“Can I help you?” Sarah asked.
“Can you help me? What the hell did your boy do to my son?”
“Excuse me?”
“My son. Shane Flannery. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.”
The woman looked like she was going to explode. “My son came home bleeding the other day and now I can’t make him go to school! I brought him over here to talk to you and now he won’t even get out of the car!”
She pointed, and Sarah saw him — fingers pressed white against the car window, eyes wide. The playground bully. He’d looked so large on the playground, and now he looked small and lost, like a ghost in an attic window.
“It took me all this time just to get him to tell me the name of the kid who did this to him! Now where is he? Where’s Kyle? Is that him?”
Sarah followed her pointing finger again, and there at the living room window was Kyle, staring intently out.
“Are you? Are you Kyle? Why are you staring at my boy? What did you ever do to him, what did he ever do to you?”
“I’m not staring at Shane,” Kyle said flatly.
“What are you staring at?”
“Your car.”
“What about my car?”
The corners of Kyle’s mouth twitched upward slightly. “It’s on fire,” he said.
She stared at him — so did Sarah — then both of them turned back to look at the car.
Black smoke curled up from under the hood — thin wisps of it at first, then thick black clouds.
Both women ran for the car. Shane was frantically struggling with the door handle, and Sarah could hear the dull thunk of the doors locking.
The Flannery woman yanked her keys out of her purse, dropping it and all its contents to the ground. She was screaming something. Sarah couldn’t even tell what. The woman was trying desperately to open the car and her son was pounding on the window to get out and —
Sarah looked helplessly back at the house.
Kyle was expressionless, but she thought she’d heard him laughing.
She ran back into the house, grabbed Kyle’s shoulders, pulled him away from the window and made him face her.
“Make it stop,” she said.
“What?” Kyle said, with wounded innocence.
“Kyle. Are you doing this?”
“What? Am I doing what? How could I — ”
“Make it stop. Now. That little boy could die. Is that what you want?”
“Yes!”
She raised a hand to slap him.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Or else what? What are you going to do to me, Kyle?”
He stared at her for a moment, then stared outside. His shoulders sagged. “All right,” he said. “It’s out.”
She ran to the door, just as the woman opened her car and pulled her screaming child out of it, pulled him into her embrace like a baby.
“Are you all right?” Sarah shouted, as the flames died away. “Is everything — ”
The woman stood and glared at her, the look on her face beyond words.
She looked at her car, and back at the house. She put her son, kicking and screaming, back into the car, got in, and tore off down the street.
Sarah just watched her go.
Kyle came and stood next to her.
“You could have killed that boy,” Sarah said. The words sounded thick and strange in her ears. “You could have killed both of them.”
Kyle shrugged. “Good.”
“No, Kyle, that’s not good — ”
“Yeah, mom, it is. Okay? It doesn’t matter. He — do you know how many times he’s beat me up? Do you know how many other kids he beats up? He’s — he's worthless, it doesn’t matter — ”
“Kyle, of course it matters — ”
“Why?” he exploded. “Why does it matter? Why are there people like that? You don’t know, you’re not there, you send us off to school alone and the teachers don’t know, they don’t care, they don’t do anything and kids like that shove me and hit me and make fun of me and it happens every day and I just want it to stop! I get so mad and I can feel it! I can feel it inside my head and it wants to come out and I just want to make them stop!”
“Okay, listen. Listen to me.” She grabbed his shoulder and crouched down, looked him in the eye. “What about me? Did you want to hurt me, a minute ago?”
“I don’t know — ”
“You did, didn’t you? What if I died? Then what?”
“I wasn’t going to — ”
“What if you did? What next? Who next? What if the police came and took you away, what then? Do you kill them?”
“I don’t know!”
“Where do you stop? What happens to you?”
“I don’t know! Stop it!” Joel screamed.
“Mom?” Josh was staring at both of them from the doorway. “What’s going on?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “Your dinner’s getting cold.”
She nodded, wiping tears out of her eyes. “Go finish your dinners.” She gave Kyle a little swat. “And as soon as you’re done, go up to your rooms and pack.”
“Pack?” Kyle said.
“We’re — going on a little vacation. For your birthday,” she said firmly. “It’s a surprise.”
“What about school?” Josh asked.
“We’re leaving tonight?” Kyle asked.
“You — can make up the homework later. Classes too.”
“But — ”
“Move.”
Sarah, driving again. Sarah, nearly asleep. The broken centerline of the road in her headlights just an endless pulsing ribbon. Her car would start to drift, and the thrum-thrum of her wheels hitting the bumps of the divider line would jerk her awake again.
“Mom, I’m tired,” Josh said. “We should stop soon.”
“I know, baby.” She reached over and patted his leg. He wasn’t complaining, just pointing out, without saying it, how tired she was, too.
Dangerous to drive like this. You could flip the car if you’re not careful. Then what? What will you trade away this time?
Stop it. “Stop it,” she said out loud.
“Mom?”
“It’s nothing, baby.” She glanced at him, and her eyes flicked to her rear-view mirror, looking at Kyle passed out asleep in the back. “We’ll stop soon, I promise. We just need to find a motel.”
Josh tried to smile.
She went back to watching the road.
At night, all roads are the same road, black and nameless and endless. This was the same road, this trip the same road trip, the one her friends were never coming back from —
No. Enough. Let it go.
She shook herself fiercely.
Somewhere, she could hear laughter. Somewhere on this same road.
Her eyes drifted half-closed, snapped open, closed again.
Almost time it’s almost time they’re almost twelve you’re almost there almost twelve it’s almost midnight and the road is humming a lullaby under your tires under you’re tired you’re just eighteen and it’s almost midnight —
You tell your friend Jerry, he’s the one who’s driving, you told your parents you’d be home hours ago and are we lost or what?
And he just laughs and you laugh and he throws another beer can out the window.
Three days, three whole days on the Oregon Coast with Jerry and Susan and Brendan and Matt and high school is finally done and you’ll be friends forever and your whole future stretches out ahead black and nameless and —
Sarah’s eyes almost open. She’s going too fast —
You’re going too fast, she tells Jerry, and they both laugh and then he doesn’t make the turn and the guardrail doesn’t hold and the world ends.
The new world is upside down and the blood rushes to her head and the world is red and the blood is everywhere, everything is blood and metal and safety glass like diamonds and screaming and when she can’t scream a
nymore, when her lungs feel like they’ll burst, there is only silence, silence and her ragged breathing and then footsteps, quiet footsteps and a tap at the window and a voice that says, soft and gentle and understanding:
“Well, now. Looks like you’ve found yourself in a world of hurt.”
She said something. Screamed something. Wasn’t sure which.
“Calm down. Calm down, now. You gotta think a minute, you’ve got to think real clearly. You need to make a decision, here, an important decision. Could be the most important one you’ll ever make. All right? I’m gonna ask you something. All right?”
She nodded.
He pulled what was left of her window out of its frame in showers of glass. Just so he could lean in close and whisper:
“How bad do you wanna live?”
She told him. He kept asking her and she kept telling him, she wanted to live, and he pulled the metal of the car aside like pulling off a blanket, lifted her out of the wreck like picking her up out of bed, and everything inside her was broken and wrong and by the time he laid her out on the beach, far from the car and inches away from cold pounding surf, it wasn’t anymore. She didn’t hurt, she didn’t bleed, just stared up at the horns of the moon in the sky as he pulled the clothes from her body, touched her, made everything right inside her. Kissed her warm and helpless as the bodies of her friends were cooling down to the temperature of the ocean’s night air. She could just see the car’s headlights from where she was, as they stabbed blindly into the dark.
“I’m not the devil,” he told her, fusing her bones under his touch, “but I’m nearly as old as him and there’s those would say I do the devil’s work, and maybe that’s so, and there’s those that come to me for fame and those that come to me for talent and you I found just wanting your breath to stay in your sweet body and that’s surely something altogether different. No matter what they say I’ve never taken anyone’s soul, never taken anything that wasn’t mine and you’re going to give me what’s mine, all right? You get to live, you get to walk away, and when that moon comes around all sharp again nine times from now you will have yourself two boys, two fine young boys, and one of them will be your perfect angel, everything you ever dreamed, and the other — the other one belongs to me, and on his twelfth birthday, well. On his twelfth birthday, you hand him over to me, is all. You hand one of your boys to me or there will surely be hell to pay.”
There was more. There was more that happened that night, his breath hot in her face and his pen in her hand, signing everything away and he was taking her name, even her name belonged to him and she didn’t want to see this part —
She jerked and gasped and was awake again.
The car was driving along the winding coast, the wheel gently moving under her unmoving hands, steering itself.
She stared at it, then at Josh.
He looked almost apologetic. “I didn’t want to wake you,” he said.
It was a family emergency. That was all Sarah would say on the phone, and she had co-workers who would cover her shifts at the bakery without question or complaint, but her manager wasn’t happy, her manager had said “We’ll talk about this when you get back,” which she felt fairly sure meant she wouldn’t have a job when she got back, but she couldn’t make herself care.
There was money, some, at least, money she’d started to put aside for their college funds, and obviously — if she was going to face reality here — she was only going to need half of it.
The other half could go to gas and hotel rooms and ice cream cones and kites, and she could almost start to believe that this was the vacation she’d told them it was.
She could almost believe it, except the world told her it wasn’t true.
Leaves turning too soon, falling to red and golden ruin. Crows and cats that stared at them in the street, watching and secret. The sound of footsteps and tapping windows when no one was in the street. Radios in stores and restaurants that died away to static droning as she approached, distant sounds coming through like laughter and car crashes. He’s coming, the world whispered, and she was finally listening.
She wasn’t going to run anymore. That had been her first impulse, but she was done. There was nowhere she could run to that he couldn’t find. She would have to make her stand here, in this coastal town whose name she didn’t know.
The knock at her door was coming at midnight.
The boys had been too excited to sleep. Tomorrow was their birthday — not as good as Christmas, maybe, but still, so close and so far —
“Tomorrow’s a big day,” she told them, and her voice was bright and cheerful and automatic, and felt like it was coming from somewhere else, someone else. “You need your sleep. So I want you to drink this.”
The hotel room’s microwave chimed, and she pulled out the two steaming mugs.
“Moommmm,” Kyle said, “warm milk’s for babies.”
“Maybe,” she agreed, pulling the bottle out of her bag. “But this isn’t.”
Josh stared. “Peppermint Schnapps? What’s Schnapps?”
“It’s alcohol, stupid,” Kyle said.
“Hey, now. Be — ” Sarah’s voice nearly caught. “Be nice to your brother.”
Josh had to be talked into it. Kyle didn’t. But soon they were both fast asleep — Josh giving up and lying down, Kyle trying to stay awake and the cup finally slipping right out of his hand.
Sarah’s heart was pounding. She ran to their sides and checked their breathing, their heartbeats, worried about the sleeping pill she’d split between their two drinks. She wasn’t trying to kill them. She just wanted both of them to sleep through this.
God, she loved them both so much.
She stared down at their sleeping bodies for the longest time.
Then she went to the closet, and started to pack a single small suitcase.
It was well after midnight when the knock finally came. She shot a worried glance at the beds, but they didn’t wake.
She walked over to the door, took the chain off, opened it. He looked exactly the way he did twelve years before.
“Evening,” he said. “I hope the hour don’t inconvenience you much.”
She shook her head. She had a thousand impulses to scream, to run, to fight, all of it buried under layers of numbness like thick cotton.
“No. Not at all.” She waved him in. “Do you — want anything? There’s a little coffee maker — I can — ”
He shook his head. “I do believe I’ve already made it as clear as I can what I want from you.” He glanced over at the bed. “Are we still clear on that?”
She nodded, and he moved over to the beds. “Here they are, then. Aww. Don’t they look like little angels, sleeping like that?” He smiled up at her, and she didn’t smile back. He shrugged, reached out, and brushed a strand of hair out of Kyle’s eyes. “Well. I’ll just be taking my boy, then, and I won’t be troubling you no more.”
“You’re not taking him.”
He snatched his hand back like it had been burnt. Slowly he turned to look at her. “Oh, I surely am. Or they both die. And that’ll just be the start. You wanted your life and I gave it to you, and if you don’t honor our agreement — ”
“Listen to me,” she said.
“— If you don’t honor our agreement, you’re gonna know kinds of hurting you don’t even have names for.”
“Listen to me. You’re not taking him. You’re not taking Kyle. You’re taking Josh.”
His eyes narrowed. “This one is mine. You know it. Just look at him. And this other one — hasn’t he been your perfect little golden boy? Hasn’t he been everything I promised you?”
“He has. He has and I’m going to miss him every day for the rest of my life but Kyle needs me and you’re not taking him. You’re not.”
She sat down on the bed, lifted Kyle up and cradled him like a doll. “You don’t know him. You don’t know anything. I know he’s scared and hurt and confused and angry, so angry at the world all the time, and
he’s scared that anger’s going to eat him up. I’m not going to let it. But you would.”
“This is not up for debate,” he said.
“No,” she agreed, “it’s not. Josh is — Josh is strong and smart and he’s a better person than I’ll ever be, and whatever you do to him, you’re not going to break him. I know it. He’d be safe even with you. He’ll be safe wherever he goes.”
She laid Kyle back down on the bed, kissed his sleeping forehead. “I’ve carried that piece of paper all this time. I’ve read it a thousand times, and all it says is that I have to give up one of my boys. It doesn’t say which one.”
He stared. “You’re serious.”
“That’s his bag, right over there. And that’s the door.”
She stood, not watching, holding herself steel-straight. She managed, somehow, not to break down completely, not to scream and cry and rage until they both were gone.
And by morning, when, half-sane, she tried to explain to Kyle where his brother had gone, the piece of paper she’d carried all these years, folded and secret and kept, no longer held her name, or even a single word.
The world didn’t end that night. The sun came up in the morning, the way it always does, no matter what we’ve done while it was gone.
The sun came up, and kept coming up, into days and weeks and years, until finally a day came that didn’t have Sarah in it, any longer.
The sun still rose that day as well, beautiful and bright, and was even brighter the day they put her in the ground, the day all her friends had gathered to say what a shame it all was, how young she’d been, how much they’d miss her.
And everyone wanted to shake Kyle’s hand, to lavish their attention and sympathy on him, and all he wanted was just to disappear.
He did, gradually, falling further and further back in the crowd as the line filed past her grave, as people gave her their handfuls of dirt and their last goodbyes.
Finally, only one person stood next to him.
They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t need to.
They just fell quiet into lockstep, walking away as the casket was lowered.
“You look different,” one of them said.
“You look the same,” the other replied.
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