Chapter 21
TWENTY-ONE
SILAS
TWELVE YEARS OLD
“Stop bein’ such a little pussy and do it. It’s about time you learned to be a little more like your old man.”
Silas’s father looked across at him from where he sat in the driver’s seat of his beat-up pickup truck. Grinning that disgusting smile that drove into Silas like rusted nails.
He hated it.
He hated what his stomach felt like as he sat on the passenger side, one hand hanging onto the door handle like it might be able to stop him from having to unlatch it.
His molars ground so hard it was giving him a headache as he warred with what to do.
His momma would be so disappointed in him if she knew what his dad was putting him up to. He knew it was wrong all the way down to his bones.
“I don’t want to,” he finally mustered up the courage to say.
His dad laughed a boisterous sound like he thought it was hysterical before the back of his hand came out and cracked at the side of Silas’s mouth.
Silas flinched hard with the impact. A splutter of pain and the taste of blood.
He shouldn’t have been caught off guard. He should have known exactly what would be coming for him if he disobeyed his father.
But his momma had always told him to do what was right. To stand his ground against anyone who would try to persuade him into drifting onto a dangerous route.
He figured his dad was included.
“Didn’t ask if you wanted to, boy. I told you. Now get your scrawny ass out of the truck and do it before I give you the kind of whooping that will leave you unable to sit for the next week.”
Nausea boiled in his guts, and his skin felt hot and sticky, his breaths coming hard as his heart pounded with fear.
Anger bubbled on the underside of it. He wanted to lash out the same way as his father had done. Strike him across the face. Maybe take the brick he clutched in his opposite hand and smash him on the side of the head with it.
His dad must have been able to see it because he swept in close, his voice cutting like razors across Silas’s face. “You want me to take your disobedience out on your momma for raising such a pathetic piece of shit?”
Silas bowed with the words. Terror ripped through him at bringing more attention to his mom. He tried his best to protect her. To stand in the way when their dad was coming for her.
Things had been good when their mom had kicked him out. Months of peace and his momma smiling, joy in her as she took care of him and his little sister and brother.
Meems had told her it was right. Called it taking out the trash.
But when the trash had come back, pounding at the door and demanding to be let inside, his momma had called the police.
They told her that she had no right to keep him out.
He was on the lease, and she had no papers saying he couldn’t be there.
Silas knew to his guts it was bullshit. Wrong that she had to let him back in. Wrong that he’d won again.
“Don’t sit there and act like you’re better than me,” his father sneered. “You got my blood running right through you. It’s time to use it. Now get out before I beat the man into you.”
Hatred boiled in that blood. The blood that Silas hated. He clenched his teeth, sucked for a bunch of breaths, and tried to shove off the fear.
But it chased him like a swarm of bees as he finally shoved open the door. His ears rang with adrenaline. A concoction of terror and hate and disgust.
He ran across the road and bashed the window of the car rather than his daddy’s head.
Glass shattered, little splinters that went everywhere.
But he wasn’t prepared for when an alarm started blaring. Shocked, he jolted back, eyes skating back and forth to see a bunch of people turning to look at him. Panicking, he started to run back for the truck.
But not before a guy came busting out from a store, right behind him in a flash.
Tackling him to the hard pavement below. His chest pressed so hard to the road that he thought it was going to cave in as the man pinned him down.
“You little shit. Did you just try to rob me? You bust my car window? You’re gonna pay for that.”
Silas struggled to break free, and for once, he was thankful his dad was there, that he could get this guy off him because he was crushing him bad.
Putting so much weight on him it was hard to breathe.
Only his attention cut to the opposite side of the road when the engine of his dad’s old truck suddenly roared, tires peeling out, the tail of his truck disappearing as it swerved down the street.
His momma stormed with him out of the Crimson Creek police station. She had his hand locked in hers, like he was four and she was marching him out of a store after throwing a tantrum.
The sun shone bright, and he blinked against the jarring rays. Jarred from sitting on a hard chair in a dark office for what had felt like an entire week, then the next released into the cool spring air.
He wanted to fall to his knees from the relief, but he tried to force his chest and chin up. To pretend like he hadn’t been the most scared in his life. That his heart hadn’t felt like it’d been stretched and mashed like Play-Doh.
The worst part was his mom. The way he could feel her entire body quaking. Her head held high too as she rushed with him down the five steps of the big building and around to the side of it.
There, she whipped him around, and she bent the smallest fraction since he was almost as tall as her, getting right in his face. “Tell me what happened.”
“I already told you.” He basically stammered it, though he tried to make it sound hard. Mean like his dad’s voice.
He wasn’t great at telling his mom lies. But no way was he going to let on that his dad had forced him to do it.
Not when he knew she would confront him, which would turn into a big fight, and she’d end up getting hurt.
He would never be responsible for that. Would never let it happen. It was his job to take care of her.
It was what he’d been made to do. He knew it all the way down into his soul.
“Don’t lie to me, Silas. I know you’re not telling the truth.”
Redness flushed his skin, and the scrapes on his face from being pushed down onto the pavement burned, but not as hot as his shame.
“I told you. I saw that there was a wallet in the cupholder, and I figured there had to be money in it.”
Air huffed out of her mouth, and she inched closer to him, but her words came out soft. In all the belief that she always gave him. “You’re not a thief, Silas. I know you didn’t come up with that plan yourself. You can tell me whatever you need to.”
He wavered, looking away and gnawing at the inside of his cheek like it might be able to keep the truth from bleeding out.
“Please tell me, baby.” Sadness oozed out with it, and he looked that way just as she whispered, “I know it was him, wasn’t it? Did your dad put you up to it?”
Put him up to it?
Moisture bleared in his eyes, and in discomfort, he shuffled on his feet, trying to fight the hurt that blazed across him like the strike of a leather belt.
“Tell me, Silas. You’re not going to get into trouble. I just need to know.”
“He made me.” He hated that he sounded like a sniffling little baby when he said it, but he couldn’t help it. Couldn’t help the icky feeling that slicked through his veins.
“Because I’m like him,” he whispered like a horrible secret.
His mom took him by the outside of the arms. “You are nothing like him. Nothing.”
She almost shook him as she wheezed the last.
“You are kind and good and care about those around you. You love, Silas. You love with every cell inside this body, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve got his blood, you’ve got Silas’s heart.”
She said it as she set her hand over the thunder of it.
“It’s your heart.” The words gushed out of him. She was who he wanted to be like.
Tears blurred her eyes, the soft green sad. “No more of this, baby. It’s done. It’s over.”
He wanted to ask her what that meant, but she suddenly shot upright, taking his hand again, glancing both ways before she darted them across the tree-lined street to where their minivan was parked on the opposite side.
Confusion bound him when he saw that Meems was sitting in the front passenger seat, and when his mom ripped open the sliding back door, his brother and sister’s car seats were both buckled onto each side of the middle row with an empty spot left right in the middle.
There was no place to sit in the back seat since the whole thing was stuffed with their things.
“Get in, baby,” his mother whispered.
His nerves scattered.
Excitement and relief and more of that confusion as he tried to process exactly what was happening.
“Hi, Sigh-us, my brover!” Brody kicked his tiny feet as Silas squeezed by to get into the middle, and he could barely return a, “Hi, buddy,” around the lump in his throat as he settled into the middle.
On the opposite side, Elena reached around her car seat, a big smile on her dimpled face as she gripped at his arm. “We’re goin’ to Meems’s house.”
His heart felt like it was going to explode, and his grandmother shifted around to give him a soft smile. “That’s right. We’re going to Meems’s house.”
Bewildered, he met his mother’s gaze through the rearview mirror.
He thought he was going to be grounded forever.
Or maybe his dad would have been the one to give him his punishment, even though his mom never told him when he was in trouble so that wouldn’t happen. Still, his dad didn’t seem to care that much about it when he found out, that was, if he was even around.
But instead, his mother said, “And we aren’t coming back.”