Thicker Than Water

by Brigid Kemmerer

  I can rebel in my own way, too.

  After the burial, there’s a reception in the church hall. My mother made four of the casseroles, and I know she expects me to help serve, so I take my place behind the table beside her. People haven’t lined up yet, but she’s setting out serving spoons and napkins.

  “Have you eaten anything yet?” she says.

  I roll my eyes. This is part B of the overprotectiveness of my family: my diabetes. I’ve been monitoring my own blood sugar for years, but to hear my mother tell it, she should still be feeding me spoonfuls of pureed meats. “I’m fine.”

  “Have you?” she presses.

  “Maybe you didn’t notice that we were at a funeral, and you’re literally unpacking the food while we speak.”

  “I want to see you eat something.”

  I’m not even hungry, but I pick up a roll and tear off a hunk with my teeth, just to shut her up.

  “That was nice of you to help with little Madalyn,” she says.

  “I have to be on my toes or I’ll lose my ‘favorite aunt’ status.”

  She smiles at me. I’m their only aunt.

  “Set out those tongs for the vegetables,” she says.

  While I do, she adds, “I saw what happened with Stan’s new stepson. Daniel shouldn’t have started something.”

  Finally! Someone on my side!

  “Right?” I exclaim. “I can’t believe Danny had to be such a jerk!”

  “Don’t misunderstand me.” My mother levels me with a sharp look in her eye and a jab with a salad spoon. “I don’t want you speaking to him again until this crime is solved.”

  It didn’t hurt, but I rub my arm anyway. “Over thirty cops showed up for the funeral. I felt pretty safe.”

  “I don’t care if a hundred cops showed up for the funeral. There is something unusual about that boy.”

  I scowl and start slicing into the chicken noodle bake. I made the crust on top, and it’s perfect, slightly brown and crispy. “All of you are treating me like I’m four years old. He wasn’t trying to lure me into the woods with a lollipop. I was being polite.”

  “Polite girls don’t offer to tie a stranger’s tie.”

  Now my cheeks flare with heat. It’s no secret that my grandmother passed on her views on how young ladies should be raised. It doesn’t help that Mom says it like I was helping Thomas adjust his boxer shorts. “It wasn’t like that.”

  “I was young once. I know what it’s like to see a strange boy, full of drama and mystery.”

  “Mom!” I have to restrain myself from stomping a foot.

  “This is not a romance novel. I was being polite. That’s all. I know what he’s been accused of.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m sorry, are we executing people immediately after the crime now? Maybe Danny should have just shot him. Would that make you happy?”

  “Charlotte.” She gives me a dangerous look.

  People are beginning to file into the church hall, milling around and talking in hushed voices. I know a lot of people here, but not everyone. The younger officers rotate through weekend flings like they have a police version of OKCupid, and I can never keep the girlfriends and boyfriends straight. There’s a man standing alone near the corner, but he looks as though he’s waiting for someone—he keeps glancing at the doorway. He’s young, very clean cut. No wedding ring. He looks like a cop, the way he’s surveying the premises.

  No one has approached the line of food yet, but that’s because no one wants to seem insensitive—like they’re only here for cornbread and sweet potato pie and not because a woman died. I don’t see Stan anywhere, which makes it more awkward.

  Then again, maybe his absence will make it less awkward. It will definitely make it less like a funeral. That’s a little sad.

  “Stan’s not here,” I whisper to my mother.

  “I know,” she says, her voice equally low. She tears open a bag of cutlery. “He left to go down to the station.”

  “No one could bring Thomas back up here?”

  “He’s being held. I called your father to tell him what was going on. He said Danny was insisting on pressing charges.”

  My head almost explodes. “Are you kidding me?”

  “Calm down, Charlotte. You’re causing a scene.”

  A scene. Maybe four people are looking at me.

  Mom gives them a kind smile.

  My grandmother makes her way over to the table. I can’t take another lecture about how I’m not smiling widely enough or how nice young ladies never raise their voice above a whisper. I say I need to make a visit to the ladies’ room and I bolt.

  “Walk, dear!” my grandmother calls behind me.

  “You’d better come back and get some food!” my mom calls.

  Honestly.

  The late summer air is heavier than it was before the funeral. Clouds are thickening south of here, and the slightest breeze lifts my curls. A storm is coming.

  Matthew’s voice catches me before I get far. “Hiding from Grandma?”

  He’s standing by the church wall. Jenna is leaning against the bricks, doing something with his phone. He downloads any games they ask for, but they usually watch My Little Pony videos on YouTube.

  “You don’t know me,” I say.

  He snorts. He and I aren’t as close as Ben and I are, but there’s not much that escapes Matt’s attention. He’s a good cop. Of my brothers, he’s probably the best.

  “What’s she after today? Your bare legs or the fact that you’re not wearing lipstick?”

  I blink. “I don’t know if I should be impressed or creeped out that you noticed either of those things.”

  “It’s my job to notice things.” He hesitates. “You doing okay, Char?”

  “Sure. Just pissed at Danny.”

  “Hmm.”

  I frown. “Hmm what?”

  Jenna leans back against his leg, and he teasingly shakes her by the shoulders until she giggles and squeals, “Daddy!”

  He hasn’t answered my question, and now he’s not looking at me. “Hmm what?” I ask again. “Why are you all treating me like I sat down to dinner with a serial killer?”

  His eyes flash up. “Because you’re not too far off the mark.”

  “What’s a cereal killer?” says Jenna. “Why would someone kill cereal?”

  Her voice is so earnest it makes me laugh, but Matt is still stony faced. “I saw the pictures, Charlotte. Someone who could do that—I don’t want you near him.”

  “If you all think he did it, why isn’t he locked up?”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “What?”

  He fidgets.

  “You don’t have enough,” I say. “Do you? You don’t have enough to hold him?”

  “It’s not my case,” he says. “Local police are handling it.”

  “But I’m right, aren’t I?” Another thought occurs to me. “Did Danny pick a fight on purpose?”

  “I didn’t see Danny pick a fight.”

  But now I can put the puzzle together. The cops might not have enough to hold Thomas for murder, but hitting a cop, in full view of a bunch of other police officers—that would stick.

  I storm away. “You guys are ridiculous. He’s a teenager. He just lost his mother.”

  “He’s eighteen years old,” Matt calls after me. “And you’re the one acting like a teenager.”

  I want to give him the finger, but Jenna is still standing there, and I would definitely lose the favorite aunt status if I taught her how to flip someone off.

  I head across the field, into the cemetery. There’s no one there. Stan is at the police station, and everyone else is in the church hall, at the reception. The new graves are in the back corner, and there are a few trees for shade.

  No one is paying respects, and my brothers are responsible for her son’s absence. I think of my closeness with my mother, and something about that tugs at me.

  I stride across the field, looking for the mound
of fresh turned earth.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THOMAS

  This is my first time in a jail cell.

  It sucks.

  I don’t have many memories of my father, but one of the few clear ones involves a policeman. I was sitting in a car, an old sedan, staring at my father’s back while he talked to someone in the alley between two brownstones. Sunlight beamed down, turning the car too hot in about fifteen seconds. I wanted to get out, but he’d told me to stay put and we’d get ice cream.

  I don’t remember the ice cream. I don’t even remember his face.

  But I remember a police officer coming to the car, grabbing my arm, and trying to drag me out.

  And then I remember the cop collapsed on the pavement.

  I had to have been about five. I always used to think I was remembering it wrong, that maybe my father had hit him, or maybe someone had shot him. There was a lot of yelling.

  And then there was my father, his hand on the back of my neck, his voice low. “Don’t tell your mother.”

  I can’t remember if I ever did or not. I was five years old—I must have, right? It’s not something we ever discussed later. We ran out on him after that. Mom never kept any pictures, so while I remember the rasp of his voice, I can’t put together the image of his face. I’ve tried to sketch the memory, but it never comes together on paper. I’ll end up with half-drawn images: the door of a car, the bricks of a wall, the shadow of strange men standing at a distance. All penciled shadows and half-profiles. Sometimes a stray reminder will thread its way through my thoughts, but it’s never anything solid enough to catch or identify. Dark hair like mine, maybe. The smell of some spicy cologne.

  I don’t remember being afraid of him. Mom was, though, especially after we left. She home schooled me for years, the kind of helicopter parent who’d have a Band-Aid out before she saw blood. Other moms would be buried in a book at the playground while their kids fell off the slide or busted their noses, but my mother would be standing there, always within arm’s reach.

  She made me crazy.

  She knew it, too. I made sure she knew it. You know how with a cat, if you squeeze it too tight, it’ll claw the hell out of you? Imagine being ten, wanting to play a pickup game of basketball, and your mommy’s standing right there, looking at the other kids like they’re potential felons.

  I ran away. Twice.

  The first time, it took her forty-five minutes to find me. I know it was exactly that long because she kept screaming it at me.

  “Forty-five minutes, Tommy! Forty-five minutes! How could you do that to me?”

  She smacked me good, too. She might have been crying, but I was too pissed to care. Told me that she couldn’t lose me, that she’d already given up everything for me, and how could I do that to her?

  Like I was supposed to care. I didn’t have anything to lose.

  The second time, I made damn good and sure it was longer than forty-five minutes.

  Eleven years old, forty stolen dollars in my pocket, and I ran like hell. Spent half my money on a cab into the city. Spent the other half on two pizzas and a bottle of soda. I slept curled into a doorway. Some cops picked me up around four in the morning.

  I gave them my phone number, and they asked my mom why she hadn’t reported me missing.

  I don’t remember her answer. I just remember her kneeling in front of me in that gritty city police station, holding my hands with her shaking fingers, asking me if they’d taken my picture.

  They hadn’t.

  She took me home, and I thought she’d beat the hell out of me. She didn’t.

  “What do I have to do?” she asked. “We can’t keep doing this, Tommy. What do I have to do? What do you want?”

  “I don’t want you!”

  I screamed it at her. I might have thrown something. God, I was such a shitty kid.

  But she was a good mom. She saw through the rage. She gripped my arms and forced me still. “No. I mean it. Tell me what you want. Tell me.”

  I was crying, then. “I want to go to school. I want friends. I don’t want to be alone.”

  She nodded. “Okay.”

  Two days later we moved. I got what I wanted: a new town, a new life, a new start.

  I have no idea what she wanted. I have no idea if she got it.

  And now it’s too late to ask her.

  After I found Mom’s body, after my hysterical nine-one-one call, they put me in a police car and drove me to the station to ask me some questions. They could have taken me to the middle of the desert and put a gun to my head and I wouldn’t have known the difference. That night, when I was sitting in front of a little steel table with a cup of cooling coffee sitting in front of me, my brain was locked on repeat, playing the same twenty seconds over and over again.

  Me sitting up in bed. Checking the time. Two eighteen a.m.

  Walking down the hall to use the bathroom.

  Seeing her door open. She never slept with her door open.

  Calling her name.

  Hitting the light switch.

  The bruises. The bulging eyes. The scent of urine.

  Tripping over my feet to get to her side. Fumbling the phone until I could get my fingers to dial.

  They made me repeat the chain of events, asking questions for an hour before I realized I was sitting in an interrogation room, that I was a suspect.

  Until this afternoon, when Officer Danny threw me up against the wall of the church, I hadn’t realized I still was.

  I keep replaying the way he fell. Like when I was a child, I’m missing a moment of time.

  My hand doesn’t hurt. Maybe I didn’t hit him hard.

  I definitely didn’t hit him hard enough.

  I’ve got some rage saved for Stan, too. He stood there and watched that prick shove me into the backseat of a cop car.

  At least I’m the only one here. Not a lot of crime in this craphole town. They took my belt and my tie, like I’m a threat to myself. I think about counting the bricks, but that sounds like such a cliché. Before you know it, I’ll be singing “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen.” Instead, I lie on the little cot and inhale bleach and disinfectant and whatever else goes into cleaning this place.

  After an hour or so, I wonder if Stan is going to bother coming to get me.

  I wonder if I want him to. There’s a part of me that would rather sleep here than down the hall from the room where Mom—where she—

  Suddenly my throat closes up, and I make the most embarrassing sounds. There’s a guy at a desk down at the end of this hallway, and I don’t think he can hear me, but maybe he can.

  I press my fingers into my eyes, and they’re wet. I can’t believe I missed her funeral.

  This is terrible. I’m a terrible son.

  I’m shaking. I can’t stop crying. I scrape at my eyes and suck in air.

  During the interrogation they kept asking if I knew anyone who held a grudge against her. Like I’d have a clue. We just moved here, and Mom and I aren’t exactly Bunco Buddies. We haven’t heard from Dad in years, and once we got away from him, Mom never seemed to worry about him coming after her—not like this. I don’t know anyone, much less someone who’d break in and press a cord to her neck until her eyeballs almost fell out of their sockets and she pissed the bed.

  I have a thousand memories of her face. Every expression you can imagine.

  The one memory, the worst one, is the one that keeps coming to the forefront.

  She’d never let me get away with sitting in this jail cell while her funeral was going on.

  The irony strikes me, and I almost laugh. But it’s not enough to chase away the tears.

  I swipe at my eyes again. I need to think of something else.

  Voices echo down the hallway. Someone is talking to that desk clerk. They talk for a while, until I grow bored with trying to piece together the words. My tears dry up. I’ve got it together now.

  Counting the bricks is looking better every minute.
>
  Shoes march down the linoleum and come to a stop in front of my cell.

  I glance over, then sit up. I’m glad I had time to get myself together. “Hi, Stan.”

  I can’t read his expression, but he doesn’t look happy. Then again, he just buried his wife. It’s not like I expected him to skip down the hall, whistling.

  “Tom.” His hands are in his pockets, and he just stands there looking at me.

  It’s been days since it happened, and this is the first time I consider whether Stan thinks I did it, too. We stare at each other.

  Mom used to tell me he was a good detective. I have no idea whether that’s true. He hasn’t solved her murder, but when I asked him about it, he said he wasn’t allowed to be on the case.

  And that was the end of that conversation.

  I’m probably not revealing state secrets by saying Stan and I don’t talk much.

  He clears his throat. “You know it’s a felony to strike a police officer?”

  “Too bad it’s not a felony to be an asshole at someone’s funeral.”

  Mom’s chiding voice bounces around the inside of my head. Thomas! Language.

  Now I can swear all I want. I don’t want to.

  Stan is still staring at me. The weight of it presses down on me, until I start to sweat under my collar again. That idiot didn’t have to mess with me at the church, but I didn’t have to provoke him. Guilt won’t let me meet Stan’s eyes.

  Even without looking at him, I can almost hear him thinking.

  I’m eighteen. He’s not my father. He owes me nothing. He could wash his hands of me right this second and there is absolutely nothing I could do about it.

  He jingles keys in his pocket. “I talked to Danny Rooker. He isn’t going to press charges.”

  He says it like I should be throwing confetti. “Does that mean I can leave?”

  “It means you can leave.” He hesitates. “Are you coming home with me?”

  He knows I don’t have anywhere else to go. Now I have to clear my throat. I pass a hand through the damp hair on my neck and look at the walls. “You tell me.”

  His voice turns a little rough, a little surprised. “I’m not going to turn you out on the street, kid. You’re Marie’s—” His voice breaks and he takes a second to get himself together. “You’re her son.”