Chapter 49
When Eileen was gone, Dante helped Lennon off the floor and downstairs. Lennon caught a glimpse of his son—emerging from the dark of the foyer—and blacked out. She came to minutes later, strapped into the passenger seat of Dante’s car. It was dark, and they were driving through the thickly forested back roads that snaked along the coast.
“How did it start between you two?” she asked in a small voice.
Dante’s hands tightened, bloodless, around the steering wheel. “You should rest.”
“No,” said Lennon. “None of that. Don’t patronize me. I want the truth. Why didn’t you tell me you had a child?”
“I intended to…when the time was right.”
Lennon couldn’t tell if that was a lie. She was beginning to question whether she’d ever been able to tell. If any of her reads on him were reliable. If she even knew the man sitting next to her at all. “How did it start between you two?”
“Do you really want to—”
“Yes,” said Lennon, cutting him off. “How did it start?”
“Same way it started with us. Only I was the student, she the advisor.”
So this was the real source of his reluctance. Lennon had sensed it was something more than the usual trepidation but had not put the pieces together until now. Dante himself had been in a relationship like this one, and if his tortured expression was any indication at all, he’d suffered for it.
Lennon didn’t want to ask the question that followed. But some dark suspicion prompted her to ask it anyway. “How old were you when it first began?”
“Lennon—”
“How old, Dante?” Lennon said this gently, afraid that she might wound him.
“I was turning sixteen.”
“So you were fifteen?” Jesus Christ, she thought, he was a baby. Just a child himself. Younger even than the son he had now, by the looks of it. The idea of it filled her with revulsion and rage on his behalf.
Lennon didn’t want to ask the question that came next. A part of her felt like she had no place to. But she had to know—after seeing them together, the way Dante had held Eileen’s shoulders—she had to have an answer, even if it broke her to bits. “Are you…still with her?”
“Lennon, you have to understand—”
“Just answer the question,” she said, her voice breaking a little with the effort of both trying to be gentle and holding back her tears. “I need to know. When was the last time you were, you know, together?”
A muscle in Dante’s jaw jumped and spasmed. “Six months ago.”
“So since you’ve known me?”
“Yes.”
Lennon felt like she might fall through the floor of the car. “Do you love her?”
“She’s the mother of my son.”
A gaping silence opened like a wound between them.
“Are you going to…keep being with her?”
He kept his eyes on the road. “I don’t want to. I haven’t wanted to since you and I…began. Maybe since before that, even.”
This, at least, came with some measure of relief. “You could’ve told me—”
“I did,” said Dante. “I told you many times that we shouldn’t proceed. You didn’t listen.”
“This isn’t about me,” said Lennon. “This is about you and the secrets you’ve kept. How you weren’t honest with me, or, I suspect, anyone. Not even yourself. You’re acting like this was a relationship between two people who could actually consent to one. But Dante, you were a child with a grown woman who had no right to…” Lennon cut herself short. She couldn’t get the words out.
“Don’t pretend this is about that,” said Dante, and he brought the car around a tight bend. “If you have something you want to accuse me of, then say it.”
“I don’t have anything to accuse you of. But I do have questions.”
“Like what?”
“Like why is it that I bare so much of myself to you while you always keep me at arm’s length? You never let me close enough to understand you. When you’re at your weakest, you shut me out. Is it that you don’t trust me—”
“That’s not it.”
Lennon felt close to tears now. “What, then?”
“I can’t care for you in the way you want to be cared for,” said Dante. “I warned you in the beginning, and you wouldn’t hear it. You didn’t want to believe me, and frankly, neither did I. I wanted things to work because I wanted you. I still do. But that isn’t enough to blind me to the truth.”
“And what is the truth, Dante?”
“This needs to end. It needs to end because it should’ve never started in the first place.”
Lennon received these words like a backhanded slap. It all came to her so clearly then, as if she’d woken up from a dream. She had been na?ve and stupid in falling for Dante. And Dante had used her, the way men are apt to do. It had been the same with Wyatt and all the others Lennon had loved and slept with. She had given them everything, and they’d taken and taken and taken. And when she had nothing left to give, or when they just grew bored of her offerings, they discarded her like she was nothing at all.
“I defended you,” said Lennon. “When Claude accused you of killing Benedict, when people began to believe him, I stuck up for you. Always. I’ve been on your side this entire time, and now I see that I was a fucking fool for that because clearly I don’t even know you.” She was crying now—hot, angry tears that cut tracks down her cheeks. “Maybe Claude was right about you—”
A boy appeared in the middle of the road. Eyes wide, refracting the light of the headlights. He had a long pale neck slashed open just above the collar.
Dante wrenched the steering wheel a split moment before he would’ve struck him.
The car careened off the side of the road, toward the gully that ran along its shoulder. Dante slammed the brakes so hard that Lennon snapped forward, gagging as the seat belt cut deep into her throat. A beat passed. The boy in the road lunged across the left lane and disappeared into the dark of the tree line. Lennon unclipped her seat belt even as Dante caught her by the arm and begged her to stay in the car.
Lennon wriggled out of his grasp, kicked open the car door, stepped out into ankle-deep mud, and dragged her way up the side of the ditch to the road where she’d seen the boy just moments before. He couldn’t have gotten far, not in the condition that he was in. But when Lennon staggered across the road and peered down into the gulley, then past it through the trees, there was no sign of him anywhere.
He’d just…disappeared, like he’d never been there at all.
And then, with a sinking feeling as though the ground had opened beneath her feet, Lennon remembered. She had seen this boy before, back in Amsterdam. She recalled the way he’d moved and glitched like a thing not human. The way that even when Lennon tried to bring his blurred and twisted body into focus, she couldn’t, no matter how much she strained her eyes. She’d blamed the strobe lights and darkness in the club, but what if it was something else? Something inhuman?
“That boy back there,” said Lennon, turning to Dante, who now stood in the street. “He’s the one from Amsterdam, isn’t he? The friend on bad terms.”
Dante gave no answer, which was confirmation enough. “Lennon, I need you to get back in the car. It’s not safe out here.”
“Who was that boy, Dante?” Her voice was rising now, shaky and hysterical. She didn’t sound like herself. She couldn’t get the image of the boy’s open throat out of her mind. The fear in his eyes.
“His name is August. He was a student of Benedict’s and a friend of mine, or at least he was. A friend of mine, I mean.”
So this was August, who Claude had referred to. The name of the boy tattooed along Dante’s ribs. The apparition from Amsterdam. “What happened to him? What happened to his throat?”
Dante didn’t answer. But his expression said what he wouldn’t.
“Did you hurt him? Is that what Alec was referring to?”
“We can talk about this later,” said Dante.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Well, it’s the only one I can give you tonight,” he said, and he looked tired then. So tired that if his knees had buckled right out from under him, if he’d fallen there in the middle of the street, Lennon wouldn’t have been remotely surprised. “Get in the car. We can talk in the morning.”
Lennon—stunned, shaking—got back into the car.
They drove home in silence. Dante retired to his bedroom and Lennon to hers. But come morning, Dante was gone, back to Drayton. He left a note on the dining room table: I was called back to campus. I’ll be home in the evening. We’ll talk then. Breakfast is in the fridge.
Lennon crumpled the note and tossed it into the trash. After the events of last night, she had no appetite, no energy to do much of anything really except sit, listless, in front of the TV, thinking over all that had occurred last night at Eileen’s, the apparition of that boy with the slashed throat who had spawned in the middle of the road.
The phone rang. And kept ringing.
Lennon let it go to voicemail twice before, on the third call, she sprang up from the couch, frustrated, to answer it. “Dante isn’t in right now—”
“It’s me,” said Carly. “I’m in Savannah, in the bar of the Clark hotel. I have a flight out at eight tonight, so we have to meet quickly. When can you come?”
“Why are you here?”
“I did some digging on your boyfriend,” she said, and Lennon could tell both from her tone and her spontaneous flight to Savannah that whatever she’d dug up had been bad.
“I thought I told you to drop that—”
“You did,” said Carly, “and that’s precisely what prompted me to start sniffing around. You’re a terrible judge of character. Always have been. So I need you to come here now. Faster than now, preferably. Trust me when I say you’ll want to see this.”
“Give me fifteen minutes.”
“Make it five if you can,” said Carly, and she hung up.
Lennon got dressed, shut the door of her bedroom—paranoid even though Dante said he wouldn’t be home until the evening—and called an elevator to Savannah. Apart from visiting Eileen’s, Lennon had rarely left Dante’s house since she’d first arrived there at the beginning of the summer, and she found it so strange and dizzying to be out in the world again, with all of its noise and traffic, the trolley buses packed to capacity with tourists, the flocks of pigeons, and people thumbing texts into their phones.
Walking through Savannah, Lennon found that she no longer knew how to make her way through the world. She’d forgotten simple things, things she would’ve thought indelible, like how to move with a crowd of people, how to blend in. Now she felt as though gazes trailed her as she made her way through the streets. As if the people flooding the sidewalk along with her sensed—bristling—that she was not like them. And she felt the creeping paranoia that she was about to be outed or attacked or otherwise ostracized.
Lennon was relieved when she spotted the Clark Hotel. Inside she found Carly at the bar, nursing a martini and carefully avoiding eye contact with the guy who was chatting her up. Lennon willed the man away as she approached, a mental tug that pulled him—in a sharp and wooden movement—from the stool he sat on. He lurched out the door without paying his tab, oblivious to the bartender, who called after him as he went.
Lennon sat down on that same stool. “What did you find?”
“Hello to you too,” said Carly, gazing after the man with a furrowed brow. “What did you do to that man?”
“What do you mean, what did I do?”
“He left so abruptly.”
“And how does that have anything to do with me? I’ve never even seen him before.”
Carly narrowed her eyes. “You need to get better at gaslighting if you plan on making a habit of lying to everyone all the time.” She reached into a stiff leather tote bag resting on the stool to her left and produced a laptop. “I found something on your Dante.”
“He’s not my anything.” Not anymore.
“I would certainly hope not.” Carly opened a file on her laptop that looked like a cross between a spreadsheet and a PowerPoint presentation, complete with a photo of Dante, a professional-looking headshot, like what you’d expect to see on a university’s landing page. But as she scrolled lower, there were other photos too—grainy clippings of newspaper articles that blurred as Carly scrolled past them, and at the bottom of one page, a small baby picture. “It was tough, at first, to find anything on him. Our database at the firm is extensive, but it almost seemed like someone had wiped or locked every known record relating to him. What little I managed to scrounge up was almost entirely derived from secondhand sources, so bear with me.”
Lennon glanced down the bar to make sure no one was listening. Nodded for her to continue.
“The man you now know to be Dante was born in Harlem, New York, to a Loucille, or Lou, Fredericks. But he had a different last name before. I wish I could give it to you, but it’s been redacted from every file I can find.”
“Redacted? How is a name redacted?”
“I don’t know,” said Carly. “But what I do know is that everything I gathered on him, I had to find by going backward. I started with who he is and tracked back to who he was. Somewhere along the way, it’s like he lost his name. He was Dante…and then as I went back in time he simply wasn’t. In every prison record, every file, every article, every letter and birth certificate, all I could find to identify him by was a blank space where his first name should’ve been.”
“What? That doesn’t even make any sense—”
“Let me finish,” said Carly. “We don’t have a lot of time, I have a flight at eight, and I think you’ll want to hear this. The father, Martin Fredericks, was out of the picture. CPS removed Dante from his mother’s home at age five—”
“Why?”
“He showed up to school covered in bruises.”
“And he didn’t say who gave them to him?”
“He didn’t say anything at all. According to his file, he was mute for the entirety of his childhood. After CPS took him from his mother, he went to live with his great aunt, Rosetta Lowe, near Beaufort, South Carolina, for several years.”
“Is her house the one I’ve been staying in?”
Carly shook her head. “That home was demolished, the land sold to a homeowner nearby who absorbed it as part of their property. That is the home you’ve been staying in, I think. Dante purchased the entire estate fourteen years ago. I was able to find a deed with his name on it, the name you now know him by, Dante. He bought the house when he was nineteen for two million, cash.”
“What?” The idea Dante had purchased a property like that at just nineteen staggered her. Drayton must’ve rewarded him well.
“That’s not even the half of it.” Carly scrolled lower, highlighted a chunk of text from a police report. “After Rosetta Lowe’s passing, Dante was released back into the custody of his mother, who was living with a man who would later become his stepfather. There were whispers of alleged abuse, a domestic violence charge that didn’t go anywhere. The police were allegedly called to the house a few times. None of those rumors can be corroborated with evidence. What we know is that at nine years old he beat his stepfather so badly that he was almost decapitated internally; by the time the police found him in the bathroom he had no pulse. I have no idea how a nine-year-old kid was able to do that to a grown man almost three times his size. But they were the only two in the apartment at the time. There was no weapon. No one else to blame. He was immediately placed in juvie, in the aftermath of that assault.”
“What happened to his stepfather?”
“Paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. Died in a care facility four years ago.”
“My god.”
“It gets worse,” said Carly. “He was held in a maximum-security prison called the Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility. The week he first arrived there, the first riot in the prison’s thirty-year history broke out. And these riots continued for the months that he was there. Weirdly, each of the boys who’d had a hand in inciting these riots—inmates with good behavior, no citations, who abruptly turned violent—had had strange interactions with Dante just prior.”
“Strange interactions? But I thought he didn’t speak?”
“He didn’t. Not out loud. The boys all claimed, and later a few of the prison guards too, that they could hear Dante in their heads. Speaking without a voice.”
A chill carved down her spine. “And what did he say to them?”
“That’s the thing. No one knows. None of the boys could remember. What we do know is that he was placed in solitary confinement in an effort to contain him from the rest of the prison body. And this is where things get weird. At midnight on his eleventh birthday, he was released . Or at least they think he was. All that’s known is that he disappeared from the prison that night. There were whispers that the guard on duty, a woman by the name of Judy Parker, might’ve aided some type of escape or prison break. She was questioned but remembered nothing of that night except that he had had a visitor.”
“A visitor? Who?”
“She either didn’t know or couldn’t say. Eventually, after no evidence of her interfering was found, they let her be. She died a few years later. A stroke. As for your Dante, or the boy that became him, his criminal record was expunged a year after he disappeared from the prison. Then less than a decade later, he graduated from Drayton College with his doctorate, making him one of the youngest PhDs in the country. And one would think that, given the strangeness of this story, given his past, there’d be some curiosity, some media coverage, something . But it’s almost like a gag order was placed, like his record wasn’t the only thing that was expunged. It was his history too. His birth name—I think that’s when it disappeared from all the records. Even physical ones. Look at this.” Carly fished through her bag and withdrew a yellowed newspaper. She opened it flat on the bar top and pointed to an article at the bottom of the page. There was a grainy picture of a prison, and an article beneath that talking about a juvenile inmate. The rest of the article was riddled with empty spaces where a name should’ve been, like the ink had been bleached from the paper.
A little lower down was a blurry school photo of the boy who had been haunting Lennon’s dreams from the day she’d first stepped foot on Drayton’s campus. In the photo he wasn’t smiling, but his lips were parted wide enough to see that he was missing his two front teeth. His eyes were large and solemn.
“Is this all you found?” Lennon asked.
Carly nodded.
“I want you to forget this happened,” said Lennon then, with real force behind the words, making them a reality as she spoke out loud.
Carly shifted in her seat, looking pained. “What do you mean…I—I don’t feel well.”
“It’s okay,” said Lennon. She felt sick with guilt over what she was doing but couldn’t run the risk of someone else tampering with Carly’s mind. If, somehow, Dante discovered that Lennon had been looking into his past, she had no idea what he’d do to her. But she was certain he wouldn’t hurt Carly if she posed no threat to him. Now, if he glimpsed into Carly’s mind, he would see that she had no memory of what she’d done or why she’d done it. If he wanted answers, he’d simply have to find them with Lennon.
“I think I’m drunk,” said Carly, disoriented, eyes screwed shut.
Lennon, in a quick sleight of hand, grabbed her sister’s laptop and the folder that contained all the information about Dante. She would destroy both of them later, burn the papers and remove the hard drive from the shell of the laptop, break it into pieces and then cast those pieces into the sea, erasing the last bit of evidence that could possibly tie Carly to Dante.
“You’re not drunk,” said Lennon, squeezing her sister’s hand.
“I think someone put something in my drink.”
“It’s okay. You’re safe with me. No one is doing anything to you.”
Carly turned to look at her sister, a fat tear spilling down her cheek. “Why are you lying to me? We never used to lie to each other.”
Lennon squeezed her eyes shut, reached deeper into her sister’s mind, retrieving the memories one by one the way someone plucks out splinters with a pair of tweezers. It was painstaking work, painful for the both of them.
“Just try to relax,” said Lennon, squeezing her fingers.
But Carly snatched her hand away. “What are you doing? You’re hurting me.”
Here, Lennon choked back tears of her own. “I’m sorry—”
“Just tell me the truth.”
One memory left. The one of that first phone call at Dante’s house, when Lennon had asked for her help. What a mistake that was, to drag her sister into all of this mess, to put her through this. She had so many regrets, but that was the one thing she regretted most. At the time she’d felt like a child, wanting her big sister to fix her mess. But she had been careless, selfish, to drag Carly into this.
“Stop it,” said Carly. “Just please stop. Be honest with me—”
Lennon ripped the memory free of her mind. Carly stiffened. A slick of blood trailed from her left nostril and filled the dip of her cupid’s bow. Lennon grabbed a few damp cocktail napkins and tried to wipe up the mess, but Carly slapped her hand away, stood up so sharply her stool rocked back and clattered to the floor of the bar. She gazed at Lennon, confused, disoriented—not even remembering why she was there in the first place. All Lennon had had the time to do was extract her memories pertaining to Dante, but she hadn’t had the time to replace them with new, false ones to explain why Carly had come to Savannah at all. There was a wound in her memory, raw and open. Needing to be sutured shut. But Carly wouldn’t let her.
“You ruin everything, you know. Everything you touch it just…it goes to shit.”
“I know,” said Lennon, through tears. “And I’m sorry.”
Carly snatched her bag, light without the folder and laptop that Lennon had stolen. She didn’t seem to notice, though. She slung it over her shoulder and made her way to the doors of the bar. “I have a flight to catch.”