Chapter Twenty-Two
Agust of wind curls around the nape of my neck, leaving a path of prickled sweat.
I rub it away, focus on opening the front door.
The buzz of the fading porch light and the rustling and creaking of branches and leaves is all I hear when I crack it open, gingerly stepping in.
I snap it closed behind me, and the sound of nature's cries are quickly replaced by my mother’s. They are shallow and guttural. They rip me in two.
I step toward them, following the swollen wailing through the blacked-out hall. And it feels as if every wall stands on edge, each corner sharpened, all trusses straightened, awaiting my return.
My heart shivers inside my chest because aside from my mother’s tapered cries, and the big, empty gaping hole Jade’s murder had left behind, the house was too quiet.
I bridge the doorway of the kitchen expecting to find her, only to hear her cries coming from further down the hall, seeping through Jade’s bedroom door.
I step back at the same time I hear a click and then a whooshing, as if something is spinning, round and round like a carousel.
Paralysis snatches me.
Takes a kick to my knees.
I glance over my shoulder, back into the kitchen, squinting my eyes, trying to make out something, anything through the darkness.
That’s when I see him.
A crimson, beat-up face lingers beneath the cherry of a lit cigarette.
I guide my eyes to where a blade of moonlight spears through the thin, ripped and dirty drape at the side, landing on the gun positioned in the center of the rickety kitchen table.
It’s still spinning, round and round, until he slams his palm over it, cutting the whirring sound clean off.
My father rests back in the flimsy chair. His knees are wide beneath the scarred trestle table, his arm extended, hand wrapped casually around the gun, finger on the trigger.
He wets his lips, drags his wrist beneath his nose.
“Not man enough to do it yourself, you had to get someone else to do it for ya, boy?”
I take a deep breath and hold it in my lungs for a very long time.
My Vans squeak when I take a step into the kitchen, toward the man that had never had the privilege of the title ‘father.’
The kitchen counter cuts into my lower back when I lean against it, crossing my arms over my chest, my feet at my ankles, lifting my chin.
I suck on my front teeth, swallow my rage down, and work to not let evil win. However, I feel my body stretching against me.
“You wanna tell me why your daughter was just murdered, brutally, I might add, and all you’re worried about is the fact that you got your ass beat?” My voice is quiet, yet hard, and there's a beat of silence before he laughs.
He. Fucking. Laughs.
I take another deep breath, feel the world contract and expand around me.
It seems the catastrophe of losing his child hadn’t so much as scraped his hard edges.
It made me fucking sick because it was confirmation that the man in front of me only cared about one thing, and that was his pride, and the permanent bruise that had set in stone around it after meeting Skinner’s pummeling fists.
My throat tightens, my fists too, along with my spine, and I shove away from the counter, moving toward him.
However, I only take two paces before the soft and trembling hands of my mother’s wrap around my forearm, then my bicep, her thumbs brushing across my skin.
She tries to pull me back, and when I glance over my shoulder toward her, I wish I never had.
All of the blood in my body rushes to my head, my pupils shake.
I want to scratch at my eyes. I want to tear them from their sockets. I want to take away their ability to see, because the grim sight staring back at me is a haunted memory I had pushed away and buried at fifteen.
I rip my arm from my mother’s hold, pace toward my father.
“What the fuck did you do to her!?” I shout, throwing my arm behind me, toward my mother. The woman that he’d so obviously dragged and left at death's door.
Cigarette marks are burned deep into her bony chest, and she’s sporting bruised eyes that had been forced shut.
He shrugs like none of this, his abuse, his volatile beatings, mean anything at all.
“That cunt…” It takes everything inside of me not to reach for the gun and put a bullet between his eyes. “Should have taught her daughter not to be a desperate whore.”
I’m shaking my head, sucking on my front teeth as I stare at the vile garbage sitting beneath me.
“What, you think what happened to Jade was her fault? You think she asked for this?”
He laughs again, wets his lips, screws his nose. “That was all your mother’s doing,” he sings the words out.
I can barely breathe. Can hardly speak, finding only enough voice to say, “You never deserved to hear her call you Dad.”
He sniffs, chin to his chest, eyes on the pistol. “Yeah, and you think you deserved to be her brother?” He scoffs. “Weak-ass no son of mine.” Jerking his chin toward my mother. “You’re just like her.”
And at that, I take a step forward, though Mom tries to pull me back.
“Waste of air space,” he continues running his mouth all while keeping his jaw locked, though he raises his vicious eyes and stares right into mine. “You know what, son?” he says the last word with distaste.
I don’t reply, and the pile of shit fills the vacant space.
“If I had known you would be born with a pussy…” He smiles at that, and I see he’s missing several teeth. “I would have made sure to get rid of you when you were still in utero.”
I leap for the gun, and so does he, and then I’m flying over the table, both of our hands wrapped around the pistol, bodies crashing to the floor.
Splintered pieces of timber lay around us, the chair he was sitting on now in pieces as we grapple and tumble for power.
Mom is screaming at the top of her lungs. Neither of us hear her.
I’m on top of my father and my finger finds the trigger and I’m unsure if he let me have it, because everything happens so quickly when I get the barrel between his eyes.
“Was it you?” I spit in his face, then I jam the steel into his skull harder, struggling to speak the words that sit like weights on my tongue. “Were you the sick fuck that raped and killed your own daughter?”
He laughs, then bites his bottom lip back into his mouth, a tsk coming from behind the back of his teeth. “That’s sick, boy.”
I jam the muzzle harder. “Yes or no. Say it!” I shout.
His chest rattles with a laugh, then he starts to cough, and when he chooses not to reply all I see is a veil of red and smash the butt of the gun into his forehead.
“Tell me!” I shout, and I’m ready to bring the steel down again when he chooses to speak.
“I’ll tell you what…whoever did it…did us both a favor, especially if she was going to turn out anything like her,” he spits in Mom’s direction.
I return the barrel to his forehead, my voice steady and even when I say, “I never should have miss—”
Only, before I can finish talking, before I can put a bullet in my father’s skull, before I can register that the barrel has left its target, a pressure so intense and a grip I only know as my father’s, pushes my arm into the air and I’m staring at my mother…
and my finger has already squeezed the trigger.
“Mom!” I wail when I watch her eyes drop, the tears that sit at both rims spilling, along with the drip of blood from the bullet hole I put in her forehead.
Everything moves in slow motion when she falls and something spears into my side, and before I can register the pain, or what is really happening, I’m jamming the barrel to my father’s temple, staring evil dead in the eye.
I clench my teeth, only so he can’t see them chatter.
“Do it, son,” he whispers, his voice a death rattle.
So I do.
I set the bullet that should have been his free.
I swallow so hard it clicks with the trigger.
Blood sprays across my face, and I keep my eyes open, never blinking.
Not when the scarlet mist seeps into the corner and not when it casts a crimson film across the surface of my vision, reminding me what I’d become—what he made me…a killer.
Fragments of bone decorate the floor around me, the white so crisp among the pools of deep red.
The steaming gun is in my hand, shaking, when I grapple my way to my feet, stumbling toward my mother.
A sharp pain chews at the back of my eyes and I try to swallow, try to block out my mother’s empty eyes and the loss of hope when she realized she’d just lost her life…at the hands of her son.
I bracket my palms at the side of my head, squeezing when I lose my balance and catch the wall at my back, sliding down, mirroring the stream of tears at my cheeks.
I try to move again, to reach for her but my efforts are futile.
Even my bones, every muscle, knows I don’t deserve to hold her, to embrace her, to call her mom.
I drag the tip of the handgun across my temple and trap my breath behind my teeth.
My chest stops moving, the air I’m holding burns my lungs, and I’m no longer crying, even as tears involuntarily drip from my eyes.
I knew what I needed to do now.
I feel the capillaries in my eyes pop and I don’t blink, shakily bringing the barrel to my open mouth.
My teeth chatter on the alloyed steel and more beaded tears make their way down my face as I tighten my fist around the handgun.
I couldn’t save my sister.
I’m a useless brother.
A son that killed his mother.
Any other thoughts are evanescent.
I whisper for forgiveness, begging with my whole fucking heart, and when there’s nothing left of me, my trembling finger finds the trigger, and I count down from three, never taking my eyes from my mother.
I don’t know what I expected to feel, but it wasn’t this.
The barrel is still in my mouth, and my teeth aren’t chattering now, they’re clenched around the steel.
I can feel my pulse beating through the nerves in my gums, coiling with the striations beneath.
I think I hear the front door opening.
I think I hear the dragging of feet.
I think I hear a voice.
I think I’m crying.
I think I might be alive.
I think I choked.
Skinner’s voice is like a tug, pulling me back.
“Chase.”
It’s low, wary, with a rhythm of uncertainty.
And I don’t reply, even though I want to.
My head remains pushed to the wall, barrel in my mouth, finger turbulent at the trigger.
I think Skinner’s in the room now. I think his hand is on my shoulder. I think he might have just taken the gun out of my mouth. I think he’s taking a seat beside me.
I’m staring in front of me, at my mother, dead on the floor, though beside me I see Skinner draw his knees up, dangling his wrists.
He jerks his chin at my father.
“Killing another man takes stones…” He pauses and waits, sucks down a breath.
“I’ve seen a lot of men cower at the face of being the leading hand to death.
But wanting to kill yourself, even getting as far as putting a smoking gun in your mouth…
” He shakes his head, dips it between his shoulders.
“That takes another fucking set entirely.”
I let the stalk of my neck hang as I turn a glance on him. There’s blood on his fingers. I think it could be my mother’s. The pool of her sad life reaches and stretches for us, touching at the edges of my shoes.
“So, what does killing the wrong person take?” I ask, and every word feels like I’m speaking around the edge of a razor.
He lets go of the breath he’s holding, then turns his eyes on me.
He’s about to speak when I cut him off, “How am I supposed to live knowing that the bullet that was meant for him…” I jerk my chin toward the malignant corpse across the room, then back in front of me. “Landed in my mother? And I was the fucking one to put it there?”
Heavy silence fills the space.
“I should be fucking dead.” I temper a cry, push the tears away, do it all again.
It made me feel weak. I fucking hated feeling weak.
When my cries fall silent, my body no longer jolting, I wipe my arm beneath my nose, and Skinner's voice croaks from beside me.
“Yeah, need you at the Keller’s. Bring someone with you, gotta grab his truck.” A pause, then, “Now.”
I turn my head, watch him calmly shove his phone back into his front pocket. He adjusts his leather cut on his shoulders and returns his wrists to his drawn knees.
“I’m sorry, man. If I hadn’t—”
“He deserved it,” I mumble, and they’re some of the truest words I’d ever spoken.
Skinner nods toward my mother. “But she didn’t.”
At that, I swallow around the brick cemented in my throat. “You’re right…she didn’t.”
My spine turns hot and sweaty.
Skinner says, “Harlen’s on his way. When he gets here, gonna need you to leave. Gonna need you to walk out that front door and not look back.”
“Wh-what does that me-mean?” My words are spoken through a void of emptiness, a chosen disconnect.
Not a beat passes when Skinner says, “It means I’m gonna take care of this.” He doesn’t look at me when he speaks, and my heart slips into my throat. “There are gonna be questions, but I’ll make sure Rusty gets Wynston to put them to bed, you hear me?” His eyes are black with promise.
Silence presses again.
I can hardly whisper, “I killed my mom.”
“No, you didn’t. That bullet was meant for your father.”
“It doesn’t matter—”
He barrels over me, “It fucking does.” Skinner loops his hand around the back of my neck, grabs it, yanks me forward until my forehead presses to his. “Now, get your ass up, and go see your mother.”
I nod and I keep nodding and in slow motion, I do what he says. I rise to my feet, and when I almost fall Skinner grabs my arm, helps me find balance in the eye of the storm.
I take one step forward, only for Skinner to put his hand to my shoulder, to stop me.
“When you’re done, grab anything you want to keep.” His voice is a low rasp and all I can do is swallow, nod again when he turns and leaves the room.
And when silence presses again, I travel through my mother’s blood until I’m on my knees at her side, reaching for her hand, curling my fingers gently around her thin and long fingers as if she can feel me, as if I don’t want to hurt her any more than I already have.
I’m shaking, and now, so is she.
Her thin body is weightless and limp and I pull her up to me and cry into her bruised neck and when I’m done, when there’s nothing left but the debris of our past and violence and too much blood, I get to my feet.
I’m not shaking anymore when I walk out of the room, toward mine, snatching up my notebook that lay on top of my beat up keyboard.
I leave everything else behind and head for the front door, the way Skinner told me to.