by Lisa Unger
“I’m your half brother,” he said. He almost spat it at me. The tears left his voice and it was suddenly flat as glass. “We don’t have the same mother. Your mother is dead. He killed her because he wanted to be with my mother. But instead he went to jail—because of you.”
I felt like he was slashing me with razors. Every word out of his mouth had sliced me, too deep to hurt but not too deep to bleed.
“You little fucker,” I hissed at him.
Then he started to sob again, wailing something about wanting to know his father, wanting to go home to his mother, and how he hated me, hated me, hated me. And I saw that he was just a little boy. And then, because I’m a weakling and a fool, I started to feel bad for him.
Then, “If you’d kept your mouth shut, we’d all have been together. That was the plan.”
Another slash across my heart. I started to feel myself weaken—physically, emotionally. That drain opened up inside and everything started to pour out of me—my strength, my fight, my will to live. My world was too ugly. Why would anyone want to live there? When Luke twisted his hands away from my grip, I had no inner resources to marshal. Even the sound of Beck calling weakly from her grave wasn’t enough to put the fight back in me. It took nothing for him to flip me over and straddle my chest. Then he closed his hands around my neck and started to squeeze.
Was it true? Had my father killed my mother so that he could be with Rachel and Luke? If he’d gotten away with it, what had he planned for me?
Luke wasn’t very strong, so he wasn’t completely cutting off my air. But it still hurt, and that biological imperative to survive kicked in. I was gasping, seeing stars, and finally the lack of oxygen motivated me to start prying his little fingers from my throat. But he had a death grip.
“Luke, that’s enough.”
I wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from. But then it rang out again, louder, more stern.
“That’s enough!” It was Rachel, her voice a shout that echoed off the trees. “Let your brother go.”
He released me and I sucked in air, felt the blessed filling of my lungs, and rolled over to start coughing and coughing.
He rose to face his mother, who approached us slowly. She looked around the scene, her jaw open in naked awe. “What have you done?”
She reached for his shoulders and gave him a little shake. “What have you done?” Her voice was a shriek, an absolute wail of horror and despair.
But Luke didn’t have a chance to answer, because those distant sounds grew suddenly louder. There were voices and lights in the trees, the whopping blades of a helicopter overhead, and suddenly our clearing was filled with a bright light from above. I crawled my way over to the grave where Beck lay, and she was so still and so white at its bottom. And Langdon was lying in a dark circle of blood.
My father would have said that boys don’t cry. But I did. For the first time since my mother died, I cried my heart out.
31
Cold still clung to the region as I left my building and climbed on my bike. Even as the end of February approached, the frigid temperatures held on tight. There was no sign of warmth. The groundhog saw his shadow and quickly retreated to his burrow. There were no crocuses pushing their way up through the persistent cover of white. It was frigid and gray as I rode my bike the short distance from my new condo in town to the Coopers’ house.
I was headed to the first of three sessions we would have before the Skype conversation I’d agreed to have with my father. Dr. Cooper wanted to prepare me, to get my head straight, my questions in order. She didn’t want me to be blindsided. I’d asked her to be present for the actual conversation and she’d agreed. Isn’t it amazing how much power our parents have over us? I was afraid even of his image on a screen.
I didn’t want to go to Florida to see my father. And Dr. Cooper said I didn’t have to, that it wasn’t my responsibility to give him what he wanted. But I had questions, a lot of them. And I needed answers. So I agreed to a Skype conversation that would take place in Jones Cooper’s office, a place I would never have cause to visit again. I didn’t want to do it in my new apartment, the one I shared now with Beck, or in Dr. Cooper’s space. These were both safe havens where I was free, finally, to be myself and I wasn’t willing to give either of them over to the man who killed my mother, even if he was my father.
News interest in Beck and me had faded, though for a while we were mobbed by reporters when we left our new apartment. So I was grateful for the quiet street as I sailed down the hill. You can imagine the coverage: BAD SEED AND PSYCHO PROFESSOR KIDNAP COED! MISSING GIRL RESCUED BY CROSS-DRESSING BOYFRIEND! It was endless—we couldn’t turn on a television or pick up a newspaper without reading more of the story that was gripping the area and the country. Beck was constantly Googling us, and reading all the insane things people were writing and saying. Naturally, she thought it was a gas—or she pretended to think that, just to feel like her old self again.
But until the trials started, if they ever did, interest in us had died down. I never gave an interview, never reacted to the mob, kept my head down. I wore the same boring outfit every day, my androgyny uniform: jeans, white shirt, black peacoat, ski hat, Doc Martens. There was never an interesting picture of me to publish. And Beck behaved herself, too. Which surprised me, because I expected her to lap it up. But she was too shattered to have any fun yet. She still had nightmares, was taking an antidepressant. She’d started sessions with Dr. Cooper.
I’d left her behind, wrapped in a blanket on my couch, sulking. She didn’t want me to talk to my father, wasn’t happy with Dr. Cooper’s prep sessions either.
“What can he say to you?” she asked. “It can only set you back.”
“I’m fine,” I lied. “I’ll be fine.”
But the truth was, neither of us was exactly fine. We were getting there, maybe, but it would be a while. Lynne, Beck’s mother, was staying with us until Beck seemed “more like herself.” She and Frank totally accepted us, which surprised me. But they were those type of hippie parents who tried to get behind whatever was going on. Frank was a bit aloof with me, but polite and respectful. Honestly, it’s the most you can ask of men sometimes. They’re so wound up, so buried beneath layers of “boys don’t cry,” and “pussy,” and “man up,” that they don’t even know how to feel about anything. I should know.
Me and Beck? I don’t know. It’s weird. But it’s definitely love.
“I always knew you were a boy,” she told me. “Maybe at first I thought you were a lesbian. But I never thought you were just a regular girl.”
“I never thought you were a regular girl either,” I told her. And she found that funny.
“I wanted you right away,” she’d said.
She was a little angry that I couldn’t say the same. So bound up, wound up, repressed, confused was I that I didn’t even know what I wanted, if I wanted anything at all. I was a twenty-two-year-old, mentally unstable virgin, with gender confusion. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. I didn’t even want anyone to stand too close to me. If anything, Beck’s physical presence had made me extremely uncomfortable. But, for me, maybe that ranks as attraction.
What I could tell her was that I’d always loved her, which made her happier. And it was true.
“I’d still have loved you if you were a girl,” she said. “All I see is you.”
I don’t know if that’s true for me, but I love the way Beck loves. If everyone loved like she did, the world would be a better place.
As I rode my bike through town, I was thinking about Luke, as I had every day since I learned he was my brother. They carted him off screaming that night, and I could still hear him at night after I fell asleep. IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyou, he’d yelled into the night. I didn’t know if he meant me or his mother or the world. Maybe he meant all of us.
That night, as the cavalry arrived, I was the only one who could explain what had happened when Detective Ferrigno came on the scene. So I told him—ev
erything. I told him who I was (he didn’t seem too surprised—either he already knew, or he was one of those guys that had seen everything). I told him about my panicked flight to Luke’s and why, what I had found there, and why I had come to this place in the woods.
I told him about Langdon, and how I thought he might either be obsessed with or associated with my father. That he had been obsessed with me. Finally, I told him and the other officers about Luke. It all sounded totally crazy, of course. And the look on Detective Ferrigno’s face, a kind of mystified, angry frown, told me that he wasn’t quite buying the story. They took Beck and me to the hospital, but a police officer was stationed outside my door. It was a few days before they decided that I was victim and not perpetrator.
“Don’t tell them anything without a lawyer,” said Rachel as I was being led away. Which I thought was a strange thing to say. I couldn’t answer her; I couldn’t even look at her. Were the things Luke said true? “Your father wouldn’t want you to do that.”
She stood watching me as the paramedics walked me down the path toward the ambulance that waited. Beck had been airlifted away from me. And I just remember feeling nothing but that familiar numbness. I turned to look at Rachel one last time, and I had a strange thought. What does she know?
I passed the Kahns’ house on the way to Dr. Cooper’s. There was a “For Sale” sign in the yard, and the place had a strange air of desertion. I knew that Luke had disappeared into a kind of catatonic state. (Yeah, right. Everyone else seemed to believe that, but I knew that little freak better.) He had been committed to a mental health facility about forty minutes from The Hollows. Langdon was in a coma, having suffered catastrophic brain injury from Luke’s blows with the shovel. A full recovery was not expected. How do I feel about this? It sucks. I hate Langdon; I miss him. I wish he was here to talk all this through with. I hope he lives so that he can be punished, and to answer all the million questions that I have.
So Beck and I were the only ones able to tell the tale. And neither of us really knew the whole story, just our pieces. And Rachel was playing the suffering mother, completely innocent in the whole matter. She was, she claimed, as mystified as everyone else about how Langdon and Luke connected and conspired to torture me, and why. Her decision to move to The Hollows was just for Fieldcrest; neither she nor Luke had any idea I was here, hiding from my ugly past. Yeah, sure. I don’t believe her. Jung didn’t believe in coincidence, and neither do I. What he believed in was synchronicity: the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, and yet are experienced as occurring together in some meaningful way. In other words, the universe conspires—our minds, ideas are linked, suggesting a larger framework, a kind of neural web where we are all connected. I’m not so sure about that. But people conspire, that I know. Especially people like Luke.
The Kahn home was now behind me. And even though I was just a few blocks from Dr. Cooper’s, I found myself turning around.
After I left her alone in the woods that night she disappeared, Beck sat crying. (Would she ever forgive me? I really don’t know.) Eventually, she grew cold, calmed down, and started to pull herself together. I hated you, she said. I was going back to tell everyone that you were a boy. I was going to set your whole life on fire. Would she have done it? Probably not. Beck burns hot but cools down fast.
She heard Luke approach and she thought that I had come back for her.
“He was small, just a kid,” she said. “But he looked so much like you, it was stunning. How could you not have seen it?”
She knew so much about the case—everything really. She said that she’d suspected all along that there was something strange about me. That’s why she liked me. Once she knew about my aunt, it was just a quick Google search to find her blog. And once she knew who Bridgette was, it was pretty easy to figure out who I was. She read all the books, the articles. She’d seen all the news documentaries, the made-for-television movies. She knew immediately who Luke was when she saw him. She knew that he was my father’s other son.
“But he’s not like you,” she said. “He’s heartless; I saw that right away. He’s evil.”
But he had approached her sweetly. “Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re upset?”
“What do you want?” she’d said. “Who are you?”
She tried to walk past him when he didn’t answer her. But he followed her. When she started to run, he gave chase. “He was laughing,” she said. “It was just this little-boy giggle in the dark night. It was nightmarish.” In her mounting panic, she lost her footing and fell hard.
“When I pulled myself up,” she said, “Langdon was ahead of me. And Luke was behind.”
“He doesn’t love you,” Langdon said. “He can’t. He belongs to me.”
He caught up to her fast, and hit her with something she didn’t see. After that, things came back only in her nightmares—dark, fairy-tale memories of being carried through the woods, Langdon sticking a needle in her arm, Luke sitting inside the mine shaft, staring at her. He brought her candy and water; she remembered that. She lived on mini Mars bars. Why did they keep her like that?
“I think they were enjoying it,” she said. “Like a kid keeps a lizard or a frog.”
Dr. Cooper thinks I should worry less about the how and why of things. How did Rachel and Luke find me? How were they connected to Langdon? What kind of an agenda were they running? What did it have to do with my father? Who was manipulating who? She says, for my purposes, it doesn’t matter. But it does. Between Beck’s nightmares and my obsessive thinking, neither one of us may ever sleep again. I felt myself getting more ragged. It was killing me. I had to know the answers; it was part of the reason I needed to talk to my father.
I stopped my bike in the street in front of the Kahns’ house. Rachel’s car wasn’t in the driveway. And I was thinking about that journal. Surely, Rachel had changed the locks. Still, I just happened to have that key in my pocket. What if it still worked?
Dr. Cooper and Sky had both asked me for different reasons to stay away from Rachel Kahn. She can’t give you what you need, Dr. Cooper warned. Everything you need is inside you. Her reasons, her answers, whatever they are … they matter to your psychological wellness not at all. It is only the here and now that matters. You’ve come through tremendous trials, internal and external. And you’ve survived. You’re on the road to healing yourself. Stay focused on the present and the future.
But the past, the present, and the future are not a straight line. They’re all woven together, the strands twisting and turning through each other. How can you walk into the future without understanding your past? I said as much. Your past is important to process, yes, she said. Not Rachel’s. Not Luke’s. Yours.
That desire I had on first meeting Rachel and Luke—I so badly wanted to help, to be there for them. Did something deep inside draw me into their lives? Was there some psychic and/or biological link that attracted me to Luke? When I thought of my time in the Kahns’ home, at their table, it was the most comfortable, most happy I had been in my adult life. I fit into their little union. However twisted and strange that is, it’s true.
I felt my phone vibrating, and I pulled it out and answered without checking the caller ID. Only a few people had the number of this new phone: Beck, my aunt, Dr. Cooper, Detective Ferrigno, and Sky.
“Is this Lane? Lane Crowe?”
It was strange to hear my real name, so long had I hidden behind Lana Granger. It was everywhere now, my real name. I was Lane Crowe, hero, freak, lady boy, transgender poster boy for the bullied, for the gender dysmorphic. I was derided by the gay and lesbian community, the feminists, the Republican pundits. I was the number one most-wanted guest on all the major talk shows—I’d be the biggest hit since the pregnant man was making the rounds. The new cell phone I had was the third I’d had in a month.
“Who’s calling?” I asked, ready to hang up and get a new phone.
“It’s Paul Rod
riguez,” he said. “I worked for your father.”
It was the private eye who had been calling for some time.
“Don’t hang up,” he said quickly. “I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say. The cops won’t listen. They’re sick of me.”
I held the phone to my ear, kept my eyes on the house. “I’m listening.”
“Your dad fired me because I finally figured out who killed your mom. I’m sorry to be so blunt with you. You’ve been through a lot. But it was what happened to you, with that kid, that made me realize. I can’t believe I didn’t see it years ago. She was investigated and cleared. She had an alibi.”
“Okay,” I said. He was dragging it out. “Tell me.”
“I know you’re going to talk to him in a couple of days, right? I want you to know the truth. Maybe you can convince him to save his own life.”
It didn’t take him long when he finally got to the point. As he spoke, I saw Rachel move into the living room window. She lifted a hand to me, gave me a weak smile. My breath was coming out in clouds.
“Thank you, Mr. Rodriguez,” I said.
“Can you talk to him, kid?” he said. “I think he wants to die.”
No, that’s not what he wanted. I finally understood it after all this time. What he wanted was to take care of his children.
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Hey, Mr. Rodriguez, can you do me a favor?”
“Sure,” he said. He sounded like the kind of guy who would do you a favor and never ask for anything in return.
“Can you call Detective Ferrigno at The Hollows PD, and tell him what you told me?”
“Hey, wait a second,” he said. He must have heard something in my tone that he didn’t like. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
But I ended the call and stuck the phone into my pocket, then I walked up the path to Luke’s house.
32
I remembered the shoes. The small pair of practical walking shoes I saw the day my mother died. Not shoes that belonged to a man, but to a woman. The voices downstairs, as I had hid under my bed, were panicked and arguing voices. I had heard my father and a woman. Rachel. It must have been her.
