by Barry Lyga
A nurse placed the wailing newborn in his arms, and in an instant, Dean saw Antoine standing before him, for the first time in years. Just for an instant. Tears gathered and spilled, and he knew that he would do anything for this boy, that he would suffer anything to protect this child. He knew in that instant why he’d become a cop—to protect the helpless and the vulnerable. The people like himself as a kid, a kid too scared to come out of the closet, and who could blame him? He’d lived a life of fear for too long; he wanted the world to be a safe space for everyone, but now especially for his son.
And yet from the first day, Liam had protested Dean’s love. Hurled it back in his face. His boy had always clung to Wally, and Dean admitted that he came to resent it. Liam was of Dean. Dean made him. Why did he not cleave to his biological father?
For the longest time, Dean blamed the boy, but as the years wore on, he came to see that the problem was in him. It was in his talk, his walk, his mere existence. He’d committed the ancient sin. And all the good in his life could not make up for that. No one else could see it, but Liam could. Liam, who was his blood. Liam knew. Liam knew all along that there was a rotten, corrupt mass at the core of the sheriff of Canterstown. That the safe space had been purchased at the cost of a human life and a lifetime of lies.
And with that realization came a relief. If someday Dean had to go away, he knew that Liam would still have Wally. His loving Pop, who could not have cared for him more had Liam been of his own flesh.
“You’re going to be okay, son,” Dean said quietly. “Probably better than if this had never happened at all.”
And that truth, Dean realized, hurt more than all the others.
THE PRESENT: LIAM
Monday morning came. Liam could not be certain if he awoke from a fitful sleep in which he dreamed he was awake or if he’d never slept at all. One seemed as likely as the other, and his exhaustion offered no answers. He stared up at the ceiling, his phone’s alarm music running over and over.
His father was in jail. Nothing else seemed to matter.
The song played and played and played. Then it looped and played some more. Eventually, he shut it off and rolled out of bed. When he sat up, his head swam with exhaustion and grief and a dull fury, his emotional gyroscope broken to bits.
School would start soon. He wouldn’t be there. How could he?
He composed a text to El, deleted it, started over, deleted it, again and again and again, and then sent nothing.
His grumbling stomach prodded him out of his room in a pair of boxers and an old T-shirt. The door to his fathers’ room was ajar; Pop lay on his stomach on the bed, above the covers, which seemed undisturbed. Liam couldn’t tell if Pop was asleep or just lying there and decided, in a moment of emotional barbarism, that he really didn’t care.
In the kitchen, he poured cereal into a bowl. It was some kind of wheat crap for old people and had no taste until he doused it with sugar. After three spoonfuls, he lost his appetite and resisted the urge to hurl it against the wall.
Pop padded silently into the kitchen and regarded the bowl with resigned dismay. “Do you want to talk?” he asked.
Liam pushed the bowl to the center of the table, as far as he could. “Why?”
“I don’t know. But they always tell parents to talk to your kids and get them to talk during times of trauma.”
“Who’s they?” As if it mattered.
Pop gestured theatrically to the air, the ceiling, the sky beyond, the universe. “Them. Mommy bloggers and all that.”
“Well, that’s your first mistake, because there are no mommies around here.”
Pop started crying, and Liam felt about two inches tall. But he couldn’t convince himself to stand and put his arms around his father. He couldn’t even make himself stop staring at the stupid bowl of cereal, just beyond his reach.
By the time night fell, Liam was unable to think through the welter of memories and emotions colliding within him. He was a tornado inside, a monsoon. Nothing connected to anything else, and nothing stuck long enough for him to cling to it. It was like watching a movie sped up at 10x, dropping context, eliding the unfamiliar and the unknown.
One thing penetrated like a laser: El.
A text wouldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it. He had to see her.
He drove to her house. Sat in the car at the end of the block, with a clear line of sight to her front door. It occurred to him that his father had probably done something similar the night he’d broken into the Lairds’ garage.
can i see u? im down the block
No response. Not even a gray bubble with a throbbing ellipsis.
But after a couple of moments, the front door opened and El stepped out. She looked up and down the street, spied his car, and walked without hurry toward him. He got out before she gained him and leaned against the driver’s side door.
“Hey,” he said to her. And wanted to hold her and kiss her and hold her some more, but did not.
“Hey.” She stuffed her hands into her pockets. “How, uh…”
“I’m okay,” he lied. “How about you?”
She shook her head and pressed her lips into a fierce line. “Don’t ask me that,” she told him.
He held up his hands in surrender. “Okay. Okay. Sorry.”
“Do you have any idea…,” she began, then shook her head again.
“I have to…” He wasn’t sure how she would deal with this next part, but he had no choice. “The tape.”
“What about it?”
“I know it’s your uncle’s voice, but…” He rubbed the end of his nose in distraction. No one knew what he’d done. How he’d popped the tape out of the stereo that night while no one was paying attention.
And given it to El.
He figured it belonged with her family.
And now…
He told her what Dad had said. About destroying it. And why. And he knew that the last thing she wanted was to be given marching orders by the guy who made all this happen in the first place, but the hell of it was, Dad was right. It was the only thing to do.
She glared at him.
“Look, I can’t fix any of this. I can’t change any of it. But none of it…” He paused, knowing that if he continued he would start to cry. Then decided the hell with it and plowed through, letting the tears come. “But none of this is about us. You and me. And right now that’s what I care about.”
The urge to take her in his arms was too powerful. He could no longer resist. He needed her against him. But she stepped out of his arms as soon as he opened them to her.
“It’s not… I can’t just…” She was crying, too, now. “Your dad knew. He knew and he said nothing. He just fed us lies. Do you know what he did to my family? To me?”
Liam groaned. He didn’t need a recitation of his father’s sins. He knew too well. “He didn’t do anything to you. You weren’t even born yet. You didn’t even know your uncle.”
Her fuming, fearsome glare told him everything he needed to know. She wanted to slap him so badly that he could feel the strike already. He decided he would let her. He wouldn’t budge.
“It’s probably best…” She hugged herself and looked off into the distance. “It’s probably best if—”
“Don’t say it. Please.” He wiped his eyes.
“Just for a little while. Until things are better. Or calmer. Or whatever.”
“I don’t like that.”
She nodded in agreement. “I get it. But you don’t have a choice.”
Liam’s backyard was small and weedy, but it had one thing in its favor—a tall, very effective privacy fence. He found an old basketball in the garage and headed outside. The house was both too empty and too full at the same time, Pop’s grief and memories of Dad cluttering the air and choking each breath like smog.
He wondered what El had decided about the tape. He wondered if he would ever know.
He thumped the ball a few times and took a lazy shot at the hoop mounted on the
side of the garage. Pop had once entertained dreams of Liam playing ball, but that had always felt like too much work. Liam’s jump shots were so-so, his dribbling passable. If he’d applied himself, maybe he’d’ve gotten better.
As things stood, the best he could do with a basketball was dribble it fiercely and hurl it at the hoop in an attempt to fling his anger out of him.
Didn’t work.
The back door to the house squeaked open; Marcie squeezed through, followed by Jorja, who gestured for the ball. Liam decided hell no and instead tucked it under his arm.
“What’s up?” he asked, his voice toneless. It wasn’t a put-on. He couldn’t figure out how to give a damn. Or why.
“We wanted to see you,” Jorja said.
He believed she wanted to see him. Not Marcie, though. Not El’s bestie.
“We know things are bleak right now,” Jorja said. “We’re here for you, Liam.”
He didn’t even want to look at them. Their happiness corroded the air. No one should be happy right now, he decided. No one in the whole world.
Turning away from them, he dribbled and drove the ball toward the net. Jorja moved like lightning, smacking the ball out of his control as though taking a pacifier from a sleeping baby. She ducked under his flailing arm, oriented herself without even looking up, and shot the ball up high. Nothing but net.
“Screw you,” he muttered.
“I can dance with you all day on the court,” she said calmly. “If that’s what you need. But I think you need something else.”
“El needs time,” Marcie said. “But it’s going to be okay. Give her some space.”
“We know you’ve been calling and texting,” Jorja added. “You have to knock it off. It’s only been a couple of days. Don’t go all stalker-y.”
“What the hell? You hook up and suddenly you’re relationship experts?” Liam recovered the ball from behind the air conditioner, where it had ended up after Jorja’s basket. He passed it to her and watched her effortlessly shoot another two-pointer. “Not like I have a choice anyway.”
Marcie shrugged. “It’ll work out. Trust me.”
Liam watched the ball roll to Jorja’s feet. “Yeah, well, I’m having trust issues these days.”
“Trust us,” Jorja said. She snatched up the ball and fired it back to him. “And I’ve been telling you for years—try not to lead with your left leg when you go for the layup.”
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
Cross-legged on the living room sofa, she stared ahead at precisely nothing.
She’d done the right thing.
She was crazy.
It was the right thing because how the hell could she be with him right now?
It was crazy because Liam had nothing to do with it, it was ancient history, shouldn’t they heal and move on?
She’d wanted him for so long. Had him. Her fingers in his hair. His hands on her hips. Lips pressed to lips. What else was there? What else mattered?
It had been four days without him, and it felt like centuries.
She went into the kitchen. Dad sat at the table with a beer open before him, its level undiminished.
“I heard…” She stopped. Started again. “Marse said that Liam got in to see him.” Avoiding the name. “Maybe you could go, too.”
Dad shrugged.
“You know.”
“I don’t want to talk to him. I have nothing to say to him.”
He hadn’t moved since she’d come into the room.
“Well, I mean, closure…”
“Closure? No such thing. No such thing.”
She didn’t know what to say to that.
“I know you want to be with him…,” Dad began, still not looking up. “I get it. I need you to know that I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look at that boy again.”
“You can’t blame Liam. It’s not his fault.”
Dad tilted the bottle this way and that, watching the beer within slosh from side to side. “We’re always supposed to just take it,” he said with acrimony. “We’re always the ones to forgive and forget. Give up today and hope that since we did, tomorrow will be better. Not this time. Not. This. Time.”
He snatched the bottle from the table and abruptly stood, then took two steps to the sink and dumped the beer down the drain.
“You heard the tape. You heard it. He drove Antoine away. I never got to know my brother. He stole that from me. I never knew the most important part of him, who he really was. I never got to be angry at him and then ask for his forgiveness, and he never got to give it.”
Elayah absorbed this. Felt the truth of it. Let the real filter through her, as though via osmosis.
Thought of the tape, in her desk drawer right down the hall. Her father could hear his brother’s voice again. All she had to do…
“It’s not like… I’m not asking you to forgive his dad. Just Liam. It happened a long time ago, before he was even born.”
Her father regarded her with sad, envious eyes. “Oh, baby. It all happened a long time ago. Before any of us were born.”
He came over to her, and for a moment, she expected a hug, a kiss. Instead, he simply put a hand on her shoulder, squeezed once, and then left her alone there as he wandered out into the dark hallway.
The next day, Jorja and Marcie came to visit. They sat on Elayah’s bed, holding hands. She faced them in her desk chair.
They’d known each other for pretty much all their seventeen years, and Elayah had never seen Marcie look so relaxed, so at peace, so… happy.
She recognized the look. It was like gazing into a mirror that reflected emotions from the past. She’d experienced that bliss for a finger snap of time, and now feared she’d never reclaim it.
“He misses you,” Marcie said. Needlessly.
“You should call him,” said Jorja, who had suddenly become the lesbian Dr. Drew. “Not a text or an email or a DM. Call him. Let him hear your voice.”
“It’s not that simple.” She swiveled the desk chair in a truncated arc. Back and forth. Back and forth.
It was the emotions, yes. And the history, yes. And now, also, the tape. And the choice of destroying evidence—breaking the law—or putting a target on her uncle for the rest of his days.
“He feels alone,” Marcie was saying. “His dad’s in jail; his other dad’s a wreck. He needs us. All of us. But especially you, El.”
She thought of her father’s hand on her shoulder. Of the sadness in his eyes that drove out the anger and was somehow worse.
“I don’t know what to do,” she admitted. A tear came out of nowhere and traced a too-warm runnel down her cheek. About Liam. About the tape.
“What do you want to do?” Jorja asked.
She didn’t know that, either.
THE PRESENT: LIAM
Liam gave a lot of statements to the police. It seemed as though every couple of days, they called to see him or ask him to come to the sheriff’s office or the county courthouse to answer questions. The questions were always the same, and he knew what they were doing—making sure his story didn’t change.
It didn’t. It couldn’t. It was the truth.
More than a week after Dad’s confession, he was alone in the house when the doorbell rang. Thinking it had to be El, he dashed to the door.
It wasn’t El.
“Aunt Jen?”
His father’s sister gazed at him from the other side of the doorway, her graying hair done up in a bun. She refused to color her hair, no matter how often Dad had badgered her about it. His aunt had been the most significant female relationship in his life—he adored her, and right now he couldn’t bear the sight of her.
“I talked to Wally,” Aunt Jen said. “Took some time off work. I thought maybe I’d stay for a few days…?”
It was strange, having her ask permission. Of him. He noticed now a roller bag just behind her. She gazed into the house with something like wistfulness.
“You can come in,” he told her. “But I’m not g
ood company these days. Not even for you.”
“I get it.”
She rolled her bag in and stood there in the living room, clearly wanting to hug him. Resisting. Good. He knew he would fall apart, and he didn’t want to fall apart.
“I’ll only stay as long as you’re okay with it. But no matter what, I have to tell you something, and you have to hear it, Liam.”
Liam shook his head. “Unless you can prove my dad was brainwashed by the CIA into confessing to a crime he didn’t commit, there’s nothing I really want to hear right now.” It was hollow and brainless and stupid, and he was ashamed of himself for even saying it.
Aunt Jen put a hand on his arm. He flinched.
“I just wanted to tell you something that I bet no one is thinking to tell you in all this: You’re a good guy, Liam. People are going say a lot of things about your dad. You’re gonna hear a lot. And people will want to take care of you. People like Wally and me and others. And you should let us. But sometimes we’ll forget to say it, so it’s important you know: You’re a good guy.”
Liam watched his toes as she spoke. He couldn’t let her see his eyes. Swollen permanently from crying. Tearing up even now.
He should have said something. Should have thanked her. But instead he just shrugged, turned, and went down the hall to his bedroom.
THE PRESENT: ELAYAH
She met him on the hill overlooking the school twelve days after the arrest. It had been a long twelve days. Her throat was almost entirely healed, and the air had gone from almost-fall to almost-winter. She wore a purple knitted scarf with a matching hat and her middle-weight jacket.
She remembered him climbing the hill with her, both of them bearing shovels. His spitting into the grass. Then, later, her hands on his dirt-caked, sweaty back. Their first kiss still a dream.
Everything still a dream.
Dressed in jeans and a plain blue hoodie, he sat near where they’d unearthed the time capsule, knees to his chest, elbows on knees. Staring off into the distance. The Wantzler factory had gone to a four-day week, and the smokestacks were idle. There were no more reporters in town; even Indira had left. They would return for the trial, she knew. If there even was one. Rumor had it that Liam’s dad planned to plead guilty to manslaughter and something to do with mishandling human remains.
