Razorblade Kisses(100)
Her cell phone rang, but she didn’t make a move to answer it. She wasn’t speaking, not to anyone about anything. She couldn’t form sentences. She’d killed her sister and Phil and now her mother was dead too. She’d always thought of him as evil, but he’d turned her mother into a person Emery didn’t recognize. Maybe he’d turned Emery into a monster as well.
Her phone chirped that she had a message. It’d been doing that every few minutes for the past hour and Emery simply couldn’t pull her drunk ass out of bed to quit the annoying chirping. Then it rang again.
“FUCK!” Emery screamed at the top of her lungs.
She rolled over on her back and looked up at the hammered tin on the ceiling. Please stop calling me. The phone rang again and Emery threw herself on the floor and crawled into the den where the phone was on the charger, still ringing. It was Rachel. She couldn’t talk to her. She couldn’t talk to anyone.
A text appeared.
Emma, this is Meme. Tim told me to come get you and bring you to Lucas but you aren’t answering your phone.
Her heart stopped beating. She would die, drunk and in Noah’s Vanderbilt jersey. It was the only thing she had of his and it comforted her for some reason, she didn’t know why. As soon as she started listening to the voicemails, there was a knock on her door. She was on her hands and knees, her head hung so low her chin rested on her chest. She didn’t want Meme to see her like this. Ms. Carter must’ve let her into the building. Emery didn’t move. She was frozen. The knocking grew louder.
“Emma?” Meme called from the other side of the door. “Tim said to come get you and take you to one of your kids’ houses.”
Emery sat back on her heels in what looked like a yoga pose and was quiet. Her mind wouldn’t work to even respond.
“Emma? I know you’re in there and Tim told me you may be in a state. Baby girl, just let me in.”
Pushing herself off the ground, she walked over to the door and opened it. Without greeting Meme, she turned and walked into her room to put pants on.
“Emma, are you okay?” By the sound of Meme’s voice, it sounded like she was staying in the den. She appreciated that.
She pulled on jeans, rain boots, her coat, and a wool cap. When she started toward the den again, she grabbed some gum off the counter and popped it in her mouth. Emery was drunk, and she shouldn’t be going anywhere involving her job, but it was Lucas.
“Emma…” Meme’s mouth hung open and her face showed shock as she took in Emery’s appearance and demeanor. She clamped her mouth shut and she followed Emery out to her car. Once they both got in, Meme turned to face Emery, who was sitting with her head against the passenger side window. “I’m not sure what’s going on, but you need to pull it together, baby. It doesn’t sound good.”
Emery blinked. My life isn’t good. My life is miserable. All that surrounds me is misery.
Nothing. She thought nothing, heard nothing but the monotone voice of the GPS system telling them which way to go. She didn’t need that, she had the route memorized. If she could talk, she could direct Meme.
When they turned down the street that Emery knew very well, everything stopped. She felt like she was in some sort of movie where everything froze, but she kept moving. The air stopped entering her lungs, the scream caught in her throat, and she felt life leave her. The blue lights that lined the road leading up to Lucas’s home flashed on their faces as Meme tried to figure out where to park. Emery couldn’t hear anything and it felt like a weight was on her chest. She searched the road for Tim—the only part of her body that worked was her eyesight—but she couldn’t see him. Meme pulled up very close to the house.
Her nothing came crashing down as she got out of the car. She saw nothing but a body bag being wheeled out of the house. Her guts seized in fear and everything else fell away. She braced herself on a tree with one hand and vomited up all the vodka she’d had over the past twenty-six hours. When she looked up, the cart with the body was being shut in the coroner’s vehicle.
“Yeah, it’s a bad scene over here. Yeah, the kid.” Emery looked up at the cop with his phone calling in the scene. “DFCS has been involved.” The cop walked by her and she heard the words that shut down any sort of functioning she was capable of. “No, he didn’t make it.”
“Lucas,” she sputtered, spit and drool slipping off her chin and falling to the ground to pool on the leaves collected under her feet. She put both hands on her knees and tried not to scream. She had now officially lost the very kid that she’d been working so hard to help. Nothing she did mattered. She’d failed Lucas. Without realizing it, more vodka escaped Emery’s mouth. Her nose was burning with the puke.