Chapter 11 #3
She closed her eyes. She didn’t know that he would.
“You pretend to be so mean.”
“I do not pretend to be mean,” he said. “I am exactly who I appear to be, and people have a difficult time with that.”
“Okay, what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Meaning, I’m not overly friendly. But I also never go out of my way to be unkind to anybody, do I?”
“Of course you don’t.”
“Exactly. It’s not my fault if people mix up not being a people person with being mean.”
“It’s just that a lot of people feel like they have to smooth situations over. Be extra friendly and polite to make everyone comfortable. It’s me. I’m a lot of people.”
“I lost that skill,” he said.
She didn’t know what that meant. But for some reason, it made her think of his younger brother. The one that he’d gone to the store to buy candy with — the one he said… He didn’t know where he was.
She wondered if there had been some kind of family falling out, because he never mentioned his family. That one mention of his younger brother was the only time he ever had.
“So, you’re not a people person. Does that extend to your family?”
His body stiffened against hers. Like he had heard a sound in the distance, and was freezing so that he could assess the threat.
“What makes you ask that?”
“You said you didn’t know where your brother was. Maybe… Maybe you could find him.”
He let out a slow breath. “Not likely. Not on this side of things anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
“My brother is dead.”
She felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “Oh.”
She didn’t know what to say, or if she should ask more questions. He shifted behind her, and she was almost sure she felt his knuckles brush her cheek just lightly, for a moment.
“When he was eleven.”
Eleven.
The image she’d had of him as a boy buying candy with his brother rushed through her mind again and her whole chest hurt.
The tears that flooded her eyes were instantaneous. She bit her lip to hold them back. “When he was a child?” she whispered.
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t mean to lie to you.
It’s just not a very fun thing to talk about, and the truth is, I don’t know where he is.
I hope it’s good. I hope it’s bright and full of bluebonnets.
I hope there’s all the chocolate candy that he could possibly want.
But he gets to walk to the store and get whatever he wants to get.
It’s weird. It’s weird that all he ever was, was a child.
And I’m still here. Even if he’s in a place where we can meet again someday…
Will he still be a kid? I don’t know.” He breathed in slowly, then back out.
“It’s just easier to say that I don’t know. ”
She couldn’t breathe, but she could see him. She could see the path he’d taken from that boy to this man. From losing his brother, to joining the military, needing to make things right for his friend who had died, doing the rodeo in his honor, was he really doing these things for… for his brother?”
“What was his name?” she asked, her voice a whisper.
“Tyler. He was my best friend. We ran all over that ranch together. Did everything together. Well, almost everything. I had a group of friends, and when they were around, I didn’t much like to hang out with him.
Because he was just a little kid then.” He shook his head, she could feel it against the back of her head. “I regret that. More than I can say.”
She shook her head, even though he couldn’t see it. “That’s just normal. I mean, my older brother never wanted to hang out with me when he had friends around.”
“Your older brother sucks. So that’s not really reassuring.”
She laughed. “I know. It’s different. He’s a lot older than I am. And we didn’t have a friendship like that. I’m so sorry that you lost him.”
“Thanks. Me too. Me too.”
“If you don’t mind me asking you, was he sick or…”
“It was an accident.”
“I’m sorry. Your parents…”
“I lost my parents in the same accident.”
The whole forest held its breath in response to that. Everything was quiet. The night air around them went still. Even the crickets didn’t chirp. A moment of silence. She stared through a gap in the firs in the lean-to, and saw the clouds had parted, the stars bearing witness to his grief.
“Zane…”
“I don’t tell people this, Cara. I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Cody knows?”
“No. I mean, maybe he does. It was in the news. I don’t expect Cody is the type to go digging for information on anyone, friends or otherwise, but he may have. But we haven’t discussed it.”
“Just me?”
“Just you.”
She wanted to ask more questions, and she also didn’t. But she decided to let the silence lead. To let him decide. Because he had already decided to trust her, and so maybe it was the right thing to do, to just see how far he would trust her.
“I went away to a friend’s house to spend the night. My brother was annoying me. He was badgering me and saying it wasn’t fair that I got invited to do this stuff and he didn’t. I told him he would get to do cool shit when he was older.”
Cara put her hand over her mouth so that she didn’t make a sound. So that she didn’t weep. Not openly.
“When I got back the next day, the house was quiet. It was weird. No one was around. I went upstairs looking for my brother. And I found him. He was already gone.”
A sob shook her body, and she tried to stop it. She didn’t want him to know she was crying. She didn’t want to make this moment about her feelings when they were about his.
Zane must not have noticed. Because he continued.
“I went to look for my mom and dad, and they were there, but they weren’t.
I ran out of the house, I ran all the way to the neighbors’, and it was a mile down the road.
They called the police. It was carbon monoxide.
Everybody died in their sleep. Everybody died in their sleep except me because I wasn’t there. I survived.”
Those words echoed through her.
He survived.
Just as he had done in the military. He had survived then.
It sounded so heavy.
It felt so heavy.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“No. It’s fine.”
“Except it’s not.” She turned over to face him, and he kept his arms around her. She touched his face. She couldn’t see him, not in the shadow of the lean-to, but she could feel his gaze on her. “No one should ever have to go through such a terrible thing. Let alone a child.”
“But it happened.”
Those simple words gave her insight into how he had lived every day since then.
It had happened. There was nothing that could change it. He just had to live with it.
And oh, how he had lived with it. All of the darkness, all of the heaviness that she sensed in him, it all made sense now. Everything in him that seemed just a little bit lost made sense now.
The way that he kept people at a distance because of course, he did.
What he hadn’t been saying this whole time was that he wasn’t mean, he was just…
“Yeah,” he said. “It happened. It made the military feel like a parade. But I…you know I can sleep outside like this, I can sleep in a place that might get bombed out by an enemy. In my own house alone I can’t even turn the light off in my room.
Because sometimes I forget which room I’m in.
When it is. Sometimes I think I’m awake in the house and it’s empty and everyone is gone. ”
She held onto his arm, clung to him like it would help them both get through this. The reality of his loss. “Where did you go after—?”
“I think that’s probably enough for now.”
He wasn’t being mean. There was a real exhaustion in his voice.
“Okay,” she said, her chest sore, her lungs feeling tight. She was exhausted just from hearing the story, and he had lived it.
It made her feel ashamed. Ashamed at her lack of strength in the face of his.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m probably gonna give you nightmares.”
Her chest felt like something crumbled inside of it. The worst thing was, it was probably true. The thing that he had lived through would give her literal nightmares.
And he had no choice but to figure out how to live with that reality. To go on, even though he had experienced all that. To lose them was one thing, to be the one that found them…
He had just been a little boy. A thirteen-year-old boy.
She had been grieving the loss of her own childhood all this time, her own carefree life, but what had he had?
He had lost everybody.
She leaned her head forward and rested it against his chest, and his own breathing began to match hers.
This was their secret, laid bare in the wilderness, witnessed by nothing other than the stars that winked through the evergreen cover of the shelter.
She had a feeling they wouldn’t speak of this again. Not outside of this place.
But she would always know.
And as much as all of this hurt, the fact that Zane Barton had given her a chance to know him felt like a revelation.
So she would cling to that instead of the nightmares, and hope it was enough to keep them at bay.