by Patty Blount
Really looked at him.
His eyes were wild. There were lines around them, around his mouth too. Those lines were stark white at the moment. There was a black-and-blue mark under his eye—a mark I’d put there. His eyes bulged, and in them, I saw something I would have bet he’d never felt, never even believed in.
I saw horror.
But why? What was he afraid of? Certainly not the thought of my death. Hell, he’d probably wished it had been me instead of Matt a hundred times.
“Okay. Sorry. Bad joke.”
His hands, still holding me, twitched. “No joke at all, son.”
Son.
That’s twice now. I scanned every memory, looking for a single instance before I joined the squad, but couldn’t find it. The terror he felt lay like an open book in his eyes and in the twitch I could feel through his hands. Maybe I’m cruel, maybe I’m a selfish bastard, maybe I really needed all this therapy that Dr. Lewis wanted to shove down my throat, but it made me happy that I scared him. Not happy in a spiteful way, but happy in a real, down to the bone feeling of joy.
I pushed his hands away but smiled when he looked at his hands like he suddenly wanted to cut them off. “Sorry I scared you. I was just…surprised, I guess.”
His face had turned a sick gray color, so I grabbed the water cup from the table next to my bed and thrust it toward him. He gulped some down, coughed, and managed a grin. “This may be the first time since you were born that you didn’t scream when I touched you.”
What? My jaw dropped, and it was my turn for the wide eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Oh, Reece.” He laughed once and sipped again. “You were a strange baby. Cute as hell, but afraid of every damn thing. Including me. Especially me. You’d scream if anybody except Mom and Matt went near you. Me? You looked at me like I was Freddy fucking Krueger.”
“Come on,” I said and squirmed. Jesus, what kind of kid was afraid of his dad?
“I’m serious.” He dragged a hand over his face. “I couldn’t wait for you to be born. Another boy.” He shook his head with a proud grin. “Matt was great, and I had all these…these plans for camping trips and baseball games for all of us.” He shrugged and lost the grin. “But when we brought you home from the hospital, you screamed every time I held you. Your mom said you’d grow out of it. But you never did. So I stopped holding you. When you were a toddler and fussy with your teeth or if you’d gotten hurt, I made things worse if I tried to soothe you. You screamed yourself unconscious once. Scared the shit out of your mother. Your poor mom was exhausted, trying to take care of you and your brother, and all the screaming and crying you did around me—well, I was your father. My job is to take care of you, to give you what you needed—no matter what it was. And what you needed was for me to keep away.” His voice cracked, and his eyes scrunched up.
I stared at him, feeling like crap. He’d done it for me.
“What was wrong with me?” Aunt Sue had always said I was a difficult baby.
He laughed again and dropped his arm. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t let your mom find out. I didn’t want you slapped with some label just so people could treat you differently.” He sat up, stared at the cup for a moment, then turned it around and around. “Except I ended up doing that myself. Exactly that.”
“But I did grow out of it, didn’t I?”
He slid a look toward me, typical smirk in place. “Yeah. You did. That didn’t mean I stopped being afraid. How could I take you fishing or camping without your mom? What if you got hurt? What if you had a nightmare? What if you gave me the Freddy Krueger look again? I couldn’t risk it, couldn’t stand that I did that to you. So…”
“You stayed away.”
He lifted his shoulders, still not looking at me. “When you got older—and weirder,” he added with a laugh that was a slash of a blade, “well, it was hard to connect. You didn’t like sports like Matt.”
“Yes, I did. Still do.”
His head snapped around at that. “Really? What’s your favorite?”
“Baseball.”
“Yanks or Mets?”
“Mets.” Duh.
“Huh,” he said and laughed. It was a real laugh, not one of those sad ones. “I never knew that.”
“That’s because—” I broke off, left the bitter thought unsaid. “Never mind.” He nodded, and I figured he knew what I was gonna say.
“When Matt wanted to join J squad, I thought it would be good for both of you—split you up, let you each do your own things—and it was. You made some friends who were more like you.”
My jaw clenched. “More like me. What the hell does that mean?” Difficult? Weird? Afraid of every damn thing? What?
He held up his hands. “Smart. I know you won’t believe this, Reece, but when that teacher you had back in, what, third grade, fourth grade? When she told us you were brilliant, I was never so damn proud in my life.”
My face burned, and there was a tug in my chest—a weird clench that took me a minute, a full minute, to recognize as love.
“I scared the hell out of you when you were a baby, and I sure as hell couldn’t teach you anything that would engage that busy brain of yours.” He made air quotes to emphasize the word I knew was my teacher’s. “I stayed out of your way. I guess I got good at staying away.”
Yeah. Guess so. “And then you left for good.”
He flinched, liked I’d kicked him in the stomach. “Yeah. I—oh God.” He folded over his middle. “It was my fault, Reece. Mine, not yours, and I just couldn’t face that, I couldn’t. You remind me so much of him. You look like twins, you sound alike, you even do that thing with your lips he used to do.” He squeezed his eyes shut for a minute, and when he opened them, they were wet. “It hurt, God, it hurt to lose him.”
Oh. Of course it hurt. He was Matt’s father. Of course.
“I know I hurt you, I know it, and I’m sorrier than I can tell you, because you’re right—what you said in that note—I was never a father to you. It hurt so goddamn much to look at you and see the evidence of just how colossally I fucked things up.” He swiped a hand under his nose and wiped his eyes, and I cracked inside.
My father was crying.
He didn’t even cry at Matt’s funeral. He got pissed off and stayed that way for months. What should I do? Was I supposed to hug him and say no sweat, do one of those awkward bro hugs, and go grab a beer? I thought about that for a long moment and finally concluded what’s past is past. It couldn’t be changed. It couldn’t bring back my brother. Dad made the gesture. He broke years of silence and dropped all his tough, manly shit for me.
I cleared my throat and tried to talk around the giant lump in my throat. “Dad, there’s something you should know.” I broke off when my voice cracked. I swallowed and tried again. “I’m not really smart. I just take tests well.”
He gave me the yeah-right look. “Reece, I was there. Your IQ is off the charts.”
“No.” I waved a hand. “I’m serious. I am not a genius. I’m not brilliant like Alex. I take tests well because I never forget anything I’m taught.” I waited a beat, but he still wasn’t getting it. “I memorize shit, Dad. That’s all I can do. I’m a human computer, which means I’m only as good as the programming.”
He stared at me, eyes crinkling. “What happened on June 2 the year you were ten?”
I searched through memories and grinned. “Disney World. Got lost during the parade. When you guys found me, like hours later—”
“It was not hours later. More like one hour.”
I grinned. “When you guys found me one hour later, Mom was crying and hugging me, and you said, ‘Come on, leave the boy alone. He just wanted to hang out with the pretty princess.’”
“Remember which one?”
“Cinderella.”
“Smart kid, even then.” He swallowed more of my w
ater, then put the cup back on the table. “I’m sorry, so sorry you thought I hated you all this time. I love you. I love you, Reece.”
Before I could react, before I could sink into those words and just let them kind of sink in, he was back to tough. He left the bed and stalked around the room. “What the hell were you thinking with this note shit? When Amanda showed us that piece of paper, I thought it was no big deal, just another stunt. And then I found out you used a line from some rock star’s suicide note. I thought we were gonna find you in a pool of blood somewhere. Your mother needed sedatives to fall asleep, according to the brunch date.” He sneered and held his hand up a few inches over his head.
Ah. He was pissed off the guy was taller than him.
“Not a suicide note.”
Dad stopped prowling the room and waved two fingers under his eyes. “Look at me. Look at me and swear on Matt’s grave.”
I did. “It wasn’t a suicide note.”
It was. But just like that, it suddenly wasn’t. Maybe it never was.
“So what the hell was it?”
“It was a good-bye note.”
“You were gonna leave and go where, exactly?” He spread out his hands and lifted his eyebrows.
I thought about coming clean and telling him the truth, but I…I just couldn’t do it. I grabbed the lie I’d been telling for so long and expanded it. “I was going to enlist. Not sure which branch yet. I like the idea of flying. But not submarines. So the Navy is a tough decision for me.”
“The Navy. Baby Jesus on a bun, are you freaking kidding me?”
“No.”
“Then why did you join J squad?”
I pulled up my knees. “Matt. Matt made me swear. Made me promise not to let you push me out of your life.”
“When? He never regained—” His face froze when the answer dawned on him. “Jesus. Oh God. How long, Reece? How long?”
“Twenty minutes, I think.” I wrapped my arms around my body, trying not to lose it. “He was pinned, Dad. Could barely breathe. He grabbed my hand, held it so tight, begged me not to let you go.” I held up my right hand. To this day, it still tingled from my brother’s grip. “He knew. I don’t know how, but he knew he was dying, and it was my fault, and he wouldn’t let go. He wouldn’t let go until I fucking promised him.” I looked up, looked into my dad’s face, his lips trembling, his eyes wet. “I did. I didn’t want to at first, because I knew what would happen if I did. I kept saying no, but he begged, and he was in so much pain. God! Dad, it was my fault, so I promised I would do what he wanted. He smiled. He smiled, and that was it—he held my hand until he lost consciousness, and I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry.” Tears fell out of my eyes and plopped onto my arms.
Arms grabbed me, the strong arms I used to wish would toss me high up in the air like Matt. Or carry me on his shoulders like Matt. They grabbed me and held me, and I cried until I couldn’t breathe, cried for Matt, cried for all the wasted years, cried until I was empty.
“Christ, will you put on some clothes? This is getting weird,” Dad muttered into my hair when my sobs finally slowed.
I was in a hospital on a suicide watch, in a fucking dress, but my dad was here, and damn if it wasn’t the best day I ever had.
***
An hour or so later, after Dad got me sprung from the hospital, we were driving home when he asked me the bonus question.
“So what did Steve say about your video?”
I braced myself for Dad’s wrath. “I didn’t show him yet. I waited for him, but he had stuff to do, and then I got admitted to the hospital.”
“You didn’t show him? Jesus, Reece! That could be crucial evidence in his investigation.”
I spread my hands apart. “I tried, Dad. I was in his office, but he said he had to interview the guys on-scene first. And then—”
“Then what?” He looked at me with a frown when he stopped for a light.
“Amanda saw the video.”
“Yeah, I remember. You think she knows this kid?”
“I know she does. He’s her foster brother.”
“Holy shit. Did you tell Steve all this?”
Slowly, I shook my head. The light turned green. Dad drove through town, impatience sweating out of every pore. “No. I didn’t get the chance. Amanda asked me to wait—”
“Oh goddamn it, Reece!”
“I know. But I owed her one, Dad. Amanda’s a foster kid. Did you know?”
By the unsurprised look he shot me, I figured he did.
“Anyway, she and the kid in my video, his name’s Larry Ecker, live with the Becketts. She told me how bad it’s been for her, for him, and how much they love it there. She asked me to wait to report to Steve, wait until she had a chance to see for herself what Larry’s been up to.”
Dad was silent for a moment, but when I looked over, I could see the muscle clenching in his jaw. “I knew Amanda was a foster kid. The Becketts are good people, so life can’t be that bad for her.”
“She loves the Becketts, Dad. She wants to stay with them. So does Larry. She said they could be sent away like that.” I snapped my fingers.
“Oh,” he said. “So Larry starring in your video could be enough trouble for the big adios?”
“Yeah.” I looked away. “Like I said, I thought I owed that to her. Time, I mean.”
Dad pulled up to the curb in front of our house—well, Mom’s place—and cut the engine. “Reece, everybody who steps into that firehouse has to do one thing, the same thing, and that’s do the job—period. What if this kid is guilty? What if he set three more fires since Saturday and you could have stopped him? What if one of us got—”
I shot up a hand. “I get it. She asked me for time.”
Understanding dawned, and he nodded. “Okay.” He slapped my leg and unfastened his seat belt. “I’ll call Steve.”
“Dad, what about Amanda? I don’t want to mess things up for her—with the Becketts.”
Dad’s lips went thin. “That’s not on you, Reece.”
But it was on me. I’d demanded that she trust me, but did I give her that same trust back? No, I acted like she’d betrayed me when all she was trying to do—all she was still trying to do—was keep her own family together.
Cursing, he shoved himself out of the car. “Okay, look. I’ll make some calls, see what we can do. The Becketts aren’t the only foster family in town.”
I opened my door and joined him on the sidewalk. “What if…what if it’s not enough? What if she never forgives me?”
He turned, faced me directly, and put a hand on my shoulder. “Could you live with it if he sets another fire that kills somebody? One of us, a civilian, somebody close to you?”
Somebody close to me…like him?
Tucker practically leaped into my arms when I walked in the door, followed by Mom. “Jesus, Abby, let the kid breathe.”
“I’m okay, Mom.”
“Reece, I—”
Dad’s hand squeezed her shoulder, and she left the thought unsaid.
“I’m gonna take a nap.”
They nodded, and Tucker followed me up the stairs and curled up on my bed next to me. Under us, hidden in an old iPod box, was something that could show everyone I was a liar.
I left it where it was. For now.
***
“And you shot this footage yourself?”
Steve, the fire marshal, sat in our living room, watching the video on my phone.
“Yes, sir. On-scene.”
The fire marshal took off his glasses and stuck one end in his mouth, a frown creasing his forehead. A moment later, he looked up at me. “Okay, Reece. I blew you off the other day, and I’m sorry for that. This is good work. Scoping out the scene on arrival is good, solid firefighting practice. You looked for the things that stuck out, and you found something. This, by
itself”—he returned my phone—“well, it wouldn’t stand up as evidence. But it gives us a direction to look in.”
Steve put his glasses back on, opened a file folder, and handed me some sheets of papers.
“These are reports from the investigation—not just of Saturday’s fire, but of three others. I’m showing these to you because your dad says you’re sharp.”
I looked at my dad, and he nodded. My mother, who hadn’t stopped hovering over me since Dad brought me home, sat on the couch next to me. She made a sound that she tried to cover with a cough, but I knew it was one of frustration, and the glare that went with it was aimed straight at my dad.
“You and your friend Bear were first on-scene and reported the fire, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me exactly what you saw.”
“Uh, well, I was driving,” I began and recounted the entire event. When I finished, Steve’s eyes snapped to mine.
“Your dad tells me you have a perfect memory. Is that true?”
“Yes. If I consciously look at something, I remember it.”
“Let’s go back to the beginning again. You got out of your car. What did you smell?”
As soon as he said the word smell, it hit me, like I was right there. But I didn’t know how to describe it. “The smell was bad. Melting plastic. Rubber. Burnt sugar. Noxious—something chemical, because I felt my throat go tight. Not gasoline or kerosene. I know those odors.”
“You had no gear, correct?”
“Um, not exactly. I had practice gear in my trunk but an empty tank. Bear and I moved across the street, just two hundred feet away, and we could breathe better.”
“You did not see flames?” he asked again.
“No, only smoke. But we could feel it. The heat in front of the house was intense. You could see the heat waves at the roofline.”
“When did you see flames?”
“Not until Truck 3 vented the structure. Flames shot out at the front and back of the house.”
“Front and back?”
When I nodded, Steve jotted something down on his notepad. “Go back to the smoke. Describe it.”