Right Behind You

by Gail Giles

  Copyright © 2007 by Gail Giles

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: November 2008

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  The author wishes to acknowledge Ajahn Pannadhammo and Ajahn Kusalo for the Hungry Ghosts passage.

  Summary: After spending four years in a mental institution for murdering a friend in Alaska, fourteen-year-old Kip begins a completely new life in Indiana with his father and stepmother under a different name, but not only has trouble fitting in, he finds there are still problems to deal with from his childhood.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-04071-6

  Contents

  PART I: Alaska

  Chapter 1: WHAT I KNOW

  Chapter 2: WHAT I THINK I REMEMBER

  Chapter 3: WHAT THEY TOLD ME

  Chapter 4: WHEN GLOVES EXPLODE

  Chapter 5: WHEN PEOPLE EXPLODE

  Chapter 6: TOUCHSTONES

  Chapter 7: CHANGING LANES

  Chapter 8: BITING THE GORILLA

  Chapter 9: LEARNING TO WADE

  PART II: Indiana

  Chapter 10: THE “GO” PART

  Chapter 11: UGLY PUP AT THE POUND

  Chapter 12: HUNK O’ LOVE

  Chapter 13: SOMETIMES TOMORROW IS JUST ANOTHER DAY

  Chapter 14: LOVING MAKES LITTLE SENSE

  Chapter 15: THE FIRST CRACK

  Chapter 16: FINDING BLUE

  Chapter 17: GOING UP IN FLAMES

  Chapter 18: GO AGAIN

  PART III: Texas

  Chapter 19: DéJà VU WITH A TWIST

  Chapter 20: MAYBE, THE HAPPY

  Chapter 21: HANGING BY MY CROTCH

  Chapter 22: THE LONG SPOONS

  Chapter 23: PIECES OF FLINT

  Chapter 24: FINDING OUT

  Chapter 25: ONE LONG SPOON?

  Chapter 26: ONLY ONE BOWL OF TRUTH

  Chapter 27: FIGURING IT OUT

  Chapter 28: YOU GOTTA LIVE TO HAVE A SHOT AT HAPPY

  Chapter 29: LIVING WITH IT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Always and always and always for Jim Giles and Josh Jakubik, my heroes.—G.G.

  He stood in front of me, soaked by the rain. It sluiced down his face into his eyes and mouth, but he didn’t make a move to wipe it away.

  He cradled something wrapped in an olive green poncho.

  “There are three things you need to know about me,” he said.

  “First, you don’t know my real name.

  “Second, I murdered somebody once.

  “Third . . . well, maybe this will tell you.”

  He thrust the poncho forward. “Please read this. All of it. Swear to me you will.”

  Real name?

  Murdered?

  “Sam, will you swear you’ll read this?”

  I nodded. Reflex.

  And he was gone. Down the stairs into the dark and rain.

  PART I

  Alaska

  Chapter 1

  WHAT I KNOW

  On the afternoon of his seventh birthday, I set Bobby Clarke on fire.

  I was nine.

  It was all about Bobby’s birthday present.

  A baseball glove.

  Chapter 2

  WHAT I THINK I REMEMBER

  It surprises people to learn that summer days can get highs of a hundred degrees in the Alaskan interior. And July is fire season. But it was a windless day, so Dad was planning a controlled burn near our cabin to clear the brush. He had let it get out of hand while Mom was sick.

  A lot of things had gotten out of hand while Mom was sick.

  Me.

  Dad.

  Aunt Jemma.

  We were miles from any real town or even a road that was more than a rutted dirt trail.

  Dad was draining all the gas out of the lawn mower into a small pail.

  “Why can’t we just go get some gas?”

  “Stop whining, Kip. There’s no wind this morning. It takes a good hour to get to a gas station. If the wind kicks up while we’re going to town, we can’t get the burn done. We can make do.” Dad handed me the pail.

  “Take this and pour it into the bucket outside. Don’t get any on your clothes. Be quick about it. I still have to drain the snow machine and the generator.”

  How stupid was it to make a hot day hotter by tend-ing a fire? I was sick of working hard all the time. And I was tired of “making do” the Alaskan way. Being poor. Following Dad’s orders. I gave the lawn mower a toe-bruising kick.

  Dad laughed. “You get mad at me, you kick the tire, I don’t get a bruise, the tire doesn’t care, and you’re the only one hurting. How’s that working for you, Kip?”

  As I poured the last pail of gasoline into the bucket, Dad came out of the shed.

  “I don’t want to fight with you all day, Kip. Lose the attitude.”

  “My head hurts.”

  “Your head hurts whenever there’s work to be done.”

  Dad snapped into his “I-will-be-obeyed” voice. “You have to get tough to live in the bush. It’s not called the last frontier . . .”

  I tuned him out. I’d heard the same lecture on hard work a million times, and I was about ready to throw the gasoline on the house so we wouldn’t live in the bush anymore.

  He stopped his sermon when we heard a car and then saw the dust swirl on our excuse for a road.

  “I think it’s Aunt Jemma,” I said.

  Dad’s face went so tight I could see lumps where his jaw was. “And she’s here for another fuss,” Dad said. “The woman won’t leave me alone.”

  Aunt Jemma’s rental car bucked to a stop in front of our cabin. She got out and slammed her door, rounded the back, opened the trunk, and pulled out boxes.

  “What the hell does she think she’s doing now?”

  Dad was kind of whispering to himself, and he sounded like he could throw Aunt Jemma and her car right down our road.

  “Stay out here and straighten up the shed for me, Kip.”

  He slapped his lighter on the hood of our truck and headed toward Aunt Jemma. They were already arguing before they hit the porch. About me again.

  My mother died in April and Aunt Jemma had been hammering at Dad since then to let her take me back to “civilization.”

  As much as I was sick of the Alaskan way, I wasn’t sure I was sick of Alaska. And Aunt Jenna’s civilization preached nothing but rules to me. It meant leaving the place where I had memories of Mom. It meant leaving Dad, which I couldn’t imagine, even if he made me mad.

  Aunt Jemma and Dad’s arguing made my head hurt. It reminded me of . . . the other arguing. Mom and Dad’s. I always thought that was my fault too.

  I could hear their voices. Like hail on our cabin’s tin roof. Louder, faster, harder.

  “Pigheaded . . .”

  “My son . . .”

  “Lawyer . . .”

  “Over my dead body . . .”

  “She died because she couldn’t get decent medical care in this . . .”

  The hollow inside me filled up with red mean. I banged a snow shovel against the wall in the shed to drown out their storming with mine, but the yelling from the house let words pop between the beats of metal against wood.

  And then Bobby Clarke trot
ted up to the doors of the shed.

  “Kip, you here? Come out. I want to show you something.”

  “I got work to do. My dad says to clean up the shed. Go home.”

  “Come out and see my birthday present. It’s the best baseball glove anybody ever had.”

  I stepped out of the shed to send the little snot on his way. Bobby was waving the glove in front of my face. “My dad gave me a bike, but I don’t know how to ride a two-wheeler yet. This is from my mom. She said it will make me the best player on the T-ball team.”

  The glove was a beauty. The leather was the color of leaves when they first drop to the ground. And it was on Bobby Clarke’s hand.

  “Nothing can make you a good baseball player,” I said. “You can’t catch a ball, not even if you had a glove twice that size.”

  “You’re just mad ’cause you’re too poor to have a glove.” He waved the glove again, taunting me with it. “You don’t even have a mom to give you one.” He pushed it toward me, then jerked it away.

  I glared at the birthday gift from his mother.

  My head throbbed as the voices in the house rose.

  Bobby shoved the glove toward my face again.

  I wanted to ruin it. Ruin the glove. The birthday glove.

  I grabbed the bucket. I sloshed the gasoline on the glove. It splashed all over his arms and shirt and dribbled down his pants. Some even spattered up on his face.

  I don’t think he knew what I threw on him. He sputtered when he called me a bad name and pulled his hand out of the glove. Cradled it against his chest.

  By then I had the lighter.

  Had flipped it open.

  Had flicked the wheel.

  And as soon as I saw the blue spurt of flame . . .

  I pitched it at the birthday baseball glove.

  Pitched it onto Bobby Clarke.

  Chapter 3

  WHAT THEY TOLD ME

  I have no memory of what happened after that. I know what my father told me. I know what the doctors told me. I’ve read the newspaper accounts.

  But there is a hole of weeks in my life. And the hole starts with the minute Bobby caught fire. My father says that he heard the screams. Mine and Bobby’s. His argument with Aunt Jemma was cut short when he looked out the window and saw one writhing child aflame and another frozen child howling. He says it still shames him that his first emotion was relief to see that I was the frozen howler.

  He threw Bobby to the ground. Ripped off his own shirt and covered Bobby, burning his own arms. My aunt was phoning the state troopers already.

  Miles from a town.

  A rough dirt road.

  It took a long time for the ambulance to get to the cabin. It took a long time for the ambulance to get to a place where the LifeFlight helicopter could land. It took a long time to fly to Anchorage.

  Bobby lived for three days.

  When someone remembered to look for me, I was under our truck in fetal position. Dad pulled me out. He says my face was tear streaked but I was no longer crying. My eyes were open but vacant.

  I didn’t speak for four months.

  My age and my psychiatric state made commitment to a mental hospital the only reasonable answer.

  I didn’t know where I was for weeks anyway.

  Dad moved to Anchorage, where I was confined. Somewhere in his files are stacks of legal papers that deal with my case. He hasn’t told me much about the therapy that brought me out of my near-catatonic state. It took five weeks for me to respond. Five.

  Dad came in my room, and finally I blinked and slid my eyes to his face.

  “Hey, Kipper, you back?”

  Dad says I closed my eyes and tears ran down my face. He didn’t know if he should hug me or call the doctor. He opted for the hug.

  There was therapy. Play therapy. Puppet therapy. Art therapy. I did whatever anyone asked me. I took pills; I drew pictures; I looked at the books; I listened; but I didn’t speak.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  There were legal reasons to keep me in the hospital. Before I could be released, doctors had to say they understood what I did. That I understood it. A judge had to say I was not a danger to myself or others. And if I wasn’t talking this wasn’t going to happen.

  I turned ten.

  Ten.

  I should have been in Boy Scouts.

  I weighed sixty-two pounds.

  I had a loose back tooth.

  I had murdered another child.

  Chapter 4

  WHEN GLOVES EXPLODE

  My first words were “Wile E. Coyote.”

  It was toward the middle of my hour of not talking to The Frown. The shrink had dark floppy hair, a wrinkled-up forehead, and a constant kind of squint behind his wire-rimmed glasses. He wore rolled-back sleeves, propped his tennis shoes on his desk, and read sailing magazines while I sat silently — I guess to show me that he had all the time in the world.

  That day I had taken all the wrapped candies out of the plastic container and sorted them by color.

  “I get paid whether you talk or not,” he said.

  I put a red with the other reds.

  “Just so you know.”

  The Frown reached into his bottom drawer and pulled out a Nerf ball and tossed it into a small hoop attached to his closet door. It was made to look like a basketball but was way smaller, about the size of those little black bombs in the cartoons. . . .

  “Wile E. Coyote.”

  My voice surprised me. Rusty. Like the first time we opened the cabin windows in spring.

  If The Frown was surprised to hear me after months of nothing, he didn’t show it. He shot the ball again. Missed. “The cartoon guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  The Frown put the ball down, but not his feet. “He’s cool. The coyote. But he messes up a lot.”

  I put a green candy with the yellow ones. Looked at The Frown. Waited for him to see the clue. There was something wrong with the picture.

  He looked at me and waited. I scooped the candies up and slammed them into the bowl. I wanted to throw the candy bowl straight at The Frown’s head because he was so stupid. I tucked my hands under my thighs instead.

  At my next session I sorted the candy and The Frown tapped a pencil against a legal pad.

  “The coyote thing — the cartoon guy. I got it wrong?”

  “Wile E. Coyote,” I said.

  “Yeah. You didn’t say his name because he messes up a lot. You thought of him for another reason.”

  I paused in my sorting and looked up at him. “It’s not because he messes up.” I sorted a few more candies. “I don’t know what it’s about. Not for sure.”

  “So give it your best shot, Kip. No right or wrong answers here.”

  I sat there running the cartoons in my head. The roadrunner with his legs spinning into sort of a blurred wheel. The coyote running off the cliff, his feet pedaling in the air before he drops. Then I saw it again. The picture I needed. “It’s about the bomb.”

  The Frown stopped in mid-tap. “Like when he’s holding that round bomb thing with the fuse?”

  Something hot clogged my throat but I forced my words through. “Uh-huh, the fuse burns down and the glove explodes and then you see the coyote and he’s all smoking and his fur is all burned and his eyes are all big. And everybody laughs because he’s gonna be right back chasing the roadrunner bird and his fur won’t be burnt anymore.”

  “The glove explodes?”

  “What?” Which one of us was crazy here?

  “Glove. You said, ‘the glove explodes.’”

  “I said bomb.”

  The Frown eased back in his chair and tapped his chin with the pencil. “I’d be expecting to hear you say ‘bomb.’ That’s why the glove thing surprised me.”

  “I never said ‘glove.’” The Frown nodded his head. He looked like one of those Bobblehead dolls. “You need to wash your ears or something,” I said.

  “You’re upset.”

  “I have a
headache,” I said. “Can I go?”

  “Sure, talk to the nurse. You have orders for pain meds if you need them.”

  Chapter 5

  WHEN PEOPLE EXPLODE

  My home — or the “hood,” as the older kids called it — was a “state mental ward for dangerous juvenile offenders.” The ward was supposed to be for twelve- to fourteen-year-olds. At nine, I was the youngest to enter for the four years and seven months I lived there. Be-fore me, there had been no provisions for under-twelves that committed such a horrible crime. But I wouldn’t be the last.

  Some were there for evaluation before trials. Some, like me, were there because the system wasn’t sure what to do with us. Some were too bat-shit crazy to go to trial and too dangerous to let loose.

  A ten-year-old joined us when I was twelve, but he was a hardened ten whose father had pimped him to other men since he was six. He’d stabbed one of the “clients” and his father during one of the transactions. The other kids called him TwoFer and gave him a lot of respect. I was simply scared shitless of him.

  Cowboy was a school shooter. Yes, a school shooter in Alaska. He unloaded on a class in his middle school. From all we could figure, his reasoning was that it seemed an easy path to stardom.

  Slice ’N’ Dice was into retro. He talked like a Miami Vice rerun. He was in for dismembering neighbors’ pets and stashing the parts in their houses to provide them with a macabre kind of Easter egg hunt. Just fourteen, he was in for eval so he could be squirreled somewhere before he started dismembering people.

  We went to classes, school-type and therapy-type. We had individual therapy, group therapy, regulated study time, and monitored free time.

  We did it all moving about in cubes of gray. The floors were gray, the walls were cinder block covered with layer upon layer of thick gray paint. Hard. Unrelenting. No paintings (sharp edges), no bright colors (can aggravate aggressiveness), high ceilings with recessed fluorescent lighting (patients can’t reach glass bulbs) needed for dark winter days.

  But in summer, the light poured in the vast, unbarred windows (bulletproof glass) and bounced off the shiny walls and floors like the sounds did, echoing and amplifying. I hated the summer; the noise was bad enough. The light and the noise pushed me to the edge.