Chapter 33 #2
Jake sits up slowly, one arm wrapped around his ribs. He looks smaller on the ground than he ever did in my memory, which should feel good and doesn’t. Not exactly, anyway.
His face changes. Lennon sees it too, because I hear her inhale.
“Did she poison your Dad?” Lennon asks. “Or was it the both of you together?”
Jake’s eyes widen.
Not like the suggestion horrifies him. Just like he’s surprised somebody finally figured it out.
“He was sick,” Jake says. “Everyone knew it. Mom knew it. I knew it.” His eyes come back to me. “You knew it. Just like everyone knows about you.”
For years, those words would have taken me down.
Sick. Like Dad. I’d have started having a panic attack, or gone out and gotten smashed or high so I didn’t have to think about the implications—
Instead, I look at Lennon.
She pulls away from me, one hand braced against the side of my ruined truck. Her face is white and wet with sweat, but her eyes are on me with a focus that feels like a hand around mine.
She knows what he’s doing, and the feeling of being together in the shared reality where we both know I’m not the man Jake is describing means everything.
I take a deep breath.
Then another.
Dr. Delaney’s voice comes to me, absurdly calm in the middle of the ditch. Name the sensations you feel. Stay in your body. Name the true things.
Mud under my boots.
Blood on my hand.
Lennon alive.
Jake on the ground.
I’m not fifteen anymore, and I’m not my father.
I’m certainly not the story my brother tells when he needs to sound like the sane one.
“It’s over,” I say.
My voice is low, and it shakes, but it is mine. “I may never know what really happened to Dad. Maybe Mom poisoned him. Maybe she just convinced him he was too broken to live. Maybe you helped. Maybe you watched and called it loyalty. But I know what you did to Lennon.”
Jake’s nostrils flare.
“You don’t know shit,” he spits.
“I know enough.”
He turns his head toward the gas station like he has just remembered the world exists beyond the ditch.
A clerk is walking toward us from the edge of the lot, phone held out, too far away to hear everything but close enough to be an audience.
Which is all Jake has ever required. Jake’s face shifts almost lazily into a pained expression.
“Only someone sick in the head could suggest a thing like that,” he calls, voice suddenly louder. “Do you hear him threatening me?”
The clerk slows.
I see the exact second Jake decides which mask to wear.
My body reacts before my mind does. Not with another fist in his face, though I can’t say the idea doesn’t cross my mind. But no, this is older training and newer discipline meeting somewhere in the middle.
I step sideways, putting myself between Jake and Lennon without touching him again.
Because Lennon is behind me, and protection is not the same thing as punishment, no matter how much I want them to be the same for at least one more minute. Jake could stand to lose another couple teeth first.
“I have proof,” Lennon says as the clerk approaches in the distance.
Her voice is stronger than her body looks. She reaches for her phone with muddy hands and lifts it high. “I have the video of him poisoning the coffee tin. I have—”
Jake looks at her with that same sympathetic smile he has worn my whole life, as if no one could possibly believe anyone else’s truth if he got to tell his most-reasonable version first.
“Do you?” he asks, voice smug. The blood in his teeth makes his smile grotesque.
Lennon looks down at her phone and then her face just goes empty with shock.
“No,” she whispers, although I knew before she said anything that something was wrong.
She turns the screen to me.
There’s a white glow from the clean start-up page. Hello, it says.
For a second, my brain refuses to understand it. Then it comes together with a sickening click.
Jake must’ve remote-wiped her phone.
Lennon’s thumb drags uselessly across a screen that no longer recognizes her.
Jake pushes to his knees, cradling his ribs.
“Poor thing,” he says, and the gentleness in his tone is worse than the blood. “You’re confused. Your phone got a virus, honey. Don’t you remember? We had to do a factory reset.”
My hands curl.
There are sirens in the distance now, closer than before.
Jake hears them too and his eyes sharpen.
Here we go, his face says. Time for another round of the game he’s been winning our whole lives.
I uncurl my fists.
For years, I thought the worst thing I could do was prove Jake right.
Lose control and swing first. Become the maniac he’d been introducing to rooms before I ever stepped into them.
But Jake was never really afraid I’d be violent.
He’s been afraid of the day I stopped believing the story he told me about me. And started realizing he’s been lying about the story he told about himself, too.
Because then I might glimpse the truth of him. And nothing is more dangerous to a man with murderous secrets in his closets than the truth… or the one person in the world who might be able to guess them.
Come to think of it, when Mom put me in the wilderness facility the first time, part of why I’d been so uncontrollable was because I’d been convinced there was no way Dad would ever kill himself, and Mom put me in there because I couldn’t “accept reality.” What if really, I was just too close to guessing her secret?
And she had to keep Jake on a weirdly close tether his whole life because he was the one other person on earth who knew?
The first police cruiser turns into the gas station lot, lights washing blue and red over the mud.
Jake closes his eyes like a man in pain. Then he turns toward the sound, holds both hands up high, and starts screaming bloody murder as he gets up and runs crookedly toward the nearest cruiser: “Help! Help, he’s trying to kill me!”