The Truth About Him (Everything I Left Unsaid #2)

by M. O'Keefe

  “You better find a way to remind him or I will burn this trailer park to the ground. Starting with that trailer, right there.” He pointed at Annie’s trailer.

  Breathe in. Breathe out. Show him nothing.

  But I was out of practice, living up on that mountain, and I must have shown him something. Some facial tic I couldn’t control gave me away.

  “That’s right, Dylan,” he said. “I know about your girlfriend.”

  “Then you know she’s the girl who shot her husband the other night. She’s got cops watching her. The District Attorney’s office.”

  He leaned down, his mouth and its fetid smell brushing over the side of my face. “I’ll kill them all, Dylan. The girl, your old man. Your business partner. His mom. Get your brother back here or they’re dead.”

  The trailer door opened and Ben was belched out onto the brown grass.

  “You been hiding for a long time,” Rabbit said to me. “But everyone that hides gets found sooner or later.”

  “Everything okay out here?” Ben asked, his cagey dark eyes shifting from Rabbit back to me.

  “I was just leaving. See you around, old man,” Rabbit said, lifting his hand. “The beer is all yours.”

  Rabbit started up his Harley. The rumble of the motor startled birds from the trees behind Ben’s trailer, and they took to the sky en masse, getting the hell out of this place.

  Smart birds.

  Ben and I were stuck like that, frozen, until the roar of Rabbit’s bike had faded into silence.

  And then the old man sagged, bracing himself against the side of the trailer. “Jesus,” he sighed, wiping his hands over his face. They were shaking, his hands. And I tried not to care. “What did he want?” Pops asked.

  “Max has gone missing. No one has seen him since he was here that night. If I don’t find him he said he’d burn this place to the ground, starting with Annie’s trailer.”

  “Shit. How did he know you were here?”

  “I saw Rabbit a month ago. He caught up with me outside of Charlotte. I was leaving a party and he…he must have been following me.” It had seemed like a weird coincidence at the time and I’d been so crazy to get home so I could talk to Annie, so I could wrap my hand around my dick and come to the sound of her voice, that I didn’t pay any attention to the fact that Rabbit had shown up out of nowhere. If I’d been in my right mind I would have known something was bad. Really bad.

  That’s how he knew about Blake and Margaret. I needed to call them. Warn them. Blake was going to lose his mind. Put the whole place on lockdown. “And my guess is he’s been watching you for a while.”

  “I got a number for Max,” Ben said, pulling his phone out of the pocket of his pants.

  I lifted the scrap of paper. “Rabbit gave me one.”

  Pops looked at it and shook his head. “Different number. Call them both.” He tapped on the screen and then handed me the phone. “One of them is probably a burner; he might have ditched it by now.”

  Right. Max’s phone might be in a shallow grave with a bunch of bodies.

  With his own body.

  But it was all we had at the moment. Two phone numbers. One missing brother.

  How had this happened? I wondered. How was I somehow working with my father to find my brother? Nearly a decade of nothing from them, and I spend three days off my mountain and I’m pulled right back into their bullshit.

  I punched the number Rabbit gave me into my phone and walked away from the awning out in front of Pops’s weird garden. I paced for a little bit, like a dog picking his spot to lie down.

  Calling my brother, wanting to talk to him, hear his voice, had been a hard habit to break. And one I never would have broken on my own without him making it clear for nearly a year that I was not welcome in his life.

  Despite the years trying to yank it free, I could feel the pull of this…this worry over the never-ending black drama of my brother’s life. The grinding knowledge that someday, somehow, my brother would get himself killed.

  There was nothing I could do to stop it, and I knew that. I’d known it for a long time, but it didn’t stop the small belief, fostered by nothing, not one thing, that I might be able to change the collision course of my brother’s life.

  Save him.

  My heart was pounding. Hard. In my throat. In my gut.

  My brother.

  The phone rang and rang and then just stopped.

  I called the number Ben gave me.

  After three rings, a robotic female voice said, “Leave a message.”

  And there was a long beep.

  “Max,” I said. “This is Dylan…your brother. We need to talk. It’s about Rabbit and this disappearing act you’re pulling.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you need to come back here. Now. You owe me. And you know it.”

  I hung up and walked back toward Pops.

  “Nothing?”

  “Machine.”

  “He hangs out at The Velvet Touch.”

  “The strip club?”

  The very same fucking strip club where Annie had been. I felt like my heart was going to explode.

  “I’ll go tonight,” I said. Rabbit probably had the place watched, but I had to do something.

  “I’ll go,” Ben said. “You look like you’re going to fall over.”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “No. Max might show up here.”

  Ben nodded, as if accepting his bullshit assignment.

  “We’ll find him,” he said.

  I laughed. Right at him. “How the fuck did you stay an optimist?” I asked. “All those years with Mom, all the broken promises, all the rehab that didn’t work. The cheating and the lying. The stealing. The club, your ‘brothers’ who—”

  Ben blinked up at me, his dark eyes full of pain. So much goddamn pain. Enough pain that I shut up. Looked away. Stared at this weird exile my father lived in. And then realized it was where he was going to die. Rabbit or no Rabbit. This was Pops’s grave.

  Because he had cancer.

  I took a deep breath and then another. Until they stopped feeling like they were digging me out from the inside.

  “Nurse at the hospital told Annie you have chemo on Friday.”

  For a long time Ben didn’t say anything, and I refused to look at him. “Annie knows?” he finally asked.

  I nodded. Pops swore. For what it was worth, I had to give him credit for that. At least he wasn’t trying to manipulate Annie with his illness. That she was manipulated anyway was still a problem.

  “She’s staying ’cause of you.” I spat the words and all my scorn at the old man. “She hasn’t said as much, but it’s part of why she’s staying. To look after you.”

  “I didn’t ask her to.”

  “Oh, well, that makes it all right then. Pardon me for thinking you’d give a shit—”

  “Watch what you say there, son. You have no idea what I give a shit about.”

  “No,” I laughed. “You’re right. I have never had any idea what you cared about.”

  Ben pulled a joint out of the chest pocket of his gray tee shirt and lit it up. He took a hit before handing it over to me.

  “You’re joking,” I said. All the years between us and he thought I would just smoke up with him?

  “It’s medicinal.” Pops shrugged and took another drag.

  “So you really have cancer.”

  “I really do.”

  “Is it…bad?”

  “No, son, it’s great. It’s the rainbows-and-blow-jobs kind of cancer.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No. I don’t. I don’t know what you mean.” Ben looked up at me through a curl of smoke. “Maybe if you took the time to spy on me yourself instead of hiring other people to peek through their blinds at me, I might be able to figure out what you mean. But we’re strangers, so you’ll have to spell it out.”

  “Are you dying?”

  “Yes.”


  My mind was blown totally blank and I could feel some kind of reaction to my dad’s statement coming to life. Breathing fire. Grief. Anger. A hideous sort of righteous vindication.

  Yes, part of me howled, This is what you get.

  Immediately, I emptied my mind. I thought of nothing so I wouldn’t think of Pops dying of cancer.

  There was a white trailer between Annie’s and Ben’s. A white trailer with a porch. There were some white plastic chairs on it, a plastic table that had blown over.

  “They figure I’ve got about six months. If the chemo don’t kill me first.”

  “Why bother with the chemo?” I asked, staring at that trailer. As far as trailers went it was about a million times better than Annie’s. “Seems like a shitty way to go out.”

  “I suppose it does,” Ben said, taking another drag and then stubbing the joint out.

  Six months. Holy fuck.

  “Why was Max here the other night?” I asked.

  “Because I reached out. Told him about the cancer.”

  Finally, I turned to look at him. “I thought you two weren’t talking.”

  “Yeah, well, something about dying makes you want to get a few things off your chest.” Ben pointed over at Annie’s trailer. “What are we going to do about her?”

  “We?” I laughed, not interested in the ways a dying old man was going to try to keep Annie safe. Just like fucking Hero Cop at the hospital, with his heart in his eyes. I didn’t trust that guy to keep her safe, either.

  Me, I was going to keep her safe.

  “We aren’t going to do anything. I will take care of her.”

  “Seems to me, a rich hotshot like you oughta be able to get her to leave. She deserves better than this place.”

  “No shit.” Suddenly I thought of what Hero Cop said.

  She’s a sweet girl and she’s got no business getting mixed up with you and your family.

  That was truth made out of blood and bone and steel.

  She deserved a whole lot better than my family.

  I am not my family, I told myself, when I felt those dark thoughts start to turn that way. I worked really hard not to be my family.

  But only because they sent you away, said a poisonous voice in the back of my brain.

  “Who lives there?” I asked, pointing over at that white trailer with the nice deck. The white trailer right smack-dab between Annie and Ben.

  “A woman named Joan,” Pops said.

  “The undercover DEA agent?”

  Ben reeled back in his chair. “The fuck you talking about?”

  “Annie said she was undercover DEA. She showed Annie her badge the night Max was here.”

  For a second I thought Ben might pass out. But he only closed his eyes and thumped his head against the back of his chair.

  “The fucking bitch. Fucking cock-sucking bitch. Of course,” he muttered.

  “Something you want to let me in on?”

  “No. But she ain’t here no more,” Ben said. “Haven’t seen her in days. Since the night Max was here.”

  “So that trailer is empty?”

  “Guess so.”

  So Max was in the area. Dad was here. Rabbit was hanging around. And I couldn’t get Annie to leave.

  With all those rotten pieces, something bad was inevitable.

  I pushed the heels of my hands into my eyeballs until I saw sparks behind my eyelids.

  “You want to sit down?” Pops asked. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You ain’t, and anyone with eyes can see that.”

  My father’s concern made my skin crawl.

  Where was your concern when I was in jail, getting beaten for your sins?

  “Suit yourself, you stubborn cuss,” Pops muttered.

  I’d spent years getting rid of this anger…this hate. The boy I’d been, the man I would be if I stayed in my father’s orbit. I’d shed that like a shitty skin.

  And now it was back. And I was scared of it. Scared of what it would turn me into. Of how it would infect my life now.

  How it would infect Annie.

  But I didn’t have a choice.

  “I’m going to be your neighbor, Pops.”

  ANNIE

  Maybe I should take up smoking, Annie thought, staring up at the moon. The clouds were a sparse veil, moving fast in some unseen, unfelt wind.

  Or knitting?

  She needed a hobby. A distraction from her own thoughts.

  Knitting sounded boring.

  The night was black and thick. And she felt impossibly small inside of it. Like if she sat very still she would simply lose her edges and blend into the night around her. And when morning came she’d be gone.

  Her moments of strength, of feeling like…herself…were too few and far between, and she didn’t know how to gather them up to make something recognizable to herself.

  Inside, where she’d always known who she was despite everything that happened to her. Where the concretes of her identity, of her existence, lived, now felt vacant. Missing.

  She was sitting on her small stoop. The metal steps were digging into her thighs, but it was too hot inside her trailer. Too small, with all her thoughts.

  Her fully charged phone was dark on the step beside her.

  He said he would call.

  Her longing for him was a physical ache.

  Dylan. His voice in her ear. His rough capability. His dark past that matched her own dark present.

  It was selfish—she knew that. He’d been exhausted the last time she saw him and he’d had to drive back to his house.

  But she couldn’t stop the feeling.

  Her hands shaking, she picked up the phone and called him.

  “Hey.” Relief and pleasure at the sound of his voice shot through the darkness inside of her, creating little pinpricks of light. Just enough to see by. “You okay?” His sleep-rough voice was asking a question so familiar, so incredibly beloved, that she smiled.

  “Yeah,” she answered. “I’m sorry to call so late—”

  “It’s okay. I was awake.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  He paused before answering. “Nothing, really. What about you?”

  “I fell asleep like the moment you left the trailer. And now I’m wide awake.”

  “The dangers of naps.”

  “Have you slept?” she asked. “You looked so tired earlier.”

  “I’m fine. Why are you whispering?” he asked.

  “I’m sitting outside. It’s too hot in the trailer.”

  “I hear that.”

  “You’ve got central air. There’s no such thing as too hot where you are.”

  He was silent for a moment, and she thought maybe they’d been disconnected.

  “Dylan?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She leaned back against the door and she heard something rustle on his end. She imagined him rolling over in that big bed of his, the purple comforter down around his waist.

  “It’s funny to be talking to you now that I know what you look like. And what your house is like.”

  “It’s a little more disturbing now that I know where you live,” he said.

  “Don’t speak ill of my trailer.”

  His laughter was a small sigh. And it filled her like air.

  “I’m sorry we argued today,” he said.

  “I’ve been thinking about that.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t have any practice being honest with someone. Showing someone how I really feel.”

  “You can show me.”

  “Sometimes…” She looked up at the moon, so clear in this moment she could see the craters on its surface. “Sometimes what I feel is scary.”

  “That’s the stuff I want to see, baby.”

  “I want you to show me your scary stuff, too,” she said.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he said. “There are some things…some things th
at maybe should just stay hidden.”

  “I think if you and I are ever going to stand a chance, those are the things you have to show me.”

  She could hear his breathing, agitated now, as if he were running.

  And had been for a long time.

  She stood, her butt numb from the metal seat, and went back inside her trailer. It wasn’t any cooler, but it was private.

  She climbed onto her bed and stared out her window. Same moon as before. Same clouds. Different perspective.

  “Do you think about that man you killed in prison?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Not as much as I used to. But I think about him.”

  “What do you think about?”

  “Why do you want to talk about this?” he asked.

  “Because we both have this thing. This big, awful thing in our lives, and you’re the only one I know who might understand. Who I can talk to about it. This is the scary stuff, Dylan, that you said you wanted to see.”

  “You want to start some kind of murder survivors club?” She flinched at the words. At his tone. “Because that’s some morbid shit, Annie.”

  “It’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep and I feel pretty fucking morbid,” she snapped back at him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “All the ghosts come out at midnight, don’t they?”

  “I understand Hoyt would have killed me and maybe you, too. But that doesn’t erase everything that was good about him. And there were good things. He worked hard. Day in and day out. He was good to the crews. And he used to love corn on the cob, like he could eat dozens of ears, every August. No butter. No salt. Barely cooked, and he’d—”

  “Shhhh,” he breathed. “Okay. I understand what you’re getting at.”

  And you’re the only one that does. That’s why I need you.

  “So tell me,” she said. “Tell me something about that guy you killed.”

  “He was a boy, really. Younger than me. His father was a part of a gang that had bad blood with the Skulls going back generations.”

  “Did you know his name?”

  “Hector. Hector Vasquez. His dad was killed in that fire Ben set.”

  “Oh my God, Dylan.”

  “Like six months into my sentence he was on me. Relentless. And I couldn’t avoid it. Couldn’t keep my nose clean. My head down. It was fight or be killed. I took some serious abuse from this guy and his crew for two years and it just kept getting worse, and I knew the only way it was going to end was him or me.”