“Why . . . ?”
He looked down at his shoes and shook his head. “Why you gave me up,” he said. It was almost a whisper. “Why you didn’t care. Why you didn’t want me.”
She sucked in her breath, and it made a sound as sharp as a scream. She stepped back, until the wall stopped her, and she felt cold, unaccountably heavy, as if she might sink straight through the floor. “What—what are you talking about?”
Tyler met her gaze and held it. This time, she saw no glints of yellow, no reflections. Nothing but pain. “I’m your son,” he said. “I’m the one you gave away.”
And then he turned and started to walk away. She cried out then, a sound that ripped itself out of her soul, and reached out to him—not to hold him, not to hug him, but to push him.
Push him away. Far away.
He didn’t stop. He didn’t look back. She heard him saying good-bye to Laurel and Amy and Elena, and she heard the other girls leave after him.
But she sat in her chair, numbed, frozen, unable to think what to do or how to stop the destruction that was rushing at her, at her daughter, at this tight family unit she had built so carefully out of lies.
It was all coming apart.
Kill him, something in her said. Brutal and quiet and practical. Kill him before worse happens.
But she couldn’t do it when he’d been born, and she couldn’t do it now, not after having seen his pain.
Maybe I was wrong, she thought. It was a frantic thought, a child’s desperate plea for mercy. Maybe he’s not like his father.
But he was. She knew he was.
Because if he wasn’t . . . what did that make her? What awful, terrible monster did that make her?
THE NEXT DAY passed in a nightmarish fugue. She didn’t know how to find the boy, how to contact him; she couldn’t ask Laurel. Her daughter would know something was wrong.
But when Laurel was late coming home, she couldn’t stand to wait any longer. She started to call, but no, her voice would betray her.
Texting was safer: Where are you? Who are you with?
She imagined Laurel telling her phone, none of your business, but the text back was more polite. Just Amy and some other ppl. All OK.
Emma couldn’t ask the deadly question, Are you with Tyler? She just couldn’t. So she compromised. Where are you?
Mall. Emma could almost hear the where else would we be? at the end of that, and see the eye roll. Home soon.
He’d met her at the library. Maybe she wouldn’t have invited him shopping. Maybe it might all go away, now that he’d been here, seen Emma, said what he had come to say.
Maybe it was over.
Emma tried to pretend it was, desperately. She made dinner—Laurel’s favorite, beef stroganoff. She rehearsed answers to questions in her mind. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Honey, you can’t believe what strangers tell you.
She was stirring in the noodles when she heard Laurel’s keys in the door. Without turning, she said, “Hey, honey, thanks for being on time.” Which, of course, Laurel wasn’t; sarcasm was a nervous defense against the fear churning inside her.
Because she didn’t turn, she missed whatever nonverbal cues Laurel might have been giving her, but she couldn’t miss the tone in her daughter’s voice. The hard, flat, angry tone. “Why didn’t you tell me?” Laurel asked.
Emma put down the spoon and turned to look at her, and with one glance she knew, knew, that it was all going to fall apart. There was no rehearsal for this. No possible response that made any sense at all.
“Why didn’t you tell me I had a brother?” Laurel said, and the sick feeling in Emma’s stomach turned black and toxic, and she sank down in a chair at the kitchen table, staring blindly at her hands. On the stove, the stroganoff bubbled and hissed, and she ought to be stirring it, but she didn’t care. Let it burn. “Mom? Mom! Answer me!”
That last rose to a shout, almost to a scream, and Emma raised her gaze to fix on her daughter’s. The golden flecks in those eyes. The fury in her face. The betrayal.
For sixteen years, she’d kept secrets, and now . . . now they were out. But she tried anyway.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Emma said. Her lips felt numbed, as if someone had hit her. “Honey—”
“Tyler. I’m talking about Tyler!” Laurel spat. “He has all the papers, all the proof that we’re twins. Twins. And you gave him up? Why did you give him up? How could you? Didn’t you love him? Do you even love me? My God, what are you?”
It was all black with pain, all of this, and she hated hearing it in Laurel’s voice, knowing that her daughter was infected with this horror too. She’d tried to shield her. Tried her very best to make it go away.
But like the dream, it came back.
Emma took in a deep breath, closed her eyes, and said, “I had to give him up. I couldn’t keep him.”
“Why?” It was a wail, and she heard the tears in her daughter’s voice.
Against the black velvet backdrop of her closed lids, Emma saw a flash of yellow eyes. “Because . . . because I would have hurt him,” she said. “It was the only way I could save him, Laurel. I kept you because I could. But he—he was—” She couldn’t explain this, not in a way that her daughter would ever understand.
“He was what? He was just a baby!” That last rose to a scream of raw fury and hurt, and then it was too late; Laurel was gone, the door slammed loudly enough to rattle glass, and Emma opened her eyes and wiped away tears and realized, with a jolt of horror, that her daughter was running away from her.
Into the dark.
Toward an evil she knew nothing whatsoever about.
Still, she tried. She ran out the front door just in time to watch her daughter slam the passenger door of a sedan, catching a glimpse of Tyler behind the wheel as it sped away. He’s too young to drive, she thought ridiculously, conventionally, knowing that was the least of her problems. She wheeled back into the house and flew into action.
Emma had sense enough to take dinner off the stove and dump it aside, and sense enough to open up the gun safe and take out the two things she’d sworn she would never need again: the silver-coated knife and the revolver filled with custom-cast silver bullets.
The other thing in the gun safe was a manila file folder. Emma hesitated, then grabbed it. The file. The whole story. Gruesomely illustrated. She didn’t know if it would do any good at all, but she took it anyway. She changed into dark pants, dark shirt, black jacket: like an assassin, she told herself. In case sneaking was necessary.
And then she went out; not after her daughter, but after her son.
FINDING LAUREL WASN’T that hard; though Emma had always tried very hard to be a normal soccer mom, she’d never been able to shake the habits she’d acquired when her life was ripped to shreds. For years, she’d lived in a state of caution, of paranoia, of fear so pervasive it was existential. So while she let Laurel have leeway, she kept a tether on her. The cell phone had a tracking feature, and if there was one thing Laurel would never, ever discard, it was her cell.
Tyler was definitely moving quickly. The signal that Emma locked in was on the freeway. Emma mounted her own cell phone into the console of her van, put the revolver under the seat where she could easily grab it, and set off in pursuit. She kept the speed reasonable until she was safely on the interstate; it was late enough that the traffic was lighter, and speeding cars were nothing new around here anyway. She weaved in and out of traffic, following the blinking light of her daughter’s mortal danger as it sped west, and she felt absolutely sure that her life—the life she’d constructed—was over.
I’ll take him with me, she thought. One way or another, this stops here.
She was gaining on the signal by the time they’d hit the outer borders of Fort Worth, out into what was officially the countryside . . . and that was dangerous, because the cell coverage would get spotty the farther out from population centers they ran. That might be the intent, she realized. She ne
eded to catch them before the signal disappeared.
She floored it, blowing past slow-moving trucks and sedans and semi tractor-trailers, some whose drivers blew their horns in warning; she didn’t heed them, didn’t care about the consequences of what she was doing. She’d been waiting for this, she realized. Whether she’d been able to acknowledge it consciously or not, she’d been waiting for this to happen every moment since Laurel’s birth.
There was a kind of freedom in knowing it was finally here.
She caught up to the signal.
It was a truck. A cattle truck, rattling along in the night, full of scared and shifting cows on their way to the end of their lives.
She could imagine Tyler, smirking, coming alongside the cattle truck, taking Laurel’s cell, tossing it into the stinking hauler. Easy enough to do, especially if it was stopped at a light. His idea of a joke. That made sense, because his father would have found it hilarious.
The realization hit her like a bullet.
My daughter could be anywhere.
Emma pulled over to the shoulder in a spray of gravel; her tires skidded, and she almost went over the steep shoulder, but she didn’t care. She couldn’t get her breath, and her heart was pounding so hard and fast it filled her ears with a furious drumming. A desperate silent scream was locked inside her vocal cords.
And then she heard the cheerful sound of her cell phone’s ringtone.
She put the van in park, shook her trembling hands to get feeling back into her fingers—that was how hard she’d been gripping the steering wheel—and then yanked the cell phone off the console. The screen read PRIVATE CALLER. No number visible.
She didn’t say hello.
She didn’t need to.
“Don’t you just love modern technology?” the voice from her nightmares said. “I fucking love it. Makes everything so easy. Just—reach out and touch somebody.”
Her phone made a little chirping sound; she had a text message. She opened it and saw a smiling photo of Laurel, taken with a flash. Laurel, inside Tyler’s car.
“You know who this is, don’t you, Emma?”
She couldn’t answer, didn’t want to answer, the way a child puts the covers over her head to hide from the monster in the bedroom. She could feel his attention fully on her, like the scorching heat of the sun in the desert.
“Do you want her back?”
She swallowed painfully, licked her lips, and said, “Yes.” It took everything out of her, but she did it.
He laughed. She reached down under the seat and took hold of the gun; she put it in the seat next to her, as if its mere presence could protect her from that laughter.
But nothing stopped the sound from crawling inside her, touching her, taking her. That confident, utterly callous laugh—it told her he was certain he could repossess her.
“You’ve been watching us,” she said; it came out more like a whisper than she wanted. “All these years.”
“Nope. No point in wasting my time. You’re predictable,” he said. “One of your best qualities. Tyler’s taken a liking to little Laurel, and good for him; a brother ought to care for his sister. He’s bringing her to me for a proper introduction. If you want to be here for it, you’d better get back on the road.”
“Where?” The fear had drained out of her, as if she just couldn’t contain it anymore; it was too big, too vast. It had ruptured the skin of her and bled out, leaving her empty.
He gave her an address in Rockwall; at least an hour’s drive east across the metroplex.
“Emma?” She’d thought that she couldn’t be afraid anymore, but the sound of her name in his mouth made her shudder. “You be careful on the roads, now. Wouldn’t want you to miss this.”
She didn’t wait for him to hang up. She put the phone back into its holder on the console, put the van in drive, and sped away, sliding into traffic just ahead of a Mustang. The young man in the passenger seat flipped her off as the small car whipped around her. She didn’t care.
She took the next exit, U-turned, and floored the gas headed back the opposite direction.
He’ll wait, she thought. He’ll want me to see. He’ll want me to know.
She had to pray that was true.
THERE WAS SOMETHING eerily unsurprising in the utter middle-class normality of the subdivision. The brick wall at the entrance bore the words SERENE SHORES. To justify the “shores,” there was a large pond right inside; it was probably charming in the daytime. Now, there were only the indistinct pale shapes of ducks dotting the bank and dark smooth water, and the trees looked frozen and twisted. She drove around the pond and then turned right. The streetlights lit up the front of a McMansion, built on the same pseudograndiose lines as its neighbors looming only a couple of feet away, maximum houses on minimum lots. There was something vile about this ultimate horror hiding here, in this neat, pretentious suburban neighborhood.
She pulled up to the closed garage door. Tyler must have put his car inside. She prayed Laurel was in the house. Emma shut the engine off, dropping the keys and her cell phone into one pocket of her leather jacket and jamming the revolver into the other. She picked up her purse with the file stuffed inside, took a deep breath, and opened the van door.
The front door was flanked by two Chinese temple dogs, staring off into the distance; there were leaves and spiderwebs and a wrinkled flyer for a tree-trimming service jammed in behind the one on her right. As she looked down, half crazy with fear, she suddenly had a premonition, a strong one. She’d learned not to ignore those; if she’d listened to the first one she’d ever had (I really need to catch a ride home from school today, not walk home), she wouldn’t be in this fix now.
So she took the gun from her pocket and put it down in the shadow between the temple dog statue and the brick wall.
Then she rang the bell. A cheery little three-note chime sounded from within, and only a second or two went by before the door swung open.
Tyler was standing there.
He didn’t say a word. He took a step back, avoiding her gaze. That was smart. If her stare were able to kill, he’d be writhing on the floor. She stepped inside. The door closed behind her with a soft, final click. She clenched her teeth and walked on.
The entry hall had striped wallpaper. The house smelled like lemon furniture polish and vanilla—air freshener, not the warm scent of things baking. The art was of the Thomas Kinkade school: cozy cottages bathed in sunshine.
“Sorry about this,” Tyler said, his face turned away. “I really am.”
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t. There must be something of her in him, but he was his father’s puppet. She followed him down the hallway, past darkened doorways, to a brightly lit living room. The monster’s lair.
The lair gave a good imitation of a homey den. The monster and her daughter were sitting on the sofa, having some flowery-smelling variety of hot tea. There was a muted TV program playing on the wide-screen television set. Tyler’s influence could be seen in the room—gaming equipment, wireless controllers dumped on the coffee tables, empty soft drink cans on the pass-through bar to the kitchen. Everything about the room was . . . normal, and at the same time completely fake, as if the monster had ordered a room of furniture from some store ad and positioned the pieces exactly as they’d been in the photograph.
There was one personal touch: a single photograph, framed and centered under a spotlight on the wall . . . a posed image of her and Laurel, done years ago for a Christmas card. How did he get that? She couldn’t think about it, couldn’t worry about that now.
She said, calmly and firmly, “Laurel, please come here.”
Laurel’s father looked up at her and smiled. He wore the same skin she remembered. It sent a seismic shock through her . . . like the house, he was bland, nondescript, brown hair (dusted now with silver) and brown eyes. His skin tone was medium, too; a dozen witnesses would have given him a dozen different nationalities, depending on their preconceptions.
He couldn’t be
picked out of a crowd, and that was the point. The entire point.
“Emma,” he said. He sounded pleased. “Have a seat, we were just talking about you.”
“Laurel, please come here.”
Laurel took a sip of her tea and settled in deeper on the couch. “I’m fine, Mom.” Emma couldn’t read her voice, and Laurel was looking at the creature in the man suit. Was she really oblivious to the danger?
Emma wanted nothing more than to launch herself across the coffee table, grab her daughter, and get out of that room, but she knew that was what he was waiting for. She focused on him. If she’d brought the gun inside, she would have tried to kill him now . . . but she realized that wouldn’t have worked. He was expecting instant, unreasoning violence.
So she said, “What name are you using these days?”
His eyebrows raised, as if he was very mildly surprised. “The same one I’ve always used, Em. Charles Wilson. I noticed you changed your name, though. Laurel, did you know your mom used to have the last name Kazinski?”
“What?” Laurel blinked, and her bright, accusing eyes focused on Emma for the first time. “How much more haven’t you told me? God, Mom. My real name is Kazinski?”
“Your legal name is Saxon,” Emma said. “Everything he tells you is a lie, Laurel. Believe me.”
“Why should I?” her daughter shot back. “You’ve lied to me my whole life. What about Tyler? Even if you couldn’t keep him, why didn’t you tell me I had a brother somewhere out there? And you told me my dad was dead!”
I hoped he was, Emma thought. Her breath caught in her throat as she saw Charles—this was the first time she’d ever known what he called himself—put an affectionate hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Don’t be too hard on your mom, kid,” he said. He patted gently. He left his hand there. Every nerve in Emma’s body screamed at her to do something.
“Your mom went through a very hard time,” he told Laurel. “Look, I was no prize; I admit, I left before you two were born. Your mom went into a tailspin, and she had to be treated for depression. She gave your brother up for adoption because she was so angry at me. I’m just happy that I came back to my senses after that. I was able to get him back.”
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