I nod. “I’ll be ready.”
His hands are in his pockets as I let him out the door. He gives me a small smile over his shoulder, like a little thank you. It slips off his face before he’s fully turned away.
Dash
The trip to Georgia doesn’t feel quite real. For one, I’m hungover as fuck. My head hurts so bad, I worry a few times about getting sick in the car. Every time I think of why we’re driving, I feel like someone kicked me in the chest.
I don’t know how to wrap my head around the fact that Lex is gone. No more phone calls, no more trips, no more roller blading. Never any dancing. Lex is gone. My little sister, dead. I couldn’t even go right to her. Someone had to fly her home.
I realize that it’s real, but every time I think of her like that—alone, on some fucking island—I want to scream and rage.
Other thoughts of her are softer. Sweet and silly Lexie. She was such an awful toddler. Crazy kid. Crazier teenager.
I think of all the things she liked: white powder donuts from the gas station, propping her bare feet up on the dashboard. Then I have to tell myself that these things died with her. I remember the bad babysitters who thought Lex was trouble in a cute disguise, and would make her spend whole days up in her room for doing things like refusing to wear pants. I remember how she loved to eat Play Doh when she was three. All the extra hours she’d spend at the dinner table, staunch in her refusal to eat green beans. I remember last year, when she came and stayed with me for three weeks, flying into and out of Burbank for the jobs she didn’t cancel. I remember how she looked when I left her at rehab: sad but strong, almost mischievous with her thin smile in the window as I walked away, like she knew things the rest of us didn’t.
Is this what she knew? That she would die a pointless, early death? That she would perish in a hotel room with strangers, doing what she told herself she’d quit but never really could. And why not?
I don’t think of Lex as weak. I never could. Flawed, maybe, but never weak. The characterization of addicts as weak is one that drives me fucking crazy.
Lexie wasn’t weak. She was maybe stupid. She was maybe headstrong. She walked too close to the edge. I remember she was two years old and my mother told her “don’t step in the road” and Lexie stuck her shoe into the road and grinned.
Does that mean she deserved to die? My sister, she deserved to die for being wild and reckless? It was part of who she was.
My mind spins. Evolution. Survival of the fittest. Lexie wasn’t fit? She was. She was so fucking fit. My little sister was a champion at living.
And now she’s gone.
I feel like I’m on a bad fucking trip and can’t come down.
And sometimes, Am cuts through the fog in my head.
“Do you want a pillow? I keep one in the trunk.”
“I’m getting food. What do you want?”
Mostly, she talks with her hands…touching my hand. Touching my shoulder. She opens ranch sauce for me, urging me to have a couple fast food French fries. When I can’t, she watches like a hawk as I drink water from a bottle she hands me.
I’m supposed to meet my parents at the funeral home at six. The FUNERAL HOME. To see my sister’s DEAD BODY.
Unreal.
One of the times my mother called me crying, she said it was costing thirty grand to get Lex home fast.
I watch Amelia pull into the parking lot in front of a one-story brick building as if it’s something from a dream. At the same time, hate fills up my chest and head: blind hatred for this place, and pain I can’t assuage.
“I can wait out in the car for you,” Amelia says. “Whatever you need.”
I shrug. Do I want her to come in? I don’t know. When she touches me, that low-level agony I feel all the time—like dread and shock and horror all in one—kind of recedes and I can breathe a little. Yes—I want her with me. But I don’t want to ask her to go in.
Funny the desire I feel to shelter Am. My stomach knots up at the thought of going in myself…
My eyes ache when I think back on Lexie’s rehab. I helped her do that. It didn’t work. What if Mom and Dad blame me?
Then I feel like such a sick and selfish bastard. Lex is dead, and I care what our fucking parents think?
I guess I make some sound or face, because Ammy looks over with her soft eyes. Her hand is on the console in between us, so I take it. Sandwich it between my bigger hands and look down at her small, pale fingers.
“I used to look at your hands…”
“Mm?” I watch as the corners of her lips twitch.
“We were little. You were maybe eight or nine. I would always stare at you. I didn’t realize why until a whole lot later.”
I trace freckles on her knuckles. “I guess the most a little kid can know is they like looking at another person. I liked all your things—your little toys, too. Do you remember?”
“I don’t know.” She looks almost bashful. “You were always super nice to me. You were my hero.”
And of course, the moment ends right there. Because I’m not a hero. If she knew the truth, she’d never say something like that.
I rest my head against my chair and shut my eyes. When she says, “Your mom is here, I think,” I get out—and leave Amelia in.
Twenty-Two
Amelia
Dash goes in with one arm wrapped around his mother. I hate it that I’m not there too, but I didn’t want to be pushy. I feel queasy while I wait for him: more so when a Porsche pulls up and Mr. Frasier climbs out, wearing jeans and a black t-shirt. My gaze trails him to the door, where I notice that he doesn’t take his sunglasses off.
Are the Frasiers divorced? I realize I haven’t told Dash about my dad and Manda. Dad met someone new, now: Harlow, a professor at the University of Georgia. He moved to Athens after the divorce, to be closer to me.
I realize as I tap the steering wheel that there’s a lot we haven’t discussed: Dash and me. I’m not sure he knows what my major is (it’s a double: English and marketing). I don’t know anything about his college years or life after except what I could find online: He was in India for some time after school—that stint abroad that I mentioned at the work party—and he’s worked on three films for Disney. That’s how I recognized his artwork in the bar. Because I’d seen a YouTube video of Dash showing his sketches and talking to a group of inner city kids about his work at Disney. It’s why I applied at Imagine instead of Burbank. And also probably why I applied at Imagine instead of somewhere with no links to Disney.
I wonder if he knew he would be paired with me. If he wanted it. So much about this man I love is still a mystery to me. So it’s amazing that I love him how I do. That I feel ill on his behalf as I wait for him in the car.