Chapter 17
We’d left Sawyer’s house well over an hour ago, but it didn’t register until much later that Alaric was the one driving the SUV.
At first, I simply basked in the afterglow of my time with Sawyer, a holiday miracle in itself.
Even the memory of the cinnamon ornament session with Sawyer and the twin stepbrothers retained a golden glaze, the air thick with cloves and the delicate tension of kids trying to outdo each other with weaponized dough snakes.
Maybe Christmas wasn’t so bad, not if there were weaponized dough snakes every year.
I’d half expected Paul to pull me aside and ream me out for pushing him on the house issue.
Instead, we ate too much, then cleaned up together, then watched Christmas Vacation while the kids huddled on the floor, phones aglow.
At one point, Alaric drifted to the kitchen to help Paul put away leftovers, and the way they conspired over Tupperware made me feel…
proud? Maybe that was the feeling. I don’t know.
So, when we’d left, I’d settled into the car. It wasn’t until we’d been on the road long enough to exhaust the playlist of classic rock and roll (Sawyer’s doing, via a shared playlist) that I realized we were minus one Brad the driver.
“Hey,” I said, I sat up. “Wait. Where’s Brad?”
Alaric kept his attention on the blacktop ribbon ahead. “It’s the day before Christmas Eve. He’s at home with his family.”
“Ah. Of course.” For a second, I felt irrationally disappointed, though I couldn’t articulate why. Maybe I’d grown accustomed to being chaperoned everywhere like a high-value diplomatic hostage.
I rolled the thought around. “By the way, thank you for the minimal emotional manipulation so far today.”
“No problem. I do what I can.” His matter-of-fact delivery almost made me laugh.
“I mean it,” I said. “In retrospect, I understand what you were trying to do yesterday, taking me to all those places, showing me I’m not friendless. That I was valued. I can see, now, that was the point.”
I didn’t add that I’d learned a couple other things about myself along the way.
“You aren’t friendless. Not unless you want to be.”
“I know.” I traced the pattern of dashboard vents with my finger. “I mean, I know that now. So, uh, what’s the point you’re trying to make today?”
“I already told you. Spending time with the people we currently know and who are important to us.”
I turned my head to study his profile, the angle of jaw and the precise lines that, apparently, made teenagers swoon. “It can’t be that simple.”
“It is.” He kept his hands at ten and two, knuckles pale where the cold had settled in.
“Recognizing what you already have, seeing the value of your current relationships, being grateful for where you are and who you’re with.
” He glanced over at me as he said this last part.
“Sometimes, it really is just that simple.”
“Okay. Then”—I cleared my throat—“are we going to your brother’s house? Since we’ve already visited all my friends and family.”
“Dean lives in Canada now,” Alaric replied, and there was an odd note in his voice. But not regret, and not pride.
“He does?”
“Yep. I go up for New Years, generally. Not Christmas. He and his wife spend Christmas with her family.”
“He doesn’t invite you?”
“He does, but…” Alaric shrugged, then flexed his hands on the wheel. “I also like the idea of spending Christmas with my wife, when I have one, and her family. Or our family.”
Of course my brain couldn’t help but conjure what sort of person would end up as Alaric’s wife, what superpowers she’d need to qualify, and then felt a weird stab of jealousy.
I stole a glance at him. “Then who do you spend Christmas with?”
“Different people over the years.”
He was a question dodger, that’s what.
“How about this year?”
“You’ll find out when we get there.”
Crossing my arms, I faced out the windshield again. Sometimes, I didn’t know why I kept asking him when he always put me off. Of course he wasn’t going to tell me where we were going.
But then a question rose, fizzing just below the surface. I wasn’t sure if I should ask. Then again, I wondered if I should ask anyway since he hardly answered any of my questions regardless.
“What?” he prompted.
I fiddled with my scarf, twisted it around my hand. “I want to ask you a question, but I don’t know if it’s too personal.”
“Are you kidding?” He turned his head, his eyes skating over me. “Please, I would love nothing more than if you and me got too personal.”
Channeling my inner Sawyer, I rolled my eyes
However, when I faced him and prepared the words, I kept my tone gentle. “Why aren’t you spending Christmas with Duke?”
The energy inside the car changed, quick and irrevocable. It was like flipping a breaker. And the temperature dropped a degree, maybe ten. Alaric’s whole demeanor went from relaxed and teasing to alert and tense.
“I don’t talk to Duke. I haven’t since I turned eighteen. And neither does my brother.”
I recognized the perimeter he staked. The old me would’ve let it go. But after two days of being poked and prodded by his psychological cattle prod, I had zero compunction about poking back.
“Tell me what happened.”
He didn’t answer, but the air between us felt dense with static. Even the whine of the highway faded.
Finally, he said, “For the record, I’m not bellyaching. Nor am I complaining. I’m answering the question you asked.”
“Okay. So noted.”
“I don’t remember my real dad. He died in the service, overseas, just after Dean was born.
” He loosened his grip on the wheel, then set his shoulders with a slow, deliberate roll.
“But, as you know, and frequently remind me, my brother and I grew up in Duke’s big house, and we always had enough to eat. ”
“I’m—I’m sorry about your dad.” I wanted to reach out and set a hand on him, but I didn’t know where to put it. I wasn’t good at this, at comforting someone. I needed more practice.
“Thank you. But—well—my mom came back to Alenbach when I was four so her parents could help out. She also got a job at The Weston Company.”
“I think I knew that.” I hoped he would fill in more blanks for me about Duke and his mom without me having to ask.
He went on. “But did you know my mom and Duke dated in high school?”
I sat up and faced him again. “No. No, I had no idea.”
I knew his mom was generally regarded as beautiful, but also shrewd, clever, and wickedly smart.
She was a chemical engineer and worked for the industrial chemical division of the company.
I also knew she’d died in an accident shortly after marrying my biological father.
She’d fallen down a flight of stairs or fallen off a platform at the company, something like that.
“They did. And she left Duke for my father while they were all in high school.” Alaric’s voice was low, measured.
“After my mom died—” He faltered, cleared his throat, then kept going.
“After my mom died, we had a string of nannies. Duke never laid a hand on us, but any time we’d misbehave, do or say something Duke didn’t like, he’d fire, then replace the nanny.
This was a very—as you might call it—efficient strategy.
My brother and I learned real fast to behave how Duke wanted, how to be perfect sons, so folks wouldn’t lose their jobs.
Duke didn’t want anything else or have any use for us beyond that. ”
As I absorbed this information, my mind pictured a pair of little boys walking a daily tightrope, terrified of the collateral damage of being themselves. “What do you mean? He didn’t want anything else?”
“When he wanted us, we made sure to be available and be exactly the kind of sons he wanted us to be. He’d show us off to his friends or business associates. We made sure to get good grades, play the right sports, look a certain way, espouse certain beliefs. But beyond that, we were left alone.”
I felt the ache of it, the void at the center of all that perfection.
“I had no idea,” I said, quietly. “From the outside, you looked like the perfect family. He always acted so proud of you.”
“What he was proud of was himself, not us.” He drove quietly for a few moments before adding, “I understand why you hate the ornamentation of Christmas. All the glitter and shiny plastic.”
I turned my face to him, surprised by the shift. “You do?”
“Yeah. I do. Dean and me, we were just ornaments to him, not people. If we’d been robots that he could pass off as human, I think he would’ve been more satisfied.”
It was a precise analogy. My mind reeled at how closely his experience mapped onto my own, the mutual revulsion at anything that masqueraded as love without substance.
“Is that why you testified against him at the child support payment hearing? To get revenge?”
He shook his head. “No, Aly. It was about doing the right thing, it wasn’t about revenge.”
“But don’t you want to get revenge? For how he treated you and your brother—like you were disposable objects—growing up?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Alaric twisted his lips to the side in contemplation, eventually saying, “I can’t think of any better revenge than letting that man live the life he’s chosen, rotting away in that empty house.
Okay, yes. It’s full of stuff, but that stuff is empty.
Stuff can’t give you a hug at the end of hard day and it doesn’t give a shit whether you succeed or fail.
He’s lonely because money matters more than community to him.
No matter what he buys with his borrowed money, or how many shiny ornaments he surrounds himself with, it’s all—ultimately—soulless and meaningless. ”
The words filled the car and I couldn’t help but feel their gravity. It felt personal.