The Best I Could (5 page)

The dark, silent years after Mom’s death were
hallowed ones. No one talked about them. No one talked about the
way we crumbled, becoming the parts of ourselves we hated. Jet had
cried and fucked his way through it. Literally. Deena pretended it
never happened. Dad died with Mom. I didn’t do anything to save
anyone.

I stood my ground. “Then don’t be like him
and step away.”

“What about you, Tansy?” Jet asked. “If
you’re not angry or wallowing in despair, what are you?”

“I don’t know.” My insides twisted into
knots. “I don’t know what I am.”

Turning, he slammed into the room with his
things, the sound echoing through the house.

“And we shall call this tune ‘the slamming of
the doors’,” Hetty said from behind me.

Turning, I found her watching me from the
living room surrounded by her cats. Snow remained at my side, no
longer nudging me.

“Is that supposed to be funny?” I asked.

Rather than answer me, Hetty studied my face.
“You are so much like your mother.”

My chest tightened. “I don’t want to be like
anyone.”

Hetty smiled. “Neither did she. I guess
that’s why she ended up with your father.”

Stepping toward the living room, I choked
out, “Why?”

One of the cats, a fat
orange tabby, hissed at me. Hetty nodded at him. “That’s Grumpy.
He’s a mean ol’ cuss.” She laughed softly, her gaze going distant.
“Your dad needed direction. I think your mom liked
being
his
direction.”

“So she was as self-centered as he was?” I
asked, disappointed.

“Maybe,” Hetty answered, surprising me.
“You’re not self-centered, Tansy. You’re just tired like the rest
of us. Your parents created enough drama in our lives. They’ve left
us looking for peace.”

My hand found the wall at the end of the
corridor. “I think I’m scared.”

“Good. Scared isn’t so bad. It’s better than
angry.”

By the way she looked at me, I knew she’d
misunderstood my words. I wasn’t scared of what was going to happen
next. I wasn’t scared of where my life was taking me. I was scared
of love. Scared of falling in love. Scared of being in love.

He did the best he could for
all of you,
Hetty had said.

Love made you do the best you could for
people while giving your essence to someone who may destroy it. I
didn’t want to do the best I could for the people in my life. I
wanted to do more than that. I wanted to give the people I cared
about everything I had and still have enough to spare while keeping
my essence.

“Tansy,” Hetty called, drawing my attention
away from my thoughts. “You’re not like your dad. None of you
are.”

How could she be so sure? Could falling in
love for us be the same way it was for him? Could we fall so hard
that it would destroy us?

“I’m tired,” I muttered, turning.

My room was the finale, the echoing sound
finishing ‘the slamming of the doors’.

***

Dad’s visitation and funeral were exactly as
I’d imagined them to be. Two days, a handful of people—mostly men
and women who knew Hetty—and a coffin with a man I barely
recognized lying inside of it.

“He’s so thin,” Jet whispered.

The swelling that had plagued Dad’s body for
over a year was gone, his once swollen features now cold and
slim.

After the initial shock of seeing him, we
avoided looking at the casket, plastering on false smiles for the
people who sauntered through whispering things like, “I’m sorry for
your loss.”

By the end of the first day, Deena’s
grumpiness was rubbing off on all of us.

“I’m not sorry,” Deena grumbled, the words
chasing the last visitor. “I’m not sorry at all.”

“I don’t think he knew a single damn person
who showed up,” Jet complained.

“It was nice that they came,” I reasoned.

Exhausted, we trudged through the rest of the
evening; through showers, a painfully silent meal, and restless
sleep.

On the second day, Hetty’s van followed a
hearse to a small country cemetery. No one else came to the
gravesite.

A preacher said a handful of thoughtful words
and murmured a prayer, Hetty dabbed at the corners of her eyes, Jet
stared at nothing at all, and Deena scowled.

The casket was lowered into the ground next
to our mother’s plot a few rows ahead of Mom’s family. Half the
graveyard was full of Mom’s relatives. Dad didn’t seem to have
people. If he did, he’d never talked about them much.

Jet gestured at the grave. “Do we really
spend our whole lives to get to this moment?”

It didn’t seem so bad to me. An eternity of
sleep after years of pain.

Dirt thudded onto the wooden casket below.
Across from us, Hetty spoke quietly with the preacher, a young man
with bright eyes. Occasionally he glanced at us, his gaze flicking
from my nose ring to the fire engine red sprinkled throughout my
hair. Rebel, it yelled. A rebel I was not.

“For what?” Deena asked Jet. “For dying?”

“No, to be put on display for people who
don’t even know you, and then buried with no one here to see.”

“We’re
here,” I pointed out. “Maybe we shouldn’t spend life just to
get to this place. We should just make the most of it, you
know?”

“Maybe,” Jet murmured.

He’d forgiven me for comparing him to Dad.
Either that or he just didn’t care. Not when he was leaving. A cab
sat idling at the edge of the cemetery, waiting to whisk him away
to the nearest airport. Back to New York. Back to his life at
school where he’d blow straight through his part of Dad’s life
insurance. The part that hadn’t been used to pay off debt.

“I don’t want to stay here,” Deena whispered,
her voice shaking. For the first time in months, she sounded like a
sad, scared, fourteen-year-old girl.

Jet’s eyes met mine over her head. “Tansy’s
staying,” he assured.

Tansy’s
staying
.
Tansy’s
staying. Tansy’s staying.

The words echoed through my head, mocking me.
Oh, God! I wasn’t sure I could do this again. I wasn’t sure I could
watch someone I loved spiral into nothing. Only Deena wasn’t Dad,
so maybe it wasn’t the same. Dad hadn’t been angry, he’d given
up.

A tear slid down Deena’s cheek. “But you’re
not. You’re not because it’s too hard for you to stay, right?
Because you need to start over. What about us? Do you even care
that you’re just leaving us behind?”

Jet’s gaze went wild, sliding from the grave,
to Hetty, and finally to the waiting cab. “You’re starting over,
too.”

“Are we?” Deena wailed.
“You’re leaving us behind with Nana who, quite frankly,
hasn’t
started over. She’s
living in the same town Mom’s buried in for Christ’s
sake!”

“It’s going to be fine,” Jet said firmly, his
jaw set.

In that moment, I hated my brother. I hated
him for his lack of compassion, for running from his ghosts while
leaving us behind to deal with ours. Resentment ate at my
insides.

“It’s still starting over,” I told Deena.
“The town doesn’t matter. It’s how we go about getting out of here
one day.”

“Without Jet,” she mumbled, her gaze avoiding
our brother.

His lips parted. “I’m sor—”

“Don’t!” I warned. “Sorry is a bullshit word.
If you feel the need to apologize, then you’re doing something
wrong.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” he muttered.

It was the worst thing he could have
said.

Reaching for my sister’s hand, I tugged her
toward Hetty’s van. “Are you?” I asked, throwing a glare over my
shoulder.

Hands in his pockets, his shoulders sagging,
and his head down, Jet headed for the cab.

“Wait!” Hetty called. “You’re already
leaving?” She glanced at us. “You’re not going to tell your brother
good-bye?”

“We’ve said enough good-byes,” I
answered.

Jet kept walking. Hetty rushed forward, her
gaze on his back. He picked up his pace.

“You shouldn’t let him leave like this,” she
told us.

Deena exploded, her eyes shining. Wrenching
her hand free from mine, she screamed, “He’s the one leaving! He
could have stayed for the rest of summer. We aren’t doing anything
to him! We didn’t do anything to Dad! We aren’t hurting them!” She
placed her hands over her ears. “Quit blaming us!”

Hetty’s brow furrowed. “No, I didn’t
mean—”

Deena hummed to drown her out, her eyes
squeezed shut. My heart broke. Not for my dad or Jet, but for my
sister who carried too many confusing emotions on her shoulders
without knowing how to channel them.

I reached for her. “None of it is our fault,
Deena. She didn’t mean that.”

She pushed her hands tighter against her
head, the humming rising. In the distance, Jet climbed into the
cab, and the car pulled away. He never glanced back.

“Dear Lord!” Hetty breathed. “I don’t know if
I can do this.”

I glanced at her. “Just don’t say you’ll do
the best you can. There’s no good way of doing anything. Just
fucking do it.”

Her gaze passed between us, weary acceptance
falling over her features. “Let’s go fucking do this then.”

Deena quit humming, her shocked gaze finding
our grandmother. “Nana—”

“We’re going to have to start a swear jar,”
she mumbled, shaking her head. “Too many dirty mouths in this
family.”

A startled laugh escaped me.

Hetty ushered us toward the van, throwing an
apologetic look at the young minister who’d come out to speak up
for Dad.

Climbing into the vehicle, I studied our
grandmother.

Was Nana a lot like Dad? She’d come crawling
to the country when Mom died, living only a few miles from the
cemetery where her daughter was buried.

Or was she better than Dad because instead of
letting it kill her, she’d retreated to do something different?
Maybe even something bigger while remaining close to the daughter
she was forced to say good-bye to.

That kind of love didn’t seem so bad.

***

A day after the funeral, Hetty had me sitting
behind the desk at the animal clinic twiddling my thumbs because I
didn’t know what the hell I was doing.

Worse yet, I was exhausted because I’d spent
the night dreaming about the day Dad died. In the dream, the blood
from the hospital had leaked onto my toes, but instead of stopping,
the blood had dripped harder, faster. Before long, it was a river,
filling the rooms, the hallways, and the stairwells, drowning
people. The guy from the roof was there, sailing a ship on a world
covered in a bloody ocean, a cigarette dangling out of his mouth.
Part human, part dragon. He reached for me and yelled, “Come knit
me a bigger sail!” Which made no sense, but I wanted to do it. I
wanted to climb aboard and knit him a sail out of pastel yarn, soft
colors rather than harsh. Instead, I’d drowned in the blood and
woke up gasping.

The clinic was the last place I wanted to be.
It smelled too much like a hospital, even if the patients weren’t
human.

A male veterinarian, two assistants, and the
only other office clerk kept glancing at my badly done hair, the
piercings in my ears—I had six altogether—and the one in my
nose.

“This is my granddaughter, Tansy,” Hetty
introduced. “She’s going to help out in the office.”

They kept staring. If Hetty told them about
me, she obviously forgot to mention my appearance.

“It’s semi-permanent. It washes out,” I told
them, gesturing at my hair. “Give me a week or two, and I’ll
replace it with blue, maybe green. Pink or purple if I’m in the
mood.”

The veterinarian—a thin, balding middle-aged
man with a smile too big for his face—offered me his hand. “I’m
Sean Whitehall,” he introduced. “Welcome to Refuge.”

I shook his hand, my grip much looser than
his.

The rest of the staff mumbled their names,
but with my memory I’d never remember them anyway. I was much
better with faces. There was a birdlike woman, her nose pointy, her
eyes small and close together, a blonde-haired girl with hair poufy
enough to reach heaven and firm enough to stop a bullet, and a guy
with professional football shoulders and a face scarred by years of
acne.

“Okay,” Hetty said cheerfully, clapping once.
“Well, I’ll let Vanessa,” she indicated the poufy-haired girl,
“walk you through what you’ll need to know out here.”

She left. Sean and the assistants disappeared
with her.

Vanessa went back to staring. “So, are you in
school and stuff?”

My gaze took in her colorful knee-length tent
dress and cowgirl boots. “No. You?”

She shrugged. “College. First year. Sean
Whitehall is my dad. I’m here for the summer helping out. The girl
who usually mans the desk just gave birth, so she’s out on
maternity leave.”

“Okay,” I replied.

The phone rang, and she answered it, her gaze
flicking occasionally to my face before scanning my body. There
wasn’t much to see; patched, cut-off shorts, a black swing tank,
and a pair of combat boots.

Half the day passed. Vanessa did most of the
work, her lingering gaze settling too often on me. No conversation.
No training whatsoever. Rather than ask her what I was supposed to
be doing, I took mental notes: Answer the phone with a cheerful,
sugary sweet, “Refuge Animal Clinic.” Go to the large, gray filing
cabinet in the back for records. Walk to a wooden shelf in the
lobby for leashes, collars, heartworm medication, or flea control
items. Blah, blah, blah.

I was leaning down, sneaking my brother’s
hand-me-down iPod out of my pocket, when the bell on the door rang.
Vanessa froze, a smile plastered on her face.

Rising slowly, I peered over the edge of the
counter and froze, an avalanche of emotions piling on top of
me.