In the Blood

by Lisa Unger

  “She’s done this before, Mr. Miller,” I heard Langdon say gently to Frank.

  “Not like this,” Frank answered. He shook his head vigorously, as if he was trying to shake something off. “This is different.”

  Lynne was crying now, really sobbing, and the sound made me uncomfortable in the extreme. As Sky closed the door behind me, I lay down on my bed. I could hear the noise outside my window, the voices outside my door. I wished everyone would just go away.

  “Is there anything I need to know?” he asked. He sat at my desk and took a pair of glasses from his pocket. “Of course, I’m not a criminal attorney. If it comes to that, I know someone.”

  I liked his casual, practical nature, as if nothing would surprise him and as if there were a contingency plan for any outcome of this situation.

  “No,” I said. “There’s nothing you need to know.”

  He looked at me through his round, gold-framed spectacles. “There is the matter of some missing time. Two hours, right?”

  “I was in the woods,” I said. “I go there a lot, to be alone.”

  “Were you alone?”

  “I need to sleep,” I said. “I’ve never been so tired.”

  He regarded me a while longer, then stood with effort, picked up his briefcase.

  “Get some rest,” he said. “But be prepared to talk in the morning.”

  I pulled up the covers and curled myself up. I wondered where my aunt would sleep, how long Langdon would stay, what tomorrow would hold. I thought about Luke and the raging tantrum I’d left him in, his next clue. But most of all I thought about Beck, kept hearing over and over the last words she said to me: Why are you doing this to me?

  It was about 2 A.M. when my phone woke me. I dug it out of my bag and answered it without looking at the caller ID.

  “Beck,” I said. I was still half asleep, dreaming about her.

  “No,” he said. His voice was mocking. “Still can’t find your friend?”

  “Luke,” I said. What a little asshole. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “What kind of a question is that?” he asked. “Of course I do.”

  “What do you want?” I asked. I fell back against my pillow. Sleep had abandoned me completely; I was wide-awake now.

  “Are you alone?”

  “What do you want?” I asked again.

  “I wondered how you were doing with our game.”

  I got out of bed and walked to the window. The crowds outside had dissipated, and the room beyond my door was quiet. I heard the distant drumbeat of panic that I’d heard when I first discovered the next clue. I had so much else to worry about that it had quieted for a time. But now the rhythm was picking up again, a steady jungle beat.

  “Do you know where the next clue is?” he asked. His voice sounded deeper, older than I knew it to be. Perhaps because he was talking softly. I thought about hanging up and calling his mother. But I stayed on the line. The truth was, I liked talking to him. At least he was interesting, something else to focus on besides my own misery.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  These clues, all to do with the tragic secrets and lies of tortured souls … well, let’s just say they spoke to something deep inside me. What did this boy know about me? And how? And why was he teasing me with it?

  “If you know where it is, I suggest you go find the next clue,” he said. “There isn’t much time.” He sounded like a comic-book villain, which I guess was his only frame of reference.

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “How can you be so cold?”

  It was a whisper, but he might as well have screamed it. Those words, Beck’s words, shot through me. I thought of the dirt on his bike tires, the form slipping into the shadows. He was there that night. He saw.

  When he started laughing, I hung up. When he called back, I turned off my phone.

  I got dressed swiftly and walked into the living area. What did he mean, time was running out? What had he seen that night? Who had he told? Did he know where Beck was?

  I thought I was alone in the suite, then I saw my aunt’s suitcase and discovered her sleeping in Ainsley’s bed. I wanted to wake her, thank her for coming, and then ask her politely to go back to Florida. Things were about to get ugly, and she’d been through enough.

  But I knew that it wouldn’t fly, and if I woke her up, she’d try to pull me into conversation. I just couldn’t talk anymore. The worst part about my aunt is that she knows me. That’s the problem with family. You can put on a mask and a costume for the rest of the world, but you can’t hide from the people who changed your diapers.

  I pulled on my coat and slipped from the room, moved down the dim hallway, and took the fire stairs down to the laundry level in the basement. It was empty, but well lit. I followed the gray hallway, the scent of fabric softener heavy in the air, and wound up at the back door that let out near the bike racks.

  As I rode through the night, my legs pumping, my heart racing with exertion, I thought about what Rachel had told me. Luke manipulated the other students in his class, teased certain behaviors out of them. Because he can, she said. Because he’s bored and needs constant stimulation. He’d hooked me. When I pulled on the line, he reeled me in. We pick our own predators.

  It wasn’t long before I saw headlights come up behind me. I pulled over into the shoulder and turned, expecting to see Detective Ferrigno or a squad car. How was I going to explain this? Instead, it was Langdon’s Volkswagen. He pulled up ahead of me and climbed out of the car.

  “What in the world are you doing now?” he asked. His voice bounced off the street, echoing strangely. His palms were open as he approached me. “Have you completely lost your shit? I mean, are you not in enough trouble?”

  “Are you following me?”

  “I was sleeping in my car outside your dorm,” he said. He looked embarrassed suddenly, ran a hand through his mass of hair, gazed down at the road between us. “I was worried about you. I had a feeling you were going to do something crazy.”

  “I figured out the next clue,” I said. It sounded lame, even to me.

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Are we talking about that stupid scavenger hunt? We’re not. Are we?”

  I dropped the bike and walked over to him, handed him the second poem. If he remembered that I’d lied to him about finding it, he didn’t bring it up. He stood squinting at it.

  “I can’t read this,” he said finally, handing it back. “Not in this light.”

  I read it to him, and when I was done he was watching me with an expression that I couldn’t decipher.

  “This is really getting fucking creepy,” he said. “Get in the car.”

  I went to the car, and he retrieved my bike, hefting it into the trunk. I thought he was going to take me home. But instead, he kept driving ahead, heading toward The Hollows Wood.

  20

  Dear Diary,

  It has been a while since I last visited with you. And a lot has happened since then. I think it’s funny how life is like that, forever dashing your expectations. You just start to accept the conditions of your world when everything around you changes again.

  I am in love. There, I said it. It’s true, and it’s a magical feeling. I had forgotten what a head trip is a good love affair. And after years of just one shitty thing following the next, it feels like heaven. I go to sleep thinking about him. I wake up thinking about him. I am a teenager, giddy and nervous, waiting for the phone to ring. And it’s delicious.

  Today, I met him at a swank hotel in town. After I dropped my son off at his new school, I hurried home and showered. I changed into a new dress I bought for the occasion, a simple black sheath. For the first time in years, I had bought underwear that wasn’t designed solely for comfort—a lacy push-up bra and matching bikini panties. And guess what? I’ve still got it. I am not just the beleaguered mother of a troubled child. I had my hair done a week ago, punching up the gold highlights that had turned mousy and flat, opting for a
shoulder-length straight bob. And when I look in the mirror, I see her. The girl I used to be—bright and happy and full of hope. I am not her. But I remember her.

  The valet took my car, and I stood on the steps of the hotel and looked out into the harbor. I could hear the halyards clanging on the boats and smell the salt in the air. Florida. We have moved to Florida, a new school, a new life. I think, I dare to hope, that we have done the right thing.

  I stood in the doorway of the grand dining room. The high mirrored ceilings and enormous chandeliers reflected the light streaming in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. And the tinkling of silverware and the hum of conversation were a kind of music that carried me away. I drifted over to the table where he waited for me. He rose and took me into his arms. We didn’t linger long over lunch.

  And the good news, the best news of all, is that this man who’s setting me on fire—well, we’re already married. Yes, that’s right, diary. I am having a red-hot, sizzling, secret fling with my own husband.

  After my mother’s accident, she decided that it was time for her to go back to Florida. Who could blame her?

  And, maybe in a way, it was a blessing. I couldn’t lean on her anymore. I had to call my husband that night and ask him to come home for good. I told him that I needed him and that I couldn’t manage alone, and that he was right. I’d made so many mistakes relating to our child, and I needed him to help me rebuild our family.

  And, you know what? He did it. He made changes in his job—less travel, more time working from home. We sat down with our son and we told him that things were going to change. That he had one opportunity to change his behavior in this new place, in a new school, or we would have no choice but to send him to the place my mother had suggested.

  There was a school in Florida, not very near my mother and sister, about two hours south. We decided to move there, enroll him in their new program for troubled children, and build a new life, start over. We would be closer to my family, but not so close as to burden them with our problems.

  It’s an understatement to say that our son wasn’t happy. But I think that he saw us, for the first time, as a united front and he realized that he had very little choice. No more divide and conquer.

  The move was not easy; none of us really relished the idea of living down south. But the school was highly regarded, and they’d been having success with cases like ours. Through education, medication, and therapy, children like our son were being managed and helped. There were even therapy and education session for us. My husband and I saw it as a last chance to have a seminormal life with our child.

  He would board four nights a week at the school and return home to us Friday through Sunday night. This served to remove him from any dysfunctional relationships that might be contributing to his illness (whatever that was—we’ve had as many diagnoses as there are out there, from bipolar, to ADHD, to schizophrenia, to borderline personality, to malignant narcissism). This was the hardest part, because he and I had never been apart.

  I don’t have to tell you how all of this went. The rages, the tears. He locked himself in a bathroom for eight hours. He tore the curtains off the wall in his room. He tried to set the clothes in his closet on fire. But the difference was, this time, I didn’t seek to comfort and coddle. I didn’t give in to his demands. I held back and let my husband handle our son. And, guess what? He did a much better job than I ever had.

  Our son seemed to calm under my husband’s firm guidance. If our boy was fire, my husband was cold water. With my husband, tantrums and breakdowns didn’t escalate the way they did with me. I would lie on the bed in my room and listen to the high-pitched sound of my son’s voice, the low, easy rumble of my husband’s, and then silence or even—imagine—laughter.

  The night before he left for school was the hardest. I lay beside my son on his bed while he begged me not to send him away.

  “I’ll be good, Mom,” he said. “Don’t send me to that place.”

  And everything inside me hurt, but I held my ground.

  “It will be fine,” I said. Even though I wasn’t sure I believed this. “And it’s not forever. We’ll all learn how to do better together. And then you’ll come home. Anyway, it’s just four nights away.”

  He sobbed. And after he finally fell asleep, so did I. In the morning, my husband took him. My son didn’t even look at me. He wouldn’t even say good-bye. I told myself that this was the first step toward normal.

  And something happened while he was away that week. I expanded. I stretched out and became myself again. I didn’t spend my whole day dreading the call from his school, or bracing myself for breakdowns over homework or what was for dinner. I didn’t worry about his nightmares, or his visions, or his lies, or who he might hurt. For the first time he was in a place where they were actually equipped to handle all of it. And toward the middle of the week, over pizza and a bottle of wine, I fell in love with my husband again.

  We’re hiding it from our son, this love affair we’re having, this newfound happiness. The weekends are still hard, and Sunday the worst of all. He hates the new school, of course, but we’re already seeing changes. And we’re learning that it is okay for him to be unhappy and to deal with it. He’ll need to change his behavior to be happier, and that’s something we haven’t taught him. Because when he’s been unhappy, I’ve tried to change the world to make him happier. I never asked him to be accountable for his own happiness. And for someone like my son, who has emotional challenges, this failure on my part has had some terrible consequences. Another child might have just been whiny, or spoiled or entitled. Our boy is filled with rage when things don’t go his way.

  We feel that it would set him back if he knew how really happy we were while he was away at school. I know; that’s another bad mother badge for me. But you don’t understand; you can’t. Normal children demand all of you, night and day. They want and deserve to have you all to themselves, some of the time at least. But troubled children want all of you and then more and more. They want things inside of you that you didn’t even know were there. They mine the depths of you, pillage every resource and then still it’s not enough. I have been filling myself up again—spending time with my husband, working out, reading, seeing films. I’ve applied for a job at the local bookstore café, just something to reconnect me to the world, to my love of literature. When our boy comes home on the weekends, I’m a better mother, a better person. I am fresh to the fight on Friday afternoon.

  Since the first time I’ve started visiting with you, diary, I feel strong. I am in love again. I am hopeful for my son and for our family. I am almost afraid to say it. But I really believe, in my deepest heart, that everything is going to be all right.

  21

  Once I pushed a little boy off the jungle gym at school. I won’t forget the look on his face as he fell. The wide surprise in his eyes, the O of his mouth as he felt himself tilt off the metal surface and gravity took him down hard. He landed on his arm funny and it broke, twisted at an unnatural angle beneath him. There was a snap, an ugly sound that caused me to cringe inside. And then a loud wail of pain and fear. A swarm of adults flew from their playground posts. I stood above him, looking down. Much was made of my “flat affect” in that moment, my total lack of remorse.

  It was one of several times I was removed quickly from a school and installed in another. People looked at me strangely. The teacher, who had been so warm, was suddenly stiff and cool.

  “He fell,” I remember lying.

  “No,” said the teacher, who had been on the playground. “I saw you push him. Why did you do it?”

  “He made fun of me,” I managed.

  But I was young, unable to articulate my feelings. The fact was that this boy had been quietly and surreptitiously torturing me since the first day of school. I was small for my age. I had a very high IQ, was separated out for gifted programs. And this overdeveloped mouth-breather, for whatever reason, had it in for me. He pulled my hair, stole my pencil box, h
id my show-and-tell. I dreaded him, dreamed about him, lay awake at night worrying about what he’d do the next day. I didn’t tell anyone about him. Because I was such a chronic liar, no one ever really believed the things I said. As a child, I had what I can only describe as daydreams. I saw people who weren’t there, imagined conversations with them. I thought they were ghosts sometimes. I heard voices in my head that told me to do strange things, like wash my hands fifteen times, or avoid a certain food all day, otherwise my mother would die. It was part dream, part imagination, part lie. It’s impossible to explain. Anyway, that’s why no one ever believed me anymore.

  My fear and rage toward this boy was a throbbing, swelling thing that lived inside me. That afternoon, he’d eaten my sandwich. So I was hungry, as well as miserable. When he came up behind me on the jungle gym and whispered in my ear that I was too small for third grade, that I should stay with the babies in preschool, the thing, the white-hot rage that was always simmering, expanded and exploded from me. I jumped up and spun around and used all my strength to knock him back.

  The truth was, I didn’t think he’d fall. I was pushing him away, not too concerned with where he’d go. It was true that I did not feel remorse that day, though I do now. What I felt more than anything was relief. He’d stay away from me now. They always do, you know, when you really hurt them. The bullies always stay away then; they’re cowards at heart.

  And curiosity was the other big thing I felt. I was deep in wondering about that snap, and the broken bone, and how would they fix it, and how bad would it hurt. And what would the body do inside to knit that broken thing back together. And I couldn’t stop thinking about that; I was totally focused inside on those questions, coming up with theories and wondering who I could ask or what I could read that would give me all the information I wanted. So that’s why I seemed flat, though somewhere deep inside, I was upset. It was just buried deep under layers and layers of manic thoughts and strange voices.

  Dr. Cooper and I have talked this through. I understand who I was then better now that I’m older. There was a little bit of OCD, a little bit of my being too intellectually smart while emotionally underdeveloped. There was my hormonal imbalance, which has corrected itself mostly since puberty. There are other theories, too, about what might be wrong with me. But that’s the thing about mental illness; there’s no such thing as a cookie-cutter diagnosis. We’re all crazy in our own special way. Some of us just have it worse than others.