The Summer We Fell Apart Read online

  The Christmas lights Finn had hung outlined the roofline and the low-slung angles of Shelley’s California ranch house. She could see where he had begun a row of lights around the large windows, but it was also where he had obviously run short, since only one side was complete. Didn’t this signify that his true intention had been to buy lights? Maybe something had happened to him on the way to or from the store. An accident? A robbery? As Kate pulled into the driveway, she found herself praying for any of these scenarios; not so much because she hoped he hadn’t gone off on a bender but because she just didn’t want to think he’d actually steal in order to finance it, although the romantic notion of a good-natured drunk was as naive as the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold scenario. She took note of the empty spot where the truck was usually parked as she turned off the car. Shelley opened the front door and met her on the path before the bridge, where just beneath the surface the mottled orange skin of the koi flashed brighter than usual under the reflection from the lights.

  Kate ran the idea of an accident by Shelley, and so she agreed to show Kate the way to the store. But the route yielded nothing. The parking lot was empty and the road along the way was clear of overt signs that anything troubling had occurred within the last few hours. While she drove, she hit REDIAL on her cell over and over, hoping that if Finn saw her number, as opposed to Shelley’s, he would pick up, but it went to voicemail every single time.

  On the way back to Shelley’s, Kate swung by her own house, but it was empty and dark, everything just as she and Finn had left it. His duffel was still on the top shelf of the closet, so, at the very least, the lack of premeditation could be argued. But when she pointed this out, Shelley seemed unimpressed with her logic.

  Shelley continued to hypothesize that Finn was running off to meet his ex-girlfriend, to stop her from marrying. Kate dismissed the idea. Like their father, Finn was a captivating storyteller. If he had a sympathetic audience in Shelley, she could easily see him embellishing a tale of lost love. She had never known her brother to care intimately about anything for an extended period of time, except a drink.

  Back at Shelley’s, Kate went into the studio and looked around. Shelley followed close behind, step for step. She had made it sound like she and Finn had only a couple of drinks, but there was a considerable amount of empty beer bottles on the worktable, just shy of a six-pack and a half. Kate would wager a bet that Finn had consumed most of them, considering Shelley’s size and her current sobriety.

  Kate pointed to the bottles. “That’s the problem.” This was classic Finn. The drinking started slowly: the night before Thanksgiving, when he had asked to borrow her car, followed by Thanksgiving dinner, and then the night when he took the car and came home smashed. Now this afternoon, into this evening, hence his disappearing act.

  Shelley frowned.

  “He’s a drunk,” Kate stated matter-of-factly. “Sometimes he can hold it but other times…” She shrugged to indicate that it was out of control.

  “Why didn’t you say something to me?” Shelley asked, her mouth hanging open in surprise.

  Kate supposed she would have had no way of knowing. In the beginning, Finn could be a jovial drunk. “I’m not his keeper, Shelley. This has been going on since he was in his teens.” She paused and said, “He’s probably off drinking somewhere until either your credit card maxes out or he dies.” Kate saw the look on Shelley’s face and steeled herself for the reaction.

  “My God, how can you be so cold? You allowed him to drink at Thanksgiving dinner—you didn’t stop him. You should have told me. You should have told me not to have any alcohol.” Shelley ran her hands through her ragged hair, eventually pulling it back away from her face, wrapping it around her neck like a scarf, and twining it around her fingers.

  “I am realistic. There’s a difference.” Unmoved by her insult, Kate shrugged again. “He’d just find a way to get the stuff if he really wanted it.”

  “But how can you let him?” Shelley let go of her hair as she flung her arms out at her sides as if she were going to fly. “How can you just stand by and watch?”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?” Kate snapped. “I asked you not to call the police, not yet. Against everything I believe in as an attorney. How much shit do you think I’m in here as well? You are my client and he is my brother.” Kate was shaking and she had to turn away from Shelley to compose herself. Everything she worked for was on the line right now if Finn didn’t show up. If Ben found out, she was done. Over.

  Not wanting to divulge ragged details of her upbringing, enough had already been said at this point anyway, far more than she ever wanted to share, Kate said, “I asked him to come here because I saw the shape he was in at our father’s funeral. He’s been drifting for a year now, he has nothing.” She was astonished by how easily she used her father’s death to manipulate the mood.

  “Oh,” Shelley moaned as she paced the studio. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Kate said just as her cell phone rang.

  Shelley stopped pacing and turned to stare at the phone in Kate’s hand. Kate didn’t recognize the number and her voice quivered when she answered.

  “Kate Haas,” she said as evenly as she could.

  She didn’t hear the detective’s name, just that he was with the California Highway Patrol. Her brother, as far as they could tell, had been involved in a one-car collision with a guardrail about thirty miles from the Nevada state line. They found him passed out in the truck at the scene of the accident. He had been driving with an expired license.

  They were holding him at the hospital for tests. Unfortunately, the truck, which was not registered to him, was totaled.

  Kate heard the officer sigh when she explained that her brother had been driving a friend’s car with permission. How many times had he heard that excuse?

  The officer then gave Kate a series of numbers, which she wrote on her hand. There was the precinct number, his extension, the hospital number, and the impound lot at the tow yard.

  When Kate got off the phone, she repeated everything to Shelley, who, at the news of Finn’s miraculous reappearance, had sunk down into a chair. She held herself rigid, her posture impeccable, although she appeared diminished: her face as colorless as her hair, the lines around her eyes and mouth a deeper shade of charcoal, as if an artist had deliberately aged her.

  Kate could tell she had questions, but before she gave any answers she dialed the tow yard. More than she needed to see Finn, she needed to know if the sketchbooks and the paintings had been in the car. Her fingers shook so badly that she had to cancel the call three times before she got the number right. Once she finally got someone on the line, she found out that the police removed all the personal possessions. The guy working the office had no idea what, if anything, they removed from the truck. Although he did add that it was “way beyond drivable” so he couldn’t be sure if anything had been salvaged.

  As Kate relayed the information to Shelley, she pulled out a chair opposite her and sat down. “Obviously, I won’t know anything more until I get there.” Kate’s throat was dry and she coughed out her words. “I will recuse myself as your counsel due to conflict of interest. It wouldn’t be right. I can’t represent both of you in the same proceeding and, well, I suppose Finn will need me.” She was sure there would be some sort of charges filed against him. While the officer on the phone hadn’t mentioned Finn being drunk, Kate had a hard time imagining he hadn’t been. Even while she told Shelley that Finn would need her, Kate was thinking she should just let him drown under a public defender’s care. How was she going to explain this to Ben? She wasn’t. What could she say in her defense?

  Kate took a deep breath before she said, “You can tell Ben whatever you need to about this. I understand.”

  Shelley sat, stroking the scarf of hair around her neck as she considered Kate’s offer. Kate felt uneasy in the silence, especially when Shelley reached out and took Kate’s hands in both of hers. Seeing Kate flinch, Shelley
opened her hands to examine Kate’s. When she saw the row of blisters, she let them go.

  “What happened?”

  Kate squirmed as she admitted, “I cut down a tree.”

  “You cut down a tree?” Shelley repeated but didn’t pursue it. She looked all around the studio before she returned her gaze to Kate. “Ben has nothing to do with this. I lent Finn the truck, so I cannot rightly accuse him of stealing it, can I? As far as the sketchbooks and the paintings. If the police have them, I just want them back before the auction people get here.”

  “Shelley, are you sure this is what you want?” Kate asked. How would Finn ever learn what it was to be accountable?

  “Let me tell you something,” Shelley said and then licked her lips before she continued, “when I married the artist, I was pregnant and he already had a son.” She broke off and gave Kate a wry little smile. “So when I had our boy, I was happy. Two years apart I thought they would be brothers, friends for life, you know? Look out for each other.” She leaned forward and said, “It’s what every parent wants, I suppose.”

  Had Kate’s parents ever connected the dots between their children? Had they been encouraged to be a tribe? Only through benign neglect, she thought sadly, had they come together at all. And that had been all Kate’s doing as she begrudgingly assumed the role of caretaker. A role she recognized now that she had assumed based solely on her belief that her father’s dreams had somehow been more important than her own. Considering where she was at this very moment in her life, she would have to concede she had made a very poor choice.

  Shelley frowned at her own memories. “They never were. Even as children. I would leave the room for a moment when they were small and have to come back right away because one was always crying in outrage. And you see now,” she looked around the studio again, “they are only united in the money their father’s legacy will bring and they care about nothing else.”

  “Shelley,” Kate began as she realized how she and Shelley seemed bound to the past by the memories they wanted rather than the memories they actually had.

  She held up a hand to silence Kate. “I know you think I’m a fool. But I would never put you in the position to have to choose me over your brother, Kate.”

  Shelley’s generosity where Finn was concerned was enviable, not only because it absolved him but it extended to Kate as well. It seemed quite simply a gift with no strings attached. Although nothing about Kate’s emotional state had ever been simple, even in the best of times, and while she accepted Shelley’s gift for what it was, she was wary. “What if they aren’t there? The books or the painting?” Her chest hurt and she was short of breath. “You heard me say I can’t represent you both?”

  Shelley rubbed her hand back and forth across the table. “There’s no need to make a choice.” She looked sorrowful. “You didn’t really listen to me. I’m not going to press any charges.”

  “But—”

  “But what?” Shelley asked. “Why on earth are you still here?”

  If there hadn’t been a pileup on the freeway five miles from where Finn had run off the road and into a guardrail, if there hadn’t been a backlog in the usually sleepy emergency room in this border town, Finn wouldn’t have lain on a gurney for more than two hours while the triage team, ranking the patients by injury, attended to the most critical first.

  By the time Finn was examined and blood tests were administered, his blood alcohol level had fallen a half a percentage point below the legal limit. The police officer that had originally called her had come back on duty just as the reports were in from the lab, and the look he had sent Kate when he found out was barely disguised disgust. But he had no recourse other than to allow Finn to leave. Kate was relieved not to have to fight a DUI, yet she shocked herself by how prepared she was to do that on Finn’s behalf. She had paced the hallway outside his room while she waited for the results, readying her arguments in anticipation of manipulating the situation until she won.

  Finn’s license, while expired, had no outstanding warrants, and so after Kate paid the necessary fines (tow truck, impound lot, ticket for driving without a license), and was handed a large, clear garbage bag with Finn’s things (the sketchbook and rolled canvas among them), her knees buckled in relief. If either Finn or the police officer had noticed her reaction, they didn’t let on.

  Her brother’s face and chest were badly bruised from where he had hit the steering wheel on impact with the guardrail. His left eye was swollen shut and his rib cage bandaged with a swath of restrictive cloth that cradled and protected his midsection. Because of this, he couldn’t stand up straight, and with his facial expressions limited, Kate was unable to determine just exactly what, if anything, he was thinking.

  When she first set foot in his hospital room and peered around the curtain, she had been shocked by how much Finn looked like their father lying there in the bed. How had she not noticed this before? She felt a jolt of adrenaline rush from fear and began to tremble, all because it reminded her of the one and only time she had paid her father a visit in the hospital. Like Finn, he had been sleeping when she arrived, yet she had snuck out before her father or any of her siblings had even known she was there. It was a hard failure to swallow. She couldn’t stand seeing her father die in that way, yet a small part of her thought it might be the death he deserved. Afterward, it was nearly unbearable for her to live as his daughter with that realization, to attend his funeral, to scatter his ashes, to ponder what his last thoughts might have been. Had he asked for her? Wondered where she was? She’d never know and she’d never be able to ask her sister.

  Because of her freak-out at the sight of Finn in the hospital bed, she had backed out of his room and hid in the cafeteria until he was awake. If running away had been an option, she would gladly have taken it. Especially because it appeared that her presence hardly mattered. When she returned to his room, Finn stared with one good eye at a spot on the wall beyond her head and refused to answer her questions. Kate filled in the blanks and what she didn’t know she guessed. Since arriving to clean up Finn’s mess, Kate had been forced into doing all the talking; most communication existed out of necessity to relay facts. Nothing personal. She tried to treat her brother as she would any client in crisis and for a while it worked.

  It wasn’t until she helped him into the car in the parking lot that she felt herself begin to unravel. She never should have come right away. She should have let him spend a few nights in a cell for unpaid fines before she showed up. But then she wouldn’t have gotten back the sketchbooks, so she had no choice other than to save his ass. This only made her angrier. When had it become so common in her life to make decisions based upon the absence of choice?

  She waited until they were on the freeway until she asked, “Where were you going? Vegas?” She quickly glanced over at him, but his swollen eye was on her side so she couldn’t tell if anything had registered. Her craziest guess was that he was headed to Vegas where some pawnshop would probably have given him less than a hundred bucks for the lot of drawings, which he would have spent in some random bar in less than an hour.

  He moaned and moved stiffly in the seat. He appeared to be searching for a comfortable way to sit. Kate had forced him to wear his seat belt and she imagined it hurt. Too damn bad.

  Inside the closed-in car, the stench leaking from Finn’s pores was a combination of the antibacterial gunk they’d swabbed all over the cuts on his face, alcohol, and dirty clothes. It was overwhelmingly sweet, with an underlying dank sour odor that made Kate roll down her window for fresh air. “Hey, you need to say something here,” she demanded of her brother as she pressed her foot on the gas and flicked her lights at the car in front of her.

  Under her breath, she muttered, “Drive or get out of my way, buddy. Fast lane. F. A. S. T.” When the lights didn’t work on moving the asshole out of her way, she honked. Finally, the car moved to the right and Kate sped past in the left lane as she continued to berate Finn. “I’m not going to act l
ike you’re stupid by stating the obvious, but you have to realize the position you put me in, right? I mean taking off in Shelley’s truck was bad enough, but stealing the sketchbooks and the painting? What were you thinking? And don’t tell me nothing, because I know such an idiotic plan had to have been given some thought.”

  Finn turned away from Kate so he was facing the window.

  She huffed, “I’m not going to stop because you won’t look at me. Are you kidding? Seriously?” Kate took a deep breath. “I never should have given you a chance. Never. Never should have brought you out here. I’m the stupid one. Absolutely I am the stupid one. You know, there’s a reason I never see any of you. I don’t need shit like this in my life. Not any of it. Do you have any idea how hard I work? What it took for me to get to where I am? I have worked forever. I took care of you when we were kids; I’m not doing it as adults. I’m done. The next time you need something try calling Mom.”

  Finn grunted.

  Kate couldn’t tell if he was trying to laugh at the absurd notion of calling their mother for help or if he was in pain. Fuck him either way.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to talk Shelley out of filing charges,” Kate lied, trying to provoke a response. “The truck is totaled, the sketchbooks…” She banged the side of her hand against the steering wheel in frustration and immediately her hand began to throb. She felt the tears at the corners of her eyes but did nothing to wipe them away as they ran down her cheeks.

  “If you’re not going to talk to me then I’m putting you on a plane back to Boston. Today. Is that what you want?” She thought the threat of sending him back might get him to talk.