Page 4 of Thicker Than Water
“Oh, come on. He knows what happened.”
That’s exactly the problem. Aiden, Jason, and I were eating pizza on Sunday evening, local news playing in the background, when the story of Gavin’s murder blared across the screen. Jason dropped his slice then, not even wincing as the hot tomato sauce splattered his lap. He sat there, wide-eyed, wide-mouthed, unchewed crust adrift on his tongue, and his shock hooked my attention so completely that it took me a moment to process its source: Jason’s boss had been killed.
Later that night, I tumbled through dreams of Gavin’s stitched-up mouth—until something woke me. A sound from down the hall led me to Aiden’s room, where his light was still on at two in the morning. Peeking inside, I found him sitting on the edge of his bed, hunched over his phone with his brows drawn, his feet digging into the carpet like he was crushing cigarettes beneath them.You okay, hon?I asked, and he startled, flipping his phone upside down.
I’m fine, he said, but he skated one finger over his lips, as if thinking of the thread that wove through Gavin’s.
“The news stories have freaked him out,” I tell Sienna now. “You don’t need to tell him the guy might’ve deserved it, too.”
“Well, what if he did?”
“Nobody deserves to be murdered. And especially not likethat.”
Three assaults to his body: the postmortem sewing, the suffocation that killed him, the stab wound in his stomach. I glance toward the wall, at those bloodred roosters, and shudder.
“Maybe not,” Sienna says. “I’m just saying: carrying this horrible thing that someone’s done to you, knowing every single day they got away with it—” She smooths her blunt dark bob. “It’s enough to make a person snap.”
I take a long breath before asking: “Are you sayingyou’regoing to snap?”
Sometimes I wonder. It’s been seventeen years since Clive Clayton downed six shots of Jaeger at a party, drove across a double yellow line, and killed Sienna and Jason’s parents on impact. Sixteen years since he was sentenced to only three in prison. Fourteen and a half since he got out on parole. But it was just last week, working on the splash page for a new A&A client, that I saw Clive’s Instagram among the open tabs in Sienna’s browser. And yesterday, Sienna scowled at a post about his new car, a growl low in her throat.
“No, I won’t snap,” Sienna says. “I have you.” She boops my nose. “But not everyone has a Julia to hold them together.”
She reaches for my hand, and it takes less than a second for our fingers to lock together, perfectly grooved to each other like gears in a machine. The first time we held hands like this, we’d known each other less than two hours. We were twenty-two, Jason twenty-four, and I was pregnant, though nobody but Jason and I knew that yet. I’d only been dating him for three months, and I was hoping that meeting his sister would solidify a connection with him. I liked him, of course—was probably going to love him—but everything had happened so fast, and his proposal had been with a twist tie he’d shaped into a ring. I wasn’t wearing it the night I met Sienna—dinner at Olive Garden—because I hadn’t answered him yet. I’d only kissed him when he asked, smiled without my teeth, and told him I’d think about it.
The dinner was awkward to start. Small talk and small laughs. When the waitress asked what I’d like to drink, I was about to second Sienna’s order of a cosmo—maybe it would relax me, turn me into someone more interesting to Jason’s cool, tall sister with the blistering blue eyes. But then I remembered the two lines on the pregnancy test, shaped like a road I’d travel forever, and I switched to cranberry juice. So we went on: small talk, small laughs, until Jason, spearing a tomato with his fork, proclaimed, “Mmm, these are good motatoes.” At Jason’s fumbled word, Sienna and I looked at each other, sharing a panicked gaze as we struggled to pinch back our laughter, our mouths filled with fresh sips. But as soon as Jason corrected himself, so earnestly—“tomatoes, I like thesetomatoes”—we exploded into simultaneous spit-takes, spewing bright red juice all over our salads.
The night rushed ahead after that, with Jason edging more and more toward the periphery. Sienna and I leaned toward each other, hunting for everything we had in common: we both love foods that are sweet and savory (we later dipped our breadsticks into theraspberry sauce on our cheesecakes); we both graduated from UConn; our names both end with A, a fact that Jason contributed dully, as if it barely warranted a mention. But Sienna and I latched onto it, latched onto each other, too, our hands locking together for the very first time across the table. And four years later, when naming our two-person brand development business—Sienna as designer and coder, me as copywriter—it took us only three minutes to decide on A&A Brand.
On the ride home from Olive Garden that first night, I said to Jason, “I love your sister!” Then, my heart buoyant, veins buzzing as if I really had ordered that Cosmo, I added, “And I love you too.”
I hadn’t said that to him yet, and the sentence felt stiff on my tongue. But I kept going, trying to loosen the words, soften them up.
“I love you and we’re having a baby.” I said this second part as if it were shocking news—which it still kind of was, the ink on my diploma barely even dry. “I love you and—I think we should get married.”
I didn’t allow myself to wonder: if I hadn’t just bonded with Sienna so intensely, would I still be saying yes to Jason? Or, in time, would we decide to raise our son in separate houses, loving each other but not in love?
Jason jerked to a stop on the side of the road. Cupping my face in his hands, he told me he loved me too. But then—because he knew about my mother, the phrase she’d repeated my entire childhood, drilling it into my head like an emergency phone number—he asked if I was sure. And briefly, like so many times before, I heard my mother’s warning:Never trust a man.
I silenced it with another kiss.
Now, Sienna nods toward the TV, where the news has moved on from Gavin’s murder. “We should start the movie,” she says. “But first:motatoes!”
Since our initial Olive Garden dinner, Sienna and I have referred to food asmotatoes. It doesn’t matter what kind. Soup is motatoes. Cupcakes: motatoes. Nachos: motatoes with cheese. Jason always rolls his eyes, but Sienna and I smile every time.
“What do you want,” I ask, “chocolate popcorn, or pretzel cookies?”
I need comfort food right now, something to distract from the warning that’s wormed its way back:Never trust a man, never trust a man.My mother’s been dead for eight years, but in the wake of that December night with Jason—my laptop open between us, my finger shaking as it aimed at the screen—I’ve been hearing it more and more. And every time, it’s as clear and precise as if she’s standing beside me, whispering it into my ear.
“Pretzel—” Sienna starts, but my phone cuts in. The ringing fills the room like a siren.
I squint at the screen, not recognizing the number, but pick up anyway. I have to answer unknown calls; Jason’s always letting his cell phone die, forgetting to charge it or just not caring to, so there’s always the possibility he could be calling from someone else’s phone.
But the person on the other end isn’t Jason. It’s a woman, and as she speaks, something turns off inside my head. I don’t hear the caller’s voice, or the ghost of my mother’s, or even Sienna’s as she registers my expression—What’s wrong? Who is it?I read on her lips.
I ask the woman to repeat what she said, and as I press the phone tighter to my ear, I can just make it out: Jason’s name, thenhospital.
When I hang up, I say only this: “Jason’s hurt.” And as Sienna and I lurch for our keys, our shoes, I see on the muted TV a shot of a residential road. Lights from several cars strobe against the trees, back and forth, over and over, switching between the color of blood and the color of a bruise. They’re pulsing, insistent, will not be ignored: blue and red, and blue and red, and blue-red-blue-red-blue.
