Thunder Falls

by Michael Lilly

  “Are you still in contact with him?” I ask.

  Trina shakes her head.

  A nurse walks into the room, a tiny thing who, at first, reminds me of Gale Quispitt, the little nurse with a big personality, who worked at the only hospital in Riverdell. However, a moment’s observance reveals that this nurse’s demeanor and way of carrying herself differ vastly; she moves almost without making a sound, and only acknowledges our presence in order to excuse herself as she squeezes around the side of the bed. She checks Mom’s vitals—no notable changes—and slips back out the door, her brief presence having felt no more substantial than that of a spirit.

  “No,” Trina says, “I got clingy and he ran for it. I wish I knew then what I know now. I’m a lot better at these things now. Maybe still not as good as…most people—” Translation: non-abused people “—but I’m getting a lot better at setting boundaries, both for myself and for others.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll cross paths again some day,” says Todd. Despite his bookshelf full of horror and thriller books, Todd is a romantic at heart. I’m more of a realist, but I quite enjoy when Todd gets on his romantic kicks.

  “Or maybe you’ll find someone who will leave no room in your mind for those doubts and insecurities,” I say.

  Trina seems to be somewhat removed; she just shrugs.

  The ambitious morning light begins to brighten the window, sapping its inky blackness and leaving a dull, unremarkable gray in its place. I guess some part of me knew how much time was passing, but during the fact, it seemed more like we were on a dimensional plane removed from time itself. Now, presented with direct evidence of time’s relentless march, I’m plucked unceremoniously from that realm and deposited back into this one, the one where my mother is in a coma with no end in sight.

  Trina stands up, straining her body into a long stretch, then goes to look for a doctor, perhaps hopeful for an updated, more optimistic prognosis.

  “This has definitely been interesting,” says Todd.

  “It has,” I say.

  “Seems like she’s been put through a hell of a gauntlet on her own.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. Thorn family trait, I guess.”

  “Must be.”

  Todd and I sit in silence until Trina returns, by which time golden bars of sunlight slice through the blinds and lay across my mother, as if to impress upon us the prison her mind is in.

  “No news,” Trina reports from the doorway, “I guess she’s relatively stable for now, so all we can do is wait until she either gets better or gets worse.” I hear her voice catch on the latter.

  She crosses the small room to her chair.

  “Knock knock,” says a voice I know all too well.

  Thirty

  “Beth!” I say. I nearly knock Todd out of his seat as I fly out of my own—he breaks into a laugh as he regains his balance.

  I hug her close and hear her say, “You didn’t tell him I was coming?”

  “I figured he could use a surprise of the fun type for once,” says Todd.

  Beth hugs me tightly and I feel her figure relax. I make a quick mental note: Beth Connors is being vulnerable and affectionate.

  “I’ve missed you, friend,” she says.

  “I’ve missed you, too,” I say.

  I pull away and Beth looks at me, her always laser-focused eyes simply observing instead of boring a hole into my mind like they used to. I introduce her and Trina and the two shake hands and smile.

  “Man, all that shit in Riverdell seems so long ago,” I say.

  Beth nods and looks away, her mind clearly taking a detour through those intense few days last November.

  “So fill me in. What’s been going on?” she says, snapping back to the present like a compressed spring jumping out to its relaxed shape.

  Fortunately, catching Beth up requires far less re-telling and context. Additionally, Beth sits and listens with the same earnest patience that Trina had.

  When I finish, she sighs wearily and shakes her head. “Christ. What are the odds that some random-ass case from twenty years ago ends up in a showdown with Jeremy Keroth’s daughter?”

  Todd and I just shrug and shake our heads, and Beth changes her emphasis:

  “Jeremy Keroth’s daughter. Fuck, Rem. What happens now?”

  In response, my phone speaks up before I have the chance to do so. It buzzes aggressively as I take it out of my pocket, as if aware of its message’s urgency. It’s Creed.

  He begins speaking as soon as I pick up. “Remy, big news, I’ll shoot you a text with a link. All’s well here. Gotta go. Odin says hi.” Indeed, I hear my German shepherd whine before Creed cuts the line, and a second later, my device dings as it receives the promised text message.

  The link directs me to a blog (Happman’s Happenin’s, Musings of a Woke Bloke). The first post on the blog is explained in its title: Suspects in Massive Child Porn Operation Exposed, Charged.

  “Holy shit!” I say. Todd, Beth, and Trina look up and six eyebrows rocket up into their respective hairlines (well, five and seven eighths—Todd singed off a small chunk of his left eyebrow when he was learning flambé).

  Rather than read the entire article out loud, I skim it and recite the highlights. The text is occasionally interrupted by a photograph, and indeed, every single mugshot goes into a sinister corridor of my mind with associations and memories of my ordeals over the past year. My memories of it mingle and collide, though, and I can’t match the mugshots to where, specifically, I saw them.

  Near the end of the article, the author (Charlie Happman, perhaps sired by a Chaplin fan) mentions the massacre in Wometzia. Of course, that story has been all over the news (local, state, and even a couple of national and international news stations did stories) since yesterday, but in today’s media climate—that is to say, one where any kind of violence gets a free ticket to the front page and a featured piece on the nine o’clock news—it was overtaken shortly by a Florida man who made a bomb threat using a metallic suitcase full of what seemed to be discarded phone chargers and various other retired USB cables.

  I finish reading the article and we stand in awed silence for a time.

  “Holy shit,” says Beth. “So…does that mean it’s over?”

  “It’s hard to say. But I think so,” I say.

  There are many superstitions that deal with “tempting the devil,” and while I’m not a superstitious man, it’s hard for me to believe that the text I receive from Creed now is a coincidence.

  It says, “Uh-oh.” It’s accompanied by yet another link.

  The link leads to yet another news site, this one telling of a complex jailbreak led by (and for the benefit of) none other than Jeremy Keroth.

  “But this could be good, right?” says Todd. “Most of his guys are either dead or in jail now.”

  “Yes…but I don’t think he was planning to use them, anyway,” I say.

  No, indeed, when I visit the image of Keroth in my mind (or, rather, when his devilish grin erupts into my nightmares), he is no longer a creature of reason. Millennia of evolution and established civility melt away from the core of his mind, like breaking the mold away from a freshly cooled piece of metal, leaving nothing but the sharp and the dangerous—the vengeful.

  The times I’ve had thoughts (conscious or otherwise) about him have been relatively few, but each of them leaves me with a sort of insidious residue, a stain on my mind and soul. No temperature of water nor any intensity of scrubbing has yet been sufficient to wash that feeling away, and it often leaves me feeling weak.

  “What is happening?” asks Trina.

  At this moment, surely Todd’s and Beth’s minds are going at the same rate mine is, if in slightly different directions—if our thoughts were represented visually, they might look like a forking lightning bolt. But although Trina is bright, she doesn’t have the experience or the mindset that we’ve had to adopt for our professions.

  “Do you remember Dad’s friend, Jeremy Keroth?” I ask.


  But I’m asking Trina. When I told her about the events in Riverdell, I refrained from using his name, but now, I see that it’s the most effective tool for her to see exactly the depth of depravity we’re dealing with.

  Todd and Beth were ones I had to tell about Keroth. I had to explain to them the horrors that he and my father committed while I was growing up.

  But I don’t have to explain that to Trina; she was there. She experienced it alongside me. She and I would endure the same thing, often back to back, then go our separate ways to cry it out and try to process what had happened, only to meet up again later in the day or evening to pretend that nothing had ever happened.

  We were good at that. No matter what had happened, no matter how bad things had gotten, we were always able to support each other in the endeavor of burying it all.

  But now I’m asking her to do the unthinkable: I’m asking her to fish out the rusty key from her mental keyring and plunge it into the lock that she undoubtedly hoped, all these years, she’d never have to touch again.

  Through her face and eyes, I can almost watch her as she performs that mental task—a hurt expression at first, which then morphs into sadness and, finally, anger. She remembers and, now, she understands.

  “He got out of jail?” she asks. Her voice is flooded with emotions now, each fighting for dominance in her words; it’s hard to tell which is winning. “What do we do?”

  “Hope that the police find him before he finds us. Or me, more specifically.”

  “You think he’ll come after you? I’d think he’d just go into hiding somewhere, lie low for a while,” says Beth.

  “There was something in Ginger’s voice that reminded me of him,” I say. “I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, but then I got it: revenge. He’s careful and methodical, sure, but even as coolheaded as he usually is, that all takes a back seat to retribution in his mind. And not only does he want me punished, he wants to be the one to deliver it.”

  “Do you think he knows how to find you?” asks Todd.

  “I think he thinks he does.”

  He looks at me, his eyes pleading. “You’re not thinking of running off again, are you?”

  A pang of guilt stabs through me, quick and merciless. I was indeed considering doing just that, but the thought passed quickly.

  “No. It wouldn’t do you guys any good. When we were in Riverdell, his most powerful asset was his army of minions, right? Guys he coerced, threatened, or blackmailed, or the odd nutjob pervert who genuinely wanted to help him. Using them, he could, in effect, be all over the place, all at once, without ever leaving his fake white-picket-fence lifestyle.

  “But he no longer has that. Without his and Perkins’s leadership, the whole operation has been flailing for weeks. Even if he wanted to, he no longer has the influence he used to. If he so much as sends a carrier pigeon to one of his old contacts, there’s always the chance that they turn him in. He can’t manipulate people into obedience anymore.

  “So, where does that leave us? What do we do now?” asks Beth.

  “We go to Riverdell,” I say.

  Thirty-One

  Beth looks surprised.

  Todd nods his head.

  Trina looks mortified.

  “Will you come?” I ask.

  Just like her memories of Keroth, Riverdell itself beats with a sinister rhythm, building with an ominous ebb and flow like the Jaws theme.

  For the most part, I’ve been desensitized to the memories of Riverdell due to my presence there for most of my life. But Trina ran out amid constant fighting, abuse—trauma. In this small moment (which is no doubt a huge moment for her), I wonder whether she’s given much thought to what it might be like if she ever did return to Riverdell.

  “I can’t,” she says. The emotions that were previously struggling for her voice have settled—and anguish won.

  “I’ll stay here with you,” Todd says to Trina. “We can hang tight while they go sort out what they need to.”

  An uninformed onlooker might see Todd’s offer as a copout, an act of cowardice, but it’s quite contrary. Todd is offering to let me leave him behind so that my sister, whom he’s only known for a matter of hours, can feel safe and comfortable in her first trip west of the Mississippi in a decade. He spent a month in a state of constant worry about me, finally set out to find me, and within a week of finding me, offers his own mental well-being in exchange for Trina’s.

  This is the farthest thing from a selfish or cowardly act.

  Considering all of this, I tear up a little before having to turn away—I don’t want my own emotions coming into play with Trina’s decision-making.

  “I’ll go,” she says. Her anguished look has transformed into one of determination.

  “Trina, you don’t have to. I know what memories that place has for you.”

  “I know, I know. The place has haunted my nightmares for years now. I never wanted to go back. Ever. But maybe it will bring some kind of closure. Maybe confronting the memories—acknowledging that they’re memories, and not just my imagination tormenting me—will allow me to be at peace with them.

  “Or, you know, maybe I’ll spend the entire trip in a fit of panic and flashbacks. Either way, it’s something I have to confront. If I do it, then I’ll know, from then on, that it will never have the same power over me.”

  Two hours later, we’re boarding a plane to Portland, Oregon. In terms of secrecy, it’s a relief to be moving about in a public, crowded place without worrying about who might see me—without running the face of every single bystander through my mental database to see if maybe I recognize someone as a threat from my past. I guess I didn’t notice how much of a toll my secret life has been taking on me.

  I feel a little bad for leaving my mother alone in her hospital room, but she is unconscious, and I’m sure she would understand if she knew the circumstances. I make a mental promise to return to her as soon as I’m finished with my business in town.

  We’re on a larger plane, with four seats in the middle section—perfect. Beth sits on the left, then Trina, me, and Todd. Trina has been talkative since we left the hospital—more so than I’ve seen her so far—but now, as the plane prepares for takeoff, she quiets down. She puts her head back and closes her eyes. I don’t think she has any intention of sleeping, but I leave her alone anyway. If she wants to feign sleep, she has every right to do so without intrusion.

  The flight is only a couple of hours long and goes smoothly with no turbulence. The second we touch down in Portland, Trina’s eyes shoot open and she takes several deep breaths. I squeeze her right hand and she nods, steeling herself.

  We step off the plane into the cool, humid Oregon air. A shiver runs through me, but not from the cold.

  One hidden advantage of flying is that, if Keroth has any of his old resources available, he’ll most likely have some way to have seen that I flew to Oregon, and he’ll thus receive my message: No more hide and seek. No more bullshit.

  We shudder to think of the state Todd’s house might be in, after this time of neglect. We didn’t sell it, as we figured perhaps we could return to it some day, after all of this ended. Maybe that day is today. When we left, we were under constant siege by the less intelligent of Keroth’s clutch, ranging from the mailbox being smashed to a brick being hurled in through our front window. We repaired the window before we left, but both of us brushed Riverdell into the darker, less attended areas of our minds, acknowledging that it may continue to be a target for vandalism.

  We’re pleasantly surprised to find that the house has remained, more or less, exactly how we found it. In its abundance of Oregon moisture, the grass needs to be cut and weeds have overtaken the small garden, but regarding the structure itself, it stands strong and proud, like a guard dog hailing its returning masters. The windows remain intact and even have a hint of their glossy newness underneath the residue left by months of Oregon rain.

  I’m certain Keroth is waiting for me at my c
hildhood home, but even so, I do a lap around Todd’s (and my) old dwelling just to be sure it’s safe. As much as we can with what little we packed, we get settled. I note the distinct hollowness in it since we moved out but, probably by association, I still take a unique and powerful comfort in being here.

  We’re spared the awkwardness that should be settling over us by yet another text from Creed: “You’re not doing what I think you’re doing, are you?”

  I reply with a smiley face.

  “Oregon? Right after Keroth escapes jail? You’ve lost your damn mind.”

  “Gotta end things somehow. I’ll let you know if I survive tonight.”

  He doesn’t reply.

  “How are you planning on tonight going?” asks Beth. Following her question, Todd and Trina, too, beseech me with their gazes.

  “I’m going to the old house. Alone. He only has so much sleeve left to shove tricks up into. But if he manages one, I’d rather it be me who goes down than any of you. I’ll give you a time limit. If I’m not back before then, get out of here as fast as you can. Out of Riverdell, out of Oregon. Just get gone. If I’m right about his intentions, he’ll leave you alone. He wants me.”

  “You’re not going alone,” says Beth. Her protest is breathy and intense.

  “There’s no reason to endanger more than one of us. If I go, he stops and it’s over. If one of you goes, he’ll keep going until he gets to me.”

  “We’re not as helpless as you think,” says Beth.

  She’s getting heated now—she can’t see it. Even though she’s been a part of it, she can’t see the wake of damage, of pain and trauma and of death, that I’ve left in my path.

  In the beginning, I thought of myself as a vigilante of sorts. I wanted to do good for the world, and that goal coincided with one that would bring me a measure of closure regarding my past. But that one action—big and decisive as it was—set into motion a series of events I couldn’t have foreseen at the time. To think of the events that have come as a result of those actions gives me a sense of despair, but when lain parallel to the thoughts of all of the kids who would have suffered at their hands otherwise, I can’t bear either timeline.