Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

by Tucholke, April Genevieve

  That eagerness scared me. Sitting there in the booth next to River, fear began to claw and claw at me like water claws at a drowning man, until my throat constricted and I half choked. Something was going to happen. Sunshine and Luke were busy flirting, and not paying attention. River’s hand gripped mine underneath the table, but his skin felt cold and my fingers went limp inside his. I watched Jack’s father, swaying in the square. I watched as he put a hand into his pocket. I watched as he pulled out something silver, something that sparkled in the fading sun.

  I watched as he lifted it to his neck.

  I watched as he slashed it across his throat.

  Nothing happened. One second. Two seconds. Three.

  And then the blood poured.

  It gushed down the front of his yellow shirt, and his shirt went slick, and crimson.

  Jack’s pa turned white, stark white, against the dark red of his shirt. He looked at the silver thing in his hand as if seeing it for the first time. He threw it from him. It hit the sidewalk and skidded a few feet.

  The mom with the toddlers screamed. The two dark-haired girls screamed. Jack’s father fell down to his knees. One second. Two. And then tipped over on his side, and didn’t move.

  Sunshine jumped up at the screaming and looked out the windows. Her mouth opened, and a weak little wail dribbled out of her lips. Luke sprang to his feet. He followed her gaze. His hands went to the table and gripped it tight.

  A man killed himself in front of me. In front of the town. And River made him do it. I knew it. I knew it like I knew I was near the sea by the taste of salt in the air. I knew it like I knew the sound of Luke’s steps as he walked around the Citizen.

  I knew it like I knew the feel of River’s arms around me, when he was fast asleep.

  Sunshine kept wailing her weak, drooling wails, and I was shaking all over, my fingers, my legs, my head . . .

  River’s face was blank. He didn’t look guilty. Or ashamed. He didn’t look like anything. His hand still squeezed mine underneath the table. I shook it off. I pushed myself out of the booth and ran out of the restaurant.

  I stopped running when I reached the screaming woman with the toddlers. She was quiet now, staring and silent, her hands covering the eyes of the two twin boys so they couldn’t see what lay at her feet.

  I looked at the gaping slit in the man’s throat, and the front of his shirt, covered with blood, at the ground beneath him, also covered in blood. The grass was black with it.

  Something caught my eye off to the left.

  A razor.

  Sunshine was beside me now. She let out another weak scream. A crowd was forming around the body. The two girls. The popcorn man. The cowboy kid. Luke. Graziella. Gianni.

  I took one more look at the body on the ground. And then went back into the restaurant.

  River still sat in the booth. He saw me, and smiled, like it was nothing. Like it was all nothing.

  I left. I took the path through the woods toward home. But when I got halfway, I turned around and went back.

  I walked through town, past my high school.

  I found Jack in his plain, bare kitchen, in the dark, staring into space like he was waiting for something bad to happen. Which it had.

  “I decided to run away once, after my dad had been drunk for a whole week straight,” he said, after I entered without knocking. He was sitting on a rickety chair by a cheap wooden table. I wondered if the lights were off because he liked it that way, or because the electricity bill hadn’t been paid. I was familiar with both.

  “I tried to fake my death first, like Huckleberry Finn,” Jack went on. “With the pig’s blood. I even went into the butcher’s, and asked about getting some. But the guy started to ask a lot of questions, so I left.”

  I glanced around the kitchen. Its sad walls were covered in faded wallpaper, and you could taste the rotting optimism of the sweet pink-flowered print, now coming off in strips. There were empty bottles of liquor in the sink, and the smell of smoke, and dust, and unchanged garbage. And I compared it to the Citizen’s kitchen, with its high ceiling and big windows and yellow couch and good food in the fridge for once.

  “You want to get out of here?” I asked.

  Jack nodded. He got up and walked down the hallway that led off the kitchen, and returned a few minutes later with a backpack. He followed me out of the house.

  We avoided the main square, the sound of an ambulance siren echoing in our ears, and walked to Citizen Kane in silence.

  I supposed he would find out soon enough, about his pa. No doubt he’d already guessed. Flashes of Daniel Leap’s white face and blood-drenched shirt kept hitting my brain like a fist. I didn’t know much about kids. Especially smart kids who noticed everything and looked at me with big smart blue eyes under reddish brown hair. The tips of my fingers were still shaking and my heartbeat was hard and irregular and off, like all my shaking had shook my heart out of position and it couldn’t find its way back.

  So I took Jack into Citizen Kane’s kitchen. He sat down on the yellow couch and watched me while I grated fresh ginger into two glasses of homemade lemonade. Freddie used to do the same thing whenever I was unhappy.

  Jack and I sat on the yellow kitchen couch, in the weak evening sun, and sipped the spicy, sweet, tangy stuff, and felt better. Or I did, at least. And whether it was the ginger or the memory of Freddie, I didn’t know. But my fear dissolved a little. Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it did.

  Afterward, I brought Jack to one of the guest bedrooms on the second floor. It was dusty, but the sheets were clean . . . or had been once, when they were put on the bed, which I hoped wasn’t that long ago. It was kind of a manly room, with olive-green wallpaper and dark curtains and carpet and a black brick fireplace.

  Jack took a look around. He didn’t say anything. But I think he liked it.

  He put his backpack down on the bed and then leaned his thin body against the carved fancy-pants bedpost. “Was it Pa?” he asked, looking straight at me, thin lips pressed hard together.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Is he dead?”

  I stared back into his dark blue eyes. “Yes.”

  I went over to the old lamp by the bed and turned on the light. It was thick and yellow, and filled the guestroom with a fuzzy sort of warmth. I could see the brown freckles on Jack’s nose and cheeks now. And his dry eyes. I cleaned the dust off the nightstand with my palm.

  “Did River do it?”

  My heart stopped. And then started again. “What do you mean, Jack?”

  “Did he use the glow and make Pa kill himself?”

  I swallowed, and took a breath. River had told him about the glow? “No. Yes. Mostly yes, I think.”

  Jack didn’t say anything for a few minutes, just gazed at the fireplace, though it didn’t have a fire in it.

  I looked at the ceiling. Citizen Kane had high ceilings in all its rooms, and it usually gave the house a sense of air and space. But tonight the ceiling didn’t feel nearly high enough. This bedroom, and its old satin bedspread, and big wood bed, and six shrouded windows, was stifling.

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” I said finally. “I’m going to make River leave the guesthouse. I’ll make him go far away. I will.”

  Even as I said it, I knew it was a lie.

  I wouldn’t do anything of the sort.

  “River was just looking out for me,” he answered.

  “It doesn’t justify what he did,” I said, kind of sharp. But then I put my hand on his thin shoulder. “What did he tell you, about his . . . about what he can do? What did he tell you about the glow?”

  Jack shrugged, his hair shaking around his ears as he did so. “Not much, just that he could do things, like make people see monsters. I don’t think it’s the whole story, though.” Jack looked me direct in the eyes. “River is a liar.”

 
; “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  Jack started to unpack his bag. He’d taken a lot of things, probably because he hoped to never go back. And I hoped that too. I helped him put away his stuff, and fetched him toothpaste and whatnot. When he got to the bottom of his bag, he reached in and pulled out a small, square painting, maybe nine inches tall.

  “It was my grandpa’s,” he said as he leaned it against the wall above the nightstand. “My dad sold the rest of his paintings off, because he wanted to be drunk all day instead of working. But I saved this one.”

  The painting was done in oils, and it was a self-portrait. The painter had painted himself, in front of a canvas, brush raised, while a blond-haired woman lounged on a couch off to his right.

  The painter looked like somebody. Somebody familiar. Maybe Daniel Leap, without the drunk in him.

  Or maybe not.

  And the lounging woman looked exactly like Freddie.

  I tucked Jack in, went down to the kitchen, and waited for River.

  CHAPTER 18

  LUKE CAME HOME first.

  “Daniel Leap,” he said, and threw himself down on the couch beside me. Dust motes flew up and swirled around in the last bits of the day’s sunlight coming through the kitchen window. “Damn. And you saw the whole gory thing, out the damn pizzeria window. How are you doing, sis?”

  I just shook my head. Luke didn’t know the half of it.

  Luke sighed. “He’s been our town drunk for as long as I can remember. God, I hated the way he would scream at us . . . but still. He was almost an Echo landmark.” Luke slouched down into the couch and crossed his arms. “Wonder what finally pushed him over the edge?”

  “He was Jack’s pa,” I whispered. “Daniel Leap. That was his father. River and I met him this morning.”

  Luke rose out of his slouch. “Fuck.”

  “Exactly.” I paused. “I brought Jack home with me. What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t just leave him in his house all alone, waiting for a government official to show up and toss him in some godforsaken facility. So I put him in the green guestroom.”

  Luke leaned over me suddenly, and gave me a hug. I didn’t know what to do at first. But eventually my arms floated up on their own and hugged him back.

  “Our father’s an ass,” he said, letting me go, “who ran off to Europe and never calls or even sends postcards. But at least he didn’t kill himself in the town square.” Luke let out another little sigh, and his shoulders slumped forward.

  I gave my brother a sad kind of smile.

  He smiled the same sad smile back, and it was so different from his usual arrogant grin that he barely seemed the same person.

  Luke got up, went to the fridge, pulled out the iced tea, and poured both of us a glass. Then he sat back down on the couch. “What’s going on with the world lately? Devils, kids in cemeteries, witch burnings, drunk men suiciding themselves in the town square. Are we living in the end- times, sis? Is the Apocalypse nigh?”

  Luke took a long drink of tea and shook his head. “Like I said last night, it all started when River got here. Which could be a coincidence, like most things in life. But what are the odds that a man kills himself in the center of town, and you have a front-row seat when he does it, and the suicider’s kid was hanging out with you in the attic the day before? God. I’m not going to get the image of his bloody shirt out of my head, not for years.”

  I shivered. The shiveriest sort of shiver, the kind that starts in your heart and spreads down your legs, all the way into your toes.

  What was making me shiver, though, wasn’t the image of Daniel Leap’s bloody shirt, or the gaping slit in his throat. It was River, looking eager as Daniel raised the razor to his neck.

  The last of the light slipped from the window. A blue twilight settled over the kitchen.

  “Jack has a painting,” I said. “I saw it when he unpacked. It’s of Freddie. He said it was his grandfather’s.”

  Luke’s eyebrows shot up.

  I nodded. “Yeah.”

  He got up from the couch and stretched. “Well, add that mystery to the growing list. Look, I’m going to bed. Jack will probably be up early. And since it looks like he’s moved in, we’ll need to start taking caring of him.”

  The right way, his face said, as in, not like our parents.

  Luke walked out the kitchen door, and a minute later I heard his feet moving on the second floor above. He was probably going to check on Jack.

  I sat in the empty kitchen and drank my tea. It was dark now. Most of the room was in shadow. The windows were wide open, and suddenly I had the feeling that someone was watching me, looking in from outside, hidden by the darkness—

  The front door banged open. I heard footsteps cross the foyer, go past the marble staircase, through the formal dining room we never used, and stop at the doorway to the kitchen.

  I clanked the ice cubes at the bottom of my glass and looked up.

  River.

  I sat there and looked at him, and he looked at me. And I got an itch, looking at him, a burning itch, to shove him out the front door of Citizen Kane, into the dirt, and kick him in the face until he lost the lazy look in his eyes.

  Maybe River was right, about me and the toe-curling violence.

  “Remember the time we napped on this couch, Violet?” He sat down next to me.

  “I do, actually. It was Monday.” I turned and stared at the fat, mean butcher knife that was sitting on the kitchen table. Luke sliced bread with it, though I’d told him more than once to use the serrated bread knife instead. I thought about picking up that knife, about how it would feel in my hand as I shoved it into the soft part between River’s ribs. I let my mind linger on that feeling for a moment, let the toe-curling part of me sing out.

  “Monday? Monday was a lifetime ago.”

  I ignored him. “So. Tell me how you did it. And try not to lie, liar.”

  River stopped smiling, but his face was calm. “I made him think the razor was a silver pen. And then I made him draw a line across his throat with it.” River gave a sort of low, quiet laugh.

  Hearing River admit what he did, actually say it out loud and make it real and true, made my heart seize up tight, like someone was digging their fingernails into it.

  He had lied about not planning to use the glow again. Straight to my face.

  I hated him.

  Part of me hated him.

  The other part . . . That part didn’t really care.

  Which scared the hell out of me.

  River grabbed my hand and held it to his chest. I yanked it away, and he grabbed it back . . . and a heartbeat later my fury disappeared, fast, like cold water down the throat on a scorching hot day.

  “Just because you didn’t hold the weapon doesn’t mean it wasn’t murder, River.”

  He continued to hold my hand. I tried to pull it away, but it was halfhearted and he just held me tighter.

  I reached down inside myself. I tried to muster my previous anger. But there was nothing there. River’s hand was hot on mine and it felt good and I had nothing left.

  “Don’t worry, Vi. I’m not in danger. That’s the beauty of being able to do something no one else can. No one would believe it. There’s no way for me to get caught.”

  “Damn it, that’s not what I meant.” I threw his hand off of mine, and dragged myself into a standing position so I was hovering over him. “This isn’t about you getting caught. This is about you committing murder. Murder. Don’t you think there was anything wrong with what you did? At all? Daniel was a drunk, and he shouted insults at me, and he wasn’t taking care of his kid, but he was also pathetic, and lost, and sad. You don’t murder people like that, River. You don’t murder anyone. You show them compassion, for God’s sake.”

  Go ahead, Vi. Get mad. He deserves it. Even seems to want it. That lazy look .
. . it’s a challenge, rise to it . . .

  River shrugged. “Who has the time? Murder is pretty ambiguous, morally speaking. Be a little more philosophical, Vi. What kind of person would I be if I let Daniel Leap go on living? The way he talked to you, that day in the square—that was just wrong. And Jack’s life with him was miserable. You could argue that Daniel wanted to die. Why else would he get drunk so often? And here I could help him get what he wanted, as easy as a thought. Some people don’t deserve to live. And, to go a step further, some people need to die. Why was I born with this gift if not to make the world a better place? Sure, I do the monster stuff, for fun, and because I like to feel the glow in me. But Jack’s father—that wasn’t fun. I did that for Jack. And for you. Yes, it was a bit messy, and far from perfect. But hey, you’re both better off.” He put his hand to his mouth. And yawned. This conversation was boring him. “You can’t deny it, Vi.”

  I stood there, silent. “Yes. I can,” I said, at last. But River was . . . River was starting to make sense. At least, what he said sounded logical. Some part of me, some sharp, noticing part, didn’t buy it. Not entirely. Something about it felt . . . wrong.

  Didn’t it?

  River reached forward, put his hands on my waist, and pulled me to him. “I have no regrets. The only thing I wish is that it wasn’t getting more and more difficult to predict the results of my glow. I was really good at it, even just a few months ago. But lately, I can’t seem to stop using it, and then when I do, it doesn’t go how I plan.”

  “Wait . . . what? You can’t predict the results? What the hell does that mean?” I squirmed in River’s grasp, but my heart wasn’t in it and he ignored me.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. I just seem to be losing a little bit of my control. Kind of surprising, is all. It seems to have taken on a mind of its own, almost as if it’s controlling me, rather than the other way around. I’m sure it’s not a big deal, though.”

  I stopped squirming. I was starting to feel better. River was right. Some people did deserve to die. An uncontrollable glow wasn’t a big deal.