This brought him back to reality. “Yeah. I did.” His face was bleak.
Oh. I blushed.
“Do you like what you do?”
“What do you think?”
I wasn’t sure what I was thinking but I was thrilled that he was taking part in the interrogation. “Well, I suppose you make a lot of money doing it.”
“Money isn’t everything.”
He was full of contradictions—I was confused. “I thought you said you chose to do this for the money?”
“I said I did,” he repeated. “I think you and I both know that I have more money than I know what to do with. If it were still only about money, I would have quit a long time ago.”
“So why don’t you just stop doing it then? Take your money and get out?”
He hesitated and looked at me with worry.
I took a breath.
“I’m just curious,” I whispered.
“I know.”
He sighed and stared at the ceiling. “I can’t just run away from it. Once you’re in, you’re in it for life. If you try to leave, people become suspicious. They think that you’re either talking to the cops or you’re changing your affiliation.”
“Who cares what people think?”
“People who talk, who leave, get hunted down and killed.”
I tried as best I could to hide the shudder that was fermenting at the nape of my neck.
Cameron yawned and swept his hand over his face again. I wondered if his weariness made him more tolerant of my questions, made him answer them without editing or sugar-coating. I felt like I was taking advantage of him—a small tinge of guilt lingered—but my thirst for information overpowered.
“Why don’t you just run away? You have enough money to hide yourself, protect yourself, don’t you?”
“Because they won’t just kill you. They’ll kill your family, your friends, everyone you know … then they’ll kill you. There’s no such thing as running away.”
I gulped. “Who are
they
?”
“The people I work with.” He turned his head and looked at me pleadingly. “Change of subject?”
I let it go out of guilt but also out of relief to leave this line of questioning. Even I had to admit that it was too much information—more than I could swallow.
I took a second and continued the interview, “Tell me about your family.”
He smiled but his eyes were cautious. “What do you want to know?”
Everything. “For starters, what does your mother do for a living?”
“She drinks,” he answered promptly.
Okay. “What about your dad?”
He cringed and stalled. “I don’t like to talk about my father.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s … not a very nice person,” he said, struggling.
“Neither are my parents,” I said.
“It’s not the same thing. My father’s a con artist.”
“Can you tell me about him?” I murmured. “Please?”
He closed his eyes. “When I lived with my mom, my dad would come strolling in every couple months with his expensive suits and big cars, while my mom and I lived in dumps. The small amount of cash my dad did give to my mom she drank away. When I went to live with my dad, I thought that things were finally going to get better. But my dad was … he wasn’t who I thought he was. His money was not his own. He hung out with rich people, pretended he had money so that he could swindle old ladies out of their money …”
His tired voice had started trailing.
“He must have had some money to put you through private school,” I pressed for more.
“When I first came to live with him, he didn’t know what to do with me. Eventually though, he figured out that he could use me too. He put me in that private school and showed up once in a while with some woman who’d have money but no husband. Then he’d put on the rich, father-of-the-year act. It worked like a charm; they trusted him … he stole all their lifesavings and disappeared. The payments to the school would stop after that.”
His voice was so faded, I could barely hear him. “What happened then?”
“The school sent me to live in a group home.”
“Wow.” This made me angry.
Cameron plunged his head deeper into the pillow. “He always came back sooner or later, usually when he was getting low on cash. He’d put me back in school so that he could start the show all over again. When I got older, the cops assumed that I was his partner in crime, ’cause he kept coming back to find me, and I was the only one the women could identify. I turned fourteen, my dad disappeared again, and I got thrown in juvi when I couldn’t tell the cops where he was hiding. That’s when I met Spider, and we cooked up a plan to sell drugs to the rich kids I went to school with. Within a month of getting back from juvi, I was making my own payments to the school and never had to depend on my dad’s stolen money again.”
“What happened to your dad?”
“I don’t know. He came back once with some woman. I didn’t want to be associated with him and get thrown back into juvi. I told him to stay away; I never saw him again after that.”
His breathing had become slower, deeper. I took another second.
“Cameron?” I called out softly.
“Hmm … ?”
“Was my brother happy?”
He considered this. “Most days …”
I held my breath.
“Do you think he knew he was going to die?”
There was a long pause.
“Cameron?”
“ … I really wish I knew, Emmy …” he said with a long sigh.
After a minute, he was asleep.
He snored, just a little bit, like a subdued Darth Vader.
I carefully reached over him, feeling the heat that radiated from his skin, and clicked off the lamp. I lay there for a while, next to him, listening to his calm, even breaths, watching his chest rise and fall in the shadows. I was exhausted. Having him there, so close, was strangely peaceful, but it didn’t help me relax. I could feel every muscle in my body tiredly tingle. When half an hour had gone by, I started to wrestle with the sheets again. I was afraid of waking him.
I considered … decided, listened vigilantly. When I was sure he was in a deep sleep, I extended my hand … and very slowly slid it under his. I clasped our fingers. In an unconscious reflex, his hand squeezed mine. I inhaled and I exhaled, and finally, finally I fell asleep.
We were woken up in the morning by the commotion of incoming guards downstairs. I had awoken a few seconds before Cameron, carefully peeling my hand away from his before he realized what I had done. My hand suddenly felt cold, unnatural, like it was missing a finger.
The front door slammed shut.
Cameron shot out of bed like a bullet and stood, disoriented, panting, every muscle of his body tightly clenched, like body armor.
“It’s okay, Cameron,” I gasped. I was scared of him, for him.
He turned abruptly toward my voice. His face was ominous.
I smiled softly and waited for him to come back.
He kept his eyes on me. He blinked. His fists loosened. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, ran his fingers through his hair, and scratched his head, breathing with purpose. After a long second, he turned. A forced smile had crept across his face.
“Good morning.” My voice croaked a little. I swallowed the sadness of him away.
“Mornin’,” he answered gruffly. His cheeks flushed, and his hair went every which way. He was beautiful again.
I sighed with gratitude.
“I thought you said that you don’t sleep?”
“I don’t … usually,” he replied with a sheepish smile.
The bedroom door was still ajar, the way Cameron had left it during the night. Meatball was already downstairs, likely taking on the routine of his food inspection duties.
Cameron and I stepped down the stairs together. Spider and Carly were walking in through the front door. Spider grimaced as soon as he saw us. Carly turned to him. “Told you he’d be here,” she muttered loud enough for us to hear.
Spider wasn’t laughing when he turned to Cameron. “Is there a reason why you weren’t answering your phone? You could’ve at least left us a note, man. We had no idea where you went.”
Cameron cleared his throat, looked like he was about to respond, peeked at me, and flushed a little more. Guards carrying boxes were lining up at the doorway, and being halted behind Spider and Carly, who were blocking their procession. Carly moved ahead to let them through. Spider followed her, ensuring to throw a glare at me before he disappeared through the kitchen.
Some of the guards’ gaze flashed toward the stairs in our direction as they walked through.
Cameron sparked a small discreet smile my way and ran down the rest of the stairs. He walked out the door, passing Griff on his way out.
“Hey, Ginger,” greeted a chipper Griff. He peered at me over the box of frozen dinners he was carrying. He paused at the door to take off his shoes, balancing the box at the same time. Cameron was walking off the front stoop. His head momentarily spun toward Griff, but he kept walking to the awaiting vans.
Griff eyed me top to bottom. “Did you just get up?” he asked in passing and continued into the kitchen. I realized with mortification that I was still wearing my pajamas—my uncool Mickey Mouse flannel pajamas.
Back in Cameron’s room, I was walking on air, setting a new record for my morning routine. Then I bounced back down the stairs and into the kitchen where Rocco was busy putting the groceries away. Cameron, Carly, and Spider were sitting at the kitchen table, murmuring over paperwork. Cameron, who was also freshly showered and dressed, snuck a look as I walked into the kitchen. He grinned very quickly, and bent his head back over the documents in front of him before Spider and Carly ever noticed the momentary lapse of attention. I smiled to myself and helped Rocco put the groceries away, tucking them in whatever free space we could find.
I fixed myself a bowl of cereal, even if it was already past lunchtime. Not wanting to disturb the business meeting and feel Spider’s resentment, I strolled to the back deck, where I sat to eat breakfast alone.
The sky was gray. The air was still and muggy. A storm was brewing.
I watched the dark clouds billowing above, threatening rain for the day. Under them, the far-reaching forest was harshly calm, and a thin layer of fog draped the treetops. I closed my eyes and took a long-winded inhalation; the smell of the mossy dampness of the woods that surrounded me was a newfound reassurance, as if the blanket of greenery was keeping the storm from ever really reaching me. An uncanny reaction for a city girl, I thought.
When Cameron came to sit next to me, he put his feet on the table, and we watched the dark sky, while the clouds debated whether to burst or keep moving.
He was next to me, but he was far away.
I turned to glimpse him just as a drop splashed against his forehead.
“Why didn’t you listen to me?” he asked, his voice distant. He rolled his head and kept my eyes. “When I told you to stay away from the projects, why did you still come back?”
If his eyes hadn’t been locked with mine, if my brain worked when he was near me, if I was able to lie to him, I could have come up with a million plausible excuses. Except that I couldn’t lie to him, but I couldn’t tell him the truth either. Was I even sure what the truth was, exactly? I broke the dazzle and practiced pulling on the thread that was unraveling from my shorts while my cheeks turned a deep shade of red.
When I looked up, Cameron had turned his attention back to the sky. He was far away again. My lack of response had been enough of an answer for him?
After a short while, steady droplets of rain started coming down.
Chapter Eleven:
Fun and Games
Cameron had announced to me that he wanted to do something fun. We headed down the driveway, with Tiny straggling. Rain pelted down on us, and we had to pick up speed.
When we came to the bend in the driveway, something at the back of the property had caught my eye. Griff and Spider were standing near the tree line at Griff’s usual spot. Spider’s face and his shaking finger were very close to Griff’s face. His chest was pumped, his face was beet red. His lips were moving rapidly, angrily. Griff had his back to me, with his head bent in submission.
While I was quickly taking all of these things into account, I hadn’t noticed that my pace had slowed. Cameron had come back to get me.
“You don’t have to wait for Tiny,” he told me, grinning.
Tiny had caught up to us, panting. He glanced knowingly to the back of the property before catching my eye, but remained silent.
When we got to the garage, Cameron stood by with an even larger grin on his face.
Naïvely, I smiled back. “What?”
“Which one?” he asked, waving his hand back and forth along the lineup of cars like a game-show host.
The smile was washed from my face. I shook my head in disbelief. Was this Cameron’s idea of “fun”?
Cameron nodded as if he heard my thoughts. “They’re your cars. You should know how to drive them.”