I wanted to wrap my arms around her, but I was torn as to what I would do after that—give her a hug, or strangle her to death. “I worry about you,” I said. “Deeply.”
“Snafu,” she said. I stared at her. “You know,” she said, “situation normal, all fucked up.”
“I know what snafu means.”
She punched me in the arm. “Don’t worry, big brother,” she said. “Ernest Hemingway said we’re all broken. That’s how the light gets in.”
“Hemingway also blew his own head off with a shotgun.”
Susannah laughed. “Are you worried I’m going to off myself?” When I continued to stare at her, she got serious. “I won’t ever want to kill myself, because I wouldn’t give Luco the satisfaction,” she said.
“He’s dead,” I said.
“And I’m not,” she said. “Winning.”
FRANKIE GOT A plea deal from the DA—ten years, with the possibility of parole after serving three years of his sentence. He took it.
Having my best friend go to prison was devastating. Strangely, aside from Frankie, the person I missed most at that time was Fay, Uncle Gavin’s old girlfriend. She would have known what to say to Ruben, or to Frankie. But she had never returned after walking out of the house that night. Uncle Gavin had dated a few women after Fay left, but they rarely stayed at the house—Uncle Gavin would spend the night with them somewhere else—and none of them ever lasted more than a few weeks, let alone showed any genuine interest in me or Susannah. And none of them could cook. We had not had a truly good dinner since Fay left. Even the house missed her, if the state of the windows and the wood floors and the kitchen counters was any indication, but Uncle Gavin and Susannah and I had somehow muddled through. Now, though, it felt as if some black hole of dread had opened up beneath the foundations and was drawing everything into it.
One evening about a week after Frankie began his prison sentence, Uncle Gavin appeared in my bedroom doorway. He rarely came up to the second floor, where I would hole up and do my homework or read or play games on my laptop, a refurbished model that Uncle Gavin had gotten me for school. I was sitting on my bed, blowing off studying for exams and playing Skyrim instead, when Uncle Gavin knocked on the open door. I closed the lid of the laptop. “Hey,” I said.
Uncle Gavin came in and sat on the one chair in my room, which was at my little-used desk. He glanced around as if taking in for the first time the bare walls and the piles of mostly clean clothes. “You all right?” he asked.
Since Frankie had gone to prison, I had not talked to my uncle other than saying what was necessary in order to live in the same house. I had not talked to anyone, really, aside from him and Susannah.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m fine.”
He nodded, appraising me with those damned dark eyes. “I learned something today,” he said.
When it became clear he was waiting for a response, I said, “Okay.”
Now my uncle’s gaze didn’t waver but focused on me. “I told you before that if the police couldn’t find those men, I would.”
Distracted by Frankie’s incarceration, it took me a moment to understand what my uncle was saying. Those men. As if from the end of a long corridor in my memory, I heard my father shouting, my mother’s scream, gunshots. Something in me stirred, unseen and on the verge of waking. My voice was a dry rasp. “Did you? Find them?”
It was now dark outside, only a streetlamp down the road shining weakly, unable to even cast a shadow across my window. The lamp on my nightstand gave the room a warm, comfortable glow, but I shivered at my uncle’s single, affirmative nod.
“Where are they?” I said.
“In Jacksonville,” he said.
I shook my head in disbelief. It was so mundane, as if he were telling me where some former neighbors had moved to. My parents’ killers should be in prison, or dead. Not in Jacksonville. I tried to imagine what they were doing in Jacksonville, then decided it didn’t matter.
“What … what are you going to do?” I asked, a bit breathless.
Uncle Gavin considered me for a few quiet seconds. “That depends on what you want,” he said finally.
I stared at him. Deep in a cave at the center of my heart, that unseen thing was yawning and about to open its eyes. I knew what my uncle meant. He was asking me if I wanted him to do something about those men. If I wanted him to see to it that those men never left Jacksonville.
In my mind, I saw them both, the one with the goatee and the acne scars who had fought with my dad, and the other one, Ponytail, the one with the gun, and they were both lying on the deck of a boat, bags over their heads, hands tied behind their backs. It was midnight and the boat was speeding out into the open ocean, where under a moonless sky the faceless crew would toss the two men overboard, and they would kick and flail and scream but eventually slip beneath the waves, water filling their mouths and noses and lungs as they sank down, down through the ink-black sea …
The scene in my mind was so clear, so visceral, that I gasped and came back to myself a little, sitting on my bed and staring at the dark-blue comforter in front of me. I looked up at my uncle, and he must have seen the horror on my face.
“No?” he asked in a quiet voice.
I couldn’t speak, but I shook my head. Uncle Gavin replied with a curt nod and stood, then walked out of my room. The thing in my heart curled itself into a ball and went back to sleep, and I leaned back against my
