“No thanks, Dr. Phil.” I shake my head. My brother was, among other things that weren’t worth mentioning, quite nosy. He was a shameless gossip and knew every piece of information about everyone.
Probably because of all the beds he rolls out of every Saturday morning.
“I told you a long time ago, I don’t get my genius, heartfelt humanity skills from the good, reality drama Dr. Phil.” He starts, good humor and all. “I get them from…”
“Oprah and her guests,” I finish, rolling my eyes. “You really need to let that one rest. It’s run it’s course.”
And needs a quick, sudden death.
“And miss out on girls thinking I actually care about their daddy issues? Hell no, bro. That’s easy pussy.”
“You were practically on your death bed, asshole, and you still have got ass on your mind.”
“What can I say? I’m a red-blooded male with a working libido,” he jokes but his voice drops the cheery tone. I glance at my brother and notice him look out the window.
“You good?” I’m always worried about my brother, sure. But there’s something different about him.
“Yeah,” he starts. “A libido that my girlfriend will find as a gift from the gods.”
Of course, he’ll play it off. “Seriously, what was that?”
“It’s just, when the silence closes in on me, I swear, I can still hear the faint ticking of a timer in the back of the car. Like it was counting down each breath I took,” he says, his voice sounding far way.
I don’t have to ask what he’s talking about. I already know. Unconsciously, my grip on the steering wheel tightens, as does my jaw and the rest of me.
“Oh, by the way, the police came by yesterday.” I glance at him so fast, I almost swerve off the road.
“What?”
“Yeah, it was right after Mia left, but I never talked to them, not after they came by on Tuesday. I played it off like I was asleep.” Liam goes on, a dark note in his voice. “Of course, I know what their questions are going to be but, J…”
“I know.”
My brother’s not stupid. Year after year he’s always at the top of the honor roll at school. Of course, he knows a bomb was set on my car and I was the target.
“What made you jump out?” I question after a while. There’s so much I want to ask him, but I know a lot of that is pointless shit that’ll just trouble him. Despite how he has shaped his identity over the past three years as a hardened, careless ‘heart throb’, Liam is by far the most sensitive kid I’ve ever known.
“I don’t know.” He glances at me. “Intuition, maybe?”
Silence falls over us in the car. We sit there, being haunted by ghosts of the dead—
“Or maybe it was Aiden.”
—or maybe being saved by them.
“Yeah,” I start, but my voice is hoarse. “Big bro would definitely do that for you, anytime.”
We don’t talk about Aiden much, actually, we don’t talk about him at all. Each of us choosing to grieve our brother in our own way. His death is still so fresh, I bet his body isn’t even cold in the ground and yet, our father has moved on. Engaged and shit, like we didn’t just lose someone in our family.
“Anyway, did you look into what I told you?”
“Yeah, so far all roads lead to Mia.”
“He set her up real good.”
Yeah, fucking Matthews knew what he was doing but my question is, why her? Why would he target Mia, of all people? And this was before the girl even knew she was going to be living with us.
“Fuck!” Liam shakes his head but with his arm in a cast, and his ribs hurting like hell, it’s hard to move much. “I knew that snake was acting up that night.”
“And I think he wasn’t alone.”
“You didn’t drive that car for two whole weeks and in that time, it was at home, underground,” Liam starts, eyes narrowed. “How could he have accessed your car.”
That night was the second time I had driven the Camaro since John and Mom’s divorce and then my brother’s death then finally, egging Mia’s car. Other than that, the car was parked in our underground parking lot the whole time. No one has access to it, beside Liam and John.
“Maybe he did it right there at the tracks, when everyone else was concentrating on something else,” I look away. “Say something like a drama queen slapping the shit