One Kick: A Novel

by Chelsea Cain

  “You don’t have to do this,” Bishop said, in a voice so light it was barely more than a breath. “Just tell me no,” he said. “I can’t make you see him.” He touched her arm. “Just say no and we walk out of here right now.”

  Kick pulled her arm away. “What happened to your brother?” she asked.

  Bishop hesitated.

  “The boys in the photographs at your house,” Kick pressed. “One is you.” She had wanted to knock him off balance, and for a moment it worked. “The other boy is your brother, am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to him?” she asked.

  He regarded her warily. “What do you think happened to him, Kick?”

  “I think he died,” Kick said.

  Bishop’s face didn’t show anything. “He did die.”

  “I think he was murdered,” Kick added. “I thought maybe he was missing, but James and I searched, and we couldn’t find him. Which means he’s not missing. He’s dead.” Kick searched Bishop’s eyes for some sign of pain. If it was there, he didn’t let her see it. But she knew she was right. “That’s why you do this,” she said. “Why you don’t care what it costs.”

  Bishop was motionless. “That is very observant of you.”

  She turned away from him, toward the door.

  “I’m ready,” Kick said.

  18

  THE LAMINATE FLOOR OF the infirmary was the color of a swimming pool. It gleamed, reflecting the fluorescent lights overhead, so that the floor seemed to ripple like water. Bishop didn’t pause. He nodded at someone in a medical coat at the nurse’s station and then led Kick across the room, through the sea of hospital beds, to an area partitioned with hanging-curtain dividers. A TV was on somewhere. A black man about Kick’s mother’s age was sobbing in a hospital bed nearby. Kick could feel his eyes following her.

  When they got to the curtains, Bishop stopped. Kick reached out, lightly touching the thin cotton that separated her from Mel. It had a light-green checkerboard pattern, like children’s pajamas. Her fingers were trembling. She looked down at her legs. She never wore dresses bare-legged. Her legs were too pale and scabby and bruised. Her blackened toenails were visible through her sandals. Act normal, Mel would say. Above all else, fake it till you make it.

  He was right there. After all these years. She moved her hand into the fabric of the curtain. It was so light. Nothing, really. She moved forward, pushing the cloth to the side. The curtain rings jangled overhead. And then her hand touched air and the curtain fell behind her.

  Her heart was racing. She couldn’t look. She moved her hair in front of her right shoulder, the way that Mel had told her it was prettiest, and averted her eyes to the floor, emotions pressing at her throat. Bishop was right next to her; maybe he had always been next to her.

  She heard a cough and looked up.

  He had lost weight since she’d seen him in the courtroom. His blond hair had faded to the color of wet sand and had thinned to a fine, soft fuzz on top. His skin seemed delicate, almost transparent. He lifted his head weakly from the pillow. His lips were chapped. They cracked when he smiled.

  “There’s my girl,” he said.

  A flood wall gave way inside her. She felt everything all at once: the devotion, the fear. It was as easy as lowering a zipper. She had held so much in for so long. She had tried to do what people expected. She had been good. She had always done what he told her.

  She sobbed and lifted her hands to her mouth in surprise at the sound. But it was like being caught from behind by a wave, like a force of nature overwhelming her. She rushed, shaking, to a plastic chair at his bedside.

  His fingers struggled to touch her as his hands strained against the leather straps that bound his wrists to the bed. She moved her hands to his and wrapped her fists around his fingers. The moment their hands met, she lost it and dissolved into tears. His skin felt waxy and warm.

  She was shaking all over. She laid her head down, her cheek on his knuckles.

  Through the blur of her tears she could see Bishop standing stone-faced at the foot of the bed, watching.

  “Thank you, John,” she heard Mel say.

  Bishop didn’t bat an eye. “No problem,” he said.

  19

  KICK KEPT BOTH HANDS wrapped tightly around Mel’s fingers, her face pressed against his liver-spotted skin.

  Bishop was ramrod straight with his hands clasped in front of him. She could feel his eyes on her, monitoring her, watching for clues, cataloging every reaction, every word.

  She knew Mel’s hand. Even swollen from edema, she knew his joints, his knuckles, the shapes of his nails, the map of his veins. Its familiarity was an anchor. Her tears drained onto his skin.

  “I thought you’d be mad at me,” Kick said.

  “Never.” Mel’s voice cracked. His hand trembled under her touch. She knew he was struggling not to cry. “I want you to be happy,” he said. “I always tried to protect you.”

  A rush of relief pressed at Kick’s sternum and then escaped her mouth as a whimper.

  “Let me look at you,” Mel said.

  Bishop was all soft edges now, an abstract shape through Kick’s tears.

  For a moment she couldn’t move. It was like an electrical short circuit, a blown fuse. She wasn’t sure which wasn’t cooperating, her body or her brain. But she was frozen.

  “Please, Beth,” Mel said.

  She lifted her head at the sound of his voice, as surely as if he had cupped her chin and raised it. She turned to face him, keeping one hand on his, afraid that if she let go, she’d be pulled away by some unseen, dangerous current.

  He was trembling. The whites of his eyes were threaded with red. His scalp, visible through his thinning hair, was pocked with blemishes where patches of skin had flaked away. He lowered his head back onto the pillow and weakly squeezed her hand as his gaze traveled up and down her body.

  She sat very still, on the edge of the chair, motionless, straight-backed, like she was posing for an old-fashioned photograph. Her hair hung in a curtain on either side of her face, strands of it stuck to her wet cheeks. Her eyes felt swollen. Her nose was running. Her yellow dress seemed inappropriate now, too bright, too cheerful.

  His eyes continued to move over her with a sort of curious astonishment. And it dawned on Kick that while Mel had changed since she’d seen him last, she had been a child the last time he had seen her. And now she was sitting there, a grown-up.

  She pulled at the hem of her skirt.

  “You’re still my girl, Beth,” Mel said.

  Bishop coughed, and Kick glanced at him. There was no judgment in his face; there was nothing at all. But as their gaze met, he moved his eyes pointedly up to the corner of the ceiling. Kick followed them to the dome security camera mounted there, aimed at Mel’s bed. When she looked back at Bishop, he had returned to his sentry pose.

  “You know what today is?” Mel asked.

  His wide, hollow eyes brimmed with tears.

  She knew he didn’t mean the anniversary of her rescue. “It’s the anniversary of Linda’s death,” Kick said.

  Mel nodded, his weak grip spasming around her fingers. He gulped, his lips drew back over his teeth, and he began to weep. “She loved you,” he said.

  Had Linda loved her?

  Linda had loved Mel. She had been good to Kick. She had said some of the things that mothers say and done some of the things that mothers do. She had taught Kick how to play the piano a little.

  “It’s my fault,” Kick said quietly. She looked away, letting her hair form a wall between them so Mel couldn’t see her face.

  “No,” Mel said firmly.

  His tone stirred something in her. There was the Mel she remembered: that voice, always so full of authority and commands. Neither she nor Linda ever questioned him.

  She thread
ed her fingers between his and leaned slightly forward. “Do you remember that house we lived in?” she asked. “In Seattle?”

  Something changed. An almost imperceptible shift in the room. She could tell that Mel felt it. She could see it in his eyes. He was suddenly wary of her.

  Kick snuck a peek at Bishop. His head tilted slightly. “Mel taught me how to pick locks,” Kick explained. She smiled at the irony of it. All the drills, the target practice, paper clips and handcuffs. “He abducted me and then he taught me a hundred ways to get away.” Mel’s hand tightened around hers. “And you were right,” Kick said, leveling her gaze at Mel. She slowly pried her hand from his. “It never occurred to me to use any of those skills to get away from you.”

  “I trusted you,” Mel said, his fingers pawing the bed, reaching for her. “You’re a good girl.”

  “Yesterday, I came across one of the locks we used to make.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Kick noticed Bishop take a step closer to her.

  Mel’s face creased with pain. “Your mother and I couldn’t work. We couldn’t risk it. Those locks helped support us.”

  Your mother. It rolled off his tongue so easily. Kick’s eyes started to fill, and she had to turn her head and clear her throat. Sometimes she had so many emotions at once, she couldn’t put a name to any of them. Sometimes she had to put them in a box in a jumble and sort them out afterward. “A little girl was abducted in Seattle,” Kick said, “and when they found her, she had one of my Scrabble tiles.”

  She could see the blood throbbing in Mel’s temples, the veins pulsing like they might burst through his fragile skin.

  “She says she got it from a boy who was abducted three weeks ago,” Kick continued. “The boy was kept in a house with a box, hidden behind a closet, behind one of our locks. I was there yesterday. I know your locks. But it wasn’t a place I’d been kept in. When you are kept in the dark, with long periods of nothing to do, you explore. I know the shapes of all those rooms you locked me in. Which means the boy found the tile in another box, in another house.” She looked at him intently. “Were we ever in Seattle, Dad?”

  Mel’s eyes were pleading, his mouth contorted.

  Kick could feel his pain, like a physical presence, a band of pressure around her chest. She reached out and took his hand again, that hand she knew as well as her own. “I know you tried to be good to me,” she said. “Be good to me now. The house I was in, there was an explosion. It was wired with a bomb. You want to protect me? I’m lucky to be alive.” She moved her hair aside and lowered her chin so he could see the lump at her hairline. “I was knocked unconscious.”

  A flush of red washed across Mel’s sweaty cheeks.

  “Do you want to feel?” Kick whispered.

  Beyond the curtain partition, the man started to wail again.

  Mel nodded a fraction of an inch.

  Kick scraped her chair across the bright blue floor and laid her head down on the bed, in front of where Mel’s hand was tethered, and slowly eased back into Mel’s grip. Bishop stood silently a few feet from the end of the bed. She was surprised he didn’t stop her. His face didn’t register any reaction. She locked eyes with him, made him watch, as Mel’s fingers started to crawl along her scalp. Bishop didn’t blink. Mel’s fingers found her hairline, stroking the edge of her forehead. He paused at the knot of tissue.

  Kick winced.

  Bishop’s body tensed.

  “It still hurts,” Kick said to Mel. She extracted herself from his hand, his fingers so entangled in her hair that even when she was free, a few long brown strands remained around his fingers.

  Kick sat, dizzy, with her hands palm up in her lap. Someone was talking to the yelling man now, an insistent, calming voice. She couldn’t hear the words, but the man stopped bellowing. In the absence of his complaints, smaller sounds appeared: the electronic pulse of medical equipment, the low hum of other conversation, the bright crackle of a television tuned to a show that no one was watching.

  “You know I will never share the location of a single safe house,” Mel said.

  “Yeah,” Kick said, unable to keep the anguish from her voice. She sighed and wiped the tears from her face as she stood up. “I know.”

  Mel squirmed against the wrist straps. “But the lock,” he said.

  She froze, waiting.

  “I gave the specs to someone,” he said. “Someone I knew online.”

  Kick and Bishop exchanged a quick look and Kick lowered herself back into the chair. “Why?” she asked Mel.

  Mel hesitated. “He helped me out with a few things. I never knew his name. We used encrypted software to communicate.”

  “What did he do for you, Daddy?” Kick asked.

  She could see him make the decision to give her this, this one thing. His body relaxed, as if he’d given up a struggle with himself. “He was a fixer. He took care of problems. Relocation issues. Fake IDs. Moving money around. The rumor was he was ex-military, or some kind of ex-spy. No one trusted him. But he could get things done. He lent me money once, when I needed it. And a few years before Linda died, he did some banking for us. Putting things in order, so that you and Linda would be taken care of if I ever had to go away. That was when I gave him the lock specs.”

  Kick glanced at Bishop and saw him stiffen slightly. She knew what was going through his mind. Mel’s specs were probably all over the Internet by now. The information was useless.

  “The boy who was abducted,” Mel asked. “Light skin? Dark hair? Small for his age?”

  Kick’s breath caught in her throat. He was describing Adam Rice.

  “Yes,” Bishop answered for her.

  Mel’s yellowed eyes moved to Bishop, like he had been part of the conversation all along, rather than a lurking specter. “He liked to hang them by the wrists,” Mel said. “He posted pictures sometimes, on the file-sharing sites. The boy’s faces were always blurred. The man in the photographs was only visible from the shoulders down. He was big, at least back then. Looked Caucasian, but I can’t be sure. I only glanced at the images. Once I realized what he was capable of, I cut off communication with him. He’s a sadist. A man without a tribe. A stranger. He had no interest in the Family philosophy.”

  The Family. Mel had always used that term to describe them. Like they were a group of benign uncles.

  “He used the Family to acquire used items,” Mel said, and Kick understood.

  “‘Used items’?” Bishop asked.

  “Boys,” Kick said softly.

  No one moved.

  Bishop was going to make her spell it out. “The Family sold him boys,” Kick said.

  “Some children can’t adapt as well as others,” Mel said. “That doesn’t leave a lot of options. Placing them in a new home seemed like a gentler alternative to a shallow grave.”

  A new home. Like a dog from the pound that didn’t work out. This had always been the threat, growing up, that she could be turned over to someone else, someone not as nice as Mel and Linda, someone who would hurt her much worse. She knew it happened. She had seen it.

  “But the boys this man acquired ended up in shallow graves anyway, didn’t they?”

  Mel nodded. “There were rumors.”

  The collage of missing-child posters flashed in Kick’s mind. All those dark-haired, slightly built boys. Almost elfin-looking. Adam Rice, with his dark eyes and hesitant smile—it had been his face that had set her off again, triggered something that had made her need to help him, to do something. She felt a connection with him. He seemed familiar somehow. She thought it was because he reminded her of herself.

  The pieces were falling into place as if they had always been there, right there in front of her, waiting to be noticed, but too close for her to see them for what they were. So many parts of her childhood had been packed up and tucked way in the far-off dark corners of her mem
ory, but she remembered the day she met James. He had been dark-haired, with a cautious grin. Poor James, whose circumstances she recognized even then were so much worse than her own. “He bought James.”

  “Good, Beth,” Mel said, please.

  “You remember Mr. Klugman’s new car? The convertible? He used the cash he made on the boy to buy it. He went right to the dealer.”

  He had hurt James, and now he had Adam. Who knew how many other boys he had taken? She had to make Mel understand. “James found me,” she said. “He saw me on the news and he wrote me. He’s my family. We need to find this man.”

  “He’s gone, Beth.”

  “What about Klugman?” Bishop asked.

  “Gone,” Mel repeated.

  “He’s right,” Kick said. They had been experts at shedding their identities. “No one stayed anywhere longer than six months; every time we moved we changed our last name.”

  “Then we’re done here,” Bishop said.

  Mel’s eyes widened. “Just a few more minutes,” he pleaded.

  “You got what you wanted,” Bishop said in a harsh whisper.

  Kick was distracted, her mind on James. She got to her feet shakily.

  “Remember that vacation we took to the desert?” Mel asked her with sudden urgency. “I taught you how to do a back float in the hotel pool. Do you still like to swim?”

  Kick memorized him. This was the last time. She would never see him again. She knew that now.

  “Everything else aside,” Mel said, eyes burning into hers, “I’m still the guy who taught you how to swim. So if you want to remember me, you could remember that.”

  Kick heaved a tortured sigh. She hated him for making her grieve him. She kissed her palm and then leaned forward and placed her hand gently on Mel’s forehead. His skin felt vaguely plastic, like he was already half corpse. He closed his eyes as she touched him. “’Bye,” she said, her voice breaking.

  Bishop had her by the elbow and was shepherding her away from the bed.

  “Show me that pretty smile,” Mel croaked.