Andrew kept silent, still standing, hands deep in his coat pockets.
“This…church thing,” Henry continued. “You didn’t come to the service on Sunday, just the reception. And you didn’t come to the funeral, just to Amy’s house—”
“I didn’t get an invitation.”
“No one got an invitation,” Henry said. He poured himself another drink. “It was open to the whole church, which admittedly you’re not a part of, but Catherine did tell you to come. And it wasn’t like they were checking tickets at the door. Still, you only came to the reception. In fact, the only time you came inside the actual church was when we broke in. Why was that?”
It was Andrew’s turn to look confused. “Why was…what?”
“Why don’t you like churches?” Henry asked.
Andrew stared at him.
“It’s a simple question,” Henry said. He downed his drink in one and poured another.
“Not really.”
“I have a few theories,” Henry said, as though Andrew hadn’t spoken, and he actually wanted to—wanted to wipe that smug look off Henry’s face and tell him that theories were based on observed facts or whatever and Henry didn’t know shit about him—but Andrew stayed silent.
“One,” Henry began, settling into the chair, full glass in hand. “Maybe you grew up in a terrible church. Were molested or something. Two,” he said, more forcefully, because he saw the look on Andrew’s face, “you’re gay and it’s not clear if we’d be cool with it.” He gave another thin smile. “Or maybe you think the minute you step through the church doors for worship you’ll be struck down by lightning.”
“For being gay?” Andrew said, incredulous. “Which, by the way, I’m not—”
But Henry cut him off: “For being a sinner.”
“I thought everyone was a sinner,” Andrew muttered.
“Yes, but you’re supposed to confess your sins to God and to the people you’ve sinned against,” said Henry in a bored voice, as though reciting an old lesson, which, Andrew realized, he probably was. “Make amends. You know there’s this part in the Bible where they’d make these sacrifices to God in this holy temple, but God told them they couldn’t do that if they’d sinned against someone and hadn’t made it right. He told them to leave the temple and go be reconciled to their brother—”
“Speaking of having something against your brother,” Andrew cut in, “you know she thought you might be involved? Before this Matt thing? Yeah, she thought you knew something about James and were protecting him. She told me.”
Henry’s face didn’t change. “I’m not her brother. And I wasn’t involved.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really.” Henry shot him an irritated look, finished his third—fourth?—drink and set the glass down hard on the glass tabletop, making it rattle. “Just stop. Stop for a second, okay? You know I didn’t do anything to Amy. Because I was somewhere else, right? Unlike you, I might add—but that’s beside the point,” he said, waving a hand as Andrew opened his mouth again. “This isn’t even about Amy.”
“Then who is it about?”
“Catherine.”
Andrew could tell he was trying to appear calm, but there was a hectic flush in Henry’s cheeks that made him look fevered.
“You can tell me, you know,” Henry said.
“Tell you what?”
“Why you look like you’re carrying around a metaphorical cross all the time. You know you don’t actually have to be miserable twenty-four-seven just because you raped her.”
One second. Two. Andrew could not hear one single sound in the entire house, not even his own breath, or Henry’s.
“Surprised I know?” Henry said, his voice soft.
Andrew stared at him. “You’re wr-wrong,” he said, his chest so tight the words came out jagged. “Completely wr—”
“I don’t think I am. I’ve been thinking about it all week. Watching how you look at her. Like you want to get hit by a car every time she smiles at you. It’s eating you up. It’s why you drove here to bring her stuff back.” He adopted a fake-casual voice. “You don’t live far away and just kind of maybe thought after Christmas you might as well—bullshit. You felt bad. So fucking bad you can’t even go to a church service, not even a funeral for a murdered kid. Because what you did to Catherine is pretty much on par with what this guy—Matt or James or whoever the fuck he is—did to Amy. Maybe you get points for feeling guilty, but on the whole I don’t really think so. Once she tells me the truth, I’ll kill you just the same.”
Andrew took a step back as though Henry had lunged at him, even though the other boy was still sitting down. “I didn’t rape her.” The words came out fast now, panicked. Jesus, he even sounded guilty. “I just—”
“You just what?”
“I knew!” he burst out. “I knew! I saw the guys in the hallway before, just standing there like they were waiting for something”—he saw Henry’s eyes narrow but plowed on—“and I didn’t say anything to them even though I wanted to know why they were just fucking standing there the night after finals when everyone else was out. And then a few minutes later there was a different guy there and the one from before, he—he asked the new guy if he was going—going to go again but it had to be a-after him and I just…I just walked back to my room and tried not to think about it. But I stayed awake and kept checking the hallway and finally she was there and I—I knew.” He blew out a ragged breath. “I knew what I had done. And I knew it was my fault.”
Henry said nothing. Andrew kept waiting for him to say something, do something. Hell, even stand up and try to hit him. But the other boy wasn’t even looking at him. Henry was looking past him, and something dropped out of Andrew’s stomach at the expression on his face. He turned to see Catherine standing feet behind him like a sleepwalker, her skin pale against her funeral clothes, her blue eyes wide, and Andrew saw something shift there as she looked at him, as clear a change as if they’d turned black or blind.
“You knew?” she said. Just then, Molly came down the stairs and trotted up to Catherine. She appeared not to notice.
“Catherine—” But he stopped. He didn’t know what to say. She was Joan of Arc asking her executioner why, and he didn’t have an answer.
“Get out,” she said.
He didn’t move.
“Get out!” Her face was turning red, her eyes spilling over, her whole body shaking. “Go—”
He went.
Catherine stumbled forward, felt her hands on the stainless steel of the Brisboises’ sleek refrigerator, and let herself slide down it.
Henry was saying something. She tried to listen, but her mind sounded like a windstorm and nothing else was getting through.
He knew.
Andrew. He’d been there that night. Saw…them. Waiting.
She wanted to peel her skin off with her own fingernails, wanted to bleed until there wasn’t anything left inside her. Wasn’t that an old healing ritual, hundreds of years ago? Rid the body of impurities. Drain it dry.
But her skin was whole, all her blood inside it. Had Amy bled that night, in the struggle? Or was it just her breath that had been taken, and all her blood was left to thicken inside her, slowing to a stop inside her veins?
Catherine felt like hers was doing the same as she knelt like an invalid in Henry’s kitchen, so far from the girl she used to be it was like that girl had died and all that was left was a ghost who drifted through the rain and made her grave in the trees.
Catherine raised her head. She tasted whiskey mixed with the salt of tears. She thought if Henry left too she would fall through the earth. He seemed to her a tether keeping her from the depths of hell, a forest she’d never find her way out of. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For not talking to you. Last year. And
the ones before it.”
Henry reached out a hand, slowly, as though sure she’d shy away from him. But when his hand fell to her hair, she didn’t move.
It cannot be helped.
She thought she knew now what her father had meant. It was as though something in her had latched onto something in Henry years ago, and they were fused into one. A connection formed in childhood that couldn’t be changed, not after telling him about hearing her parents fighting, and vomiting on his bare feet after too many summer snow cones. And wrestling in the community pool, hearing the sound of whistles and laughter oddly muffled under the water, his hands on her shoulders, her legs.
He was her childhood, those laughing-crying-panting-breathless days when life had been so much simpler but also more concentrated in its intensity. And then she’d gone away, coming back changed, different—wary of anything childish or shameful, her mind remembering the kiss under garden lights, Mrs. Brisbois’s rigid disapproval. She told herself he didn’t fit into her life anymore. She told herself it was pathetic to be his shadow. How cruel she’d been. How senselessly cruel. Throwing them away—as careless as a suicide, a soul flung high to fall where it may.
Of course, he fit. He’d always fit. And if she was his shadow, he was hers as well. Time hadn’t changed that. Her cutting him out of her life hadn’t changed that. Even during senior year, just being in the same room with him again had been a struggle. It affected her. He affected her. She had allowed him inside her beating child’s heart and years later, at eighteen, was surprised to find him still there, as though he’d been hidden away all this time.
She wouldn’t cast him aside again. Andrew was gone. Amy was dead. She wouldn’t lose Henry, too.
“Can you take me?” she asked him.
His hand traced its way from the top of her head to her shoulders, following her hairline so closely his fingers brushed against her tears on the way down. “Where?” he asked her.
“You know.”
He helped Catherine get up, steadying her as she breathed shallowly for a minute before starting to walk. They went outside, Henry gently pushing Molly back before closing the front door. Catherine clung to him. His car was cold when he opened it for her. No music. The blur of the world outside: thin trees, the sun inching down behind them. Everything green and gold and entirely silent. He didn’t have to ask her anything. She didn’t have to speak.
Because of course, he did know.
* * *
—
Andrew hit his hand on the steering wheel, his lips pulled back against his teeth. His breath sounded thin, whistling, and even though it was only a ten-minute drive to Bob and Minda’s house, it felt as though his mind and body had traveled a hundred miles to get there. He couldn’t get that image of Catherine out of his head: like a ghost in her black clothes, the way her eyes changed as she realized.
It was just past four p.m. He could be back home in an hour. Out of this town for good. If Bob wasn’t there he’d stop by the station to talk to him. But he’d grab his things now, leave a note for Minda if she was out too. Polite, even though being polite was the last thing on his mind. Manners and courtesy had been drilled into him at a young age: make his bed and open doors and please and thank you always and was that why he had done it? Gone back to his dorm room and waited in the dark for a sound that told him he was right even though a part of him already knew it? Scared to act, to cause any kind of confrontation. Don’t make a fuss and don’t make a scene and don’t draw attention—lessons he learned as his parents’ marriage broke apart. Meek and mild like that child—but he wasn’t a child anymore. So why the hell was he still acting like one?
There was something bubbling up inside him as he entered the garage code and went into the house. He felt on the edge of rage. Like if someone said something to him, he’d shout a reply; if someone touched him, he might hit their hand away.
Minda greeted him from the kitchen. The sound of her voice rolled over him and he tried to master himself, rearrange his features into a face she wouldn’t question.
“Hi,” he said when he got to the kitchen. Minda was on her laptop at the table.
“Hi yourself,” she said brightly. She was wearing her reading glasses, with narrow purple frames. “What are you up to?”
“I’m headed home, actually.”
“Home?”
“Yeah. I, uh, think I’ll grab my stuff now. Where’s Bob?” Andrew had seen both cars in the garage.
She nodded her head. “He’s upstairs, but he’s on the phone. Very important stuff, apparently. Cannot be disturbed.” She rolled her eyes. “Why? What’s up?”
“Just want to talk to him before I go.”
Minda set down the pen she was holding and leaned back in her chair, her eyes studying him behind her glasses. “What happened?”
“What?”
“What happened?” she repeated.
He tried to look confused. “Nothing. I’m fine.”
“Uh-huh.” She stood up and walked over to him, her expression shrewd. “You smell like alcohol.”
He swore inwardly. “It wasn’t—I was with people who were drinking.”
“And you, what? Used it as mouthwash? Come on, Andrew—”
She reached for him but he jerked back. “Can you just get Bob? I need to talk to him.”
She raised her eyebrows. “If you think he’s going to be more relaxed about this than I am, I think you may be forgetting his chosen profession.”
“I need to talk to him,” Andrew said again. “Please.”
Minda looked him over one more time. “You’re not leaving tonight.”
He stared at her.
“You’re not,” she said again, as though he hadn’t heard her.
“I—Minda, you don’t get it. I have to leave tonight. I can’t stay here.”
“Well, if that’s not what all hosts just love to hear from their guests, I don’t know what is. No, you’re not leaving, Andrew. Not least because your mother would never talk to me again. How many drinks did you have?”
“One,” he admitted, the word coming like a pulled tooth.
“Then you won’t pass a Breathalyzer if you get pulled over. Not until very early morning.”
He looked at her blankly.
“Alcohol absorption,” she said. “There’s a timeline. I’m a doctor, you know, in case you forgot my job as well.”
Andrew disregarded this. “I’m below the legal limit now.”
“Kid, you are eighteen years old. The legal limit for you is zero. And you won’t blow a zero-point-zero-zero until”—she glanced at the clock—“two, maybe three in the morning.”
“Then I won’t get pulled over—”
“As opposed to all those people who plan on getting pulled over—”
“Don’t talk to me like you’re my mom. You’re not even a mom.”
The silence in the kitchen was a solid thing, pushing into all the corners; Andrew was almost surprised it didn’t shove the table and chairs against the wall like a poltergeist.
“I’m sorry,” he began. “Minda—”
“Sit.”
“Please, I shouldn’t have—”
“Sit.”
He sat.
She walked to the fridge, took out a whole roasted chicken, and set it in front of him, moving her laptop to the side as she did so. The chicken was store-bought, in a rounded plastic container that looked like a dome. Andrew could see drops of condensation clinging to the plastic.
“Eat,” Minda said. She pushed her glasses onto her head.
Andrew gave her an incredulous look.
Minda undid the container with a snap. She tossed the top aside and it skidded across the table, almost to the edge. “With your fingers. No need for manners here. I’m not a mother, after all. I am a black woman doctor,
married but happily child-free, so clearly I don’t conform to any expectations. Why should you?”
“I said I was sorry,” Andrew said, a little desperately. Looking at the chicken reminded him of that movie Matilda where a fat kid had to eat a chocolate cake the size of an ottoman. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Stop looking so terrified.” Minda pushed the chicken toward him, but her voice had gentled a little. “You don’t have to eat all of it. I’m not mad.” A pause. “Okay, a little. You were being rude. But I think I know why.”
Slowly, Andrew reached out and tore a piece of chicken off. It was cold but smelled good and tasted better. “Yeah?” he said, chewing.
“Yeah,” she said. “Trauma. You have all the classic signs.”
“I do not—”
“You’re shaking and pale and look like crap. You’re not eating or sleeping unless someone makes you, and you keep looking around like you’re waiting for something to suddenly attack you. Classic trauma syndrome.”
“It’s not me,” Andrew said, “who was traumatized.”
“Trauma doesn’t have to happen to you directly to have an effect.”
Andrew frowned at her. “You deal with trauma? I thought maybe the ER or—”
“People think GI is all poop and vomit, and it is,” she admitted. “But it’s also emaciation and feeding tubes and feet of intestine removed to save someone’s life. And sometimes patients die. Like this morning.”
“I’m sorry.”
She waved a hand. “We knew it was coming. Long time coming.” She tapped her fingers on the table. “You’re not eating.”
He took more chicken. Almost despite himself, he was feeling a little better—but just barely. “So is this why you always feed people? Because you can’t feed your patients?”
“And there you go with the detective stuff again. I wish you wouldn’t fight it, you know.”
“I’m not a detective.”
Monsters Among Us Page 23
