The Thunderproof Sky

by Loretta Lost

  Because that’s what I am right now.

  A motherfucking beast.

  “Snow,” he says softly, and it warms my heart that he finally recognizes me. I am somehow so relieved to hear him say my name. He even touches me a little differently than he touched me when he thought it was her—and it’s not just because he’s trying to stop me from killing someone. “Shhhhh. It’s okay,” he tells me, pulling me a few steps away from Benja—I mean, my father. This is my actual father? Damn. Not much of an improvement. I really haven’t had much luck with paternal figures.

  “Should I kill him?” I ask Cole, softly. Then, like a child begging for ice cream, “Can I kill him? Please.”

  “No,” he whispers against my ear. “Calm down, Snow. He’s an old man, and he has terminal cancer that has metastasized to his bones. You don’t need to kill him.”

  “You’re right,” I respond, becoming limp in Cole’s arms, relaxing against his body. I lift my hands to squeeze his biceps thankfully. “You’re absolutely right. Cancer is better. I should let him suffer.”

  The man is grunting in pain, and holding his wrist where I ripped the IV out. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “Sophie is your biological daughter,” Cole says, loudly and simply. “We just found out, and she just wanted to meet you before you die.”

  The man’s face changes, and he looks at me in horror and surprise. “I don’t have no fucking daughter.”

  “You do,” Cole responds, still holding me tightly. “Sophie was born a few years after Liam, and from what we understand, your wife never told you. She was afraid to tell you.”

  “That’s bullshit,” the man says, hissing and leaning forward. “I don’t know what the faggot done told y’all, but I ain’t got no daughter. I only make sons, not weak pathetic bitches. I know, because I knocked up a couple whores when I was overseas, on tour. They all had sons. Poor little sluts thought I was going to bring ‘em back to the USA with me—dumb twats. I just left them there to rot—them and their spawn, in their shithole cities that we bombed into the dirt. I left them there to starve.” He laughs like it’s the most hilarious thing ever. He laughs until he starts coughing violently.

  My body becomes tense again. “Cole,” I whisper. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  “I know,” he tells me, pulling me back another step away from the man. “I know, love. Just try to restrain yourself.”

  The man leans back on the pillows. “That Liam is a real piece of work, spreading stories like that about his poor mother. No wonder the old hag can’t stop crying. This must be some kind of sick joke, spinnin’ a yarn about some baby dumped on the side of the road. How much did the faggot pay you to come here and torture an old man? Isn’t cancer enough?”

  “Let’s go,” I beg Cole. “Please. Can we go?”

  “Your wife was upset?” Cole asks him. “She was crying when Liam told her about Sophie?”

  “Yeah, of course she was upset. He was badgering her so much she cried for days. I wanted to smash the boy’s ugly face in. Asking insane questions about how she left a baby to die in the snow.”

  Waves of dizziness cloud my eyes. “Well,” I mumble almost incoherently. “I didn’t die.”

  “You think that was you?” Jim Larson asks, incredulous. “You really want to come into the miserable lives of a bunch of poor old people and cause us hell? What the fuck do you want from us? Money? Attention?”

  The inability to express my anger is killing me. I can’t deal with this. Shifting around in Cole’s arms, I bury my face in his chest. I close my eyes, understanding for the first time why Serena needed me. It’s excruciating being the only person in one body. No one to call upon or switch to when things get hard. How do normal people do it? How do they cope when they have to hear or see things they don’t want to hear or see? How do I leave this place, if Serena isn’t willing to come out and take over? Who is going to step in and protect me? I feel myself slipping slightly, and I try to hold on to consciousness. I want to leave so badly, but I can’t. That might mean letting Sibyl out. And I can’t risk that—not after what she did to Cole. I also can’t risk leaving the body empty and catatonic—not here, not right now.

  Not in this disgusting hospital where they might try to shrink me.

  Serena, where are you?

  I grip Cole tightly for support, trying to remain lucid, trying to remain in this body.

  But I am starting to feel dizzy, and weak, and I don’t know if I can stay. This is not how I normally behave—this is not what I normally do. My job is to kill people like Jim Larson. Or at least try to maim them. How can anyone expect me to stand here and listen to that and do nothing about it?

  “What is wrong with you, man?” someone in the room is saying—with an accent so thick I barely understand him. “This girl shows up claiming to be your daughter, and that’s the way you treat her? Do you have no heart?”

  “You’re going to be dead soon,” says another voice. “We’re all going to be dead soon. There is no time left for cruelty—no time left to act this way.”

  “I wish Sophie was my daughter. I would just give her a hug, and tell her I’m sorry. I would ask for forgiveness, and ask her what her life has been like. Ask her what she does for a living. Ask her how she met her boyfriend. I would want to know what kind of person she is. Does she have any kids? What are her favorite movies or TV shows?”

  I turn slightly, to see two men in the beds adjacent to my father’s, chastising him. They both have accents I can’t place. One might be African, while the other sounds Caribbean. They look horrified at his behavior.

  “I never had kids,” the Caribbean man says. “My wife had a problem with her ovaries. But if someone walked in here while I was on my deathbed, and told me she was my little girl—I would go to my grave a little bit happier, knowing I left something beautiful behind me.”

  “Man, I have a lot of kids,” the African man says. “Too many kids. But do you see any of them here, giving a shit about me? I worked my whole life to feed them, clothe them, send them to school—and now I’m all alone. My kids don’t care, because they always had it easy. They only care about themselves. I wish my daughter would come here and hold my hand, for five seconds.”

  My face softens a little, listening to these sweet old men. I really needed to hear these words—I was starting to believe that everyone was like Benjamin. I look at them in wonder, examining them like they are alien species. It is difficult to process the fact that there are some good fathers in the world. Maybe I just got dealt a crappy hand, and have never been lucky enough to get a good one.

  “Actually,” says the Caribbean man, “I could really use a hug. Here I am dying of lung cancer, and I’ve never smoked a day in my life. How is that fair? For just ten seconds, I would like to pretend that I have a beautiful daughter who cares enough to come see me.” He is opening his arms to me, with a big smile. “What do you say, Sophie?”

  I look at him, frozen in shock for a moment. Then I look at Cole for permission, since his arms are still locked around me to keep me from murdering everyone.

  “Are you calm?” he asks. “She’s gone?”

  My heart sinks a little to know that he doesn’t trust me—he wants her back. He thinks I am only capable of violence, and that I feel no love. I dutifully nod, and resume pretending to be Serena. I have no other choice. He releases me.

  I move over to the stranger with lung cancer, gingerly. I am staring at him with wide eyes that are a little unsettled, a little tortured.

  His arms are still open, and he is still smiling. “I should probably warn you that I smell like death,” he tells me as I approach. “The cancer is eating away at my lungs. I’m rotting from the inside, and I can taste it every time I breathe.”

  I lean over his hospital bed and put my arms around the old man’s shoulders, squeezing him tightly. “You’re not rotten on the inside,” I whisper. “He is. You have a kind soul, and that can never be touched by cancer.”
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  “I haven’t always been good,” he tells me, as though confessing his sins. “I have a lot of regrets.”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. You will always be pure, like freshly fallen snow.”

  He hugs me back, although his grip is weak. I can feel his body shaking with sobs. When I pull away, I see the tears gathered in his eyes, and streaming down his face.

  “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you. You’re an angel.”

  I smile at him sadly. “I wish you had been my father, instead.” Stepping away, I return to Cole, and grasp his hand. He has a very strange expression on my face. “Shall we go?” I ask him.

  “Yes—wait.” He looks at Jim Larson grimly. “I was hoping this meeting would go a little differently. I was hoping for your blessing to ask your daughter to marry me—not that I require your blessing, but it would have been nice to have a little traditional formality.” Cole shakes his head, clenching his fist. “But you’re nothing. You’re worthless. You are lucky you have cancer, because if you didn’t, I would find a far more painful way to end your life. Cancer is too good for you. Cancer is too natural, too kind. I hope you rot in hell.”

  The African man cheers. “You have my blessing, kid.”

  “And mine,” says the Caribbean man. “You two should definitely get married and have lots and lots of babies.”

  This makes something twist inside me.

  Cole gives the men a sad smile. “We will try.”

  “Come on,” I say, pulling on Cole’s hand to leave the room. Once we are out in the halls of the disgusting hospital, I can’t wait to get away from this place. But he refuses to walk quickly with me, and pauses.

  “Scar?” he asks. “You’re okay?”

  I turn to him and nod, biting my lip. “I’ll be more okay after our nice dinner.”

  “You still want to do that?”

  “Hell, yes,” I respond. Then my brow creases. “Cole. It wouldn’t have mattered. This was always my destiny. If my parents had kept me—that man might have treated me almost as bad as Benjamin did. Definitely as bad as Professor Brown. I was always meant to be fucked up like this.”

  “We don’t know that. Maybe your father is not as awful as he seems.”

  “Are you kidding me? I met him for three seconds and I—well, Snow nearly murdered him.”

  “I don’t know, maybe he’s behaving badly because he’s dying? Pain can bring out the worst in a person. Maybe he would have loved you. And if not, maybe Liam could have protected you.”

  “Does it really matter?” I ask him.

  “Yes,” he responds. “It matters because we should try to give Liam a second chance. If that is what he grew up with, then maybe his upbringing wasn’t too different from ours. And if his genetics are similar to yours, he could even struggle with some of the emotional problems, or have a similar mental disorder.”

  Disorder. He’s calling my entire existence a disorder. I don’t think he would say that if he knew who I really was. “You just want me to forgive Liam because you want a free trip to Switzerland,” I accuse him.”

  “Maybe,” he says with a wink. “Could be even nicer than the Ritz.”

  This makes me smile. He does have a valid point.

  “Actually,” he adds pulling me closer and speaking in a low voice, “there are many amazing hotels on my bucket list, all over Europe. I would love to take you to all of them. Take you in all of them.”

  “Oooh,” I say with interest slipping my hand into his back pocket. “I like the sound of that.”

  “You should text Owen the fake names on our fake passports,” he tells me, “So that he can buy our plane tickets.”

  Nodding slowly, I admit to myself that getting as far away from this whole fucking country as possible does not sound like a terrible idea. “Okay.”

  “We just have to make one more stop before Switzerland,” he says softly.

  I glare at him with suspicion. “Cole? You mean Le Cirque, right?”

  “We also have to visit your mother.”

  Chapter Five

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I say as I walk briskly through the hospital, my shoes clinking on the floor. “You want me to go through that again? Isn’t once enough for one day?”

  “It doesn’t have to be today, Scar. It can be tomorrow—but definitely before our flight leaves. Hey, slow down! Scarlett!”

  Shaking my head, I march through the dirty halls, eager to escape the awful smells and sounds. I am feeling sick to my stomach, and disgusted with the whole experience. When Cole grasps my wrist, I turn to him with fury in my eyes. I have to fight back the urge to hit him.

  “I am so sick of you telling me what to do,” I whisper menacingly. “Restraining me so that I can’t even move? Why are you treating me like I’m a child?”

  “You were about to kill him,” Cole says softly. “I wasn’t restraining you, Scar. I was restraining Snow. You have no idea how violent and impulsive she can be, sometimes. You’re not usually awake for it—but I have been. I know her, and I know what she’s capable of. I have known her for years, before you had any clue she existed. She could get you into serious trouble.”

  He hates me. Pulling my wrist away from him, I stare at his face for a moment, filled with hurt and rage. How did he expect me to react, when that man spoke to me like that? How am I the monster, when this is the way all of these people have treated me, and treated Serena? She would have just taken it all. She isn’t capable of fighting back. She has some kind of moral or ethical line she refuses to cross—and if I didn’t take charge and cross that line for her, she would be dead.

  I refuse to feel ashamed. But something about the way Cole is looking at me makes me feel guilty. His opinion is the only one that matters to me. I lower my eyes uncomfortably. Fighting back—fighting for my own survival—has turned me into a monster that Cole cannot trust. I think about the way that he clamped his arms around me. I think about the gentle way he spoke to me, like I was a child throwing a temper tantrum.

  He has always seen me as a child, hasn’t he?

  I turn and begin heading for the car. My relationship with Cole was nearly perfect, before. Before Serena checked out, and I became in charge of this body for several days. Now that I have to brush my teeth in the morning, and eat breakfast, and deal with all the daily minutiae that I always escaped, I also have to deal with Cole’s disdain.

  I never knew how much disdain he had for me. It was easy when I only showed up for a few minutes at a time, or a few hours. I only had to fight the bad guys, or have sex with Cole, or say a few “wise” words on a subject that Serena couldn’t bring herself to address. Cole and I were basically friends with benefits—we were basically Tinder fuck buddies, and whenever he was bored with her, he could swipe left on Serena, and swipe right on Snow—he knows all the right triggers to call upon me. And there I would be, his on demand, temporarily, for his pleasure, for a few laughs.

  We’ve never really had to live with each other 24/7—we’ve never been in a real relationship.

  Actually, that’s not true. I was there 24/7, in the back of her mind, longing for him. I was always there, waiting for those few precious moments when I would have a chance to come out and touch him. But he didn’t see me. He didn’t know I was there. He spent the entire time loving her, and he even felt strange about continuing to love me when she was gone.

  I was never married to Cole. I was the other woman. I was his mistress.

  Why am I surprised that he’s so disdainful of me?

  Men only love their mistresses when they are a secret, guilty pleasure. When they have to arrange covert meetings in dark alleys and seedy motels, and only communicate on a burner phone. When they actually leave their wives for their mistresses, they often feel regretful. The whole basis of the relationship was the excitement of illicit activity.

  Now that I’m here all the time, he can’t stand me. He doesn’t even know it’s me, but the second that he thought it was, he tre
ated me like a loose cannon. Um, excuse me, but maybe I deserve the opportunity to hurt the man who is possibly responsible for ruining Serena’s whole life? Why else would we go to see him? And I couldn’t even strangle him with his IV tubes—not even a little bit. I couldn’t even watch his eyeballs bulge out of his head a little, as he gasped for breath. That was just really, super disappointing.

  Cole doesn’t care about how I feel in all this. He made me stand there and listen to the fact that I probably have more half-brothers somewhere in the world, and that my father left them to die and laughed about it. Shithole cities that we bombed into the dirt. What are their lives like, if they are even still alive?

  Are they more messed up than I am?

  “Scarlett,” Cole says, as he follows close behind me. “Please, stop. Stop, and look at me. We said no more running away.”

  We have reached the car now, and I am about to open the door and get into the driver’s seat. But he is pressing his hand on the window and preventing me from entering the vehicle.

  “Please don’t be upset with me,” he begs. “Please.”

  I look at his pleading eyes and earnest expression, and it melts my anger. I shake my head, looking away to try and maintain some of my strength. “This isn’t fun, or easy, Cole.”

  “It’s just once in a lifetime,” he assures me. “I’ll be right here beside you. When it’s done, it’s over, and then we have the rest of our lives.”

  And then you have the rest of your life with her. I will disappear into the background, where I belong—where you want to keep me. So, you won’t have to worry about all the dangerous, inappropriate things I might do.

  “Can I drive?” Cole asks softly, prying the car keys from my hand. “You seem a little shaken up.”

  I nod, moving away from him to walk around the car, but as I put my hand on the lever and open the passenger door, someone standing behind me places a hand on my shoulder.

  “Hey,” says a strange man’s voice.

  I look up, and see that Cole is on the other side of the vehicle, getting into the driver’s seat.