Well, I’m sort of buying it. I think he likes seeing me happy, but I think he’s even more relieved that at last, I’m doing something wrong and he gets to know about it.
He’s also enjoyed the (perfectly innocent) pictures that Caleb’s been texting me, and I can’t blame him. Caleb’s hot and he has hot brothers.
“Fine, I’ll buy you booze,” I say.
“You’re my favorite sister,” he says, grinning.
We both take a long sip of our respective coffees, then look out the plate glass window we’re sitting by. This coffee shop is across the street from a big shopping center, which makes for pretty good people watching.
Particularly today. There’s definitely a certain level of schadenfreude involved in watching people shop on Black Friday while peacefully sipping a drink across the street.
“You weren’t actually going to try and buy something, were you?” I ask him, my chin in my hand as I watch two people shout at each other in their cars, both in the wrong lane.
Bastien’s just staring out the window, his coffee in one hand, resting on the table, and he doesn’t say anything.
“I figured you just said that to Mom and Dad as a reason to leave the house because if you said ‘we just really want to not be here right now,’ they’d get all weird about it,” I go on.
He still doesn’t answer. I follow his gaze, but I can’t tell what he’s looking at, other than a general shopping madness.
“Bossy,” I say, and he finally turns to me.
The look on his face stops me cold.
“I think I found Javi,” he says, voice low, eyes locked on mine.
Then he swallows.
“That’s the real reason I wanted to get out of the house — I mean, Mom and Dad are also unbearable, but —”
“Is he dead?”
The question comes out flat and emotionless, my lips and fingers already going cold, my heart a knot getting pulled tighter with every second.
Bastien just shakes his head. He looks away. He looks at me again, and suddenly he doesn’t look like my college student brother who plays soccer and volleyball and rock climbs and is constantly apologizing to girls for being gay.
He looks like my kid brother, young and scared and lost.
“No,” he says. “I mean, I don’t know. That was misleading. I didn’t find him, I found where he was a month ago.”
“A month?” I echo, the knot still tightening.
I don’t want Javier dead. I want to say that first, that I want my big brother back. I want back the guy who taught me to write in cursive long before I learned in school, the guy who drilled me endlessly at kicking soccer goals, the guy who beat up the boy who pulled my hair in fourth grade.
But I saw Javier after he came back, and before he went to rehab, and he may as well have been a ghost. He barely talked, couldn’t joke, couldn’t laugh. The only time he ever seemed alive was when he’d wake up screaming.
In other words, I think Javier might already be gone.
And the truth is that I don’t know which is worse. He’s on the streets and he’s addicted to opiates and winter is coming, and I’m one hundred percent positive that when he sleeps, he still wakes up screaming.
“I’ve been calling around to shelters and churches and groups that work with the homeless,” he says, softly. “A volunteer with the Richmond needle exchange program said she helped someone matching his description at the end of October, right after Halloween. She gave him a bunch of syringes, some medical supplies, and a couple doses of Narcan. Said he turned down an HIV test.”
I nod. I swallow hard, and I keep nodding and I stare out the window at the zillions of cars fighting to get their cheap TVs and underpriced pants, and I have a thousand thoughts all at once.
I think, he’s still using and at least he’s using a needle exchange and at least he has Narcan in case he overdoses and I hate the first, hate that he needs the last two.
I think he was exchanging needles while I was having fun with Caleb.
I think I can’t believe I’ve been so happy while Javi’s been out there, still using, still on the streets…
“When did you find out?” I finally ask, still staring blankly out the window.
“A week ago,” he says.
“I should have been calling too.”
“Ollie.”
“I’ve done nothing.”
“Ollie, knock it off,” Bastien says gently. “Don’t start guilt-tripping yourself.”
“But I should have been —”
“I mean it. I finally talked to someone who’d seen him and what does it help? Jack shit.”
“We know he’s still alive and still in Richmond,” I point out.
“We know he was three weeks ago.”
I look at my hand on the table, my nails shiny and dark blue because I painted them yesterday, listening to my parents ignore each other. It’s good, if minor, stress relief.