Crashed (Mason Brothers 2)

One

Andrew

* * *

“This summer is going to be hot,” my brother said.

I flipped the page in my sketchbook and started a new drawing. “Uh huh.”

“They say it’ll break records.” Nick came out of the back bedroom and into the living room. “It’s only the first week of July and it’s already off the charts. I checked the air conditioner,” he said, looking at me. “Looks like it works fine. You won’t have a problem.”

“Right,” I said, putting my pencil to paper. I drew a sandy beach, the sand winding away in perspective. Low, white-capped waves rolling gently in. Palm trees.

“There will be storms and other shit like that,” Nick said, dropping onto the sofa across from me. “Power outages maybe.”

My pencil put a lounge chair on the beach, an umbrella. “I’ll be fine.”

“Not if the power goes out. I left an emergency number on the fridge. Keep your fucking phone charged for the next two weeks while I’m gone.”

On the beach chair appeared Lightning Man, the superhero Nick and I wrote about in our comics. That is, Nick wrote the stories and I drew the panels. Lightning Man was wearing a cutoff version of his usual black tights and a sleeveless version of his black superhero shirt. His cape was hanging on a nearby palm tree branch and he had sunglasses on. His arms were laced behind his head and he was grinning.

“You know,” I told Nick as I drew, “I would keep my phone charged if I was the kind of person who liked talking to people. Which I very much am fucking not.”

“Keep it charged,” Nick growled in a voice that would intimidate anyone who wasn’t his big brother. “I might want to call you.”

“To check up on me?” I asked. Lightning Man wasn’t alone on this beach. “I’m not helpless without you, asshole. You just think I am. Besides, you shouldn’t be calling me while you’re on your honeymoon. You’re supposed to be there with Evie, remember?”

“Evie will want me to call you,” Nick said with pissed-off logic. “Besides, it’s my honeymoon. I’ll call whoever I want, whenever I want. And you better pick up the fucking phone.”

I lowered the drawing pad just enough to look at him. My little brother—my only brother—was sprawled on the sofa in the living room of my small bungalow in suburban Millwood, Michigan, glaring across the room at me. Nick Mason was dark-haired, muscled, and what the women liked to call gorgeous, even wearing ratty old jeans and a T-shirt. Since I looked in the mirror every day, I knew he looked a lot like me, except that I was a few years older, my face was thinner, and my hair was a shade darker. I had muscles in my arms and shoulders that were leaner and tighter than his, and my eyes had darkness behind them born of experience he didn’t have. But there was no doubt we were brothers.

From the waist down, of course, we didn’t look alike at all. Because I was in a wheelchair and he wasn’t.

Seven years I’d been like this, ever since a drunk driving accident when I was twenty-three. My buddy was drunk. So was I. He drove. We crashed.

He died. I lived.

That’s all I’m going to say about it.

Nick had been my rock through good and bad for those seven years. But now he was married, happy, and taking his new wife on a two-week honeymoon. And it was giving him stress fits to leave me, which pissed me off and warmed my cold, cold heart in equal measures.

I chose option one. “Would you be happier if you could put me in a kennel?” I asked him.

“Shut up,” he replied. “I’m looking out for you. I’ll have my phone on in Hawaii. You can text me if you need me. Evie, too.”

“I won’t be texting you, because I’ll probably be interrupting something porny, and I don’t need that in my life.”

“Jesus, I don’t know why I bother,” Nick said.

My gaze moved to the window. This was standard conversation for Nick and me. We really did piss each other off, though for some reason it didn’t keep us from seeing or talking to each other every day. Some things in life are mysterious.

Two weeks. He’s going to be gone for two weeks.

I wasn’t panicking.

My non-panic was distracted by the sight of a car pulling into the driveway across the street. Being a pathetic shut-in, I knew that Mrs. Welland, the seventy-year-old lady who’d lived in that house, had died two months ago, so it wasn’t her. And she’d lived alone, so this was a stranger.

Mrs. Welland hadn’t died in the house itself. She’d passed out at Safeway, someone had called 911, and she’d never come home.

I was pretty glad that if Mrs. Welland had to go, she hadn’t died alone in her house with no one to find her. Because I kept an eye on her without her knowing, and I would have figured it out when she didn’t pick up her mail. And then I would have had to call 911. And that seemed way too involved for me.

Mrs. Welland didn’t have any family that I knew of, so it was a surprise to see the car. It was a Civic, with no logos for cleaning companies or anything on the sides. I saw a California license plate, and I knew that my security cameras would get a record of the number.

If you’re going to rob or murder someone, the worst place you can do it is on my fucking street. I’m always home, I never sleep, and I have a ton of very advanced electronic surveillance.

“Hey, asshole,” Nick said from the sofa. “Remember me?”

I looked back at him. He was scowling at me. He and Evie had gotten married at City Hall, which was wheelchair accessible. I’d worn a suit. Our mother came—she’d been out of our lives for a long time, but now she was back. Our father didn’t, because no one had invited him. As far as I knew, he hadn’t even been told that the wedding happened.

We were a fucked-up family. Nick should go to Hawaii if he wanted to, be happy if he wanted to. He’d dropped out of college when I had my accident and he’d never gone back. I was a selfish asshole. It was only two weeks. I was thirty fucking years old. I could do without him.

“Don’t you have a plane to catch?” I asked him.

“Not for a few hours yet.”

There was hesitation in his voice, and I hated to hear it. In that moment, I fucking hated it.

“Go,” I said. “G

o sit on a beach, snorkel in the ocean, climb a volcano. Drink fruity drinks. Get laid. Just go.”

I wasn’t going to do any of those things. Technically I could drink a fruity drink if I wanted, but that would be pretty lame sitting alone in my house in Michigan. As for getting laid, even though the equipment worked just fine, there was no chance in hell. To get laid you generally have to leave the house and have a working body. You also have to have a personality that even slightly attracts women. All of which crossed me out.

I couldn’t do those things, but Nick could.

“Go,” I said again. “I’ll be fine.”

He reluctantly got off the couch, found his baseball cap, and put it on. “The schedule is on the fridge, with the phone numbers,” he said.