The Good Son by Carolyn Mills (best novels for teenagers .txt) 📕

“Coffee. From a vending machine,” she says. “Best I could do.”

I sip the tepid coffee, waiting. But for what, I don’t know. For someone to come out and tell me that my brother will be fine. For the news about the arrest in the Amy Nessor investigation to make sense.

After a while, Mom turns her attention to practical matters. “Has anyone spoken to Erika?” she asks. “She might want to bring Leah. Someone should call her.” Maybe sensing my confusion, mistaking it for something else, she offers to do it herself.

I almost agree. It’s tempting to hand this whole situation over to my mom and let her take care of things. To lean back in this hard, plastic chair and just close my eyes. “I’ll call her,” I say. I stand up and move into the corridor, where the light from the windows mixes with the light from the fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling, making the hall too white. Too bright.

Erika is flustered and upset when I tell her about Richard. I imagine part of her distress is really on account of Leah. Like me, Erika’s probably wished her fair share of punishments on Richard. Except she didn’t harbour angry accusations of false crimes. She didn’t turn him into something he wasn’t, and herself in the process.

Next, I call Bruce. He is all reassurance and understanding when I tell him where I am. He’d already made arrangements, he tells me, to have my shift covered for today and my interview has been moved to next week. “I took care of it for you. Wasn’t sure when you’d be back.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I say.

“Don’t worry about anything here,” Bruce says. “Just do what you need to do and take care of yourself. Is someone with you?”

“My mom. My brother’s wife is here, too.”

As I make my way back to the waiting room, I consider stretching out on the floor. I so want to put my head down. But when I turn the corner, Brenda is coming through the ICU doors and all thoughts of sleep vanish as I scan her face.

“Still no change,” she says. She looks haggard, the skin under her worried eyes sagging.

Mom steps forward and enfolds Brenda in an embrace. I think back to my conversation with Brenda, when she was so angry with me and I thought she was talking about the Amy Nessor case, but all along she was talking about Dee Dee. Here she is, holding vigil at Richard’s bedside, right after he confessed to her that he was having an affair.

“You must be exhausted,” Mom says, and at first I think she is talking to me, but then realize that of course she is talking to Brenda. “Have you had anything to eat or drink? What can I do to help?”

The TV in the waiting room flashes to the image of Marcus Daley in his orange jumpsuit. I cannot wrap my head around the simple fact that Ricky wasn’t involved in Amy’s murder. The thought that my brother is innocent floats through my brain, along with another thought, much more insistent: he has to wake up.

CHAPTER FOUR

•

LATER, MANY, MANY DAYS LATER, Ricky remains unresponsive, though his body is not still and quiet, like I expected it to be. Stretched out beneath the bleached white sheets, his limbs twitch and jerk, and every so often a soft moan escapes his lips. With each fretful sound or movement, my heart thuds expectantly, but he doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t see me sitting beside him.

So I keep waiting.

I am better now and have been permitted to sit beside his bed with all its beeping equipment. In this noisy quiet, I play back the conversation I had the other night with Ricky’s friend Jeremy regarding that long-ago Tuesday in October when Amy Nessor went missing. Jeremy was incredulous that I ever believed Ricky to be involved. I remember all too well Ricky’s own disbelief on the phone when he pieced together what I was accusing him of. Right before he got in his car to drive to Dunford. He must have been more upset with me than I realized, which makes sense. It says something to know your kid sister thought you capable of abducting and then murdering your six-year-old neighbour. Though even now, with the truth staring me in the face, I wonder if I will ever forgive him for all the things I once believed, and if he will have the chance to forgive me for believing them in the first place.

MOM AND BRENDA TAKE TURNS beside him. We have rented a room at the Still River Inn, which is not on the river at all, but just down the road from the hospital, directly across from Lion’s Gate Cemetery. It’s like a joke of sorts, to stare out at a graveyard, while your brother is fighting for his life. We use the motel room as a home base between visits. A place to sleep and keep a few things when we can’t get all the way back to Dunford or, for Brenda, Toronto.

But right now, it’s me beside Ricky. And while I’m attuned to every flutter of his eyelids, I am also preoccupied with the missing minutes and the hours of his life the day that Amy Nessor disappeared. Jeremy did his best to describe what he remembers, but it was so long ago, and while that Tuesday has haunted me forever, it left a much fainter imprint on Jeremy’s life. And probably Ricky’s, for that matter.

Ricky was with Darius and Jeremy that night, in Darius’s father’s 1969 Ford Thunderbird, a model quite similar to Marcus Daley’s 1967 Chevrolet Impala, a detail that will forever torment me. They weren’t in Leeville watching a movie at all, which I already knew because I’d heard Ricky telling Darius to lie about it, only I had the reasons all wrong.

“After school we went to my