Chapter 38 #2
Bram glanced down at the red bottle then back at his son, his claylike, pale face juxtaposed jarringly against the shadow behind him.
“Get that light out of my eyes, kid.”
Zach turned off his headlamp, plunging them both into gray darkness, the sun beginning to lift the night’s velvet.
“That’s better,” Bram said. Then more quietly, almost to himself, “Isn’t it strange how you can see better without a light once the moon’s out, or like now, just before first light? It’s kind of beautiful.”
Zach blinked, not sure what to do with his father’s soft musings about moonlight and dawn. “That’s why you have the lighter fluid,” Zach said. “Because of before. Because you got away with it before.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
But Bram’s voice was thin and his tone unnerved in a way that made Zach’s body purge something noxious and parasitic, his dark speculations disgorging into words beyond his control.
“The articles—they said Serena and Abraham Junior had smoke in their lungs.” Zach couldn’t be sure given the semidarkness, but Bram seemed to flinch at the sound of the names.
“They’d inhaled smoke, so the police knew they were alive during the fire, that they hadn’t died before.
Been killed before. But Abraham Jr., he couldn’t get out of bed by himself.
And your wife. She had problems. She was unconscious, the articles said.
That’s how you did it. Made sure she was asleep, lit a fire with one of her cigarettes where you knew it would catch, and left the little boy behind.
So you could have all her money. Have whatever money you got for killing my brother.
That’s why you trapped me. But left me alive.
To get away with it again. To get money. ”
His father cocked his head to the side, voice gone thin. “You’re not supposed to be reading that kind of garbage, Zakky.”
This time his father using the nickname didn’t disassemble Zach, but returned him firmly to the present, grounded him so deep into himself that he understood the horrific vulnerability of his situation.
Because he might be right about all his father had done and planned to do, but he still had no way to fight him off.
At any moment Bram would shake away his surprise, his hesitation, and grab Zach, hurt him, steal him away from Bonnie for a thing as stupid as money, as insatiable as greed, as endless as Bram’s desire for control.
A furious ball of long-swallowed loathing tore open within Zach at the injustice of it all, and his voice was something else then, a spitting disdain in it as he said, “You don’t call me that! Only Mommy does.”
Bram scoffed. “ ‘Mommy.’ Can’t just call her ‘Mom,’ like a normal kid.
She made you such a baby.” The outline of Bram’s head gave a disapproving shake.
“I told her you wouldn’t be able to survive the real world the way she spoiled you, but she didn’t listen.
She had to make you into her little mama’s boy. ”
His father’s words made his mother’s absence so present that Zach found his balled fists wiping away cold tears and painful strings of bloodied snot.
Bram flung a hand in Zach’s direction. “Do you see yourself? You don’t even understand who she was! She’s not worth crying over.”
Zach felt his next words as a betrayal despite knowing they were no secret. “I knew her. And I knew about her drinking.”
“She didn’t just drink. She was an alcoholic. And a terrible mother. Always turning you two against me, lying, babying you, disrespectful. Always sneaking behind my back.”
“No! She was good. A good mom. She tried.”
“She didn’t try anything. Never tried to toughen you up. Never tried a program. She got what she deserved.”
How many times had Zach heard his father’s opinions on who deserved what? An endless list spooled out in memory, Bram worthy of respect, success, adoration, instant obedience while his family, the world, deserved only ridicule and correction.
The night she died his mother had threatened to leave Bram.
Had revealed that she’d discovered his business was a fraud.
Which Zach knew in his father’s eyes meant she hadn’t just fallen short of giving him what he thought he deserved, she’d threatened to destroy the things he thought were already his.
Zach reeled back in time to all he’d overheard that awful night after their last fight.
The sound of his father stalking down the hall.
The rumble of the garage door. But had Zach actually heard Bram’s car drive away?
He pictured his mother in a hot bath, trying to soothe herself after the explosion caused by the word “separation.” Saw her quickly growing drowsy and loose because she’d had too much to drink at dinner, and then more to drink as she lay in the tub.
He saw his father, only pretending to leave.
A shadow creeping up from the garage, spindling silently down the hall and past the room where Zach and Bonnie slept.
His father, turned inside-out to his full Underself, slipping into the bathroom where Grace lay with her body submerged, eyes closed, head resting against the edge of the tub.
When I see an opportunity, I take it, Bram had said to Pike.
It wouldn’t have required much effort, not when she was like that.
Not given his father’s strength. A little pressure.
A little patience. But there’d been that report.
The one that blamed alcohol and pills. The one ruling his mother’s death an accident.
The report Bram had sent Aunt Felicity, smug over the way it shattered her.
Didn’t a report mean tests, exams, a search for evidence of a struggle if his mother fought back, tried to escape?
But how hard could his mother have tried, really, when she was like that. How hard would she have even been capable of fighting, incapacitated in that way.
And Bram hadn’t hesitated to drug Russ, Dave, and Zach to serve his own ends. Serena, too, had died with some kind of sleeping medication in her bloodstream.
His mother might not even have run the bath herself. Zach pictured Bram carrying her in his arms, helpless, unconscious. Saw the smooth, merciless face of the Underself watch her slip under the water. Wait until it was satisfied.
The idea of it, that all this time his anger toward his mother had been unjustified, that she hadn’t left him and Bonnie willingly but had been violently forced from the world, pulled from existence by a vicious hand that was supposed to protect her…
Zach bit down on the inside of his cheek. “She was leaving you.”
Bram released an unamused laugh. “Always eavesdropping. Always sneaking around like your mother instead of coming at things straight, like a man.” He paused, as if waiting for Zach to deny it, before adding, “If you heard that, then you know that even with all I did for her, she wanted to destroy my life.” Zach saw the anger that radiated from the Underself at these words as red ripples in the semidarkness.
“Even though she could barely function, even though I was the one who gave her her whole life, she still tried to destroy me. A drunken mess. That’s what your mom was. ”
His father’s cruel assessments glanced off Zach, gone insignificant.
“She loved me. And Bonnie.”
The shadow-creature that was his father half laughed, half scoffed. “She ruined you.”
“You did it,” Zach said. “You took her from us.”
“You’re just a kid. A stupid kid lost in the woods.”
A hard, condensed bile of outrage rose in Zach’s throat. “I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“I’m not stupid. Or lost.”
Dawn was brighter now, the light losing its gray. The wind spun snow around Bram where he stood exposed in the clearing, and the furious tension of his face, the dark glower of his eyes, made Zach unconsciously lean back.
“What are you dancing around here, Zach?”
A deep swallow before Zach could answer, “You killed all of them.”
The accusation seemed to raise the dead, because in Zach’s eyes the swirling white of the snow became dead souls. Serena, the brother Zach had never known, his mother, even Pike, encircled Bram, made manifest, all sacrificed for the anointing his father thought their deaths would bring him.
“You make everything so difficult, you know that?”
Bram lurched into motion, flinging himself in his son’s direction.
Zach turned and fled.