Destruction: The December People, Book One

by Sharon Bayliss

  “Our mom gave it to him to use as his object. It’s more powerful as an object than my stone, but I wanted something of my own to build from scratch. The cross comes with built-in magic. Millions of people across the world and across time have used it as their talisman. People sing to it. Speak to it. Put it over the bodies of their dead. It all adds up. But you still have to make it your own, put your own magic in it, or it’s still just an object.” She swished a piece of waffle around her plate with her fork. “You have these in your house,” she said, still looking at her plate.

  “Yes,” he said. “We’re Christian.” He didn’t know if she expected any more explanation.

  “I thought you might understand then, if you saw his,” she added.

  “I do,” he said, even though he wasn’t entirely sure.

  “You have another talisman too.” She put one finger on his hand, on his wedding ring.

  He smiled. “I guess I do.”

  atrick stood at the edge of the family room and watched his “brother” peruse their bookshelf. This strange boy had hijacked the family room. Patrick lingered in the hallway, a good ten feet away, as if Xavier emitted radioactive waves he wanted to avoid. But Emmy blew past Patrick like a stiff wind of cherry vanilla body lotion. She came from behind Xavier and grabbed his arm. He jumped and pulled away, but this didn’t discourage Emmy. She grabbed his arm again and pulled him away from the bookshelf. Patrick wanted to tell her to lay off… because she should… but he didn’t, because he wanted Xavier to know he stood firmly on Emmy’s side.

  “When is your birthday?” she asked him.

  Emmy generally got her questions answered, but Patrick didn’t know if she would this time. Xavier looked at her as if her voice just sounded like an annoying buzz.

  “October 17th,” he said finally.

  “That was just a week ago,” Emmy said.

  He stared at her without response.

  “Happy Birthday, I guess,” Emmy said.

  “Thanks,” he said. He looked at the bookshelf, then back at Emmy and Patrick in turn, to see if the exhausting one-question interrogation had ended. He didn’t know Emmy.

  “Patrick’s birthday is June 25.” She stated the fact with a hint of malice, as if this should upset Xavier.

  Patrick didn’t know why Xavier should care. Xavier already knew he lived with the other family, already knew his father had cheated and lied. Instead, Patrick had the truth poured down his throat with a funnel, over one night.

  “Patrick is only four months older than you,” Emmy said. She stared Xavier down.

  “It’s not his fault when he was born, Emmy,” Patrick said.

  “Did our dad come visit you? How often did you see him? Did you know he had other kids? How long was he with your mom? Did she know he was married? Did you? Did he love her?” Emmy asked.

  “I don’t know,” Xavier said.

  “What do you mean, ‘you don’t know’? Which question are you answering? You have to at least know if he visited you. You know whether or not you know my dad and when you saw him last. It’s a simple question.”

  “He’s your father,” Xavier said. “Ask him your questions.”

  “You’re evading my questions on purpose.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “It is my business, brother.”

  Then Emmy got quiet so suddenly Patrick thought Mom had entered the room. No one except Mom could shut up Emmy like that. But he couldn’t have been more wrong this time. Patrick saw the other half of the weirdo twins, Evangeline. Her wet hair from the shower explained why brother and sister had parted for longer than a few seconds. Evangeline looked at Emmy the way the cat looks at frogs she plans to impale with her claws. Patrick moved between them without realizing he had done it. Xavier did the same thing.

  Emmy didn’t seem bothered by the obstruction or Evangeline’s threatening stare.

  “Why aren’t you wearing the clothes I gave you?” she asked Evangeline. “You’d rather wear the ratty clothes the shelter gave you? You think I want you to wear my clothes? I’m trying to help you.”

  Evangeline didn’t answer. She approached Emmy, and Patrick and Xavier hovered nearby. Evangeline touched Emmy’s arm, as if she poked a mountain lion.

  Emmy gasped and tears streamed down her face as if they had already amassed inside her, waiting to fall.

  Emmy turned to Patrick, rubbing her arm. “She hurt me.”

  Her arm appeared undamaged. “Jesus, Emmy, she’s not even five feet tall. Grow a pair.”

  “No. She hurt me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Forget it. Where’s Jude?”

  Okay, so that’s how it would be. Only Jude could possibly understand the pain of, and defend her from, twelve-year-old girls who lightly touched her arm.

  Patrick followed Emmy to Jude’s room and saw Emmy’s friend Samantha alone in the room with Jude. What a crappy time to be dumped here so her parents could roam around Europe. Samantha looked as if she was made of spun glass and had no business around a horny bull like Jude. Jude lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, and Samantha applied a Band-Aid to his finger, for some reason. She did it way too slowly, as if she wanted the excuse to hold his hand. The sight of her manicured baby-pink nails made him think about how it would feel to have her nails graze his back or run through his hair. It didn’t take much for her to get him excited. And he had to live in the same house with her for a week. Eventually, she’d notice he stared at her like she was an IMAX movie screen. Apply the fucking Band-Aid already.

  Emmy held out her arm to Jude. “She hurt me.”

  At least this caused Samantha to drop Jude’s hand and place hers on Emmy’s arm.

  “The girl?” Jude asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did she do?”

  “She touched my arm, and it hurt me.”

  “How?” Samantha asked.

  “It wasn’t physical pain. It’s like she hurt my feelings.”

  Silence.

  “She made me feel like I was insignificant,” Emmy continued. “Like no one cared about me. And I really believed it. I hated myself. I wanted to hurt myself. It was the freakiest thing I’ve ever felt.”

  Still nothing.

  The accusation sounded completely insane. But Jude looked at her seriously.

  “I’m so sorry,” Samantha said. “What a bitch.”

  Always Emmy’s puppy, Samantha would blindly console her even when she said something completely crazy. Did Samantha actually hear what Emmy had said?

  Emmy started jabbering to them about the injustice of it all. When things went wrong, Patrick thought his siblings secretly loved it. They loved any reason to brood and conspire and stare at the ceiling and have Band-Aids applied for them. As Emmy talked, her cheeks flushed as if nothing in the world exhilarated her more than misery. Patrick figured she really just loved change, good or bad. She wanted things to happen. She loved all kinds of change. New school years. Change in seasons. Change in the weather. Big news events. Bad news.

  Jude and Emmy once made him late for school when they decided to follow a tower of smoke to see what burned. They watched hurricane coverage with the same rapt attention most people gave the Super Bowl. They liked personal disasters, too. Gossip. Scandals. Especially Emmy. Occasionally, Patrick saw Emmy around school with an unlikely new friend. And he could always guess the reason. Something bad had happened to this person. Someone died. Or her father lost his job. Or his brother was arrested. Emmy could sniff out scandal like a shark sniffs out blood.

  He had seen Jude do this, too. When Patrick’s friend Tyler got injured in a car accident, for some reason, Jude wanted to go to the hospital and visit him, along with Patrick. Jude had once thrown Tyler against a locker for looking at him funny, but once Tyler was attached to an IV, Jude collected money at school for a balloon bouquet.

  Emmy and Jude managed to toe the line between creepy people who like to burn ants for fun and Mother
Theresa. Whenever Mom and Dad would let them, they’d volunteer to help disaster victims. Emmy actually started a volunteer chapter of the Red Cross for kids. They would do things such as bring old toys to wildfire victims. Emmy even got on the news once for her good deeds. Patrick suspected Jude and Emmy didn’t want to help people as much as they liked getting a chance to go see the aftermath of disasters. But, the end result remained the same. Someone got helped. A lonely person got a friend. A homeless child got a toy. Did it matter why?

  “She’s evil,” Emmy said, bringing her tirade to conclusion. “Evil. There is something wrong with her. Do you think that’s what she looked like? That girl looks nothing like us. Maybe she’s not even his.”

  “She looks like Nana,” Patrick said. “You know, like from pictures when she was young.”

  “No,” Jude said. “That’s not okay.”

  ‘No’ she doesn’t look like her, or ‘no’ it’s not okay she does? Before now, only one other really bad thing had happened to the family—their grandmother committed suicide. Patrick could still remember what Dad’s face looked like when he found out. That’s when he saw him cry for the first time.

  Thankfully, Samantha sat on the floor now with her legs tucked under her, not touching Jude. She looked as if she wanted to disappear. Patrick didn’t blame her. It really sucked that her parents dumped her here this week of all weeks. He would have been afraid that she wouldn’t come back, if she hadn’t been stuck to Jude and Emmy like a magnet.

  David spent most of Sunday at his office. He always had emails to answer and plans to review. After he had killed as much time as possible, he drove home. He thought Amanda might wear down if he could prove himself an asset to the family. She didn’t want to raise five teenagers by herself. She didn’t like it when he left her with three for a weekend. Maybe he’d start with offering to pick up dinner so she didn’t have to cook. But she didn’t answer his calls.

  He didn’t let the unanswered call stop him. He picked up some pizzas anyway and headed home.

  David rang the doorbell, which felt strange. Amanda opened the door. She looked at him as if she had gotten a phone call from a solicitor at 6:00 a.m. She left the door open and walked back into the house without a word.

  An unspoken invitation? David’s stomach lifted.

  He entered the house and closed the door behind him quietly. He feared she might change her mind and kick him out any minute.

  She waited for him by the stairs as if he had arrived late for a pre-existing appointment.

  “I brought pizza,” he said.

  “Put it in the dining room and follow me,” she said, then walked up the stairs.

  He did as she said, then followed her up the stairs and into his office. She closed the door behind them.

  “We need to discuss some practical details,” she said in the same tone she probably used to read off agenda items during a budget allocation meeting. David half expected her to hand him an agenda and suggest he take careful notes. But he had the feeling he would remember what she would say.

  “I’ve started shopping around for a divorce attorney,” she said. “You should do the same. I really want it to be as quick and painless as possible so it’s easier on the kids. You know how I operate. I don’t care to quibble over stupid details. To the point and done.”

  David had expected it. But that didn’t help at all. To him, it seemed like being told he had only a five percent chance of surviving a disease. That five percent could stretch to hold every second of every day of the forty more years he’d hoped to live. Or, in this case, years he hoped to be married.

  “No. Let’s shop around for a marriage counselor. You can’t just divorce me. We haven’t even talked. We haven’t attempted to save our marriage. You never just give up like that.”

  Amanda chewed on the inside of her cheek unconsciously.

  “Stop doing that. You’ll rip up the insides of your mouth,” David said. “It will hurt when you drink coffee.”

  “Tell me this, David. What kind of woman would I be if I didn’t divorce you? If I hesitate… if we spend months or years in therapy, maybe I’ll… I am not the kind of woman who stays married to a man who cheats on me.”

  “You’re saying you don’t want to try counseling because you’re afraid it might work?”

  “We’re getting divorced. There’s no other option that makes me feel okay with myself.”

  “Do you want to get divorced, or are you just doing it because that’s what you think you ought to do?”

  “Get a divorce attorney, David.”

  David didn’t remember ever changing Amanda’s mind about anything, unless he counted convincing her to try sushi. But he could find plenty of space to live in that five percent chance.

  “Before we move on to the next topic,” Amanda said. “I need you to understand our marriage is over. Nothing I am about to say should give you any hope about us. It’s all about the kids. Period. Do you understand that?”

  David couldn’t bring himself to say yes, or nod. “I hear you.”

  Amanda squinted at him. He expected her to call him on his word play, as she usually did, and force him to say yes. But she let it go.

  “I don’t want you here,” Amanda said. “Just the sight of your shoes in the closet makes me want to cry. Or tear the house down. I hate the thought of having to see you every day. Talk to you. It’s the worst thing I can think of.”

  She paused. Dear God, let there be a ‘but.’

  “You need to move back in,” Amanda said. “Since the guest rooms are full, I figured you could sleep in your office. I need you to co-parent with me, and it looks better to the case manager if our family looks solid. And Evangeline asked me if you could live here.” Amanda stared at the palm of her hand for a long time before she spoke again, as if she had written her lines there in invisible ink. “I couldn’t refuse her.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re my roommate, not my husband. You understand?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “I don’t want any of this.”

  She hadn’t looked him in the eye since they had started talking. She ran her finger along the blue veins lining her forearm, as if noticing them for the first time.

  “I talked to the case manager in Odessa,” she said.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “I didn’t tell her the truth, if that’s what you mean.” Amanda flashed him her blues for a half second, as if she wanted to slap him in the face with her eyelashes. “She told me about what happened to them… and to Crystal. About the tick marks on their backs.”

  She picked up a glass orb paperweight from his desk and balanced it on her palm. The long-ago Father’s Day gift had never looked more like a deadly weapon.

  “I think she’s lying,” Amanda said.

  David weighed her words as Amanda did with the paperweight. “What do you mean?”

  “Or, perhaps, she is mistaken,” she amended.

  “How could she be mistaken?”

  “Crystal Carr,” Amanda said. Her name sounded so odd on Amanda’s lips. Especially… like that. She slung her name at him as a decisive point that could end any argument.

  “What about her?”

  “Crystal was a feminist. She didn’t seem like the type to take a man’s last name, let alone let him abuse her and her children for years. And Odessa? She wanted to move overseas. I’m sure she would have moved at least out of Texas. Really though, she wouldn’t have moved anywhere. She didn’t even like to eat at the same restaurant twice. She would have travelled. She was always looking for something.”

  A tingling sensation shot from David’s fingertips to his earlobes. He felt as if he had fallen asleep halfway through a movie and then woken up and couldn’t follow the story. What the hell had he missed?

  She snapped her fingers in his face. “What’s the matter with you? Breathe.”

  “You knew her?”

  She tightened her hand into a
claw shape and looked as if she might use it.

  “I introduced you, you asshole… or did you forget?”

  “But it wasn’t like that. I remember. It was in the laundry room at your apartment building. It was a Friday night. We went in there to get your clothes out of the dryer before we went downtown. She was in there guarding her clothes while they dried, reading a book. She was drinking something that looked really weird, and I asked her what it was. She said it was bubble tea. You told me her name and told her mine. We both said hi. I asked her if she was going to spend her whole Friday night reading. She laughed at me and didn’t answer. And that was it. You never mentioned her again.”

  Her eyes had narrowed with each word he spoke, and he didn’t realize why until a second before she said it out loud.

  “Oh my God.” She sucked on her tongue as if she wanted to remove a bad taste. “The detail… you remember what she was drinking the first time you saw her?”

  “It’s not a big deal. You’re a big picture person, but I’m more into details. I remember stuff like that. About everything… not just her.” Sort of true, but he hoped she wouldn’t test him. “I remember the details about when I met you, too.” That test, he would pass.

  “Did it start then?” She asked it quietly, as if she hoped he wouldn’t hear and wouldn’t answer.

  “No. Not right away. It was…”

  “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

  “You were friends with her?” he asked.

  “Sort of.”

  “Sort of? You said she never wanted to eat at the same restaurant twice. That must mean you ate at restaurants with her. Which ones? When?”

  “For God’s sake, David, that’s hardly relevant.”

  To David, it seemed critical. Which restaurant they ate at, what they ordered, and what they talked about. He couldn’t imagine any information more interesting—evidence that truly fascinating things happened in the world he knew nothing about. What else happened when I wasn’t paying attention?

  “I’m just saying I knew enough about her to know there is a hole in the story somewhere. She would never let that happen.”