Chapter Thirty-Three Lee #2
But his roommate looked at him like he’d spoken another language. “James?” he echoed, then laughed stiffly. “Did you forget
my name? It’s been two weeks, dude.”
James leaned to the side, and in this light his eyes were definitely brown, deep and dark like the earth. His name is Matt , Lee realized. Matt Baldridge. Why had Lee called him James?
Lee’s vision felt skewed, like he was seeing two Matts at once, the stairs spiraling up above him and down below, the darkness
unlatching its jaw. He ground his palms into his eyes, where an unbearable ache had bloomed. What good was it having eyes
anyway if he couldn’t trust them? Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Are you okay? Matt Baldridge said.
Let me out, Lee , the suitcase said.
Please, Jim , his mother said.
Jim , his mother screamed, her voice echoing across the sea. Again and again and again, quieter, and then not at all. She was
the only one who called him that, had liked having a name that only she was allowed to use.
Everyone else called him James.
Matt Baldridge stared questioningly at Lee, who felt like a city crumbling to ashes.
Lee’s father had killed his mother, and he’d known the whole time but done nothing about it.
Never before had Lee wanted so badly to be just as insane as his mother, unable to tell reality from dreams. He wanted to be wrong, he wanted to be broken, because it was better than the alternative, of knowing his dream was real.
He shoved past Matt and ran back to his room, grabbed a suitcase, and started throwing all his things inside. Tell me it was a dream , he would say to his father the moment he saw him. Lee needed to see his father’s eyes. He knew when people lied, and if
he asked his father, he would know the truth.
He was breathing so hard that he thought he might throw up, his hands trembling uncontrollably. He tried to open his Ativan
and spilled half of it across his desk because he couldn’t hold the bottle steady. He’d already taken too much today and it
was supposed to be his Last Resort medication, but the walls were collapsing on top of him and his mind was a forest fire
and the truth had its hands around his throat, squeezing and squeezing and squeezing.
He choked down three pills dry and lay on the floor, the ceiling light flickering above him. It was a dream , he whispered to himself, drooling out of one side of his mouth.
It was all Matt’s fault. Matt and the stain on his shirt that had triggered the memory he’d tried so hard to bury.
Lee had been so careful to build a world he could tolerate, and Matt had ruined it all in one moment.
Lee wished he could go back in time and shove Matt down the stairs before he’d seen the stain, or smash his face against the railing.
He should have covered Matt’s whole shirt in blood so there was no more stain, no more memory, no more of this feeling like the entire universe was dying inside him.
It was Matt’s fault, it was Matt’s fault, all of this was Matt’s fault, and Lee had made him pay.
Lee had cut Matt up and shoved him in the suitcase and buried it in the woods.
Of course he had—Lee Turner was someone to be afraid of.
Too strange, too quiet, too tall and thin and pale, he could never be the son of someone perfect like James Turner.
Lee was the one who could never get it right, could never be normal.
Lee was the murderer. A man, a murderer, a stain.
He threw his things into a bag and ran off before anyone could spot him, could catch him and send him to jail, even if he
deserved to die there for what he’d done.
And that brought him here, to this moment, in the house behind the sword ferns, one hand on the gate in the front yard.
As the pain faded from his head, he quietly closed the gate and walked back to the kitchen, where he stared at a stain that
was almost certainly soy sauce, but reminded Lee all too much of another stain he had seen many years ago. And this time,
even as his blood ran cold and his heart beat so fast he was sure he would die here and now, he remembered.
“Back already?” his father said.
Slowly, Lee turned to face his father.
His eyes were brilliant green, just like the sword ferns beyond the windows. Just like Lee’s eyes.
Lee knew the answer he should have given.
Yeah, I just forgot my phone. The words floated up to the surface of his mind and then evaporated, something he might have said in another life, one where
he still lived in the dark.
His father was looking at him like Lee was the strange one, the one who was broken, the one who had taken their life and crushed it in his bare hands. His father
always winced at him like he was staring directly at the sun. His watch was broken, ticking incessantly on his wrist, the
hands stuck at 11:44, and Lee’s face twitched with annoyance at the sound. His father let out an awkward laugh at the motion
and turned away rather than keep looking at something so strange.
But of course Lee Turner was strange.
For almost a decade, he’d slowed his heart with sedatives until he was so numb he could barely speak.
He’d floated through the world like a balloon running out of helium, dragging across the sidewalk, slowly dying.
For so long, he couldn’t even remember why he’d done it at all, why he was living half dead from fear.
But now, he remembered.
He remembered pressing his ear to his bedroom door at night while his mother sobbed in the hallway.
I think I should go away for a while , she said, each word trembling like the thinnest branches on a dying tree. There’s something wrong with me, Jim.
And he remembered his father letting out a long, slow, disappointed sigh. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t need help , he said. You need to go to bed earlier and start exercising again. And stop acting strange in front of Lee. He deserves a normal mom.
A normal mom , Lee thought. Just like how James Turner deserved a normal son.
Let me out, Lee , she said. Let me out of the suitcase, out of my own mind, out of this life that burns to the touch. No one else can see me but I know
you can. So please, let me out, Lee. It’s so dark in here and I can’t breathe.
“Lee?” his father said, setting his coffee cup down on the counter.
Lee clenched his jaw so hard that he was sure his teeth would shatter from the force. His father had never cared for how he
or his mother felt, only how they looked to the rest of the world.
“Lee?” his father said again.
A normal mom. A normal son. Your life will be easier this way. People can be very judgmental . Everything is back to normal . His father’s words wound tighter and tighter around his throat.
“ Lee? ” his father said, clamping a hand on his shoulder.
You don’t need help, you don’t need help, you don’t need help a thousand times over, when all he meant was I won’t get you help .
Lee grabbed his father by the shirt.
He hadn’t expected it—no one expected Lee to do anything quickly, or violently. He was someone who was barely there, a shadow that lingered in corners and would never amount to anything, would never touch anyone because the world slid through his fingers like sand.
His father was so startled that he didn’t even raise his hands to brace himself when Lee smashed his face into the edge of
the counter.
His nose crunched against the marble edge and Lee tasted bright sparks of blood, and there was his roommate, shoving back
against the banister. But Matt was blond, and Lee’s father’s hair was dark—one was the truth and the other was a lie.
Lee smashed his father’s face against the counter again, and this time teeth clattered to the ground, but his father pushed
back. His face was a mask of blood, Lee could hardly even see his features anymore, he could have been anyone at all—James
Baldridge, Matt Baldridge, Jim Turner, James Turner, Lee Turner.
Was this how he’d killed Lee’s mother? For trying to take Lee away from him? What a joke. He’d never even wanted Lee here.
He just hadn’t wanted her to have him. Hadn’t wanted to be the man with the crazy wife and dead kid.
His father punched him in the face but he hardly even felt the impact. In that moment Lee was not a man, or a murderer, but
a wild animal. His father struck him with fists while Lee’s teeth sank into his ear and pulled. This is what you made me , he wanted to scream, but he couldn’t, because his teeth were clenched around cartilage. There was a wet ripping sound, and
then his father’s ear was in his mouth, and his father was on the floor and Lee was falling back against the counter.
His father screamed and clamped a hand over the bleeding hole where his ear used to be. You will never be normal again , Lee thought as he spit the ear to the floor. His father gaped at it dizzily, as if nauseated to see a piece of himself no
longer attached, but then his gaze snapped to Lee, and his eyes burned.
He grabbed a kitchen knife, and before Lee knew what was happening, he jammed it into Lee’s stomach.
It slid in so easily—but of course it did, Lee Turner was not a real person made of meat and bones. He was an idea, a regret,
a darkness. He could no longer feel pain, could no longer taste the blood on his lips or hear his father’s ragged breaths.
He shoved his father back and the knife clattered to the floor. Lee seized it before his father could, even with his trembling,
blood-slicked hands, and plunged it into his father’s heart.
It was harder than he expected. His father was real, after all.
James Turner had aimed for his son’s soft, exposed organs in his lower abdomen, but Lee had to force the knife through the
rib cage. It resisted, and his father pulled at his hands, but he plunged it in again and again and again, ravaging the heart
that he once would have done anything to stop from breaking.
Soon his father stopped fighting back and the knife was too slippery to hold and Lee was too dizzy to stay upright. He collapsed
against the side of the cabinet, his head smashing into the handle, his whole body made of television static. He pressed a
hand to his stomach, and still he couldn’t feel any pain, which was probably a bad thing.
The kitchen was soaked with blood, splatters of it all over the walls, the counters, the cabinets, more than Lee had ever
seen. His father lay dead on the floor, the warm pool of scarlet slowly yawning wider beneath him. The dark, narrow stain
by the kitchen door was now vivid red. Had it been there all along? This is a dream , Lee thought, even though he knew that dreams could still be dangerous. Maybe it was the blood loss, but the whole world
had a sepia haze to it, fading at the edges, a sure sign that Lee would wake up any moment now.
I need to clean this up before Hina comes , Lee thought, rising to his feet unsteadily. But who was Hina again? The name sparkled at the edges of his mind, but he couldn’t remember her face. Lee closed his eyes, tried to reach for the thought, but it slipped through his fingers like silk.
Where is James Baldridge?
The sword ferns shifted beyond the kitchen window, revealing the well in the yard glowing in the sunlight.
He grabbed his father by the ankles and dragged him across the house, leaving a red trail in his wake. He panted, shivering
from cold sweat as he dragged his father off the back porch, across the yard, and hefted him into the well. He wouldn’t fit
at first, so Lee had to shove him down until he folded in on himself like a shirt crammed into a suitcase, scraping down the
side of the well and splashing at the bottom. He lay face up, green eyes staring toward a sun he could no longer see.
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Only then did Lee feel the pain of the wound on his abdomen. The warmth spilling down his legs was his own blood, not just
his father’s.
I need to call someone , he realized. He didn’t think, in that moment, that they would arrest him for killing his father. He didn’t worry about it
then, because there wasn’t enough blood in his brain to think of anything but his phone on his bed, of finding someone to
stop the bleeding.
He tripped as he stepped onto the porch, and from there he could only crawl through the house, the world tilting violently
beneath him. The brightness of the blood in the kitchen screamed at him, the only color he could still see. The world felt
underwater, as if he was swimming through his own house.
He reached his room, and even though he could see his phone on the bed, he could go no farther.
He crawled as far as his closet before his legs dumped him forward and he couldn’t move his arms to catch himself.
His chin slammed against the floor and rattled his teeth.
The ground scorched his cheek where it was pressed against the tatami mats, but the rest of his body was freezing cold.
He reached for the closet door to pull himself up, but could only slap weakly across the paper, streaks of blood splattering
across it as he weakly nudged the door open.
Another stain , he thought as the world grew cold and dark.
His blood seeped through the floorboards, through the cold dirt, and at last spilled across a small box with a turtle carved
on the lid.