Page 5 of Steadfast
At the time, I hadn’t wanted to understand why.
Most crucially, Jude couldn’tpossiblybe standing twenty feet away from me on an ordinary November morning, right in the center of Colebury, inspecting a heap of a car. If he were actually here, I’dknowit. I’d feel it deep inside, the way the bass line of a good song vibrates through your chest.
Behind me, a car tapped its horn, and I barely registered the sound. I was still taking in the shine of his too-light hair and the muscled line of his forearm. The horn tap turned into a full-blown blast, which finally brought me out of my dream state. Vermonters never honked, which could only mean that I’d been staring at Jude for quite some time. With a hasty glance in either direction, I let up on the brake and gunned the accelerator.
Somehow, I arrived at work ten minutes later, which was miraculous since I didn’t remember any of the drive. But there I was, shutting off the engine in a parking space behind the hospital. I jerked the keys from the ignition and tossed them into my bag, but I didn’t get out of the car yet.
Deep breaths, I coached myself. Gripping the steering wheel, I put the side of my face against its cool center. My heart shimmied along at a disco rhythm while I tried to get over my shock. I knew Jude was out of prison. We’d been notified when he was released. But that was six months ago. I’d been on edge for a few weeks last spring, but he never turned up. After that, I forgot to worry about seeing him here in Colebury. My heart believed he had left Vermont just as thoroughly as he’d left my life.
My heart was a goddamned idiot, obviously.
A tap on the window startled me so badly that I spasmed upright.
“Sorry,” mouthed the man outside my car.
“Jesus and Mary, mother of God.” I fumbled for the door handle. “Denny, you nearly gave me a heart attack.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “But you were slumped over, like someone having an aneurism. Like someone who needed the hug of life.”
“That’s forchoking.” My tone was a little harsher than I meant it to be. Denny was a good guy, if awkward, and it wasn’t his fault that I was freaking out. I got out of my car and followed my coworker toward the building on shaky knees.
“Seriously, are you okay?” He held the hospital door open for me, and I took my first lungful of the institutional air that we breathed all day.
“I’m fine,” I lied. “Just having a moment.”
“Is it your mom?”
Denny was nothing if not attentive. He knew something of my frustrations at home. And everyone knew of my family’s tragedy. After it happened, my brother’s death was in the paper for two weeks straight. First there were the sad stories—Police Chief Loses Firstborn. Then came the gritty details of the crash investigation, and the revelation that the poor police chief’s son had been thrown from a car driven by a junkie who was jacked up on painkillers.
The newspapers didn’t tell the whole story, though. They didn’t reveal that the junkie in question was the boyfriend of the chief’s daughter, who had been repeatedly forbidden to date him. That bit of scandal didn’t make the papers, out of respect for the grieving family.
We’d been in the news for weeks, and yet some of the really important questions went unasked. Such as: where on earth were the golden boy and the junkie going together that awful night?
“Sophie?”
I realized I was standing in front of my desk like a sleepwalker. And I’d never answered Denny’s question. “Yes?”
“Can I hang up your coat?”
I scrambled out of my trench. “Sure. Thank you!” I was losing my manners as well as my mind.
When he walked away, I rounded my desk and sagged into the chair.Get a grip, Soph, I ordered myself. But it wouldn’t be easy. When I was seventeen, I thought Jude was sent to me from heaven. When I was eighteen, I let him take me there. When I was nineteen, he broke both my heart and my family.
He’d been gone for three and a half years now. I’d shed an ocean of tears for him. The first year had been the roughest. My family was a grief maelstrom, and since Jude was the cause of it, I hid my broken heart. Nobody had wanted to hear me say that Jude had never meant to hurt anyone. Nobody cared that he’d obviously been in need of help. They didn’t want to hear that he’d been (mostly) wonderful to me.
That he’d been the only one who listened when I spoke.
My father couldn’t tolerate Jude evenbeforehe killed my brother. When I’d begun my teenage obsession with Jude, it had taken my parents by surprise that good girl Sophie could become a rebellious teen. I’d dyed my hair black and got a tattoo on my ass. It was ordinary kid stuff, but my father raged and threatened.
He’d also snooped in my room. When he’d found a receipt for condoms, my father had forbidden me to even talk to my boyfriend anymore. He’d ranted that Jude was trouble, but my heart didn’t listen. Instead, I just lied more often and snuck out at night.
Things got a little less tense when I’d moved into the dorms at University of Vermont for my freshman year of college. My father assumed that the forty-five miles from Colebury to Burlington would lessen Jude’s influence in my life. But we only carried on more freely. Jude’s Porsche wore a groove into highway 89, and I spent every weekend with him.
Then, one ugly spring evening just after freshman year ended, state troopers showed up at our door, hats in hand. That night Jude proved all my father’s points in one fell swoop. As our front door opened to reveal the officers’ hats in their hands, my father won every fight we’d ever had.
That night will always be a blur to me. I remember my mother screaming, then fainting in the living room.
“But what happened to Jude?” I’d asked in those terrible moments of confusion. Nobody answered me. It was twelve hours before I’d even learn that he was alive. As the awful story began to unspool, I ached for him. To know you’ve killed someone, even in such an awful, careless way, would be terrible. It was all so horribly sad.
