“Is it your mom?”
Denny was nothing if not attentive. He knew something of my frustrations at home. And everyone knew of my family’s tragedy. After it happened, my brother’s death was in the paper for two weeks straight. First there were the sad stories—Police Chief Loses Firstborn. Then came the gritty details of the crash investigation, and the revelation that the poor police chief’s son had been thrown from a car driven by a junkie who was jacked up on painkillers.
The newspapers didn’t tell the whole story, though. They didn’t reveal that the junkie in question was the boyfriend of the chief’s daughter, who had been repeatedly forbidden to date him. That bit of scandal didn’t make the papers, out of respect for the grieving family.
We’d been in the news for weeks, and yet some of the really important questions went unasked. Such as: where on earth were the golden boy and the junkie going together that awful night?
“Sophie?”
I realized I was standing in front of my desk like a sleepwalker. And I’d never answered Denny’s question. “Yes?”
“Can I hang up your coat?”
I scrambled out of my trench. “Sure. Thank you!” I was losing my manners as well as my mind.
When he walked away, I rounded my desk and sagged into the chair. Get a grip, Soph, I ordered myself. But it wouldn’t be easy. When I was seventeen, I thought Jude was sent to me from heaven. When I was eighteen, I let him take me there. When I was nineteen, he broke both my heart and my family.
He’d been gone for three and a half years now. I’d shed an ocean of tears for him. The first year had been the roughest. My family was a grief maelstrom, and since Jude was the cause of it, I hid my broken heart. Nobody had wanted to hear me say that Jude had never meant to hurt anyone. Nobody cared that he’d obviously been in need of help. They didn’t want to hear that he’d been (mostly) wonderful to me.
That he’d been the only one who listened when I spoke.
My father couldn’t tolerate Jude even before he killed my brother. When I’d begun my teenage obsession with Jude, it had taken my parents by surprise that good girl Sophie could become a rebellious teen. I’d dyed my hair black and got a tattoo on my ass. It was ordinary kid stuff, but my father raged and threatened.
He’d also snooped in my room. When he’d found a receipt for condoms, my father had forbidden me to even talk to my boyfriend anymore. He’d ranted that Jude was trouble, but my heart didn’t listen. Instead, I just lied more often and snuck out at night.
Things got a little less tense when I’d moved into the dorms at University of Vermont for my freshman year of college. My father assumed that the forty-five miles from Colebury to Burlington would lessen Jude’s influence in my life. But we only carried on more freely. Jude’s Porsche wore a groove into highway 89, and I spent every weekend with him.
Then, one ugly spring evening just after freshman year ended, state troopers showed up at our door, hats in hand. That night Jude proved all my father’s points in one fell swoop. As our front door opened to reveal the officers’ hats in their hands, my father won every fight we’d ever had.
That night will always be a blur to me. I remember my mother screaming, then fainting in the living room.
“But what happened to Jude?” I’d asked in those terrible moments of confusion. Nobody answered me. It was twelve hours before I’d even learn that he was alive. As the awful story began to unspool, I ached for him. To know you’ve killed someone, even in such an awful, careless way, would be terrible. It was all so horribly sad.
I kept my empathetic thoughts to myself, of course. Nobody would even say Jude’s name in my home. The only name on anyone’s lips was Gavin. Poor Gavin. Gavin the great. Lacrosse hero. Beloved son.
On the outside, I did all the right things. I stumbled through my brother’s wake and then his funeral.
But secretly, my heart tore open for Jude. After he made his plea-bargain and went quietly off to prison, I’d tried writing him. I wrote several letters in quick succession. They were all variations on “why?” and “what happened?” I’m not proud, but they also contained plenty of “I love you” and “why won’t you talk to me?”
It wasn’t until weeks after Jude’s conviction that I received a large envelope from the Northern Vermont State Prison, containing all of my letters. Unopened. A single sheet of paper inside read, “Letters refused.”