Page 38 of What You Left Me

All I can do is believe. I am a Cubs fan for Chrissake. My people waited 108 years for a World Series win. I know a thing or two about keeping the faith.

So Ibelievethat time hasn’t slipped that far past me. Ibelievethat if I want to be back on the side of existence I’ve known for eighteen years, more than I’ve ever wanted anything, I will be brought back. Ibelievethat I’m like first baseman Anthony Rizzo—game seven, bottom of the tenth—and the ball is a little high coming toward me, but dammit, I’m gonna catch it, because catching it means it’s done, the curse is over; the Cubs win the World Series.

You know what? At this point, I’m not above skipping to the bargaining stage. Spitty didn’t stop for the red light, but I was the one who let him drink and drive. I will take responsibility. Mama Dorothy’s always telling me that when your chips are down, and you’ve really screwed up, sometimes a genuine apology is all you can give, because you can’t go back in time and change what you’ve done.

So I, Martin Frederick McGee, am sorry.

• • •

Not a word, aside from Daniel’s phone giving directions, has been uttered in the car since we left the hospital. As we unpack ourselves onto the driveway, we shake the cold silence out of our limbs. I step on a dried-up egg yolk. There are two more splattered onto the garage door.

In the early morning, when the night sky starts flirting with daylight’s soft pinks, the McGee house doesn’t look like the 1970s horror set I remember from Friday night. A garden in the front yard bursts with carefully maintained flowers surrounding a sign that readsWelcome to the McGees!Flanking the sign are four gnomes to represent each member of the McGee clan. Turrey’s shoes crush tulips as he walks over to the little red-hatted man with Martin’s name carved into the back. He picks up and drops the odd figurine in one swift motion.

“Are you for real, Spits?” he mutters, wiping egg yolk remnants onto his mesh shorts. “How can this kid be eighteen years old and still think it’s funny to egg people’s houses?”

When Cameron, Aminah, and I came to Martin’s for his party, I noticed something sticky underneath my feet as we walked up the driveway, but I didn’t think twice about it.

Turrey lifts the gnome up again, a two-finger pinch now, and removes a key taped to the bottom.

The rest of us migrate to the entrance. Turrey keeps the key held at chest level, a little bit away from him—a sacred object. The beginning of answers to questions not everyone knows they’re asking. He parts the crowd to push the teeth into the lock. My heart is a balloon with a pin through it, waiting to be popped.

The front door swings into a clapboard hallway starved for light. A linoleum path leads into a carpeted living area straight ahead and a tiled kitchen to the right. Two staircases go up and down on the left side of the hallway. Shoes line the space between. From the first upstairs step, a backpack spills its contents out onto the ground. We stand facing this portal into Martin’s life, our energy so stale it’s decomposing. This is happening. We are here.

And Martin isn’t.

Turrey positions himself in the center of the doorframe, blocking entry. One by one, the others turn to face me, slowly and deliberately, like a winning hand being shown card by card.

It’s as if I’ve had my eyes closed and I’m blinking them open for the first time. Being silently confronted by this ragtag group of old and new strikes me as the most hysterical thing that could possibly happen. Nothing I knew of the world two days ago exists anymore. The gap between what used to be and what is just closed. I didn’t mean to be, but I was standing in the middle of it all when it happened. It’s the funniest thing. I laugh and laugh.

And then I’m crying.

I squat down on the concrete slab in front of Martin’s front door, everyone else watching me as I laugh and cry like it’s the most obvious marriage of emotions one could ever experience.

“Petra?” Aminah asks. “Are you okay?” She shoots a look to Cameron.

“I’m sorry to do this. It’s just so funny. How I’m here. Why I’m here. None of it makes any sense at all,” I say.

Brooke squats in front of me. Her eyes, constantly and beautifully water-stained, meant to feel everything all the time, try to send me comfort. “It’s okay,” she says as she holds my shoulders.

“No.” I shift my attention from her glistening tears to Martin’s backpack. “It’s really not.”

• • •

I’m sorry for always letting Spitty talk me into doing pathetic stuff I know isn’t right. It’s not like he’d cut me out of his life if I stopped doing all of it. Yet here I am, the sad excuse of a human who spent more than half of high school pretending I didn’t like having my picture taken. Spitty was gonna give me three hundred bucks if I could go four years without letting someone get a good shot of my face. I got three years deep into this bet, ruining my sister’s wedding photos, and Istilllost, because Brooke started sobbing when I said I wouldn’t take pictures with her at prom. Photos of me wearing a white suit with an orange-sherbet vest, orange-sherbet tie, orange-sherbet socks, orange-sherbet cummerbund, a top hat, and a cane are now the only semidecent ones my family’s gotten in years.

It was all just a way to pass the time. Now I understand how precious time can be. There are much better ways to pass it.

I’m sorry.

• • •

“Pick your sorry self up off the ground, and let’s do something about it,” Cameron commands. She grabs my arm and pulls me up. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are looking for a shoe box with a letter in it. A pact between Martin and Spencer. Petra says Martin told her about it in her dream last night, and as impossible as that sounds, I believe her, and so should you all.”

It might be for me sitting here on Martin’s front doorstep crying, or it might be because they do in fact believe, but Cameron’s unwavering certainty stuns everyone into complacent silence. Each face wears the same expression. For a beat, it’s all there is to see. Puzzled sympathy coming at me from every angle. Even Aminah has no argument to make, and she never goes along with anything she can’t directly fact-check.

Then Turrey moves out of the doorway, and every face drops to neutral, like curtains on the truth—back to the charade again. Cameron wipes dirt off my shorts and urges me inside.

Oh, how the air can change in a matter of two feet. It smells like laundry detergent and cigarettes and the sleepy warmth of mid-June. The linoleum creaks as I propel myself toward Martin’s backpack. An unfolded note from Brooke sits in plain view.