Chapter 34
When Jem left the room, he didn’t know where he was going.
He walked for a while—down hallways that stretched out forever under artificial lights, past shops where people browsed and talked like everything was normal and the smell of cinnamon and pine hung in the air, along rows of windows that glowed with the glare off the snow.
Too bright.
Too loud.
Too many people.
As he walked, though, part of him was back in the room. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know anything about her. Or about me, about that part of my life. We don’t talk about it because it doesn’t matter.
And part of him was back in the chalet. Watching her face as Tean said, He’s your son. Seeing the truth of it surface in the instant of panic before she managed to put on the mask again.
He’s your son.
He couldn’t be.
But he was, obviously. Tean wasn’t wrong about that kind of thing.
Stephen was his brother. Which was seriously fucked up.
He had a brother. Older? Younger? Jem guessed younger.
He didn’t remember anything about a brother, although he’d been so young before his mom had left—before they’d taken him away, he corrected mentally—that if she’d had another child somewhere, he might not have known about it, might not have understood.
But he thought, most likely, Stephen was younger.
He had a brother. God, he thought with something like a laugh rising in him, two of us might make Tean start drinking.
Now that Tean had pointed out the relationship, Jem could see it—some of it, anyway.
They had similar builds, similar hair, similar eyes.
If Stephen grew a beard, got a better haircut, and wore some slouchy retro gear, the likeness would be unmistakable.
Hell, they even had the same MOs—they’d both lifted a key from the housekeeping staff.
Who was he? Where had he been for Jem’s whole life? Had he grown up with Brigitte, or had he been in care? Did he have the same dad as Jem? Or as Maeve and Milo?
What were he and Brigitte doing together?
And sneaking in behind that thought, another: That’s why she never came back for me.
It was like a snakebite, and the suddenness of the pain startled Jem out of his thoughts.
He stood in a large area at the rear of the lodge—more of those massive windows looked out on an observation deck, which gave a view of the lodge’s heated pool and, beyond that, the mountains.
Trees and stone made blue and gray marks on the fresh snow, and their shadows had the feathered edges of brushstrokes.
Catty-corner to the observation deck, inside the lodge, a theater marquee said KOLEN LODGE CINEMA.
Framed movie posters lined the walls—holiday classics, all of them: Christmas Story, Elf, Home Alone.
Over the poster for It’s a Wonderful Life, a banner said NOW PLAYING, but on the box office window, a hand-written sign announced THEATER CLOSED BECAUSE NO POWER.
Voices came from a nearby hallway—women talking over each other, one of them with a honking laugh, another one screaming, “Stop! Stop! I like leopard-print!”
Jem moved before he’d even made the decision.
He loided the lock on the cinema door—it wasn’t real security, just something to keep people from wandering in—and eased it shut behind him.
On the other side, the lobby was silent except for the hum of the HVAC.
Dark, too, aside from a pair of emergency lights.
He helped himself to a box of peanut M the emergency lights here were only on the stairs and walkways, and he stood for a minute near the exit, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Then he climbed the steps until he was about halfway up.
He made his way down the row and picked the middle seat, which was obviously the best seat in the house.
He dropped into the chair—it was one of the recliner kind, and the power buttons didn’t work, probably because everything was running on the generator.
He kicked his feet up, set the Coke in the drink holder, and started opening the box of M they were too expensive.
But sometimes—if Jem pled his case—Tean would stop at CVS, and Jem could smuggle in a few of the theater-sized boxes of candy.
But not until after Tean had explained that theaters made most of their money off concessions, and they were undermining a local business, and if they kept it up, the theater would close, and the neighborhood would go bad with all sorts of unsavory types moving in.
One time, after Jem had made Tean watch Mad Max, there’d been something about a biker gang.
Jem stopped opening the M she was a good liar, but not as good as Jem.
But he’d kept choosing her. He’d kept taking her side.
Hell, he’d gotten pissed at Tean when he should have been pissed at her.
He could have said, Let’s take a break. He could have said, We all need a minute.
And instead, he’d let it keep going. He’d made it worse.
He should have stopped, but he kept going.
He’d known he was pushing Tean’s buttons, and he’d kept pushing.
Back in their room, when Tean was still talking about it, Jem had known that avoiding the conversation was only going to make Tean work harder.
He’d known that Tean wouldn’t let it go.
He’d known he needed to be the one to hit the brakes.
And instead, he’d just kept making it worse.
Why?
He’d been in a nice house one time. A young couple.
Lots of money. And they’d wanted a big family—that was a Mormon thing.
It had been good at the beginning because Jem was old enough to know how to play along, and he was tired of bouncing around, and they weren’t too annoying about the church stuff.
It seemed like it might work. Then they’d gotten the twins, Jackson and Jackie, a boy and a girl.
They’d been seven or eight. A lot younger.
And—and bad. That word floated up in his head in a kid’s voice.
They’d been bad. They’d broken the big TV.
They’d used markers on the walls. Jackson had started a fire in the basement.
And then they all had to go.
And then, for Jem, LouElla’s.
He’d understood, in a way, what was happening. Because he’d been in care long enough. Seen it before, although not like that.
When you didn’t have any control over the big stuff, you used the little stuff.
When the future was scary because anything could happen, you did whatever you could so that the one thing you could count on was sure to happen. Even if it was bad. Even if it wasn’t what you really wanted. Because familiar—predictable—was safe.
When someone you loved started acting differently, you got scared. And when you got scared, you wanted control. And you always knew how to make him mad.
Jem patted himself down. He found the prescription vials he’d taken from Stephen’s bathroom—the two that had been prescribed to Jacob B., and the one for Jessica Brown. The one he thought might be an Ambien.
He opened the Coke. He popped the maybe-Ambien.
Tinajas had told him, when he’d talked about Jackson and Jackie, why they did it. She’d explained it.
He closed his eyes.
Because, dumbass, she’d said, like it was obvious, like he should have figured it out himself. We’re all our own self-destruct buttons.