by Chris Beakey
“Are you okay?”
He gave her a blank look, then turned to open the cabinet over the kitchen sink. There was a bottle of amber-colored liquor there. Scotch or bourbon, she thought, like her father drank. He poured it into a glass and took a long gulp.
His eyes became teary from either the burn of straight whiskey or from the emotions he must have felt as he stared at her.
“Do you want something to drink Sara?”
Her stomach rolled with the thought of alcohol. She shook her head and her voice croaked as she said “No.”
“Sure you do,” he responded. “I’ll get you some water. Go into the back room.”
She stayed in the doorway, wishing once again that she had never gotten into the truck, and that she was back home with her father, and Kenneth, safe in her room.
But you need to know what happened, she thought. And what he’s going to do now.
She turned away and went into the addition. It was much colder this morning. Her arms were stippled with gooseflesh as she crossed them over her chest. The air still carried the scent of last night’s fire. The sight of the bong on the coffee table only deepened her regret.
Kieran sat down on the couch, seemingly unconcerned over the wetness of his boots and the snow he had brought into the house.
He set the water on the side table, and watched her as she walked forward and sat down next to him. She took a long drink. It was lukewarm but tasted good sliding past the dryness in her throat. She felt as if she was supposed to wait for the conversation to begin, but when she looked over at Kieran he was staring at the wood stove, looking as if he had been shocked into silence by his grief.
“I guess you found my phone,” she said. “Where was it?”
Her voice pulled him back. He met her eyes.
“You dropped it when you were sitting here last night. I found it between the cushions.”
She wanted to ask him why he still had it. Wanted to ask what her father had said to him a moment before.
“I saw the note you left,” Kieran said. “I want you to explain it to me.”
She had known he would bring it up, and had planned her response.
“I didn’t know how long you’d be gone. I knew Aidan would be freezing when you brought him home and didn’t want to be in the way when you tried to get him back into bed.”
He frowned. “Is that really true?”
She nodded.
“It felt like you were trying to run away.”
A rush of heat came to her face. She looked past him, toward the bedroom wing where she had seen the laptop.
“No…I wasn’t running away.”
“Do you want to tell me why you really left?”
“That is why…I didn’t want to bother—”
Color filled his cheeks. “Don’t lie to me Sara.”
“I’m not.” She brought the glass to her lips, drank the rest of the water, and managed to meet his eyes again. “I would never lie to you.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes.” She looked down at the braided rug on the floor, and told him the truth. “I heard you trying to get Aidan to calm down so he could sleep. I heard you slap him. It shook me up. I tried not to think about it but later, after you left, it started to bother me.”
She waited for him to respond, heard him sigh.
“I didn’t slap my brother Sara.”
She looked at him. “I heard you.”
“No you didn’t. I told you about the way we grew up. The way our mother beat the shit out of us, usually right before she barricaded us in the closet. She boarded us up in there for hours, in the dark. Ignoring us no matter how hard we kicked and screamed.”
She glanced toward the front of the house, thought of the closet where the plywood had been. “That’s horrible.”
“Yeah, it was. And it’s the kind of thing you never forget. So when I needed my brother to cooperate I reminded him of how she would hit us—that horrible fucking sting from her palm smacking his face. It was a sound I made with my hands, to get his attention.”
She frowned, unable to hide her reaction as she remembered the whimpering, sorrowful sounds from Aidan that had followed.
“That’s a harsh way to get someone’s attention,” she said. “It sounded mean.”
“I knew how to take care of my brother.”
He was glaring at her now.
“What were you doing when I was out looking for him? Did you go back into my room?”
She tried to shake her head, to tell him no.
“Don’t you think that if I wanted to show you my personal space I would have?”
He held her eyes, as if he was daring her to deny it.
“You violated my trust.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
He slowly shook his head and then slipped the tips of his fingers inside the braided bracelet on his right hand. She saw the pained emotion in his eyes, and thought of the matching version on Aidan’s wrist and the depth of the devotion between them.
Devotion that now seemed dangerous.
She looked toward the wood stove. She thought she saw embers burning from last night’s fire but when she blinked the sparks looked as if they were suspended in the air.
“Is there anything else you want to tell me, Sara, as long as we’re being completely honest here?”
She looked at him again, and realized for certain that he already knew everything that she might have admitted. She turned toward the window and the gray, snowy light, felt an inkling of the same fear that had gripped her the night before. The need to escape.
“I should go.”
She stood up and felt strangely lightheaded as she remembered the way Kieran had angled his truck in the yard, blocking her from exiting even if the engine hadn’t been dead.
She turned back toward him. “Can you please take me home?”
“No, I don’t think I can do that.” There was a strange echo behind his voice. “Not in this condition.”
Condition? She gazed back at him. He was still sitting in the same position, still watching her, observing, she thought. Like he’s waiting for something.
“I don’t know what you mean,” she told him. “I’m fine.”
But she knew that she wasn’t. Knew it from the wavering of the wall behind him and the wobble in her knees.
Kieran stared at her, his expression still radiating a steady, controlled anger.
“Aren’t you feeling tired?”
She tried to swallow the dry lump at the back of her throat, and tasted a bitterness on her tongue. She remembered the cloudiness of the water he had brought her. He put something in it, she thought, and reached for the back of the couch to steady herself. She felt an acceleration in the beat of her heart and beads of sweat on her forehead, and knew that she had to get out of there.
But with the leaden feeling in her legs she knew she couldn’t move quickly; knew she had to do something else.
“Can you get me some more water?”
Kieran was sitting completely still on the couch, still watching her closely.
“Please?” She used the back of her hand to swipe at the sweat on her brow. “With some ice?”
Kieran nodded and placed both of his hands on his knees and stood up, then turned and walked with what looked like deliberate slowness back toward the kitchen.
She waited until she heard the cracking of the ice tray before she stepped back toward the front door and took her phone from her pocket and slipped outside.
She stood on the concrete landing and scrolled as far as “Dad” when the door slammed open behind her and Kieran grabbed her by the hair, then kicked the back of her knees to drop her to the ground, then yanked her back inside. She screamed as the pain tore through her scalp; screamed again just before he put his
hand over her mouth and nose, cutting off her oxygen as she shook her head from side to side. She reached up but he swatted her hand back down. The room spun around her in a blur as he pulled her away from the door, the edges of her vision going black as she made one last attempt to shake herself free.
“Had enough?”
His voice was a soft whisper in her ear—confident, dominant and stifling her will to resist as he abruptly turned her around so she was once again facing the front room. He kicked the door shut behind him and then took his hand away, still holding her firmly at the waist as she leaned forward and caught her breath.
And then suddenly he moved her aside, raised one of her arms so that it rested against the back of his neck and across his shoulder.
“You should be able to walk all right, if you really try.”
She struggled—or meant to struggle—but could only slump against him as he led her toward the back section of the house. He steered her toward the right, the direction of Aidan’s room.
Aidan’s door was open. He led her in and pushed her down onto the tangled sheets of Aidan’s bed.
She tried to sit back up but found that she couldn’t; tried to talk but couldn’t seem to move her mouth.
The bed began to move in a slow circle underneath her. She tried again to sit up, but could barely raise her head. Her eyes were drawn once again to the stain on Kieran’s coat. The streaks were ragged and vertical and led to a splotch just below his sternum.
He looked down and then looked back at her, and nodded.
“It’s blood,” he said.
She felt a tremor in the muscles of her abdomen as he slowly lowered himself, so his knees balanced on the edge of the bed and the coat was just a few inches from her face.
“Aidan’s blood.”
She winced and shut her eyes, turned her head toward the bedroom wall.
Kieran reached down and put his palm firmly against her cheek, then forced her to look at the stain again.
“I tried to save him, but he was dead before I got there.”
She imagined her father standing over Aidan, then stepping back and driving away.
And then Kieran, holding Aidan against his chest.
She tried again to sit up, but could barely raise her head.
“Don’t try to leave, because you won’t be able to,” Kieran said, then stepped out into the hallway and shut the door behind him.
She looked toward the window that Aidan had crawled out of the night before, saw that plywood had been nailed over it, from the outside. Plywood from the closet, she thought, where Kieran and Aidan had been locked away.
The walls floated around her. She tried—but failed—to sit up again. Tried to speak but managed nothing more than a whispered “Kieran, don’t —”
She heard the heavy, metallic click of the deadbolt and then the chain, locking her in.
Stephen stayed behind the wheel of the Explorer as Detective Niles stepped out of his Hummer and gave a short wave to the deputy who had followed him, who remained in his car.
He lowered the driver’s side window as Niles approached, but Niles veered toward the passenger side of the car and went straight back to the area that had been damaged by the impact with the boy’s body. Stephen watched through the rearview mirror as Niles squatted down and tilted his head in a stagy, self-conscious appraisal, playing up every bit of drama in the moment. Niles then stepped back, pulled his phone from his pocket and took several pictures of the damaged area.
Stephen opened the door, and started to step out.
“Remain in your vehicle Mr. Porter.” Niles’ tone was cold and official. After snapping several more photos, he slowly walked around and stood in front of the open driver’s side window.
“License and registration,” Niles said.
Stephen took his license from his wallet and the registration from the packet of documents in the glove compartment and handed them over. Niles smirked. He looked like a schoolyard bully, out to settle a score.
“You have a new cover on your right rear taillight,” Niles said. “All clear and shiny.”
Stephen gave him a blank stare, noticing there was an ugly bruise on his cheek.
“Replaced this morning, I suspect.” Niles looked down at the registration. “So where are you off to?”
You can tell him you’re going to try and get the Jeep started, he thought. You have jumper cables in the back.
But a sudden instinct warned him to say nothing.
“Nowhere,” he said. “Just driving.”
“Really? That’s dangerous, on these slick roads. You could hurt somebody out here.”
Niles was staring intently at him.
“You want to tell me how your ass end got damaged?”
“I had an accident in a parking lot yesterday.”
Niles frowned, clearly indicating his disbelief. He then glanced back toward the deputy and said: “Stay put.”
He looked in the rearview mirror again as Niles went to the deputy’s car. There was a short conversation, and then Niles was back.
“Detective Caruso asked for a warrant to seize your vehicle. It just came through. So you need to step out.”
He glanced at the dashboard clock. He was due at the meeting site in five minutes. Niles was watching him closely, looking highly alert to his reaction as he thought through the steps he had taken; the careful cleaning of the damaged area, the replacement of the taillight cover, the disposal of the shoes he had worn when he had gotten out of the car.
“Unless you have someone who can come pick you up I suggest you ride back into town with one of us,” Niles said.
Like I’m being arrested already. He glanced toward the deputy’s car and saw himself riding down the mountain and missing the meeting. And then he imagined Kieran O’Shea sitting in front of Caruso’s desk, telling Caruso and Niles what he had seen.
“I can’t,” he said.
Niles looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “What are you going to do, stay up here?”
The excuse came to him quickly, and he knew it would probably only damn him further.
“I’m going to the house where my daughter was stranded last night. I called for a tow. I have to meet the driver there.”
“Kieran O’Shea’s house,” Niles said.
He nodded, and felt the cold air drifting through an opening at the top of his coat. He tightened the scarf around his neck and turned around, and looked at the winding upward slant of the road ahead of him. The house was at least another half mile away, and O’Shea had said the clearing was another mile beyond.
No way you’re going to get there in time now.
He turned his back and started walking.
“Enjoy the cold,” Niles said.
He looked over his shoulder, saw the smirk that had come back to Niles’ face, then broke into an unsteady near-run, heedless of the hard-packed ice underneath his feet.
He was still running when he slipped. His arms dropped too slowly to break his fall and his chest and chin slammed against the frozen ground.
He stayed still for several seconds. His limbs were numbed by the cold and his balance wavered as he made the effort to get back up. He touched his chin with a gloved hand that came back dotted with blood. He opened his eyes wider to the snowbound landscape around him—saw pulsing shadows at the edges of his vision—and felt as if he was going to faint.
“I really need to get out of here.”
Sara’s middle of the night phone call echoed through his mind, taking him back to the fear in her voice, and the memory of her near-breakdown in front of Caruso.
The intensity of her emotions; like her mother, he thought. After the truth had come out.
He continued walking, faster now, thinking of the suspicion he had felt when Sara had left the house the night before. Sus
picion he had wanted to ignore in the hope that he could simply trust his daughter to be completely truthful with him.
Even though it’s become your nature. The past and present clashed together as he again thought of Lori, before the affair and after, the complete transformation of her personality as she tried and failed to deal with her guilt and the distrust that he had not been able to push away. He had started trying to read her emails long before the accident; had become accustomed to going to her computer minutes after she left it to see if she was still logged on; had checked the browser again and again to see what Web sites she had visited, always finding the “history” cleared.
Until the night when he had heard the muffled sounds of her whispering into her phone behind the closed door of the den. The same night she finally forgot to clear the history, which enabled him to see the Web site she had been logged onto. A site for online chats about all kinds of sexual dysfunction.
Sadomasochism. Incest. Pedophilia.
Hours of sleeplessness had followed, as the questions churned through his mind, working their way into his dreams when he finally drifted off. He had never asked her about what he had seen—hadn’t wanted her to know of his snooping. Two days later she was gone.
The feeling of dread stayed with him as he rounded a bend and saw Kieran O’Shea’s house. It was set back within the trees as he remembered. The Jeep was still parked in the front yard, embedded in the snow. There were at least two sets of footsteps leading up to the front stoop. Closed curtains on all of the front windows blocked the view of the inside as he approached, and knocked, and prayed that Sara would come to the door. Everything he had done during the past several hours was at complete odds with the tell the truth; take responsibility messages he and Lori had always preached. Just a few weeks earlier he had told Sara that he trusted her to never drink and drive and had made her promise that she would call him if she was ever out with friends who wanted to drive under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Call me, he had told her. No matter what.
The conversation now seemed like it had taken place between two different people. A man who still yearned for the days when his little girl would rush into his arms as he came home from work. A daughter who had always been a model student, who spent virtually all of her free time during her sophomore year of high school volunteering at the nursing home where Lori’s father had spent the last weeks of his life. A pleaser, as Lori had called her.
