Chapter 38
Zach lifted a hand to shield his eyes from the blinding brightness of the light Bram trained on his face.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
Zach said nothing. Neither of them moved.
Bram cleared his throat. “I hope you know, what you saw—Pike attacked me. I was only defending myself.”
Zach still couldn’t see Bram’s face, only the star of his headlamp, steady and fixed some thirty feet away.
“He must’ve picked up on something you did or said,” Bram continued, “because he knew you’d figured out what he did to Ginny.
Went after me same as he went after you, back in the Bowl.
But I won.” His father’s voice softened, crinkled into kindness, and though Zach knew every word was a lie, that Bram himself had told Pike what Zach knew, he still wanted to swallow the sound of his father’s affection deep, let it warm him, wash him clean.
The light didn’t allow Zach to read his father’s expression, to evaluate the changes on the familiar face.
“Is he—is Pike dead?” Zach asked, voice humiliatingly high, excruciatingly hesitant.
“He didn’t leave me any other option.”
Zach fiddled with his coat, feeling naked under the light, patting himself as if to check that he hadn’t somehow been stripped and exposed.
“Come on,” Bram said. “We’ll go back to the hut together.”
“I can’t see. Because of your headlamp.”
The light danced down as Bram aimed it toward Zach’s feet, transforming its beam into an elongated oval that stretched from father to son.
Zach squinted at the dark shape that was his father. “What about the money?”
A pause. He pictured Bram’s face going furrowed.
“What money?”
Yes, what money? The money his father had stolen from investors? Or the money Bram had held out to Pike like bait, only attainable if Zach was snatched from the world’s reach?
“The insurance money,” Zach whispered.
The light wobbled. “Can’t hear you, buddy,” Bram said. Zach slid slightly backward on his skis, unsettled by his father’s bright tone, his lack of irritation.
Bram was hiding his Underself.
Zach could pretend he’d said nothing at all. Despite the way his hairs prickled, the way his eyes scanned the meadow around him for some escape, his exhaustion kept him from fleeing. Yet he couldn’t force himself to move toward his father. Not without knowing who Bram really was.
This time when he spoke he was louder, but a tremble still fissured his voice, betraying his fear at questioning his father. “What about the insurance?”
A hesitation, as if sound in this place took an unusually long time to traverse the space between them.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Bram remained so calm, his words so even, that Zach found himself hoping he’d been wrong, that his own memory, his own understanding, had been as dim and fragmented as the blowing snow made his father’s light.
“I’m glad I found you. I’ve been worried, Zakky.”
The sound of the nickname his mother had used ripped through him, sucking air from his lungs as sudden and cruel as the kick to the ribs in the sleeping bag.
Months of being “you,” or “kid” or nothing at all. Months of being a thing summoned, dismissed, criticized, commanded, but not fully human. Not worthy. And now Bram was uttering the endearing diminutive only his mother and sister had ever used.
“Are you—are you crying? Stop that.” Bram’s disgust, his instantaneous anger, seethed through the darkness bare, as if masquerading as a loving, concerned father for so brief a time had been burdensome enough it made Bram all the more disdainful of Zach’s show of emotion.
“Sonofabitch,” he muttered. “Just—let’s get a move on. ”
Zach switched on his headlamp. It cast Bram’s shadow to enormous proportions on the wall of trees behind him. Against the deep black of that shadow, his father’s face was bloodless wax. A sneer carved across the Underself, teeth clenched. Zach shook, weightless and adrift.
“You didn’t ask, Dad,” Zach said, voice small.
Bram held up a hand to shield his eyes.
“What?”
“You didn’t ask. How I got hurt.”
Bram had no patience for other people’s pain.
Only when Bram was hurt or sick did pain and sickness truly matter, so unjust and awful, his family expected to bear witness and tend to him like a suffering saint.
But even Bram, under normal circumstances, would’ve commented on what Zach could feel; his nose swollen huge and bent, blood curling down his face to flake on his skin like drying rust.
His father paused. Did he hear the challenge in the words? Yes, he had to, because his anger dissipated into a dismissive shrug, a matter-of-fact tone. “Assumed you’d fallen. You’re always getting yourself hurt. Lemme take a look.”
Bram slid a few feet closer before Zach called out, “No. You stay there,” and Bram stopped, head tipping again in that childlike, curious way he had.
“Christ, this thing is heavy.” Cringing, Bram set his pack down on the snow. It landed with a hollow clatter.
He didn’t move toward Zach. Didn’t speak. Only stared from a little more than twenty-five feet away, eyes a half-lidded squint that made Zach a bug in a jar, Bram giving an impatient tap-tap-tap on the glass.
Still with his same odd remove, Zach blinked back. Watched through his throbbing face as Bram’s all-eclipsing shadow sprouted long talons that pierced the snow. Grew blackly shining serrated teeth when his father bared his, perfectly white and even and square, in the imitation of a man’s smile.
“You obviously want to rest a minute,” Bram said. “That’s okay. I do, too. Then we’ll go.”
Human and inhuman overlapped. Tangled.
As Zach’s chin lolled toward his chest under the awful weight of Bram’s shadow and smile, his headlamp tripped over Bram’s backpack. A flash of red from a mesh pocket made him look again.
It was the bottle of lighter fluid.
The clatter sound of Bram’s pack—the same noise as when Zach set down a stack of firewood, threw kindling into the hut’s stove.
Did his father have wood in his backpack?
Dry wood and lighter fluid. Lighter fluid and wood.
The attack, the avalanche, had left behind bruises.
Brokenness. Proof of harm. And yet those physical, visible signs seemed somehow easier for his mind to cope with than the possibilities that now bent Zach, consumed him, and the base, devouring fear that rose from the reptilian part of his brain.
He looked out on the scene, flipped through the events of the last few days, the last few months.
All he’d witnessed, heard, overheard, suspicions he’d pushed away when they seeped into consciousness from his darkest edges.
It all began to fold together, each fact a playing card riffling into a whole that neatly interlaced into the very worst of everything.
Zach’s blood beat thick in his throat yet he sagged, utterly exhausted.
The Underself, cruel and slippery, was Bram’s true face.
He saw that face, saw his father, who had told Pike he couldn’t do the thing close up, tying Zach into the sleeping bag with a ski strap to distance himself, to erase Zach’s voice as he’d tried to lay claim to his own name, his own humanity, calling out to the predator in the cabin.
His father, so incompetent at building a fire, so unprepared for the wilderness, stuffing the ancient blanket onto the coals left in the potbelly stove thinking it would ignite, smoke, suffocate.
And when the blanket’s tatters only smothered, only steamed and stunk, Bram, gnashing his teeth, grunting that horrible, animal noise as he emptied Zach’s backpack, his coat, had found the camping matches Zach’s mother had carefully placed in his emergency kit, lit them, once again tried to set fire to the blanket.
But Bram had failed. Too frenzied, too inexperienced to set things alight, to understand the blanket’s damp rot kept it from burning.
And so the frustrated shadow of the Underself had beaten the thing on the floor it had decided was no longer useful as a living son before charging out to get supplies to set the cabin on fire.
In Zach’s head, the GPS map. The timing clicked together. The trip from the miner’s cabin to Pantheon to fetch fire starters, dry wood, lighter fluid, would take about fifteen minutes for a grown man as strong as Bram. A little longer to return uphill.
Zach followed the curves of the cruel logic, the story his father would tell.
Zach had tried to go down the trail for help but had gotten lost trying to return to the hut.
Poor kid must have felt lucky to have found the cabin, not realizing he was making fatal errors.
And who could blame him, really. After all, Zach was still only a child!
He must have spilled the lighter fluid as he was starting the fire.
He didn’t understand that when he fell asleep, when he ignorantly left the stove’s door cracked, it might cast a spark, ignite the accelerant that he’d let puddle on the floor, drip on the blanket, seep into the dry, old wooden furniture.
Of course that would set the cabin instantly ablaze, trapping Zach within its inferno.
He probably never even woke up. He’d been found in the melted husk of his sleeping bag, after all.
And the poor father, the poor girl, to lose the son and brother so soon after the wife and mother.
Poor Bram, who’d lost so much family to addiction and fire.
Poor, pitiable Bram, the true victim, the true survivor, as always.
His father jerked his chin in the hut’s direction. “Time to go, kid.”
Zach shook his head.
Bram hadn’t left him for dead in the cabin. He’d only made sure Zach was trapped, neutralized, because Bram knew from experience that to get away with murder he needed Zach alive as the cabin burned.
“That’s not a request,” Bram ordered. “Let’s go.”
“It was you.”
“What?”
“Was it the same with them? The fire?” Zach gestured limply toward his father’s backpack.