CHAPTER FOURTEEN #2
But what about this nagging feeling of discontent? What the hell was I supposed to do about that, and how was I supposed to make it go away?
How was I supposed to keep it from worming its way into this life, the one I'd wished for and never thought I'd have?
***
“Help me! Noah! Help!”
BANG!
I bolted upright in bed, gasping and clutching at my throat. Sweat dripped from my forehead, soaking the sheets I lay upon. Beside me, Meg stirred, lifting her head off her pillow and outstretching her arm toward me.
“Noah, baby, what happened? Did you have another nightmare?”
I groaned in response, laying my hands over my face.
Of course it had been another nightmare. There was always another nightmare. And while Meg thought those nightmares put me at 1111 Daffodil Lane, not far from where we were right now, she couldn't have been further from the truth.
No, those nightmares brought me to a place farther away. Somewhere unbeknownst to me, but a place I could still smell, hear, see when I squeezed my eyes shut.
Twenty years ago, Seth—my biological father—had taken me to that house and demanded I find a bag while he threatened some guy named Tommy with a gun.
Twenty years ago, I'd wandered around that filthy, flea-infested house until I found a boy a little older than me.
We fought. We tumbled into a dark, dark room, where he tried to strangle me, and Seth told me to get outside, get out of the house, and after I did, after I listened, there was a gunshot.
A thunderous crack that had shaken the entire ground I stood upon, rattling my bones and soul for all of eternity.
I'd never forget it.
I'd never forget them.
And it was him who haunted me. Not the horrors in Dad's old trailer, but him. The boy with the messy hair and mean eyes. He had been as dirty as the house. He had been as helpless as me. A victim. A product of something he'd never asked for.
What ever happened to you?
Was it his dad who died that night or …
I shuddered with a sigh, letting my hands fall from my face.
“You're okay, baby,” Meg said, her voice heavy with sleep. She sat up, wrapping her arms around me and resting her cheek against my shoulder. “You're okay. You're safe.”
She didn't know. She knew about none of it. God, nobody did. I'd never told anyone. I'd kept my fear-driven promise to my piece-of-shit father, who'd sworn he'd get me …
I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember what the hell he'd bribed me with for going into that house that I knew I shouldn't be anywhere near, let alone in.
“McDonald's,” I muttered aloud, nodding slowly.
Meg lifted her head. “What?”
The need to tell someone was overwhelming.
Fuck, the need to tell her … she'd carry it with me.
She'd carry the world if I asked her to, though I never would, but this …
I wanted … no, fuck, I needed to let her in on this.
I needed to tell her, to explain what exactly kept me tethered to a past so horrible that it terrorized my dreams more often than not.
“Meghan,” I whispered, my voice hoarse, and I swallowed.
My hands shook as fear took me by the throat, its long, cold, bony fingers tightening their hold and piercing my flesh.
I was doing this, and I had to remind myself that my father—the father whose blood soiled my veins—wasn't coming back from the dead to slaughter me for spilling his dirty, dark secrets.
He couldn't hurt me, he couldn't hurt any of us, but why did it feel like he might?
“What's wrong?”
“I … I need to tell you something,” I started slowly. “I know it's late. I-I know we need to sleep, but I have to do this now or—”
“Noah, you're freaking me out right now,” she said, her fingers tightening against my chest.
“No, don't … don't be scared. It has nothing to do with you. It's—”
“Does this have anything to do with us?”
I furrowed my brow because, you know, I had no idea how to answer that question.
Because while, no, it didn't directly have anything to do with our relationship or the way I felt about her, it had everything to do with why I wasn't sure I wanted to keep on building a life in this town, where not a single thing happened.
“Why are you hesitating?”
I wiped the remaining sweat from my brow as I shook my head.
“Because I don't know,” I admitted honestly.
“I mean, no, it doesn't have anything to do with us, but it has something to do with me. It has everything to do with me and who I am, and you … you need to know. You need to understand. You need—”
“Okay,” she said, interrupting softly. “Okay. Whatever it is, tell me. Go ahead.”
So … I did, but not without stalling or hesitation.
Telling her the gritty details of that night was as harrowing of an experience as anything I'd ever been through.
And the guilt! Holy fuck, the guilt … it was like I'd been the one to commit the crime myself, like I, at six years old, had been an accomplice when I was nothing but an innocent, unwilling participant in the shit show Seth had made of his miserable life.
But despite the time it took for me to get through uttering the words aloud, Meg listened to every word without interruption.
Silently, she encouraged me with soft gestures on my back or squeezes of my hand, but never once did she hurry me along, and every so often, I had to stop talking to take a moment and think, And yet, despite all of this, despite everything, she loves me.
Seth had never been lucky.
Nobody had ever loved him.
And that fact alone set me so far apart from the man who'd given me life, and I knew I was nothing like him. Everything in me was all Rain, and the parts that weren't had come from the man deserving of the name Dad.
But Seth had given me these memories, the nightmares, and the guilt. And even twenty years later, I couldn't figure out how to live with them.
“I feel like a part of me lives in that house … on that stoop,” I confessed, relieved that this story was coming to an end. “Constantly replaying those events on an endless loop, over and over and over again.”
“You were only six,” Meg whispered, the first words she’d spoken in … I couldn't tell you.
I nodded. “Six years old. It's been twenty years. God …” I scrubbed the palm of my hand over my mouth. “Twenty fucking years, and—”
“You never told anyone,” she finished softly, sadly.
“Nope. Nobody until you.”
“We've been together for five years, Noah. You could've … God, you could've told me sooner. You could've told someone, even if it wasn't me. I can't believe you didn't even tell your dad.”
Fight or flight was set alight in my bones, and I was desperate to make her understand.
“But he said he'd kill me, Meghan,” I pressed. “I was six years old. I was this scared little fucking kid, and he looked me right in the eye and said, ‘If you tell anyone, I will kill you and your whore mother.’ So, I never … I couldn't …”
“But he's dead,” she reminded me, as if I'd forgotten—and, hell, maybe I had.
Maybe I did forget, constantly, that the son of a bitch had been burned down to ash and tossed somewhere undisclosed because nobody on the face of this planet gave a single fuck about him.
“But he said he'd kill me,” I repeated.
“But he can't.”
He can't. He can't.
But he tried.
A thought crossed my mind as I slowly turned my head to look at her, my mouth agape. “D-do you think … do you think that's why … holy fuck, do you think he thought I’d told Dad? And that's why he …”
“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “That isn't at all in the police report. He never said that to your dad.”
“Maybe he was waiting for Dad to say it to him,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe he didn't want to be the one to—”
“Noah, think about this for a second. Seth probably killed a lot of people in his life, right? He probably got away with murder more times than any of us can even imagine. Why would this be different than the rest?”
“Because …”
My words died in my throat as I furrowed my brow because she'd made a good point. Think, Mason. Think. The gears in my head creaked to life, my thoughts buzzing a mile a minute.
“Come on, Detective,” she said softly, wrapping her arms around mine and tugging me back down to lay at her side.
A flicker of an idea was brought to life as my head hit the pillow. “What if …”
“Mmhmm?” She laid her cheek on my shoulder and stretched her arm across my chest.
“What if … what if he'd never killed a kid before?”
Meg hummed thoughtfully into the darkness of our bedroom as her fingers traced circles through my chest hair, nodding softly. “You think that could've messed him up? Like, maybe he had some guilt over it?”
“Maybe,” I said, but I wasn't sure I was convinced.
He hadn't seemed guilty, not at all panicked.
And I didn't know for sure that he'd killed that kid, did I? I hadn't seen anything. Most of what I thought I knew was built entirely on assumptions, a six-year-old brain fitting jagged pieces of a messy puzzle together. For all I knew, he'd killed Tommy, and—
“What if Tommy had been his first kill?”
Meg's fingers stalled in their lazy circuit.
“And what if he was important to someone?” I went on, staring at the blank ceiling we couldn't decide what color to paint. “What if he … what if he wasn’t supposed to kill him? I mean, he'd only fired his gun to …”
My voice trailed off, and my jaw dropped as something very sudden and somehow critical hit me out of nowhere.
“He was protecting me,” I stated. “That kid …
he was choking me. He was going to kill me.
And Seth … he pulled him off. He threw him into the corner.
The kid was already hurt. He could've left it alone, we could've gotten out of there, but he didn't. He told me to get out, he told me to leave, and then he fired the gun.
He didn't want me to see it happen. He …”
“What if he was protecting you from more than just that kid?”
“He kept telling Tommy not to look at me,” I went on absent-mindedly.
“Holy fuck, what if it means something? God, Meg, this is what I'm talking about.
I can't … fuck, I can't turn this off. I can't just live with this and go on like it never happened.
It's like a part of me is moving forward—buying a house, getting married, having kids—while another part of me is still … back there. Wondering why. Wondering when the fuck Seth is gonna walk through the door and put a bullet between my eyes.”
“Baby, maybe you should … I don't know … maybe you need to talk to someone. I mean, not just me. Maybe a doctor. Maybe …”
I narrowed my eyes and asked, “What?”
She swallowed; she hesitated, like she didn't want to finish the sentence but knew she had to. She'd already started.
“Maybe … you need to figure out what happened,” she said slowly, getting each word out with cautious intent. “Maybe, Detective, you need to finish the puzzle and then lay it to rest.”
“This is why I’m becoming a detective,” I replied, licking my dry lips. “To stop the bad guys and to solve mysteries and—”
“I know,” she said, reaching up to caress my cheek. “And if solving this one will help you to move on, then I think you should do it.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “Yeah, I do. But, baby, if you do solve it and you still can't put it behind you, then—”
“Then I'll talk to a doctor,” I agreed, turning to press a kiss to her forehead while my thoughts traveled a mile a minute.
Thinking, thinking, thinking about my first steps, about the first person I was going to reach out to.
Because I realized I’d been wrong about one thing.
Someone had loved Seth.
For whatever it was worth, he had mattered to one lone person in this world.
Levi Stratton.