And of course, there was sweet, awkward Jeremy Glass. His eyes were as dark and wise as the earth, but he hid them behind a joker’s mask.
I knew he loved me from the moment we met. But I also knew his love was a weight that would drag us both down. Jeremy was always there when I needed him. But he deserved better than me. I could never provide the kind of love he needed to keep him afloat. I just didn’t have it to give.
Yet, selfishly, I took what I could from him. I made his sweet obsession with me a side dish to Patrick and Ryan. I used him as a back-up flotation device to keep myself from drowning.
I supposed I thought I could go flitting between lovers, like a honeybee gathering pollen, forever. If I stopped, I’d have to look at myself. It was easier to look outside of myself for answers.
I guess I had it coming. Ryan was like a drug I couldn’t kick. His ocean-blue eyes. Perfect lips. Hair like woven sunlight. Body like a god—except those scars he never showed to anyone but me. Scars he said he’d gotten in a boating accident.
I never considered that he didn’t need me the same way I needed him.
That he needed something else.
Last spring, when I’d suspected something was brewing between Ryan and him, I had it out with Derek. I threatened him to get him to stay away from Ryan. Insisted Ryan was mine. But he’d thrown the threats back at me. Told me he’d tell Ryan I was fucking older guys. I’m not sure if he knew about Patrick. Maybe it was just a lucky guess. Spake may be a jerk, but he’s devious and smart. I couldn’t take the chance of Ryan finding out about me and Patrick.
So we were at an impasse, Derek and I.
This past October I caught them. I’d been out walking, looking for branches and twigs for my new art project. They were parked on one of the little-used dirt service roads that run through the nature preserve, the windows fogged up from their breath. I came right up to the car and peered in.
They didn’t see me. But I saw enough. There was no doubt what they were doing in there.
Instead of confronting Ryan, I invited him to dinner at my house. I needed to know if he was serious about Derek, or if it was just a fling. I was well aware of all his past lapses. Who was I to complain, with my track record?
But Ryan always came back to me. I was the default. I was home base.
Mother was out of town for the weekend, as usual, and I didn’t expect her back until Sunday evening. That Saturday night I made roast chicken and potatoes with peas. I lit candles. Poured wine. Dressed in my Pirate Queen outfit. Lit a roaring fire in the hearth.
Ryan smiled at me, candlelight dancing in his eyes. He took hold of my hand.
“I’m always going to love you, Suze. You know that. But I finally realized who I am. And what I need. I’m different. I just never understood.”
I sipped at my wine. I glanced appreciatively at my reflection in the dining room mirrors. The effect was hypnotic, sensual. Yes. I’ve always been able to work my special brand of magic.
“You don’t mean that, Ryan. This is just a phase.”
“It’s not a phase, Suze. I’m gay. I’ve always sort of known it. But, you know, with my dad, I just couldn’t go there.”
I sipped at the wine again and tossed my hair over my shoulder. I was tipsy, on my fourth glass. I’m not sure what I said. I know it was crazy, but I still felt certain he was mistaken. That he wanted me. I leaned over to kiss him, but he pulled away, spilling his wine all over his plate of food.
“I’m sorry, Suze. I didn’t know for sure until I met Derek. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
He was apologizing. Not begging, not pleading. Apologizing.
It was true. Ryan didn’t want me.
But I couldn’t let go. I threw my glass at the wall behind him and stood. I told him that I’d been fucking his father. How his father was the real man, and a better one than he’d ever be.
And that if he broke up with me, I’d tell his father all about him and Spake.
Ryan turned every shade of red imaginable, then whiter than a sheet.
“You’re crazy.”
“I know.”
“Let me go.”
“I can’t.”
Ryan stared at me silently, his lips moving, then stormed out.
I sat at the dining room table, gulped down the rest of the wine bottle, and cried.
Jeremy Now
The white painted roots form a delicate filigree at the edges of Susannah’s death shroud, coiling and twisting toward her abdomen, culminating in a large skull and crossbones.
The poison seed and its toxic roots.
No one murdered Susannah.
She did it to herself.
Nearby, on the tent floor, is the artist’s blade that made the cuts. Leave it to Susannah to end her life methodically and artistically, with the tools of the trade.
I swallow back nausea, but it’s no good.
I’m going to be sick.
I haul myself out of the tent and spew my insides out onto the snow.
Chest heaving, I lie on my back and stare up at the moon, tremors exploding through me in violent spasms.
I’m tired. So tired. I’ll sleep for a moment and then find the strength to go back in there and wrap myself in that filthy blood-encrusted sleeping bag.
No. If I sleep, I’m going to die out here. “I don’t fucking want to join you, Susannah!”
Why did you do this to yourself? Do you want to take me with you?
Darkness steals over the moon and I slip down the rabbit hole of oblivion.
She settles beside me in the snow, silver light glinting in her eyes. She’s never looked more beautiful, and the animal urge inside my dying brain refuses to go quietly. She strokes my hair.
So much power, I think. Enough to give a dying boy a hard-on.
But I have no strength left to act on it. Even within the hallucination, I can feel the life force ebbing out of me.
“It only hurts a little after you cross over,” she says gently.
“Fuck you,” I spit. I hate her. Hate her for turning my love for her into a weapon. If it would do any good, I’d sock her in the teeth, but she’s a ghost, and I can’t move anyway.
“We’ll have so much time together, Jeremy. Isn’t that what you always wanted?”
“I didn’t know what I wanted, Susannah. I was just a horny idiot.”
But I know that isn’t entirely true.
It was just that I loved a different Susannah. The one who didn’t exist.
“No. You were different.”
I take in a shivering breath. My cells are shutting down one by one. This is it. I’m going to die for nothing other than my own stupidity.
Maybe fate always wanted this. I’d cheated death twice before.
Third time’s a charm.
“No. I wasn’t. I was just dumber. Why did you do this?”
Rage shudders through me.
It’s amazing the clarity one has in the moments before dying, I think idiotically as my breaths wind down.
“You used me,” I shout.
A single tear rolls down her cheek. I gulp in one long shivering breath, then fade into darkness as the sky drops down on me.
C H A P T E R
t h i r t y - n i n e
Now (January 13th)
I wake to the sensation of being burned alive. I’m encased in plastic, the ground under me shuddering and grinding. A face peers down at me.
“Good thing you left your leg out there like that, kid, or you’d be a goner.”
I fall back into oblivion, convinced I’m in hell.
I finally realize what’s going on from the newspaper someone has left on the table beside my bed.
MISSING GIRL’S DEATH RULED A SUICIDE.
I don’t have enough strength to read the rest.
But it’s the notebook that has my name on it that tells the truth. Finally.
Inside is just one line.
A link to YouTube.
It takes a few more days
for me to gather the courage to look.
Spake and I visit Ryan every day. He’s making slow and steady progress. He’s up walking, his wavering eyes have begun to focus better, and he’s begun to speak in a slow, halting, and somewhat garbled manner. And he smiles. A lot.
His night terrors are gone.
So are mine.
But I can feel her waiting. Waiting for my final act.
I know how. But Susannah still needs me to know why.
Susannah: Then
I sat at the dining room table, head resting on my arms. When I looked up, Mother stood there, cradling a big white book.
“So,” she said, conversationally. “I just saw Ryan.”
“Oh, God. You were listening?”
“I tried to warn you, Susannah. I tried to help you understand that the Morgans are the devil’s spawn. But what did you do?”
She took a seat beside me, her voice suddenly dropping to a whisper. “Bitch. Slut. I heard everything. Everything.”
She set the book on the table. What I’d thought was a Bible was the furthest thing from it.
Mother opened the book, leafing through page after page of gruesomely defaced photos. She pulled out a firsthand account of the death of her high school sweetheart, written by Jeremy’s long-dead mother, Teresa. The note claimed that Mother’s long-ago boyfriend, Douglas Lewis, was left by Patrick Morgan to die in the icy waters of the reservoir.
I didn’t want to believe it.
Then she pulled an envelope out from the back of the album. On it, she’d printed in her same messy hand. HUSH MONEY.
She pulled out a thick sheaf of photocopied checks, some for as much as $5,000.
“If it isn’t true, why do you think he paid me all this money to shut me up? Who do you think owns the deed to this house?”
I stared at Mother, speechless, as she tossed the envelope with the checks into the fire.
“I’m sick of taking his blood money. Teresa took it, too. But then she stopped. We didn’t talk much, but she called to tell me she was going to go public.”
The blood rushed to my head and I felt dizzy. “What? What are you saying?”
“I’m telling you that the man you have been sleeping with is the monster who murdered the love of my life, and who ran Teresa Glass off the road to her death. And do you want to know why he killed Dougie? Do you?”
I tried to stomp out of the dining room, but Mother grabbed my wrist and squeezed with the strength of a man.
“He killed Dougie because one night, in some town upstate, Dougie watched Patrick rape, then kill, a younger girl. A girl of thirteen. Patrick always liked them young.”
I was sobbing, trying to free myself from her iron grip.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Mother’s voice grew progressively louder, until she was shouting. “To see your demon lover? He’s enslaved you, and now your soul is going straight to hell!”
“You’re crazy!”
“Am I? What do you think of your precious Patrick Morgan now?”
I pulled free and ran up the stairs to the bathroom, threw up my dinner, slumped to the floor, and cried some more.
Patrick Morgan, my savior, my surrogate father, the man I’d come to idolize, was a murderer. A monster. How could someone who could be that cruel truly love me?
He used me. Used me to punish my mother. Tormenting her and extorting her wasn’t enough. He had to destroy me, too.
And Ryan. His love for me was a sham. A masquerade.
What did that leave me with?
Only Jeremy. Who I cared too much about to taint with my poison.
I heard the clomp of Mother’s heels on the staircase as she headed to her bedroom and slammed her door.
In the medicine cabinet, I kept razor blades to refill my shaver. I sat on the tile, the sharp edge hovering a millimeter away from my wrist.
I would have sliced deep into the flesh, severing the vein. I would have bled myself out all over the bathroom floor.
But that would have been too easy.
A plan started to form.
Now:
At last, on the night before I’m to return to school, I click on the link.
Susannah speaks directly into the camera. Directly at me.
“Okay, so you loved me.”
She tightens her ponytail, clears her throat, and looks straight into the camera. Straight at me.
Straight into me.
“That was only because you didn’t really know me.”
Susannah looks away.
“I decided to end it all. Not in a fit of desperation, but in a way that would shame the people who’d wounded me to my core. Maybe, if I was really smart, I’d take them down with me.”
She looks at me again and I shiver at the feral coldness there, and wonder how I never saw this side of Susannah before.
“I had plenty of time to plan.”
A smile curls her lips and it’s even more chilling than her cunning stare.
“And you, Jeremy, would be my unwitting accomplice.
“If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll have unearthed the truth by now.”
She swallows, her voice is cracking. “And maybe, someday, you’ll be able to forgive me.”
Susannah’s image fades to black.
To the tune of a single lilting cello, words write themselves in white script across the black screen.
For Jeremy, with Love and Squalor
The writing fades, and a wavering, white line cuts across the black. Below the line, a single red seed pulses and sprouts hairline-thin roots that fill the black space in an intricate tangle of scratchy squiggles. Curling tendrils pierce the ground and draw a white tree, its branches fanning out like skeletal fingers.
The image dissolves and the cello music fades to silence.
I stare, unable to rip my eyes from the dark screen, paralyzed with emotions I can barely identify.
“Roots,” Susannah’s voice whispers. “You always loved history, Jeremy. But what if that history, and those roots, are the very things that want to strangle you? Drag you down back into the dirt with them? Jeremy, all the roots in this town, all the poison roots have a single poison seed.”
I suck in a breath and begin to shake. I want so badly to shut my computer and turn it off. But I can’t. I hug my arms close to my chest and force myself to listen.
The blackness gives way to Susannah, seated in front of the wrinkled white sheet, alive. So alive.
“I’m sorry for manipulating you, Jeremy. For using your love to get back at the ones who hurt me.”
“And most of all, I’m sorry for the nonsense about raising me from the dead. I hope you didn’t fall for that. When I kill myself, I mean to stay dead. I only threw that in so you’d really believe I was gone.”
She looks straight into the camera and says flatly. “I want you to find Mother’s book. I was going to use it and expose all those roots to the light…but, Jeremy, it wasn’t enough reason to live. I just wanted to end it. And to take them all with me.”
“I knew you wouldn’t rest if you’d thought someone had killed me. That you wouldn’t rest until you’d uncovered every last secret. I’m sorry.”
She looks down, hair falling like a curtain over her face. When she looks into the camera again, her eyes are shiny with tears. “I wish I could have loved you back, Jeremy. But my heart died a long time before I did.”
I turn off the computer and cover myself in blankets, waiting for the dark to claim me, for her to come so I can apologize for not getting it. For missing the gnawing emptiness behind the radiant smile.
But she never does.
E P I L O G U E
Now (April 7th)
Once the ground thawed enough, we chartered a boat and buried Susannah on her island, the island Celia Morgan bought from the state and had officially renamed “Pirate Island.”
With Spake’s help, Ryan shuffled up to the grave’s edge and tossed the silver Kabbalah pendant on to
p of the traditional Jewish oak coffin I insisted she be buried in.
“Ashes to a-a-ashes, d-dust t-to dust,” he said in his faltering stutter. And I began to shovel in the dirt that would fill her grave.
In his own way, I guess Ryan really had loved her, too.
Beside Susannah’s three-spired sculpture, we’d installed a simple headstone that read:
Here lies the Pirate Queen. At peace at last.
But, sadly, I know that isn’t true.
Not yet, anyway.
Trudy Durban was declared unfit to stand trial. In jail, her weak hold on reality tore loose and she slipped completely into madness, her ravings about murders and devils ignored. Strangely, the day after her commitment to the psych ward, Trudy Durban’s house mysteriously burned to the ground, the evidence of Patrick Morgan’s crimes gone up in smoke along with the last traces of Trudy Durban’s sanity.
In the end, Patrick Morgan got to take his good name to the grave, his esteemed memory marked by a statue of his likeness erected by a grateful town.
What waits for him on the other side, who can say?
I’ll never know if Patrick Morgan really did drive my mother off the road or if she was driven to madness by her own personal demons.
I’m happy to let her rest in peace.
With the poisonous tree cut down, the roots are better left buried. Let some future historian dig them up.
For me, at least, the drowning dreams have stopped.
At my dad’s, Celia’s, and Marisa’s insistence, I’ve been attending Teen-Anon meetings three times a week.
And though there are times I would have cut off my other leg for a just a sip, I haven’t had a single drop of alcohol in four months.
Often, I walk down to the reservoir and gaze at Pirate Island. On clear nights, when the moon is blazing over the water, I think I see her waiting by the shoreline, her dress rustling in the breeze, and my stomach twists in knots.
Breaking Glass Page 27