Delusive

by Courtney Lane

I didn’t peg her as a woman who would secede her crown to someone else. Of all the things she had told me, not once did she say she loved her husband. With the push to get into the drug business, I knew she wanted her husband to go down. With the way Elias hated her, she was in desperate need of someone in her son’s life to manipulate him.

  There was only one reason for her to do all that she had done. The woman had no plans to retire from the empire that she had and would continue to build.

  The things Elias had told me the night we came up with a plan together were all true. He had said his mother wanted him to be her lackey to do the dirty work, the things which appealed to his more volatile nature. But he couldn’t agree with where she wanted to take the business. He didn’t know his mother wanted to use me to get him to see a different side of things. She was wrong if she thought I’d do it as payment in receipt of her help.

  For now, I’d play nice and see where the path toward making her think I aligned with her would lead me.

  “What is your definition for gratitude?” I asked.

  “When you meet with Roth again, you’ll want to hate me. You’ll get over it. When you do, I want you to take down my bastard of a fucking husband once and for all. I want you to have your revenge. Every last bit of it.”

  I no longer questioned whether or not Kirsten ever loved her husband, and I no longer questioned all the things that Elias—or for that matter, my father—had told me. The key to uncovering all of my parents’ secrets was right in front of me and its name wasn’t Kirsten Cari.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  THE PARKWAY BEHAVIORAL AND Rehabilitation Hospital was a private facility in the greater Las Vegas area. The lobby was clean and spacious with a large intake desk situated at the far wall wedged between secure doors at either side that led to the patient and hospital areas. A waiting area was offset in the corner of the lobby with lockers that could only be accessed with digital codes.

  “May I help you?” a receptionist asked.

  “I’m here to see Roth Cari,” I told her.

  “I need the patient’s code and your identification.”

  I gave her the number Kirsten had written underneath the address and slipped my identification from my wallet.

  “You’re not permitted to take any personal items in with you.” She pointed to the lockers and typed a few things on her keyboard. Peeling a stick-it note from her yellow pad, she wrote a series of numbers on it. “You can lock up all your belongings in the lockers while you’re visiting the patient.” She slid the paper over the desk to me. “This is your access code to locker 42. Don’t lose it.” She looked over my identification and typed a few things into the computer.

  Done with whatever she needed to do with my identification, she handed it back to me along with a laminated visitor’s badge that had a sticker with today’s date placed on the top right hand corner.

  After I locked up my belongings in one of the lockers, a man in blue scrubs appeared from one of the doors and ushered me inside the hospital. As he led me to the far end of the hall and ran through the rules and regulations of what I could and couldn’t do while visiting Roth, the din coming from the patients and employees served as chaotic background music.

  He herded me through the recreation room, which reminded me of a high school cafeteria, and out the doors at the far side of the room. The large backyard was fenced with beds of faux turf and a mix of jacaranda, lemon, and bottle trees.

  The orderly pointed to a man, sitting on a bench between two trees, providing shade from the unobscured sun. I gave myself a minor pep talk before I approached him. A plain-clothed nurse sat with him, reading a hardcover edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to him.

  She glanced at Roth and stood. “Rachel,” she introduced herself and shook my hand a little too firmly.

  “Hanley,” I told her.

  She asked for his patient code, before she said anything further. I quickly gave it to her. “It’s nice to see him get a visitor. You won’t get much talk from him. His brain was damaged by the trauma and it affected his speech and fine motor skills.”

  “Trauma? He was…?”

  “Attacked.” Her eyes widened as she examined me. “It was lucky that someone found him and got him care. They never found the man who did this to him.” She sighed mournfully. “I think the person who found him was the one who admitted him here.”

  “Kirsten Cari?”

  “I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “Without access to his records right now, I can’t be sure. I don’t want to guess and be wrong.”

  “Will he ever get better?” My hand shook as I looked over at Roth. I could only see the back of his head and wasn’t sure if I could go through with what I needed to do. There was a tinge of guilt that told me I was the reason he was in this state.

  “One can hope.” She glanced at him for a moment. “I’ll be right over there.” She pointed to a bench underneath the tree, a few yards from where we stood. “Don’t push him too hard to talk. He tends to get a little agitated if he’s frustrated.” With a nod, she left us alone.

  I rounded the bench, giving Roth a little nervous wave. His brown eyes were fixed on a location in space. His curly black hair was in need of a haircut and hung in loopy curls down his face and neck. One side of his hair was shorter than the rest. As I examined the shorter side of his hair, I could see scars left over from stitches and a wound in his bronze skin.

  If the nurse in New York was right in stating my father checked him out somehow—and now knowing the true nature of the man who raised me—I knew my father tried to stop Roth from telling me the truth about Frankie. My father was telling the partial truth on a day that would be forever etched in my history as the last time I saw my father alive. He’d said he killed him, but the operative word “tried” was missing from his admission.

  The moment I sat down, he clutched the drawing pad on his lap and gripped his blue pen with a complexion-draining grip.

  “It’s Leina, Roth,” I said quietly and slid my hand over his. Forgetting about all the awful things he’d said to me and the way we treated each other, I gave him my empathy. “I’m so sorry for what my father did to you.”

  He continued to stare into space, unmoved. His jaw firmed and his lips pursed together. Lips that he once quipped about us sharing. He claimed they were of the same size and shape, but his comparison was meant to be an insult instead of a compliment.

  “Kirsten Cari told me to come here and…I got your message.”

  Having trouble, Roth tried to open the sketchpad. I leaned over and opened it for him. The pen rattled severely in his hand. Unable to maintain a grip on it, he dropped it to the ground.

  I picked it up from where it landed in the grass and guided his hand over the slim plastic. He held it as if he meant to stab something with it, clutching it in his closed fist. He began to draw, disproving a little about what Rachel had said about his fine motor skills. At first they seemed like a bunch of lines, but as he began to shade, I realized he was drawing a blue rectangle.

  Nodding at him, although he couldn’t look at me directly, I affirmed I received his message. “The blue packets of poison?”

  He finally looked at me, but his gaze was so distant I wasn’t sure if I was in the way of what he really wanted to look at it. He blinked twice, purposefully, and leveled his eyes to the ground.

  When we were together, he would try to joke with me when I gave him the silent treatment after one too many times of him calling me a worthless bitch. “Blink twice for yes,” he would say before trying to make me laugh by tickling me until I spoke to him again.

  I tore the sheet from the pad and clutched it in my hand. “I know my father fed poison to my mother’s husbands. I also…found out my father lied to me about Frankie. I know he attacked you because he didn’t want you tell me the truth about my mother being long gone.”

  His head lolled around as if he had trouble keeping control of it. He brought his trembling hands to his head and mad
e himself shake his head. The pad and the pen slipped off his lap and fell to the ground.

  “That’s not true? Then, why…did he try to kill you?”

  He pointed to me with a trembling finger. “K-kill…y-y-you.”

  I blinked, my eyes watering, hoping I didn’t hear him right.

  “U-use y-o-ou. K-k-i-ill y-you.” He held his head to shake it again. His hand trembled as he reached for the pen on the ground. He stuttered the word protect and seemed stuck on a syllable that began with the letter S. When he finally said it, his enunciation made it difficult to understand what the word was.

  “I don’t get it. Why would he…” I looked down at the drawing in my hand, feeling a pounding headache occur behind my eyebrows. “Are you saying that he was going to use the poison on me?”

  “You.” The word was carried on the wind in a whisper.

  I began to stare at Roth, who kept staring blankly back at me. I put the pieces together and took a wild guess at what he meant. “Are you saying I killed Frankie’s husbands? I didn’t have anything to do with it. Why would you say that?”

  He dropped his chin to his chest and began to moan at an intoning volume.

  “Shh. Please calm down.” I squeezed his hand and glanced around, paranoid someone would separate us before I got any answers.

  He yanked his hand back from me and began to rock. The louder his moans became, the more erratic his movements were. The orderly rushed over, ready and able to restrain him. He continuously screamed the word I couldn’t understand earlier over and over again.

  When I returned to my car, I said it over and over again, until it evolved into something that made sense: “Sister.”

  “Protect Sister.”

  THE CAR MY father died in, the car that penetrated my mind with fragments of painful memories, stood before me in a storage space in a rural town just outside Ipomoea. It was my last chance to make sense of what Roth had said—to make sense of things that didn’t make any sense. If I had blocked anything, the car I couldn’t bring myself to ever drive would be the key to unlocking it. I’d had it transported to a storage facility just outside Ipomoea until I could figure out what I wanted to do with it. Now it was time it did something worthwhile.

  I took a drive away from the coast, navigating through the obscure back roads with very little to no traffic until I found a long stretch of straight road. Initially, I maintained a slow speed. My hands shook, having trouble maintaining their grip on the steering wheel and the gear shift. The leather bucket seats felt like they were covered in embers, deeming it impossible to find any semblance of comfort.

  Ignoring my fear, I did what I hadn’t been able to do in years. My mother used to do it while I was in the car and she felt anxious or antsy. Back then, I thought it was a part of her nature to be a free spirit and a daredevil. Now, I knew it was because she wanted an escape, and maybe she wanted an end to motherhood; after all, she never made me or my sister wear our seatbelt. The façade of a good life with my parents was continuously falling apart in front of my eyes. The fuzzy and fairytale-like memories became clearer, unleashing the bitter truth.

  The last time she had me in her Nova, she did something that nearly killed us—board-shifting. You couldn’t do that with more modern cars, but with the classic, specifically the Nova, you could. To keep acceleration, you kept the accelerator to the floor and shifted like a mad person to maintain speed.

  I did just that, pushing in the accelerator all the way down, speeding increasingly and I continued to shift without the clutch. I began to remember all the things I tried to suppress. They cut into my memory like tiny pinpricks, flashing scenes of things I’d long suppressed or refused to remember.

  I remembered her death. I remembered the impact of her being hit as she exited her vehicle after her wreck. I remembered watching her fly into the air and land several feet forward on the track. It should’ve been impossible to hear over the loud roar of the motors, but I remembered hearing something crack. I remembered the pool of blood. I remembered screaming.

  I remembered what I had forgotten.

  The door to the mansion seems ominous in size. I’m twelve years old, standing hand-in-hand with my sister. My father is behind us, jittery, nervous. My mother opens the door and the smile on her face begins to fade.

  “Your children,” my father snarls. “Remember them?”

  She puts on a fake smile and feigns she’s happy to see my sister and me. I believed it then, but recalling the scene with adult eyes, I knew she was less than pleased. She bent down to crouch to my height and took my sister’s hand to pull her to stand at her side. “I can’t take both this weekend,” she says, staring at me. “Your father should’ve told you. I’ve been busy.”

  “You can make time for both of them.” My father points at her face and twists his mouth into a frown. “They haven’t seen you in months, Frankie.”

  She stands up straight to stare at my father, sharing the same look of disgust he has on his face. “This isn’t about them, Marcus. Just another excuse for you to stalk me.” She brushes past my sister and me. Grabbing my father by the shoulders, she begins to shove him. She doesn’t stop until he gets angry and marches down the driveway. At the end of the drive, they argue with one another.

  My sister and I watched them bicker at each other. It’s too quiet to understand what they’re saying at first, but then their volumes increase, allowing me to listen in.

  “You think I loved you?” my mother questions. “I never loved you. You’re nothing to me but the father of my children. Do the job I paid you to do and take care of them. I can’t have them around this husband, especially not Leina. He doesn’t really like kids.” She pokes him in the chest repeatedly, making him jerk with every assault. “I’m onto you, Marcus. I know you’ve used Leina and what you’ve talked her into doing. Congratulations, you bastard. You’ve succeeded in ruining her. She’s going to grow up and be just like you—a monster. Thank God Holden has more of me than she does you. She’s going to make up for the disappointment you’ve turned Leina into. If you want to leave a child here, leave Holden. You can have Leina.”

  “You’re so angry.” My father sobs and roughly pushes his tears away from his cheeks with his palms. “You’re saying things you don’t mean. They’re lies. I would never do anything to hurt you or our kids. I know you still love me. I know you love our kids. Both of them”

  “I hate the part of them that you share. I’ve only loved one man in my life…and it was never you.”

  My father balls his fists and begins shaking in anger. “If you loved him so much,” he spits at her, “why did you give up his son?”

  “Is that what this is about? If you’re so upset about it, how can you two be friends? How can he be friends with you knowing—”

  “Because he never loved you, Frankie. Why else would he have annulled his marriage so fast, so that he could marry your friend—the friend who doesn’t even love him. He may not have loved you before, but I can guarantee he hates you now.”

  “No,” my mother gasps, “what have you done? I’ll move again until he realizes the truth. He won’t ever find me until he finds out about that bitch he married, and that she’s lying to him. He won’t find our son, either. I made goddamn sure no one would after what was said about me and my son. That bitch made him walk away from me while I was pregnant, because she told him Roth wasn’t his—but yours. He will see the truth someday. I will make goddamn sure of it.

  “And you? I rue the day I ever made the mistake of having a one-night stand with you. A bigger mistake to let you fool me into sleeping with you again two months after Holden was born. I was stupid and insecure, thinking my body was ruined after the pregnancy and that I needed you. I never needed you. I hate you. Had I never showed you a second of fucking weakness, you wouldn’t be able to hold the girls over me. You wouldn’t have ruined my body and my life with those kids.”

  My father clutches his heart, his is face pained as though she�
��d slapped him. He turns and marches down the drive, heading to where he parked the car down the street, leaving me with the woman who didn’t really want me there in the first place.

  MY SPEED WAS so fast that the speedometer had turned around and started counting from zero again. It read forty miles per hour, which meant I was pushing one-hundred and sixty. The force pushed me back into my seat and everything around me was a stream of indecipherable scenery. I clutched the steering wheel fiercely, because any small movement would’ve sent me off the road. I knew I would have to slow down soon—I could feel the car wanting to lift against the heavy winds.

  I felt sick to my stomach, knowing Roth was my half-brother. My father knew from the beginning and never said anything to me. Was it that he hated my sexuality so much, he’d prefer to see me with someone related to me rather than to see me with a woman? Or did he know Roth’s relation to me was a tiny thread that led to bundle of a tangled mess that would’ve brought the world he created—the world he made me believe was real—tumbling down on his head. The discovery of the truth would have ruined our relationship. He would no longer have me, the pawn who gladly made moves across a dangerous board, to do everything he asked of me.

  In either case, my father had more than one reason to try to kill Roth.

  I couldn’t slow down, even if it meant going faster would flip the car. I couldn’t stop until I remembered it all.

  “I don’t want to do it anymore, Dad,” I sob over the phone as I clutch the blue packet of sugar in my hand. I look at the door to the den, making sure I’m alone in husband number four’s office. “It makes them really sick. I think it makes them die. Frankie really loves this one. She told me so.”

  “She lied to you if she said she loved him,” my father says from the other end. “What have I told you about letting your emotions rule you? Dry your tears and do this one last favor for me.” He hangs up the phone.