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It’s a Friday night and Lexi is at a party as she has the last 4 Fridays. And Saturdays. And whatever other days there was booze.
Keith and Jason were fighting about… whatever it is they fight about. Keith still hasn’t gotten a job and Jason said something about quitting the baseball team to get a job and Keith vehemently disagreed and then Jason went off about how Keith hasn’t gotten a job yet and they can’t live off of their savings forever and that’s when Lexi tuned out.
Whitney has been hiding in her room, running up there the second she gets home from school and not so quietly crying. She’s tried to talk to Whitney but her hallucinations make having a coherent conversation with her difficult, espeically when Whitney can’t decipher what Lexi says is real and what her mind is creating.
Sam is… she doesn’t know where Sam’s been. Can’t have gone far. He’s in eighth grade. What was she doing when she was in eighth grade? She can’t remember. She can’t remember much of anything and doesn’t want to.
Lexi is about to knock back her drink when the glass is plucked from her hand and spilled onto the floor.
“Hey!” she shouts, whipping around. “Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Lexi thinks that she should be intimidated by this guy, over six feet of muscle, hardened eyes that have seen too much. But she can’t help her eyes from roaming over his features, chiseled and gorgeous and oh so tempting after Jared and her are having yet another off in their on-again-off-again relationship.
“Some creep put something in it,” he says, voice gruff.
“Oh,” she says, the fight draining out. “Well… thanks.” She looks up, batting her eyelashes. “Is there any way I can thank you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Drink some water and go home. You’ve had enough.” He pushes a sealed water bottle into her hand.
Her flirtatious smirk falls. “I’ll ask again. Who the fuck do you think you are.”
“I’m a guy who hates seeing people throw their life away for instant gratification and temporary distraction.”
She holds herself back from throwing the water bottle in his face. “I’m not—”
“I’ve seen you around,” he cuts her off. “And I definitely don’t think you’re old enough to be drinking whatever you were about to.”
“What are you? A cop? Look around. It’s not like I’m the only one.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Still. Doesn’t seem like you’re doing it for the same reasons as them.”
“Oh, yeah?” she says, fiddling with the cap of the water bottle and taking a sip to mull over her next words. “And what have you been able to psychoanalyze about me?”
“You’re drinking to forget.”
She stills, the words sobering her more than the water he’s made her drink.
“You don’t know me.”
“I don’t,” he says. “But… you’re not as much of a lost cause as you think you are.” He nods his head over to the corner where Jason is not so subtly lurking with Zac. “There’s people who give a shit about you. That’s more than a lot of people can say. You don’t have to listen to a single word I say but… pushing everyone away doesn’t do anything but hurt you and them.”
“And what if that’s what I want?”
“Then you should probably think about why you do. And if it’ll be worth it when you don’t want to anymore.” His jaw tightens. “I don’t know what happened and you don’t gotta tell me. But I know what it’s like to come out of something that fucks you up and the rest of your life and look back on who you were before and can’t remember how you could ever not feel how you do now. And it also sucks trying to compete with the person you used to be and feel like everyone expects you to be the person you used to be. But if they really do care about you, which, by the looks of it they do,” he looks over at Jason and Zac again, “then they just want you to be whoever you are right now. And for you to be as okay as you can be.”
“I haven’t been okay in a long time.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
There’s a tense silence as his words sink in, her mind still intoxicated but clearer than its been in a long time. “My mom. She died. And my dad… he left us.”
He clinks their water bottles together with a humoreless chuckle. “Wow. I guess I get it even more than I thought.”
Her head snaps up. “Seriously? You’re not… you’re not just saying that?”
“My mom was an opioid addict. Died of an overdose when I was a kid. And my dad chose crime instead of his family and got locked up for life.”
“Oh.” She bites her lip nervously. “I don’t… it’s not the same. What happened to me wasn’t—”
“And I’ll stop you right there. If you were about to compare our parents dying and leaving us then I’m just gonna tell you to shut up while you’re at it. This isn’t a competition and I didn’t tell you that to make you feel bad. It sucks. It sucks no matter how it happens.”
She tries to believe him but it doesn’t stick, the guilt still gnawing at her. “She was sick. For a while. And then she just… we knew she was going to… but we still weren’t ready. Sometimes I forget. It's like, she's still alive in my head even though she's not actually," she stops. "It was hard on all of us but especially my dad. He was always a great dad. He loved us. He did everything he could to give us a good life. And then he just… he just left.”
“When was that?”
“A month ago. My oldest brother, Keith, had to drop out of med school to take care of my younger siblings. Despite the bachelor’s degree in bio-chem-whatever, he hasn’t been able to get a steady job while he’s also dealing with all of the finances since our dad hasn’t been gone long enough for him to have access to any of the accounts. My other brother’s anger issues have only gotten worse after dad left and I know something’s been going on with him at baseball but it’s not like we talk enough for me to know. Hell, we can barely talk before it becomes a screaming match. My little sister, Whitney, is on these fucked up antidepressants that give her hallucinations but they’re the only ones that are set with our insurance that don’t cost a fortune and our dad took care of all that medical shit and it’s not like she knows any of the nitty gritty technicalities of it all even though she’s 15 and she should know—”
Lexi stops, shaking her head. “And who even knows what my Sam is up to. He’s the youngest. Really into art. He’s always holed up with his easel painting or something else but… we don’t care enough about him I think. Because he’s the easy one. He’s not as fucked up as the rest of us. And that sucks. But… we’re all barely holding on.”
“That… is disturbingly familiar you don’t even know.”
Her brows shoot up and a surprised laugh jolts through her. “Seriously?”
“Seriously. Like… that’s uncomfortably similar. Are you sure your family isn’t my family from another universe?”
“I definitely don’t think so,” she says.
“You never know,” he says. “The multiverse is vast.”
“God, you’re a fucking nerd, has anyone ever told you that?”
He gestures to his body with a cocked brow.
“Hey, just ‘cause you’re hot doesn’t mean you can’t be a nerd.” Her gaze floats over to Zac whose head is thrown back in a laugh.
“I’m Jason by the way.”
Her brain stutters over the information. “My brother’s name is Jason.”
“Which one?”
“The angry one.”
He snorts. “Oh. Wow. Yeah.”
“I’m Lexi,” she replies. “And, uhm. Thanks. For this.”
He pauses, warring over something she can’t decipher. “Listen. I know we just met and we don’t know each other, but I’m a private investigator. If you want, I could look into where your dad went. Pro bono. I don’t… I only do pro bono work.”
“...you’re serious?”
“Completely,” he says. “You deserve closure. And we’re kindred spirits. We gotta stick together.”
She laughs. “I don’t think that’s a thing.”
“Oh, it totally is.”
Lexi doesn’t see Jason for another week. Doesn’t even get a text or call from him.
Things don’t magically get better overnight after one pep talk from a stranger. If anything, things stay as fucked up as they have.
And then, the police show up to their house.
Her and her siblings huddle together, clutching onto each other as the commissioner tells them that their dad’s car was found at the bottom of a ravine. That he got caught in a storm on his way home, most likely hit a deer and crashed through the guard rails, dying on impact. He didn’t suffer.
“He’s dead?” Sam asks, tears pooling in his eyes. “You’re saying he’s dead?” Keith pulls him into his arms immediately.
“The gas station attendant remembered him as soon as we showed him the photograph. Remembered that your dad didn’t want to wait out the rain so he could get back to his kids.”
“He didn’t leave us,” she hears Whitney sob, words that she’s repeated for weeks and Lexi refused to believe.
Lexi is frozen, the words echoing in her head.
Dead. Dead. He didn’t leave us. He’s dead. Dad is dead.
She finds herself sitting by the pool when everyone’s finally collapsed from exhaustion into a semblance of sleep.
“Hey.”
She turns around, expecting to see her Jason, the other insomniac of the family.
Instead, it’s the Jason from the party.
“You found out what happened,” she says, voice emotionless, spent out from the unexpected end of her night.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. You… we got closure. And…” She blinks back tears. “And now we know that he loved us until the end.”
Jason sits beside her, pulling off his combat boots and socks and sticking his feet into the water with her. “Tell me about him?”
And she does. For the first time since he left, since he… she talks about all of the good memories she refused to let herself remember.