Tyler’s vision exploded in a billion tiny sparks. He fell back onto the table, and his head slammed into the wood. Jacob jumped on top of him, roaring, his voice too high and too loud, and started hitting Tyler with both fists: his head, his chest, anywhere he could reach. Tyler held up his arms, trying to block the blows, but his brother was stronger. Tyler’s sinewy build was no match for Jacob. His head and body took blow after blow.
Tyler’s head swam, and he couldn’t think or see. Instead, it was just black, and then those white, blinding sparks, and pain. Pain exploding all over his body in what would be great bruises, as dark and purple as ripe grapes.
“Jacob! No!”
Suddenly, the beating stopped, but Tyler didn’t move. He was still on the table, his face and body hot and sticky with blood and his mind still swimming in and out, in and out, in and out. He tried to blink, but his eyes wouldn’t work, and very, very faintly, he could just make out the outline of his father holding his prick brother back. “Stop, Jacob!” his father said. “Just stop! Calm down!”
His mother raced toward Tyler, her hands outstretched. “Oh my gosh. Oh no, baby. Oh no. Are you okay? Can you see?”
“He hit me first!” Jacob was screaming again and again, his voice high-pitched.
Tyler tried to grit his teeth, but a sharp lightning bolt of pain shot through him. “Yeah,” he said, but his voice sounded muffled and strange. “I’m fine.”
The pain of even speaking was too much, and before he realized what was happening his parents were shuffling him into a car, and his brother was left at home while his mother held ice to his eye and cooed to him about leaving her purse on the entryway table.
That was why they’d come back.
They’d saved him.
“What happened, Tyler?” his mom said. “What set him off ?”
“I hit him.” Tyler’s voice sounded like he was speaking through a mouthful of gumballs.
“But why?” his mother asked. “Tyler . . . why?”
Tyler tried to shake his head, but it sent pain through his body like a rocket. So he stayed still and let his mother hold a little bag of ice to his eyes. First one, then the other, as if that would make any sort of difference.
His father kept glancing at him in the rearview mirror and making concerned noises in this throat. He said things like, “You’ll be all right, champ,” and “Really just a few good shiners you got there.”
And, as much pain as he was in, Tyler almost enjoyed the ride to the hospital.
It was the most kindness his parents had shown him in a really, really long time. Maybe since he was a little boy.
His father pulled up to the hospital, to the same emergency room entrance where he’d gone with Mattie just days before, and helped him out the car. He leaned on his parents and hobbled in.
The microphone was dangling down, somewhere near his belly button. He tore it away and stuffed the cord in the pocket of his jeans.
An hour later, he was sitting on a hospital bed while a doctor stitched a cut along his cheekbone. The doctor was a jolly, fat man with a red face and steady hands.
“He got you good, didn’t he?” asked Emile. He stood in the room, watching while they cleaned Tyler up. They’d also given him a healthy dose of Vicodin. He hardly felt anything. The swelling in his eyes had gone down enough that he had some of his vision back, albeit a narrow split of what was normal.
“Pretty good,” Tyler admitted. It still hurt to speak. Jacob had split his lips in two places.
Emile watched the doctor stitch him up. His parents were waiting just outside with the promise that they would be updated after Emile had a chance to speak to his charge.
“You should have told me, Tyler. I could have helped you.”
The doctor gently pressed a bandage along his cheek. “We’ll butterfly these other ones, okay? Sit tight. I’ll send a nurse in and she’ll take care of it.”
He stripped off his gloves and washed his hands at the sink. “Try not to get in any more fights while I’m out, okay?”
The door closed behind the doctor. Emile stepped closer to the examination table and put a hand on Tyler’s back. “I know about your brother,” Emile said. “And I know about his problem.”
Tyler nodded. Though the painkiller was starting to clear away most of the pain, it was leaving him groggy and strange. “How?”
“I’m good friends with your swim coach. He’s been suspicious for some time, and some traces showed up in Jacob’s last drug test. He spoke to me. And this behavior, from a normally shy, kind boy, just confirms it.”
Tyler’s blood froze in his veins. Emile had said he knew what was going on . . . was he referring to all the shit with Jacob? Was that possible?
“I tried to get him to stop.” Tyler’s voice was halting. “I told him I wouldn’t get him any more.”
“Your brother is beyond your help, Tyler. His behavior . . . it was erratic. He was calling me. Making wild accusations about you. And when he didn’t get the response he wanted from me, he went further. We think he may have even submitted bogus information to Crime Stoppers.”
Tyler looked down at the floor, a lump rising in his throat. His parole officer moved his hand to his shoulder. “Am I . . . What’s going to happen?” Tyler asked.
Emile shook his head. “We’ll figure something out. But I’ve got your back on this, okay? I’m not going to let you go down for this when you tried to do the right thing.” He smiled at Tyler. Really smiled. “We’re getting somewhere together, aren’t we?” He patted his shoulder again.
Tyler gripped the edge of the table. Something like relief coursed through his body.
And for some reason, he felt a lot like crying.
Cade
Friday, July 3
Cade paced in the game room, his phone pressed to his ear. The doors were locked, but it was a precaution he hadn’t needed to take. No one ever used the game room. They hadn’t for a long time. The room had died when his mother and sister left. Even the maids didn’t come in here often, and a fine layer of dust lay over the pool table and the vintage pinball machines. A massive television hulked in the corner. An old one. The kind of monster that had been popular before flat screens had been invented, that took four men to even lift.
The line continued to ring.
They used landlines, overseas. At least they did where his sister lived. They didn’t abide cell phones. There were rules. Rules and rules and rules, and that was the price she had paid.
Freedom was a funny, funny thing.
The landline crackled and buzzed, and for a moment Cade was afraid the call had been cut, but then the static cleared, and there was someone at the other end of the phone.
A female voice answered the call politely.
“Hello?”
It was a voice used to getting messages from strangers. It was not primed for familiarity.
“Hey, Mom.”
There was a long pause. “Cade?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” He wasn’t sure who else she might think was on the other end of the line; she’d only had two children.
That he knew of. There were plenty of secrets hiding between all of the dollar signs. Secrets that no one dared even whisper about.
“Does your father know we’re talking?” she asked, her voice hushed, as if he might be listening in somehow.
“No. I just hadn’t talked to you in a while. Or Jeni.” He paused, suddenly nervous. “How is Jeni? I got her letter.”
There was a long, thick pause that told Cade everything. “Great. Jeni is . . . she’s great. She’s happy here, I think.”
His mother should have been a better liar. But she wasn’t.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah.” Cade sat down in one of the theater-style recliners his father had installed back when they were a real family. A puff of dust rose from the chair. “I’m taking a class. Psychology. I’m going tonight, actually. I think I’m going to get an A.”
> “Good for you, sweetheart.” He could hear his mother trying to smile. But it was as if the air had gone out of her, like a week-old birthday balloon with only enough helium left to keep it bouncing along the floor.
“Can I talk to Jeni?” Cade tried to sound less hopeful than he was.
“She’s not having a good day, Cade.”
“Please, Mom. I miss her.”
His mother sighed heavily. “Just a minute.” He heard shuffling on the other end of the phone, and his mother’s voice, gentle and low, like she was soothing a hurt animal.
A moment later, a voice that was familiar and strange all at once was on the line.
“Hello?”
“Jeni? It’s me, Cade.”
“Cade?” She sounded far away. Lost. He was reminded of the time they’d been separated in a Nordstrom, and she’d fallen asleep inside a clothing rack.
Their father had been furious. But he’d almost upended the entire store, just looking for her.
“Yeah. Cade. Your brother.” Was he reminding her? It hadn’t been that long. It wasn’t as if people just forgot they had siblings.
“Hi,” she said. “Hi.”
“Hi.” Cade cleared his throat. “Uh. I got your letter.”
“My letter . . .” She trailed off. “Oh. My letter. Right.”
“You said you were working in a restaurant?”
“Not today.” She was matter-of-fact about this.
“Why not today?” he asked.
“I don’t work when they give me . . . It’s a shot. It’s a special shot. Special medicine. It keeps me.”
“It keeps you?” Cade repeated. His heart sunk. His mother was right. She wasn’t well today.
“It keeps me calm. It’s Zen medicine.” She giggled, but the sound was loose and strange, like whatever had been holding her together was undone.
“Do they have to put you on so much medicine, Jeni?” Cade asked.
She stopped laughing. “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” he repeated. He sister wasn’t his sister anymore. It was just like the last time they’d spoken. And the time before. And the time before that. She was an echo. An empty shell with the same name and the same voice.
But it wasn’t her.
“Cade?” Her voice was mouse-tiny.
“Yeah, Jeni?”
She sounded muffled and tight, and he realized she was crying. “I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”
Cade swallowed hard. “I still love you, Jens.”
“I love you too.”
But then there was some shuffling, and his mother was on the line again. “Cade, you know you can’t upset her like that! The doctors say emotional trauma is what triggers her episodes. Now she’ll have to miss her shift tomorrow in the kitchens. We have to go.”
“Okay, um, can you tell her that—”
But it was too late.
The line was already dead.
Cade stood up and threw his phone angrily into the couch cushions. It bounced off and hit the floorboards, but he didn’t move to pick it up. He crossed to the opposite side of the game room, where there were two large dartboards. A few rogue darts lay along the bottom of the baseboard. He picked them up, collecting seven before returning to a thin blue line painted neatly onto the floorboards.
He threw one. It stuck in the outer edge of the board.
It hadn’t just been a phone call.
He threw another. It bounced off and hit the floor.
The third got the slightest bit closer. It stuck, precariously, along the very edge, and then fell to the floor.
He was looking at his future.
Cade had been there when it happened. He had been there when his sister killed their cousin. He had tried to stop her, but she had a knife and there was blood. A vast, incredible amount of blood that was spilling out of Andrew’s chest, and his sister, screaming and screaming and screaming while his cousin convulsed on the floor.
And died.
Just like Stratford.
Angrily, he threw another dart. It hit the target near the center.
The next two were even closer.
Money was his family’s legacy. But now so was this. The rage. The insanity.
And the murders.
One minute his sister was fine, and then she was odd, looking at movements in the air, taking pills from plastic prescription bottles, and then she was a killer.
That was why she was gone. The choice had been prison or a hospital for the criminally insane, and Jeni was in no shape for prison. She was manic, wild with happiness one moment, weeping the next, and practically shivering with rage in the space of an hour. And then she would have days where she was happy. Kind.
Normal.
And now Cade was her. She was the reason why his father was so harsh with him. Why he had been sent back to the psychiatrist. She was the reason his family had split into two separate units of perpetual disrepair.
And now he was doing the same thing.
He had killed someone.
He was a murderer. And he had been a prisoner in his own family for some time.
For the first time, guilt seeped through the walls he had erected and found its way into his brain. It seeped slowly through his blood until it found his heart and made a nest there.
For the first time, Cade wanted to tell someone.
He threw the last dart.
It didn’t make it to the board. It bounced off the wall and clattered to the floor.
Cade didn’t pick it up.
Ivy
Saturday, July 4
Ivy strolled down the street, watching the black car trail her.
When she went into the coffee shop for a chocolate chip frappe, it parked and waited for her. When she sauntered into the clothing store, it did the same.
She knew who was in the car. She knew who was behind the dark windshield. She recognized it by the state license plate and the small white scratch on the hood where someone had keyed it.
It was her brother’s car.
Daniel.
She pretended not to notice him following her. It wasn’t until she sauntered down to a café, ordered a piece of Red Velvet Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting, and opened a book that he finally left the vehicle, looking left and right repeatedly as he crossed the street, like he was afraid of being followed.
Inside the café, he sat down at the little table across from Ivy.
“Hey, Ivy. Happy Fourth.”
“Hello.” Ivy was very polite. She carefully cut off the tip of the triangular piece of cake. It was sweet and moist and thick and perfect, and her favorite since she was a little girl. She’d tried to get the recipe many times, but the restaurant owner claimed it was a family secret.
“Can we talk?” Daniel put his right ankle on his left knee. His foot jiggled. It was what their father did when he was nervous. Daniel had inherited the habit.
“We’re talking.”
Ivy took another bite of cake. She had been to the café four times in the past week. It was new for her. Before, she had allowed herself two slices of the red velvet per year, and even then, she had only half.
Now, she’d clean her plate, and she would lick her finger and sweep it around the plate to clean up the crumbs.
“We can’t talk here.” Daniel looked left and right again. He leaned forward. “It’s important.”
Ivy considered him, and a heavy blanket of guilt wrapped itself around her shoulders. “Is it as important as my little visit to your place of work?” She cut off a large wedge of cake and stuffed it in her mouth, but suddenly, she couldn’t taste it. It weighed on her tongue like thick kindergarten paste.
“Yes. More. I need to apologize. So can you just come with me? Please? I’ll buy you more cake.”
Ivy eyed the last few bites, but pushed it away. She dropped five dollars on the table. “It’s fine. Let’s go.”
She followed her brother to his car, and they pulled away from the restaurant. For a moment, her heart sped up. Wa
s he taking her to the station? Did they find something? But then he turned left, toward the park instead of the station, and her heart slowed.
“I’ll drop you back at the café,” he promised. “Or wherever you were parked.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Excuse me?”
Ivy fiddled with a thread coming loose from her shorts. “I walked.”
He blinked at her. “That’s, like . . . almost four miles, Ivy.”
“Yeah, well. I needed to work off the cake I was going to eat.”
That was a lie. She didn’t care about eating cake anymore. She walked often. She hadn’t liked driving before, and she especially didn’t now. Mattie used to drive her, sometimes, in his new car before the accident. But she hadn’t spoken to him much since the kiss. She knew it didn’t mean much, but she was afraid she’d just messed things up more by kissing him.
And, deep down, she knew she’d only complicated things so she had something else to worry about. Something else to concentrate on.
Something besides Stratford.
It wasn’t that she wasn’t attracted to Mattie, because she was. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want him, because she did. It was that in that moment, she had needed Mattie, and he had needed her, and they had needed each other. She’d needed someone to understand her. And now, she missed him fiercely, and she hoped he missed her, too.
Daniel cleared his throat. “We needed to talk about something.”
Ivy gripped the seat belt, her nails biting into the smooth material. “Sure.” Her blood was hot-cold. She closed the air-conditioning vents.
“I needed to, well . . . I needed to apologize. And I needed to clear something up, okay?” He put on his blinker and the car moved into the park.
“What?” She watched the trees pass by the window. A group of girls jumped rope in a patch of grass, ponytails swinging. She half smiled.
“I never really thought you had anything to do with it.”
“Then why did you bring me in? Why did you try to scare me and embarrass me?”
His fingers tightened around the gear shift. “Can this stay between us, Ivy?”
She nodded.
“I was trying to draw out Mrs. Stratford. I believe, I know, she had something to do with it. I just can’t prove it just yet. And I knew she was watching you. So I thought if I brought you in, maybe she’d make a mistake. Say too much.”
Secrets, Lies, and Scandals Page 22