A scream rips out of my throat as Emerson stumbles against the second story railing. My dad tries to grab him by the front of his suit, but misses. In a burst of rage, Emerson grabs hold of my dad and slams him against the bannister, ready to throw him off the landing.
“Stop it! Emerson, stop!” I scream.
Finally, I seem to get through to him. With gritted teeth, he lowers my dad away from the edge, tossing him roughly onto the floor. He raises his blue eyes to mine, and my heart shatters as I see the furious tears streaming down his face. Stepping over my dad’s drunken, prostrate form, Emerson marches into his room and snatches his mother up by the arm. She can barely stand, beside herself with wasted emotion. Emerson swings her arm over his shoulders and all but drags her away, carrying her dead weight down the stairs.
“Wait,” I call out, my voice a strangled cry, “Emerson, where are you going?”
But he doesn’t answer me. He simply makes his way to the front door. I pull myself off the ground and race after him, grabbing for the back of his suit.
“Emerson,” I plead, clutching the bannister as I reach the final stair. “Stop. You can’t go. Not now.”
He pauses with his hand on the doorknob. Turning back to look at me, his eyes are full of hardened resolve. He’s shut his heart out of the equation, I know. And try as I might, there will be no reaching him now.
“Goodbye Abby,” he whispers, and wrenches the door open.
He guides his mother across the threshold and out to his Chevy. It isn’t until I hear the engine start that I sink down onto the stairs, hollow and cold. He’s gone. And this time, I know he won’t be coming back for me. I glance around the house, at all the artifacts of my childhood that were destroyed in Dad and Deb’s wake. But of course, it’s not the material things I grieve for, now. It’s my entire life as I’ve known it. The future that will never come to pass.
I sit there at the foot of the steps for hours, listening to my dad’s anguished groans from the landing. At some point, he manages to stand and pull himself into the master bedroom, slamming the door behind him. He won’t come down to check on me. Not in the state he’s in. But who am I kidding? Even at his best, Dad couldn’t be bothered to give a shit about me.
Numbness creeps through my body as I sit stock still, unable to process what’s happened to me. To Emerson. To our splintered family. Nothing that’s happened this morning makes any sense. What happened that set our parents to drinking like that? What was my dad saying about Deb stealing from him? And what about my grandparents’ interference with dad and Deb’s brand new marriage?
Chapter Eleven
It’s noon before I’m torn out of my shocked reverie by the sound of a car door slamming. My pulse picks up as I pull myself to my feet. Has Emerson come back home again after all? Is he here to help me make sense of all this chaos? The front door clatters open, and a familiar face appears—but it isn’t his.
“Abby,” Riley breathes, rushing to me. “Abby, what the hell is going on?”
“Riley?” I breathe, unable to focus, “Riley, what—?”
“Are you OK?” she whispers, her voice tearful. She takes me in her arms, brushing the hair out of my eyes. “Are you hurt?”
“No, I’m...Riley, what are you doing here?” I ask. “How did you know to come?”
Her already dark eyes cloud over as she wraps her arms around me. She’s bracing me for something. Bad news. But what?
“You didn’t show up at school,” she says softly, “But Emerson did. He stormed in just as people were switching classes. Abby...He...”
“What?” I whisper, looking at her with mounting dread. “What did he do?”
She rests her hands on my shoulders, take a deep breath, and goes on.
“He started screaming for Tucker,” she tells me, “And when he finally found him, he...Abby, he just beat the shit out of him. It was brutal. Some teachers eventually pulled him off and threatened to call the cops. Emerson’s been expelled, Abby. He ran back out of the school and drove off. I couldn’t find you anywhere, so I thought...I was so scared...”
I stare at my best friend, uncomprehending. My heart can take on no more anguish. There isn’t any room left. I sink into a state of catatonic silence as Riley gathers a change of clothes for me and leads me out of my house.
It’s the last time I ever step foot in that place I once called home.
Over the course of the tumultuous next few months, the entire sordid saga comes out into the open. On the morning after their wedding, Dad and Deb were about to head off to Europe for a couple weeks for the second leg of their honeymoon. Dad visited the bank to get some travelers’ checks, but found that his accounts had been frozen because of some suspicious activity. He and Deb had already consolidated accounts when they moved in together, but Dad has never been good about keeping track of his money. Only when it was pointed out to him by the bank did he notice the dozen or so transactions in Deb’s name. She’d been withdrawing money, keeping some in a separate account, presumably for her and Emerson.
The rest she’d been wiring to her ex-husband, Emerson’s father, still serving time in Connecticut state prison.
Devastated by Deb’s betrayal, Dad struck out to hurt her in the worst way he could think of. He stocked up on booze, headed back to the hotel, and baited her into going on a bender with him. She allowed it to happen, of course, but Dad was the instigator. Only when they were both wasted in their hotel room in the wee hours of the morning did he turn on her. He demanded an explanation, but the only one she had to give was that she’d been using him. She noticed him at AA—saw his nice clothes, fancy car, and sad eyes—and knew he’d go for her. Deb insisted that she developed real feelings for him later, and that she couldn’t just leave her ex-husband to rot in prison, but it was obviously too late.
Emerson’s expulsion from our high school was immediate and ironclad, after what he did to Tucker. I have no idea what possessed him, in that moment, to target my assailant from years ago. Maybe he wanted to hurt someone who had hurt me, and given that he couldn’t throttle my dad the way he wanted to, went after Tucker instead. I’ll never know what his motivation was. All I know is that Tucker ended up with two broken ribs and had to wear a neck brace to prom. Or so I’m told. It’s not like I had any reason to go.
The bender Dad started as payback for Deb didn’t end the day after his wedding. Or the week after. Or the month after. He descended into an alcoholic depression that far exceeded the one he’d fallen into after Mom’s death. I couldn’t go back to his house—I didn’t feel safe there. I stayed with Riley for a few days before my grandparents arrived on the scene. They came up from Florida and took me in to one of their nearby summer homes for the duration of the school year. Dad didn’t even put up a fight when they took me away. But he did tell them all about finding me in bed with Emerson the morning after the wedding. And even though nothing had happened between us that night, my grandparents looked at me a little differently from then on.