Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
AUGUST
I hear him before I see him.
Jake’s voice cuts through the thin wall of my RV, and the sound of it activates my nervous system in a way that’s older and more animal than fear. More like something that lives below the ribcage.
I stay on my couch.
Lennon’s got this. She doesn’t need me stomping out there like some sort of caveman.
My sketchpad is open on my knee and I’m not drawing, just holding the pencil and listening to the rhythm of what I can’t quite make out through the wall.
Lennon has been competently handling things her entire life without me and she doesn’t need me walking out there and becoming the headline, which is what happens when Jake and I end up in the same space.
So I stay on my couch.
I hear her voice through the wall, careful as she tries to cut off my brother’s insidious version of being reasonable: I’m not doing this.
His voice, softer than hers, which is the whole move I know so well: I’m just trying to understand—
I am gripping the pencil hard enough that my knuckles have gone pale.
I’m still not going out there.
Her voice, tighter: You froze my accounts and you blocked my number—
His voice, patient, almost sorrowful: You’re raising your voice.
Her voice: I am not—
His voice: Lennon. Listen to yourself.
I stand up.
Fuck.
I sit back down.
Listen to yourself. The oldest move in the playbook. Not Jake’s originally. It was our mother’s, which Jake absorbed so thoroughly I don’t think he knows anymore that he’s running it.
I spent eighteen years on the receiving end. Listen to yourself, August. Do you hear how you sound? This is what we mean about you. You’re unstable.
It was the careful persistent replacement of my own perception with theirs until I couldn’t separate out what was true or not anymore.
The hell of it is, sometimes I still feel like I can’t trust myself.
I know exactly what that kind of mindfuck does to a person.
The pencil snaps.
I look at the two pieces in my hand, then set them on the cushion.
Two seconds later, I’m out the door.
Cold air hits me and I take in the plaza in one sweep.
Jake is standing close to Lennon. Not touching her, but he learned early that the most effective pressure doesn’t require contact. Another thing he learned from our mother—just getting inside someone’s space with the practiced way of making proximity feel inescapable.
Raven stands in their doorway with their arms crossed and an expression I would not want directed at me. Ricky’s truck is at the far end of the lot with the engine idling.
Lennon sees me first.
Something moves through her face fast—relief and alarm in the same moment. Which tells me she doesn’t want to be alone with my brother but is aware that me being out here with him might not be a good idea. Well, I’m glad we both know it.
Because the fact she feels any relief at my presence means I’m staying right where I am.
Jake turns and his eyes narrow with accusation. Like I’m exactly the disaster and disappointment he always expects me to be. Like here I am right on schedule, proving him right again.
“August.” The single word is so full of judgment and self-righteous contempt.
Like I’ve victimized him just by existing. Again.
I hear the story he’ll be telling everyone come Sunday. That delinquent, troubled brother of mine seduced my poor, easily deluded wife, can you believe it? Tempted her to the dark side.
It’s hard to hold back the boiling rage of my fifteen-year-old self and the wilderness camp and every psychiatric hold.
Every time I overheard Jake tell someone about his troubled brother with that particular mournful dignity, his eyes going ever so slightly misty as he explained the hardship of a man burdened by circumstance. It moves through me like current and I feel every inch of it.
But by god, I will not prove him right by allowing him to provoke me. Especially when this is not about me. I breathe in for a count of four, and then out for six.
“I think you should go,” I say, and my voice comes out level.
“I’m talking to my wife,” he says. “This doesn’t concern you.”
“I’m not your wife anymore.” Lennon says in exasperation. “I’m divorcing you.”
He ignores her, his eye on me with a look that might be curiosity if it weren’t so cold underneath. “You know what I find interesting? I came here to talk to Lennon and here you are. Suddenly you’re her protector.”
He tilts his head. “You always were so jealous of everything I had. So tell me, brother. How long have you been fucking my wife?”
“You’re a pig who clearly doesn’t know the woman you married.” Fuck. I’m taking the bait when I swore I wouldn’t take the bait.
“And you do? Intimately, I suppose.” His insinuation is disgusting.
Do not take the bait.
This is all he and Mom ever do.
Bait me, and I took it every time because I had no idea how to self-regulate. At least in the past. But I have tools now.
The doc and I suspect my mood disorder is a combination of genetics, the environment I grew up in, everything that went down with my dad and the trauma that came after. But either way, these are the cards I was dealt and self-regulating does not come naturally to me.
But it’s a skill I have done my damndest to learn, and this motherfucker will not set me on my back foot, much less knock me down.
So I take a step back.
“I’ll let you discuss whatever you need to discuss with Lennon, and then, again, brother, I invite you to leave.”
“What exactly has she told you about herself?” Jake keeps digging at me. “About her episodes? About the way she gets when she’s not well?”
“Jake—” Lennon starts.
“I’m asking my brother a question.” He doesn’t look at her.
“August. Genuinely. Because I’m worried about her.
The Lennon I know—when she gets into a state like this…
She can seem very together, right up until she isn’t.
I’m not saying that to be cruel. I’m saying it because I’ve been with her for nine years and I know what not-well looks like. ”
The rage is a live thing in my chest.
I breathe through it.
Is this motherfucker seriously trying to do to his wife what he and Mom did to me all those years—
“She seems fine to me,” I say.
“Of course she does.” Almost a smile. “She seemed fine to me too, in the beginning.”
“Go home, Jake,” Lennon says.
“I’ll go home when I’ve said what I came to say.” His entirely pleasant facade remains as he keeps talking, talking to her, but still facing me.
“What do you think Priscilla would have to say about your amended custody agreement if she found out you seduced your brother’s wife and were causing mayhem?
What will Owen have to say when he grows up and finds out what a head-case his daddy is?
I think Priscilla will agree he should be protected from someone so erratic with such bad decision-making skills—”
Son of a bitch—
I am going to hit him.
It’s only Ricky jumping on my back that keeps me stomping forward to cross the distance between me and swinging at him.
“Whoa there, big guy,” Ricky says.
But it’s Lennon’s voice saying my name that really stops me. “August.”
Right. Not my fight.
I take one step back. Then another.
Which is when I notice Jake reaching for his phone and dialing. What, is he calling Mom?
But I realize it’s much, much worse when he starts speaking, satisfaction in his eyes.
“Yes, hello, I need to report an incident at the Cielo Vista RV Park—”
The motherfucker is calling the cops.
“He’s lying—” Lennon moves toward him and Raven is there first, pulling her back, and she’s shaking, she’s actually shaking.
I’m glad Ricky’s still got hands on me, because I don’t trust my newfound ability to self-regulate under circumstances like this, especially when my big brother has that glint in his eye, begging me to deck him.
Baiting me.
Wanting me to go absolutely apeshit on him.
Jake turns slightly away, voice dropping into the phone, still perfectly calm: yes, my estranged wife appears agitated. I’m concerned for everyone’s safety. There was a physical lunge toward me and theft of a significant sum of money—
And I understand it now. Why he actually came here.
He had 911 on speed dial the whole time. Probably practiced the speech on the way over. Volatile brother-in-law. Agitated wife. Domestic disturbance.
None of it technically false, but all of it a complete lie.
This is the exact playbook that got me 51/50’d twice, and that was after the trauma wilderness camp from hell.
They’ll listen to Jake. They always listen to Jake. He’s so reasonable. And not covered head to toe in tattoos. He wears fucking polo shirts and khakis. No one will hear me.
No one will listen they’ll take me away they’ll take me away and there’s nothing I can do about it—
Staring in the middle distance, a loud ringing starts up in my ears.
And I absolutely just close down.
It’s the wrong thing, the thing that gets me taken away. But I can’t do anything more, as every system shuts off, than what it takes to keep standing and staring at nothingness.
The world recedes, everything growing more and more blurry and distant around me.