by Katy Regnery
Hope buckles her seat belt, and I do the same, turning to her.
“What do you think about me trying the Knife Edge?”
She had shifted into reverse, but as she jerks her head to face me with a shocked expression, she pushes the gearshift back into park. “I’d ask if you have a death wish.”
Jem’s favorite way to summit the mountain was on a trail called the Knife Edge. And yes, parts of the trail were only three feet wide, with a steep drop-off on either side. And yes, the trail had claimed twenty-three lives over the past five decades. But I am here. And I am desperate to walk as closely in Jem’s footsteps as possible.
“Have you done it?”
She nods, her face stony. “Yes.”
“Then why can’t I?”
Hope turns away from me and backs out of the parking space. “Because, like my brother, I’ve been climbing Katahdin since I was ten.”
“I did some challenging climbs with Jem,” I say. “He took me to Yosemite every other weekend. I climbed Glacier Point.”
“Via the Four Mile Trail?”
“Yeah.”
“Right. That’s a strenuous trail to a peak under a thousand meters high.”
“And . . .?”
“What comes after strenuous on a trail rating?”
“Very strenuous.”
“Uh-huh. Then what?”
“Um . . .,” I hum, trying to remember. “Very, very strenuous?”
Hope rolls her eyes, then pays the garage attendant and drives into the night. “Do you know what the Knife Edge is rated?”
No. But I feel like I’m about to get an earful.
“Bat-shit crazy,” says Hope, stopping at a red light and turning to look at me with irritation and worry. “That’s what it’s rated. It’s only recommended for expert climbers.” She takes a deep breath, pressing on the gas as the light changes. “Brynn, should I be worried about you?”
“No.” Leaning my elbow on the windowsill, I blink back the sting of tears. “I just . . . I just want to—”
“I know,” says Hope, sighing as she turns onto the highway. “You want to feel close to him. But you’ve got to be smart if you’re going to walk the Greatest One. As opposed to Glacier Point, Baxter Peak is at 1,600 meters. An additional fifty percent to climb, Brynn. You’re going to be tired by the time you get to the top. Weary like you won’t believe. And definitely not strong enough to take on the Knife Edge. No offense. Anyway, Jem would come back from the dead and kill me if I encouraged you to do it. It’s one of the most dangerous trails in New England. In the world.”
“Okay,” I say, reaching up to swipe at my eyes. “No Knife Edge.”
“Phew. Thought you might fight me on it.”
“Nah. I get it.” I nod my head, but my disappointment over the change in my hiking plans makes me change the subject. “How are your parents?”
“They’ve aged a lot, you know, after . . . it happened,” she shares with a heavy sigh. “But they’re salty New Englanders. They’ll probably outlive us all.” She glances over at me. “Will you have time to see them while you’re out here?”
I know I won’t. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to say to them. But Hope glances at me, so I try to give her the answer she wants.
“Maybe on Tuesday, on my way back to the airport. I’ll definitely try,” I say. “How are you? Still loving your job?”
Hope is the youngest biology professor at the University of Maine.
She nods, her face relaxing. “Totally.”
“Any good stories?”
She grins. “Well . . . I met someone.”
I smile with her, surprising myself because I feel a rare wave of genuine happiness to hear her news. “Shock me and tell me he’s one of your students.”
Chuckling softly, she shakes her head, blonde waves undulating. “Sorry to disappoint you. He’s a professor of environmental studies at BU. Came up to Orono to teach a class, and luckily, I sat in.”
“Love at first sight?” I tease.
“It was the way he talked about land preservation,” she says, sighing dramatically before winking at me.
“A biologist and a preservationist. You sound perfect for each other.”
“I hope so,” she admits, her voice wishful.
“Hey!” I say, pieces of information clicking into place. “Didn’t you say you’re going to Boston tomorrow?”
“Yep.”
“And how long have you two been together?”
“Ten months, give or take.”
“Do you think he’s going to—”
“Don’t say it! It’s bad luck.”
“—propose?” I whisper over her warning.
“Oh, see what you did? Man, I hope you didn’t jinx it!”
“Sorry,” I say, cocking my head to the side. “But now that it’s out there . . . do you?”
“Like I said . . . I hope so.”
For just a moment, my brain flashes back to Jem on one knee, his aqua blue eyes outshining the sky behind him as he opened a tiny white velvet box in his palm.
Brynn, will you marry me?
I clench my eyes shut just for a moment and take a deep breath, then open them again as I exhale, bracing for the wave of panic that always accompanies an especially poignant memory.
Maybe it’s being away from the place where I’d lost him, or being with his sister, who’d loved him as deeply as I had, or this plan to climb Katahdin and bid him farewell, but instead of panic, a wave of peace washes over me, and the tears recede.
With a sigh of relief, I roll down my window and breathe in the Maine air, grateful that memories of my own proposal warm me instead of destroy me.
“I hope so too,” I say, looking over at Jem’s twin sister and praying that her future holds all the happiness stolen from her brother. “I really, really do.”
Cassidy
Nine years old
The elementary school secretary, Mrs. Hughes, peeks at me over the counter with cold eyes, and I slink down farther in my chair, staring at my beat-up sneakers, which are covered in drying puke.
After lunch, two kids trapped me in the bathroom, the smaller of the two standing in front of the door while the bigger one asked me if I was a “raping, murdering fuck” like my father. When I didn’t answer, he pushed me so hard that I stumbled backward into the sink, crying out as the thin flesh covering my hip met the smooth, hard, unforgiving porcelain.
“One eye blue and one eye green,” he sneered, spittle collecting in the corner of his mouth as he advanced on me. “It’s weird as fuck. You’re a goddamned freak, killer.”
He pushed me again, and I whimpered softly.
“You gonna cry?” he asked.
I wanted to cry.
Heck, I wanted to cry just about every day of my life, but instead I sucked in my cheeks and clamped my teeth around the warm, wet flesh, willing the pain of the bite to overwhelm my tears as I stared down at the tiled floor.
“You don’t belong in this town no more,” he said. “You and yore mama give everyone the creeps. You got to move on.”
“J.J., we gotta go. Someone’s gonna come.”
“Shut up, Kenny.” J.J. turned back to me, smacking my cheek twice, hard, forcing me to look up. “You look at me when I’m talkin’ to you, boy.”
His eyes were brown and mean when I met them.
“You heard me? No one wants you here, killer.”
I gulped down the rising bile in my throat.
“No one wants yore tainted blood here.”
“J.J.—”
“No one wants the reminder of who yore daddy was and what he done.”
I tried to swallow again, but it felt like the muscles of my throat had frozen and I couldn’t force them to work.
“No one wants—”
A sharp, unavoidable heaving sensation lifted the contents of my stomach, and I opened my mouth just in time for my regurgitated lunch to splash all over J.J.’s Patriots sweatshirt, blue jeans, and Nik
es.
“Fuuuuuuuuck!” he screamed, jolting back. “What the fuck?”
Tears streamed from my eyes, more a result of the puke than a reaction to the meanness. Vomit dripped from my lips and chin, onto my red T-shirt, onto my scarred Wal-Mart sneakers.
“Screw this!” yelled Kenny, opening the bathroom door and disappearing into the hallway.
“You’re gonna pay for this, you little shit!” bellowed J.J., turning around to follow Kenny.
My shirt and shoes were covered in throw-up, and without a change of clothes, I couldn’t go back to class. So I headed to the nurse’s office instead. She took one look at me and gasped without sympathy, giving me a pair of sweatpants and an old T-shirt from the lost and found. While I was getting dressed, I heard her tell the school secretary to call my mother.
Mama arrived forty minutes later, her eyes worried as she looked into mine. I mumbled something about being sorry, but she told me to stay put as she hurried into the principal’s office. Sitting on a chair outside his half-open door, I can hear just about everything he’s saying to her.
“This school simply isn’t a good fit for Cassidy, Ms. Porter. I’m sure you can appreciate how uneasy the other children are around yore son.”
“But why?” she says softly, her voice emotional. “Cass is a good boy. Kind.”
Mr. Ruggins clears his throat. “We’ve never had a problem with Cassidy, per se, and to be clear, I can’t make you pull him from school, ma’am. But I can tell you that episodes like today will not be isolated. I imagine it’ll just get worse for yore son as time goes on.”
“I don’t understand. He wouldn’t hurt a fly,” she says. “He’s gentle and—”
“No one here is disputin’ that, Ms. Porter. But I think it would be better for Cassidy, and for you, ma’am, to think about homeschoolin’ him.”
“Homeschoolin’! But I’m not a teacher. I don’t know how to teach him.”
I imagine Mr. Ruggins leaning forward as his chair squeaks. “Don’t need to be. You can buy a book from the Wal-Mart over in Lincoln that’ll tell you how to teach him everythin’ he needs to know. We can even order it for you if that would help. Or I can ask Mrs. Hughes to make a recommendation for you.”
“But what about friends? He’ll be lonely with no one but me for company.”
“Ms. Porter,” says Mr. Ruggins gently. “Cassidy doesn’t have any friends, ma’am.”
“Of course he does,” she says, “Joey Gilligan. Sam White. Marcus—”
“No, ma’am,” says Mr. Ruggins firmly. “He doesn’t have any friends anymore. Cassidy sits alone at lunch, alone on a bench at recess. He walks through the halls alone. No one speaks to him unless it’s to give him a hard time. He minds his business—yes, ma’am—but trouble still finds him.”
My mother sobs, and it tears at my heart a little because I’d been keeping it a secret, how the other kids had been treating me since my father’s arrest and conviction. I didn’t want her to worry about something else. Now she knows, and I can tell it’s hurt her. I clench my fists, and, even though my cheeks are still raw and bleeding from chewing on them in the bathroom, I bite down anyway.
“Mr. Ruggins! Cassidy didn’t do anythin’ wrong!” says my mother, her voice breaking a little.
“But his daddy sure did,” says Mr. Ruggins. His chair squeaks again, and this time I imagine him leaning away from my mother. “Ask the families of those poor girls. He did wrong, all right.”
“Paul is . . . well, he is a very sick man. We didn’t . . . that is, we had no idea what was goin’ on. He was away all the time, and . . . and . . .” She pauses before speaking again. “But Cassidy’s just a child. He’s only nine years old. He’s not his father.”
“Cassidy is his son, ma’am.”
His son.
I am the son of the man one reporter called “the bloodiest serial killer the state of Maine has ever known.” My mother tried to protect me from the truth, but there was no hiding it during the trial and sentencing. It was on the TV and in the newspapers at the grocery store. It was everywhere.
My father, Paul Isaac Porter, raped and murdered at least a dozen girls along the I-95 corridor between 1990 and 1998.
It’s a fact.
And now it follows me wherever I go.
Rapist’s son.
Murderer’s son.
Freak.
Killer.
Since his arrest, and especially since his conviction, I’ve been called every ugly thing you can think of. People cross the street when they see me and Mama coming. They egg our house and throw rocks through our windows. They move out of our pew at church when we sit down. The waitresses at the town diner pretend they don’t see us even when Mama asks if we can place our order. Even good people—like my teachers, like the pastor and his wife, like Mr. Ruggins —can barely look us in the eye.
Mama cries all the time. She calls herself stupid and naive and says that she should have known. She doesn’t sleep much. She jumps at the slightest sound. And lately, when she doesn’t think I notice, she stares at me hard, like she’s puzzling through something. If I catch her, she looks away quickly like I would if I was caught doing something wrong.
Cassidy is his son, ma’am.
But I’m not him. I’m me. A separate person.
There’s a long and painful silence as I wait for my mother to say something—anything—else to try to explain that my father and I are individual people. I didn’t rape anyone. I didn’t murder anyone. I didn’t hurt anyone. Not ever.
But she doesn’t say anything.
And her silence is chilling.
“You take him on home today, ma’am,” says Mr. Ruggins after a long and awkward silence. “And you think on what I said . . . okay, now? I’m certain it would be best for everyone.”
When Mama emerges from Mr. Ruggins’s office a second later, her face is white and her eyes are red and weepy, shell-shocked, and defeated.
“Mama?” I murmur, feeling worried as I take her hand and look up into her bloodshot blue eyes.
She looks down at me and lifts her chin. “We’re leavin’.”
I walk beside her out of the office, down the hallway, and out the double doors to the parking lot. I’m silent as I get into the backseat and buckle my belt, silent as my mother starts the car and silent as she cries quietly all the way home.
Brynn
When we get to her place, Hope opens a bottle of good Merlot and barbecues steaks for us, telling me climbing stories about her and Jem while the steaks sizzle and the stars come out. She tells me about how Jem saved the life of a little girl who’d gotten separated from her family during a camping trip. None of the rangers could find her, but Jem, who knew every nook and cranny of Katahdin, managed to find her near one of the waterfalls on the Hunt Trail.
“He was only fifteen, but that’s when I knew that climbing mountains wasn’t just a hobby for him,” says Hope, sipping her wine while fireflies light up her backyard like a chain of blinking Christmas lights. “It was the look on his face when he walked into the parking lot where they’d set up a triage center. He was covered in trail dust. She looked even worse. But he . . . well, I knew we’d never get him out of the woods after that.”
“He never told me that story.” I take a sip of my wine. “God, I miss him.”
She sighs from where she stands beside the grill, putting a hand on her hip. “Promise you won’t get mad if I say something?”
My eyes widen. “Are you going to say something mean?”
“Not mean, really . . . just frank.”
I gulp. “Okay.”
“I didn’t really get you two.”
“Get us?”
“Don’t get me wrong: you made him happy, and I’m a hundred percent certain that he loved you.”
I take another sip of my wine, looking up at her from where I sit on a picnic bench near the grill, waiting for her to continue.
“But . . . I think I always thought he’d end up
with someone who loved the outdoors—you know, hiking, climbing, camping, all of it—as much as he did.”
“I . . . liked it,” I mumble.
“No,” says Hope, and though I’ve never seen her teach, I have a sudden taste of her in professor mode. “You tolerated it. Because it was part of his job, and because you loved him. And maybe even . . .” She pauses for a moment, nailing me with her eyes. “. . . because you thought you could change him.”
“You’re assuming a lot.”
“Am I?” Her voice trails off, and I suspect we are getting to the part that has the potential to get me mad. “I worried about it lasting. You and Jem. I worried that you’d eventually make him choose.”
Her words suck the air from my lungs, and my vision blurs.
“Oh.”
“Brynn,” she starts gently, shutting the lid of the grill and coming to sit next to me. “I don’t mean to hurt you. I swear I don’t. But I just wonder if, over time . . . if maybe you would have gone to the woods less. You didn’t grow up hiking and climbing. You couldn’t tell me, here and now, with any conviction, that you loved it. But he did. It wasn’t even selfishness—it was instinct. It was need. It was in his blood, and there was no way you were ever going to get him out of the woods.”
“I wasn’t trying to get him out of the woods. I loved him just the way he was.”
“I know you did,” she says, wincing as she tilts her head to the side. “But would you have wanted to hike and camp for every vacation? Would you have wanted to raise your kids in the woods every weekend?” She pauses, shaking her head. “You lived in the city. In the middle of San Francisco, Brynn. Going hiking was an excursion for you. A day trip. For Jem it was a way of life. His job was to write about hiking and climbing, and I suspect that’s the part of him you tolerated and tried to accept by joining him from time to time. But you must know, even when he was with you, he was subjugating part of his nature by living in the city. He longed to be in the wild constantly. All the time. Every weekend. Every moment.”
“He told you that? That he was selling himself out?”
“I knew him better than anyone,” she says quietly. “I was watching it. I was worried for him. And for you. For both of you.”