As I struggled to remain afloat, I gagged on more water, gasped for air. My body suddenly felt as if it were made of lead. I was going to sink. I was going to drown—
I smashed into a rock. I tried grabbing hold of it, but it was too slippery, there were no handholds, and then it was behind me.
The river spun me twice, and when I was facing forward again another rock reared up in front of me.
Somehow I managed to clasp onto this one and not let go. Water crashed over my shoulders, roared in my ears.
The rock that had stopped me, I noticed with relief, was the first of several that protruded from the water in a line like well-worn molar teeth.
Moving from one to the next, I made slow but steady progress toward shore until I could stand once again.
Thankfully the riverbank here was not as steep as where I’d slid in, and I was able to clamber onto dry land, where I collapsed onto my chest and spewed my guts out.
***
Back at the campsite my dad was still propped on his elbows, still watching me.
“Water…?” he said.
“I lost our bottles.”
Something flitted across his face. It took me a moment to realize it was fear. Then a kind of loathing filled his eyes, a kind of hate. I was convinced he was going to jump up and smack me before I remembered he didn’t have the strength to do that, even if it’s what he wanted to do.
Instead he slumped onto his back.
“I can go get some,” I said. “I can bring it back in my hands?”
He didn’t reply, and I didn’t persist. I didn’t really want to go back to the river anyway.
I turned my attention to my right hand. A half-moon gash split my palm from thumb to pinky finger. I didn’t recall when or how it happened, but it must have been when I’d grabbed onto one of the rocks.
I scavenged the first-aid kit from my mom’s backpack and tended to the wound. The white cotton bandage bloomed red immediately. I unwrapped it and applied a fresh one, securing it more tightly. It turned just as red just as quickly.
“Dad,” I said, “my cut won’t stop bleeding.”
He didn’t reply.
“Dad!”
He mumbled something. I caught “guy” and thought he was saying “Bri-guy.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Guy…knocked up your mom…”
“Who?”
“Left…”
“Who?
“Because…you…”
“Me?”
“Didn’t want…”
“What—?”
But I understood.
My real dad didn’t want me. That’s why he left my mom. Not because of her. Because of me.
Because I was born.
***
Over the course of the day the old twisted tree had become host to at least fifty crows. The black birds had taken up residence on every rotting branch, turning the tree into a living monstrosity, like something out of a dark fairytale, or a haunted forest. Aside from the odd caw, or the leathery beat of wings, however, they remained eerily quiet.
The last of the sunlight had faded to dusk a few minutes ago, and although I could no longer see the ghastly tree or the greedy crows, I knew they were still there, still watching my dad and me with their unreadable black eyes, biding their time until they could feast.
The gash across my palm had stopped bleeding some time ago, so I was no longer worried I was going to bleed to death. But my poison ivy was worse than ever. It had spread everywhere. To my ankles, my stomach, my upper arms, my neck, behind my ears. Even to the dreaded area between my fingers. The itching there was so intense, the small puss bubbles so intolerable, I wanted to chop off my hands.
My mom had yet to return, and I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would be spending another night just me and my dad who wasn’t my dad.
My dad who wasn’t my dad.
I glared at him in the firelight, and for the first time in my life I felt nothing for him. No love, no fear, no respect. Nothing.
Actually, that wasn’t true, I realized. I did feel something. I felt cheated. He was a phony, an impostor, a stranger who’d only pretended to be my dad to make my mom happy. He had been lying to me for my entire life—or, at least, since I was three. I knew this because there was a photograph in my baby book that showed him and my mom and me together at my third birthday party.
So what happened to my real dad? Did he really leave my mom and me because I was born? Where did he go? Why didn’t he ever come back to see me grown up? Did he try? Did my fake dad send him away…?
A noise distracted me from these reflections. I glanced about, surprised to find the night had already deepened to an ebony black. I didn’t see anything.
It could have been my imagination, or a falling rock, or the crows.
Or the bear.
I waited, listened.
Nothing.
Not the bear.
But it would be coming. I was sure of that. It would be coming because it was sick and starving and knew it had an easy meal—an easy two meals.
I stood decisively. Maybe I should just go, just start running. But which way? What if I ran straight into the bear? By myself? Without a fire?
I looked at my fake dad. He resembled a corpse. He wasn’t one, not yet. Sometimes his breathing would go real quiet, and sometimes it would go real loud. Now it was real loud. It almost sounded as though he were snoring.
Could the bear hear him? I wondered. Was it coming for us this minute? And when it arrived, who would it attack? My dad was helpless, yeah, but the bear didn’t know that. Chances were, it would go for me, because I was smaller.
I added another log and more sticks to the fire, feeding the flames. All the while my eyes kept drifting to my dad.
Maybe if he was farther away from the fire, the bear would go for him first. Maybe it would stuff itself silly, and it would leave me alone…
“Dad?” I said, stepping quietly toward him.
He didn’t reply.
“Dad?”
His hair was drenched with perspiration, plastered to his head like when you get out of a swimming pool. His eye sockets seemed to have grown bigger, while somehow sinking into his face. Black stubble covered his jaw, forming a thick tangle that could almost be called a beard.
I seized one of his ankles in each hand and dragged him away from the fire, toward the river. He was heavy, and it took all my strength. I stopped after twenty feet or so. I didn’t want him too far away in case the bear didn’t see him and came straight for me.
I dropped his legs and was about to return to the fire when his eyes opened and he said, “Brian…?”
“You’re not my dad.”
“What, doing…?”
“You’re not my dad.”
I left him.
***
The bear arrived an hour later. I couldn’t see it; the night was too black, the shadows outside the reach of the fire too thick. But I heard it grunting and snuffling. I crouched next to the flames, statue-still, hyper alert, praying it ignored me.
A scream. Weak. My dad.
Another one, so high-pitched it sounded like it belonged to a woman.
I plugged my ears with my fingers and kept them plugged long after the screams had stopped.
***
It took the bear forever to eat my dad. It kept making strange chuffing sounds, like when you swallow too quickly and the food gets stuck in your throat. Above the constant rush of the river I heard bones breaking, cartilage crackling, like when you tear a wing from a barbecued chicken, only much louder.
Then, finally, the munching sounds stopped.
Later, I tried to sleep. I couldn’t. My body was exhausted, but my mind was wired. I rolled from side to side, from back to front. The poison ivy itched maddeningly.
I ended up pacing to keep warm in the dark, frigid morning for what seemed like hours. Then, in the silvered light of breaking dawn, I made out my dad…or what remained of
him. For a moment my brain couldn’t recognize what it was seeing because my dad no longer conformed to the shape and form of a man. He was more like a pile of clothes tossed haphazardly on the floor.
I went closer.
His red tank-top was split down the middle. His stomach was slit open. White ribs, several snapped in half, jutted into the air, glistening wetly like a mouthful of monster teeth. Everything they used to protect, all his organs and guts, were missing, leaving an empty, sagging cavity. Both his legs were chewed to the bone. Oddly his left forearm and his face were perfectly intact, though covered with blood splatter.
His eyes stared blankly at nothing.
I returned to the dying fire, shrugged my backpack over my shoulder, and went looking for my mom.
***
I found her on the other side of the poison ivy patch, a little ways along the steep path we’d followed to reach the canyon floor.
“Mom!” I shouted, waving my hands over my head ecstatically.
She stood there for a moment, as if she didn’t recognize me, or thought I was a mirage. Then she called my name—shrieked it, actually—and ran toward me.
She scooped me into a mammoth hug. I think she tried to lift me off my feet, but either I was too heavy or she was too weak and we collapsed to the ground. She started laughing and crying and kissing me all over.
***
My mom looked as bad as I felt. Her hair was messy and knotted, her face and clothes streaked with dirt and sweat, her hands enflamed with poison ivy. But she was smiling like she’d just won a million bucks.
“Oh baby, oh God, oh baby,” she cooed. “I couldn’t find the car…then night came…then I got even more lost…” She stiffened. Her smile faltered. “Where’s your father, angel? Why’d you leave him by himself? What happened?”
I told her.
***
Well, not everything. I told her a bear ate him. But I didn’t tell her I dragged him from the fire to use as bait. I said the bear did that, dragged him away.
I wasn’t sure how I’d expected her to react to this news, but she surprised me by not reacting at all.
Face impassive, she stood, ordered me to wait where I was, and went to confirm my dad’s death for herself.
***
When she returned I could tell she was super upset because she didn’t say anything to me. In fact, she barely looked at me, just marched past where I was waiting, back up the canyon wall. I fell into line behind her, relieved to be with her again, and even more relieved to be returning to the campsite.
After five or ten minutes we came to an eighty-foot-long iron chain that had been installed in the drainage passage we were ascending.
“Why’s this here, Mom?” I asked. “To help people climb?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Mom?”
No answer. She was breathing as heavily as I was. Perspiration saturated her white top, making it cling to her shoulder blades and her bare breasts. She drew a hand across her forehead.
“I don’t think this is the right way,” I went on. “We never saw the chain on our way down—”
“Shut up, Brian! Please! Just…shut up!”
I frowned at her. She was looking at me in a way she had never looked at me before. I didn’t know if she was sad or angry or what. Then her legs gave out and she dropped to her knees. She leaned forward and vomited.
I stared, terrified. I had never seen her puke before.
When she finished, I tried to help her—but she pushed me away.
My eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
She glared at me sidelong. “Did you move him?” she asked quietly. A string of saliva dripped from her mouth. She didn’t seem to care.
“Huh?” I said.
“Your father. Did you move him?”
“No,” I said, telling myself I wasn’t lying, because she didn’t ask me when I moved him. And I didn’t move him today. So I wasn’t lying, not really.
Besides, how could she know I’d moved him?
“There were footprints,” she said, as if reading my mind.
“Footprints?” I said, pretending not to understand. But I thought did. My insides turned to mush.
“Next to…drag marks. He was dragged. You dragged him.”
“The bear dragged him.”
“They were your footprints, Brian!” she blurted, and I thought she might throw up again. She didn’t. She just kept looking at me, but in a pleading way now, as if she wanted me to tell her she was wrong.
But what could I say? How could I explain why my footprints were next to the drag marks?
“Did you do something to Geena, Brian?” she said.
Geena? Why was she asking me about Geena?
“No, Mom, Geena died in her sleep,” I said earnestly. “I didn’t do anything to her. I swear.”
***
Geena died one month after her first birthday. My parents had gone to the neighbors who lived four doors down the street. I was only nine then, too young to babysit, but my parents didn’t want to pay for a real babysitter so they left me in charge. Geena had already been fed and put to bed. All I had to do was keep an eye on her, and if there was any trouble, to call the Applebee’s. Their telephone number was stuck to the fridge with a Budweiser magnet. My parents said they would be home around eight o’clock. They didn’t return until midnight or so. I’d fallen asleep on the sofa in the living room, and I was just waking up, clearing the fuzz from my head, when my mom started screaming hysterically from Geena’s room. Then she was shouting, and my fake dad was shouting, and I was asking what was wrong, but nobody would tell me.
An ambulance arrived a few minutes later. The serious-looking paramedics took Geena to Craig Hospital. No one there could save her though. She’d been dead for too long.
Over the next couple days specially trained police officers came to our house to comfort my parents and me while Geena’s death was investigated. At one point a detective asked me if I had been alone all evening, if anyone had come over, if Geena had been behaving differently, and a bunch of other questions. I told him Geena had been sleeping quietly. I had been watching TV, then I fell asleep. That was all that happened, all I could remember. I think he believed me. I believed me.
Since then, however, I’ve always wondered whether maybe I did do something to Geena after all. Because every once in a while I would have the same memory, sometimes when I was awake, sometimes when I was asleep. I’m standing by Geena’s crib, looking down at her, and I hate her. I mean, I really, really hate her, for no reason at all. I hate that she is so small. I hate that she is so unaware. I hate how she looks at me with her big black eyes. I hate how she kicks her pudgy legs and arms. And in the memory I see myself reaching down, into the crib, and pinching her nose between my index finger and thumb. And when Geena begins crying loudly, squealing, I cover her mouth with my other hand. And then I begin counting Mississippis to fifty…
***
“Geena died in her sleep, Mom,” I said again. “That’s what the doctor said—”
“And I believed him!” my mom said, pushing stringy hair from her face. “I believed him, I believed him. You were her older brother, you would never do something to hurt her. Why would you? You wouldn’t, so that’s what I believed. She just stopped breathing…”
“That’s what happened, Mom.”
“I don’t believe you, Brian! God forgive me, I don’t, not anymore…”
Convulsions shook her body.
“Mom…” Her crying made me want to cry too. I patted her head.
“Don’t touch me, Brian!” She batted my hand away. “Why did you drag your father away from the fire?”
“I didn’t.”
“Don’t lie to me! Stop lying! Stop it! I saw your footprints!”
“Are you mad at me, Mom?”
“Mad at you? Mad? You murdered your father—”
“He’s not my dad!” I shouted, tears bursting from my eyes.
Her mouth gaped wide in surprise.
“Not my real dad!” I plowed on. “He told me! You lied to me! You both lied to me! He’s not my real dad, that’s why he’s never liked me—”
“He stopped liking you, Brian,” my mom snapped, almost wearily, “because he thought you killed Geena! Everybody thought that! Don’t you remember the police, the family court, the judge? Don’t you remember any of that?”
I frowned, because I didn’t. Not exactly. It was foggy, dreamlike, like the memory of standing at the crib, looking down at Geena.
“I was the only one who believed you, Brian. I’ve always believed you. But now…not now. You killed Geena. You killed your father. My boy, my baby boy…why…?”
She covered her face with her hands and curled into a ball.
***
I studied my mom coldly, processing what she had told me. Everyone knew I’d killed Geena? Was that really why my dad never liked me? Why we moved to a new neighborhood shortly after Geena died? Why I started going to a different school?
If this was true—everyone knew I’d killed Geena—and my mom told the police I dragged my fake dad away from the fire so the bear would eat him and not me, then they’d probably believe her over me. They might even go to my house to search for clues and stuff. They might check my fort in the backyard. If they did that, they would find the squirrel heads. I got rid of the bodies, tossed them into some bushes in Cushing Park, but I kept the heads in a shoebox so I could look at them now and then. They had dried up and were just bones and teeth and tufts of fur. But if the police found those, they would know I liked to kill things, and they might change their minds and arrest me for killing Geena, and for helping the bear kill my dad.
They might put me in jail and throw away the key.
I didn’t want them to do that.
I couldn’t let them do that.
Dark Hearts: Four Novellas of Dark Suspense Page 5