CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CONNECTICUT, AGE THIRTY-ONE
When I had been thirty and Luke was thirty-three, he'd decided to go to the movies anyway, despite hating the idea of going alone. He wanted to spite me after I asked him not to go at all, as if we weren't brothers, but a bickering old couple instead.
Sometimes, it’d felt that way.
He walked into the theater with his popcorn and large soda and found himself a seat. He sat down, ready to enjoy his moment of rebellion against his overprotective, paranoid little brother, when he heard a familiar voice from the row behind him.
Luke and the various witnesses who'd stepped forward gave identical accounts of the exchange.
Like I always said, my brother had never been one to lie. An embellisher of the truth sometimes, sure, but rarely a liar.
“Hey, Zero. Finally living up to that nickname, huh?”
Luke had claimed he'd tried to ignore him, that he’d sat quietly, browsing his phone for a few minutes in an attempt to distract himself. But Ritchie had always been incapable of stopping himself from antagonizing.
“Where's your boyfriend? I mean, your brother, unless … shit, is he your boyfriend now? You guys have always been fuckin' weird. I bet he fucks better than any woman you’ve been with, right?”
Luke shook his head and tried to keep his anger from spiking while the trailers began to play.
Honestly, he should've just left, and I'd told him so on more than one occasion.
Luke's phone rang. It was me. It rang twice, and he sent it to voice mail.
“God, I miss Charlie boy. Been a long time. If you tell me how he's doing, I'll tell you how Melanie's doing. How about that?”
Ritchie tossed a handful of popcorn at Luke. Instead of engaging, my brother gritted his teeth and texted me, never once mentioning to me what was happening.
“She used to talk about you, you know. Used to scream your name, too, when I was plowing into her, but I slapped her around a little. Took care of that.”
Ritchie had been lying. He'd never been with Melanie. Didn't even know where she was—none of us did at the time. But Luke hadn't known that.
“Go to hell, Ritchie,” Luke finally replied, stuffing his phone into the pocket of his leather jacket.
“Oh, you don't like that, do you? You don't like that I finally have that pretty little pussy all to myself, huh? Don't like that she finally came to her senses and dumped your loser ass?”
It had been sometime around this point when Luke said he'd started to struggle. Started to wonder if he should leave or if he should kick Ritchie's ass instead. If he should complain to management. If he should just fucking go home.
God, he should've just gone home.
“You know what else she said to me?”
“Will you fucking shut the hell up?” someone else in the theater shouted, finally speaking up, but Ritchie never could stop talking.
He could never stop, period, and that was what eventually killed him. Because without someone else to hold him back, Luke couldn't stop either.
Ritchie leaned forward, putting his mouth against Luke's ear. Luke tried to brush him away, but Ritchie grabbed onto his shoulders, holding him steady.
“She said she always wished Charlie boy had died in that crash too. Burned to a crisp, just like your mommy and daddy. She even said you guys would still be together if it wasn’t for his psycho, whiny ass, always crying, always getting in the way. She said she would've just killed him herself if his cock wasn’t bigger than y—”
He stopped talking when my brother's fist flipped up from the armrest and bashed him square in the mouth.
I hadn't noticed the blood on Luke's hand that night—I'd been too stunned—but the impact against Ritchie's front teeth had cut into Luke's knuckles.
One of Ritchie's teeth cracked, and he cried out, “Asshole! You broke my fucking tooth!”
“Asshole?!” Luke stood up, enraged and unable to see beyond revenge. “ I'm the asshole?!”
He climbed over his seat and into Ritchie's row. Ritchie began to rise, ready to fight, when Luke's hands shot out, encircling his throat.
“You never left him alone. You always made his life a living hell. And I always looked the other way because you were my friend. God, you were my best friend! And I let you torment my little fucking brother, and for what?! What the fuck had he ever done to you, huh?! He was a little fucking kid! What the fuck had he ever done to you?!”
Luke's hands tightened, snapping Ritchie's bones and crushing his windpipe. Someone screamed for help; someone else screamed to stop.
That same someone screamed, “You're killing him!”
Someone else ran out of the theater, screaming for the manager or someone— anyone .
God, so much fucking screaming , but Luke hadn't heard any of it, and even if he had, I couldn't be sure that he’d cared in that moment.
Because then he said, “I told you once if you ever fucking said some shit about him again, I'd fucking kill you. Remember that, you piece of shit? Why can’t you fucking stop?!”
But he had stopped, and Luke realized two seconds too late that his former best friend was no longer breathing, just as a security guard and a manager ran into the theater.
A few people tried to stop him on his way to the emergency exit with little success. He ran to his bike, hopped on, and sped home as quickly as he could, knowing the cops would be on his tail. Knowing there'd been witnesses. Knowing they'd heard Ritchie say his name. Knowing they'd catch him and arrest him and take him away.
All because he had to see me one more time. To warn me. To tell me he loved me.
And that had made it really, really hard to hate him, even when he pleaded guilty. Even when the judge sentenced him to twenty-five years to life in Connecticut’s Wayward Correctional Facility for murder in the second degree. But especially when his eyes met mine as the guards took him away to begin the rest of his life behind bars, and I tried hard to see him the way the rest of Connecticut had seen him—a cold-blooded murderer—and I couldn't.
He was still just my brother, and it had been really, really hard to hate him then.
And it was still really, really, really hard to hate him now as I sat across from him at a metal table in the Wayward visitor center.
It'd been a little over a year since he'd been thrown behind bars. The first couple of months, he'd been held at a county jail before his transfer to the state prison, medium security.
Luke had once said the real bad guys got thrown into max, speaking like he knew what he was talking about, like he wasn't scared shitless of mingling with some of the worst people in our society, and when I'd pointed this out, he'd simply said, “I'm one of them now, Charlie. Yeah, maybe I'm fuckin' scared. I am fuckin’ scared, but I'm no more scared of them than I am of myself.”
As it turned out, he'd had a fairly good point then, I realized after I visited him at the correctional facility every other Sunday. These guys—the ones I'd seen visiting with their friends and family—weren't much different from my brother, or hell, even myself, apart from the fact that they'd committed their crimes and gotten themselves caught. Luke had even introduced me to a few of the guys he'd started to call his friends.
No, it wasn't the other guys who had scared me or left me feeling uncomfortable, unable to put a word on the strange sensation settling in the marrow of my bones. It was Luke who had done that. Not because he'd become someone I no longer recognized. He hadn't at all, and that was the problem. He was still Luke, still my brother, still my best friend, and I couldn't bring myself to accept that this place was where he belonged, according to society.
I couldn't accept that he had used his own bare hands to rob someone else of their life. No matter how much I might've hated that particular someone else.
But that wasn't all I was having a hard time with.
I shifted my ass against the cold bench as Luke raked his hair back with one hand. He'd started to let it grow longer since he'd been locked up. I wasn't sure what had inspired the change or if he just hadn't gotten around to having it cut. If I was being honest, I didn't care enough at the time to ask. All I cared about was how angry and alone I was and how I really, really, really, really wished I could hate him.
“So, then Wolf just”—Luke made a flicking motion with his wrist—“chucks this fucking book at this dude's throat and told him to stop being a pussy for crying on the phone. And Soldier and I were just sitting there, like, what the fuck, man?”
He got caught up in a burst of laughter, to the point where tears squeezed out from his eyes, and all I could do was stare across the table at him, wondering if he'd always been this guy or if he'd just adapted that easily.
A sigh whooshed from him, taking the rest of his laughter with it. “Guess you had to be there.”
“Yeah, guess so.”
He folded his arms against the table. “So, anyway, how have things been with you? Any changes?”
I swallowed at the dryness in my throat. “Things are pretty much the same as they have been.”
Luke blew out a heavy breath and rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Son of a bitch. Are you serious? Still ?”
“It's been two weeks since I was last here, Luke. What did you think was going to happen in that time?”
“Uh, it's been over a year since I've been here. They have to get bored eventually.”
I cocked my head at that, staring at my brother like he'd also lost his damn mind the moment he lost his freedom. “You think it's gonna be so easy for Tommy to get over the fact that he lost his fucking brother ?”
“Tommy can go to hell,” Luke fired back. “He doesn't need to take his shit out on you.”
“His brother is gone ,” I replied harshly, enunciating every word to try and get it through his thick skull. Like he wasn’t aware.
Luke flattened his hands on the tabletop and leaned over it, bringing his face closer to mine. “And so is yours .”
“You're not fucking dead , Luke.”
He shook his head and pushed off the table, leaning back and turning to glance out the barred window. “You know what I mean.”
I didn't honor him with an answer, but I knew exactly what he meant. I was reminded of it every single day when I left for work, knowing I was going to return home to an empty house, just as I had every day since he'd lost all control and choked the life out of Ritchie Wheeler.
Of course, there was also the never-ending torment.
As it turned out, people couldn’t separate a killer's family from the killer himself, and ever since that day in the movie theater, Tommy Wheeler and his poor old mother had made it their life's purpose to make mine a living hell.
It had started as shouted obscenities from open car windows or a flipped finger if we ever crossed paths in the grocery store. Then, it escalated to nasty notes left in the mailbox and garbage thrown onto the front lawn. The latest incident had been waking up to the words LUKE CORBIN BELONGS IN HELL written in spray paint across my car windshield.
The cops suggested getting surveillance cameras on the property to catch Tommy or his mother or both in the act to build a case against them and take them to court. But I didn't want to take them to court. I didn't want to make a big fucking thing out of it. All I wanted was to be left alone to wallow on my own shitty branch of grief, and if there was a way to establish that without having an order of protection slapped on the two of them, I'd take it.
“You know, it might sound crazy, but maybe you should talk to them,” Luke suggested gently.
“Oh, right. Good idea. I'll just call them up and invite them over for dinner. I cannot foresee a single thing going wrong in that scenario,” I muttered sardonically.
Luke's glare turned to stone. “Don't be a jackass. Next time you see one of them, lay it out. Tell them their beef isn't with you; it's with—”
“Do you really think they're not aware of that already? They wrote your name on my car, Luke, not mine . But you're in here, where they can't get at you. You’re protected . Me, though?” I thrust a hand toward the window. “I'm out there, trying to live my fucking life, which has never been a walk in the park, in case you forgot. But then you had to go and …”
I couldn't get the words out, no matter how badly I wanted to throw them in his face. All I could do was raise a clenched fist, then drop it to the table, shaking my head and staring out that window. Too afraid to look at him and see the guilt in his eyes. Too afraid I wouldn't see any guilt at all.
Nothing was said between us for a few minutes, and I wondered why I even bothered anymore. Every other week, I made the two-hour drive to come see him, where I'd listen to him talk about stuff that had happened since our last visit. Always with accompanying laughter. Always with a tinge of joy and excitement he'd never had before during his life on the outside, where he'd put all his focus on simply getting by and not on getting happy.
Here? He was happy. He didn't need to say it; I already knew. And I resented him for it.
“I don't know what you want from me,” he finally said after minutes of silence. “How many times do I have to tell you that I'm sorry?”
“Sorry doesn't change anything,” I replied, still unable to look at him. “Not for me … or them.”
I could see my car from where I sat, and I thought about leaving early. I thought about never coming back at all. I thought about what my life might be like if I ran away and never saw my brother or this place ever again. For a second, it didn't seem so bad. In fact, it was almost tempting, until I glanced back at him and realized that, despite how badly I wished I could hate him, I didn't.
“Shit's gonna get better.” He said it like a promise. “It has to.”
“I don't know about that.”
“They're gonna move on, one way or another.”
He was so certain, and I wanted to believe him, just as I'd believed him countless times before. But I never believed him about Tommy Wheeler or his mother's ability to move on. This wasn't a spat between childhood friends. This wasn't a silly rivalry over a girl. This was about death and justice, and I knew, as deep as my bones, that Tommy Wheeler was out for my brother's blood.
It was just unfortunate for me that Luke’s blood was also mine.