In the Blood

by Lisa Unger

  Now, years later, she opened the door wide for me, and I stepped inside. I’d always felt welcomed here, as though I belonged. And that’s because I did belong among the murderous and psychotic. They were my peeps.

  She walked into the kitchen and brewed me a cup of tea—peppermint with honey, just the way I liked it.

  I sat at the table, in the same place where I sat on the day of my interview. It seemed like a lifetime ago. But it was just a little over a month. I was literally a different person then. I had sat there, presenting myself as a girl. Today, I was fully dwelling in my male self.

  I felt real and right for the first time in my life. I had dwelled among women to hide myself, to heal myself. It was so much easier to be a girl, so much sweeter, and truer and closer to the heart and the spirit. I had embraced and accepted that part of my psyche, my anima. And I had let it go. And I was a stronger person for it.

  “I just wanted to talk to her,” she said. She knew why I had come and she got straight to the point. “Your mother.”

  She looked down at her neatly manicured nails. “It was so crazy for her to keep him, your father, just because of you. They stopped loving each other years earlier. And I had a troubled child, too.”

  My mother could not have been more different from Rachel. She was fiery—big emotions, big temper, big love. (Like someone else we know.) How would she have reacted to Rachel’s visit? To her pleas? Not well, I’m guessing. She’d have lost it. In her fights with my father, she was by far the one that blew the hottest, the one who might resort to violence first.

  “But she didn’t see it that way,” Rachel said.

  My mother let Rachel into the house. She was civil at first, but things got ugly quickly.

  “We started to argue,” Rachel said. “We were both angry; he’d made promises to both of us. We each had a child with him. She called me a whore, and I’ll admit that I slapped her.”

  I could envision the scene, see my mother reeling back from the blow. What would she do? She’d strike back. Of course, she did. Then she ran upstairs to get away, to lock herself in the bedroom to call the police.

  “But I got to her first. We struggled for the phone she had in her hand, and she ran with it out into the hallway. Your father was supposed to be there. We were planning on talking to her together. But he was late. He was chronically, forever late for everything when it came to us. Because he was always with you and her.”

  There it was, the bitterness.

  “You act like my mother was the other woman,” I said. “She wasn’t.”

  We were none of us innocent in this. We all had our roles to play. But of all of us, my mother was the most wronged. If I’d been normal, if my father had been faithful, none of this ever would have happened. I wouldn’t hear her maligned.

  “It was an accident,” said Rachel. “In our battle, she tripped over the runner in the hall. The corner slipped from beneath her, and she fell over the railing.”

  She took in a little gasp and began to cry. Silently, stoically, the tears fell.

  “It was an accident, Lane. Please believe me. It has haunted me. Not a day goes by that I don’t look back in regret.”

  And I could see that it was true. Looking at her, I saw how hollowed out she was. I thought it was Luke who had turned her into the small, careful, joyless woman she seemed to be. And surely he played his part, but it was so much more than that. Guilt, if you live to carry it, is a terrible burden. It weighs you down, stoops your shoulders, pushes you right into the ground.

  But her sorrow, her regret? It didn’t mean much. Her actions had led directly to my mother’s death. She had let my father go to prison, was clearly willing to let him die for a crime he didn’t commit. She wasn’t that sorry. Not sorry enough to own up.

  “Your father came home then,” she said. She reached her hand over the table to me. But I didn’t move a muscle. “But you weren’t supposed to come home. You were supposed to be late at school.”

  I didn’t answer her. She nodded and kept her hand where it was, an open invitation.

  “I wanted to call the police, to face the consequences. But I couldn’t. What would happen to my special-needs son. I had no family, no husband. No, we decided that he’d hide the body, act as though she’d run off with her lover. She was having an affair, too, you know?”

  “Sure, trash the victim,” I said. “That’s always a good defense. The slut got what she deserved, right? Meanwhile, nothing was ever proved.”

  She bowed her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  I heard the clock ticking in the kitchen. She was an analog girl in a digital age. I had really liked her a lot.

  “I had to take care of Luke, and your father had to take care of you. We were thinking of both of you. I know she would have wanted your father to take care of you, Lane. Our plan was to wait until things blew over. Then we were going to be together, all of us. We were going to be a family.”

  “Right,” I said. “The world’s most fucked-up family.”

  “No family is perfect,” she said stiffly. “We all have our problems.”

  There was more, so I waited.

  “Luke struggled even more after his father went away,” she said. “The older he got, I’ve told you, the worse he was. We went from school to school, from doctor to doctor. He’d been diagnosed and dosed for several different disorders. Nothing ever helped. You know the drill; you’ve lived it. I was literally at the end of my rope when I got a call from Langdon Hewes.”

  She leaned back a little, looked up at the ceiling. Then she wiped the tears from her face.

  “He said he’d met your father when you were boarding at the school in Florida. They’d maintained a correspondence, he said, and he’d been keeping an eye on you at Sacred Heart College—unbeknownst to you, of course. He told me what you’d done, how you were hiding from the events of your past. He asked me to bring Luke to Fieldcrest. Langdon thought it could help Luke.”

  “But Luke is beyond helping,” I said.

  And Rachel nodded. “It wasn’t long, I don’t think, before Langdon was in his thrall. Luke sniffed out his obsession with you almost immediately.”

  It was true that Langdon had an ongoing correspondence with my father. Detective Ferrigno had told me as much. But he’d said it seemed fairly benign. He said the notes from my father simply asked about my progress, expressed his hope that Langdon would look out for me and for Luke, if he could. It was a normal correspondence between a concerned parent and his child’s college adviser, someone who is a recognized expert in cases like Luke’s and mine.

  Except that it wasn’t normal at all, was it? Langdon had used my father’s disconnection from Luke and me to worm his way into our lives. He had sought to bring us together, for reasons I didn’t quite understand. Maybe he did, in some twisted way, think he was trying to help us. But only so far as it served his desire to be “there for me,” to get me to “let him in”—what he said he wanted in the woods. And Rachel, probably also acting out of desperation, had let him use us all. But I didn’t feel the need to say any of this. I was just there to listen.

  “Over the years, Luke had grown to hate you,” said Rachel. “He blamed you for your father going to jail. Of course, I tried to shield him from all of it. But as he grew older, he found things out on his own.

  “We thought—Langdon and I—if he could get to know you, we could work through that. I thought it would be good for both of you to get to know each other. I thought it might help him and you. Hence the ad and Langdon’s putting it in your hands.”

  She made it all sound so innocent and benign. It was anything but that. Langdon never had Luke’s best interest or mine at heart, just the fulfillment of his own desires. Why didn’t she seem to realize that, even now? And was she underplaying her part in all of this? She couldn’t have thought any of this was good or right or healthy.

  “It was Langdon’s idea,” I said. Of course, it was. He was the one pulling
the strings—at first.

  “I don’t know how quickly Luke figured it all out. I didn’t realize how complicated things had gotten. They were running a whole other agenda that I had nothing to do with. Luke was raging all the time; I had no idea why. I was locking him in his room every night just because I had no idea what he would do after I fell asleep. It wasn’t until that night that I realized he’d been sneaking out.”

  “And what about Beck? Why did they take her?” I asked because it was something I’d been puzzling over. I was really just thinking aloud, not imagining she had an answer. But what she said was surprisingly insightful.

  “I think Luke would have done anything to hurt you. And Langdon just saw her as a threat to his relationship with you. Ultimately, neither one of them saw her even as a person. For Langdon, she was an obstacle. For Luke, she was just a game piece.”

  With Langdon in a coma and Luke supposedly catatonic, the details of who was using who and why were elusive. I asked her what she thought.

  “I honestly just don’t know,” she said. She was the embodiment of exhaustion. Just looking at her made me want to lie down and go to sleep for a thousand years.

  I couldn’t help but think about my father. Two sons, by two different women, both with mental illness. My mother and Rachel were physically and energetically so different. What was it about each of them that drew him?

  I remembered what she had told me about the mental illness in her family—her father’s battles with depression, her brother’s suicide.

  Was it the damage in each of these women that attracted him? My father was a man who liked to solve a problem, to fix the damaged things. He liked to feel needed. Maybe Rachel and my mother exuded a kind of scent that attracted him. They needed his stability, and he needed their chaos. Yin and yang.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I asked her. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  So many years had passed, and my father was so close to the lethal injection. Rachel was just about to get away with murder. I always knew that part of my father’s money would go to the other child. He’d told me himself long ago. It was something that I had pushed away. I didn’t want to know about them. Rachel was around the corner from a big payday.

  She sagged across the table, dropped her head in her hand.

  “Because I’m tired, Lane. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want your father to die because of something for which I am ultimately responsible. I can’t lie my way through another day. I can’t help Luke. I thought I could, that’s why I kept this secret so long. But I see now. This incident has proven to me that he has grown beyond me. One day he’ll be bigger than me. One day, when it’s the most advantageous for him, he’ll kill me.”

  I didn’t say anything. It was true. Part of me wanted to comfort her, but I held myself back. There was a hard knock on the door then.

  “Hollows PD,” came a booming voice. “Open up.”

  She looked up. “You already knew,” she said. “You called them.”

  “Are you ready to tell your truth?” I asked.

  She gave a faint nod, had the pale, trembling look of fear. She grabbed my hand. This time I held hers tight, gave her a comforting squeeze. I know how soul wrenching it is to face the truth, the past, everything you’ve sought to hide. It’s vertigo, standing on the edge and looking over, imagining the fall, the impact. But at first, it feels like flying.

  “Will you take care of him, Lane?”

  “I will,” I said. “I’ll take care of him. I promise.”

  33

  Langdon Hewes died. It was written in the headlines of The Hollows Journal: HEWES DIES FROM ANEURYSM. The words, so stark on the page, so devoid of all the layers of incident that led to them, made me angry. I folded the paper and tossed it to the floor, where it lay soft and harmless in the morning sunlight.

  And even though I have no reason to wonder, I do. Langdon’s injuries were extensive, but the last I’d heard he was showing some improvement—some movement, some speech. Then, suddenly, he died. Some would say that his death was a blessing. That’s what people say when something has gone on too long for their comfort. It was a blessing. He’s at peace now. It’s for the best. Of course, none of us knows if that’s really true. What awaits Langdon on the other side? Who can say?

  It is September now, autumn in The Hollows. It’s still warm outside, and the days still seem long and lazy. Beck and I are back at school. She’s redoing her last semester. And I am beginning my master’s work in abnormal child psychology in the graduate program at Sacred Heart, working at Fieldcrest as part of my study. My mother wanted me to help people, and I want that, too.

  It’s the work you were born to do, Beck always quips. Psycho.

  It had been an Indian summer day like this when Elizabeth went missing. I still think about her and how her life was cut short. Her case was never reopened, and the ruling of accidental death still stands. Once it was understood that I had nothing to do with Beck’s disappearance, there was less reason to take a fresh look at the events of that night. Another loss for the world, another beautiful girl gone. But was she a victim of fate or a victim of violence? I have tried to remember that night. Did we fight? Did she somehow know about me? Did she run away from me that night and not her boyfriend, as some witnesses claim? I pray that my dreams of her crying are just that, and not memories. I do know I never would have hurt her, not on purpose. Which doesn’t make anyone feel better, does it? Death by accident is as cruel as murder would have been, just as merciless.

  Speaking of bad intentions: Luke still resides at a mental health facility about forty minutes from The Hollows where I visit him every other week. And today is visiting day.

  Beck has already left for class. So I shower and get dressed. She was angry with me this morning, picked a fight over who was supposed to stop at the store yesterday and get the coffee. We were forced to drink the dregs from yesterday, because whoever it was (Beck) forgot to run the errand. She’s always mad at me on visiting day, consistently creates some kind of drama. She doesn’t want me to visit with Luke, and she hates that I consider it an obligation.

  He’s my brother, Beck. Who is left to care for him?

  Um, his father.

  My father can’t even care for himself.

  Why is any of this your problem? Your brother tried to kill you. Your father might as well have murdered your mother even if he wasn’t the one to push her. This is nuts. How are we ever going to have a normal life?

  We’re not, I told her. Nothing about our life will be normal. Ever. If you wanted normal, you picked the wrong guy.

  She left in anger, which she had promised before that she would never do again. But we break our promises, don’t we? All the time.

  I head downstairs, hop into my new hybrid, and putt-putt out of town. I wanted a muscle car, one of those new Chargers, to connect with my newfound maleness. But I guess, ultimately, I’m too crunchy, too concerned about the planet. Beck and I shopped for a hybrid and wound up with a Prius, which looks more like an orthopedic shoe than a car. But, fine. See, I told her as I signed the paperwork. This is normal. We’re buying a car.

  Fuck off, she said. But she smiled. Who knew that beneath all the tats and piercings and bad attitudes, my girl just wanted the things all girls are supposed to want. She wants to be loved, to be safe, to have a home and a car. And she wants those things with me. I can give her some of it.

  I cross the town limits and wind through the outlying suburban developments. Eventually, those give way to farmland. Then I’m heading through a thick, wooded region. And the trees around me are starting their show of gold, orange, red, and brown.

  I wish I could say that the sight of it fills me with joy, a sense of peace or renewal. But that’s not how I feel. Let’s face it, not that much has changed. I am still in therapy, still need medication to control my various problems. Beck and I … well, our relationship is exactly what it has always been. It’s intensely loving, but we still
have the same degree of heat, the same arguments that escalate instead of wind down. My coldness sometimes makes her cry.

  I think of her parents’ relationship, stormy, on-again, off-again. I think of my parents, often resorting to violence. How will Beck and I learn to love each other differently? We both know we have to try, and we are trying. But it’s not all hot sex and hybrids.

  At least I’m whole, fully realized, as Dr. Cooper is quick to remind me. I’m not hiding. I’m not lying. And I have made my home in The Hollows. I feel like it has closed around me, ensconced and protected me. I feel like I can live a real life here. Untethered from the past, I can walk into the future.

  I approach the grounds of the juvenile facility that houses Luke. It tries hard not to look like what it is. The landscaping is lovely. The gates manage to seem ornately decorative, even though I know them to be electrified—like a mansion (for maniacs) or a country club (for nutcases). And the man who greets me at the gate is armed. He knows me, this aging guard with his slick gray hair and formidable paunch. He waves me in, and I feel a familiar lurch in my stomach. I hate this place. And I have grown to hate my brother.

  My father is ill. He has liver cancer and very little time to live. I have taken the trip to Florida to see him after he was released from prison and admitted to a hospital not far from where he spent the last seven years. The visit, without my going into too many details, was awkward. He apologized for all of his mistakes.

  I’m sorry, son. I can’t count the ways I failed you and your mother.

  Dr. Cooper urges a journey toward forgiveness. It’s a concept that I don’t really understand. What does it mean to forgive someone? It only means that you release the anger, the hatred. It doesn’t mean that you’re saying it’s all right now, or that you’ve forgotten the wrong. It just means that you’ve drained the boil. When you touch it, it doesn’t hurt as much. That’s all.

  But I am not angry. I do not hate my father. I miss my mother, every day. I wish everything about our life together had been different. But I do not blame him, or her, or even Rachel. Really, I blame myself. Maybe if I had been a different kind of child, they would have had a different kind of life. Dr. Cooper says we need to work on my thinking.