Page 75 of Fall onto me
Wes: Seriously Foster, don’t do anything stupid. We will get vengeance.
How he got the news,I don’t know. Probably from Rita, or maybe Foster called him.
I respond because he can’t.
It’s Skyler, we’re in for the night I promise.
The hospital calls us,informing Foster that Adeline is being taken care of by the best doctors and nurses in the hospital, her friends. She’s in a coma, in the ICU, but the outcome isn’t looking good.
Sophie is going to stay the night with Rita. Foster’s in no shape to comfort her right now, and we’re keeping it a secret from Soph until we know more. He simply doesn’t want his little sister to see him this way. “Do you want to go to the hospital?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “I don’t want her to be there alone,” he cries out; it’s a painful sound. “But I don’t think I can see her like that, Skyler, I don’t think I can …”
“She’s not alone,” I assure him, trying to comfort his mind. “Her friends are there with her, taking good care of her.”
He’s looking past me, to the wall, at nothing in particular. A frozen shell of the man he is as he replays that earth-shattering sound over and over in his head.
“I want to die,” he whispers. “I’m already an orphan. She was all I had.”
“Sophie,” I remind him, which makes matters worse. He begins to wail.
“I need to ground myself, something to remind me, because I think I’m losing it, Sky.”
He doesn’t move when I lean my back against the headboard, but I grab him and place his head on my lap. He’s curled into himself, wrapping his arm around me.
And although my voice is shaking, whenever he sings, it brings me comfort, so I sing the song his grandma always sang to him, ‘Hush Little Baby.’
His body relaxes for a moment, but the moment I stop singing, he weeps.
I hold him until his breathing finally calms, alerting me that he’s gone to sleep, and I drift off behind him.
* * *
I’munsure when I fall asleep, but a sound startles me, and I wake to a dark room with Foster not in the bed.
“What are you doing?”
“I need the blueprints,” he sneers.
“For what?”
He shakes his head. “Your mom texted you.”
I squint at the bright screen.
Mom: I’m sorry to bother you, Skyler. I just wanted to let you know that your father has been arrested.
Panic drips down my body,because I know without a shadow of a doubt that TK isn’t my father.
The moon illuminates Foster’s frame, the glint of a gun in his hand. I need to talk him off the ledge.
“What is killing him going to do?” I ask, although it’s what I want to do myself. We can’t spend our lives in jail, not when Sophie is most likely going to need us to raise her. “We don’t have the blueprints anymore. We gave them to the police, remember?”
“The hospital called again.” His shoulders slump, and he drops the bag. “If she lives … and it’s a very fucking slim chance that she’ll survive. She’ll be paralyzed, possibly a vegetable.”
“We’ll get through this,” I whisper the lie between us.
“I can’t.”