In the Blood

by Lisa Unger

  We have more patience for girls who act like boys than boys who act like girls. A tomboy is considered cute. One day she’ll shuck her muddy jeans and put on a dress, and everyone will gasp at her beauty. They’ll all laugh about her tree-climbing, frog-catching days.

  But there’s no such tolerance for the boy who puts on a dress, who wants a toy kitchen or a baby doll to love. Jung would say that this is because, even culturally, our anima is repressed, hated, derided. We hate our female selves. A boyish girl is perfectly acceptable. A girlish boy? Not so much. In certain places, you’d get your ass kicked, find yourself “gay-bashed.” You might even get yourself killed. That’s how much we hate our anima.

  Beck was fully unconscious, and I was trying to keep the falling dirt off her face, away from her nose and mouth.

  “Why are you doing this?” I yelled at Langdon.

  He walked to the rim of the grave.

  “Why?” he asked. He seemed incredulous, as if he couldn’t believe I’d ask such a stupid question. I could see the sweat pouring down his flushed face in spite of the cold. The walls around me seemed high, but they were crumbling and I started clawing at them, trying to create a foothold to lift myself out.

  “I came here for you,” he said. He swept an arm to the trees. “I followed you to this dump in the middle of nowhere.”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about. He must have seen it on my face.

  “Don’t you know me?” he asked.

  Now he looked hurt, as though I’d let him down terribly. He was a different person than the man I’d known all these years. There was nothing of the mellow, kindhearted adviser and professor that I had grown to rely upon.

  “Dr. Chang was my mentor,” he said.

  It took a few seconds for the name to register. I thought about those years so little. The space between then and now was a dark and chaotic parade of horrible events. I didn’t think about Dr. Chang and his crazy school, even though I suppose I owed him a debt of gratitude.

  It had been a place much like Fieldcrest. But my memories of my old school, my teachers, the day-to-day, were somewhat fuzzy and vague. Did I remember Langdon? It would have been more than ten years ago. He would have been one of the young doctors that rotated through for a semester.

  For a medicated, mentally ill person such as myself, ten years might as well have been a million years. I could hardly remember my mother’s face, if I closed my eyes. She’d been slipping further and further away from me.

  What should I do? I thought. Pretend that I remember him? Tell him the truth? Instead, I did what I always did, stared blankly at him, trying to figure out what he wanted.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t remember much from that time.”

  “I assisted in your group therapy sessions,” he said. “You were a standout. Sensitive and gifted in a room of maniacs.”

  I was struggling to place him. But I really only remembered Dr. Chang, and some of the others—Dr. Rain, who taught science; Dr. Abigail, who did art therapy. There was a music teacher, young and very pretty. I remembered her, but not her name. I had no memory of Langdon at all. Really, in all the years we’d spent together at Sacred Heart, wouldn’t I have remembered before now? But was there something? Something deep within me that remembered him and had been drawn to him because of the memories? I don’t know.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again.

  Now it was his turn to stare, the shovel in his hand. I waited for him to say something else. But he walked away from the grave then. As scared as I was, part of me was grieving, too. I’d trusted him and cared about him. Why is it that no one you love ever seems to stay?

  When he came back, he had a gun. It didn’t look right in his hand. He was the kind of guy to carry a book, a laptop, a pen, not a semiautomatic.

  “You killed her because she discovered your secret,” he said flatly. “You dug her grave. Then, in despair, you killed yourself and fell in with her. That’s how I found you. That’s what I’ll tell the police, and they’ll believe me. I’ll tell them that I’ve been watching you, following you for days, because I’ve been so worried.”

  It would work. It really would. It was a perfectly logical story, fit right together when all my lies were revealed. It would make a fitting end to a tragic, titillating tale. Everyone loves a good murder-suicide.

  “Don’t do this,” I said. “Please. We can both walk away from this, all of us can. Nothing has happened yet that can’t be fixed.”

  “You confided in me that you had killed your mother,” he went on, blankly, almost trancelike. “That you let your father go to jail to protect you.”

  “Is that what this is about?”

  “Your father is a friend of mine,” he said haughtily. “We’re close.”

  Was that true? I had no way to know. Was my father pulling strings from behind bars?

  “This is not going to work,” I said. “It’s almost impossible to get away with a crime these days. The forensic science is too advanced. They’ll see the trajectory of the bullet. You’ll get caught and go to jail. You might even get the electric chair.”

  I know I sounded rambling and desperate. And I saw with despair that he was beyond listening.

  “If my father has anything to do with this,” I said, “he’s using you. Just like you used Luke. Just like you’re using me. We collude with our predators, Professor. Wasn’t it you who taught me that?”

  He lifted the gun on me, and I closed my eyes. When the shot rang out, I wondered what it would be like to die, how long it would take, if it would hurt, what was waiting for me on the other side …

  It was silent then for a long time, and finally I opened my eyes. I saw Langdon’s arm dangling over the side of the grave. Inspecting myself, I realized that I hadn’t been shot at all. Then a small white face, as pale and round as a moon, was floating above me.

  Luke looked down at me and smiled. I could see that he held Langdon’s shovel.

  “I hit him,” he said. He held up the heavy shovel. “With this. He was going to kill you.”

  “Good job,” I said, for lack of anything better to say.

  As glad as I was to see Luke, as glad as I was to see anyone, there was something unsettling about him standing so high above me, holding a shovel.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. He dropped the shovel and started rummaging in his pack.

  I shook my head and said, “Can you get us out of here?”

  He looked up from his pack, and he gave me a grim little nod. “I’ll get you out. I brought a rope.”

  “Do you see my pack up there?” I asked. “I need my phone.”

  He didn’t answer me.

  “Did you bring anyone with you, Luke? Did you call the police?”

  “No,” he said. “I came alone.”

  “Luke,” I said. “Where’s the gun?”

  He looked over the side at me. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s my friend,” I said. “She needs help. I need you to find that phone before you get me out of here.”

  “Okay,” he said, and he walked off.

  “How did you get here?” I called, just to keep him talking. The cold air was starting to feel painful now that I didn’t have adrenaline pumping through my blood.

  “Same as always,” he said. He was still out of sight, and it was making me nervous. I got to work on that foothold again. “I rode my bike,” he was saying. He sounded far away. I looked up to see Langdon’s lifeless arm still dangling over the side.

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “You know I have,” he said. He was closer now. The sky was clearing and I could see a few stars. Beck was moaning, muttering something I couldn’t understand. I put my hand on her head, offered her some soothing words … “It’s okay … we’re okay … we’re going home.”

  Then Luke was looming again, this time holding my phone. “You were in my room today, in my crawl space.”

  I didn’t say anything. This was not the time f
or a tantrum.

  “Right?” he said, when I stayed silent.

  “We have a lot to talk about,” I said. I put on my best Dr. Cooper voice, soothing but firm. She always has such a clear idea about the right things to do and the right order in which to do them. I always admired that about her. “And we’ll do that. But right now we need to get me out of this hole, and call the police.”

  “But I want to talk now,” he said.

  He knelt down and I saw that he was binding Langdon, which probably wasn’t a bad idea. But I needed that rope, or the phone. And he obviously wasn’t in any hurry to deliver on either one.

  “How about we play a game?” asked Luke.

  Oh my God, really? I struggled to keep my composure, but the stress was starting to mount. I looked up to see that the gun lay on the edge of the grave and he had his hand on it. For fuck’s sake. I leaned against the wall and drew in a deep breath as I dug my toe into the hole I’d made, and started, as subtly as possible, pushing it in deeper. The dirt was cold and hard, and my progress felt painfully slow.

  “What kind of game?” I tried to keep my voice steady. I didn’t want him to know how close to the edge of my endurance I was. Or that I was scared. So far, I’d never beaten him at any game we played.

  “Twenty questions,” he said.

  “And if I win?”

  “Then I’ll help you and your friend out of the hole. And you can call the police.”

  “And if you win?”

  He smiled a little, and his eyes were shiny and dark with mischief.

  “Maybe I’ll kill you all and fill in this hole, then go home and climb back into my bed. They’ll think I was locked in my room all night. The only two people who know I can get out are right here.”

  I didn’t answer, just kept pressing my foot in, scraping and pushing, scraping and pushing.

  “They’ll figure it out, Luke.”

  He shrugged. “Or maybe I’ll help you anyway. If I win, I get to do whatever I want. Because you know what? I never get to do what I want. Do you know that? Kids never get to do what they want. It sucks.”

  He was as sullen and whiny as any eleven-year-old. But he was fucking nuts, and that’s what made him dangerous—like those little African kids, high on drugs, carrying machine guns. Crazy, drugged, and violent as sin; it was a nasty, terrifying combination. I felt the rise of bile—it might have been anger or it might have been fear. So divorced from my emotions was I that I couldn’t tell which. But even so, there was an undercurrent of empathy for him. I understood him. I was him—if no longer, then once a long time ago.

  “That’s cool,” I said. “I get it. I’m not that much older than you, you know. I’ve been through all the same shit.”

  “I know,” he said. “Believe me. I know everything about you, Lana.”

  And here I thought I was so good at keeping secrets, at hiding myself away from the world. Beck, Luke, Langdon … they had all figured me out.

  “You can call me Lane,” I said.

  “Lane,” he said, as though he were testing it out on the air. “That’s a really gay name.”

  “So,” I said. “How do you want to play? You think of something and I guess what it is?”

  “Don’t you know how to play twenty questions?” he asked.

  “It’s been a while,” I said. No, I’d never played twenty questions.

  “I’ll change the rules a little,” he said. “You can ask any question. It doesn’t have to be just yes-or-no answers. We don’t have all night.”

  He sat on the edge of the grave, dangling his legs over the edge, kicking his heels against the dirt. He gazed up at the sky and seemed to be thinking. In the moonlight, he was an angel in a parka. If he’d sprouted wings and flown away, I wouldn’t have been surprised. “Okay. I’m thinking of something.”

  I watched his face. It was perfectly still, carved from stone. But there was a flicker of something. I knew how lonely he was. I knew because I had been lonely like that, too, all my life.

  “Just get me out of here,” I said.

  “No,” he said. He was cool and certain. “Play with me.”

  30

  “Is it a person, place, or thing?”

  “It’s a person,” he said. “But it’s also a state of being.”

  “Male or female?”

  He gave me a look. How ironic that I would ask, his face seemed to say. “Male. That’s two questions,” he said.

  Beck said something unintelligible, and I looked down at her.

  “Shut up!” he barked at her.

  I don’t think Luke saw me jump. I knelt down to Beck, and she suddenly seemed so much paler, weaker. She was drugged, probably starved, dehydrated. I put a hand on her and her skin felt cool—that couldn’t be good, right? Shock or something like that? She opened her eyes at my touch and all I saw on her face was fear; it opened something up in me. I realized how deeply fucked we were, and bit back panic. The brain seizes in panic, and I was already out of my league. She reached for me and whispered something, but I could barely hear her.

  “That’s cheating!” he said. He held the gun now and I could see that he was getting angry.

  “She doesn’t even know what’s happening.”

  “Yes,” he said petulantly. “She does.”

  I stood to face him, and I could feel Beck’s hand on my leg. “Young or old?” I asked.

  “All ages,” he said.

  “Look,” I said. “Can we just end this? Why are you doing this?”

  “Three, four, and five,” he said. His kicking grew rhythmic, and he was biting on the edge of his thumb. I began pressing my toe into the earth again. It felt like I was getting deeper. A few more inches, I thought, and I might be able to lift myself out of the grave. I thought I heard something on the air then. Was it a siren? The wind picked up and a light snow started to fall. I could feel Beck shivering. Were we going to die out here tonight?

  “Do I know someone like this?” I asked.

  “Quite a few, I’d say.”

  “Am I like this?” A little deeper.

  “You are, but you don’t know it.”

  “Are you?”

  “Yes.”

  Honestly? I had no idea what he was getting at. I mean, really, I was intellectually shut down. All I could think about was getting Beck and myself out of the hell we were in. Luke cocked his head, seemed to be listening to the night. I used his diverted attention to kick harder at the foothold and my toe slipped in deeper to the frozen ground. My hands were shaking from cold and fear.

  “Where do men like this live?”

  “Everywhere,” he said. “Anywhere.”

  Beck was tugging at my jean leg but I was ignoring her. If I looked at her again, I was going to fall apart and risk Luke’s anger.

  “Don’t look at her,” he said. “Look at me.”

  His ankle was well within my reach. But if I pulled him into the grave, we’d all be stuck. The flakes falling from the sky were sharp and cold. The snow had already started to stick to the ground. If I was going to make my move, it would have to be one motion. I’d have to step up hard, grab his ankle, and push myself up and pull myself out at the same time. Maybe he’d be too surprised to shoot. How much experience could Luke have with guns?

  I couldn’t even think of another question to ask. Luke and I locked eyes.

  “Do you give up?” he asked.

  “No,” I said.

  I heard a moan from up above, and Luke looked toward the sound. Then he bounced up out of sight. Langdon’s arm slowly disappeared as he was dragged away from the edge.

  “Luke,” I called, but he didn’t answer.

  After a second I heard an ugly thwack. Then again. The sound of it made my stomach turn, but Beck was pulling at me harder. I bent down to her. This time I heard her. Her breath was hot in my ear as she whispered the answer.

  I felt myself reel back from her. But even in my utter disbelief, I knew that what she said was the truth. Part of
me had known it all along.

  When I looked back, Luke was standing above me. He held the shovel in his hand, and there was a fine spray of red across his face and jacket.

  “Next question,” he said.

  I pretended not to notice that he looked like a horror-movie killer standing there, blank, empty, covered with blood. I tried to offer him a loving smile. Isn’t that what we all want, really, deep inside? Just to love and be loved? Well, maybe not everyone.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said. “Langdon used you. I get that none of this is your fault.”

  He made a little noise somewhere deep inside his throat, and for a moment I thought he’d break down with relief. His face did a little wiggle, the corners of his mouth twitching. But then I realized he was laughing.

  “Is that what you think?” he asked. “That he used me? That pathetic gay pedophile? No.”

  I did it in one motion. I dug my foot in hard and lifted myself up high enough to grasp the edge and pull myself up. Luke already had the shovel lifted by the time I landed on the slick ground, but I rolled away before he could bring it down.

  It landed with a thud, spraying dirt and sharp cold flakes of snow inches from my head. But I was up quickly. And in the next second, I was diving at him, throwing all my weight in his direction. I caught him by the waist and we both fell hard to the ground, Luke issuing a thick groan when my body hit his.

  I had his wrists. The shovel had fallen out of reach, and the gun sat uselessly on the edge of the grave. He struggled at first, writhing beneath me, issuing a strangled yell of rage. But I held him down, and after a while he started to sob. Big, gulping, pathetic sobs.

  “You’re right,” he said. “He did use me. He molested me and used me to get to you.”

  “I know the answer,” I said, still pinning him.

  “No, you don’t,” he wailed.

  “I do. The answer is ‘brother.’ You’re my brother.”

  He drew in a little gasp, all his fake wailing drying up instantly.

  “She told you,” he said. He narrowed his eyes at me. “You cheated. You didn’t win.”

  “No,” I lied. “I knew it all along.”