flooded Gabe’s mouth. The only thing tethering him to sanity was the cell phone in his hands.

Tyler: JK?

Gabe’s thumbs flew over the tiny virtual keyboard.

Gabe: I wish. Mom was talking to friend on phone and then I guess she was shot. The friend, I mean. Now Mom’s going over there and making me listen in case she says something. Only she can’t talk. Just breathe. But it sounds all wrong.

Tyler: That’s awful. Do you know her?

Gabe: Sort of.

Colleen was old, even older than his mom. She had a daughter in college but seemed to have forgotten how to act around kids. Her attempts at conversation had a slightly desperate quality. Every time she saw him, she asked him what his favorite subject was in school. And every time he said, “Lunch,” she laughed in a fake-y, high-pitched way.

Only Gabe would give anything now to hear her fake laugh. Not this. He strained to hear sirens or footsteps or rescuers shouting in the background, but there was nothing but the harsh, irregular rasp of her breath. And then even that stopped.

Gabe: I just want to hang up and tell my mom we got disconnected.

But if he lied, his mom would probably know just by looking at his face.

Without warning, a scream shattered the night. Gabe’s whole body jolted like he had just stuck his finger in an electric socket. He let his cell phone fall to his desk.

The scream hadn’t come from Colleen’s house.

It had come from right down the hall.

From the room where his sister slept.

Gabe’s head whipped around. He saw no one in the hall. And he hadn’t heard anyone come in, although he had been so focused on the two phones he had blocked out the rest of his surroundings. Could a burglar have snuck in after his mom ran out? Had she forgotten to lock the front door?

Another scream pierced the silence.

“I’m coming, Brooke! I’m coming.” He jumped to his feet. At the last second he grabbed the landline phone, the one that was still connected to Colleen. As he picked it up, a new sound came from it. Something he didn’t have time to think about now.

Instead he ran down the hall and opened the door to Brooke’s bedroom.

Brooke was sitting bolt upright in her little pale blue wooden toddler bed. Her mouth was stretched wide in terror, and the whites showed top and bottom on her eyes. Her breathing was fast and shallow. She didn’t even turn toward him. Instead her staring eyes were focused on one corner of the room. The corner where the window was. The corner he couldn’t see because the door only opened three-fourths of the way and then was blocked by the dresser.

Gabe let the phone slip from his suddenly boneless hand. What was his sister looking at? Who was in the room?

Brooke screamed again, her hands coming up in front of her face, ready to ward off a blow.

Taking a deep breath, Gabe charged forward to put himself between whoever it was and his little sister.