Chapter 32
TRIPP
I’ll regret this.
As I stare at the expansive building towering in front of me, my eyes slide toward the uppermost windows and I pull in a long breath. I’m probably only imagining the haunting organ music and the call of crows screaming their warnings from high up in the tree tops.
Behind the massive double doors and their frosted windows inlaid with swirls of iron, stands a phantom nearly forgotten. She’s older now, and it shows in salt and peppered hair and deep crow’s feet that crinkle next to her eyes when she grins widely at me.
A quick look thrown over her shoulder grants her the freedom to close the distance between us, and before I can blink, her arms are thrown tightly around my shoulders.
“What are you doing back here?” I ask her as I clap a hand against her back.
“I was asked back after—” She sighs. “After you were asked to leave.”
Carla was let go only a few days after my parents found a puke bowl that we’d hidden under Brody’s bed when he was going through his first rounds of chemo. She’d interrupted my folks handing out my discipline and told them that she was the one who’d given it me to keep for him.
Forcing her out of the house wasn’t just her punishment, but mine, too.
“Mrs. Montgomery is in the lounge,” she tells me. “I’ll send her out for you.”
“Thanks, C.” With a look down the hall to the looming space behind her, I dip my head before offering her a smile. “Take care of yourself, okay? You’re ever in Miami, I want you to look me up.”
Her fingers meet my cheek, pinching it between them like she used to do when I was a kid, and the only adult who may have ever cared about me in this house disappears in search of the one who gave birth to me.
Molly rounds the corner minutes later, dressed to the nines as she always is, her hair styled and her makeup done as if she’s on her way to some kind of photo shoot.
“Tripp,” she says with a sigh, her brows stitched together as her arms cross at her chest. “I asked you to visit at the hospital, not at our home.”
“A bedside is a bedside when you’re family, right?” I ask, throwing on a saccharine smile as I shoulder past her.
I thought that by now, I would have forgotten the way that it smells in this house. That all of the memories I thought I still had would have been wrong. Wiped away.
Boy, was I fucking wrong.
The runner on the floor of the foyer is different, and so is much of the art hung on the walls, but everything else is the same as I remember it. The same polished hard wood sits beneath my feet. The same wallpaper that was put up after my brother was dragged through the house covers the walls.
The only thing missing is that stupid ficus.
“Where’s Jeff?”
Not offering time for her to answer me, I trail through the foyer to the stairs that I used to run up and down for hours at a time when I was a kid. My hand runs along the same dark railing that I almost cracked my head open trying to use as a slide on more than one occasion.
Like a character out of Wonderland, I shrink down as I walk through the hall. Every door holds its own memories and behind them, their own pain.
Brody’s tears as his body was torn apart from the inside. Edie’s sleepless nights spent crying and trying to soothe her own broken heart. Nash’s endless prayers as he begged God to fix something that was never broken.
I’m too afraid to even consider what kind of secrets might lie in the silence behind Graham’s door.
By the time I push open the heavy pair of two-paneled doors at the far end of the hall, I’m four feet tall and swimming in my clothes.
“Hey, Jeff,” I say quietly, crossing my arms over my chest as I lean against the door frame.
He looks like shit.
I don’t remember the last time I saw the old man wearing anything more casual or comfortable than a smoking jacket, but he’s got on a silken set of pajamas today.
The top half of his body is propped up and supported by a wedged pillow.
His face is more pale than it was the last time that I saw him, and I can only assume that’s because of his procedure.
My own brown eyes slide toward me from their place inside his skull, and I can’t meet their gaze.
They’re the one thing I can’t change. The one thing I can’t stand to see reflected back at me when I look in the mirror.
“You never were good about following an order,” he grouses. “What do you want?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I tell him, shoving my hands into my pockets as I chance a few steps closer. “I didn’t know if you were gonna die or not, and…”
“You thought that you would try to win your way back into my will before it happened?”
A deep huff pushes its way from my throat, my head shaking.
“I don’t give a shit about your will,” I tell him. “I didn’t want there to be any bad blood or whatever between us if you croaked. I think maybe a part of me wants to try to forgive you.”
A palm presses against his chest as he laughs, forcing a series of wheezing coughs out of him. Against my better judgment, I cross the room to offer him the small glass of water next to his bed.
He could probably reach for it himself, but…
Snatching the glass in his wrinkled hand, he pulls a sip from it.
“What in the world do I need your forgiveness for?” He demands. “I’ve not done a thing to you.”
“Right,” I nod toward the ground. My hands shove themselves back into my pockets as they ball into fists. “You just threw me out because I didn’t believe the same thing you did, and you ripped my brother away from me.”
Slamming the glass onto the table next to him, he pushes himself up into a sitting position, now supported by an elbow pressed into the pillow underneath his body. His brows stitch together as a red flush creeps across his face and neck, leaving his skin mottled.
“I purged sin and sodomy from my home,” he grits. “You may be able to tolerate those things, but—”
“I am those things,” I tell him with a hollow laugh.
“You think that, just because you spent your life telling us that something was wrong, it would keep it from existing? Jules and I have a partner who we love, who makes us happy, and your God’s opinion doesn’t change that.
I grew up to be everything you tried to teach me to hate, and I’m happy.
And all you ever amounted to is a bitter old man. That’s fucking embarrassing.”
His nostrils flare at that, his eyes narrowing at me.
A wrinkled hand flies toward me to snare the collar of my shirt, pulling my body closer to his as his lip curls.
“You disgust me,” he grits, spittle hitting my face like the venom in his words. “There was always something wrong with you. Your defiance, your affinity to serpents and Devils. If I hadn’t witnessed your birth myself, I’d believe you to be the spawn of the beast.”
Look in the fucking mirror, Jeff, I think. I may as well be.
“Okay,” I say with a cold smile, taking hold of his wrist to free myself from his grip. “Thanks for the clarity on that, Father.”
Picking up his water glass, I drop it next to his bed to send it crashing to the floor before pivoting toward the bedroom’s exit.
My hand braces itself against the door frame, and I pause.
I look back to the old man lying in that bed, and my head shakes with a glance up at the ceiling fan above him.
“It may not have lasted all that long,” I tell him, “but there was a time that, if you’d told me you could have walked on water, too, I would have believed you.”
My fingers push through my hair on my way down the stairs of a house that was never really my home.
The pictures hung on the walls are all lies; stories told of a happy family that has never existed.
Children who were never loved. Parents who wanted lapdogs and blind loyalty instead of whatever it is they think we’ve given them.
With Molly on my heels, I find myself standing inside the massive dining room. It feels like a lifetime ago that I last stood in this room. Graham hid away from the raised voices, the hurled insults, and the dishes used as projectiles.
He was still hiding when all of my shit was stuffed into garbage bags and I was pushed out of the front door, with my terrified girlfriend trailing behind me.
A hand rests at the back of one of the chairs, and I pull in a breath. The chairs are different now. This isn’t the same one that I kicked over that night.
They’ve probably erased any trace of me that existed in this place, just like they did with Nash.
“It’s time for you to leave,” Molly says from behind me.
My fingers tap along the wooden frame of the chair beneath them, gripping it tightly before I round on her.
“I just wanna know if you ever actually gave a shit,” I shrug. “If I hadn’t walked away from the church, would you have loved me? Or was there always some other condition I’d never be able to meet?”
“Of course I loved you, Tripp, but you denounced your Lord. You’ve covered yourself in horrible, demonic imagery,” she tells me with a shake of her head.
Her lip curls as she uses her hands to gesture toward me.
“You’ve mutilated the body that God gave to you.
I don’t recognize you. I gave birth to a beautiful, perfect boy. ”
“Yeah, that doesn’t always work out the way you want it to, does it?
” I scoff. Pushing past her to leave the room, I stop, turning to meet her eyes.
“You know, you’re gonna keep losing kids, and by the time you finally ask yourselves if you’re the problem, it’s gonna be too late for you to do anything about it. ”
“How could you—”
Raising a hand as I turn away from her, I cut her off with a middle finger held high over my shoulder as I storm out of the room.
My jaw tightens as my feet hit the drive, my molars grinding against each other as my lips pinch tightly together. Time crawls slowly past while my feet carry me across the massive property. Every swallow feels like trying to pull a boulder through my tightening throat.