Blood in the Past (Blood for Blood Series)

by East, Jordanna

  “It’s been rocky, but he’s been pretty supportive since...”

  “Well that’s good. I’m glad someone’s there for you.”

  Lyla’s phone rang. She tugged it from her pocket and scanned the caller I.D. It was Anthony. She held the phone up and shrugged at CJ. “Speak of the devil, huh?”

  CJ frowned even though Lyla let the call go to voice mail. They parted ways, and when Lyla passed another operating room, she peeked in to gauge the size of the box. Perhaps she’d return later under the guise of retrieving more cardboard boxes. The hospital would be emptier, especially the operating rooms. Proud of her plan’s infant stages, Lyla called Anthony back and let him know she was, in fact, working—and working late.

  ***

  The day of Lyla’s mother’s funeral, it rained. Not a heavy rain, but a fine mist that encompassed the mourners in added sadness. Though Lyla sat wedged between her aunt and her father, her mind couldn’t have been further from the diminutive woman to her left, the aunt who suspected Lyla of killing her own mother. Nor could her heart have been further from the man to her right, the father whom Lyla suspected was the catalyst of her mother’s suicide. The three of them sat stoically at the front of the rows of attendees, tear ducts barren, their usually olive skin pale against their dark hair and attire.

  At the conclusion of the services, Lyla rose to her feet. If she stared at her mother’s coffin any longer, she’d be tempted to jump in the grave beside it. When LeeAnn and her father approached her parents’ next-door neighbors, Lyla joined them.

  “I’m gonna head home,” Lyla said, addressing neither of them in particular. She’d already made up her mind to skip the repast altogether. Besides, she had plans for that evening.

  Her aunt’s eyes widened in alarm. “You’re not going to join us at your parents’ house for lunch?”

  “It’s not my ‘parents’ house’ anymore. It’s just his house now, isn’t it?” Lyla indicated her father with a shift of her gaze.

  Calvin said, “I think your mother would have wanted you to celebrate her life with family and friends, Lyla.”

  “What do you know about what Mom wanted?”

  Her words stung them both, but neither retorted, so Lyla spun on her heels and left, drifting through the crowd and misty rain. The damp, spongy earth made a sucking noise with each footstep, and she almost didn’t hear her phone vibrating against her keys in her pocket. She answered without looking.

  “Why didn’t you tell me your mother’s funeral was today?” Anthony bellowed.

  Lyla was startled by his volume. “I wasn’t sure if I wanted you there, and I didn’t know how to tell you that.” Her boyfriend kept shouting, so Lyla continued sarcastically. “I’m doing fine after just burying my mother, though. Thanks for asking.”

  “I’m sorry, you’re right. I just wish you would’ve told me. I wanted to be there for you. I’ve asked you over and over when and where the services were being held.”

  He paused, and Lyla didn’t know what to say. He was right. But after seeing what her father had driven her mother to, something about having a significant other by her side made Lyla’s stomach sour.

  “Can I pick you up?” he asked, finally ending the silence.

  “No.” Realizing she’d responded too curtly, Lyla sighed. “I have...plans. I mean, I just want to be alone tonight. Please try to understand. I don’t know how to deal with this, but I do know I wannna deal with it alone.”

  “Okay, but if you change your mind, which I hope you do, please call me.”

  Lyla agreed and hung up. She wished she hadn’t mentioned having plans. Hopefully, Anthony wouldn’t dwell on her tiny slip-up later on.

  Lyla reached her apartment and readied herself for the evening, laying several items out on her bed. The days between her mother’s death and burial had allowed Lyla’s need for revenge to fester in her heart and mind. She’d suffered many emotions during the past few days, but revenge was the only one remaining, the only thing that mattered. Her father was responsible, that much was clear. She had to make him pay. She had to get justice for her mother. She had to make things right.

  That night, her father would take his last breath.

  ***

  Lyla waited while the clouds marched in from the horizon, thickening with every mile and blackening Philadelphia with gloom. The somber mist that had engulfed the day was followed by a deluge of heavy rain and thundering fury that night. When the sky opened up, the late summer humidity dissipated, but Lyla’s anger towards her father hadn’t cooled.

  She stared at the items she’d laid out on her couch. Her gaze lingered on the receptacle she’d stolen from the hospital the other night. Lyla had needed to break its lock open to retrieve the vials inside. Shards of hard plastic still lay scattered on her living room floor. Lyla stepped over them, snatched several vials of her chosen drug and a syringe, and tossed them in her bag. Then she grabbed the liter of Jack Daniel’s whiskey—her father’s preferred brand—and the lighter.

  Lyla eased her car to a stop a few blocks away from his house. A low-hanging branch scraped the roof. Lyla cringed at the sound, almost as if it were begging Lyla to return her foot to the gas pedal. But she did not. She parked, drew 10 ccs of succinylcholine into the syringe, and slithered out of the car into the wet night. She hurried to her destination in a half-crouch, trying to blend into the darkness of the asphalt.

  She sneaked around the back of her father’s house through the shadows of the maple trees. They still clutched their leaves in denial of the approaching autumn. Every now and again, the rain would tear a leaf from its branch and the fluttering shadow would frighten Lyla. But instead of cursing the rain, she thanked it. It softened the ground, cushioned her footfalls, and tethered the neighbors to their couches. Few, if any, people would witness her arrival.

  Searching for signs of life in his house and finding only the soft flickering of a TV in the living room, Lyla entered through the back door. Despite burying his wife hours earlier, her father had gone on a date that night. She’d overheard him bragging about it to a group of his colleagues at the funeral. A few were impressed by his gall, but most were repulsed.

  However loathsome Lyla found it, she’d learned from her mother that, following a date night, her father would drunkenly pass out on the couch, which was good for Lyla, logistically. She imagined his stench: sex and a perfume so cheap the woman probably purchased it at the cosmetics counter of the nearest drug store. For a second, she marveled at how he at least had the decency not to bring the girls to the house where his wife—her mother, for God’s sake—had lost her life.

  She knew the bristles of the doormat made a scritch-scritch noise, so Lyla bent each leg and thoroughly and silently dried the soles of her sneakers on her pants’ legs. Without squeaking, wet shoes, she tiptoed down to the basement, pausing to grab a candle from the emergency kit at the top of the stairs. The old house’s circuit breakers were notoriously fickle, so she switched off the main breaker, drowning the house in complete darkness. Lyla paused in the spot where she’d overheard her aunt’s suspicions only days earlier. With her ear toward the ceiling, she strained to hear any indication of her father’s stirring over the din of rain pelting the house. She heard nothing, so she removed the hypodermic needle from her over-sized bag, almost piercing herself as she fumbled for it.

  “Here I come, Daddy,” she said in a singsong whisper, creeping back up the stairs.

  Lyla found her father prone on the couch, three quarters of his face buried in a pillow dampened by his own sweat and drool. Before she’d hit the circuit breaker, the TV had probably been playing a rerun of Law & Order. An empty whiskey bottle stood on the coffee table. She imagined her father being too drunk to notice it obstructing the television, partially distorting the image through the curvature of the glass. Lyla squatted between the sofa and the table, holding the needle firmly. She punched the tip into the sluggish pulsing of his jugular vein and plunged the chemical into his blood
stream. He didn’t budge, and he never would again. Calvin Kyle didn’t deserve such an easy ending.

  In the following minutes, Lyla toured the house. The carpet runner that once lined the upstairs hallway had been removed, revealing dull, unfinished hardwood. Exposed staples tugged at her shoe soles. Fresh paint fumes tickled her nose. None of it fooled Lyla. She still saw the blood. She still wrestled against tears as the copper odor assaulted her with every breath.

  Lyla faced the difficulty in being there head on as she scuttled around grabbing whatever items she wished to salvage. She knew she needed to be there to move forward, and she intended to take her mother with her. She grabbed her mother’s blown-glass oil lamps from the master bedroom nightstands, a gift from LeeAnn that Lyla had coveted for years. She stopped to admire the painting above the headboard. It depicted the Philadelphia Art Museum from the riverbank, drenched in the orange glow of sunset. The canvas was three feet by two feet, and Lyla and her mother had worked on it in tandem, using a postcard as their inspiration. Lyla wished she could take it with her, but it was too cumbersome—and would be too suspicious.

  Lyla tiptoed around the blood stain that had soaked into the floorboards and found her mother’s tortoise shell reading glasses and matching case in the bathroom. Her mother hardly used them, but sometimes she wore them perched on her head to hold her bangs back or she would chew on the temple tip when she read. Lyla sniffled at the image and jogged back downstairs to snatch her mother’s bone china tea set from the dining room cabinet. Lyla found only three teacups, but without time to search for the fourth, she cushioned the remaining pieces of the set with the old T-shirts she’d brought. The trinkets clamored against each other in her bag as she returned to the living room.

  Lyla took nothing of her father’s.

  Standing over the couch, she withdrew the plain white, tapered candle from her bag and lit it with the metallic Zippo lighter her mother had given her when Lyla graduated pre-med. The engraving on the lighter read HOME IS WHERE YOUR STORY BEGINS. Ironic, she scoffed, since her story had just begun. Her mother. Then her father. Death was Lyla’s story. With that thought, she held the lit candle near the magazines on the coffee table. The paper ignited slowly at first, the flames only gently caressing the surface of the pages. She blew on them gently to coax the fledgling fire to swell.

  Satisfied with the lit magazines, Lyla pulled the whiskey from her bag. The cap crackled when she twisted it open. She sloshed it all over the couch and her father. One of her mother’s oil lamps tumbled out of her shoulder bag and smashed against the edge of the table. The flames dancing among the magazines ignited the lamp oil. Lyla stepped back as the fire spread from the table to the carpet and beyond. It crawled up the sides of the couch with red and orange fingers, clawing at her father. The flames licked the drapes and formed a fiery tent above her. Just as a boom of thunder shook the old house, Lyla backed out of the room where the fire raged and consumed her father’s body. She exited the way she came, never looked back, and tried to forget that she was ever daddy’s little girl.

  Outside, embers flitted and flurried around her. Safe from the blossoming inferno, Lyla lingered in the back yard for a few moments to bask in the heat of her childhood home. It burned despite the rain. Almost in defiance of it. Something about the burning home beckoned her like a setting summer sun on the horizon. When the flames took over, triumphant in their fiery invasion, Lyla sprinted into the street, a mask of panic plastered on her face, along with her wet hair.

  “Help! My father! Someone help!” she screamed, fighting to be heard against the roar of the storm. The neighbors emerged from their homes, some to help, some to gape. One of the next-door neighbors—the same one from the funeral—approached Lyla.

  “I called 911,” he said. “The fire department’s on its way. Lyla, are you all right?”

  Lyla heard the neighbor perfectly, but she stared at him with wild eyes, pretending to be too distraught to understand him. He clasped her hand and led her farther across the street, presumably to distance them from the house in case it exploded. Before long, they heard the sirens in the distance. A sedan pulled up and screeched to a stop, beating the fire trucks to the scene. In the flickering light of the burning home, Lyla saw a large, rigid antenna standing out from the back of the sedan’s roof. A barrier separated the front seat from the back. It was an unmarked police car.

  A man with boyish features, betrayed only by the creases around his eyes, jumped out and grabbed her shoulders. “Is anyone inside?” He shook her and demanded again, “Is anyone inside? Is your father in there?”

  Lyla didn’t have to feign confusion anymore. The stranger’s mention of her father had genuinely taken her aback. Does he know me? She thought of the car he’d pulled up in; he probably worked with her father. He may even have attended her mother’s funeral. She wondered if he’d heard about her father’s date.

  “He’s unconscious,” she sobbed. Through her tears, mustered by thoughts of vengeance for her mother, she managed to add, “I couldn’t move him.”

  Lyla felt a jab of guilt when the man sped toward the house. He shouldn’t have gone in. He should have waited for the fire department.

  He never came out.

  4

  Next of Kin.

  WHEN JASON BRIGHTHOUSE Jr. crossed through the doorway, home early from class, something seemed off. The air felt wrong. Two police officers stood in the foyer, blocking his view of his mother, but he heard her wailing. Instinctively, he welled up, too, that familiar stinging sensation prickling his face. She peered past the officers at him, her bronze hair frizzed and her jade eyes rimmed with red. Her eyes told Jason his father was dead.

  The cops tried to console them. “You both should know that he died valiantly while trying to save a fellow officer from his burning home,” one of them said.

  Their words sounded far away. Only his mother’s sobs were up close and personal. She and Jason had spent their whole lives trying to prepare themselves for that moment while praying it would never come. Being a police officer came with risks, especially in Philadelphia. But they had expected bullets, not back drafts.

  The two officers poured out more information. Words tumbled from their mouths and spilled down the fronts of their cheap suits. Cheap suits. Like the ones his father wore. The men were fellow detectives. Jason should have known the department wouldn’t send mere beat officers to notify the next of kin of one of their own. Jason teared up at the thought of him and his mother being reduced to ‘next of kin.’ Instead, he tried to focus on the men’s words, which were doing so little to quell his tears. He tugged his fingers through his thick, curly hair, eventually settling his head in his hands. As he listened, sniffling, eyes closed, he learned that his father knew the other man, another detective.

  “We think Detective Brighthouse heard the call over the scanner and recognized the address. Though he was off duty, he’d been driving around in the vicinity of the residence and rushed to save his colleague.”

  Jason felt as if the words were coming from another household, happening to another family.

  But the second officer continued. “The detective he attempted to save had a wife and daughter. Unfortunately, his wife committed suicide earlier this week. Perhaps he didn’t want the family to be struck with two tragic losses in one week.”

  But why didn’t he think of his own family? Jason returned to that question over and over. He wished he could be strong, proud of his father’s selfless act, but Jason stubbornly refused to chase away his selfish thoughts.

  Before Jason and his mother fell asleep on the couch, neither wanting to retreat to their own rooms, his mother spoke. As far as he could remember, it was the first time she’d done so that day. She said, “He must have thought if it were him in a burning house, he’d want someone to help him return home to us.”

  Those words touched Jason. He knew they were true. He knew she echoed his father’s sentiments exactly.

  ***

&nbs
p; Three days later, Jason and his mother sat huddled together against the chilly air. The motorcade for the dual funeral for Brighthouse Sr. and his colleague was tremendous, snaking through the city for blocks, but nothing compared to the actual turnout. Hundreds of men and women came to pay their respects to the two fallen detectives.

  Jason recognized some of the uniformed officers from the Police Athletic League and family barbecues. Strips of black cloth cut across each of their badges. A sea of solemn faces swayed to the bagpiper’s rendition of “Amazing Grace”. With everyone so lost in their collective grief, hardly a body remained still when the rifle squad shot three volleys into the air. The resounding crash rattled Jason’s chest, but he sat motionless, among the few who didn’t flinch.

  Desperate for something to focus on besides his own grief, Jason watched the honor guard split to fold two separate flags. They placed one in his mother’s trembling hands. They brought the other to a young woman across the aisle. She acted oddly disinterested in the ritual, all but tossing the flag onto the chair beside her. Jason recalled the detectives’ mention of the daughter who had lost her mother and father to isolated incidents in the same week. Judging by her front-row seat, that was her. Her demeanor confused Jason; her body wasn’t heaving with sobs, nor was she clutching any used tissues. Strange for a daughter who’d lost both her parents. Up until then, he’d empathized with her; he wasn’t so sure anymore.