Chapter Fifty-Six
Fifty-Six
It wasn’t possible. That was all I could think to myself, staring at that scar right where I had landed the rock over and over again.
It wasn’t possible he was sitting in front of me, all grown up with cool-guy tattoos and an apartment and a life.
It wasn’t possible that he was anything other than a corpse, buried in a coffin, rotting away into the abyss.
“Gruesome scar, right?” He laughed. I wished he would stop laughing. It was hard to try to convince myself he wasn’t completely batshit when he kept laughing like that.
“How?” I managed to ask.
“Surprise! I didn’t die.”
I could see that, but processing it was something wholly different. What did it mean that Cody Abbington was alive? How was Cody Abbington alive?
“I know you’re thinking…” His face twisted, feigning bewilderment, preparing to mock me.
“But, but, but you died in the hospital.” His voice was too high-pitched, too shaky—a horrible impression, but he was pleased with it.
He grinned as he transitioned back to his grandstanding.
“But that’s only what they said happened.
You think you’re the only kid they hid to protect? ”
I didn’t understand. They’d faked his death?
For what? Witness protection? And then he’d just stewed all these years, waiting to come back and exact his revenge?
Starting with chopping the arms off the two people who’d tried to help him?
I’m sure James and Oswald had come from a selfless place, at least James had, but the answer to every problem couldn’t be giving the kid a new identity and sending them far away to pretend nothing had happened to them. Clearly it hadn’t worked.
“And you just went along with it?” I asked. “You said, Okay, sure, and went off and lived with a new family?”
“Here’s the thing,” he said. “I did have some brain damage.” He ran his finger along the scar and I thought some damage was quite the understatement.
“I didn’t remember what happened. I woke up in a hospital in Maine with a lady telling me she was my mom.
Turns out Oswald and her were old family friends and she was desperate for a child.
She told me that I had an accident. I was ten.
What was I supposed to think? That she was lying and really my whole family had been massacred two hundred miles away? ”
“Not your whole family,” I pointed out, and my stomach flipped at the thought of Elyse. He had sought her out, seduced her, oh my God. “Elyse. What did you do? Oh my God!” I exclaimed, repulsed.
“Calm down,” he said. “It’s not like that. It’s just a cover.”
“She knows?”
“That I’m her brother? Yes.”
I leaned back in the seat. This was all too much. Elyse did know? Elyse was part of this? I had always assumed she was involved, until I hadn’t, and now I didn’t want her to be. “Is she…a part of this?”
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch; it’s not like that either.”
“How though?” I continued with short, vague questions, unable to narrow anything down to specifics.
“I had no idea, right? The whole time—when my mom died, through my teens, later when my stepdad died—nothing. A few years ago I was experimenting with a lot of psychedelics. I’d suffered from horrible headaches my whole life—well, since someone had bashed me in the skull.
” He paused for effect. “Pieces started to come back. Eventually I remembered them, glimmers of their faces—my family. I couldn’t place them, and the only person left to ask was good old Oswald.
“He was around a lot when I was a kid, trying to sleep with my mom before she married Mitchell, so I figured he might know something. I fed him liquor until he confessed that my mom had basically stolen me—not that anyone else wanted me. That’s when he told me my real name but suggested I leave it at that.
Of course I didn’t listen, and that same night the internet told me all I needed to know.
I had a sister who was still alive, living in Boston.
Lucky for me, I had a stepbrother who lived there, so I called him up, rekindled our nonexistent bond, and moved in with him and his buddies a couple months later.
“I didn’t remember you at first,” he clarified.
“I was focused on my sister and trying to remember my family. It took me a while to approach her. You can imagine how awkward it would be to tell her the truth, right?” He glared at me in the rearview mirror before accepting I wasn’t going to react. He smiled and forged on.
“She took it well,” he explained. “She’s a lonely soul.
It was weird at first, but we just needed time.
Elyse and I needed a plausible reason to be spending so much time together.
We were inseparable. She was really clingy—just like when we were little.
No one questions it if they think you’re fucking.
“One night,” he continued, “she got the balls to ask me if I remembered that day, really pushed me on it. As soon as she asked if I remembered you, it all came flooding back. It unlocked everything. So thank you for that, I guess.”
“You’re welcome,” I said, one snarky response cracking through my resolve. He grinned, and that was enough motivation not to let it happen again.
“So I went back to Oswald, this time knowing what question I really should be asking: What the hell happened to you? I was hoping he would tell me your new name, but he couldn’t remember.
Can you imagine? That priceless bit of information and he just forgot it.
I suppose the specifics didn’t matter much; it’s not like you’d tried to kill him. ”
He waited for that jab to land, but it wasn’t hard for me to resist.
“He did tell me one useful thing. He mentioned that James Calhoun had been the one who’d gotten you out of town. He’d found some boarding school in Pennsylvania to dump you in. There are quite a few boarding schools in Pennsylvania, but not too many that take in ten-year-olds.”
He was so proud of himself, but I couldn’t handle it anymore. “Yeah, and you went there and broke into the storage units and stole my file. I got it.”
His animated posturing cracked enough for me to pick up on it.
This part was important to him. He’d been waiting years to lay it all out on a platter for me—how smart he was, how stupid it made me.
He’d probably practiced in the mirror. It was part of my punishment and he wasn’t wrong about that.
Sitting in that van, listening to him go on and on, I knew it might end up being more torturous than any physical harm he had in store for me.
- - - - -
We were well off the highway now, and I knew where we were headed.
The old neighborhood. It was disturbing how tragic this was—all of it, but mostly that he had planned out this grand finale, taking me right back to the origin.
I’m sure he’d dreamed about how poetic it would be.
He was naive to think I had an attachment to that place, that killing me there would somehow be exponentially more upsetting.
The truth was, it didn’t matter to me where he killed me. It only mattered that it would be over.
“Elyse is such a bleeding heart,” he continued.
“She likes to act like she’s not, but once I told her who I was, she would have done anything for me, kept any secrets.
Her sad, traumatized brother wanted to get to know her, he wanted to remember, and he wasn’t ready for the world to know who he was yet.
I’d seen how people who knew who she was treated her.
It was all so fresh for me. I wasn’t ready to be a freak yet. You can appreciate that, right?
“Honestly,” he went on, “I thought she would be more ruthless. Back when we would first talk about finding you, I knew she hated you. I knew she blamed you for everything. I thought we would do it all together. But she was all talk, no action, and I worried she wasn’t ready to do what really needed to be done.
It’s not like I was just going to shoot you in the street and be done with it.
So I decided to take care of everything for her.
I knew it would be better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. ”
“Does she know who I am?”
“Not yet.” His delivery was ominous, but I was relieved there was still a chance she would never find out—no matter how much that chance was shrinking.
“Does she know what you did?”
“Not yet,” he repeated, jaunty this time.
“And Dominic? He really knew nothing?”
“What did Dominic know…?” he pondered. “Pretty much whatever I wanted him to know. See, right from the beginning, once I remembered you, before I had even figured out your new name, I used Elyse’s existence to pique Dominic’s interest in your father. Not that it was difficult.”
He waited for my reaction, at least an acknowledgment, but I was using all my willpower to paralyze the muscles in my face and avoid giving him any satisfaction.
“He was depressed after a breakup; he’s a serial monogamist, by the way, just like his mother.
I told him that he was such a great writer and that he should channel his emotions into that.
I suggested he write to Abel in prison. It would make such a great book.
I thought there was a chance Abel knew where you were or what your name was.
I thought there was a slimmer chance he might let something slip to Dominic. ”
“Why didn’t you just write to him?” I asked. “Why even use Dominic?”
Jake raised an eyebrow. Pleased I was engaging again.
“Well, you know Dominic. He just has that…I don’t know what to call it…
nonthreatening bumbling-idiot aura. Plus, if Abel recognized me, that wouldn’t be ideal, now, would it?
And not to pat myself on the back, but I did have some foresight about how the whole thing might play out, what I might need from that relationship with your father down the line. ”