“I thought you would,” I say.
“You really think that lady, that shrink, is going to help you? You’re such a child, Liam.”
“Did you call your buddies at the station? Did you tell them it was me?”
He laughs. “Look, I don’t have time for this. I have to be at a meeting at Buena Vista in fifteen minutes. Then I have dinner with Frank. I’m going to give you one chance. Get her to the trailer, now. Forget the hotel. And the rest of the plan. Just finish it. Do what you have to do. And get rid of her. Understand?”
I don’t say anything. When I look back at the car, I see Lauren. She stares at me through the window. He’s changing the plan. No more hotel. No more of his “fun.” This means something. He never changes. He never gives up even a hint of control.
“Liam,” he says, interrupting my thoughts. “Don’t make me say it.”
“Say what?” I snap, my voice rising.
“Say what I’ll have to do if you screw me. One word and you’re spending the rest of your life in prison. Does that sound good?”
I reach the lake. The sun shines off the water, white ripples rolling along the surface. I wish I could just walk out into it, let it carry me to the bottom. I wish the water would fill my lungs until I settle forever in the silt.
“Do it!” I snap back.
The line is silent. I grip my phone so tightly that I might shatter the glass and plastic. The birds continue to sing over my head, but they sound wrong now, harsh and grating. God, I hate him so much.
“Dad was right about you,” he says finally. “No matter what, though, I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t toughen you up. I tried. I really did.”
“Why, Drew?”
“Because you were always crying about Mom. And you embarrassed him. You were always doing stupid stuff. Like that day when Mom was in the hospital and you beat that dude up. The one who was just trying to help you. Just dumb.”
“Do you hate me?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
“It does to me,” I say. “Just say it outright. Just say it.”
“You’re so dramatic,” he says.
“Why, Drew? Why do you hate me? Because I tripped you when you were ten? Is that it?”
Drew can’t stop laughing. “You are such a baby, Liam. Dad was right. He came into my room that night you kicked the shit out of his model. He told me that you were my responsibility. That I had to do something about you. Or it would go bad for me.”
“I don’t care, Drew.”
“You do,” he says. “You always care. You cry and whine and crawl through life like some slug. You’re pathetic. You always have been.” His laughter cuts more than any words he might throw at me. “I know you’re trying to screw me over. If you were even a little bit smarter, I might be worried about that. But I’m not. You know why? Because you’ll mess it up. You always do.”
As always, he does enough. His taunts set me afire. My vision tunnels and a feral sound rises up my throat. It turns into a scream as my arm cocks back and whips forward. The phone leaves my fingers, sailing through the air, over the water. I swear I can hear his laughter before it plunges through the sunlight and sinks to darkness.
22
After my father left Mom at her meeting, he disappeared again for days. As if emboldened by his absence, that sour smell seemed to subtly grow like an invisible yet deadly mold. It started as a hint, buried under my mother’s perfume as she moved past me in the kitchen. Then I’d notice it in the hallway by her bedroom. By the next day, it had wafted down the stairs, hanging damp and thick in the foyer, rushing out to greet me every day when I came home from school.
Drew was there during that time, but he refused to speak to me. When I brought up either Mom or Dad, he simply walked away. I actually missed him telling me I was stupid or calling me a loser. Even that would have been better than shuffling through those days so full of dread that I could taste it against the back of my throat.
By the fifth day, Mom stopped leaving her room. I checked on her that evening and she was sitting up and reading a book. I have no idea where it came from. She smiled at me and patted the mattress. I walked over but didn’t sit down. I couldn’t. I felt like if I stopped moving for too long, the specter that haunted our house would wrap its bony fingers around my throat and laugh as it crushed my life away.
“Liam, did you feed the kitten?” she asked.
I remember feeling so cold when she said that. I blinked, unsure not only of what to say, but of what was real.
“It’s gone, Mom,” I whispered.
“What?”
“The cat isn’t here anymore,” I said.
She waved me off with her thin fingers.
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Sit with me.”
“Is Dad coming home?” I asked, unmoving.
“Of course. He might be late tonight, though. Work’s very busy.”
Slowly, I backed away from her. The smell turned my stomach. I felt dizzy and overwhelmingly nauseous. I watched my mother, praying that she didn’t call me back. But dreaming that she would, and that everything would return to that oasis we lived in when she first returned from rehab.
When I reached the doorway I turned, rushing to the bathroom. I doubled over, my stomach seizing, but nothing happened. Covered in a cold sweat, I stood back up and walked out into the hallway. Drew was standing in his room. He watched me, not talking. I expected his eviscerating smile. Instead, his face remained emotionless until he shut his door between us.
* * *
—
ON DAY EIGHT, my father returned. Mom hadn’t left her room. Nor had she eaten, even though I had taken to bringing what food I could find up to her room. I stood and watched him enter the house. For the first time, a primal anger rose inside me. I pictured rushing him, wrapping my fingers around his neck, an enactment of the dread I’d been surviving for days.
But he surprised me. I had expected him to ignore me and Mom, maybe even Drew, and disappear into his basement. Instead, he came up to me, his eyes sharp.
“Where’s your mother?”
“In her room,” I said.
He hurried past me. I stood frozen, listening to him rush up the stairs. My mother’s door opened. Time passed, minutes, but I don’t know how many. I just stood there, like things could end up differently. When he appeared, storming down the stairs, I knew.
“Call 9-1-1,” he snapped. “Tell them we need an ambulance.”
I didn’t move fast enough. The entire thing felt so surreal, like it wasn’t really happening. Then Drew joined us. My father turned to him. I expected his anger to erupt again, but it didn’t.
“Come with me,” my father said. “We need to help her.”
He and Drew ran out of the room. My father called back to me.
“Call 9-1-1.”
23
My phone.
I see it flying through the air. Plunging into the dark water. Sending a growing ripple back to me. I might as well hear the muffled sound of it landing atop the rusted metal roof of some abandoned SUV. Maybe the force is enough to break through, finish the erosion that the water started decades before. It could keep falling, bouncing against what remains of a seat, through a hole in the floorboard, finally reaching the cloying earth below. Where it can sink into the ground like a corpse, never to rise again.
I laugh. That’s just not true. Maybe, for some, the dead stay dead. For me, that’s never been the case. At the same time, hatred rides the current back to me. As do rage and fear and loneliness. It is as if all of my pain, every last shard, is dredged up from the cold, lifeless bottom. The air around me thickens with the flooding tide, threatening to choke away my life on the spot.
I spin, my skin afire. My eyes burning. My hands balling into tight fists. The passenger-side door of the Mazda swings open. I see her
pale face. Her eyes as wide as mine, yet filled with fear, not rage. Lauren stumbles, holding on to the doorframe, her feet slipping on the dirt. I lunge after her, a sound rising in my throat, grating past my teeth. It is raw and inhuman. She whimpers when she hears it.
Lauren finds her footing. She runs, sprinting away from me. With each breath, she makes a noise, too. So different from mine. But it feeds me. Like a drug. I need it. I devour it.
She rounds the car and heads back the way we came. I close the distance between us. A smile pulls at the muscles of my face, causes my teeth to click together. I thrust my arm out. Pushing her between the shoulder blades. Her feet lift off the ground and she falls. She uses her hands to brace for the impact. I see her wrist twist unnaturally to the side. She screams.
Without a word, I grab her jacket. As she cries, I lift her and drag her back toward the cabin.
24
My fingers tightened around my mother’s cordless phone. I stood frozen in the kitchen, unable to put it down. Somehow, I knew it was different that time. But there was nothing I could do about it.
The sirens grew louder. Flashing lights shined through the windows at the front of the house once again. Inside, there was nothing but silence. No one moved, it seemed. I don’t even think I was breathing.
Then I heard footsteps upstairs. They seemed to shake the house as someone came down the steps. Drew’s voice rang out, startling me.
“They’re here,” he called out.
“What?” I asked.
But he didn’t answer me. Instead, he ran back up to the bedrooms. Slowly, I walked out into the foyer. Glancing at the stairs, I moved instead to the window, parting the curtain. The ambulance turned onto our street.
“Move,” my father said behind me.
I never heard him come down. When I turned, he looked past me, out the window. I backed away and he ran a hand through his slick hair, something I had never seen him do before. Giving it a strange little tussle. Long clumpy strands fell before one eye.
Drew came next. He stood behind my father, reminding me of some loyal dog awaiting command.
“Go out and meet them,” my father said.
Drew never said a word. He just ran out of the house. My father watched from the window. I turned away from him and that’s when I felt the strange pull from upstairs. It drew me closer, inch by inch. At the bottom of the steps, I turned, expecting my father to berate me for being in the way. But he didn’t, so I continued up, shuffling down the hallway, closer and closer to my mother’s room.
The smell had changed. At first, it reminded me of the woods out back. When the leaves have fallen and it rained. Sweet and putrid, as the old decays under the new. The sour smell was still there, under this new layer. The two became a physical barrier, stopping me a few feet from the doorway.
I heard my father’s voice. At first, I wasn’t sure it was him. It sounded foreign, unnatural.
“She’s upstairs,” he said.
I’d heard that tone before. When Marci Simmons first visited. It was subservient, passive, like some mockery of caring. It unnerved me more than the smell. Pushing past the barrier, I moved forward, more to be away from him, this new him, than to see her.
“She was going to meetings. She seemed better,” my father said, his voice cracking. “I didn’t know what to do. Please help her.”
I reached the doorway. Footsteps rushed through the front door. My fingers wrapped around the cold door handle as the paramedics reached the bottom of the stairs. I turned it. The door swung open. The foul air struck me across the face. Behind me, my father continued to talk. Continued to snivel and whine like some terrible parody of a real human being.
My mother’s lamp was on. The light shined across her face at an artistic angle, deepening the contours of one eye and sharpening the bone of her cheek. Her mouth seemed set in a soft, embarrassed smile. I took a step closer, wanting to brush a wisp of dark hair off the impossibly pale skin of her forehead.
“The room at the end of the hall,” someone said behind me, maybe Drew.
I moved quickly, going to her, sitting on the side of the bed like she had asked. It was cold, and a darkness seemed to surround me, like the rest of the room simply ceased to exist. As my hand reached for her, I took in all the colors that painted my mother’s death. Her iridescent skin. The sharp contrast of the shadows. Red fingernails at the end of limp, skeletal fingers. A blue blanket I had never seen before covering her up to her exposed collarbone. The twinkling reflection of light across the surface of a clear glass bottle, upended beside a damp circle on the textured carpet.
“Son.”
I reached for her. Her forehead felt like a stone polished for centuries by icy water. My tears transformed the painting of her death, clouding the edges as if an impressionist painted over reality in soft circles of life and emptiness.
“Son.”
With all my heart I prayed that it was my father who had used that word. I imagined him standing in the room, his arms open to me, his eyes sharing my grief. But when I turned, a stranger in a dark uniform stood beside me.
“We need you to move,” the man said.
I did. I ran from the room. I ran from my father, my brother, and what I felt they had done to my mother. I ran, vowing never to come back. Never to subject myself to them. I ran to be free, but real life doesn’t exactly work like that.
25
Her feet kick at the dirt. Mud splatters her shins and the bottoms of her exercise pants. I don’t let Lauren get her feet under her. Instead, I pull her up the ragged steps and onto the porch of the cabin. At the door, I let her fall to the planked floor.
“You move and I’ll fucking kill you,” I say.
With an eye on her, I unfasten the padlock and push the door open. The smell rolls out over me, earthy and thick. There is a cloying hint of death that sticks to the skin of my face and burns my eyes. I don’t know if it was there earlier, or any other time I entered the cabin. It might be in my head, in fact. But it makes me angry.
“Get up,” I say, standing over her.
She freezes, so I grab her by the arm. Right where she showed me her bruises. She flinches but I pull her up and push her into the cabin. Lauren stutter-steps, but I push her again, toward the tarp.
“I’m sorry,” she cries.
I grab her by the back of her jacket, pulling her now. I bring her down, forcibly, closer. My hand rises, getting a fistful of her shining black hair. It is soft and perfect against my fingertips, which just makes me clench tighter. She whimpers as I reach down and slip my other hand under the tarp.
I push her head down. Closer, closer. The tarp comes up. The first bone appears from under the plastic. It is more black than ivory. A femur. Even she must know it is human by the size. I stare at it for a second. It bores into me. Right to my soul. But I don’t have time for that.
The tarp folds over. And the remains sit on the floor in a haphazard pile. Atop the ribs and the bones of an arm, the top half of a skull stares darkly back at us, like oblivion rests just inside those empty sockets. The detached jawbone hangs at a jaunty angle. Like it’s laughing at us. At me.
My fingers somehow tighten, nearly pulling the hair from her scalp. I force her lower. Closer.
“Look at it!”
She fights, trying to turn her head. Her eyes are closed. She keeps making that sound. Where it drove me insane earlier, now it just grates. Making me even angrier. I push harder. Her nose is an inch away from the skull.
“Look at it!” I scream.
PART THREE
HER PLAN
1
Look at it!”
Lauren’s eyes shoot open. A fiery red flush sweeps across her cheeks. She’s shaking now. Crying and choking. She stammers and sputters. Her eyes close again.
“Look!”
Something snaps inside me. It is a
s if I have spent my entire life building millions of fragile walls. The sound of her fear. The whimpers of pain. The feeling of struggle against the muscles of my forearm, it all crashes over me, over the walls, right to my core. And that core is nothing more than a damaged child. As such, I lash out. I don’t want to. Nor should I. But I’m not calling the shots. My past is.
I shake her and scream. She cries out, louder. I push her. Her skin touches the bones. I feel her revulsion against the back of my hand. Her eyes close. I let them stay that way.
Maybe I hold her there too long. Longer than I need to. Maybe I want her to know. To understand. To experience just a hint of our life.
Or maybe I’m lost. I’m not as strong as I think I am. Maybe the flood of emotion is too much. I am caught up in it. Swept away by the current. Barely breathing as it takes me farther and faster until the cold, dark end.
My fingers untangle from her hair. I lean back on my haunches, my hand moving away from her head. She backs away from the bones, slowly, tentatively. Her head turns but she doesn’t stand. Instead, she kneels on the floor, listless, lifeless. All her silken words are gone now. She is a victim now. Just like all of us.
2
If I had been stronger back then, when I was young, things might have been different. I might have stood up to my father the day she died. I could have lashed into him, blamed him for, at the very least, ignoring my mother’s disease. Letting her die. Yet, even then, from the moment I saw her pale, lifeless face, I decided it was far worse than that. I decided he had killed her.
I wasn’t strong, though. Instead, I returned to my home like a ghost. I haunted the drama unfolding in the house, the frantic work of the paramedics, my father’s sudden outpouring of caring words. I drifted among the living, feeling closer to her than to them. Eventually, I slipped away, past the rattle of the heavy stretcher as it rolled out the front door, up to my bedroom. I stepped in and closed the door. But I didn’t move. I simply stood alone in the dark.
The Perfect Plan Page 17
