Even if it breaks your h.., p.1
Even If It Breaks Your Heart, page 1
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For Jonah and Alice. There.
I used your real names this time. Happy?
Love, Mom
For GH. You should be here to read this dedication.
Not the book, obviously, but the dedication.
You’d have loved that.
How I feel because you aren’t, is pressed between the pages of this story.
PROLOGUE
I was never gonna live forever, but I thought I’d make it to eighteen. I’d hoped, anyway. But hopes these days are kind of like this hospital room—dim, but never dark enough to block out all the bullshit. It’s impossible to achieve full darkness in a hospital. It’s all blinking monitors and a bright yellow glow slanting under doorways or from behind drawn curtains. I’m actually looking forward to the time when everyone gives up on me, if only because then I get to go home where I can get some fucking sleep.
I don’t mean that.
I reach for the book next to me and pull out a folded piece of paper. My eyes flicker to the closed door. Case is here somewhere. His coat is draped over the chair next to my bed. He’s probably next door with that kid Ryder. Hell, the little dude’s only twelve. He needs Case more than I do. Suddenly, dying at seventeen doesn’t seem that bad.
I unfurl the paper and skim the contents with a pang of regret. I swallow it back immediately, choosing not to go there. Not tonight.
I didn’t start this list for my best friend. I started it for myself. But things change, and it turns out dying makes me a sad sap. I grasp a pen in my stiff fingers and scratch a few words at the bottom.
I don’t know what made me think of her. All I know is lying here, I have no time and also too much time. To think. To remember. To feel. It’s too much feeling. A lifetime of fucking feeling and no outlet. What I wouldn’t give for a bull right now. The meanest motherfucker they could find me. I’d hold on forever.
I write her name down because it’s no longer for me. It’s for him, and he has all the time in the world, so he’d better not waste it.
One
CASE
“I’ll be honest, man, this is a lot higher than I’d thought it would be.”
Walker doesn’t say anything, but the word wuss hangs in the crisp night air between us, hovering amid the clouded breath repeatedly pulled from my chest. Fuck, I hate heights. Always have. I fight the urge to look down, down, down, past my dusty boots dangling too many feet above the earth.
“Corn silo,” I mutter before turning to him. “You said corn silo, right?” Wrapping a single arm around the cold metal frame, I accidentally clink the glass bottle grasped in my freezing fingers against it. I lift an ass cheek and dig with the other hand in my back pocket. I pull out a worn piece of paper and use my teeth to unfold it, squinting and lifting it to the pale glow of moonlight overhead.
“Right here. Jump off a corn silo,” I read aloud. I throw my head back with a groan. “Fuck, we’re so stupid.” I glare at my best friend pointedly as I start to shiver. I didn’t bring a coat up here. “Grain bin.” I gesture to the wide metal bins approximately thirty feet below me. “You meant jump off a grain silo. I can’t jump off this—I’ll die.”
The last words strangle in my throat, and I take another long pull from one of the Dr Peppers I’ve lugged up here with me. Walker shakes his head full of dirty-blond hair, his smirk knowing, his lean frame balanced precariously on the bin’s edge. I can barely make out the lettering across his chest, but I recognize his favorite shirt and know it reads GIVE ’EM HELL. Whether he’s shaking his head to say, Don’t die! or What’s the big deal? or You’re the dumbass who climbed up here! I’m not sure. I look at the paper again, holding it up.
“Your handwriting is barely legible,” I say. He rolls his eyes. It’s an old argument. As a kid, Walker spent so much time with medical tubes stuck in his hands, he learned to write on a tablet.
“Well, I’m not fucking jumping off a corn silo. What other death traps are on this list?”
A cloud passes over the moon, and I crush the paper in my fist. Not like I can read it up here, anyway. “Unbelievable,” I mutter. Suddenly, the bottle slips in my fingers, and I jerk to grip it, throwing my center off-balance. For a heart-thudding moment, I fight to remain safely seated on the narrow ledge of the silo, and the paper drops from my grasp. My gasp is carried away on the breeze, and dark spots blur my vision as Walker’s crumpled list floats lazily toward the earth. A beat later, the bottle I’m holding follows with a faint, tinkling shatter on the near-frozen ground.
I wrap my entire arm around the bar, resting my forehead against the icy metal. “Now what?”
My limbs go from trembling to all-out shaking from the cold. Or the previously consumed booze, uncomfortably sloshing around in my gut. Or the suffocating guilty feeling from what went down at the party tonight. Or, more likely, fear because I’m over fifty feet above the ground in the middle of the night without another living soul awake for miles.
“You don’t have your phone on you, by chance?” I joke to Walker, who I swear snorts in response. In my head, Walker’s always doing that half-snort, half-breathless laugh of his.
My throat narrows, and pain rears sharp behind my eyes. I swallow it back and inhale the night into my lungs, filling them to near bursting.
I can practically hear my best friend’s wheezing scoff in return. Show-off.
“The least you can do is get me some help. Isn’t that what ghosts are for?”
I imagine Walker staring at me plaintively, his expression clear.
“I know. You’re not a ghost. You’re not really here. You’re in heaven or whatever, perving with Taylor in your awesome not-sick bodies. I get it. But for one fucking minute, could you just, like, help me? Your best friend? Stuck on a fucking corn silo in the middle of the fucking Texas Panhandle?”
Red and blue lights glitter out of the corner of my eye, speeding toward me with the blurp! blurp! of a siren.
“Seriously?” I shoot a glare at Walker, but he’s gone. Of course he is.
“Give Taylor my best,” I mutter, squinting my eyes against the rapidly approaching lights below. My boots are still dangling over the narrow rungs of the mile-long ladder. Part of me is tempted to hustle down on my own just so I can be like, “Oh, hey, Officer. What’s up? Nice night. Just checking on this corn, here.”
But the swoop in my gut churns, and the ground swerves up at me dangerously.
I might ride bulls for fun, but even I have my limits.
“Good evening, Officer!” I shout down. They probably don’t even hear me.
A voice booms from a bullhorn. “Case Benton Michaels? Is that you?”
“No!” Under my breath, I mumble, “S’my granddad.” Fool ranchers naming three generations the same damn thing. I attempt to scoot out of the beam of light, and my stomach swoops all over again as I slip backward. Grasping on to the rusted frame, I yank myself upright.
“Just wait there. Nice and easy,” a male voice drawls over the bullhorn speaker.
“Where the hell else am I supposed to go?” I rest my head against the cold metal and let my eyes slip closed. I’m so tired. Like I’ve lived a thousand years in the last two hours. An eternity in the last six months.
“Stay right there, Case. Hold on tight. A fire truck is on the way.”
My eyes snap open. Sure enough, I can see the flashing lights of a fire truck in the distance, closing in. Then the front doors of the farmhouse open, and the backlit forms of several people rush out into the chilly night.
“Great.” I reach for another bottle out of the cardboard holder. Don’t want it to go to waste. Dr Pepper was our thing. Two kids on the rodeo circuit trying to be cool and look older than we were. Glass bottles that could clink like the real thing. Ironically, intoxicated me, the one who ran out of his own house party an hour ago and decided tonight was the night to cross something wild off Walker’s list, was the one who chose the soda.
Had to do the thing properly.
This venture was screwed from the start is what I am saying.
A familiar snort echoes into the silent night. Walker’s back.
“That was fast.” I raise an eyebrow, and the idiot manages to look smug. He should. Heaven had better be one massive sexcapade for him or I’m canceling religion. “This seems a bit overkill. Police and fire trucks?” I gesture wildly to the commotion below with my free arm. A frigid gust whistles through, nearly knocking off my worn Dallas Cowboys hat. I tighten my hold, looping both arms on either side of the ladder.
“Keep as still as you can, Case!” the officer shouts. “Help is on the way. We’re all here for you. I’ve called your dad.”
I groan at Walk er, who’s kicking his boots out over the edge, pleased as fuck. “You realize they think I’m suicidal. Dick,” I add. I tend to cuss more at Ghost Walker than I did at Living Walker.
His dark brows arch in a silent question.
I take a deep breath and shake my head. “No,” I say. “Definitely not. I don’t want to live like this anymore, but I don’t want to die. I just … fuck, man. You’re the one who made the list.” And he’s the one who got too sick before he could accomplish anything on it. So he left it to me.
“Case! We’re coming up. Just hold on until someone can secure you.”
“Okay!” I yell. I accidentally drop the Dr Pepper I’ve been holding. It sails down and lands with a muffled clatter. Another one bites the dust. “Oops. Sorry!” I think I hear the echo of Walker’s airy laugh, but when I look, he’s gone again and I’m alone.
Always alone.
A firefighter is climbing the ladder toward me, and I swallow hard. I hope he doesn’t fall. That would suck. But within moments, I’m secured with a clip, and both the firefighter and I are descending toward the ground. I try to hop down the last two rungs, but my boot slips on an icy patch and I fall straight on my ass.
Fucking ow.
“Christ, are you drunk?” comes a voice from the crowd.
“Dad?” I croak. Great. Just great.
Case Benton Michaels Jr. rocks on booted heels, his hands casually slung in the pockets of his sport coat like he’s assessing the going rate for grass-fed longhorns and not his only son’s life. Likely pulled from some business mixer or other, where “the whiskey is expensive, and talk is cheap.”
Kerry, our live-in housekeeper, is a few steps behind him and still in her robe. I’m warmed by the fact she, at least, was in a hurry. She surges forward, but once she’s assured I’m in one piece, any concern that might’ve been on her face melts into something that looks a lot like disappointment.
“I think I broke my ass?” I offer with a wince, almost like an apology. Like, I know I was stupid and climbed a corn silo, but on the bright side, I hurt my tailbone so … look! Consequences.
“What the hell are you thinking, Case? You could have died,” my dad grumbles.
“I think that was the point,” the officer murmurs under his breath.
“No! No,” I repeat, irritated. “That was not the point.” The firefighter helps me up, removing the clip, and I rub at my rear with a grimace.
“What was the point, then?” Kerry asks, her tone slightly strangled. It slices me to the quick, adding to the hundreds of guilt–paper cuts gouging my skin. I swallow back my sigh.
“Walker, the dipshit, always said he wanted to jump off a silo—” I cut off, tilting unsteadily and searching the ground amid the flashing police car lights. “Hold on. I dropped the list. It’s here somewhere.… There!” My limbs are stiff and achy with cold, and it takes me two tries to pick up the piece of crumpled paper covered in my dead best friend’s scribble. I smooth it out and refold it, tucking it securely into my back pocket. “As I was saying, Walker apparently never learned the difference between corn silos and grain silos, because if he thought his weak-ass lungs were going to climb that ladder, he had another thing coming. I mean—” I laugh to myself. “Okay, maybe in peak condition, but even I—”
My dad interrupts me, his voice heavy with resignation. “Were you drinking?”
I bite down on my tongue. This coming from the man who has practically shoved the contents of his liquor cabinet at me every bump in the road since the night of Walker’s funeral? Nothing a stiff drink can’t fix, Case.
Unaware of the staring contest between Case Jr. and me, the helpful officer flashes his light to the pile of broken glass shattered on the hard earth.
I tear my gaze away and gesture to the bottles. “Three for me, three for Walker. Dr Pepper, I swear.”
Kerry whimpers.
“Okay,” I cave, ignoring their pained expressions. “Six for me, but I accidentally dropped the sixth. And the one before it. Slippery fuckers.” I take a deep breath and meet Kerry’s eyes. “I promise I wasn’t trying to die.”
She starts to nod, but changes course halfway and shakes her head as if catching up. “But you almost did, anyway.”
I look askance, my palms infused with sweat, because a few hours ago, I may have lost my shit in the middle of my own house party and shouted at Kerry—a.k.a. the sweetest woman in existence, a.k.a. the woman who practically raised me—to “get these assholes off my property.” But that was Intoxicated Case. He makes dick decisions.
Sober Case makes sad ones.
“We’ll talk about it later. At home. Where’s the Navigator?” my dad asks. Case Jr. always refers to my car by its full name like he’s making sure everyone knows we’re richer than they are. I don’t remember how I got here, but I doubt it’s a good idea to say that right now, so instead, I shrug. There. That’s ambiguous.
His sigh is the longest-suffering, and he wilts several inches before looking to the officer.
The officer plants his hands on his belt. “I’ll put an APB out for it. We’ll call when it’s found. In the meantime, the Richardsons don’t want to press any charges.” He turns to me. “They’re big fans of yours, Case. They want you to know they’re rooting for you.”
I press my lips together to keep from saying something snarky about the Richardsons’ son, Pax, who’s probably still drinking beer in my living room as we speak. I’m not in the mood to rat him out.
The fact is, everyone used to root for the both of us, Walker and me. Two North Texas boys battling it out in the rodeo arena and trading belt buckles. But that was before Walker got too sick to compete.
Now there’s only me, and I’m not exactly collecting accolades these days. Who am I to cast aspersions or whatever?
My dad loads me into his Benz (“Okay, Case, get in the Benz so I can take you home”), and I tilt my head against the glass, watching as my breaths fog and disappear over and over and over.
I look to my left, where Walker’s ghost is sitting across from me, silent, no breaths to fog his window. Which is the problem, isn’t it? He wouldn’t be wasting away like this. He wouldn’t throw away this chance. If I had died, Walker wouldn’t be drinking Dr Pepper with my ghost on a corn silo. He’d be in the arena. He’d be riding bulls and catching glory. Walker is the fearless one, grabbing life by the horns and wrestling it into submission, wringing out every last drop.
He was the fearless one.
I’ll never be.
Two
CASE
I’m no longer drunk by the time I wake up, but I almost wish I were when I descend the long, lushly carpeted staircase, walk past the great room, and enter into a too-gleaming kitchen. That’s where I encounter Kerry’s sigh. I’m used to failing my dad. Expect it, even.
But Kerry’s pursed lips and compulsive swiping of the spotless granite countertop say, “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed,” loud and clear. I’ve been called a lot of things—entitled, arrogant, cocky, thick-skulled, to name just a few—but I’m not rude.
“Forgive me, Kerry,” I beg our housekeeper right away, stilling her assault on the counter and loudly pecking a contrite kiss to her soft cheek. “I was an asshole.”
She pretends to tsk my cussing but doesn’t disagree. Instead, she shuffles over to the Nespresso and passes me a coffee, black. Confused, I accept it. “Thank you?”
“Drink up,” she says in a gruff tone I’ve always thought sounded like water rushing over boulders. Raspy after decades of smoking in her youth, but smooth and soothing all the same. “You’re gonna need it. You were expected in the stables fifteen minutes ago.”
I suck a blistering sip between my lips and grimace. Coffee drinking starts early on a ranch, but I’ve never gotten into drinking it black. My dad, obviously, drinks his coffee black enough to put hair on your chest, and so did his dad before him. I come from a long line of hairy-chested men. It’s not only our names and accrued wealth we pass down in this family. We also inherit a mindless adherence to toxic masculinity. I’m pretty sure it’s in the will.
My mom died of an aneurysm when I was a baby, and I have zero memories of her. I suspect my dad loved her as much as he’s capable of loving anyone or anything outside of our ranch, but he’s never liked to talk about her. Kerry raised me, and any shred of goodness I might possess is because of her and Walker.
