hear anybody say.” He laid his head back against the chair and allowed me to stroke the sweat back from his forehead, massage his scalp with my fingertips. “This sucks,” he said. “I wish I’d stayed on the other stuff.”
“I’ll take you back to the doctor. They’ll straighten it out.”
“No. I’m starting to feel like a goddamn science fair project. Forget that. I’m just gonna get myself off this stuff and go back to what I know. It’s not worth it.”
“There’s got to be something that’ll work better than what you had before.”
“I don’t even care. I can live with that. I just don’t want to be like this.”
I rubbed his shoulders reassuringly, but when he didn’t lean forward as he normally did, I ran my hands down to his arms and kneaded the muscles there. “I love it when you do that,” he said. Then he laughed a little and said, “I totally fucking hate it.”
My hands froze in place, then retreated. “I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t stop. God.”
I began again, but hesitantly, feeling the sudden rangy energy his body was putting forth. He tolerated it for a few moments, then threw my hands off with a flail of his arms that was almost violent.
I took two steps back. He rose from the chair and walked around it to the refrigerator, retrieving a beer from the produce drawer. As he cracked it open and drank, I watched him from a distance. He wore a T-shirt that was large even for him, shorts that hit below his knees and, despite the fact that it was the middle of the night, a pair of battered running shoes. Elias was never without shoes. He slept in his sneakers. Now, for the first time since I had moved in, he looked as though he might need them to escape the house.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, my timing awkward, my voice small. “You can be hard to read, Eli.”
“I know it.” He sounded calm and ordinary. The refrigerator door closed, and the kitchen went dark again. “You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just bugged out about the medicine.”
“We’ll take care of that next week, okay? Or as soon as we can get you in to the doctor, anyway.”
He leaned back against the kitchen island. “I’ll figure it out. Are you headed back to bed?”
“Sort of. I came down to sleep on the sofa. It’s too hot up there. Right now I’m so tired I’m dizzy.”
He set down his beer and held out his arms. It was the first time he had ever done that. I walked into the hug, and despite the complication of my giant belly, he found a way to pull me close with his arms around my shoulders. The bulk of him was too much for my arms to encircle, but I did the best I could. When he buried his face in my hair, his bristly crew cut scratched my cheek.
“It’s good you’re here, Jill,” he said.
I nodded, but I felt so exhausted and light-headed I couldn’t really reply. Unsteadily in the dark, I made my way over to the sofa and curled up on my side beneath the lightest afghan. In the cool and the white noise I fell asleep quickly. And then—I don’t know quite how much later—I was vaguely aware of Elias’s shadow passing over me, leaning in. Somewhere in the core of my mind I recognized the weight of his steps against the floor, the scent of his body. But that was all, until I vaguely heard the vibrato of someone yelling in the distance, over and over, and I could not tell whether it was Cade or Elias because the voice carried the pure raspy note of the Olmstead men, the common song of all of them, the one my son would sing someday.
Chapter 18
Cade
The screaming woke me from a dead sleep. By reflex I clutched for Jill, but her side of the bed was empty. I scrambled over the bed to the stairs, barefoot and shirtless. The voice was my brother’s. From the landing I could see Elias’s silhouette: broad back, thuglike neck, arms out just slightly at his sides as if he had tried to react but got frozen in place. Over his shoulder I could make out Jill’s face as she rested on the sofa, sleeping peacefully through his raw, haggard screams.
I rushed down the steps and started toward Elias. Only then did I see that the lower half of Jill’s body—my boxer shorts