Mom’s voice hit a pitch only dogs could hear for a syllable or two. “—ow else do you explain someone breaking into our home, our bedroom, and leaving this? No, no, we have to cancel. We have to! If this comes out while we’re on the road, we’re finished! Finished, Forest, do you understand? Your credibility will be ruined! My career—” She started hyperventilating.
I couldn’t bear to hear her like that. I went to the fridge, not bothering to be quiet, and grabbed one of her favorite fizzy waters.
I shot Rudy a look, mentally telling him to stay put, and he raised his hands in silent acknowledgment.
“Enough, Angela! Pull yourself together!” There was a loud slapping sound and I froze in place just on the other side of the plastic sheet.
It seemed like the whole world froze with me. Mom was instantly silent. There wasn’t a single sound from outside. Rudy stopped breathing. I did too, until little black dots swirled around my vision, then I let the breath out slowly.
That couldn’t have been what I thought it was. It just couldn’t.
I should just walk out there and give Mom her water and figure out what it was that had them both so upset. But I couldn’t convince my feet to move.
Rudy glided silently up beside me just as I started to shake with conflicting impulses and put a hand on my shoulder.
He turned me until I was looking into his eyes, then gave me one slow, reassuring nod. Rudy was here. He knew how to deal with all kinds of things. This must be baby stuff for him.
I wasn’t thrilled with myself for taking comfort in his painful history, but I couldn’t afford to introspect about it just then.
I took a deep breath, mapped myself to his courage and strength, returned his nod, and stepped through the door.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
KENNEDY
Neither of them turned when I stepped through the door. They probably didn’t even notice.
They were locked in a mutual glare out in the yard, standing two feet apart. Mom held a hand to her cheek. Dad stood with his hands firmly planted on his belt. Between them, on the ground, lay a Manila envelope.
I studied Mom’s face from the relative safety of the patio and a chill went down my spine. I’ve never actually seen murder in anyone’s eyes before.
Seeing that adjusted something in my head. The barely-masked fear faded, giving way to fury. How dare he lay his hands on my mother? For a minute it didn’t even matter to me that he was my dad. In that instant between me seeing her face and striding across the barren lot, he was nothing but the bastard who dared.
He shot an irritated glance in my direction, then did a double-take and readjusted his glare for my benefit. I didn’t care.
The wiggles of fear which usually accompanied his attention when he was in one of his moods didn’t stand a chance against the temper building with every pounding heartbeat.
“Kennedy Lane, you have some explaining to do,” he snapped.
“Did you hit her?” I demanded, ignoring his words.
“Did you hear me, young lady?” He squared his body toward me, jutting his jaw out like a petulant boy.
“Did you hear me, old man? I asked you a fucking question!”
He snapped his fingers and pointed at me, glaring down his index finger. “You watch your mouth when you speak to me.”
He wasn’t going to give me answers.
I turned to Mom, who still had her eyes on Dad. I stepped between them and caught her eye.
She realized belatedly that she was still holding her hand to her face, and dropped it stiffly to her side. It had been covering a red mark.
“Kennedy,” she said in a voice that sounded sort of far away, as if she were murmuring to an audience through a mic. “Pick up that envelope and come inside. We need to talk.”
I picked the thing up—it was thick, packed full, and heavy for its size—then watched Mom do the bravest thing I think I’ve ever seen her do. She turned her back on my father and walked away. It was like he didn’t even exist.
“Excuse me, Angela, I believe we were in the middle of a conversation,” he said, trying—and failing—to paste a reasonable-sounding tone over his wild emotions.
Mom didn’t answer him. She beckoned to me with one hand without ever looking back.
I followed her in a sideways sort of trot, keeping an eye on Dad until I was out of arms’ reach. I didn’t think he’d hit me—but I never thought he’d hit her either.
“Kennedy, you better get your butt back here,” he snapped as Mom disappeared through the plastic sheet. “Kennedy Lane I am talking to you!”
His voice squeaked pathetically, like a kid literally begging for attention. It shook me. I always knew he was sensitive about attention, but I’ve never seen it come out like this.
He’d always told me that only has-beens have to beg for attention (which is why, he argued, Lady Gaga would never hold her edge. She continued to piss him off by proving him wrong), and that a true leader would command attention naturally.
He wasn’t commanding anything. I heard the sputtering fits and starts building up to a full-blown tantrum. When I tuned him out enough to pay attention to the kitchen, I froze for a second time.
Mom had that murder look again. Only this time, it was focused on Rudy. He stood against the wall, as far from her as he could get, slouching in a blatantly non-threatening posture.
“Mom,” I said. “This is Rudy. He’s my boyfriend.”
“I would hope so,” Mom said without taking her eyes off of him. “Otherwise we would have much bigger problems.”
I shot a questioning look at Rudy, but he was focusing all of his attention on avoiding direct eye contact with Mom.
I could have told him that was a bad idea, but instructing him on the importance of body language seemed like a moot point at that juncture.
“Both of you, sitting room. Now.” Mom released him from her piercing gaze and stepped to the living room, her heels making incongruous cheerful little clicks on the tile.
Rudy let out a breath and slumped. I grabbed his hand with my free hand and pulled him with me into the little front room.
Mom sat on the sofa, looking so close to her usual cool, collected self that I had to deliberately remind myself that Dad was still losing his shit in the back yard. She gestured to the little sitting bench across from her. We sat down.
“Hand me the envelope,” she said quietly.
I did. She shook the contents of the envelope down on the coffee table, then spread them out, shuffling papers and photographs into discreet little piles.
“This was delivered to my pillow,” she said.
Chills scuttled down my spine. “Your pillow?”
She nodded. “Someone felt this was so important for me to see that they broke into the house—not a difficult task at the moment—and put this on my bed. On my pillow.” She looked up at me, her dark eyes flat and expressionless. “Someone invaded my personal space with the sole intent of ruining you. Or me. Or your father. Perhaps all of the above. Until we know more, we won’t know how to prepare.”
“What’s there that could ruin me?” I asked.
She slid a picture across the table at me. It was a photo of my receipt for the garden stuff—over a thousand dollars. Joan must have taken that.
Mom slid another photo at me of the completed garden, so pretty and inviting that it made my heart hurt. That was all gone now.
Then a third photo that made me gasp. I looked from it to Rudy with wide eyes, and my heart sank when he went pale and turned away from me.
It was him, in my backyard, smashing the missing chair to pieces. Fractured bits of my beautiful garden lay scattered around him. In context, it absolutely looked like he had wrecked the garden himself. I wanted to argue on his behalf, but my mother shut me down with a look.
She slid the last picture in my pile at me. I expected this one, but I didn’t expect it to hit me that hard.
Rudy, naked and muddy, glaring murderously at the
camera. Me beside him, muddy and clothed only in a disheveled robe, staring blankly.
I looked like a domestic violence victim, dissociated from the insane naked person in front of me. My stomach twisted in knots.
My mother moved to the next pile, and handed me a picture. It took me a minute to recognize the person in it—it was Thomas, his face battered and bloody and bruised, beaten within an inch of his life. It was attached to one of Thomas’ school pictures, for contrast, I guess.
Then there was a picture of Julianne looking worse than I’ve ever seen her. Her red-rimmed eyes were smeared and smudged with makeup, her face puffy and blotchy from crying, her hair a frizzy mess. A bruise shaped like a man’s palm ringed her neck.
The picture after that was a little blurry, a frame snatched from a home security video—but it was clear enough to see Rudy smashing Thomas’ face.
My stomach lurched.
I swallowed hard.
The next thing she showed me was a newspaper clipping from somewhere in Arizona, showing a photo of a man lying in traction in the hospital. The paper didn’t name Rudy outright, but gave enough details—like Jason’s name—to put the pieces together.
I read it over and over again, absorbing it. Rudy had beaten this man half to death. The only reason he wasn’t serving time was because Jason adopted him. The writer of the piece had some very strong opinions about that, and none of them were good.
Whoever put all of this together was trying to paint Rudy as nothing but a violent creature, a habitual abuser. The trouble with coming up with any kind of argument against that was that, at some point, I was going to have to talk to her about dad; and I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t say something in defense of Rudy that she could throw in my face later.
Mom stared at me flatly while I processed all of this, then handed me the next stack all at once. Unlike the others, this one was focused on me.
A photo of me and the girls in my garden, the day after I finished it, when we were all happily talking about Halloween. Then the hood of Rudy’s car. Me, getting out of Rudy’s car. Me and Rudy, under the bridge, my skirt hiked up to my hips and his hands on my throat and breast, locked in a passionate kiss. A copy of my grades, and how they’ve slipped over the last couple months. If I ever found out how she got ahold of that, I’d get somebody fired.
The last photo was the worst. It was me, cradled in Bradley’s arms, coming out of the woods. Rudy was in front, looking furious. Someone had written across the picture in purple gel pen, “mid-week keggar.”
My head was pounding and I wanted to throw up. All of this, condensed and distilled and framed in bias, was too much to argue against.
Everything I wanted to say sounded stupid and hollow in the face of the evidence. It made me feel helpless, like a child framed by her nanny for stealing the last cookie. There was just too much.
Mom left the room for a few moments and my head swirled. I wanted to reach out for Rudy, but he wasn’t reachable. He was locked down tight, staring at the corner of the room, tucked into himself.
“And this,” Mom said when she stepped back in the room. Her voice was just a little higher, just a little thinner than usual and she carried a single piece of paper.
I took the typed note from her and read it out loud for Rudy’s benefit. I didn’t even know if he was listening—his face was like a stone.
“Nice parenting skills. Wonder if your followers’ kids act like this? Be a shame if they found out.”
I frowned at the paper and turned it over, but that was it. There were no demands, no suggestions, nothing but a vague threat against dad’s reputation and a barb against their parenting.
I put the note down gingerly.
Mom took her seat again, lacing her fingers together like she’d fly apart if she didn’t hold herself together.
“How could you do this to us, Kennedy?” Mom asked in a whisper. “What did we do to you that was so terrible you felt you had to trash the house and ruin us? Did we abuse you? Did you ever want for anything? How could you turn your back on your family like this? To connect yourself to this—ex-con? This violent child. Running around town with him, flaunting your delinquency.” Her voice shook with rage and disappointment.
White noise filled my head as I struggled to find an answer. My hands trembled and I smashed them between my thighs, pressing back against the spiral of panic picking up speed at the base of my skull.
“He’s not—”
“She didn’t do anything to you,” Rudy said, cutting off my apology. “Someone’s been harassing her. Stalking her. Kidnapping her. And you were—where? During all of this? Did you call to check up on her? Did you notice when her friends stopped coming over? Did you have any interest in what was happening to her?”
My mom pulled herself up stiffly, her back straight, her posture hinting at a cobra strike.
Her eyes flashed dangerously.
Rudy met her gaze blandly.
“I was working,” she said, her voice calm and dangerous. “Working so hard to provide the life that you two find so disposable. Would you wreck your own furniture, Rudy? Do you even own furniture? Would you destroy your own project, throw away your own money?”
“Mom, he didn’t wreck the garden. That was the other people. The ones stalking us.”
I was afraid, so afraid, that even with the evidence right in front of her she wouldn’t believe me. Because that’s exactly what those pictures were—evidence of stalking.
She turned her flashing eyes on me, then frowned down at the table.
“You know this for a fact?” she demanded. “Then explain that.” She pointed at the photo of Rudy smashing the chair.
“I was breaking it up to put it in the garbage,” he muttered. “It was already broken.”
“Is that true, Kennedy?” Her eyes pinned me to the spot. “Did you see it happen?”
“It’s true,” I said. “Look, mom, Rudy has a history, but he wouldn’t do that to me.”
She scoffed and turned away from me, shaking her head. “Why, because you’re so special? Too passive? Would never dare piss him off?”
“No,” I said firmly. “Because he doesn’t go off on people who don’t deserve it.”
She whirled back toward me, her eyes wild. She snatched Julianne’s picture off the table and slapped it onto my knee hard enough to sting.
“Listen to yourself! You’re so infatuated with him you’re telling me that Julianne—your best friend—deserved this!”
I looked down at the picture and visualized Rudy pinning Julianne by her throat. I expected to feel disgusted or afraid or angry, but I didn’t. All I could think is what I would do if someone kidnapped Rudy and left him for dead. I would tear them apart. For him—only for him—I would lose my mind with fury. I would snap.
I looked up at her and met her gaze fully. “Yes.”
Mom’s eyes widened and she pulled away from me, staring like she’d seen a ghost.
“What’s happened to you, Kennedy?”
I rose slowly to my feet. “It’s about time you asked,” I said quietly. She looked afraid. She’s never been afraid of me. “What happened? I found out that my so-called friends are bullies. I found out that my so-called enemies are good people. I found love and family and warmth. Julianne couldn’t deal. She couldn’t face the fact that I was getting along just fine without her, doing the thing she told me not to do, wearing the things she told me not to wear, seeing the people she told me not to see.”
“Can you blame her?” Mom shouted. She gestured forcefully at the pile of pictures. “He’s violent! He’s unhinged! He’s a foster kid with a record! Julianne loves you, you think she wasn’t trying to protect you from him?”
Rudy slouched deeper into himself, defeated. I could see it all over his face. That was exactly how he thought about himself, and it was wrong. So fucking wrong.
“Rudy grew up fighting for his life,” I said. “He’s never gotten violent without a good reason. Julianne a
nd Thomas kidnapped me. They locked me in a trunk and left me at Crunchie’s. I was in there for more than twelve hours, mom. I almost died. That’s not protection. That’s revenge—just like this.” I gestured at the table littered with photos.
She stood frozen, silently processing what I was saying.
“That keggar picture? That’s not what that was. That picture was taken the day that Rudy and his brothers found me and broke me out of the trunk. I was confused and scared and I ran until I couldn’t run anymore. They brought me back. They saved my life. Without Rudy and his brothers, you would have come home to a dead daughter and a perfectly intact house.”
She pressed her lips tightly together. She looked from me to Rudy and back again. There was a nervousness to her posture, a sudden uncertainty as the righteous indignation died.
A sick dread settled in the pit of my stomach.
“Rudy I think we need to go right now,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, but a muscle in her jaw jumped. Rudy shot me a curious glance, but I just grabbed his arm and headed for the door, heart pounding wildly.
Once we were outside, I broke into a run. He kept up with me and we slammed the doors just as a black and white police car turned onto my street.
“Drive away slowly,” I told him. “Don’t draw attention. Just get the fuck out of here.”
He moved the car without a word. We slipped away, turning the corner before the cop saw us. Still, I had him meander through various neighborhoods, winding away from both of our houses in a lazy, irregular, random pattern.
I didn’t know how mom intended to handle things, but I figured we should probably be as far away as possible.
“What was that about?” Rudy asked finally, after I guided him to the highway out of town.
He hit cruise control at 85 miles an hour headed west, putting enough distance between us and the cops’ jurisdiction for me to catch a full breath.
“She called the cops on us,” I told him. “That was what she was doing when she went to get that last note. I don’t know what she’s going to tell them. I think I changed her mind a little bit, but I don’t know for sure that she won’t still try to throw you under the bus.”
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