Shut up, I said.
“Ethan?” I opened my eyes to see Uncle Gavin frowning. Had I spoken aloud?
“Did the police,” I said, then swallowed. “Did they find who …” I could not complete the sentence.
Uncle Gavin shook his head. “Not yet.” Another pause, and something gathered in Uncle Gavin’s face, hard and threatening. “But if they don’t find them,” he said, his voice lower still, his dark eyes fixed on mine, “I will.”
SUSANNAH’S INJURIES WERE far worse than mine. The doctors had explained that the bullet had so damaged her that she would never have children, but that seemed too ridiculous a concept to worry about right now—her lower body being swathed in bandages was a more immediate concern. The nurses had told me that she was on pain medication and so might not be fully alert. In her hospital bed, she looked so small and pale, the skin under her eyes bruised. “Hi,” she managed.
“Hi,” I said.
I was in a wheelchair, my cast-encased arm now in a sling. Susannah took this in with a long, slow look. “So we both got shot,” she said.
Because both of us fucked up, I wanted to say. Instead I nodded.
She lay her head back, looking at the ceiling. “Mom and Dad are dead, huh?”
Any resentment or anger I felt toward her at that moment drained away. Her hollow voice was more devastating than tears. My own eyes watered. I was getting sick of crying. “Yeah,” I said, wiping the back of my arm across my face. Orphans, I thought. I looked at my sister, pale and distant, practically mummified by her bandages. What were we going to do?
“You should’ve shot the other guy first,” Susannah said. Then she fell back asleep.
THE DOCTORS RELEASED me the next day, but I wouldn’t leave Susannah, who had to remain “for observation,” which I read as code for she still might die. I’d like to think that I wanted to stay because of filial loyalty. Looking back, however, I realize it was also fear. Leaving the hospital would mean that I was walking away from my previous life with my mother and father and heading into a new, frightening world without them. It would be an acknowledgment that my parents’ deaths were real. So I remained stubbornly at my sister’s bedside. It was only when Susannah finally told me to get out of her room so she could get some sleep that I left. But as Uncle Gavin steered me and my wheelchair out of Susannah’s room and down the hall to the elevator, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was deserting my post.
I probably should have been more freaked out by leaving the hospital with Uncle Gavin, who was a virtual stranger. All I knew of him was that he, like Mom, had been born in Ireland and that he had brought her with him to the United States after their parents died in a car accident. On the rare occasions Mom or Dad had mentioned Uncle Gavin, it was always to say he had “gone down the wrong path” or “made bad choices” or “had to lie down in the bed he’d made.” He was a sort of family bogeyman, an avatar of wickedness. What wickedness my uncle had supposedly done was never made clear. As far as Susannah and I could piece together from the rare instances when we overheard our parents talking about Uncle Gavin, somehow Mom felt she had failed as a sister, allowing Uncle Gavin to wander off into corruption and degeneracy. Of course, Susannah and I wanted to know all about him, to hear stories about bad old Uncle Gavin and his iniquity, but Mom refused to discuss it with us in any detail, and Dad forbade us from bothering Mom about him. And now he was rolling me out of the hospital. By all rights I should have been worried, but somehow I felt … not cared for, exactly, but protected.
Uncle Gavin drove a black Lincoln Navigator, which, while upscale and tricked out in leather and wood trim, left me disappointed. I’d imagined Uncle Gavin driving some sort of bad-boy car, like a Shelby Mustang or maybe a Ferrari. Instead, he was driving the kind of SUV that Buckhead mommies dropped off at the valet at Phipps Plaza. I got into the passenger seat, Uncle Gavin closing my door with a heavy whunk.
“Where are we going?” I asked once Uncle Gavin got in the driver’s seat. I wanted so badly to go home, except my home no longer existed. Now it was only a house with bloodstains.
Uncle Gavin looked at me with those dark eyes. “You’re coming home with me,” he said.
UNCLE GAVIN LIVED in Grant Park, a gentrified neighborhood in southeast Atlanta near the zoo. The northern suburbs, seated on the gentle heights of tree-topped hills, gazed down on the glass and steel towers of Atlanta from a distance. Grant Park was older, grittier, a stone’s throw from downtown. It was also a neighborhood getting a facelift. Every third block or so revealed a boarded-up house, a weedy lot strewn with rubble, or brand-new construction.
Uncle Gavin’s house was a remodeled Victorian bungalow that sat up from the sidewalk, stacked-stone walls flanking stairs up to a gate in a wooden fence that surrounded the property. An oak tree shaded the tiny yard, which had more boxwoods than grass, but everything looked tidy.
As we pulled up to the curb by the front steps, I saw a woman standing on the front porch, smoking a cigarette. She wore a pink tank top and painted-on jeans, and her chestnut hair was piled in a messy updo. When we got out of the Lincoln, the woman dropped her cigarette and stepped on it to put it out, then chewed her thumbnail.
I stopped at the bottom of the steps. “I don’t have any clothes or anything,” I said.
Uncle Gavin held up a duffel bag. “I got you some things
