“Was this some kind of a con?” Tanner asked. He looked sad, maybe a little afraid of Adam. “Like, he’ll give you a cut later?”
“No,” Adam said. “I was worried about you. Really.”
“What were they?” Tanner asked. “Those shadows?”
“It’s a long story,” Adam said. “And we both need to get out of here.”
“Could I call you sometime? Text you?” Tanner asked. “You could explain.”
“Sure,” Adam said, handing over his phone.
“So I’ll see you?” Tanner asked, handing it back, his number entered.
“Yeah,” Adam said, not certain he meant it.
Tanner walked away.
Adam’s phone blinked. He had a text.
It read:
Call me. Please.
Area code 303. Colorado. Bobby was his best guess. Adam didn’t know his brother’s number, didn’t have it saved in his phone.
His first instinct was to ignore it, but Bobby had said please. He’d texted instead of calling, putting the ball in Adam’s court, probably scared that Adam wouldn’t respond.
“Jackass.” Adam muttered.
He couldn’t remember the last time his brother had asked him for anything with please attached. Maybe it was Adam’s imagination. Maybe it was the prickle on the back of his neck, the Sight telling him something was up, but Adam got the sense that Bobby was afraid.
2
Robert J. Binder
Robert eased the Audi into his driveway, avoiding the little dip where it met the street.
He stopped well short of the garage door and checked the parking brake before he climbed out, keys in hand. Closing the door with his free hand, he rubbed a thumbprint from the paint.
The sight of the car almost made him smile. He’d bought it two months ago, a gunmetal consolation prize that didn’t quite plaster over the ache of what he’d started calling “their situation.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, kept his face even lest the neighbors see him scowl. He’d done everything right, shed his accent, the stink of small-town poverty, and most of his family. He’d kept his mom, though there were times he thought about letting her go too.
But his best move had been marrying Annie. Strawberry blond, willowy, she hailed from an East Coast family who considered Chicago a backwater and acted like nothing existed between Manhattan and the Napa Valley.
They’d been right on track before it all went wrong.
The first miscarriage had dimmed Annie’s confidence, the thing he’d liked about her right away. She gave up coffee and the little bit of wine she still drank. When the second came, they stopped talking about baby names.
At night, she’d curl around him, press her head to his chest. He’d stroke her hair, squeeze her, and remind her it was only a matter of biology. Science had never failed him. But test after test found no explanation, no reason why they shouldn’t have a baby.
The third miscarriage tore down Annie’s optimism and Robert’s assurances.
Robert studied his two stories of white trim and fake shutters. He read the stenciled letters, The Binders, on the mailbox.
He had the wild notion to pack up his hiking boots and his dad’s gun. He could go, make a break for it. Just walk away. He’d done it before.
Robert took a long breath, let it out in a long stream. No. He wasn’t that boy anymore. He wasn’t Bobby Jack. He had a mortgage.
A whispered lullaby sounded behind him. The tune tugged at his memory, something he’d heard in his own childhood.
Robert turned to see Annie rounding the corner. His first impulse was to get her inside before the neighbors noticed. She wore an open bathrobe. Panties, no bra. Her red hair streamed behind her, limp and curling in the autumn air. She’d put on lipstick, too large for her mouth, too bright against her indoor skin. It made her smile bloody.
He started for her but froze when he saw the stroller.
They’d bought it online after Annie met him at the door with a grin so broad that he’d known the good news before she’d said it aloud. It came in a box full of parts and screws in numbered plastic bags. They’d put it together, laughing and chattering about silly baby names. He liked her suggestions better than his. Nothing had ever made Robert feel like that, like he could just burst with joy, like he’d escaped.
The stroller had sat in the garage since the first miscarriage, beneath a plastic sheet, and he’d lain awake at night, wondering if something hadn’t ridden his backwoods blood into their lives.
Now, nearly naked, Annie sang to an empty stroller. Across the street, two gray-haired women speed-walked past the Binders, their elbows lifted. Dark matching sunglasses hid their eyes, but Robert read their pinched expressions and withering suburban judgment.
His mother would have tsk ed at them and shook her head. Adam would have flipped them off or made a crack about their matching track suits, but Robert flinched.
Bending, Annie cooed at the empty stroller. Robert approached with small steps, trying to make himself small and unthreatening, using the same tactics he deployed with disoriented patients.
Each lost pregnancy had thickened the gloom until it wrapped Annie like a leaden blanket. A miasma of depression seeped into the house. He watched for letters from the homeowner’s association.
His mother was supposed to keep an eye on Annie, not let her wander the streets. Robert seethed, but forced himself to calm, to focus on his wife.
“Annie?” he asked, reaching for her. “Honey?”
“Shh,” she said, eyes fixed on the stroller. “You’ll wake him. I just got him to sleep.”
Robert pressed his hand to her shoulder, hoping he could draw her back from wherever her mind had gone. She felt too thin, pliable, like he could bruise her.
The sunlight was probably good for her, but she wasn’t eating enough. He’d talk to his mother, make sure Annie was getting enough Vitamin D. She needed spinach, kale, foods with iron—Robert forced himself to stop diagnosing. This went beyond diet or vitamins.
There was some justice in that, he knew, reaping what he’d sown. Adam had grown up talking to invisible people. It had been so easy to convince their mother to sign the papers, to commit Adam to Liberty House, to walk away and start over.
But Annie was his wife. Tears welled in his eyes. At least the speed-walking women had turned the corner.
He could keep Annie at home a little longer. She just needed time. She wasn’t a danger to anyone.
Neither was Adam, a thought whispered.
Robert squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, forced the past back down
“Annie,” he said, grasping a little harder. “The stroller’s empty.”
“Of course it isn’t,” she snapped with a bit of her old strength, a dismissive glance full of her old intelligent bluntness. She drew down the stroller’s hood.
Robert staggered backward with a gasp. Tripping over the curb, he fell onto his ass. He ignored the pain of contact as Annie scooped up the bloody mess from inside the stroller. Red stained her sleeves as she cradled the glob to her chest. Blood ran down her arms, thick and slow, like paint dripping off the side of a can.
Maybe she’d found a cat or a small dog hit by a car. It couldn’t be a child, a baby. The shape was all wrong, broken, more of a mass than a body. Yet it pulsed with a faint heartbeat, alive, impossibly alive.
“Annie!” Tilla called. Her buzz saw of an accent soothed when it should have grated. Robert’s mother came up the walk. Stopping, hands on her hips, she looked down at her son. “I’m sorry, hon. I took a nap. She was sleeping in her room. I didn’t hear her sneak out.”
“You don’t see it, Mom? You don’t see it?”
The thing, the bloody bundle, lifted its head and opened sleepy yellow eyes. It yawned, exposing a mouth full of fangs. Its eyes narrowed to slits as
it focused on Robert. It sank its teeth into Annie’s breast. She gave a little gasp and smiled, like the bite calmed rather than stung.
“Of course I see it,” his mother said. “We should cover her . . .”
Trailing off, Tilla squinted.
“Oh,” she said.
Robert found his feet. When he looked again, the thing had vanished. The blood had vanished. Though no cloud hid the sun, he shivered. Annie looked puzzled, lost and dazed.
“Well, shit,” his mother said, drawing out the cuss until it almost sounded like “sheet.” She reached for the pack of cigarettes in her back pocket.
Tilla lit the cigarette, took a long drag, and let the smoke out in puffs.
“We’d better go call your brother,” she said.
Robert’s breath hitched at the suggestion.
“Let’s get her inside,” he said.
He braced for Annie to fight him as he steered her toward the house, but she came, docile and quiet. Her compliance twisted his heart.
Tilla gave the stroller a nasty look as if it were to blame. She dragged it to the garage like a reluctant child.
Annie let him lead her upstairs, to the guest room where she’d been sleeping. Robert had told himself that it was better for her, that he wouldn’t wake her when he came home from work, but in truth he could no longer watch her cringe when he touched her. More often than not she responded like she didn’t know him at all.
He steered Annie to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Just stay here, okay?” Robert asked her, trying to not beg.
Annie pursed her lips and nodded.
He closed the door behind him. They’d have to install a lock.
The thing, the bloody glob in the stroller, hadn’t returned. But Robert could feel it lurking, like an aftertaste on his thoughts.
He wanted to tell himself it had been his imagination, the stress, the long hours at the hospital. But no. He’d seen what he’d seen. Something more than depression had a hold of Annie. Something insidious. Something other.
Robert pressed the back of his head against the door.
He’d burned all his bridges to anyone who believed in magic and ghosts. He’d locked his baby brother away in Liberty House and cut all ties.
They hadn’t spoken in years.
You did the right thing.
Robert wanted to slam his head back against the door, but he didn’t want to startle Annie. He clenched his jaw and started down the stairs instead.
He could picture Adam’s life—shit-kicker boots, hole-ridden jeans, and a ball cap that almost hid his dirty-blond hair, a disguise, an attempt to fit in where he never could.
His mother rattled around the kitchen, taking things from the freezer to make dinner, her usual outlet. He wished he had something like cooking to ease his mind. He pressed his hands to the counter and leaned toward her. He could still smell the cigarette she’d had outside. Wished she’d quit. Knew she wouldn’t.
“Where is he?” Robert asked.
“With your Great Aunt Sue. In the trailer park,” she said.
He’d known Adam had left Liberty House on his eighteenth birthday, but surely he had a job, a life. Twenty was old enough to start living, choose a vocation if you weren’t going to go to college.
“It makes sense,” Tilla said. Her lips curled as if she’d tasted sour milk. “They’re alike.”
His mother did not like Sue.
“Have you talked to him?” Robert asked.
“Once in a while.” She set a carton of eggs on the countertop, softly, like the granite might break them on principle. “I offered him the choice to come live with me. He said no.”
Robert didn’t know much about his mother’s single life. She’d kept the trailer in the woods back in Oklahoma, the few acres she’d owned with their father when they were kids. She could never give it up. This thing with Annie had to be temporary. Eventually Tilla Mae would have to go back to her patch of red mud and wild sumac.
Robert had never returned to Oklahoma. He couldn’t imagine Adam’s memories were any happier than his own. At least, being ten years younger, he shouldn’t remember as much. Robert hoped Adam didn’t remember too much.
“Here,” his mother said, putting a scrap of paper with a phone number in front of him as he sat at the table. “That’s his cell phone.”
Robert didn’t want to open that door again, but he knew that if something was powerful enough for him and his mother to see it, then it went beyond science or healthcare. Adam’s invisible world had crossed into theirs.
Robert grit his teeth and inhaled the greasy, black-pepper scents of his mother’s cooking.
He’d call. No, he’d text. After dinner.
3
Adam
Adam tried not to think about Bobby’s text, and he certainly wasn’t ready to call his brother, so he thought about Tanner instead, replaying their kiss over and over. He wouldn’t mind seeing Tanner again. He certainly wouldn’t mind kissing him again. Short as it had been, it had alleviated the loneliness he’d felt for so long.
Tanner had promised to ask his dad where he’d bought the cue and text Adam with the information. The loss of the money and the encounter with the Saurians had made their goodbye an awkward one.
Adam pulled into the trailer park around one in the morning. He’d chickened out, driven until it was too late to call Bobby, even if Denver was an hour behind Guthrie.
The single-wide’s porch light remained on. Aunt Sue would be up, but not for him. She kept weird hours lately, said it was a sign of getting old. Adam didn’t like to think about that.
A flock of plastic pink flamingos marked the border of Sue’s trailer lot. Adam parked the Cutlass in the space where it used to rest on cinder blocks, languishing beneath a tarp before Adam had gotten hold of the car and gotten her running again. Though he hadn’t put her through her paces on the drive back from Ardmore, damp steamed off her hood. He’d have to change the oil before a long trip, make sure she had enough coolant in the radiator.
Adam shrugged off the thought. He wasn’t going anywhere, certainly not to Denver.
Call me. Please.
Bobby. After all this time. Just thinking about his brother slid something black and red into Adam’s guts.
He stepped inside the ring of flamingos and wind chimes made from oyster shells and bits of rusty pipe, the boundaries of Sue’s wards. The night eased in, cricket song and a distant television turned up too loud. Adam exhaled and let his shoulders slump.
“Well?” Sue asked before he’d even shut the door behind him.
She sat in a faded green recliner. Duct tape patched the places where her cat Spider had marked it in his younger years. These days he mostly slept. Sue’s hair, the color of dirty snowmelt mixed with steel, had thinned, but it still curled around her face. She staved off her age with a daily routine of sunblock and powders, but Adam paused whenever he saw her after any time away.
She was his father’s aunt, so much older than his mother and yet so much more alive, so much more vibrant. Sue smiled. She laughed. Tilla Mae did not.
Sue was getting old, and thinking about it put a weight in Adam’s chest.
“So?” Sue asked, her voice croaky after a night of disuse. “How did it go?”
“I didn’t get the cue,” he said. He didn’t want to talk about the night’s other event, the text from Denver.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I know how much you want to find him.”
“It’s okay,” Adam said. “I have a lead.”
He moved down the little hall, unbuttoning the flannel. He’d put it on thinking it looked all right for a night at a bar, but now he wanted to ball it up and throw it in the trash. It looked old, used. Normally he wouldn’t care, but Tanner’s comment echoed.
You don’t seem small
town.
And he felt small town. He felt small, like he could or should be something more, shouldn’t live in a trailer.
“Did you know there’s a pack of Saurians living in Lake Murray?” he called.
He didn’t worry about Sue hearing him. The trailer’s tissue thin walls let each of them hear everything the other did, even the things he wished they wouldn’t. In a proper house his little room would be a closet, but it was his, and had been since Sue had taken him in.
“I knew there was a pack in Sulphur,” she said, sounding thoughtful. The paneled walls and worn carpet did little to muffle her voice.
“I thought they were extinct,” he said, moving back up the hall to the trailer’s biggest room.
Kitchen, living, dining—it wasn’t that big.
“So who had it?” she asked.
“Some college kid. Nice guy. They let him walk.”
“How nice?” she asked. She wore a knowing little smile when he came back up the hall.
“Nice arms,” he said. “Good-looking, I guess.”
“Did you get his number?”
“Yeah,” Adam said. “Though he’s going to be short on beer money when he finds out he’s not so good at pool.”
“But you’ll see him again?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “He goes to school in Sherman. That’s a long drive to date a normal.”
Even if he was a good kisser, Adam thought. Maybe Tanner would be worth the gas. Probably not. Adam would have to explain what he was, what had really happened at the lake. There was no way Tanner wasn’t already asking questions.
“There’s nothing wrong with normal men. All four of my husbands were normal,” Sue said. “And witches don’t always get along with witches.”
He wasn’t technically a witch, not following the religion, and his meager power didn’t work like theirs. He didn’t really know what he was, one more reason why he wanted to find the warlock, find his father. He didn’t know if they were the same person, despite the warlock’s magic, despite its similarity to Adam’s, but this was the only lead he had.
White Trash Warlock Page 2