“She’s lost her mind,” his mother said with a look of fear in her eyes.
I laughed at her. “I wish,” I said. “But unfortunately, I still have to deal with being quite sane, no thanks to you.”
“Just tell us what you want,” Julian’s father said. “You want money?”
What pathetic excuses for humans they were, thinking again that money was more important than anything else. Their lives weren’t worth a cent of the money they had amassed.
I shook my head. “No. I want something more. Something much more than your pathetic green paper. What I want is for the two of you to distract David so that we can all leave this hellhole.”
The three guys exchanged glances and I could feel Michael’s stare boring into my head as he tried to figure out what I was doing.
“Distract him how?” Julian’s mother asked.
I scoffed. “I don’t care how you do it. But you will distract him long enough that we can get away from here without him seeing us leave. And if you screw up and he catches us, I will make it my one singular purpose in life to pull every organ out of your bodies with my bare hands.”
I saw Adam’s jaw drop from the corner of my eyes.
I snorted without even looking his way. “What? Too dark?” I asked.
I turned to go back to the bedroom and called over my shoulder as I went. “Rob, don’t let them leave until they figure out how and when they’re going to help us escape.”
Once I had gotten back into the room, I heard the talking begin. Julian’s parents sounded hysterical, but they were cooperating. The guys weren’t taking it easy on them, too, so that helped. A hell of a lot easier than I would have made it for them, anyway. And when it sounded like they had reached a conclusion and Rob was walking them out, I went into the bathroom to take the first shower I’d taken in days.
It was time to start repairing the broken pieces.
After a few long minutes of standing under the steaming water, I heard the door open and saw Michael standing nakedly before me. “Can I come in?” he asked.
I nodded and watched him enter. “That was really something, what you did back there,” he said.
My voice fell flat. “It needed to be done,” I said. “For Julian.”
“We worked out that they will distract David tomorrow. We’ll leave just before sunset.”
“I want to go to Asheville,” I said.
“Don’t you think we should get farther away than that?” he asked.
“No,” I said sharply. “It has to be Asheville.”
Michael looked at me as I stared at him with empty eyes.
“Lisette,” he said in a soft and gentle voice.
It was as if the floodgates opened again, and I didn’t even think I could possibly have any tears left to cry. Michael put his arms around me, and I rested my head on his shoulder as we let the water stream down over us.
“It was my fault, Michael,” I cried. “Julian kept trying to get me to leave and I refused. I should have just gone with him and then none of this would have happened.”
“No, this is not your fault. None of this is your fault. No one could have known that this would happen. All of us wanted to leave, but you were right not to leave anyone behind. That is not what caused this.”
“I’m not going to leave him behind now either,” I said. “Julian had always wanted to go to Asheville, that’s where he said he would take me and so that is where I want to go.”
“Okay,” Michael said as he held my head against him and cradled my neck. “We’ll go to Asheville.”
We spent the rest of the night packing what needed to be packed, which wasn’t much, and putting it in duffle bags that we would place in Rob’s car in the morning. Julian’s parents were scared enough to know that I meant my threat to their lives and the guys were certain that they wouldn’t cross us. They would distract David over dinner with a proposition regarding funding for the underground marketing of his new, and now highly sought after, drug. While they had been talking, Rob had dropped a hint to Julian’s parents about what David had done as far as pushing their son into the path of the bullet. He also dropped a hint about how opening up an investigation with his police unit works. He wouldn’t be here anymore and would be leaving the police force once we left, but it was one last gift that he gave to Julian, and to me.
Something small that might avenge Julian’s death at least a little bit.
That night, none of us slept. We huddled together on the bed and tried to close our eyes from time to time but sleep just wouldn’t come for any of us. It felt strange to still have three sets of arms holding me, but one of them not be Julian’s.
I remembered my mother telling me that the universe worked in mysterious ways, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t what the universe intended. I felt like I had lost my mother all over again, because Julian was the last connection to her that I had left. He was the only other person in the world besides me that could remember her smile and the way she used to nuzzle my face when I did something cute. He remembered the bologna and butter sandwiches that she made, and he used to beat up the kids at school in the lunchroom if they said anything about my sandwich being weird. He was a keeper of some of her memories too and now that he was gone, my mother was gone a little bit more than she already was.
I suppose there was one other person in the world who remembered my mother. But that was the person who took Julian from me, and the one who blamed my mother for turning him into what he was now; a person who cost me my best friend and lover and who took away the last of everything I had. David didn’t deserve to own any memories of my mother. He didn’t deserve to know Julian. He deserved what would be coming to him tomorrow, the surprise of seeing that we had all left and escaped his clutches and that he would be left without anyone even seeking vengeance on him because he simply wasn’t even worth it.
“Do you believe in heaven and hell?” I asked, inviting any of the three of them to answer my question.
“I’d like to think that there’s something after we die,” Rob answered. “But I can’t say that I know the answer to that for sure. I don’t think anyone really does.”
That sounded like the same kind of answer that Julian would say. Maybe the universe did work in mysterious ways like my mother had said.
Adam was quiet. Maybe he didn’t know, or maybe he didn’t want to think about it.
“Do you?” Michael said as he met my question with a question.
“Of course,” I answered. “It would be hard not to believe in hell when you’ve lived there.”
And I’d never heard a more fantastic argument for the afterlife than that.
14
