In the Blood (39 page)

We’re not,
I told her.
Nothing about our life will be normal. Ever. If you wanted normal, you picked the wrong guy.

She left in anger, which she had promised before that she would never do again. But we break our promises, don’t we? All the time.

I head downstairs, hop into my new hybrid, and putt-putt out of town. I wanted a muscle car, one of those new Chargers, to connect with my newfound
maleness
. But I guess, ultimately, I’m too crunchy, too concerned about the planet. Beck and I shopped for a hybrid and wound up with a Prius, which looks more like an orthopedic shoe than a car. But, fine.
See,
I told her as I signed the paperwork.
This is normal. We’re buying a car.

Fuck off,
she said. But she smiled. Who knew that beneath all the tats and piercings and bad attitudes, my girl just wanted the things all girls are supposed to want. She wants to be loved, to be safe, to have a home and a car. And she wants those things with me. I can give her some of it.

I cross the town limits and wind through the outlying suburban developments. Eventually, those give way to farmland. Then I’m heading through a thick, wooded region. And the trees around me are starting their show of gold, orange, red, and brown.

I wish I could say that the sight of it fills me with joy, a sense of peace or renewal. But that’s not how I feel. Let’s face it, not that much has changed. I am still in therapy, still need medication to control my various problems. Beck and I . . . well, our relationship is exactly what it has always been. It’s intensely loving, but we still have the same degree of heat, the same arguments that escalate instead of wind down. My coldness sometimes makes her cry.

I think of her parents’ relationship, stormy, on-again, off-again.
I think of my parents, often resorting to violence. How will Beck and I learn to love each other differently? We both know we have to try, and we
are
trying. But it’s not all hot sex and hybrids.

At least I’m whole, fully realized, as Dr. Cooper is quick to remind me. I’m not hiding. I’m not lying. And I have made my home in The Hollows. I feel like it has closed around me, ensconced and protected me. I feel like I can live a real life here. Untethered from the past, I can walk into the future.

I approach the grounds of the juvenile facility that houses Luke. It tries hard not to look like what it is. The landscaping is lovely. The gates manage to seem ornately decorative, even though I know them to be electrified—like a mansion (for maniacs) or a country club (for nutcases). And the man who greets me at the gate is armed. He knows me, this aging guard with his slick gray hair and formidable paunch. He waves me in, and I feel a familiar lurch in my stomach. I hate this place. And I have grown to hate my brother.

My father is ill. He has liver cancer and very little time to live. I have taken the trip to Florida to see him after he was released from prison and admitted to a hospital not far from where he spent the last seven years. The visit, without my going into too many details, was awkward. He apologized for all of his mistakes.

I’m sorry, son. I can’t count the ways I failed you and your mother.

Dr. Cooper urges a journey toward forgiveness. It’s a concept that I don’t really understand. What does it mean to forgive someone?
It only means that you release the anger, the hatred. It doesn’t mean that you’re saying it’s all right now, or that you’ve forgotten the wrong. It just means that you’ve drained the boil. When you touch it, it doesn’t hurt as much. That’s all.

But I am not angry. I do not hate my father. I miss my mother,
every day. I wish everything about our life together had been different. But I do not blame him, or her, or even Rachel. Really, I blame myself. Maybe if I had been a different kind of child, they would have had a different kind of life. Dr. Cooper says we need to work on my thinking.

It’s all right
,
Dad,
I told him.
I failed her, too.

He tried to argue with me, but he was just too physically weak. We made peace, I think. We are bound by blood, but we are strangers of circumstance. We are so far apart that we cannot come together now. If I could feel more, I imagine I’d feel deeply sad about that.

I had one request for him, and he was happy to comply. A couple of weeks later, the paperwork came in the mail from Sky. It has been signed by all parties.

They always have Luke and me meet in this comfortable, sunny room. They call it “The Morning Room.” There’s a fireplace and some plush couches. Fresh flowers in plastic vases are placed artfully on end tables, books are arranged carefully on shelves. It is a soft and comforting place, pretty even. Except for the armed guard that sits just outside the door.

Today, Luke is sitting by the window when I arrive. His twelfth birthday has just passed, and it’s interesting how he seems to change every time I visit. He is growing up, getting bigger. It fills me with dread.

Usually, we just sit. I talk about innocuous things—the weather, events in The Hollows. I avoid anything loaded. I don’t talk about our father, or his mother. I don’t talk about Beck. I talk about television shows, movies, and video games. He stares blankly out the window. He hasn’t uttered a word since the night he was admitted.

But today, there’s an electricity in the air, something palpable that I can feel. When the door closes behind me, the hair on my arms stands on end, and someone walks over my grave.

I take my usual seat as far away from Luke as the room will allow.

“Hey, Luke,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

How can you live with it? Sitting there and talking to him after what he did to you? To me?
Beck asked me this morning, tears in her eyes.

“It’s still pretty warm out,” I go on. “But a cold front is moving in.”

He’s a monster.

“Did you hear the news?” he says.

I practically jump out of my skin. I haven’t heard his voice in over a year. It sounds strange, a crackly high and low to it. I try not to show my surprise.

“What news?”

“The nutty professor bit it.” He is still looking out the window.

“Where did you hear that?”

“I know people,” he says. “People tell me things. I think you know what I mean.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” I say. But I do. I know exactly what he means. He means that he is manipulating the staff.

“And it sounds like dear old Dad’s not far behind.” He has a young boy’s voice, but an old man’s cadence and phrasing. Very unsettling.

“He’s not well, no,” I say.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” he says. “You can take the man out of death row . . .” He lets his voice trail off.

“I have a friend here,” he says when I remain silent. “A nurse. She’s a sad person. She lost a son about my age a couple years back. I don’t think she’s over it.”

What is he trying to tell me? I feel myself go very still. The air in the room grows thick and overwarm. Again, I think silence might be the best answer.

Eventually, he turns to look at me. His eyes are glassy, probably from the medications they are giving him. I know the list, since I consult with his doctor every week. I disagree with his being medicated. There is no medication for someone like Luke. He is a psychopath, a ruthless, calculating machine with no empathy or feeling for other people. Whatever window might have existed to teach him something that approached empathy, as Dr. Chang insists is possible, has closed. Luke is a tiger cub in a cage. He will only grow and become a stronger, more efficient predator. He will never be anything other than what he is. He can only be managed.

He shifts in his seat, keeps his eyes on me as if waiting for me to speak. He wants me to ask the questions he knows I have. But I don’t say anything. I want him to start, know he will.

Then, “You know they lied to me? My mother and Hewes—they tried to trick me. But I knew right away who you were.”

“How?”

He wrinkles his nose at me. “I
recognized
you. Ever heard of Google?”

I think of the searches I have seen on his computer. There are no secrets anymore, not really—not even from an eleven-year-old.

“And I made sure he knew I figured it out during our
private sessions.
”

“Your private sessions?” The thought of that is creepy on so many different levels. I can just imagine the two of them, each of them running a separate agenda, manipulating and using each other. Who was the predator and who was the prey?

“Once I figured it out, he told me that he’d been talking to our father, that he wanted to help us reunite as brothers. But I knew he was in love with you—which is sick. And weird. I mean
who
could love you?”

I smile a little at that. He can’t hurt me but he still wants to.

“So you talked about me? In your private sessions?”

Luke shifts again, as if physically uncomfortable. He is growing more agitated, more restless.

“He never cared about me at all,” he says. “He never wanted to help me get better.”

He seems upset about it, which takes me aback. Does Luke know that there is something wrong with him? Has he hoped to get better? I keep reminding myself that he is just a child. I had been no less ill at his age. We aren’t the same, of course. I’m not a sociopath. I have problems, but I can feel, love, have empathy. I don’t see others as pieces in a game I play. That’s why therapy and guidance and medication help me. Can he be helped? I don’t know.

I still keep silent. There is so much I want to know, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of asking.

“I followed you; I was always following you. Do you know that?”

I shrug. I’d guessed as much, thinking back on the dirt on his tires. The form I saw in the woods that night at the graveyard.

“And
that
night I saw you go into the woods; I could tell you were upset and then that girl followed you. I called Hewes on my mom’s cell phone, which I’d lifted, and we went together. We saw you. We saw you with her. It was
gross.
”

“Why did you follow?”

“Why not? It was an opportunity. He wanted to know you.
I wanted to hurt you. We both got what we wanted. Only, he didn’t get what he expected. And he went a little crazy after that. I wanted to kill her. He wanted to wait until the anniversary of the night your mother died. Which I had to admit was pretty good.”

The crazy leading the crazy. Wow. It is amazing any of us has survived. But because I’m not
as
crazy I still have to ask.

“So what was it all about?” I ask finally. “What was the point?”

It is part of the reason I keep coming here week after week, not to take care of him, or to let him know he isn’t alone. I know one day he is going to have to crack and tell me all the things he must be dying to tell me. The corners of his mouth turn up in an ugly facsimile of a smile.

“Langdon, the scavenger hunt, kidnapping Beck,” I say, just for clarification.

“The point?” he says. He seems annoyed. “I thought you knew.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The point was to win.” His lips are dry, chapped white. His skin has an unhealthy gray pallor. But he undeniably looks like me, except he will be much bigger than I am when he finishes growing.

“It was a game,” I say, just to clarify.

“You know it was,” he says. “You agreed to play. You
wanted
to play.”

I almost laugh. “And who won?”

“I did, of course.”

I sweep my arm around the room. “How do you figure?”

“I exposed your secrets,” he says. “That was the first thing. You were a liar and a poser and I wanted the whole world to know it.”

He looks at me, waiting for a reaction like any little boy. I don’t give him one. “P.S.,” he adds. “I think you looked better as a girl.”

I offer him a wan smile, which he doesn’t seem to like. He shifts uncomfortably and leans forward in his seat.

“Langdon is dead,” he goes on. “He’ll never be able to tell anyone how I used and manipulated him, teased him into helping me. Not that anyone would have believed him. No one ever believes a pedophile.”

“Was he that?”

“He was if I say he was,” Luke snaps. He is getting wobbly, not enjoying my flat affect. Rachel was emotional; she’d admitted as much. She responded to Luke, gave him a lot of energy when he acted out. He liked that, because it fueled him. But he will get nothing from me.

Maybe Langdon had been a pedophile. He was obsessed with me, that was clear. I was a girlish boy, or a boyish man—in either case, pretty much a freak. So maybe that’s what he liked—not men, not women exactly. Or maybe he
was
trying to help me at first. But he was unstable, and Luke pushed him over the edge. Now that Langdon was dead, there was no way to know. Okay, Luke, you won that one.

“He got me the key to the caretaker’s building, by the way,” he says. “The Hollows Historical Society has an office on your campus. It was nothing for him to take the key.”

He is true to his word: I’ll give him that. He’d promised to tell me everything when the game was done.

“My mother is in prison,” he says, ticking off another win. “So I’m out from under her.”

Here, I smile a little. I can’t help it.

“And soon our father will be dead.”

“So?”

“So, I’ll be an orphan more or less,” he says. “A filthy-rich orphan.
And our good friend Sky Lawrence will make all the arrangements for me to be well cared for. Once I’m well, of course. And I have been feeling better.”

Of course, Rachel and Luke knew Sky. He managed my father’s money and Luke was one of the beneficiaries of his will.

“So all of this was about the money?” I say, playing dumb.

“No,
stupid,
” he says. His voice goes up an octave. “This was about me being able to do whatever I want. Kids never
ever
get to do what they want. I told you that already. Weren’t you listening to me? I’m free. I’m rich. I get to do anything I want to do from now on.” He is actually gritting his teeth, sticking his jaw out at me. It isn’t pretty.