Every Dark Little Thing

by T. S. Ward

  I think I recognize what I’m seeing right away, but throw it out from my mind as soon as the thought crosses my mind. I know what it looks like, but I keep walking, moving forward until I’m close enough to see his face.

  He’s got a scraggly goatee. He’s staring blankly. He—

  “Adam, what the fuck?” I smack him up the back of the head, ripping the tubing from his arm, and throw the needle across the room. “For fuck’s sake, Adam, I swear to fucking god—you’re sitting here shooting up? Really? What the hell happened to you? Where the fuck is Sadie?”

  He looks up at me slowly, like he’s just now noticing that I’m there.

  “Kel?” He mumbles. “That you?”

  “I don’t know who the fuck Kel is, but I’m Keely, I’m your goddamn sister. In case you forgot. Did you ever even look for me?” I want to punch him square in the nose, knock his teeth in. But I just stand there, barely holding myself up on weak knees.

  Adam raises a hand and points vaguely in my direction, not even looking at me directly. “No, where the fuck did you go?”

  “Where did—” I bark a laugh. There’s no humour in it. It’s pure outrage.

  He struggles to stand up, and then we’re shouting at each other, me just as incoherently as him.

  “Where was I, Adam?”

  “We don’t get to disappear!”

  “You want to know where I was?”

  “You think I care?”

  “Eli tried to fucking murder me, Adam!”

  “You ruined fucking everything—”

  I shove him.

  He stumbles, falls over the chair, and lands face down on the ground. He starts floundering, trying to get up.

  “I didn’t disappear, asshole. I was in a coma. I was in the hospital. I was half dead, and you just assumed I walked away to what, fuck with you? You selfish fucking bastard.” There’s so much rage in my chest right now, and this crushing disappointment.

  I might throw up.

  “You’re not even…” he mumbles, falls to his knees, and gets back up again. He points an accusatory finger at me. “You’re not even here. You’re not real.”

  The idiot thinks I’m a hallucination—I start laughing, dragging my hands through my hair, pacing the room as he tries to keep himself on his feet.

  “I don’t understand,” I hiss, “You—you were supposed to be the good one. You’re the one who got out. You were a cop, for fuck’s sake, and now look at you! You’re out of your fucking mind in Crystal’s basement.”

  “Because of you—”

  “Oh, tell me, what did I do?”

  “You got me stuck with Sadie, you got, you… you had Dad and Eli coming around, looking for you, and you, they, they did this. They made me—”

  “No one did a damn thing to your sorry ass!”

  His fingers grab his hair. “I lost Kel, I lost my job, and I had to deal with that damn kid—”

  I shove him again. Slam a fist against his chest. “Where is she? What did you do? What the fuck did you do to her? I swear to god, Adam, I swear I’m gonna—how could you fuck up this bad?”

  “I didn’t do anything, Kel,” he says, almost whines, and it’s pitiful. He tries to hug me and I punch him in the ribs.

  “That’s not my—Adam. Sadie. Where is Sadie?” I grab him by the shirt and try to hold him back. Even high out of his mind he’s stronger than me, and I stumble back.

  I can’t even look him in the eye, the way they’re glazed over like that. It reminds me of the bad days, when we were young, before Sadie was born. And I can’t stand it.

  I slap him across the cheek, hard enough that it leaves a mark. “Sadie. Where is she?”

  He grabs my shoulders, leans his forehead down against mine, and then he starts crying. “I can’t take care of her like this. I let her go. I screwed up. I let him—I let her go. This guy, he had kids, he took her. I gave her up for… I can’t, I’m not, I…”

  I slap him again and he quits talking. He looks a little more lucid. “Who? Gave her up for what? Who took her?”

  He looks at me blankly. “Who?”

  I slam both fists against his chest, grab his shirt again, and shake him. “Sadie, Adam. Who took Sadie?”

  He shrugs. “Guy… Guy and his kids. Ezra, Joe, John—is he here? Did he bring her back? Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her—just say I’m sorry. It wasn’t worth it. The drugs were shit. I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

  I can’t breathe.

  I cannot breathe.

  I start punching him. Kicking. Screaming. Hitting him blind through tears that come from rage and fear. He’s on the ground under me. He gave her up for drugs. To fucking John Ezra. The guy who was in another state, whose men were keen on hurting me, the man who said I like ‘em small—I feel my knuckles splitting against his skin.

  There’s a lot of swearing coming out of my mouth, but I hear myself from a distance, at the end of a long tunnel, screaming, “I’m going to kill you, I swear to god, I’m going to fucking kill you!”

  Soldier is here.

  He’s got me under the arms, pulling me off Adam, and I swear I’ll fight him too, just to strangle this bastard. He drags me back to the stairs, kicking and screaming, and gets me halfway up before he’s kneeling on the steps over me. The runners dig into my back.

  “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Listen to me. Listen.”

  His hands were holding my wrists, but now they’re holding my face still, on my cheeks. Thumbs brushing tears back.

  “Ghost, honey, listen. Let me talk to him. Go upstairs.”

  I shake my head. “He’s my brother.”

  “Then stop trying to kill the guy and go open the door for me.”

  I grab his wrists and sit there for a moment, trying to breathe, holding his gaze. “He gave her to that man, the one we met, that creep. He traded her for drugs. She’s eight. He doesn’t even know who I am.”

  “Ghost,” he says. There’s so much patience in this man it’s like a bucket of cold water being dumped on me. “I’m going to throw him in the snow. Sober him up a little.”

  I nod and take a breath, and then I slip past him, kick away the baggy of drugs Adam’s pulled toward himself where he’s lying on the floor. Bruised and bloodied. I’m starting to feel it, as I pull the door open.

  I stand back. Grab the chair. Sit on it.

  “Alright, come on.” Soldier pulls him up off the ground, puts an arm around his waist, and half-carries him out into the snow. He drops him in it, not too carefully. “There we go.”

  It takes a moment. And it’s not a perfect cure, but then he’s climbing to his feet, looking at Soldier in confusion.

  “Who the hell are you? Kel! Kelsey!”

  Soldier pulls him back inside and sits him on the ground.

  He looks past him, and looks horrified when he sees me. Really sees me. “You are here. You’re not Kel.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Adam,” Soldier snaps his fingers. “This is a fantastic way to meet you. My name is Ben Daniels, but your sister calls me Soldier, and I call her Ghost. Now what are we going to call you? A liar or an honest man?”

  He looks at Soldier with a frown, and then looks at me, about to say something that looks like my name.

  “If I hear my name in your mouth, I end your miserable life right here, right now,” I warn him. I cross my arms over my chest.

  “Adam. You gave Sadie to a man named John Ezra. How long ago? Which way were they going?”

  He shakes his head. Shivering. Teeth chattering. “I don’t know. A week. Two. Three. I don’t know, east, I think. I don’t know.”

  “Gonna have to do a lot better than that,” I mutter.

  I start pacing the room.

  “You’re a selfish brat,” he tells me. “You disappear, and Eli shows up, and now look. You lost me my job.”

  “I might have felt sorry for you if you didn’t give an eight-year-old to a creepy ass man for drugs,” I snap back at him.

  Soldier
tries to get a better answer out of him, but he just keeps yammering about how sorry he is, how he messed up, to tell Sadie and Kel that he’s sorry he couldn’t be better for them, until I finally give up and sit down on the stairs, face in my hands as the frustration and all that other shit wells up in tears.

  And then Soldier tells him something that’s a knife in the chest.

  “You regret not doing better? You want to say sorry? You can’t. They’re gone. And I don’t see an addict making it any longer than you already have in this mess. If you want to say sorry, if you want to express your regret, say it to the one person you can, right now. Your sister is here. Your sister, Adam, who has only ever had good things to say about you. Your sister, who has lived through harder shit than you can even comprehend like this. Your little sister, Adam. Tell her you’re sorry. Tell her you regret not being better.”

  Adam doesn’t say anything. He’s completely silent.

  “That’s what I thought,” Soldier continues. “You don’t give a fuck about saying sorry. You don’t give a fuck how she feels, or what happens to Sadie, or whoever the fuck Kel is. The obstacles to your next high. That’s all they are to you. Selfish bastard.”

  He gets quieter then, and I’m not sure he means for me to hear him, or if I hear him right at all.

  “You don’t have to apologize to her. If you think she needs your empty apologies you’re a goddamn fool. And whether you do or not, it’s still going to eat away at her, because you’re her big brother. She loves you. You don’t have to apologize to her, Adam, because I’m going to be there every damn day to do it for you. To do better. To remind her she’s worth more than this shit. I’ll be the one telling her I love her and apologizing in the same sentence.”

  My face gets hot, and I swear it’s almost like that fever again. I’m dizzy. My heart is racing. I feel like I’m about to throw up.

  I crawl up the stairs and walk out of the house in a daze.

  The cold is stark as I fall to my knees in the snow. It is fantastic against the heat of my skin, as it melts into my clothes. And I’m sitting there, sobbing, screaming out everything that’s burning through me.

  I don’t know what it is, exactly, but I think it’s something reminiscent of grief. It’s this thing that’s twisting around inside me, knotting up my guts, and stabbing me right in the heart. Grief, but—Adam isn’t dead. Sadie is alive, somewhere. So maybe it’s more for me than them, in some way, some kind of selfishness because I wanted all of this to turn out perfectly.

  I tried not to think about it the entire time, but—really, all I wanted was a perfect family to just start existing. And I think that’s what doesn’t feel fair, that I feel I’ve lost for good, because Adam and Sadie were my best prospect. Most likely to succeed.

  And if I’ve ruined that so thoroughly, what do I have left? What can I have?

  Soldier is in the snow next to me, and it’s almost worse, to have him acknowledge it. Out loud, in the open. Airing it all out. And then to say all that. To say he’ll be better, that he—

  A loud pop makes me freeze and tense. Soldier, too.

  A gunshot. In the house.

  Soldier has his hands on my shoulders as I sit up, breathe out long and hard, and then I start nodding.

  “Yeah,” I whisper, “Okay.”

  That’s it. That is the last of this.

  I am not going to fight and scream anymore. I am not going to run back into that basement to check and see if he’s okay somehow. I accept it. Accept it for what it is. And then I get up and start walking to the truck before I change my mind.

  Soldier takes a while to get back in the truck.

  I think he goes back in, to make sure, to do what I’m not. I don’t know if I’d rather he didn’t, or if it’s reassuring in some way, but it’s a relief when he gets back in the truck and starts it up. It’s a relief when we start driving and leave this place behind, to get buried in the snow.

  After a while, I look at him.

  He’s staring straight ahead, hands gripping the steering wheel tight enough to draw his skin tight across his knuckles. I want to talk, to say something, but there’s this tightness in my throat and if I try, I have no doubt I’ll crumble before any words get out.

  I scoot across the cab and rest my head on his shoulder. I don’t care about reservations I might have about it, or what he might think. I need it. I just need it.

  —

  As much as I want to go back to that little farmhouse with its woodstove so close to the honey shed, to just stay put and live there for the rest of our days, Soldier refuses. He drives until the snow is too much. He says we have Sadie to find. But we go north, rather than east. He explains his reasoning but I stop listening after he mentions Sadie.

  I keep kicking myself for it.

  We were so damn close. John fucking Ezra. That bastard. If I hadn’t fought the way I did, would we have been there when he found her? Or did he have her already? If I hadn’t fought, I hate to think of what they would have done to me.

  Even if I didn’t, Soldier got himself out of his binds quickly enough. He’d have fought the same.

  But how close were we?

  How many miles, how many minutes, had we missed her by?

  The truck finally starts spinning its wheels just down the road from a hotel. The snow is coming down heavy when we get out, grab our shit, and start towards it, and then the thought of a hotel bed hits me, and I relax just a little bit.

  “Do we check every room in this place?” Soldier asks.

  I don’t answer. But I pull my knife when the door doesn’t open and force the lock.

  “Alright,” he says, “We need a way to cover this door now.”

  I push my bag into his hands and keep my knife and some rope, waving him into the building. I don’t look at him, but when he starts to say something, I just give him a thumbs up and push him toward the door. Grab his axe before he gets too far. I’ll need it more than he will.

  He looks back, hand on the door. “Ghost? Stay safe. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

  I could do something easy. Could just tie the door shut. But I need a way to occupy my brain, to distract my mind, to focus on something that isn’t negative—so I cling to a memory.

  There was a time when Adam and I spent every day we could out in the woods, mostly at the hunting camp, creating things out of sticks and rope. Forts, traps that never really worked. We would cut down dead trees and fallen branches with hatchets that felt huge to my hands. We turned them into sharp spears and stuck them into the ground. Wove other branches into them to form walls. Covered the roof in branches and bark.

  Our traps were just spikes bound together in fences around the camp, and we would pretend to be under attack by some kind of enemy. A monster, an army.

  I hack down branches from the bush across the road and sharpen them into spikes. I tie them together into X shapes, and then tie those to longer boughs, and then set them up outside the door. I take my time, going around to every entrance in this place. Each door gets its own trap, along with junk alarms—fishing line crossed knee height over the doors, tied to bundles of whatever junk I can dig out of dumpsters and find under the snow.

  My fingers are numb as hell, my nose leaking snot, when I walk into the convenience store a few buildings down. I find a few things. A few small things. Lighters that I shove into my pockets. Jerky and other packaged meats. Some trail mix packs. A couple maps of the city from some music festival for a shuttle service.

  It’s the back room that brings it all crashing down on me.

  I walk in, knocking on the door, listening for movement. There isn’t any, but that’s the thing.

  The room is dark, so I pull out my flashlight from my belt loop and shine it inside. And my stomach drops. I stand there, staring, not backing away or shutting the door. I just stand there.

  A body sits up against the wall, a blood smear and spatter dark above the guy’s drooped head. There’s a gun in his hand. A bullet h
ole torn out the back of his rotted skull, hair matted and frozen in the cold. There are words spray painted on the wall. We’re all fucking dead already.

  The entire body is rotted, swollen and then deflated. It’s been here for a while. And there’s a slip of paper on the ground by his boots, dark writing scratched into it.

  I crouch down where I stand and reach forward for it, heart in my throat at the thought of moving closer.

  There’s nothing left in this damn world. Fuck it. Fuck it all. We’re all fucking dead. They’re all dead. No one to help us. No god to save us. Fucking fuck this. And fuck you too.

  I drop the note again. The words are smeared and have spots of water damage. He must have cried while he was writing it.

  I sink fully to the floor and let the door fall shut in front of me. Back up to the shelf behind me. I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around them and think—no one’s going to find Adam in there, and if they do, it’ll be someone like me, stumbling upon something like this. He won’t mean anything to them. They’ll think him a coward, taking that way out.

  And in a way, I think of him like that. There’s always a different way. Things always go on if you just keep going. I know that change comes when you reach for it.

  I’m an asshole for thinking it though.

  He couldn’t see it that way. Not in the thick of it. Just like this man. He couldn’t see beyond the veil of desperation and despair. All I had to do was hold out a hand and forgive him. All I had to do was drag him out of there, throw him in the truck, and fix him up. All I had to do was show him that there is more, there is always more, to help him see it and get better and give him the chance to choose that.

  I didn’t. I fucked up. I could have saved him.

  And it’s worse, because I know addiction. I’ve seen it close up and personal like that. And I’ve seen it be overcome. I know what it takes, and my role in helping him—just being there. Being the support.

  I’m sorry I didn’t do better, Adam. I fucked up. You’re right. It’s my fault. And I’m sorry. Still, I don’t entirely blame myself. He’s still at fault. He still gave Sadie up.