Chapter Two: The Call No One Should Make
I didn't scream.
Even when the jacket slid from the bed and landed at my feet, even when the lights blinked like the room itself was trying to speak—I didn't scream.
I just picked it up with trembling hands and held it to my chest. It smelled like him. The good days. Not the last few months when something had shifted in him, so quietly that none of us really noticed. Or maybe we did—and ignored it.
That night, I crawled back into my bed without switching the light on. I held Parker's jacket like it was his heartbeat, like it could anchor me to something real. But sleep didn't come.
It hadn't since the moment I heard the news.
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It was my mother's voice that broke the morning. Not a scream—worse. It was a silence that snapped. Shattered. A sob that started in her soul and ripped through the house.
I remember hearing the front door slam. She'd gone to the river, someone said. There was a phone call, something about a body found near the bridge. She went to check, probably hoping it wasn't him.
But she knew.
A mother always knows.
---
It was me who called the others. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. My stomach kept rolling like I might throw up, but I had to do it. I had to tell them.
First, my elder brother, Kyler.
"Hello?" he answered casually.
"Ky…" My voice broke. "He's gone. Parker. He's—he's dead."
A pause. Too long.
"Wait… Parker who? Our cousin?" he asked, thinking I meant the one with the disability, the one we all just called 'Little Parker'.
"No. Our Parker," I whispered. "My brother. Your brother."
He went silent. I heard a curse, then something crash in the background.
Next, I called our eldest sister, Yvette. She didn't believe me at first.
"What do you mean gone?"
"I mean gone," I said, hoarsely. "They found him near the railway bridge. Mama went. It's him."
I could hear her trying not to fall apart. She kept repeating his name like if she said it enough, it would undo everything.
---
Dad didn't find out until evening.
He had been at work, cooking lunch for students at the high school where our two youngest sisters also attended. No one had wanted to break the news to him