Damage Done

by Amanda Panitch

  Michael shook his head and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. I looked over the room. Aside from the scene on the couch, everything was white.

  Except…

  Spatters of red led toward the staircase. I didn’t think they were from the dead guy; there was no way he could have moved anywhere after that wound. I jerked my head at the blood spatters, and Michael nodded slowly, heavily, glancing at the gun in my hand from the corner of his eye. I knew he didn’t like it, but it wasn’t as if he had a better idea.

  And he trusted me.

  Together, we set off after the spatters. We had to move quietly—those spatters suggested injury, but not necessarily a mortal one.

  I was glad for the warmth of Michael’s palm in mine.

  Upstairs was just as white as the downstairs. I’d thought it was modern at first, but now the endless expanse of nothing was beginning to unnerve me. The bloody trail continued. I felt like Hansel and Gretel must have felt, following some especially macabre bread crumbs.

  The spatters took us to a closed door at the end of a hallway—a bedroom, I assumed. I squeezed Michael’s hand. He squeezed back, shooting a jag of strength up my arm, through my shoulder, and straight into my heart. I squared my shoulders, clutched the gun in my other hand, and kicked open the door.

  The second guy waited inside. I lowered the gun. He’d be no threat in his current state. He stretched half on, half off the bed, his legs—one mangled, one whole—resting on the floor, his head and arm resting on the blankets, the bloody hole of his chest propped up against the bedside. My best guess was that he’d been shot with something heavy in the shoulder downstairs—probably someone aiming for the chest and missing—and then shot in the knee later. The shooter had finished with an accurate shot to the chest. Michael released my hand; I glanced over to see him retching again. The air was cold against my palm. I listened hard, but there was no sign of the shooter.

  The shooter. Who was I kidding? My brother. There was no sign of my brother.

  I took another step into the room. I was looking for something. I wasn’t sure what, but there was something here.

  I found it on the other side of the bed. A photo. The same one I had in my bag.

  I wondered how he’d gotten a copy. It wouldn’t have been hard for someone to find it. Julia Vann had had it as her profile picture a while back. It was a good picture.

  I wondered why he’d left it behind. Saliva lodged in my throat. I folded the photo into tiny fourths and stuffed it in my pocket.

  Footsteps sounded behind me. Michael. “What was that?” he asked, his voice strangled.

  I swallowed. “Nothing,” I said. “I thought I saw something, but it was nothing.”

  —

  The rest of our time in that house passed in a blur. Somehow Michael and I found our way out of that room and back down those stairs and back through the living room and out the front door, which we left hanging open behind us like a missing tooth.

  Michael had his phone out by the time we reached the car, but he looked too petrified to speak. I laid a hand on his arm to stop him anyway.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. Guess I was wrong.

  “Don’t call the police.”

  He looked at me like I was crazy. Ha. I was getting there. “Of course we have to call the police,” he said, speaking slowly and moving his lips in big, exaggerated shapes that served to annoy me more than anything else. “Those men in there were dead. They were…murdered. And there’s a dangerous—” He caught my eye. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I said. “My brother is dangerous. But if we call the police right now, they’ll suck us up into questioning. They’ll want to know what we were doing here. How we knew to come here. How we knew those men. And even if we tell them we had nothing to do with it, who’s to say they’ll believe us?”

  “My dad is one of them,” Michael said. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, up and down. It was hypnotizing. “The police are good. They wouldn’t—”

  I found his hand and squeezed, which stopped the words clean in his throat. “Once your parents find out who I am, where I brought you today, do you really think they’ll let us be together?” I said softly. “Especially with your dad being a cop.”

  Up and down. Up and down. “My dad would never…” I didn’t even have to squeeze his hand; he trailed off on his own.

  “Exactly,” I said. “So we say nothing. Someone will realize what happened eventually.” Like the good doctor and his friend. I couldn’t imagine they wouldn’t be checking in with these guys every day or two. “If a few days go by and we don’t see it in the news, we can make an anonymous call from a pay phone.”

  “Okay,” Michael said. “I trust you.”

  I squeezed his hand again. “Don’t worry.” And then, to myself as much as to him, “Everything will be okay.”

  That might have been what the two kids trapped under Mr. Walrus had thought. They couldn’t move. They couldn’t run. They had to lie there—reports say for three full minutes—as Mr. Walrus soaked them in blood and agonize as my brother grunted and strained, trying to roll Mr. Walrus over. He finally managed. Their names were Sophie Grant and Penelope Wong. They were freshmen and I had only spoken to them once before that period.

  And then, with everybody dead or dying around us, my brother and I had twelve minutes alone.

  * * *

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF DR. ATLAS SPENCE

  * * *

  Re: Ryan Vann, age 10

  Ryan Vann is no longer a client. This will be my last entry on the subject.

  After the fire, we—Ryan’s parents and I—bumped up his sessions here to once a week. I met with him twice. Both times, I noted that he appeared to have regressed. He barely spoke; when I pressed him to speak, he gave me only one-word answers.

  I was frustrated, to say the least. But I certainly wasn’t prepared for what happened this afternoon.

  Which is to say, simply, that he didn’t show up. His mother came instead.

  “Dr. Spence,” she said, “I’m sorry this is so last-minute, but I need to cancel Ryan’s appointment.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. “When shall we reschedule?”

  The corner of her mouth twisted. “We’re actually going to switch to a different psychologist,” she said. “Ryan told us he feels uncomfortable with you after his last session.”

  I thought back to his last session. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened: I’d asked him how he was, how things were going, how he was doing in spelling, had he killed any small animals lately. Ryan had responded fine, fine, fine, no, and stared at the floor. We’d spent the last fifteen minutes in silence, me waiting for him to talk, him daring me to.

  “How so?” I said.

  She looked distinctly unsettled. “Look, Doctor,” she said. “I know he’s a liar, and what he said probably isn’t true, but he’s still my child, and I can’t—”

  “What did he say I did?” I interrupted. “Lying is a hallmark of conduct disorder. If he said I behaved in an inappropriate manner, I can assure you it isn’t true.”

  “I know it probably isn’t true,” she said miserably. “But I still can’t…He couldn’t even tell me. He was too embarrassed. He told his sister, and Julia had to come to me.” She shook her head. “When your child tells you that, you can’t put them back in a room with that person. As a mother, I just can’t.” She was already moving toward the door.

  “We can have supervised sessions,” I bargained, following. “An aide can sit in with us if Ryan is willing.”

  She didn’t stop. “Goodbye, Dr. Spence.”

  I stood and watched her go. She grew smaller in my view, her shoulders slumping and her hair hanging forward, as if she were crumpling in on herself. “Mrs. Vann!” I called after her. “He’s going to grow up and do something terrible if we don’t continue these sessions. Kids like this don’t just spontaneously recover.”

  And still she didn’t stop. />
  As I file this in Ryan Vann’s folder, all I can say is that, for the first time, I hope I’m wrong.

  My brother was looking for me. He was going to find me. Two weeks after Michael and I drove away from the dead men as quickly as we could, that was one of the things I knew for sure.

  The dead men in the house popped up on the news the day after we returned to Sunny Vale. I spent the first week back in a state of paralyzing panic, freezing every time the school loudspeaker crackled to life or the doorbell at home rang, afraid the police had found a footprint or a trace of DNA that they’d pinned to me and Michael. But they never came. I had remembered to wipe doorknobs, and it seemed our car hadn’t been spotted by any neighbors. True, Michael had left some congealed stomach contents behind, but the police didn’t have the technology they had on TV. They couldn’t trace it back to him without something to compare it to. We were safe, or so I hoped.

  That second day back after Elkton, I distracted myself from my constant state of anxiety by going to apologize to Alane. She didn’t show up to school on Monday, so my mom was kind enough to drop me off at Alane’s house the next morning. “I am the worst friend in the world,” I said through tears as soon as she opened the door. “I can’t believe I just left you there at the hospital. If you close the door in my face right now, I totally won’t blame you.”

  I stood and waited for her to close the door in my face. Not because she was so angry at me, but because she now knew who I really was.

  She didn’t close the door in my face. Instead, she burst into tears, too. Now we made a matching pair. Collectibles. “I Googled you,” she said. “I can’t believe what you’ve been through.”

  We might have stood out there all day, except that her neighbors were beginning to leave for work, and so there were some stares. “Come in,” she said, and turned her back to limp inside.

  Turning her back to me so blithely? Trusting me not to stab her or shoot her or strangle her or whatever everybody back home thought I’d do?

  That meant more to me than the open door.

  I cried on her shoulder. She cried on mine. Tears got everywhere. It was soggy. “I feel like such a jerk,” I said. “I mean, I was a jerk. You were in the hospital, and I was acting like such a jerk, and I just ran off, and—”

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe I didn’t know,” she said. “Did that guy have something to do with your brother?”

  I closed my eyes. I knew I could tell her the truth. “He’s missing,” I said. “My brother. And he’s awake. We don’t know where he is.”

  She rubbed circles into my back the way a mother would do. Not my mother, of course, but maybe a different mother, to a different child. “It’ll be okay,” she said. “It’ll be okay.”

  The second week brought the police. I nearly choked on my own lungs when I woke up one morning and opened the window to see a black car idling out front, two androgynous figures in suits reclining in the front seats. Not Goodman and West, I saw when I squinted. Two other people I could only assume were cops.

  They didn’t come for me, though. Or for Michael. We were still safe.

  No, they were clearly looking for my brother. The word was out, and suddenly there were men and women in black suits everywhere I looked. They must have thought my brother would make a beeline for me. I hadn’t seen him. I wished them luck.

  Fortunately, the police were keeping quiet about my brother’s escape. The police clearly knew he was on the loose, but the news and the papers and the Internet hadn’t picked it up. Slowly I let myself breathe.

  At the end of that second week, early on Saturday morning, my mom knocked on my door and, without waiting for an answer, stepped into my room. From the way she was wringing her hands, I could tell she had bad news. “Bring it on,” I said. Whatever she had to say couldn’t be worse than what I was thinking.

  My mother perched on the end of my bed. She stared at me, but her eyes kept flickering away to take in the crumbs on my desk and the dirty clothes scattered over my floor. She sighed. “Lucy, I have some bad news. Do you remember your and…and…your old psychologist, in Elkton?”

  My stomach turned to ice. “Dr. Spence?” Oh no. He’d talked. He was back. He was coming for me.

  “Yes.” My mom scooted closer and laid a hand on a lump in the blankets she probably assumed was my knee. It was actually a bag of chips, but close enough. “He was found dead in his home. Out here, actually, near Sunny Vale. He must have moved. Didn’t you say you saw him once?”

  The ice moved up my chest, turning my skin cold and clammy. I didn’t answer her question. “Do they know what happened?”

  My mom sighed, and the corner of her mouth twitched. “The police say it looks like…that it looks like…” She sighed again, and she looked down at her lap. “Like it was murder. Like it was…like it was…”

  She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to. We both knew what she was trying to say.

  “That sucks,” I said. My voice trembled. “Does it look like he’s…”

  “They’re going to be watching our house,” my mom said. “In case Ry—” She changed course abruptly. “It does suck. It sucks hard.”

  I cocked my head. I’d never heard her speak like that before. She’d probably leave the room and go wash her mouth out with soap. “Thanks for telling me,” I said.

  She moved away. I kind of hoped she’d try to pat my knee again, but no luck. “You’re welcome,” she said. Or even pat the bag of chips. She could’ve tried to pat the bag of chips again, and that would have been just fine.

  I had two pictures left of my brother now. I kept them behind my underwear drawer, and I kept my brother in my mind. I was ready for him.

  —

  Monday morning I climbed into Alane’s car, books cradled in my arms. “How’s Michael?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said. “I think.” I hadn’t seen him since our trip to Elkton. Well, I’d seen him, of course, at school. That was unavoidable. But every time he’d tried to talk to me, or to kiss me, I’d turned away. He’d even shown up at my house a few days ago, ingredients for chicken noodle soup in hand. I’d had my mom tell him I wasn’t home, but he’d looked up before he got into his car and seen me watching him from my bedroom window.

  She looked at me sadly. “He really likes you, you know.”

  “I know. Even though he knows who I really am.”

  She gasped. “He does?”

  “Yeah.” But he still liked me. He really shouldn’t. I’d had two boyfriends back in Elkton: Evan, whose blood probably still soaked the band room floor (they would have changed the carpet, of course, but blood doesn’t come out of concrete; I knew that from experience), and before him, Aiden Williams. Aiden had met his end in a tragic car accident. Totally unavoidable. Or so the police said. “But my brother is out there. And my boyfriends don’t fare so well when my brother is around. I can’t put Michael at risk.”

  “Ah. Right.” A spasm of fear contorted her face for a moment, and I remembered: my best friends didn’t fare so well when my brother was around, either. “Do you think…what do you think is going to happen?” Her knuckles were white on the steering wheel.

  I knew what would happen, or at least what my brother hoped would happen, because I knew the inside of my brother’s head as well as I knew mine. Better, maybe.

  Right now he was searching for me. I would literally be willing to stake my life and Alane’s life on that. He’d probably hide out, lie low for a while, after Spence’s murder, but then he’d come for me. I didn’t think he’d be so bold as to steal a car, because he’d want to take as few chances as possible to avoid ending up back in police custody. That would be fine with him. He was patient. Maybe he’d steal some kid’s bike, or buy a bus ticket. I could even picture him walking, his curls matted with dust from the side of the road. Slowly but surely, he’d make his way to me once again.

  Assuming he could. Goodman and West had talked about Ryan being in rehab. I didn’t know w
hat that meant. He might not be anything like he had been. Which could be a good thing.

  Once he was here, though (assuming he made it), there were a few more possibilities. Like I said, he was patient; he wouldn’t storm into homeroom, shouting drunkenly and waving his arms around. He would sit, and he would watch, and he would figure out the best time to strike. And by strike, I mean make himself known. He might want to start over, maybe disguise himself, move in with us as a cousin or a family friend or a tragic, pathetic orphan. No, not that. Ryan was many things, but he was not pathetic, or at least he’d never, ever see himself that way. No matter what, I knew he’d want me. It was just the matter of what he wanted from me. If what he wanted from me was something I could give. If he was angry I’d moved on without him.

  There was another possibility, but I couldn’t even think about that.

  And then it struck me: it had been too long. He wasn’t quite so predictable anymore. He might have changed wherever he’d been the past year, or, more importantly, his feelings for me might have changed. I couldn’t wait for him to find me. I’d have to find him first. I had to find him and be absolutely sure he wasn’t planning on doing anything stupid. I had to keep Alane and Michael safe. And I had to keep Ryan safe from the police. No matter what he’d done, he was still my brother, and I still had to talk to him. I still loved him. I couldn’t let them kill him. Not now that he’d sprung back to life.

  “I think everything is going to be okay,” I said. I’d find another ride home today.

  She didn’t respond, only turned back to the road, her face expressionless. Without her customary smile and enthusiasm, her cheeks were ashy and her lips thick. I turned my attention to the black car trailing us and waved in the rearview mirror. The black suit didn’t wave back.

  As soon as we parted ways after homeroom, Alane’s smile back but a little shaky, I saw Michael waiting for me in the hallway. Well, he was talking to a few of his friends, swaggering high fives all around, and very deliberately not looking at me, but I could see he noticed me from the way his eyes flickered and the way his chest pointed in my direction. Body language—he should learn how to mask his.