Chapter 39
“Stop!”
Zach followed his tracks back toward the sign, focused on the possible refuge of the cliffs beyond. He would try to climb there, to pop out of his skis and scramble away from his father, who might not expect the steepness, who might fall or at least be too wary to pursue him along those cliffs.
His ribs burned. The cold, high-altitude air charred his throat.
“Goddamn it, stop!”
The shadow that was his father traveled at an angle across the snowy meadow, clearly aiming to intercept Zach as he moved along the tree line, but unlike Zach, Bram was slowed by having to break trail.
Zach had been so stupid. He’d done the opposite of what prey should do, poking and prodding instead of soothing and backing slowly away.
He reached the sign and glanced over his shoulder. Bram had gained ground but was still a little less than twenty feet from him, crossing the clearing.
Zach’s mouth went dry and his muscles rigid as a dark potential licked at his brain. He froze where he stood and turned toward his father.
At seeing his son pause his flight and face him, Bram slowed, top lip hitching in a way that made Zach imagine the sibilant hiss of a satisfied exhale. The vivid, bestial monsters that had stalked Zach’s imagination deflated, instantly tame in contrast.
Zach forced away the acrid convergence of terror and pain that filled him and tried to focus, tried to make himself a creature that was something worse than animal now, too.
He’d mimic the mother anglerfish, holding out his stillness, his body, as a glowing lure, ruthless because like his father he, too, had made a decision.
Bram had worked so hard, weaving his webs of insurance, trusts, wills.
Bram had waited so patiently for each of his opportunities, fostering weaknesses, addictions, justifications, just-right circumstances.
Why was his son so selfish, so uncompliant?
Bram deserved this. He was entitled. Zach was his son, his.
And now Bram was so close that as he moved toward the promise of Zach’s annihilation, his eyes seemed to take in nothing at all but the boy.
The air felt brittle around Zach as his father grew nearer. Everything would change. Was this who Zach really was? It would be easy to prevent it all. To call out. To warn.
His father was less than ten feet from him now across the clearing. If Zach was going to stop it, this would be his last chance.
“She ruined you,” his father seethed to himself, to Zach, to an invisible judge and jury. “She ruined you both.”
Bonnie. Bonnie without him. Bonnie, whose body, Zach knew now, with a sureness that was bone-deep and undeniable, his father would in time exchange, sacrifice, for money, prestige, success.
Zach stayed quiet, resolved to let it happen.
But no, it wouldn’t simply “happen.” That was the kind of lie Bram told himself, and Zach refused to.
His silence was action. Zach nodded to himself, and accepted a measure of sin to preserve Bonnie.
To save himself. To avenge everyone his father had hurt.
His decision to stay quiet brought a peace tinged with rancid satisfaction that spread, merged with his blood, his skin.
“That’s right,” his father hummed, growing ever closer, and his voice slowing, everything slowing. “Stay there.”
If it worked, Bonnie would be safe. If it didn’t? Well, Zach had still done all he could do. He’d done all he could think of.
Bram yelped. Floundered. A leg, ski still attached, had been sucked into the snow, leaving Bram sitting stunned on the powder, his other leg bent against his chest, and his arms flung wide.
The mouth of the mine was even less visible than it had been the evening before, now almost completely disguised by snowdrifts. Zach stared, his mind gone utterly blank, every bit of him waiting.
He hadn’t expected a halfway result. Had been ready for his father to simply vanish.
Bram looked down at his body, at the snow, at the hole where his leg and ski were caught; the small, dark mouth of the mine’s opening.
He leaned away from where his leg was trapped in an attempt to free it.
But this motion only resulted in him jolting down slightly, eyes wide with panicked incomprehension.
“What is it?” Bram’s voice came out broken, choked. “What is this?”
“An old mine,” Zach said.
Confusion tripped across his father’s face. “In the middle of a field? No. Mines—they’re in rock, they’re in—”
Bram interrupted himself with a gasp, hands bracing against the snow as though something had taken hold of his foot. Zach pictured the miner’s ghost wrapping itself around his father’s ankle, saw the filminess of the lost soul lightly, longingly, pulling at it.
“You think you know things. But you don’t. It’s a mine shaft. Mommy and I found it.”
“Don’t just stand there, help me!” Bram commanded. Zach moved toward him, a trained response, his body’s obedience and the way his mind was still leashed to Bram’s orders a surprise.
He stopped and slid back a few paces on his skis, shaking his head. “I can’t. It’s too dangerous.”
“There’s got to be something, there’s—”
“No,” Zach said, the word a thrill, evidence of new strength. “If I go near you, we’ll both fall.”
His father’s face snapped up. “The blanket! Get that blanket, I can hold on to one end, push while you pull. Or the sleeping bag, do you have it? Or—pass me your skis. I can brace myself on your skis. Distribute my weight. Pull myself out. Now, kid! Take off your skis, we have to—”
A shrill, desperate laugh from Zach.
“What’s wrong with you? Help me!”
The laugh transformed into a retching; a gasping.
Because he had been right. Bram’s words extinguished the last flicker of doubt Zach hadn’t realized he’d still been sheltering.
“It was you,” he said. “It was. In the cabin. You tied me up. Hurt me. Tried to burn it down and kill me.”
“This isn’t funny. This is—this could be bad, this could be—”
“You just admitted it.”
“What? No, I’d never—”
“You said ‘blanket.’ To get the blanket. You know about the cabin. You tried to light the blanket on fire. It was you.”
Bram stilled, his features seeming to shrink as he tried to recall his words. As his understanding of his confession, his vulnerability, coalesced, the tension in his face fell away. He looked melted, absent, staring blankly out at no one and nothing.
After finding his mother, after trying and failing to extract her body from the cold bathwater that morning, Zach had sat on the bathroom’s tile floor, pajama bottoms soggy from the water that had sloshed over the tub’s edge as he’d pulled at her, and had seen his reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door.
He’d looked just like his father did now. A person who for the first time truly saw that some things were irrevocable, beyond his control, watching the world uncouple even as you tried to spool time backward to undo mistakes.
“You killed Mommy.”
Bram stared up at him.
“Your other wife. You gave us sleeping pills in the hut without us knowing. You gave her pills. And Abraham Junior. You burned him up. For money! I know you did. You knew he wouldn’t be able to get out on his own. You don’t care about anyone but you.”
Bram shook himself, a dog’s full-body tremble. His face warped with indignation.
“No,” Bram spat, “no. None of that was my fault.”
“You never said his name. Abraham Junior. Why not?”
“It’s my name. He wasn’t—” Bram cut himself off, as if seeing that whatever he was about to say wouldn’t encourage Zach to help him. “You have to get me out of here! If you don’t, you’re responsible, you can’t live with that, not helping—”
“Was he not good enough? To keep your name?”
Bram said nothing, arms scrabbling, trying to find purchase in the snow.
“You don’t say my name, either. Does that make it easier? To do all this? For money. For nothing. And what you did to Mommy. She knew you were a liar.”
“You’re a child. You don’t understand.”
A sob welled up in Zach and came out in a wobbling, keening scream. “Just admit it!”
“Help me! Stop pretending to be so high and mighty when you aren’t even helping me, when you’re just standing there, letting your own father—” Bram blanched. “I can feel it, my leg, it’s swinging, there’s nothing down—how deep is it? Do you know how deep it is?”
“It was all Serena’s money, and you lost it. You needed more. And you got more when Mommy died.”
Bram flung his arms out wide to distribute his weight.
“I didn’t get anything but what I was owed.
” The words seemed to prompt a thought in Bram, and he stilled.
“If that’s—is that what you’re trying to do?
I can—I can understand that. We can make a deal, okay?
If you help me, I won’t be angry.” Bram’s eyes narrowed, examining Zach as if the boy hadn’t been there before, not really, and was only now coming into focus.
“If that’s it, if that’s what you’re thinking?
Maybe—maybe we’re alike. And I’ll find another way. For us to succeed.”
All Zach had ever wanted, his father’s admiration, his acknowledgment that Zach was an entirely separate person of his own, was written across Bram’s face as he waited for his son’s answer.
“There’s no other way,” Zach said, “except Bonnie.”
Bram’s surprise at the breadth of what Zach knew flitted briefly across him. But then he regained himself, eyes a cold smolder. “Yes. Now help me.”
Zach looked down at the ever-ravenous, unfillable emptiness that was his father.
“I’d never.”
Bram’s handsome face twisted with spite. “You think you’re so much better than me? You’re a—a—parasite, feeding off what I provide. You’re evil, tricking your own father into get—getting—stuck here, wanting me to what? Die?” A harsh laugh. “You’re not better than me. Don’t you know who I am?”
As if this influx of righteousness had injected him with new energy, Bram strained, all his strength channeled into his arms, his hands, his one free leg.
Zach, immobilized by his awe at the sheer will of it, the desperate strength on display, watched as his father called on every reserve of brute force in his enormous frame to push and thrash.
Bram rose from the snow, huge and dark and swift as the awful shadow that had unfurled behind him in the meadow.
He fell to the side, kicked his legs and skis from the mine’s opening, and pushed himself backward and away to safety.
Briefly, he took stock of his condition, of the way the mine gaped wider now that he had somehow forced it to disgorge him.
Then he stood, chest rising and falling as he inhaled deep, relieved breaths.
A vicious, victorious grin spread over his face.