Close to Home

by Nolon King

  He would come back later. Once he worked up the courage to apologize.

  Because that’s what he had to do.

  He was inside out with sorry, and totally in the wrong.

  He had no excuse.

  Levi opened the fridge and stared inside it. He wasn’t hungry, but he didn’t know what to do with himself. After looking long enough to chill his face, he slammed it closed.

  He and Corban used to be close, almost like one person split into two.

  Back when they were little, they dreamed the same dreams and finished each other’s sentences.

  In middle school they became their own people, meaning they both figured out that Corban was sort of a nerd.

  But Levi had always been there for him anyway, included him in the jokes and the fun, made sure he was one of the gang.

  They had started to drift, but away and around rather than apart.

  Then freshman year came, and Kari. Levi had been jealous. He could’ve gotten over it, probably, if not for the other bullshit. The stuff Corban found while snooping on their father.

  He wouldn’t listen to reason. He had been his nerdiest, angriest, pissiest self.

  He made Levi furious.

  They had nearly come to blows.

  But that didn’t excuse his leaving Corban to Matthew Decker, not when a few simple words would have stopped the bully.

  He trudged back upstairs to the hallway. His gut felt like a family of porcupines was living inside it. There was no way to get past this other than apologize.

  Levi forced himself to stop at Corban’s door and knock. Then again after a moment without any answer.

  He opened the door after the third knock and looked inside. “Corban?”

  But Corban wasn’t in his room.

  Levi went back into the game room, then tried every other room in the house. Levi looked outside. Dad’s car was gone. Maybe he was somewhere with Corban, though that seemed unlikely after the way things had been going.

  He went back to Corban’s bedroom, and this time he went in without knocking.

  “CORBAN?”

  Levi wasn’t sure what to do. He’d spent most of the afternoon moping in his room, so he hadn’t heard Corban come home from school. Shit. It was bad enough that things had gone wrong, but he told himself that he’d fix them. Apologize and make everything right. Now he couldn’t.

  Levi began snooping around Corban’s room, feeling like a hypocrite for being angry at his brother for doing the same exact thing to their father.

  Then he found a note from Kari to Corban, and of course he had to read it.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  “Are you feeling any better?” Kari asked Corban, who was clutching his stomach.

  “A little,” he said.

  But he wasn’t. Not even a little.

  Something was sitting in his stomach like crumbled cement, jagged and jabbing inside him.

  Still, it was better than being at home, where everyone would be miserable in their own way. Sure, it was miserable here too, but at least it wasn’t his misery. Or his family.

  And Kari seemed to need him. She hadn’t let go of his hand since they’d retreated to her room.

  The room was quiet. Kari’s usual conversation had gone mostly to crickets. And Corban felt content.

  She squeezed his hand, then let it go. “I should really go check on my mom.”

  “Do you think your dad will come home? Or do you think he’ll make it two nights in a row?”

  Kari gave Corban the saddest shrug he’d ever seen. “No idea. Mom told him to stay the fuck away from her, forever.”

  “Oh. You didn’t tell me that.”

  No answer.

  Kari swung her feet off the bed and stood. “He’s hasn’t even been charged, but my mom has already given up.”

  Corban swallowed, prayed he wasn’t making a mistake. “Do you think your mom really believes that your dad could’ve done it?”

  “She should know better.” Kari glared at him. “Everyone should know better.”

  “He has an alibi for the third … one, doesn’t he?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “If he—”

  Kari shoved him backward, hard, and he lost his balance, landing on the bed. She crawled on his body and kissed him, her tongue insistent, breathing hard.

  This wasn’t how Corban had imagined it would be at all.

  “Don’t think,” she said as she rushed to pull off her pants. Then her panties. “Don’t make me think.”

  He tried to keep up with her as she undid his jeans and yanked them down. Struggled to unhook her bra as he felt cool air on his …

  Then everything was heat and wetness and his hips moved without him telling them to.

  Kari squeaked like he’d hurt her. She screwed her eyes shut and whispered, “Don’t think.”

  Then she moved.

  Shit.

  It wasn’t how he’d imagined it at all.

  Afterward, they lay together in silence. He could’ve probably stayed that way forever. But in a few minutes, she said, “I need to go check on my mom.”

  Corban rolled over. He wanted to say I love you.

  She was out of the bed, pulling on her pants. “I’ll be right back.”

  Buckling up and getting ready to follow her, Corban said, “I’ll come with you.”

  She smiled and held her hand out for his. The gesture was especially sweet considering that Kari would likely drop it in seconds, once they were around her mom.

  But Cynthia wasn’t in the kitchen, or the dining room, or the living room or den.

  “I guess she’s in her room. That means she’s gonna be sooooper sad. And I should probably go in alone.”

  They stopped in front of her door. Kari looked at Corban, uncertain.

  “Let me come,” he said. “You’ll be there for her, and I’ll be there for you.”

  Corban looked at Kari like he loved her, and felt certain she knew what his eyes were implying.

  “Okay.” She exhaled, and in that moment everything felt fine. They would be okay.

  Kari opened the door.

  Dim light spilled on the husk of her mother’s body. Cynthia’s head was lolled to the side, skin like wax and eyes of dirty glass. Three orange bottles littered her nightstand. None had caps and one lay on its side. All looked empty enough from the doorway. No one needed a pulse to know the truth.

  Kari screamed and this time Corban couldn’t hold her.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “My mom was my favorite person in the world.”

  Corban fisted his hands in his lap, over and over, as he watched Kari try not to cry. Fail. Continue with the eulogy anyway.

  “She loved to be happy … deserved to be happy. She could make me laugh even when laughing was the last thing I wanted to do. Her friends all loved her, until they didn’t.”

  Kari needed nearly a half-minute to recover from that one. She raked the empty pews with angry eyes as she gathered her breath. Corban thought that if she’d had laser vision, the whole church would be on fire.

  She had been up there too long already. Kari was going to have a full breakdown if she didn’t stop talking. She should have stepped down after My mom, Cynthia, was my favorite person in the world.

  “I don’t know how I am ever going to be okay again without her …”

  Kari was grieving onstage. This was no longer about her mom, this was about Kari.

  “… I feel like I’m empty. There’s a hole in my heart and I’ll never—”

  She shook her head, couldn’t continue.

  And then she broke down.

  Corban was out of his seat, but Ollie was faster, leading his daughter down the stairs as she murmured, “I’m sorry, Mommy … I love you so much.”

  The reception was better. Calmer. Still mostly empty.

  Corban’s so-called friends were all assholes. Levi hadn’t shown. Same for Dane, Elliot, and Pussabo. To hell with them all. Dad hadn’t
come, either.

  The one person he wished hadn’t come — his mom — insisted on attending. She seemed fascinated by the whole thing, and he felt embarrassed that they were related. Not that she was smiling or doing anything inappropriate, but she kept finding subtle ways to pump people for more information about Ollie. He was pretty sure Ollie had noticed, too.

  The final straw came when she put her arm around Kari and said, “I can’t imagine what this must be like for you.”

  “Then stop pretending you can,” Kari snapped, shaking off the condescending hug and fleeing outside.

  Corban started to follow, but Mom grabbed his arm.

  “What?”

  “She’ll be okay.” Then, “Want me to help?”

  “I wish you would stop helping.”

  He found Kari outside, sitting in the shade of an overhang, hugging her knees. He walked over and sat cross-legged beside her.

  “You’re doing great.”

  She wiped her eyes and tried to smile. “Thanks.”

  He took her hand and she leaned on his shoulder. “It’s really hard, holding your shit together, you know?”

  “I know.”

  “And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  “Your mom is a lot to take sometimes.”

  A stab of guilt and a swallow. “I know.”

  “But she means well.”

  Corban nodded, but he wasn’t sure he agreed.

  “How’s your dad doing?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. He’s totally stopped talking. He’s started carrying around a dead lightbulb, and I have no idea why.”

  “How do you know it’s dead?”

  “Because sometimes he sets it down. I shook it one time.”

  “Weird.”

  “Yeah.”

  Silence.

  “But he still didn’t do it,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Even the police know he’s innocent. But everyone thinks that since my mom killed herself she thought he was guilty, instead of—”

  She couldn’t finish the sentence. It didn’t matter. They’d already talked the possibilities out, and there was nothing new to say. Not unless they could figure out who the killer might be. Give the police a new suspect.

  Wait, what if they could do that?

  He tamped down his excitement, kept it out of his voice. He didn’t want to give her false hope. “I wonder if the killer has ever written to my mom.”

  Kari pulled away from him, blinking. “What?”

  “She gets letters from killers all the time.”

  “That’s terrible. Why are you telling me that?”

  “Because maybe this one is close. What if he knows her, and wrote her a letter?”

  “Why would the killer confess in a letter?”

  “He probably wouldn’t, but sometimes people slip up.” And he didn’t exactly feel like singing his mother’s praises right now, but … “My mom’s an expert on how serial killers think. She might be able to learn something from what he said that would be a clue.”

  “If your mom had a letter from the killer, wouldn’t she already have taken it to the police?”

  Guilty knuckles, right to the gut. There was a time when he’d have assumed the same thing. But she’d been talking nonstop about doing episodes about the killings on her new show. He wouldn’t be surprised to find out that she’d kept something secret. To be the first. Or prove herself as the best.

  But he couldn’t confess that to Kari, it’d make her feel worse. So instead, he said, “She might not have realized it yet.”

  Kari looked at him like he was her hero, and he wondered if it was a mistake to offer her even the smallest of hopes.

  “The killer might not have written my mom. But I’ll ask her to take a second look.”

  “Thank you,” she sighed, leaning her head on his shoulder again.

  It was up to him. He needed to get his mother to consider the possibility that she — one of the world’s top serial killer experts — had somehow failed to notice that the murderer she was tracking had sent her a letter.

  What if she refused to look through her fan mail again?

  It was possible. When Selena Nash had a theory, she was right until proven otherwise.

  If she wouldn’t do this for Kari, then he’d steal the letters and look for himself.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Levi was grateful to be hanging out with his friends, because everything else was miserable.

  But he wished they weren’t giving him a hard time about the same old shit.

  Dane looked at Elliot and Pussabo. “I need your help. He’s not saying anything.”

  “There’s nothing to say,” Levi repeated for the zillionth time.

  Pussabo said, “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  Elliot agreed. “His mouth is a vagina and he’s keeping his virginity.”

  Dane shook his head at Elliot and turned back to Levi. “Come on, man. I don’t understand why you won’t just tell us what your mom has been saying.”

  “Maybe you should go downstairs and have her make you some cookies. Then you can ask her yourself,” Elliot suggested.

  Levi was sick of this. His friends were supposed to be his safe space.

  “Why the hell do you even care?” he finally snapped.

  Dane flinched. “I’m sorry, man. Didn’t mean to pucker your fucker.”

  And now the mood was ruined.

  This shit usually went down between Elliot and Dane, when either Elliot took it too far or Dane finally had enough.

  “Look guys, I’m not trying to be an asshole. I’m sick of talking about it, and I want it to stop.” Levi exhaled and waited for his friends to start giving him shit.

  No one did. At least not for the next hour. It was all eyes on HardCorp and an unprecedented string of wins for Pussabo.

  “Welcome to the United States of Pussabo,” he said, after his fourth straight victory.

  The buzz was already fading from HardCorp. Levi wondered if any of them would be playing it by the end of summer. Probably not.

  “Why don’t we watch a movie?” he suggested.

  “Because I’m winning,” Pussabo said.

  “And we’re not gay,” Elliot added a second later.

  “Thanks.”

  Elliot winked. “Sure thing, Pussabo.”

  “I’m with Levi,” Dane said. “This is officially boring.”

  “One more after this,” Pussabo said, clearly desperate to hang onto his rare winning streak.

  “Let’s do something else,” Levi pressed anyway.

  “Yeah,” Dane agreed. “Let’s do something else.”

  “Just let me finish this one round. There are only nineteen—”

  Pussabo exploded into pixels, and a squadron of other HardCorp players made victory dances around him.

  “And down goes Pussabo,” Elliot said, then made a noise that was probably supposed to sound like a funeral dirge.

  “Fine.” Pussabo stood and dropped his controller onto the couch. “Whatdaya guys wanna do?”

  “Got any pictures of your mom?”

  “Fuck you, Elliot.”

  “You’re right,” he went on. “She’s barely hot. Although I do appreciate the eighties era hair she has going on down there. I call it The Reagan and Bush.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Pussabo asked again, ignoring Elliot.

  Levi wondered why everyone was so stupid. “I’ve suggested that we watch a movie more times than Elliot’s farted.”

  “Not possible,” Dane and Pussabo said together.

  Dane kept going. “No one wants to watch a movie, man. Sorry.”

  “Why not?” Levi asked.

  “Because movies take like two hours,” Pussabo said.

  “So what? You have somewhere else to be?”

  “Two hours is a long time to sit in one place.”

  Elliot looked admiringly at Pussabo. “Pussabo has a point
.”

  Levi yelled, “We’ve been playing HardCorp for almost three hours!”

  “Exactly,” Elliot nodded. “So let’s just make it an even four and then call it a day.”

  “Seriously,” Dane said. “If no one is home, then why don’t we go into your mom’s office. I bet I could get onto her computer.”

  Why the hell would Dane want to get onto Mom’s computer?

  “No way. Not an option. What makes you think you could?”

  “It’s a Hail Mary,” Elliot said. “He’s hoping he can delete the dick pic he sent her.”

  Ignoring Elliot, like everyone else in the game room, Dane said, “I don’t. But what if I can? Aren’t you curious?”

  “Not at all.” Levi shook his head. “But go ahead and try. My mom is only going to kill you if she catches you.”

  “Can I really?”

  “No.”

  And now it was tense.

  “Maybe we should watch a movie,” Pussabo suggested.

  “I’m not trying to be a dick,” Levi said. “But she will go nuclear. You have no idea. One time I got Corban to sneak into her office, because it was off-limits. She. Went. Fucking. Ballistic. We were only nine, but even then my brother was a narc. He said I made him do it. That he didn’t want to bother Mommy’s stuff.”

  Levi waited for the laughs, then continued. “And at dinner — fuck.” He visibly shuddered. “I’ve never seen her like that. He cried because he thought she was serious about putting him up for adoption.”

  “So you never tried again?” Dane was rapt, leaning forward, his mouth slightly open.

  “Once.” Levi was surprised to find that his heart was beating fast.

  Even Elliot was silent.

  “Remember last year when my mom was in New York for like two weeks with her agent?”

  Nods all around.

  “My dad was gone for a couple of days during that stretch too. I’d been curious for years, and that was my chance to see why she never let us in there. I was careful. I took pictures of everything, not because I wanted to keep anything, but because I wanted to make sure that I left everything exactly like I found it. I didn’t want to leave anything up to my stupid memory. I found a pink box with a bunch of red journals inside it. All of them about the same guy. Someone she calls The Virgin.”