I bite my lip. “But Angela’s in hell.”
His eyes are sad, resigned. “You can’t save everybody, Clara. Some things are beyond our ability to change.”
Like Jeffrey. Or my mom dying. Or being with Tucker.
“No,” I whisper. “What about the vision?”
He gives a bitter little laugh. “When did you become so faithful all of a sudden?”
It hurts, him saying that, but I’ll take it. And what I realize in this moment is that it’s his fate, too. It’s his choice. I can’t make it for him.
“I understand if you don’t want to do it,” I say then. On impulse I reach up and hook my hand behind his neck, draw myself into his arms for a hug. I let his warmth infuse me, and mine pour back into him.
When I pull away, his eyes are shining.
“If I don’t go, you can’t either,” he says. “He won’t take you.”
Oh, Christian, I think. Always trying to keep me out of trouble.
“I’ll see you at midnight at the train station,” I say. “Or I won’t. But I really hope I will.”
I kiss his cheek, and then leave him alone with the stained-glass angels.
Later I review my mental before-you-go-to-hell checklist: Make sure Web is somewhere safe—check. Tell Christian your plan, hope he doesn’t freak out too much—sort of check. And now I have to try to find my brother. The idea that Lucy knows about him, and has sworn to take revenge on me, has me near panic every time I think about it.
As usual, I start at the pizza place. Since the night at the Garter I’ve been calling like crazy, trying to reach him, but he’s never been there.
“He quit,” the manager informs me now, clearly ticked off. “He didn’t give notice or anything. He just stopped showing up about a week ago.”
“Do you know where he lives?” I ask.
The manager shrugs. “He always biked to work, even in bad weather. If you see him, tell him we need our uniform back.”
“I’ll tell him,” I say, but there’s a sick feeling in my stomach that I’m not going to get that chance anytime soon.
I wander around my old neighborhood, trying to think of where to look for him next. It feels like déjà vu, looking for my brother, the way we did last summer in the first weeks when he was gone. My inclination is to start at my old house, work my way out from there. I call Billy.
“How’s Web?” I ask, unable to help myself.
“He’s good. He smiled at me. I’ll text you the picture.”
My heart squeezes. Angela’s missing it.
“Hey, you asked the people who moved into our old house if they’d seen Jeffrey around, didn’t you? Last June?” I ask.
“First place I checked,” she answers. “A real pretty girl lived there, too. Long, black hair. She said she knew Jeffrey, from back when they were in school together, but she hadn’t seen him.”
“Did she give you her name?” I ask, my heart starting to beat fast. A pretty girl. Long black hair. Who’d gone to school with Jeffrey.
“L something,” Billy says. “Let me think.”
“Lucy?” I manage to get out.
“That’s it,” Billy says. “Oh dear,” she says, as she realizes what I’m getting at.
The answer that’s been staring me in the face all this time now basically head-butts me. Lucy’s been involved with Jeffrey for a long time, and we didn’t know it. Who knows all the ways she could have been messing with his head?
“He’s been staying at our house. Mom never sold it,” I murmur to myself.
Mom knew that I was going to run away, he told me. She even kind of prepared me for it.
The windows are dark when I get there, no cars in the drive, no bicycle leaning against the garage. We used to keep a spare key under a flagstone on the back patio. I vault completely over the fence and into our old backyard. The swings on my old swing set sway gently as I pass.
Oh, clever, sneaky Mom.
It’s not that she didn’t care about Jeffrey’s vision or that she wasn’t interested in his the way she was so involved in mine. It’s that she already knew how it would play out. She knew what he would need. I can’t help but be annoyed by this. It’s like she was enabling him to run away.
The spare key is right where I thought it would be. My hands tremble as I unlock the door and slip into the house.
“Jeffrey?” I call.
Silence.
I send up a little prayer that I don’t run into Lucy instead. Because that would be awkward.
I poke around the kitchen. There’s a stack of dirty dishes in the sink. I open the fridge and find it mostly empty save for a gallon of chocolate milk that’s a week expired and what I think is a foil-wrapped slice of old pizza. It’s hard to tell what with the mold.
I call his name again, jog upstairs to his room. He’s not here, but his sheets are on the bed, rumpled at the bottom corner. The drawers of his old dresser, the one Mom said she was getting rid of before we moved to Wyoming—in fact, I complained because she bought Jeffrey a whole new set of bedroom furniture for the move, oh clever, sneaky Mom—are full of his clothes. It smells like him in here.
I search the drawers, looking for clues, but I get nothing.
He lives here, clearly. Or he did. It doesn’t seem like he’s been back here for a while. Add that to what the pizza place manager said about him not showing up to work for a week, and color me officially worried.
Lucy could have him, right now. Asael could have him. Or he could be—
I won’t let myself think the word dead, won’t allow myself to picture Jeffrey with a sorrow blade through his heart. I have to believe that he’s out there, somewhere.
I sit down on his bed and dig for a scrap of paper in my purse, a pen. On the back of a Nebraska grocery store receipt I write the following note:
Jeffrey,
I know you’re mad at me. But I really need to talk to you. Call me. Please remember that I’m always in your corner.
Clara
I hope he gets the message.
Outside again, I hide the key back under the flagstone and take a long, last look at the house where I grew up, and I wonder if I’ll ever lay eyes on it again after tonight, or if I’ll ever get to talk to my baby brother.
Very soon now, I’ll have to catch a train.
18
YOU’LL SEE ME AGAIN
At some point in the afternoon it seems like I have nothing to do but wait for night to fall. I glance at my watch. I’ve got hours to go before I have to make the journey to the train station.