He snapped it around the armrest of the rolling chair.
“Still think I’m a flight risk, huh?” she asked.
“I would be.”
“And what if I looked you in the eyes and told you I wouldn’t try to leave?”
“I couldn’t live with myself putting you in a position to betray my trust.”
She rolled her eyes and plopped down in the chair, rocked it back-and-forth.
Said, “What now?”
“I’m going to find something to burn. In the meantime ...” he tugged the afghan he’d slept under the night before off the couch and flagged it open, “... try to stay warm.”
He brought it down over Sophie.
“You’re just going to leave me here with these wheels?”
“Knock yourself out. Take it for a spin.”
Grant walked into the kitchen where Paige was still washing up.
“Can I help?” he asked.
“Water’s cold,” she said without turning around.
He walked up to the sink beside her, grabbed a plate.
“Thanks for dinner,” he said as he submerged it in the frigid water.
Paige made no response.
“You were quiet,” he said.
“Didn’t want to incriminate myself anymore than you already have.”
“Sophie’s on our side.”
“That why she’s in handcuffs?”
Silence crept in between them.
Paige turned the water on again.
Grant could feel the tension in his sister like a living thing. Could see it in the furious concentric circles she made with the sponge across the surface of the plate.
“I heard you in the basement,” she said at last.
Grant stopped scrubbing. Let the plate sink into the dishwater.
“Then you know I don’t blame you for any of this.”
“I know that if it comes down to my word against your partner’s, I’m fucked.”
“Hey, who’s chained to a chair in your living room? You’re my sister, all right? You get the benefit of the doubt.”
“Why even bother? I’m a wreck, right? That’s the word you used. A drug addict. A prostitute who fucked her own life from every position.”
He said, “I was defending you, Paige,” but it even sounded weak to him.
Her plate dropped into the water with a violent splash.
She put both hands on the edge of the sink.
“You’ve never defended me,” she said.
“What are you talking about? I raised you.”
“Not the same thing.”
“That hurts more than you mean it to.”
“Your crusade to fix me has always been about what I need, but never about what I need from you.”
“I don’t even know what that means, Paige.”
“It means that I didn’t need to be your project. I needed your support. I needed you to stand beside me.”
“All I’ve ever wanted is to help you.”
“I believe you think that. Just like any good doctor. But I’m not your patient. Want to know why I left the first time and why I kept leaving every time you found me?”
“Been asking myself that question for years.”
“That’s the problem. You don’t have the answer, but you could never see that. I left because I got tired of watching you fumble with my problems like they were yours. Like you had the first clue about how to fix them. You’re sicker than I am, Grant. All I wanted was a brother and all you wanted to be was a mechanic. We were both addicts.”
“That’s what family does. They try to help each other.”
She turned to him.
“I got clean on my own, Grant. You show up and now we have a dead body upstairs and a police officer handcuffed in the living room. What exactly have you fixed?”
He grabbed the damp dishtowel from the counter and dried his hands.
“You make it sound like you’ve got your whole life sorted out. I just watched some guy use you, Paige. Maybe you’re off drugs, but you’re a helluva long way from clean.”
The words were out before he could stop them. He was shocked by their venom, their precision. They had come from a place he didn’t know existed, a place where there was no love for his sister. Just anger and disappointment.
Utter devastation arrived on her face.
She shook her head in bewilderment. “Fuck. You.”
Chapter 30
“Everything okay?” Sophie called from her chair as Grant stormed through the foyer and into the living room.
“Fine,” he said, selecting a short, squat candle that smelled like lavender from the flickering legion on the coffee table.
Grant went back into the foyer and made his way down the hall beside the stairs, stopping at the door to the basement. The tap continued to run in the kitchen. He listened for the clink of plates and glassware but there was no other sound. Imagined Paige standing frozen by the sink, the same mosaic of hurt across her face.
During that last intervention in Phoenix, when Paige was in the throes of a spectacular crash and burn, she had leaned over to Grant with tears in her eyes and whispered that she wished the car accident had left him a vegetable too. Then she’d kissed him on the cheek. That was Paige at her worst. Paige out of her mind. It hadn’t made it any easier, but at least he’d known it wasn’t his little sister saying those things.
So what’s your excuse, pal? Around what can you hang the blame for your poison?
And yet still, it was there.
Unquenchable rage.
He stared across the kitchen at Paige’s back.
Knew he shouldn’t say it. Knew he should just let it go. Walk away. Punch a wall in private, but he couldn’t stop himself. He never could. The acid wanted out, and it was coming.
He said, “Did you ever think for a minute that maybe I needed you? That maybe I needed a sister? Instead of a train wreck of a child who has not for one single day since I’ve known her had control of her own life? Has that thought ever crossed your mind? I guess I’m lucky I’ve never really needed you.”
He opened the door and headed downstairs.
The candleflame faltered.
In the weak light, a few fragile stairs offered the way down before disappearing into darkness. Grant remembered how easily they had flexed under his weight before and placed his feet gingerly on the first step.
It bowed.
He could hear Paige crying in the kitchen. He hated it, but he wanted it.
He started down the stairs, staying at their edge and spending as little time on each step as possible without rushing the descent.
The darkness at the bottom was even thicker than he remembered. It seemed to congeal with the dank air like a viscous ether, cold and clammy on his skin.
Grant held the candle up and squinted, realizing that his eyes had already done all the adjusting they were going to do.
In the corner, the piano loomed, barely visible in the feeble illumination.
Something about its presence unsettled Grant, a part of him actually afraid that the darkness might blurt out some old rag time, the keys moving but no one at the helm. Sour notes where the hammers were missing or lame.
Grant put the brakes on that train of thought.
All those nights lying awake in bed, just a kid and no adult in the house, afraid to close his eyes—it was the same fear. He always thought he’d grow out of it. Still hoped he might. Hell, wasn’t owning that fear part of the reason he’d been drawn to law enforcement? But adulthood had a way of making him feel like more of a child than when he’d actually been one.
Thirty-eight years old and still afraid of basements.
He took a moment to gather himself, and then made his way across the uneven stones to the window Sophie had smashed.
The fluorescent orb of a streetlight peered down at him through what remained of the glass.
Hunkered in the dark below it lay the buckled mass of the workbench. It was crudely made, a sheet of particleboard nailed to a pair of wooden sawhorses. The crew who’d done the remodel had probably left it behind. When Sophie had fallen through, she’d split the table top so that the two halves now met at a ninety degree angle. He didn’t know if it would be enough, but it looked like perfect firewood.