Bone Music

by Christopher Rice

  “About me?”

  “About a lot of things, but you came up.”

  “And so he guilted you into this?” she asks.

  “Into what?”

  “Apologizing,” she says. “You are going to apologize, right?”

  “Should I?”

  “Yes, you should,” she says and takes a sip of Sprite.

  “I didn’t expect this to be this hard.”

  “Well, maybe it should be.”

  “You’re not going to make this easy, are you?” he asks.

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  “You sure you don’t want a beer?” he asks.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  He ducks into the kitchen and reappears with a bottle of Heineken, wiping the evidence of his first sip from his lips with one forearm.

  “You’re enjoying this?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “You’re smiling,” he says.

  “I am?”

  Luke nods and takes another sip of beer.

  “Sorry,” she says. “It’s been a crazy few days.”

  “Is that what the name change is about?” he asks.

  “The name change is a year old.” And even that’s more than you should say to him right now.

  “I’m gonna do this, Charley.”

  “Do what? Apologize?”

  “Yeah. I’m just . . .”

  “You’re just what?” she asks. “Working up the nerve?”

  “Marty, he . . .”

  “He what?”

  “I don’t know; he told me apologies are all bullshit. That they’re just things we say to make ourselves feel better, and so I guess I’m trying for more here.”

  “OK. You know what might make this easier? For you, I mean.”

  “What?”

  “You could ask me what I think you should apologize for,” she says.

  Luke stares at her as if she’s an oncoming train. He swallows. “OK.”

  But he says nothing, and the silence between them extends.

  “Are you going to ask me, Luke?”

  “What would you like me to apologize for, Tr—Charley?”

  “Can I sit down?”

  “Of course,” he says.

  She takes a seat on the sofa’s edge, her eyes level with the file on the Mask Maker.

  “Here’s the thing,” she says. She’s not measuring her words, and this makes her wonder if the drug’s giving her confidence. Not through its chemistry but through the knowledge that it’s there, waiting to deploy if she’s attacked. “There was like a day or two, when I first got here, after school started, where I thought things might be normal. I think some of it was ’cause I was older and I looked different from the girl on the book covers. It’d been a year since I’d done an appearance or an interview or anything like that. And I thought, wow. Maybe, just maybe, for these last two years of high school, I’m going to get a taste. A taste of what everyone else has gotten. A taste of normal.

  “And then you started up. European History. Last period. I got called on and you didn’t. Then you tried to jump in on me. But you didn’t know the answer, and so Ms. Stockton told you to be quiet, and you got embarrassed. And that’s when it all began. Every day, every time we were together. Every chance you got. Nobody in that school called me Burning Girl until you did, and once you started, they never stopped. And I guess what I want to know is why?”

  He’s staring into his beer bottle, circling the rim with one finger. His breaths are labored things that make his chest rise and fall, but it sounds like he’s drawing them through his nose. Right now his jaw’s entirely too tense for him to breathe through his mouth.

  “I was afraid of you,” he finally says.

  “Jesus. Really?”

  “No, I didn’t think you were some serial killer. I could tell you were a good person.”

  “Oh. OK.”

  “Look, this is going to sound . . . ridiculous.”

  “Ridiculous?”

  “Lame. It’s gonna sound lame, all right? And it’s going to sound like an excuse and I don’t want it to but . . .”

  “Just say it, Luke.”

  “My mother, before she got sick, she didn’t want me to leave. She wanted me to stay here and take care of her. My brother, we all knew he wasn’t the caretaker type. You have to actually care about things that don’t have circuit boards. Anyway, he was already on his way to . . . I don’t know what. The point is, there was only one way my mother was going to let me get out of Altamira, and that was if I was the best fucking student at Los Pasos High. Ever. And I was. Until you showed up. It was like, whatever you’d been through, it just made you more grown-up. I could memorize anything, but you had this ability to reason through stuff the rest of us didn’t have.”

  “I didn’t stop you from getting good grades, Luke.”

  “No, you didn’t. But that was just half of it. I needed everyone at that school to think I was the smartest one in the room. I needed the guidance counselor to lean on my mother every day and tell her to let me go. To let me get out of here and make a life for myself. To tell her to stop falling apart every time I talked about going off to a school that wasn’t right down the highway. And then . . .”

  “She died,” Charlotte says, as gently as she can.

  “Yeah, and part of me thought I was being punished.”

  “Punished?”

  “For the way I’d treated you.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Yeah, well, for a while there after my mother died, that’s what I was. Crazy.”

  She’s not sure what she expected him to say, but it sure as hell isn’t this. These are the words of someone who’s been through the pressure cooker of grief and come out irreparably changed. Someone like me.

  “How’s your brother?”

  She didn’t mean to strike a blow, but that’s how Luke seems to receive the question. His previous admission rendered him vulnerable, and now he doesn’t have the energy to put his guard back up. He’s staring into space, like he’s forgotten about his beer, even though he’s gripping the bottle by the base with both hands.

  “Luke?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She’s not sure if he’s apologizing for drifting off or for the way he once treated her. And for a while, it seems like he’s not sure, either, because he just keeps staring at nothing.

  There’s a part of her that’s hungry for any apology he’s willing to give, but this reaction to the mention of his brother is so startling she can’t imagine leaving this house before she’s made some sense of it. If she can get some actual facts out of Luke, maybe she can convince Marty to let this whole thing go, and they can focus on whatever’s next.

  “Luke?”

  “I’m sorry for the way I treated you back then. I’m sorry for the type of person I was. And I’m sorry . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, tell me.”

  “I was gonna say I’m sorry the type of person I was then made me end up where I am now. But that’s making it about me, isn’t it? I mean, that’s selfish. And I really did want this to be about you.”

  He forces a smile, looks up from his feet.

  When their eyes meet, his smile fades as if the sudden shock of meeting her gaze has produced the same electrical charge in him that it just did within her. She hates the thought that she’s enjoying his pain, his humility, his brokenness, even though she’s sure all those things stem from more than this meeting and their pained history together. Still, God forbid she be attracted to the idea of any kind of suffering, in anyone. She plans to hold on to that moment when she recoiled from Jason’s broken shoulder, the shoulder she broke, for as long as she can.

  But who wouldn’t want to hear this kind of stuff out of one of their former bullies?

  He was never violent with her, never threatened her physically. But he did create an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion tha
t dogged her every step for two years. By itself, his behavior seemed insignificant, so if she ever complained, people would tell her to get over it. They were just comments. Just words. But when you’re forced to hear the words almost every day, don’t they add up to something bigger? A sort of crime unto itself? Death by a thousand cuts, as some people like to say.

  Now, against her will, she’s thinking of Dylan.

  Of a conversation they’d had in his office weeks before, about how people who’ve been through serious, violent trauma often tend to discount the smaller abuses they face. Dylan compared this to people who literally can’t feel physical pain. It sounds like a blessing until you remember that pain is designed to protect, to save your skin from the flame, your bone from the pose that might snap it, and once it’s gone, you can do fatal damage to yourself without realizing it. He saw this as a metaphor for how people who’d been through extreme instances of abuse sometimes lost the ability to detect the smaller abuses, the signs that someone wasn’t truly loving or a good match. It’s why it could be so hard for them to build lives better than what they’d been through. So hard for them to move on.

  By that logic, refusing to sweep Luke’s past behavior under the rug was a good thing. A healthy thing.

  A good thing according to Dylan, she thinks. And who is Dylan again exactly?

  The thought makes her jump. Luke flinches at the sight of it.

  Maybe he wasn’t a real psychiatrist. Maybe he was able to deceive her because he spoke with the authority of someone who understood darkness; not because he had studied it, but because he’d lived through it himself.

  She closes her eyes.

  Too much. It’s too much to think about Dylan right now.

  “Hey,” Luke says softly.

  It’s a mistake, looking into his eyes. A mistake to wonder if his pain, his contrition, is making him even more attractive to her. And it’s true now, she realizes, that his insults, his bullying, hurt more than they would have if they’d been inflicted on her by someone who had seemed less confident and less comfortable in his own skin, despite his recent admission to the contrary.

  “I didn’t kill anyone on that farm.” Her vision mists. She’d hoped a good night’s sleep would help keep her emotions in check, but no such luck. “I was seven. I never even saw any of the victims.”

  Luke nods. “I know,” he says quietly, “and I’m sorry if I ever made anyone think otherwise.”

  It’s exactly what she needed to hear. It’s exactly what she’s always wanted to hear from him.

  She’s on the verge of asking for a tissue, but when she blinks a few times, the tears don’t spill.

  “And if there’s anything I can do,” Luke says, and it’s clear he’s rehearsed this part, “to make up for it, let me know.”

  “Tell me what’s going on with your brother,” she says. “You looked like you got hit by a truck when I asked about him.”

  “It’s messy,” he says slowly, then takes a slug of beer.

  “And the rest of this isn’t?” She smiles, hoping it’ll take some of the edge off her words. It does, apparently, because he smiles back and studies her for a second or two with an expression she’d describe as almost wistful.

  “My brother hacks computer systems the way some of us have too much to drink on Saturday nights,” he says. “You know that, right?”

  “I remember some . . . antics, yes.”

  “Yeah, everyone remembers that prank he pulled, hacking the Copper Pot’s phone lines and sending calls to that manure store, but since then he’s graduated to bigger stuff.”

  That’s not all of it, or else Luke wouldn’t be clearing his throat and studying the wall behind her and shifting his weight from one foot to the other as though the whole story’s trying to worm its way out of his stomach like bad gas.

  Charlotte says, “So is that really all there is—”

  “He was taking classes at a small community college down in LA. Night classes, mostly. Business administration, that kind of thing. I guess the idea was he was going to go do something with computers, but legit, you know? Like start his own consulting business or something. Anyway, one day the dean of the school up and disappears, and he takes most of the tuition money with him. School’s so broke they have to shut down. I mean, it wasn’t a big operation to begin with, but it was what Bailey could afford. It was the best most of the students could afford. Cheap enough that they didn’t have to take out loans, but expensive enough that they had to work a bunch of jobs first and save. But the whole thing turned out to be a racket, and the dean was planning it for years.

  “When Bailey called he was furious, angrier than I’d ever heard him. It was like he’d made this attempt to be an honest, upstanding person and this asshole fucked him over, along with all the other students who’d already paid for the year. I tried to calm him down. Told him he could come up to San Francisco and crash with me for a while, just until he figured things out. And he did come up for a visit. But he only stayed for a day and it was . . . Well, now I see it was kind of his way of saying goodbye.”

  “Goodbye?” Charlotte asks.

  “He said he was going to do some traveling, try to figure out what he was going to do next. That I probably wouldn’t hear from him for a while. The last time I got on his ass about hacking, I didn’t hear from him for months, so this time I held my tongue, told him to do what he needed to do. A few weeks later, they found the dean of that school living under an alias in Australia. I didn’t connect the two until . . .”

  “Until what?”

  “My final FBI interview.”

  She was starting to put the pieces together, but she didn’t want to put words in Luke’s mouth, so she kept silent, nodding to indicate her understanding.

  “So my first interview goes well, I think. I mean, why shouldn’t it? I’m crazy qualified. And I’m exactly what they need. Someone proficient in multiple languages. I figure I’m a lock. But then this agent I’ve never seen before walks into the room and orders everyone else out. Agent Rohm. That was his name. Big guy. Deep voice. Southern accent. Kinda like Foghorn Leghorn. He tells me I’ve only got a thirty percent chance of making it to the academy at Quantico, but there’s a real easy way for me to make it ninety percent. Or he thought it was easy, at least.”

  Charlotte just nods.

  “He said I could inform on my brother, who was now one of the most wanted cybercriminals in the United States.”

  “The dean . . .” Charlotte says.

  “Yeah. Bailey’s the one who found the dean. And the stolen money. Even though law enforcement was taking all the credit. Bailey shipped them everything they needed to find the guy; then he fled the country. Meanwhile, the feds took the credit for the arrest, and now they want to put my brother in handcuffs because he hacked, like, a dozen different companies to do it. But I think it was the satellite company that probably put him over the top.”

  “Your brother hacked a satellite?”

  Luke nods and takes a slug of beer.

  “Did he tell the FBI it was him when he sent them the evidence?” Charlotte asks.

  “No. But he slipped up, apparently, because something was traceable back to him. Rohm wouldn’t tell me what it was. Could’ve been powers of deduction. Like they looked at the list of students who got ripped off, and there was only one or two who were real good at computers. And then there was one who was real good at computers, and that was Bailey. I wasn’t in much of a position to ask questions. The only thing Agent Rohm would tell me is that my only shot at the FBI would be if I ratted out my brother.”

  “And what did you say?”

  Luke meets her gaze. “I told him to go fuck himself with an umbrella.”

  “Literally?”

  “Word for word. If I’d had an umbrella I would have given it to him, but it was sunny out that day.”

  Charlotte smiles. “And what did he say to that?”

  “He said I’d never get a job in government or any law e
nforcement agency outside of some rinky-dink small-town police department for as long as I lived. Those were his exact words, by the way. Rinky-dink.”

  “And so you went and got a job at the first rinky-dink small-town police department you could find.”

  “Yep,” he says, and his smile seems genuine. “I showed him, right?”

  For some reason, this story means so much more than his apology. It’s proof, she realizes, that he’s a changed man; that he was willing to give up his lifelong dream rather than betray his family—his only family. That’s not the Luke Prescott she knew in high school. But it’s the Luke Prescott standing before her now, a man dealing head-on with the sacrifices loyalty entails.

  “What?” he asks suddenly.

  “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “Your face . . . I don’t know. Your expression, I’m just . . .”

  “Just what?”

  “I can’t read it.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  He stares at her for a while, and then his entire frame seems to relax, and she wonders if this is the first time he’s talked about this with anyone. If her words are the first nice thing anyone’s said about the sacrifice he made for his brother. Only then does it dawn on her how truly alone he is. A few days earlier she would have described herself as alone. Not lonely. But alone. And by choice. But when she needed help, she had no trouble drawing people around her who cared about her. Kayla, and then Marty, and now Marty’s posse of 12-steppers.

  And now Luke? she asks herself.

  No, that’s crazy. Luke is just a down-on-his-luck guy looking to make some kind of amends that will smooth his homecoming. But that thing he said, though.

  If there’s anything I can do to make up for it, let me know.

  Would it be so bad having a cop on her side right now? Especially a smart, highly educated one, who reads textbooks on profiling and crime scene investigation?

  Or a hacker who can find people living off the grid on the other side of the world? Could the same hacker tell her everything she wanted to know about someone who had lied to her about who he was?

  “Where’d you go?” Luke asks.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s like I lost you there for a second.”