Wrecked Read online

  “Ellen!” I yell again. I picture her, sitting up maybe, in her hospital bed, a tan phone pressed to her ear.

  “And half a million dollars really isn’t that much money these days.”

  “How are you? How’s your lung? How are your ribs? How’s your leg?”

  “My leg is really heavy. My ribs and the place where they had the chest tube is brutal if I laugh. I made this funny nurse leave this morning.”

  “Does everything hurt that much all the time?”

  “Not so much. Painkillers.”

  “You drug addict.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sound dreamy,” I tell her.

  “That’s about right,” she says.

  “Everybody’s asking about you all the time. Have you seen all the cards and stuff?”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “The bear is from Jason.”

  “Isn’t it weird how much like Whitey it looks, only bigger?”

  “Totally.”

  “Isn’t Jason so cool?”

  “Totally,” I say again.

  “I wish he wasn’t gay.”

  “I know.”

  “How are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How’s Jack?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did your father have a conniption?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “You’re fading.”

  “Yeah,” she says. There’s this silence. I can hear her breathe. Then she goes, “Ten million. Ten million would be a different story.”

  “Ten million?” I ask.

  “I’d probably do just about anything for ten,” she says, and suddenly I know for sure what Jason was talking about earlier. She’s got this thinking tone of voice. This tone where she’s taking an idea seriously, turning it over in her mind. Paying attention. “Yeah,” she goes. “Anything. Except kill, injure, or molest somebody.”

  “I did that for free,” I go, before I even realize what we’ve just said.

  And then I start crying. So hard I don’t make a sound. There’s this long silence while I lose it. My SAT book slips off my lap and thunks onto the floor. “Are you still there?” I finally manage to choke out.

  “Hmm, Anna,” she says, and then I think she falls asleep.

  9

  WEDNESDAY NIGHT. ELEVEN DAYS SINCE I KILLED CAMERON.

  I sit on the L of the couch and try to study. I have a biology quiz tomorrow, and I need to get a good grade on it. It’s hard to focus. I mean, my right eye can’t focus, obviously, because of the drops to keep my pupil dilated, but my brain has no excuse. The key to speciation is reproductive isolation. I’ve written it in my spiral, circled it, and starred it, so it must be important. I open up the textbook and try to find speciation. The key to speciation is reproductive isolation. Ms. Riffing gives us rhymes to help us remember. She puts tunes to them to help us more. She’s a great teacher, and even though I don’t like biology, I love her class. The key to speciation is reproductive isolation. The key to speciation is reproductive isolation. I hear my mother’s footsteps on the thirdfloor stairs, heading down. I look at the clock. Twenty minutes have passed, and I don’t know what the hell I’m reading.

  “I can’t concentrate,” I tell my mom when she walks in. She sits on the edge of the couch.

  “You’re not worried about it, are you?” she asks. I don’t know what she means by “it.” Failing the quiz? My eye? What?

  “A little,” I say anyway

  “There’s nothing to worry about!” That’s my father, yelling from his spot at the kitchen table. It’s where he likes to play poker online. He sets up his laptop and plays for hours. His favorite game is called Texas Hold ’Em. He plays for real money. He has a rule for himself that he’s not allowed to keep playing if he loses more than a thousand dollars in one year. I don’t know what he does with the money he wins. I don’t even know if he ever wins. I just hear him cursing a lot and yelling at the screen.

  “You’re worried about Ellen, too, I guess,” my mom goes.

  “And other stuff.” Things I can’t say out loud to her because I don’t have any practice saying anything important out loud to her. Like, I killed somebody. How do you make the fact of something like that go away? How do you make the fact of something like that not nag and poke at you) like some kind of virus that’s stuck in your blood, stuck in your cells, stuck in who you are and who you will be forever?

  “Would you leave her alone, please?” my father shouts from the kitchen again.

  “I’m not bothering her,” my mother calls back. “We’re talking, Harvey.” She says talking as if it’s a word my father doesn’t know the meaning of. Then she looks at me. “I’m not bothering you, am I?”

  “Amanda!” my father yells while I shake my head. She’s not bothering me exactly, but then again, I’m not used to her trying to talk to me so much either. We both hear my father stand up and start walking toward the family room.

  “Well,” she says, “come upstairs if you want. I’ll be in my study.” I never go up to the third floor. I think the last time must have been when I was about ten.

  I hear her pass my father in the hall on her way to the stairs. She hisses something at him, and he snaps something right back, and when I can tell he’s resettled himself with poker, I get off the couch and go up to my room.

  I sit cross-legged on my bed, staring at a sheet of white stationery edged in silver. I’m trying to think of what to write to Cameron’s family. I can’t think of anything beyond Dear Mr. and Mrs. Polk. After that I just start to hear screaming, stopped, and I’m shaking so hard I don’t think I could write a word anyway.

  So I stand up and cross my arms tight and pace the room. I make three laps back and forth before the shaking slows down. I land in front of my mirror.

  “Listen, Jack,” I say to my reflection. My curls are tied back in a mass of metallic spirals, and my skin is so pale it’s almost the same shade as the stationery. I don’t have to wear the spaghetti strainer at home unless I’m sleeping, so I can see that my eye is almost back to normal except for a greenish tint to the skin around it and my enlarged pupil. “I can’t believe that…” I stop. That sounds too fake or something. Plus, I never knew the left side of my mouth twitches when I talk. Ugh. “Jack,” I say again, trying to keep my mouth moving evenly. “When I was driving home that night, I had no idea …”

  I shut up and watch my reflection give me the finger. “Try it again, and come up with something decent,” she tells me.

  “Look. Jack,” I try again. “You must be feeling …”

  But it’s too hard. How are you supposed to put into words something so awful there are no words for it at all?

  I do a search on the Internet. There’s a lot of sites for if you’re dying. They give you links and medical information about what happens if you have this kind of cancer or that kind of heart condition, and what medications and operations you can have and your chances of getting any better. A bunch of other sites are for if someone you love dies. They’re about mourning and grief. I read some of them, and it seems like nobody really knows all that much about it, even though they all have a lot to say. If you’re mourning, it’s like there’s no rules about what you’re supposed to feel when, or for how long. Sometimes you feel better if you can talk to other people who are also mourning, and sometimes that makes you feel worse. All the postings seem really confident, like they’re the ones with the right answers, but then the next one will just as confidently say something totally different. I try to decide how much I’m mourning Cameron, and it’s hard to figure out. She wasn’t my sister, or even my friend really. I don’t think I miss her exactly. It’s more like I’m horrified every time I think of her, and I feel this dread and guilt that’s a part of that ink in my blood all the time.

  I think about forwarding some of the grief sites to Jack where he would see them out in California, but then I’m not sure if I should. So I don’t. Instead I keep searching. T
hese other sites come up about if you want to die. Some of them tell you all the reasons why you shouldn’t commit suicide. Because you’ll go to hell, which is worse than whatever you’re unhappy about here on Earth. Because other people will be hurt and will miss you. Because it’s wrong. Because you don’t really want to die, but you just want help to feel happier. Then other sites tell you exactly all the different ways you can kill yourself They tell you about the best way to hang yourself, the most effective method to slash your wrists, which pills to take if you’re serious about dying. I don’t like those sites. They make me nervous. Besides, I don’t want to commit suicide.

  Mostly I want to find out what you’re supposed to do when you’ve killed someone else. What you’re supposed to do for all the people who really loved her. And also what you’re supposed to feel.

  But I can’t find any sites about that.

  If I were Jack, I’d probably create one. Except I’m not him. I’m only me.

  Somehow I fall asleep, and it feels like I’ve slept for hours, only when I wake up, on top of my comforter, the clock tells me it’s forty-five minutes later.

  I can’t fall back asleep, and I can’t concentrate on anything that requires my brain, so I decide maybe I’ll clean. At least you don’t have to think when you clean.

  My parents collect glass. Blown glass. They have vases and paperweights and sculptures all over the house. I’ll go around and dust them. When they’re totally clean, the pieces by our windows change colors with the light somehow. Most of the them have a lot of orange and red in them. But the newer ones have more blue and purple. They’re kind of cool.

  I get myself downstairs and into the kitchen, rummage around underneath the kitchen sink, and find a relatively clean rag and some Windex.

  My father doesn’t say anything, but he does start to shuffle his real deck of cards while he stares at the laptop screen. He shuffles like a professional, making the cards whir and jump and fan without even looking at them.

  “God damn it,” he mutters. Then he starts to hum.

  I start in the living room, where the most fragile pieces are. Spray and wipe. Wipe and spray. They’re not so dusty to begin with, but I can tell they look better after I’ve gotten to them.

  “What are you doing?” my dad finally calls to me.

  “Cleaning,” I tell him. I notice that if I slow my hand to stop a rag over the glass, my hand buzzes just the littlest bit, as if it were resting on the sill of a moving bus or train.

  “Cleaning the glass?” my father asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. I imagine him cutting his deck of cards over and over and tapping at his mouse.

  “Remember when Jack broke the bud vase?” he calls.

  We were ten and eleven, and we were playing indoor baseball. That’s when you pull the pom-pom off the tip of a knit cap, you make chair cushions the bases, and the fireplace is home plate. You bat with your palm, and you use ghost men. It’s a good game when it’s raining out, or when you’re bored at night. We weren’t supposed to be playing it because of the glass.

  I was up. I smacked the pom-pom over Jack’s head. He had to turn to chase it. I ran like mad to first and slid off it toward the blue armchair cushion for second. Rounding that, I slipped on the wood floor and grabbed at the window seat, trying to stop myself. The bud vase went down. And shattered.

  “God damn it!” my father yelled from somewhere in the house. We heard his feet pounding the hallway above and then pounding the stairs. “That better not be glass!” He charged into the living room and saw us stuck, frozen. His face was pink. He scanned the room, taking in the cushions, the pom-pom lying innocently in the corner, the fragments of glass, like a kaleidoscope exploded.

  “Did you do this?” he asked Jack. Instead of answering, my brother took a step forward and half leaned down. I stood very still, hoping my dad wouldn’t ask me if I had done it.

  “Stop,” my father said. Jack straightened up fast.

  “I was going to clean it up,” he tried to explain. I held my breath, waiting for my turn.

  “You don’t clean broken glass with your hands,” my father told him. “What is the matter with you?” Jack stood still again. My father stared at him, jaw muscle jumping. “What is the matter with you?” he said again. “I want an answer!” Jack stayed quiet. “What is the matter with you, Jack!”

  “I don’t know.”

  I started breathing again. Maybe my dad wouldn’t notice me as much as Jack this time. You never knew.

  “Harvey?” My mother had arrived at the living-room door. “Oh.” She stared at the shards on the floor. She looked around the room, checking the paperweights and vases and sculptures. “The bud vase?” she asked.

  My father pointed at Jack. “Don’t just stand there. Get the broom and the dustpan.” But then, before Jack could move, my father said, “What were you thinking?” Jack didn’t answer. “What were you thinking?” my dad asked again. His eyes were wide open with lots of white showing, like the Black Stallion, upset. Jack stayed quiet. “I’m asking you a question, Jack. What. Were. You. Thinking?” That vein in his forehead started hopping.

  “Harvey,” my mother said. “Calm down.” I inched toward the door. I wanted to get to the hall, the stairs, my room. Away from my dad, away from his making you feel stupid and wrong.

  “I’d like to know what he was thinking!”

  Tears began to bloom out of Jack’s eyes. My mother’s mouth set itself into a thin line. She couldn’t do anything. I inched farther.

  “Stop it,” my father said. He hates crying. “Stop it now.” Jack’s tears didn’t stop. My father shook his head and snorted through his nose. “Get the broom.”

  About an hour later Jack banged through my closed door and marched right up to me. I was leaning against two pillows on my bed, braiding beads into my hair and trying to stay invisible. He was sweaty and tearstained. He didn’t say a word. He just punched me hard twice in the arm. Really, really hard.

  “Dad,” I call back into the kitchen. I tuck the Windex under my arm and shake out the wet rag. “Jack didn’t break that vase.”

  I hear him drum his fingers on top of his deck. “Okay.”

  “Okay?” I stay where I am and keep talking loud so he’ll hear me. “Did you just say Okay’?”

  “Anna, I’m in the middle of a game.”

  “But what does Okay’ mean? Did you know that he didn’t break it?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. I don’t really remember.”

  I walk over to stand in the kitchen doorway. He’s got his feet up on the seat of a chair and his laptop propped on the lazy Susan, which is so old it doesn’t spin anymore. “Why did you punish Jack and not me?”

  He sighs and keeps his eyes on the screen. “I didn’t punish Jack,” my dad says.

  “You yelled at him,” I remind him.

  “Yelling isn’t punishing,” my dad says. I can see his eyes moving across the screen.

  “Yes, it is.” I know that what I’m saying is true. I’m sure of it.

  “No.” He taps his mouse and looks up. He lifts his glasses to rest on the top of his head. They get buried in his hair. It looks stupid. “Yelling is just being angry. Punishing is giving a consequence. Like docking allowance or TV”

  “But you made him stay and help you clean it up, and you didn’t make me.”

  “I remember both of you helping to clean it up.”

  “I didn’t help.”

  He lowers his glasses. “Anna, please. This isn’t a good time for either of us to have this sort of discussion. Understand?” He looks down at his deck of cards and then back at me. I can see him working to keep the irritation out of his voice. “You’re trying to have a quiet night after a difficult week. I’m trying to also. I’d like to play some poker. Do we have to have this conversation?”

  “You brought it up.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did. You said, ‘Remember when Jack broke the bud vase?’”


  “Fine,” he smiles a strained smile at me. “Okay. But now I want to go back to my game.” He clicks himself on and drops one of his legs off that chair.

  “Yelling is punishing,” I tell him.

  “Hmm,” he goes, scanning the screen. On it clusters of cards pop up, surrounding a green poker table.

  “Dad,” I say. “Yelling is punishing.”

  10

  JACK GETS HOME WHILE I’M IN SCHOOL ON THURSDAY. WHEN I see him, he’s not as blank or stiff as he was before. He’s sitting cross-legged on his bed, clattering away at his laptop.

  “Writing another movie review?” I ask him.

  “Yeah.” He doesn’t stop typing while he’s talking.

  “What’s it called?” I ask.

  “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I watched it in the hotel.”

  But I’m not really interested in his movie review. “How was the funeral?” What a stupid question. How was the funeral? How about, It sucked, Anna.

  “In the words of Cameron’s little brother,” Jack says, looking up, “not what I expected.” And then he goes back to his keyboard.

  It’s almost dinnertime on Friday. I’m in the Gersons’ downstairs guest room waiting for Ellen to get home. I took her pillows and comforter and her stuffed animals and vanity table and all her clothes and the little round crystal hanging in her window and her TV and everything from her bedroom, and I tried to set it up exactly the same down here. And I fixed up the guest bathroom. I took all her grapefruit shampoo and conditioner and kiwi bath oil and body scrub and arranged them by the sink along with her Sonicare toothbrush. I set up her crutches by the bed, and I’m just wondering how she’s going to shower with the cast on her leg, when the Gersons wheel her in.

  “Surprise.” I give her a hug. Which, as I already know, is hard to do when one person’s in a wheelchair.

  “This looks terrific,” Mrs. Gerson tells me, meaning the room, and then she and Mr. Gerson leave, saying something about getting Ellen food or ice chips.