My Best Friends Brother

Chapter 154

The rain hammers down on the car, now in full freefall as Dad pulls up outside our destination.

“Church? You really think she came to church?” He asks with understandable trepidation.

“No,” I reply, undoing my belt and steadying myself to brave the storm. “I think she’s behind it.”

The penny seems to drop for him, he offers me his jacket as I step out but I reject it, sprinting from the heat of the car and into the chill of the late evening air to start making my way down the side of the church. It’s getting dark now but there's enough solar lighting for me to find my way through the abundance of cross shaped graves.

Just as I make it past the familiar forth row I see a huddled ball of shaking limbs laying on the puddled mud in front of the white marble headstone. Her body is soaked through to the core, the rain that's been pouring down on her for God knows how long still unrelenting as she holds her knees tightly to her quivering chest, curling herself up like an infant on the resting place of the only woman she feels was ever there for her.

Oh May... Why...

“May?” She doesn’t answer me, I can hardly hear my own voice through this growing storm anyway.

Dad spots her and immediately attempts to rush past me, but I slam my hand onto his chest to stop him, shaking my head as he tries to protest. I don’t know what mental state May is in right now, but I know the only person she will speak to, if any, is me.

“I’ll go call Hannah, get her to shut down the cavalry.” I nod, Dad walks back with hesitation towards the car as I make my way over to her, water running off the tips of my hair and trickling down my back.

She doesn't stir, she doesn't so much as move or acknowledge my presence, even when I join her on the drenched soil. I try lifting her head up from the mud but it's so heavy, her weight completely dead and dripping wet. Her usual bouncy curls now layered over and stuck to her face in such a matt that I can hardly make out her features. She’s suffocating under the pressure of today... it’s killing her slowly.

I don’t know what I can say to make it better for her, she almost killed my niece today and she fucking lied to us all. Lee is never going to want to see her again, Brie couldn’t even stand the sound of her name earlier and Jayce hasn't asked one question about where she is. I can’t promise her that she will still have her family when she leaves this graveyard... I can’t give her anything.

Swiping her hair away from her face gently until I can see her eyes, her skin quickly becomes drenched again in the water that refuses to relent unleashing itself from the clouds above us. She’s shivering, I don’t know how much of it is the cold and how much of it is just her whole body breaking out in sobs.

She’s done. She’s completely fucking broken.

“May... I’m going to pick you up and take you back to the car, okay?... Dad is waiting for us.” She makes no attempts to move, instead just extending her arm slowly and curling her wrinkled fingers around the edge of the gravestone.

“L-Leave me here... p-please...”

Fuck May, why did you do this? Why did you have to fucking do this...

I’m angry at her, I’m so fucking angry at her that I want to scream at the top of my lungs and beg her to tell me that everything I think I know is fucking false, even though we both know it isn't...

But she's my sister.

Whatever she’s done, whoever she is - She’s my sister, she will always be my sister.

Right now I don’t trust her, but I always love her.

“May, I can’t leave you here. You’re soaked through, you’re in fucking pieces and you have some shit you have to face whether you want to or not. I won’t just leave you here to die alone in the fucking cold laying over a grave... You need to –”

“I don’t need to do anything!” She snaps, her voice vicious even though her body is still firmly placed against the ground. “Everything I have is laying going to be laying six feet below m-me now!”

She breaks, even through the storm I watch her tears leave her eyes. “E-Everything I’ve ever h-had... Everything I’ve ever l-loved... I k-kill.”

Her demons are back, all of them. Clawing and choking at her from the inside out. May has always had some darkness within her, a black spot that comes with being someone on the outside looking in on a world where they feel that they don't belong.

She has never hid from me the fact that she feels lost here, a girl without parents who has been passed around from one person to the next to be cared for, never feeling like she truly belonged in any place she was forced to call her home.

Never feeling... whole.

She’s always blamed herself for Granny, a death she never could have prevented but she doesn’t see it that way. She puts on a good front but deep down inside she's still just a scared six year old girl pissing herself on the floor next to her grandmothers dead body. She’s still just a small child stretching out her arms to a boy who promised to be right back, one who never walked out of that school again. A baby sister begging her older one to love her, to notice her, when that woman was too lost to even find herself.

May sees herself as unlovable, as walking destruction, something today has only proven to be correct.

“Just l-leave me here, I want to be with t-them... Please...” She mutters with shaken breaths, letting go of the anger in her voice and laying her head down firmly against the soft ground once more. Her fingertips stroke the soil, searching, almost as if she’ll be able to feel Granny’s long lost heartbeat pulsing comfortingly through the grass under her touch if she just looks hard enough.

Her heart... I can’t fix her this time...

Wait, what does she mean ‘them’?

Oh shit...

She thinks...

“May, Heather’s alive.”

She's been laying here for hours thinking she killed our little princess...

Fuck...

She stops, her fingers letting go of the soil. She didn’t know... Her eyes slowly raise from the ground, taking her head with them, one side of her coated in thick lashings of deep wet mud as it becomes clear that she had no idea that little girl still had breath in her body.

“S-She's...” Her hand springs to clutch her chest, her other one clasping over her mouth as the relief pours out of her in pure sobbing tears. She keeps looking back at me like I’m going to withdraw my words but she knows I’d never lie about this, never about Heather.

Oh May... What the fuck am I going to do with you?

I take hold of her during her distraction and manage to pull her over into my lap out of the dirt, the water now drenching my body to a point that every one of my cells are shaking under the ice cold wind. I ignore it, right now this girl just needs me to be her brother, my anger and my quivering form can wait.

The darkness at the corner of the church becomes illuminated with flashing blue lights, not something that’s unheard of in this neighbourhood but I know who they’re here for this time. I can’t protect her... Fuck, I wish I could but this time I can’t.

May buries her head into my chest, her hand twirling into the drenched fabric of my shirt as she tries to get a tighter grip on me. When she first came to live with us in the Manor this is how I would have to hold her to get her to fall asleep, rocking her back and forth, singing the same lullabies Granny would hum to me as a baby... I know those nightmares will be back tonight, but I also know I won’t be holding her until they go away now. She’ll be on her own.

“Is she...?” May chokes on her words but I still know what she means to say, brushing away the mud that coats her cheeks as I nod at her and notice Dad coming up around the side of the church.

It’s time.

I turn and look at the gravestone behind me, Granny’s smiling face staring back at me from the sweet image we all had a choice in picking. Her smile. Damn... I could really do with one of her bone crunching hugs right now.

None of this would be happening if she was here, she wouldn’t have let it.

“May, you have to tell them everything, whatever happened to put those drugs in your room you have to fucking tell them.  Hannah will look after you, she'll make sure everything goes the way it’s supposed to but you have to tell them everything. Don’t you dare fucking protect him.” May turns to see Dad backlit against the sea of regularly flashing navy illuminations.

“I won't.”

Good.

I try to steady her on her feet when I stand but whatever adrenaline was rushing through her body to get her to this place is long gone, her leg almost instantly buckling until I scoop her up into my arms and walk down towards my father.

Everyone else at that hospital is so pissed at her but not him, Dad went looking for her as soon as he knew there was nothing more he could do for Heather. He loves her, he’s known May since the day she was born and he's been the only father either of us have ever had.

He takes her from me the moment I get close enough to his reach, brushing away what's left of the mud on her face and looping her arms around his neck as she holds him tightly.

Forcing her head under his chin, he takes a beat to just hold her, not taking a step and letting himself give her some molecule of comfort. No matter what, she’s one of his girls.

“I’m so sorry Dad.”

May...

Her words are so quiet I’m not convinced he’s heard them until I watch him press her drenched head against his chest a little tighter, tears floating in his eyes. In the eight years she’s lived at our house she's never called him that, not once... I don’t think she’s ever been able to call anyone that.

“It’s going to be okay angel, it’s going to be okay.”

Dad walks her slowly over to where Hannah stands against the car, two large police officers stood either side of her and waiting to take my sister away. I know she has to go, but another part of me just wants to keep her with me and run for the fucking hills.

Why the fuck did this have to happen?

May maintains the clutch she has on Dad until the very last moment, being forced to break away with a sob. No matter how angry he is at her he still can't stand to see her in pain, gently lowering her to the floor and keeping his arm firmly around her waist to hold her weight off her ankle.

“Hannah, are those really necessary?” He glances over at the handcuffs ready and waiting in the hands of the large officer standing next to one of his wife’s oldest friends.

“I’m sorry Cole, until she's been processed and we understand everything that happened you know what these charges are going to be. As far as the law is concerned, she left a dangerous substance within the vicinity of a vulnerable child, something that almost got her killed. In the eyes of the law, that's attempted homicide by way of neglect. It’s exactly the same thing as putting a loaded gun in a playpen with a toddler, right now there’s nothing else I can do for her. Your daughter has made it clear she plans to press all charges she can against May.”

I have to speak to Lee, she was so angry earlier but she won't be that angry forever, she loves May. She fucked up but she never would’ve tried to hurt Heather on purpose, ever, Lee knows that.

Dad moves to step between May and Hannah, gripping May’s shoulders and fighting back his own tears to try remain strong for her. He looks down at her, on the child that has fallen so far from the graceful angel he once used to let run around his backyard laughing and joking with him, a girl he embraced as his own all those years ago.

“It’s going to be okay firecracker, you are going to be brave and we are going to make sure you are taken care of until we can sort this out. Don’t be afraid.” May can see he’s ready to break, even with everything else she has going on she still can’t let herself watch him like this.

May doesn’t show a lot of physical affection to people that aren’t me and Heather, but now she can see that Dad needs it. Leaning forward, she goes up onto the tiptoe of her good leg and gently kisses his cheek, a single tear slowly tumbling down her own before she limps around him and presents both her wrists to Hannah.

She stands strong, firm. Embracing and understanding why this needs to happen, taking responsibility without hesitation like the Queen I know she will grow to be. May is a lot of things, but she isn’t a coward. She’ll pay the price for this, she’ll do it because she knows she should. Owning your mistakes; lesson one in Granny’s guide to life, she knows what she would’ve told her to do.

My heart shatters when the officer next to us clips the heavy handcuffs onto her thin wrists, guiding her past Hannah, who can’t even seem to be able to make eye contact with any of us, as she watches my baby sister pushed into the back seat of the police car.

May has always seemed so big, her personality is larger than life but all I can think of right now is how tiny she looks sitting there. She’s still just a child herself.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, I’m her big brother, I’m supposed to protect it from the things like this.

I’ve failed her.

May looks at me through the glass, holding back tears and doing her best to sign to me, but the handcuffs are limiting her ability to move.

‘Tell her I love her’

She knows you love her May... This doesn't change that... Nothing ever will.

I can’t fight my own tears anymore when I see my little sister try to rub her hands up and down her arms to bring herself comfort, only to realise she can’t, her restraints keeping her from even that. The defeat takes over her once prideful body until she just slumps down with a strangled weep right before the car takes off.

“She's going to need someone over eighteen to be with her in the interview Cole, is Tara going to meet us there?” Hannah asks, Dad slipping off his jacket and trying to offer it to me again but I don’t need it.

“I’ll call her, I think Brie wanted to do it but I’ll get somebody there now.”

I’m not entirely sure how long me and Dad have just been standing here staring out into the nothingness as the rain falls, the once bright car park descending further into darkness after Hannah left.

Eventually he pulls me with him back to the van, neither of us speaking a word as he cranks the heat and pulls away from this hallowed place.

“Do you want me to take you home or do you want to go back to Josh?” He asks, pulling one of the sheets he uses to cover the tools into the front and throwing it over my body like a blanket.

I don’t know how long it’s going to take them all to realise this, but it’s funny when he says do I want to go home or do I want to be with Josh...

They’re both the exact same thing.

He is my home now.