In the Blood

27

Why is God so unfair in His distribution of gifts? Why does He give so much beauty and love and wealth and ease to some? Why does He ask others of us to toil, to struggle, to grieve? This is something that has always bothered me. How could He create the monarch butterfly, and the pit viper? Why is the world so twisted, so dark and complicated, so impossible to understand? I was thinking all of this as I trekked, wretched and exhausted, through the woods. I expected helicopters to come swooping in overhead. But, no, there was nothing.

They’ll think I killed her, my father said to me. I’ll go to prison. And you’ll go to a group home. You have to help me.

There was so much blood. When I had knelt down to her, I got it on my palm and I thought about preschool and how they used to brush our hands with finger paint and press our palms into paper, write our name and the year. Mom? Mom? What’s wrong? She was so still and white. Her head was misshapen, flattened on one side. Her arm was twisted so horribly, it looked as if it were rubber tubing. I stood staring, the world around me reeling, and me falling through space and time.

You have to help me, he said again. He stood in the kitchen weeping.

I ran, keening, up the stairs to my room. There had been so many day-mares, so many ugly visions and imaginings, surely this was just another of them. My mom, my mom, mom, mom. I dove under my bed and stayed there. I listened to all the strange noises downstairs, the afternoon light fading, the room growing dark.

Onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightnineteneleventwelve.

Later, after her body was discovered, after he finally admitted to burying her, he said she fell from the landing, down to the marble floor below. She must have-or someone else pushed her. But not him.

He hid her body because he’d been having an affair, he said. She’d discovered it, and knew he wanted to leave her. He knew how it would look. He was a journalist, had reported the story a million times. It’s always the husband. He panicked, he claimed. He hid her body and made me help, but he didn’t kill her. Of course, no one believed him.

I helped him carry her body, wrapped in the Oriental carpet she had so loved, out to the car, heft it into the trunk. And we drove and drove, endless miles into endless night. Why? That’s what the police would want to know when I finally, with the help of my aunt and grandmother, screwed up the courage to tell the truth. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this. Why would I help the man I believed had killed my mother? And the truth is as simple as the fact that I loved my father, too. It was my mother who put the stars in the sky, but I loved him, too. Absent, short-tempered, sometimes distant-he was still my father. I couldn’t lose them both. I knew neither my aunt nor my grandmother would want me. I didn’t think they’d take me in after all the things I’d done. I didn’t want to go back to crazy school or a group home like the place where my mother worked. I would rather have slept in my own bed down the hall from my mother’s killer. But of course, I was in shock, too. And I wasn’t the most stable kid on the block to begin with.

Our parents hold an awesome power over us, Dr. Cooper said. The child of abuse will do almost anything to protect the injuring parent.

I jumped to his defense (sad, pathetic): He didn’t abuse me.

He was absent and often angry with you, by your own account, all your life. He was violent with your mother. You and a jury of twelve believe that he killed her. That’s abuse, my dear, even if he never laid a hand on you.

They came to get me on the third afternoon, Aunt Bridgette and my grandmother. My father had been taken in for questioning, and I was under my bed again. Because that was the only place in the house that I could stand to be.

They helped me pack a bag and took me back to my grandmother’s house. And there, in her old-lady living room complete with floral-patterned furniture, varnished dark wood, and doilies and a baby grand piano, I told them everything I had seen. I told them how we drove and drove, and finally I helped him carry the dining room carpet through a swampy, treed area until we came to a small clearing. And I wept and moaned as he started digging in the moonlight.

She wouldn’t want me to go to prison. Thud. You know that. She’d want me to take care of you. Thud. Whatever happened, he said. He paused, breathless and sweating in the blanket of humidity that hung in the air. It was an accident. You have to believe me.

And, oh, I so very badly wanted to believe him. I wanted to believe him so bad that I saw my mother’s ghost hovering in the air, blue and saintly. She was nodding her agreement, and I knew that she wanted me to protect myself since she couldn’t protect me anymore. She’d want me to go along with him until I figured out what the hell to do now that my whole universe had broken into a million little pieces.

Mom, don’t leave me, I called to her. Don’t go. And my voice rang out, as young and desperate and terrified as I was.

Shut up, he said. Stop saying that.

And I did stop. Because, from the look on his face, I had to wonder: if I didn’t do what he asked, would he be digging a grave for me, too?

For three days I kept his secret, told the police that I had come home to an empty house that day. And no, I had no idea where my mother was. But I was a shaking, miserable wreck, and that detective never let up. She saw my fear, my pain. She knew that I was playing a game I didn’t want to play. It was her idea to bring my father in for questioning again, to let my grandmother and aunt take me away with them. With my mother’s people, in their safe and normal camp, I could tell the truth.

When I finally told my grandmother and aunt, we went straight to the police. And the second phase of our nightmare kicked in. But at least we’ll have her body, my grandmother kept saying. She clearly derived some comfort from this. At least we’ll be able to lay her to rest. I don’t have to tell you that it killed her. My grandmother never recovered from her grief. I’m not a parent, but I don’t think you can lose a child like that and go on with your day-to-day. It’s hard enough already, as it is.

No one blames me for what happened to my mother. No one blamed me for being afraid, for keeping my father’s secret, for lying. No, no one could blame the disturbed child, the mentally ill, gender-confused young person that I was.

Back in the woods, I needed to think, but I couldn’t think. Panic was running the show. So I found the hollow of a tree and sank into its moist embrace. I let the silence wash over me, the wind in the leaves. Who was that man in the door? I kept seeing him there, just a shadow. Not my father, of course. He was on death row in Florida. News of his release would have reached me by now. Or had there been anyone there at all? I fished around in my bag for my medication and the bottle of water I always carried. I took my pills right there. Better late than never.

I felt better after a minute of just sitting and catching my breath. I had the book I’d found in Luke’s attic, and I had the GPS on my cell phone which I knew might not get a signal. But really, who has a compass? I fished the envelope out of the bag, removed Beck’s necklace. I was going to find her. That had to be where she was, right? The location I had found in the book? That was the next clue that he hadn’t had a chance to leave me. It had to be.

How Luke could have gotten her out there, I didn’t even consider. But I was sure that she was there, and I was going to rescue her. That’s where I was in my mind. I’d hurt her. I was responsible for this. I would save her. Obviously, I wasn’t operating at top capacity.

Then I heard a sound. At first I thought it was the calling of a bird, distant and strange. Then I realized, it was the sound of someone calling my name. It was far off in the distance. I strapped my bag around my body and looked up the location of the site on my phone. I studied the aerial map, the bird’s-eye view of The Hollows Wood. It wasn’t that far, maybe three miles. If I could find the state-maintained trail, I could get there faster.

I was used to this kind of terrain, comfortable in the silence of the trees. I heard the voice again, faint and distant, so I started to hoof it. Man, woman, or child, I couldn’t tell. Was it the police? My aunt? Luke? I had no idea. I just started to run.

There’s murder in my blood. A twisting rope of psychosis from my father and maternal grandfather, and probably others before them. From father to son, from father to son, it travels down the chain, a poison in the blood. Only it doesn’t kill you. I have often wished it did. I hate the thought of who I am. I despise my origins. I have done everything in my power to shed that person. And yet that person is with me always.

It was after my grandmother died and my father was convicted that I informed my aunt of my desire to be called Lana. I took my grandmother’s maiden name, Granger, as my own. I had a thought that I could bury myself this way, by taking my grandmother’s name before she was touched by my grandfather’s evil. The gene for violence, for murder, is one that travels through only the male DNA, as far as they know at this time. If I could hide from that, too, maybe I could escape my father and my grandfather’s legacy.

Beck was the first person to make me feel like a man. I had been hiding among women, dwelling in the persona of my female self. Living as Lana Granger allowed me to hide from my past, cloister myself from any sexual contact. But since my night with Beck, I was coming alive in ways I’d never experienced.

Still, I’m not sure I feel what others feel. I see people laugh and cry. I see Beck with all her rampaging emotions-her passion, her anger, her joy. I am aware of distant stirrings that might approximate what I see in other people. But have I been swept away in love, overcome by joy? No. I have felt sorrow, remorse, and fear. That’s how I know I am not a monster.

Does the psychopath know himself ? I have often wondered this. Do you know if you are evil, devoid of normal human emotion? There are people, doctors at Fieldcrest and at the crazy school I attended in Florida, who believe that a child psychopath (for lack of a better term-no one wants to diagnose a child that way) can be taught to display empathy, or to understand feeling.

Because above all else, the psychopath is a mimic. He learns to display emotions he doesn’t feel. He seeks to blend into his group, whatever that is. He will shape-shift and mold himself into whatever he needs to be to survive and thrive. The United States is excellent at breeding psychopaths-a country where we reward the individual with a hyperfocus on success at any cost. We reward narcissism-with our social networks and hideous reality television programs. We laud business leaders, even as they abuse workers, rape the environment. In other cultures, where the individual subordinates himself more freely to the needs of family and society, we see fewer psychopaths. So some forward-thinking doctors believe that if you interfere early in the budding psyche of a disturbed individual, he can be taught to think of others. He can be taught to see others not only as instruments of his desires.

What am I? The truth is that I don’t know. I know that I have truly loved and cared for people-my mother, my father, my aunt, Beck. I have regretted things that I have done, hurting people that I hurt when I was a child. So I do have feelings. It’s just that they’re muted and strange. Dr. Cooper thinks it’s a kind of arrested development, partly hormonal, partly psychological, partly related to the traumas of my life. Some of it has to do with the cocktail of medications I take, a antipsychotic, antidepressant cocktail. She thinks I will grow into myself someday. She doesn’t think I’m evil, or a monster, or a bad seed. She doesn’t believe in those things. And neither do I. I am buried beneath layers and layers of genetic and pharmaceutical debris. But I can feel myself, ever since my night with Beck. I can feel myself breaking through.

The miles were hard and the cold winter sun was high in the sky by the time I finally found the trail. It must have been going on noon. But the light was dimming. A thick gray cloud cover was blanketing the sky and I could smell snow. I glanced at my phone; the compass app showed that I was headed in the right direction, due north. Another mile and I’d be at the site marked in Luke’s book. But I started to slow my pace, wondering if I was making a mistake. Maybe it would be better for Beck if I went to the police and told them what I knew. Maybe this was just wasting time. What if I got to the site and there was nothing there?

My phone was constantly buzzing. I’d turned the ringer off, but I could feel it vibrating in my pocket. My aunt, Sky, Dr. Cooper, another number I didn’t recognize.

I decided I should listen to the messages:

“This is a bad move,” Sky warned. “Just come back and we’ll figure all of this out. That lawyer, whom you obviously are going to need, is on her way. Come back, meet with her, and we’ll go talk to the police. They don’t know you’re gone yet, but it won’t be long before they figure it out. I can’t hold them off forever.”

“Please, sweetie,” begged my aunt. I could hear the tears in her voice. “I promised your mom that I would take care of you if she couldn’t. You need to let me do that. I know you. I know you wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Running away might seem like a good choice,” said Dr. Cooper. “It might seem like the only choice. But we have lots of options that we can explore together. Call me. Or just come to my office. I’m here for you.”

Why couldn’t I ever let anyone help me?

There was one more message.

“You don’t know me,” he said. “But I know you. My name is Peter Jacobs, and you might be familiar with me as the man who has been leading the initiative for your father’s release. Some new information has come to light and I want to discuss it with you. Give me five minutes of your time.”

All famous killers have their followers, and my father was no exception. And this guy was his number one fan boy, the journalist who always believed that there was another man at the scene of the crime, my mother’s lover. It was my initial testimony that encouraged this idea. I said that I had seen a strange pair of shoes at the door. But I wasn’t sure of that anymore. I couldn’t swear to it now. In my memory, there is a pair of simple black walking shoes. But was it that afternoon, or another afternoon-I couldn’t be sure. Even so, it had been enough on which to hang years of defense, appeals, and investigations. Who is S? This initial that was scrawled into my mother’s calendar with a little heart beside it that everyone seemed to think was evidence of an affair. Personally, I had no idea who it was. My mother, as far as I saw, only worked and cared for me.

As I came into the clearing, I saw it: a mine-shaft entrance, built into the swell of a small hill. The splintered wood frame was bent and sagging, and the hole was boarded shut. It looked like something out of a fairy tale, the hole in which a troll or hobbit might live, and I stood looking at it for a second. Was she in there? The sky had grown darker, and the air ever colder. I was so far from everything now, a three-mile trek in either direction to safety. It was then that I realized how stupid I was. I needed to call the police, or someone, and I was going to do that right away. I took the phone from my pocket and was about to dial when I heard something that I was sure came from inside the mine.

I dropped my bag, moved in close, and listened. I laid my head against the wood for a moment. The boards were nailed in tight, no amount of prying with my bare fingers was going to pull them out. And the nails were rusty, as if they’d been there for a hundred years. A big red sign warned people away-DANGER: CAVERS, SPELUNKERS, HIKERS AND ALL, DO NOT ENTER THIS MINE SHAFT. IT IS TREACHEROUS AND UNSTABLE AND NOT FIT FOR ENTRY!

I tried to pull at the boards anyway, and then started yelling: “Beck, Beck, it’s me. Are you in there? Answer me! I’m sorry!”

My voice rang out, strident and panicked. A flock of blackbirds fluttered away, squawking into the sky.

“Have you completely lost your mind?”

The voice rocketed through me, a blast of adrenaline nearly shot me into the air. I turned around to see Langdon standing there. He was red-faced and sweating from exertion, in spite of the cold. I leaned against the wood and slid down to the ground, wrapping up and burying my head in my arms.

“How many times am I going to have to ask you this question?” he said. “What are you doing?”

“I thought she was out here,” I said.

I fished the book from my bag and tossed it over to him. He was bent over, leaning on his knees. He was still trying to catch his breath. But he picked it up and looked at the page I had marked.

“Was that you calling me?” I asked. “All those miles ago.”

“Who else?” he asked.

He walked over and inspected the shaft. He ran his fingers over the rough surface, touched the nail heads. “No one’s been in this mine for a hundred years,” he said. “These nails are so rusted they’re practically fused to the wood.”

“I heard something,” I said. I was still listening, but there was nothing. It could have been that all I’d heard was Langdon’s approach. I was so confused and so tired now, I couldn’t trust any of my perceptions. She’s dead, a voice whispered in my head. She’s dead because you left her alone in the woods. It’s your fault.

Langdon put his head to the wood. “No,” he said. “I don’t hear anything.”

I was spent, completely and utterly done. I felt myself shutting down, going blank, all feeling draining down that hole in my center.

Langdon reached down a hand and lifted me to my feet.

“We have to get you back, Lana,” he said. “This doesn’t look good. Everyone’s going crazy. Your aunt… she’s a wreck.”

“That’s not my name.”

The gray daylight seemed to deepen, and the whispering of the leaves all around us swelled to a chorus of voices.

“I know,” he said. All the color had left his face, and his features had fallen slack. He was a black tower against the gray behind him. And something in my body was responding-a hollow in my gut, a tightness in my throat.

“I know that,” he said again.

A universe of understanding passed between us. I ticked back through the last few months, remembered him pulling Rachel’s ad from the board, turning up places he had no reason being, climbing down into that grave after the last scavenger hunt clue. Impossibly, he was part of this. But how? Why? I couldn’t even think of the right things to ask.

“Was that you in the house today?” I asked. There were a million other, more important questions. But that’s the only one that came to mind.

He smiled, but it was not the warm and reassuring smile that I expected and needed from him. He offered a slow nod, and he didn’t seem like the person I knew at all.

Run, said the voice in my head. Get away from him.

But I was frozen where I stood. I couldn’t get my head around the idea that this man… my mentor, my adviser, my professor… was anything other than my trusted friend.

This was always my Waterloo, that I’d stand around trying to figure out the things that confused me-like that day on the playground after I pushed the boy who’d been bullying me off the jungle gym. The world was so impossibly complicated, so many factors at play in any circumstance-physics, psychology, chemistry. That boy and I hadn’t liked each other, that was the first thing. Bad blood. He’d teased me, so I pushed him. Cause and effect. He was too close to the edge to save himself with a step back, too heavy to stop his own backward momentum. Physics.

Such a delicate interplay of forces; and I had always been fascinated by how things wove together. I got lost in contemplating it. It always unsettled people, made me seem like a freak-just standing there and thinking like I did.

I saw Langdon bend down and pick something up.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him. "What do you want?”

“I’m here for you,” he said. “Just like I’ve always been.”

He moved closer, reaching out a hand for mine. I let him take it and realized how little physical contact we’d had over the years. His palm was cool and soft.

“I’ve been waiting for you to tell me who you are,” he said. “To let me in.”

His nearness unsettled me; he didn’t even look like himself. There was a strange yearning gleam to his gaze. He kept moving toward me and I realized too late that he was leaning in to kiss me. I pulled back quickly, shrank from him, really. It might have seemed like disgust, but it wasn’t that. I don’t know what I was feeling, other than a desire to get away. Certainly, under other circumstances I’d have been more gentle with him. I watched that yearning turn to anger, dark and petulant.

“No,” I said. “I’m not like that. It’s not like that with us.”

It was a realization for me, too. I started backing away from him. Again, that voice in my head: Run. This time I nearly listened, but it was too late.

“I have to go,” I said. I still thought he might let me. “Okay?”

He didn’t answer, just drew his arm back. Then slowly but inexorably, his fist was flying in my direction. But I was already on the ground, my head filled with the twin sirens of fear and pain, when I realized that he had hit me.

I stared up at him, feeling small and helpless. He stood over me, a rock in his hand. I tried to ask him why he was doing this. It was crazy… and what did he want? But none of those words made it out into the world. His face, as blank as my own, was the last thing I saw before everything went from bright white, to fuzzy gray, to black.

28

When I came back to myself, I was lying on the cold, hard earth and night had fallen. The cloud cover must have hung thick and low, because I couldn’t see the stars, and the moon was just a silvery glow in the sky. I squeezed my eyes closed, assessing the pain in my head, the hard place where my hip connected with the earth, the bindings on my wrists and ankles. There was a rhythmic sound that echoed off the trees around me. It was a sound I recognized immediately. And for a second I thought I’d lost my mind or that I was stuck in some kind of nightmare loop in my life.

The night I helped to carry my mother’s body out to the place where my father buried her, I kept thinking I was dreaming. Several times I was sure of it. Because such things didn’t really happen, and my daydreams and nightmares were often much more vivid than my waking life. And, certainly, even with all I’d suffered, nothing had prepared me for a reality like this.

The truth was that I often knew my visions weren’t real. I knew there wasn’t an old woman in my room that told me my mother didn’t love me anymore. I said things like that to upset my mother when I was feeling jealous or insecure. And I had overheard my mother and grandmother talking about my child-murdering grandfather. That time I was trying to comfort my mother. Maybe if she thought my grandfather was sorry, she wouldn’t think he was so bad. And if she didn’t think he was so bad, maybe she wouldn’t be so worried about me. It all makes a sick, twisted child’s kind of sense, doesn’t it? My poor mom. I wonder if she’s at peace now. I hope she is.

The digging continued, and I listened to its echo in the night.

This is the right thing. I know you’ll see that someday, my father said. I sat weeping against the tree. Otherwise, what will happen to you? Stop crying. You’re too old to be crying like a girl.

Yet another gender inequality: Boys and men are not allowed to feel. They’re not allowed to accept and express their emotions in the same way that women are. It’s weakness. Only pansies and little faggots cry. Everyone always talks about how bad women have it, how systematically they have been abused, maligned, hated, and discriminated against throughout history. And, of course, it’s true. But no one ever talks about how that misogyny has had its backlash on men. When you hate women, you hate all the female elements of your own psychology. Jung believed that there were two primary anthropomorphic archetypes of the unconscious mind. The animus is the unconscious male, and the anima is the unconscious female. Because a man’s anima, his more sensitive, feeling side, must so often be repressed, it forms the ultimate shadow self-a dark side that is hated and buried. Jung was a big believer in accepting the shadow, embracing it… or suffering the consequences in psychic pain.

I didn’t want to stop crying then. My father himself had been weeping just minutes earlier. The pain inside me was a living thing, a beast of fear and grief and horror. If I didn’t weep, I might have imploded.

But I didn’t cry this time. I lay very still, listening to the sound, wondering what the hell was happening to me and what I was going to do. No one knew where I was. I was not experiencing normal levels of terror for the situation I was in. Part of that had to do with the beta-blockers in the medication I was taking. They dulled the chemical fear response, hence my flat affect, which people were always so put off by. Tonight, I had a feeling my emotional flatness was going to work in my favor. Then the sound stopped and there was only silence.

I waited.

I have thought long and hard about those shoes I saw. I remember they were smallish and that I thought they might have been my mother’s. They were sensible, leather lace-ups-not like anything my mother would ever wear because she was all about style. She’d tell the girls at the group home that when we put on clothes, we’re telling ourselves something, and we’re communicating that something to every person we meet. If your clothes are dirty, or wrinkled, or ill-fitting, you’re telling people that you don’t care enough about yourself to put yourself together. It speaks volumes to teachers, to prospective employers, and to men. If you don’t care about yourself, why should they?

Those shoes belonged to someone who was practical, who cared little about form or style over function. But if they had been lying by the door when I came in, which I couldn’t swear to anymore, they were gone when my father and I left. I think. See? It’s hard. When you’re crazy to begin with, and deeply traumatized to boot, your so-called eyewitness testimony is next to useless. There were voices, too. I remembered hearing voices from my hiding place under the bed. But I couldn’t be sure of that either. Male or female, I didn’t know. And over the sound of my own frantic screaming, I certainly didn’t hear any words.

“What was it like that night?”

Langdon was standing over me. He, too, was wearing very sensible shoes, those all-terrain Merrells-the perfect choice for hiking, climbing, and digging graves. Whose grave was it that he was digging? I wondered. Mine?

“It was Florida,” I answered. “So it was warm and humid. And it was more of a swamp.”

“But tonight is the night, right? Seven years ago tonight?” There was an unpleasant eagerness in his voice.

“Yes,” I said. I had forgotten. I didn’t mark the calendar with my personal tragedies anymore. I thought I was moving beyond it all, in the ways that you can. When you begin to heal, you can tell because you start living your life again. You start living in the present moment, in the here and now. You look toward the future. You’re not always looking back, wishing, always wishing, that things had been different.

“Why did you let her touch you?” he asked.

I dared to look up at him, and I swear, he didn’t even seem like the same person I knew. The angry, hateful expression on his face so transformed him that he looked like a ghoul. I wondered, would there be a stop on the Haunted Hollows tour for this site in a few years?

“Why do you care?” I asked.

I tried to push myself up, but he pushed me back down with his foot. It didn’t take much; the whole universe was wobbly. I could feel something in my pocket, something hard pressing against my hip. It was the Mace; I finally remembered that I was carrying it. I couldn’t have picked a better day. Too bad I couldn’t get to it with my hands bound.

“What does it have to do with you?” I said.

There was some kind of battle taking place on his face then-a battle between despair and rage. I realized then that he always knew who I was, what I was. I thought about Beck’s gossipy little dig: I heard he has a boyfriend in the city. Maybe there had been some kind of weird undercurrent between us. But Beck showed me something about myself that I hadn’t really understood. I’d been so wrapped up, so repressed in that way, I didn’t know what the hell I wanted. Now I did. I wanted Beck.

“Where is she?” I asked. “Where is she, Langdon? Did you hurt her?”

An ugly smile broke across his face and he walked away from me. I pushed myself up to sitting with my elbows, despite the binding around my wrists. I started trying to rub them free. And that’s when I saw Beck lying in a fetal position near the grave he’d dug. She was pale, and bound, just as I was. She was wearing what she’d been wearing the night I left her. I’d done this to her. It was my fault.

“Beck!” I yelled, but she was still, too still.

He put his foot on her shoulder. And I saw her move, I thought. Did she shift? Did she give a weak, frightened moan? He gave her a hard push and she rolled into the hole in the earth, landing with an ugly thud.

I need you to believe that I didn’t kill her, my father said in the car on the way home. I need you to understand that.

I believe you, I said. Even though I didn’t believe him at all. I mean, what are you going to say? And a numbness settled over me. I was comfortably sleepy.

I’m doing this for you, okay?

Okay.

Son, are you all right?

I’m fine.

Dr. Cooper and I have been over and over this conversation, how wrong the whole thing was, how manipulative and insane.

Now, this is how we’re going to handle it. We might have been talking about a particularly challenging school project. And he went on to tell me how tomorrow-after he cleaned up-he was going to report her missing. All I had to do was say that the last time I saw her was in the morning before I left for school that day. That I came home to an empty house, and assumed that she was working. And he said other stuff, too, but I don’t really remember what he wanted me to say to the police. Still, it was a fairly extensive coaching session on how to act and what not to say. Use as few words as possible when talking to them. Don’t answer any questions they haven’t asked. Don’t rush to fill silences.

I do remember when the police came the next morning, that detective gave me one look and knew. Later she would tell me that I was vibrating, giving off a terrified and grief-stricken energy that she picked up on right away.

But the question remains. Did my father kill her? The truth is that I just don’t know. I know they hated each other and that they stayed together just because of me. I know that he was having an affair-another woman, another child, another life that was better than the one he had with us. This information came out early in the list of things that damned him with me and everyone else. Beyond that: the police had visited our various homes several times, the neighbors having called to complain about raised voices and the sounds of violence. My father had been to a divorce attorney who would testify that he reacted badly when he learned how much a divorce was going to cut into his personal fortune. It was a lengthy and ugly list of damning activities. But there was no physical evidence, nothing that placed my father on the landing, nothing to show that he had pushed her. But how else might she have fallen? A thousand freak ways, the defense argued. Most accidents happened in the home. Or the missing lover had done it. Maybe he had pushed her.

But my father was convicted, and appeal after appeal was denied. And now the clock was ticking, his life winding down. For the first time, now that my own life was hanging in the balance, I began to wonder. Did I owe him something more? Was he on death row because he was a poor husband and worse father? Had someone else been there that day?

“Why are you doing this?” I asked Langdon. I am not sure he understood what I was saying, because it came out like a wail as I struggled to get to my feet.

“It’s where dirty little sluts like Beck-and your mother-belong, isn’t it?” Langdon said. “In an unmarked grave, deep in the middle of nowhere.”

His words, his tone, shut me down cold. A shudder moved through me and I let myself fall back.

“I’ve read every word ever written about you,” he said. “I know you helped him bury her body.”

“I was a kid,” I said. “I was a scared, confused kid.”

“Sure. I get that. But still. You helped him.”

I had heard this before, or rather read it. On those crime Web sites, where freaks gather to analyze various cases, people come to speculate and analyze media coverage, use pop psychology and knowledge gleaned from the myriad police procedure shows that dominate prime time to come up with their own personal theories. Much was made of this element of that case, of my supposed complicity. I always hated those people who tried to make me guilty, even as I pitied them. How sad, how pathetic and dull must their stupid lives be. Plenty of people believed that I killed my mother, and that my father went to jail to protect me.

In fact, even the private investigator who continues to lobby for my father’s release suspected my guilt at one time, though by this point he seemed to have dropped me from his list of suspects, for whatever reason. But it makes for a pretty story, doesn’t it, for my father’s fan club? He’s not a murderer, after all! He’s a hero! He went to jail to protect his crazy son. That’s why I wasn’t eager to return the calls I received from my father’s team. They’d been wrong about everything for years.

“You know my history,” I said to Langdon. “You know I was taking an antipsychotic, antidepressant cocktail, not to mention what they gave me to sleep.”

“I know, with the whole suite of side effects-sedation, blunted awareness and feeling, inability to feel pleasure, asexuality,” he said, bored. “They really fucked with your brain chemistry. They’re still fucking with it.”

“So they are.”

I was deeply screwed up and had been for as long as I could remember.

“So how do you even know who you are or what you want? You can’t want her.” He glanced toward Beck’s motionless form.

“Maybe I don’t.”

I saw his expression change, and somewhere inside I smiled. I was a fuckup, to be sure, but I was also extremely smart. Did I know what I was and what I wanted? I wasn’t gay. I understood that now. My feelings of affection, my closeness to Langdon… I think, looking back now, I saw him as a father figure-someone to advise me and direct me, someone I could trust. And I had become so divorced from my feelings, had so little idea of what good, healthy feelings were, that I confused my feelings for something else. Maybe he’d picked up on my confusion and mistaken it for repressed desire.

He moved a step closer to me. I lifted up my wrists. “Untie me,” I said softly. “This is crazy.”

I realized then how little I knew about Langdon. He’d been my professor and adviser since my freshman year. We’d arrived at Sacred Heart College at almost the same time, but all we ever talked about was me. He’d never told me anything much about himself, just that he’d grown up in the Northeast. His parents were both dead; he had a married sister in Poughkeepsie, two nieces. I only knew that because he kept their picture on his desk. Who was he? What had formed him? What were his appetites?

He moved closer to me, seemed to consider me a moment, and then he undid my bindings. Everything in my body wanted to run to the grave. Was Beck dead? Could I still help her?

“Anhedonia,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I asked, even though I already knew.

“It’s the inability to feel pleasure,” he said. “It’s a common side effect of antipsychotic drugs.”

“Yes,” I said.

“You didn’t seem to be experiencing that with her,” he said, nodding toward Beck. There was anger, bitterness in his tone, and I found myself repulsed by him. But I held my ground as he moved closer.

“So you wrote that last poem?” I asked.

He nodded.

“And the one before it?”

“I wrote them all.”

“You used him?” I asked. He had access to Luke at Fieldcrest. He’d pulled that ad from the board and handed it right to me. “You used Luke to get to me?”

“He was easy to use,” he said. He offered a slow shrug. “The kid’s a wreck. So desperate for male attention, he’ll do just about anything.”

I felt a deep twist inside-sadness and sorrow for Luke. We pick our own predators. The flower gives off the scent that attracts the insect that nature designed specifically for the task. Had he picked Langdon? Had I? We draw them to us, sending out messages we often don’t even know we’re sending. Luke and I were both easy victims. In other circumstances, we might have been the predators, especially Luke, if he were older. Instead we were prey.

He took a step closer, approaching me tentatively. He’d only undone the bindings on my wrists. My legs were still tied. He didn’t want me to run. I tried to smile, but it felt tight and insincere on my face. My hand was itching to reach into my pocket. But still I held my ground.

“Just let her go,” I said.

It was a mistake. His face became a cold, hard mask. He reached for me, and as he did I shoved my hand deep in my pocket and brought out the tube, spraying.

He roared, stumbling, clawing at his eyes. And I dove my way out of his path. As he doubled over, screaming, I quickly undid my bindings and bolted for the grave where he’d dumped Beck. He was after me, but slowly-one hand rubbing at his eyes, one arm outstretched, feeling his way.

I jumped down, and landed beside her, nearly on top of her. Then I bent and lifted her shoulders, and nearly died with relief when she lolled her head and opened her eyes. They were glassy, and staring. She was heavily drugged. Shit. She was heavy. How was I going to get her out of this place? I had jumped into the grave without any notion of how to get us out.

“You left me,” she said. Her words were slurred and slow. “You asshole. You left me.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. Beck, I’m sorry.”

“Fuck you, Lane.” She reached up to hit me, but her arm fell heavily on my shoulder.

“Okay,” I said. Yes, that was my name: Lane. My real name. “Fine. We’ll fight about it later.”

That’s when Langdon started raining dirt down on the grave we were sharing.

29

For all the talk in our culture about how important it is to find ourselves, we don’t have a lot of patience for the task, do we? It’s kind of a joke, a mode of light derision, to say that someone is still finding himself. Most people, it seems, have a pretty good idea of who they are. At least that’s how it appears to someone as lost as I have been. The big things usually seem to be in line for other people anyway, like gender for example.

We have more patience for girls who act like boys than boys who act like girls. A tomboy is considered cute. One day she’ll shuck her muddy jeans and put on a dress, and everyone will gasp at her beauty. They’ll all laugh about her tree-climbing, frog-catching days.

But there’s no such tolerance for the boy who puts on a dress, who wants a toy kitchen or a baby doll to love. Jung would say that this is because, even culturally, our anima is repressed, hated, derided. We hate our female selves. A boyish girl is perfectly acceptable. A girlish boy? Not so much. In certain places, you’d get your ass kicked, find yourself “gay-bashed.” You might even get yourself killed. That’s how much we hate our anima.

Beck was fully unconscious, and I was trying to keep the falling dirt off her face, away from her nose and mouth.

“Why are you doing this?” I yelled at Langdon.

He walked to the rim of the grave.

“Why?” he asked. He seemed incredulous, as if he couldn’t believe I’d ask such a stupid question. I could see the sweat pouring down his flushed face in spite of the cold. The walls around me seemed high, but they were crumbling and I started clawing at them, trying to create a foothold to lift myself out.

“I came here for you,” he said. He swept an arm to the trees. “I followed you to this dump in the middle of nowhere.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. He must have seen it on my face.

“Don’t you know me?” he asked.

Now he looked hurt, as though I’d let him down terribly. He was a different person than the man I’d known all these years. There was nothing of the mellow, kindhearted adviser and professor that I had grown to rely upon.

“Dr. Chang was my mentor,” he said.

It took a few seconds for the name to register. I thought about those years so little. The space between then and now was a dark and chaotic parade of horrible events. I didn’t think about Dr. Chang and his crazy school, even though I suppose I owed him a debt of gratitude.

It had been a place much like Fieldcrest. But my memories of my old school, my teachers, the day-to-day, were somewhat fuzzy and vague. Did I remember Langdon? It would have been more than ten years ago. He would have been one of the young doctors that rotated through for a semester.

For a medicated, mentally ill person such as myself, ten years might as well have been a million years. I could hardly remember my mother’s face, if I closed my eyes. She’d been slipping further and further away from me.

What should I do? I thought. Pretend that I remember him? Tell him the truth? Instead, I did what I always did, stared blankly at him, trying to figure out what he wanted.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t remember much from that time.”

“I assisted in your group therapy sessions,” he said. “You were a standout. Sensitive and gifted in a room of maniacs.”

I was struggling to place him. But I really only remembered Dr. Chang, and some of the others-Dr. Rain, who taught science; Dr. Abigail, who did art therapy. There was a music teacher, young and very pretty. I remembered her, but not her name. I had no memory of Langdon at all. Really, in all the years we’d spent together at Sacred Heart, wouldn’t I have remembered before now? But was there something? Something deep within me that remembered him and had been drawn to him because of the memories? I don’t know.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

Now it was his turn to stare, the shovel in his hand. I waited for him to say something else. But he walked away from the grave then. As scared as I was, part of me was grieving, too. I’d trusted him and cared about him. Why is it that no one you love ever seems to stay?

When he came back, he had a gun. It didn’t look right in his hand. He was the kind of guy to carry a book, a laptop, a pen, not a semiautomatic.

“You killed her because she discovered your secret,” he said flatly. “You dug her grave. Then, in despair, you killed yourself and fell in with her. That’s how I found you. That’s what I’ll tell the police, and they’ll believe me. I’ll tell them that I’ve been watching you, following you for days, because I’ve been so worried.”

It would work. It really would. It was a perfectly logical story, fit right together when all my lies were revealed. It would make a fitting end to a tragic, titillating tale. Everyone loves a good murder-suicide.

“Don’t do this,” I said. “Please. We can both walk away from this, all of us can. Nothing has happened yet that can’t be fixed.”

“You confided in me that you had killed your mother,” he went on, blankly, almost trancelike. “That you let your father go to jail to protect you.”

“Is that what this is about?”

“Your father is a friend of mine,” he said haughtily. “We’re close.”

Was that true? I had no way to know. Was my father pulling strings from behind bars?

“This is not going to work,” I said. “It’s almost impossible to get away with a crime these days. The forensic science is too advanced. They’ll see the trajectory of the bullet. You’ll get caught and go to jail. You might even get the electric chair.”

I know I sounded rambling and desperate. And I saw with despair that he was beyond listening.

“If my father has anything to do with this,” I said, “he’s using you. Just like you used Luke. Just like you’re using me. We collude with our predators, Professor. Wasn’t it you who taught me that?”

He lifted the gun on me, and I closed my eyes. When the shot rang out, I wondered what it would be like to die, how long it would take, if it would hurt, what was waiting for me on the other side…

It was silent then for a long time, and finally I opened my eyes. I saw Langdon’s arm dangling over the side of the grave. Inspecting myself, I realized that I hadn’t been shot at all. Then a small white face, as pale and round as a moon, was floating above me.

Luke looked down at me and smiled. I could see that he held Langdon’s shovel.

“I hit him,” he said. He held up the heavy shovel. “With this. He was going to kill you.”

“Good job,” I said, for lack of anything better to say.

As glad as I was to see Luke, as glad as I was to see anyone, there was something unsettling about him standing so high above me, holding a shovel.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He dropped the shovel and started rummaging in his pack.

I shook my head and said, “Can you get us out of here?”

He looked up from his pack, and he gave me a grim little nod. “I’ll get you out. I brought a rope.”

“Do you see my pack up there?” I asked. “I need my phone.”

He didn’t answer me.

“Did you bring anyone with you, Luke? Did you call the police?”

“No,” he said. “I came alone.”

“Luke,” I said. “Where’s the gun?”

He looked over the side at me. “Who’s that?”

“That’s my friend,” I said. “She needs help. I need you to find that phone before you get me out of here.”

“Okay,” he said, and he walked off.

“How did you get here?” I called, just to keep him talking. The cold air was starting to feel painful now that I didn’t have adrenaline pumping through my blood.

“Same as always,” he said. He was still out of sight, and it was making me nervous. I got to work on that foothold again. “I rode my bike,” he was saying. He sounded far away. I looked up to see Langdon’s lifeless arm still dangling over the side.

“You’ve been here before?”

“You know I have,” he said. He was closer now. The sky was clearing and I could see a few stars. Beck was moaning, muttering something I couldn’t understand. I put my hand on her head, offered her some soothing words… “It’s okay… we’re okay… we’re going home.”

Then Luke was looming again, this time holding my phone. “You were in my room today, in my crawl space.”

I didn’t say anything. This was not the time for a tantrum.

“Right?” he said, when I stayed silent.

“We have a lot to talk about,” I said. I put on my best Dr. Cooper voice, soothing but firm. She always has such a clear idea about the right things to do and the right order in which to do them. I always admired that about her. “And we’ll do that. But right now we need to get me out of this hole, and call the police.”

“But I want to talk now,” he said.

He knelt down and I saw that he was binding Langdon, which probably wasn’t a bad idea. But I needed that rope, or the phone. And he obviously wasn’t in any hurry to deliver on either one.

“How about we play a game?” asked Luke.

Oh my God, really? I struggled to keep my composure, but the stress was starting to mount. I looked up to see that the gun lay on the edge of the grave and he had his hand on it. For fuck’s sake. I leaned against the wall and drew in a deep breath as I dug my toe into the hole I’d made, and started, as subtly as possible, pushing it in deeper. The dirt was cold and hard, and my progress felt painfully slow.

“What kind of game?” I tried to keep my voice steady. I didn’t want him to know how close to the edge of my endurance I was. Or that I was scared. So far, I’d never beaten him at any game we played.

“Twenty questions,” he said.

“And if I win?”

“Then I’ll help you and your friend out of the hole. And you can call the police.”

“And if you win?”

He smiled a little, and his eyes were shiny and dark with mischief.

“Maybe I’ll kill you all and fill in this hole, then go home and climb back into my bed. They’ll think I was locked in my room all night. The only two people who know I can get out are right here.”

I didn’t answer, just kept pressing my foot in, scraping and pushing, scraping and pushing.

“They’ll figure it out, Luke.”

He shrugged. “Or maybe I’ll help you anyway. If I win, I get to do whatever I want. Because you know what? I never get to do what I want. Do you know that? Kids never get to do what they want. It sucks.”

He was as sullen and whiny as any eleven-year-old. But he was fucking nuts, and that’s what made him dangerous-like those little African kids, high on drugs, carrying machine guns. Crazy, drugged, and violent as sin; it was a nasty, terrifying combination. I felt the rise of bile-it might have been anger or it might have been fear. So divorced from my emotions was I that I couldn’t tell which. But even so, there was an undercurrent of empathy for him. I understood him. I was him-if no longer, then once a long time ago.

“That’s cool,” I said. “I get it. I’m not that much older than you, you know. I’ve been through all the same shit.”

“I know,” he said. “Believe me. I know everything about you, Lana.”

And here I thought I was so good at keeping secrets, at hiding myself away from the world. Beck, Luke, Langdon… they had all figured me out.

“You can call me Lane,” I said.

“Lane,” he said, as though he were testing it out on the air. “That’s a really gay name.”

“So,” I said. “How do you want to play? You think of something and I guess what it is?”

“Don’t you know how to play twenty questions?” he asked.

“It’s been a while,” I said. No, I’d never played twenty questions.

“I’ll change the rules a little,” he said. “You can ask any question. It doesn’t have to be just yes-or-no answers. We don’t have all night.”

He sat on the edge of the grave, dangling his legs over the edge, kicking his heels against the dirt. He gazed up at the sky and seemed to be thinking. In the moonlight, he was an angel in a parka. If he’d sprouted wings and flown away, I wouldn’t have been surprised. “Okay. I’m thinking of something.”

I watched his face. It was perfectly still, carved from stone. But there was a flicker of something. I knew how lonely he was. I knew because I had been lonely like that, too, all my life.

“Just get me out of here,” I said.

“No,” he said. He was cool and certain. “Play with me.”

30

“Is it a person, place, or thing?”

“It’s a person,” he said. “But it’s also a state of being.”

“Male or female?”

He gave me a look. How ironic that I would ask, his face seemed to say. “Male. That’s two questions,” he said.

Beck said something unintelligible, and I looked down at her.

“Shut up!” he barked at her.

I don’t think Luke saw me jump. I knelt down to Beck, and she suddenly seemed so much paler, weaker. She was drugged, probably starved, dehydrated. I put a hand on her and her skin felt cool-that couldn’t be good, right? Shock or something like that? She opened her eyes at my touch and all I saw on her face was fear; it opened something up in me. I realized how deeply fucked we were, and bit back panic. The brain seizes in panic, and I was already out of my league. She reached for me and whispered something, but I could barely hear her.

“That’s cheating!” he said. He held the gun now and I could see that he was getting angry.

“She doesn’t even know what’s happening.”

“Yes,” he said petulantly. “She does.”

I stood to face him, and I could feel Beck’s hand on my leg. “Young or old?” I asked.

“All ages,” he said.

“Look,” I said. “Can we just end this? Why are you doing this?”

“Three, four, and five,” he said. His kicking grew rhythmic, and he was biting on the edge of his thumb. I began pressing my toe into the earth again. It felt like I was getting deeper. A few more inches, I thought, and I might be able to lift myself out of the grave. I thought I heard something on the air then. Was it a siren? The wind picked up and a light snow started to fall. I could feel Beck shivering. Were we going to die out here tonight?

“Do I know someone like this?” I asked.

“Quite a few, I’d say.”

“Am I like this?” A little deeper.

“You are, but you don’t know it.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.”

Honestly? I had no idea what he was getting at. I mean, really, I was intellectually shut down. All I could think about was getting Beck and myself out of the hell we were in. Luke cocked his head, seemed to be listening to the night. I used his diverted attention to kick harder at the foothold and my toe slipped in deeper to the frozen ground. My hands were shaking from cold and fear.

“Where do men like this live?”

“Everywhere,” he said. “Anywhere.”

Beck was tugging at my jean leg but I was ignoring her. If I looked at her again, I was going to fall apart and risk Luke’s anger.

“Don’t look at her,” he said. “Look at me.”

His ankle was well within my reach. But if I pulled him into the grave, we’d all be stuck. The flakes falling from the sky were sharp and cold. The snow had already started to stick to the ground. If I was going to make my move, it would have to be one motion. I’d have to step up hard, grab his ankle, and push myself up and pull myself out at the same time. Maybe he’d be too surprised to shoot. How much experience could Luke have with guns?

I couldn’t even think of another question to ask. Luke and I locked eyes.

“Do you give up?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

I heard a moan from up above, and Luke looked toward the sound. Then he bounced up out of sight. Langdon’s arm slowly disappeared as he was dragged away from the edge.

“Luke,” I called, but he didn’t answer.

After a second I heard an ugly thwack. Then again. The sound of it made my stomach turn, but Beck was pulling at me harder. I bent down to her. This time I heard her. Her breath was hot in my ear as she whispered the answer.

I felt myself reel back from her. But even in my utter disbelief, I knew that what she said was the truth. Part of me had known it all along.

When I looked back, Luke was standing above me. He held the shovel in his hand, and there was a fine spray of red across his face and jacket.

“Next question,” he said.

I pretended not to notice that he looked like a horror-movie killer standing there, blank, empty, covered with blood. I tried to offer him a loving smile. Isn’t that what we all want, really, deep inside? Just to love and be loved? Well, maybe not everyone.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said. “Langdon used you. I get that none of this is your fault.”

He made a little noise somewhere deep inside his throat, and for a moment I thought he’d break down with relief. His face did a little wiggle, the corners of his mouth twitching. But then I realized he was laughing.

“Is that what you think?” he asked. “That he used me? That pathetic gay pedophile? No.”

I did it in one motion. I dug my foot in hard and lifted myself up high enough to grasp the edge and pull myself up. Luke already had the shovel lifted by the time I landed on the slick ground, but I rolled away before he could bring it down.

It landed with a thud, spraying dirt and sharp cold flakes of snow inches from my head. But I was up quickly. And in the next second, I was diving at him, throwing all my weight in his direction. I caught him by the waist and we both fell hard to the ground, Luke issuing a thick groan when my body hit his.

I had his wrists. The shovel had fallen out of reach, and the gun sat uselessly on the edge of the grave. He struggled at first, writhing beneath me, issuing a strangled yell of rage. But I held him down, and after a while he started to sob. Big, gulping, pathetic sobs.

“You’re right,” he said. “He did use me. He molested me and used me to get to you.”

“I know the answer,” I said, still pinning him.

“No, you don’t,” he wailed.

“I do. The answer is ‘brother.’ You’re my brother.”

He drew in a little gasp, all his fake wailing drying up instantly.

“She told you,” he said. He narrowed his eyes at me. “You cheated. You didn’t win.”

“No,” I lied. “I knew it all along.”

“I’m your half brother,” he said. He almost spat it at me. The tears left his voice and it was suddenly flat as glass. “We don’t have the same mother. Your mother is dead. He killed her because he wanted to be with my mother. But instead he went to jail-because of you.”

I felt like he was slashing me with razors. Every word out of his mouth had sliced me, too deep to hurt but not too deep to bleed.

“You little fucker,” I hissed at him.

Then he started to sob again, wailing something about wanting to know his father, wanting to go home to his mother, and how he hated me, hated me, hated me. And I saw that he was just a little boy. And then, because I’m a weakling and a fool, I started to feel bad for him.

Then, “If you’d kept your mouth shut, we’d all have been together. That was the plan.”

Another slash across my heart. I started to feel myself weaken-physically, emotionally. That drain opened up inside and everything started to pour out of me-my strength, my fight, my will to live. My world was too ugly. Why would anyone want to live there? When Luke twisted his hands away from my grip, I had no inner resources to marshal. Even the sound of Beck calling weakly from her grave wasn’t enough to put the fight back in me. It took nothing for him to flip me over and straddle my chest. Then he closed his hands around my neck and started to squeeze.

Was it true? Had my father killed my mother so that he could be with Rachel and Luke? If he’d gotten away with it, what had he planned for me?

Luke wasn’t very strong, so he wasn’t completely cutting off my air. But it still hurt, and that biological imperative to survive kicked in. I was gasping, seeing stars, and finally the lack of oxygen motivated me to start prying his little fingers from my throat. But he had a death grip.

“Luke, that’s enough.”

I wasn’t sure where the voice was coming from. But then it rang out again, louder, more stern.

“That’s enough!” It was Rachel, her voice a shout that echoed off the trees. “Let your brother go.”

He released me and I sucked in air, felt the blessed filling of my lungs, and rolled over to start coughing and coughing.

He rose to face his mother, who approached us slowly. She looked around the scene, her jaw open in naked awe. “What have you done?”

She reached for his shoulders and gave him a little shake. “What have you done?” Her voice was a shriek, an absolute wail of horror and despair.

But Luke didn’t have a chance to answer, because those distant sounds grew suddenly louder. There were voices and lights in the trees, the whopping blades of a helicopter overhead, and suddenly our clearing was filled with a bright light from above. I crawled my way over to the grave where Beck lay, and she was so still and so white at its bottom. And Langdon was lying in a dark circle of blood.

My father would have said that boys don’t cry. But I did. For the first time since my mother died, I cried my heart out.

31

Cold still clung to the region as I left my building and climbed on my bike. Even as the end of February approached, the frigid temperatures held on tight. There was no sign of warmth. The groundhog saw his shadow and quickly retreated to his burrow. There were no crocuses pushing their way up through the persistent cover of white. It was frigid and gray as I rode my bike the short distance from my new condo in town to the Coopers’ house.

I was headed to the first of three sessions we would have before the Skype conversation I’d agreed to have with my father. Dr. Cooper wanted to prepare me, to get my head straight, my questions in order. She didn’t want me to be blindsided. I’d asked her to be present for the actual conversation and she’d agreed. Isn’t it amazing how much power our parents have over us? I was afraid even of his image on a screen.

I didn’t want to go to Florida to see my father. And Dr. Cooper said I didn’t have to, that it wasn’t my responsibility to give him what he wanted. But I had questions, a lot of them. And I needed answers. So I agreed to a Skype conversation that would take place in Jones Cooper’s office, a place I would never have cause to visit again. I didn’t want to do it in my new apartment, the one I shared now with Beck, or in Dr. Cooper’s space. These were both safe havens where I was free, finally, to be myself and I wasn’t willing to give either of them over to the man who killed my mother, even if he was my father.

News interest in Beck and me had faded, though for a while we were mobbed by reporters when we left our new apartment. So I was grateful for the quiet street as I sailed down the hill. You can imagine the coverage: BAD SEED AND PSYCHO PROFESSOR KIDNAP COED! MISSING GIRL RESCUED BY CROSS-DRESSING BOYFRIEND! It was endless-we couldn’t turn on a television or pick up a newspaper without reading more of the story that was gripping the area and the country. Beck was constantly Googling us, and reading all the insane things people were writing and saying. Naturally, she thought it was a gas-or she pretended to think that, just to feel like her old self again.

But until the trials started, if they ever did, interest in us had died down. I never gave an interview, never reacted to the mob, kept my head down. I wore the same boring outfit every day, my androgyny uniform: jeans, white shirt, black peacoat, ski hat, Doc Martens. There was never an interesting picture of me to publish. And Beck behaved herself, too. Which surprised me, because I expected her to lap it up. But she was too shattered to have any fun yet. She still had nightmares, was taking an antidepressant. She’d started sessions with Dr. Cooper.

I’d left her behind, wrapped in a blanket on my couch, sulking. She didn’t want me to talk to my father, wasn’t happy with Dr. Cooper’s prep sessions either.

“What can he say to you?” she asked. “It can only set you back.”

“I’m fine,” I lied. “I’ll be fine.”

But the truth was, neither of us was exactly fine. We were getting there, maybe, but it would be a while. Lynne, Beck’s mother, was staying with us until Beck seemed “more like herself.” She and Frank totally accepted us, which surprised me. But they were those type of hippie parents who tried to get behind whatever was going on. Frank was a bit aloof with me, but polite and respectful. Honestly, it’s the most you can ask of men sometimes. They’re so wound up, so buried beneath layers of “boys don’t cry,” and “pussy,” and “man up,” that they don’t even know how to feel about anything. I should know.

Me and Beck? I don’t know. It’s weird. But it’s definitely love.

“I always knew you were a boy,” she told me. “Maybe at first I thought you were a lesbian. But I never thought you were just a regular girl.”

“I never thought you were a regular girl either,” I told her. And she found that funny.

“I wanted you right away,” she’d said.

She was a little angry that I couldn’t say the same. So bound up, wound up, repressed, confused was I that I didn’t even know what I wanted, if I wanted anything at all. I was a twenty-two-year-old, mentally unstable virgin, with gender confusion. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. I didn’t even want anyone to stand too close to me. If anything, Beck’s physical presence had made me extremely uncomfortable. But, for me, maybe that ranks as attraction.

What I could tell her was that I’d always loved her, which made her happier. And it was true.

“I’d still have loved you if you were a girl,” she said. “All I see is you.”

I don’t know if that’s true for me, but I love the way Beck loves. If everyone loved like she did, the world would be a better place.

As I rode my bike through town, I was thinking about Luke, as I had every day since I learned he was my brother. They carted him off screaming that night, and I could still hear him at night after I fell asleep. IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyou, he’d yelled into the night. I didn’t know if he meant me or his mother or the world. Maybe he meant all of us.

That night, as the cavalry arrived, I was the only one who could explain what had happened when Detective Ferrigno came on the scene. So I told him-everything. I told him who I was (he didn’t seem too surprised-either he already knew, or he was one of those guys that had seen everything). I told him about my panicked flight to Luke’s and why, what I had found there, and why I had come to this place in the woods.

I told him about Langdon, and how I thought he might either be obsessed with or associated with my father. That he had been obsessed with me. Finally, I told him and the other officers about Luke. It all sounded totally crazy, of course. And the look on Detective Ferrigno’s face, a kind of mystified, angry frown, told me that he wasn’t quite buying the story. They took Beck and me to the hospital, but a police officer was stationed outside my door. It was a few days before they decided that I was victim and not perpetrator.

“Don’t tell them anything without a lawyer,” said Rachel as I was being led away. Which I thought was a strange thing to say. I couldn’t answer her; I couldn’t even look at her. Were the things Luke said true? “Your father wouldn’t want you to do that.”

She stood watching me as the paramedics walked me down the path toward the ambulance that waited. Beck had been airlifted away from me. And I just remember feeling nothing but that familiar numbness. I turned to look at Rachel one last time, and I had a strange thought. What does she know?

I passed the Kahns’ house on the way to Dr. Cooper’s. There was a “For Sale” sign in the yard, and the place had a strange air of desertion. I knew that Luke had disappeared into a kind of catatonic state. (Yeah, right. Everyone else seemed to believe that, but I knew that little freak better.) He had been committed to a mental health facility about forty minutes from The Hollows. Langdon was in a coma, having suffered catastrophic brain injury from Luke’s blows with the shovel. A full recovery was not expected. How do I feel about this? It sucks. I hate Langdon; I miss him. I wish he was here to talk all this through with. I hope he lives so that he can be punished, and to answer all the million questions that I have.

So Beck and I were the only ones able to tell the tale. And neither of us really knew the whole story, just our pieces. And Rachel was playing the suffering mother, completely innocent in the whole matter. She was, she claimed, as mystified as everyone else about how Langdon and Luke connected and conspired to torture me, and why. Her decision to move to The Hollows was just for Fieldcrest; neither she nor Luke had any idea I was here, hiding from my ugly past. Yeah, sure. I don’t believe her. Jung didn’t believe in coincidence, and neither do I. What he believed in was synchronicity: the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, and yet are experienced as occurring together in some meaningful way. In other words, the universe conspires-our minds, ideas are linked, suggesting a larger framework, a kind of neural web where we are all connected. I’m not so sure about that. But people conspire, that I know. Especially people like Luke.

The Kahn home was now behind me. And even though I was just a few blocks from Dr. Cooper’s, I found myself turning around.

After I left her alone in the woods that night she disappeared, Beck sat crying. (Would she ever forgive me? I really don’t know.) Eventually, she grew cold, calmed down, and started to pull herself together. I hated you, she said. I was going back to tell everyone that you were a boy. I was going to set your whole life on fire. Would she have done it? Probably not. Beck burns hot but cools down fast.

She heard Luke approach and she thought that I had come back for her.

“He was small, just a kid,” she said. “But he looked so much like you, it was stunning. How could you not have seen it?”

She knew so much about the case-everything really. She said that she’d suspected all along that there was something strange about me. That’s why she liked me. Once she knew about my aunt, it was just a quick Google search to find her blog. And once she knew who Bridgette was, it was pretty easy to figure out who I was. She read all the books, the articles. She’d seen all the news documentaries, the made-for-television movies. She knew immediately who Luke was when she saw him. She knew that he was my father’s other son.

“But he’s not like you,” she said. “He’s heartless; I saw that right away. He’s evil.”

But he had approached her sweetly. “Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re upset?”

“What do you want?” she’d said. “Who are you?”

She tried to walk past him when he didn’t answer her. But he followed her. When she started to run, he gave chase. “He was laughing,” she said. “It was just this little-boy giggle in the dark night. It was nightmarish.” In her mounting panic, she lost her footing and fell hard.

“When I pulled myself up,” she said, “Langdon was ahead of me. And Luke was behind.”

“He doesn’t love you,” Langdon said. “He can’t. He belongs to me.”

He caught up to her fast, and hit her with something she didn’t see. After that, things came back only in her nightmares-dark, fairy-tale memories of being carried through the woods, Langdon sticking a needle in her arm, Luke sitting inside the mine shaft, staring at her. He brought her candy and water; she remembered that. She lived on mini Mars bars. Why did they keep her like that?

“I think they were enjoying it,” she said. “Like a kid keeps a lizard or a frog.”

Dr. Cooper thinks I should worry less about the how and why of things. How did Rachel and Luke find me? How were they connected to Langdon? What kind of an agenda were they running? What did it have to do with my father? Who was manipulating who? She says, for my purposes, it doesn’t matter. But it does. Between Beck’s nightmares and my obsessive thinking, neither one of us may ever sleep again. I felt myself getting more ragged. It was killing me. I had to know the answers; it was part of the reason I needed to talk to my father.

I stopped my bike in the street in front of the Kahns’ house. Rachel’s car wasn’t in the driveway. And I was thinking about that journal. Surely, Rachel had changed the locks. Still, I just happened to have that key in my pocket. What if it still worked?

Dr. Cooper and Sky had both asked me for different reasons to stay away from Rachel Kahn. She can’t give you what you need, Dr. Cooper warned. Everything you need is inside you. Her reasons, her answers, whatever they are… they matter to your psychological wellness not at all. It is only the here and now that matters. You’ve come through tremendous trials, internal and external. And you’ve survived. You’re on the road to healing yourself. Stay focused on the present and the future.

But the past, the present, and the future are not a straight line. They’re all woven together, the strands twisting and turning through each other. How can you walk into the future without understanding your past? I said as much. Your past is important to process, yes, she said. Not Rachel’s. Not Luke’s. Yours.

That desire I had on first meeting Rachel and Luke-I so badly wanted to help, to be there for them. Did something deep inside draw me into their lives? Was there some psychic and/or biological link that attracted me to Luke? When I thought of my time in the Kahns’ home, at their table, it was the most comfortable, most happy I had been in my adult life. I fit into their little union. However twisted and strange that is, it’s true.

I felt my phone vibrating, and I pulled it out and answered without checking the caller ID. Only a few people had the number of this new phone: Beck, my aunt, Dr. Cooper, Detective Ferrigno, and Sky.

“Is this Lane? Lane Crowe?”

It was strange to hear my real name, so long had I hidden behind Lana Granger. It was everywhere now, my real name. I was Lane Crowe, hero, freak, lady boy, transgender poster boy for the bullied, for the gender dysmorphic. I was derided by the gay and lesbian community, the feminists, the Republican pundits. I was the number one most-wanted guest on all the major talk shows-I’d be the biggest hit since the pregnant man was making the rounds. The new cell phone I had was the third I’d had in a month.

“Who’s calling?” I asked, ready to hang up and get a new phone.

“It’s Paul Rodriguez,” he said. “I worked for your father.”

It was the private eye who had been calling for some time.

“Don’t hang up,” he said quickly. “I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say. The cops won’t listen. They’re sick of me.”

I held the phone to my ear, kept my eyes on the house. “I’m listening.”

“Your dad fired me because I finally figured out who killed your mom. I’m sorry to be so blunt with you. You’ve been through a lot. But it was what happened to you, with that kid, that made me realize. I can’t believe I didn’t see it years ago. She was investigated and cleared. She had an alibi.”

“Okay,” I said. He was dragging it out. “Tell me.”

“I know you’re going to talk to him in a couple of days, right? I want you to know the truth. Maybe you can convince him to save his own life.”

It didn’t take him long when he finally got to the point. As he spoke, I saw Rachel move into the living room window. She lifted a hand to me, gave me a weak smile. My breath was coming out in clouds.

“Thank you, Mr. Rodriguez,” I said.

“Can you talk to him, kid?” he said. “I think he wants to die.”

No, that’s not what he wanted. I finally understood it after all this time. What he wanted was to take care of his children.

“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Hey, Mr. Rodriguez, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” he said. He sounded like the kind of guy who would do you a favor and never ask for anything in return.

“Can you call Detective Ferrigno at The Hollows PD, and tell him what you told me?”

“Hey, wait a second,” he said. He must have heard something in my tone that he didn’t like. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

But I ended the call and stuck the phone into my pocket, then I walked up the path to Luke’s house.

32

I remembered the shoes. The small pair of practical walking shoes I saw the day my mother died. Not shoes that belonged to a man, but to a woman. The voices downstairs, as I had hid under my bed, were panicked and arguing voices. I had heard my father and a woman. Rachel. It must have been her.

Now, years later, she opened the door wide for me, and I stepped inside. I’d always felt welcomed here, as though I belonged. And that’s because I did belong among the murderous and psychotic. They were my peeps.

She walked into the kitchen and brewed me a cup of tea-peppermint with honey, just the way I liked it.

I sat at the table, in the same place where I sat on the day of my interview. It seemed like a lifetime ago. But it was just a little over a month. I was literally a different person then. I had sat there, presenting myself as a girl. Today, I was fully dwelling in my male self.

I felt real and right for the first time in my life. I had dwelled among women to hide myself, to heal myself. It was so much easier to be a girl, so much sweeter, and truer and closer to the heart and the spirit. I had embraced and accepted that part of my psyche, my anima. And I had let it go. And I was a stronger person for it.

“I just wanted to talk to her,” she said. She knew why I had come and she got straight to the point. “Your mother.”

She looked down at her neatly manicured nails. “It was so crazy for her to keep him, your father, just because of you. They stopped loving each other years earlier. And I had a troubled child, too.”

My mother could not have been more different from Rachel. She was fiery-big emotions, big temper, big love. (Like someone else we know.) How would she have reacted to Rachel’s visit? To her pleas? Not well, I’m guessing. She’d have lost it. In her fights with my father, she was by far the one that blew the hottest, the one who might resort to violence first.

“But she didn’t see it that way,” Rachel said.

My mother let Rachel into the house. She was civil at first, but things got ugly quickly.

“We started to argue,” Rachel said. “We were both angry; he’d made promises to both of us. We each had a child with him. She called me a whore, and I’ll admit that I slapped her.”

I could envision the scene, see my mother reeling back from the blow. What would she do? She’d strike back. Of course, she did. Then she ran upstairs to get away, to lock herself in the bedroom to call the police.

“But I got to her first. We struggled for the phone she had in her hand, and she ran with it out into the hallway. Your father was supposed to be there. We were planning on talking to her together. But he was late. He was chronically, forever late for everything when it came to us. Because he was always with you and her.”

There it was, the bitterness.

“You act like my mother was the other woman,” I said. “She wasn’t.”

We were none of us innocent in this. We all had our roles to play. But of all of us, my mother was the most wronged. If I’d been normal, if my father had been faithful, none of this ever would have happened. I wouldn’t hear her maligned.

“It was an accident,” said Rachel. “In our battle, she tripped over the runner in the hall. The corner slipped from beneath her, and she fell over the railing.”

She took in a little gasp and began to cry. Silently, stoically, the tears fell.

“It was an accident, Lane. Please believe me. It has haunted me. Not a day goes by that I don’t look back in regret.”

And I could see that it was true. Looking at her, I saw how hollowed out she was. I thought it was Luke who had turned her into the small, careful, joyless woman she seemed to be. And surely he played his part, but it was so much more than that. Guilt, if you live to carry it, is a terrible burden. It weighs you down, stoops your shoulders, pushes you right into the ground.

But her sorrow, her regret? It didn’t mean much. Her actions had led directly to my mother’s death. She had let my father go to prison, was clearly willing to let him die for a crime he didn’t commit. She wasn’t that sorry. Not sorry enough to own up.

“Your father came home then,” she said. She reached her hand over the table to me. But I didn’t move a muscle. “But you weren’t supposed to come home. You were supposed to be late at school.”

I didn’t answer her. She nodded and kept her hand where it was, an open invitation.

“I wanted to call the police, to face the consequences. But I couldn’t. What would happen to my special-needs son. I had no family, no husband. No, we decided that he’d hide the body, act as though she’d run off with her lover. She was having an affair, too, you know?”

“Sure, trash the victim,” I said. “That’s always a good defense. The slut got what she deserved, right? Meanwhile, nothing was ever proved.”

She bowed her head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

I heard the clock ticking in the kitchen. She was an analog girl in a digital age. I had really liked her a lot.

“I had to take care of Luke, and your father had to take care of you. We were thinking of both of you. I know she would have wanted your father to take care of you, Lane. Our plan was to wait until things blew over. Then we were going to be together, all of us. We were going to be a family.”

“Right,” I said. “The world’s most fucked-up family.”

“No family is perfect,” she said stiffly. “We all have our problems.”

There was more, so I waited.

“Luke struggled even more after his father went away,” she said. “The older he got, I’ve told you, the worse he was. We went from school to school, from doctor to doctor. He’d been diagnosed and dosed for several different disorders. Nothing ever helped. You know the drill; you’ve lived it. I was literally at the end of my rope when I got a call from Langdon Hewes.”

She leaned back a little, looked up at the ceiling. Then she wiped the tears from her face.

“He said he’d met your father when you were boarding at the school in Florida. They’d maintained a correspondence, he said, and he’d been keeping an eye on you at Sacred Heart College-unbeknownst to you, of course. He told me what you’d done, how you were hiding from the events of your past. He asked me to bring Luke to Fieldcrest. Langdon thought it could help Luke.”

“But Luke is beyond helping,” I said.

And Rachel nodded. “It wasn’t long, I don’t think, before Langdon was in his thrall. Luke sniffed out his obsession with you almost immediately.”

It was true that Langdon had an ongoing correspondence with my father. Detective Ferrigno had told me as much. But he’d said it seemed fairly benign. He said the notes from my father simply asked about my progress, expressed his hope that Langdon would look out for me and for Luke, if he could. It was a normal correspondence between a concerned parent and his child’s college adviser, someone who is a recognized expert in cases like Luke’s and mine.

Except that it wasn’t normal at all, was it? Langdon had used my father’s disconnection from Luke and me to worm his way into our lives. He had sought to bring us together, for reasons I didn’t quite understand. Maybe he did, in some twisted way, think he was trying to help us. But only so far as it served his desire to be “there for me,” to get me to “let him in”-what he said he wanted in the woods. And Rachel, probably also acting out of desperation, had let him use us all. But I didn’t feel the need to say any of this. I was just there to listen.

“Over the years, Luke had grown to hate you,” said Rachel. “He blamed you for your father going to jail. Of course, I tried to shield him from all of it. But as he grew older, he found things out on his own.

“We thought-Langdon and I-if he could get to know you, we could work through that. I thought it would be good for both of you to get to know each other. I thought it might help him and you. Hence the ad and Langdon’s putting it in your hands.”

She made it all sound so innocent and benign. It was anything but that. Langdon never had Luke’s best interest or mine at heart, just the fulfillment of his own desires. Why didn’t she seem to realize that, even now? And was she underplaying her part in all of this? She couldn’t have thought any of this was good or right or healthy.

“It was Langdon’s idea,” I said. Of course, it was. He was the one pulling the strings-at first.

“I don’t know how quickly Luke figured it all out. I didn’t realize how complicated things had gotten. They were running a whole other agenda that I had nothing to do with. Luke was raging all the time; I had no idea why. I was locking him in his room every night just because I had no idea what he would do after I fell asleep. It wasn’t until that night that I realized he’d been sneaking out.”

“And what about Beck? Why did they take her?” I asked because it was something I’d been puzzling over. I was really just thinking aloud, not imagining she had an answer. But what she said was surprisingly insightful.

“I think Luke would have done anything to hurt you. And Langdon just saw her as a threat to his relationship with you. Ultimately, neither one of them saw her even as a person. For Langdon, she was an obstacle. For Luke, she was just a game piece.”

With Langdon in a coma and Luke supposedly catatonic, the details of who was using who and why were elusive. I asked her what she thought.

“I honestly just don’t know,” she said. She was the embodiment of exhaustion. Just looking at her made me want to lie down and go to sleep for a thousand years.

I couldn’t help but think about my father. Two sons, by two different women, both with mental illness. My mother and Rachel were physically and energetically so different. What was it about each of them that drew him?

I remembered what she had told me about the mental illness in her family-her father’s battles with depression, her brother’s suicide.

Was it the damage in each of these women that attracted him? My father was a man who liked to solve a problem, to fix the damaged things. He liked to feel needed. Maybe Rachel and my mother exuded a kind of scent that attracted him. They needed his stability, and he needed their chaos. Yin and yang.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked her. “Why are you telling me this now?”

So many years had passed, and my father was so close to the lethal injection. Rachel was just about to get away with murder. I always knew that part of my father’s money would go to the other child. He’d told me himself long ago. It was something that I had pushed away. I didn’t want to know about them. Rachel was around the corner from a big payday.

She sagged across the table, dropped her head in her hand.

“Because I’m tired, Lane. I can’t do this anymore. I don’t want your father to die because of something for which I am ultimately responsible. I can’t lie my way through another day. I can’t help Luke. I thought I could, that’s why I kept this secret so long. But I see now. This incident has proven to me that he has grown beyond me. One day he’ll be bigger than me. One day, when it’s the most advantageous for him, he’ll kill me.”

I didn’t say anything. It was true. Part of me wanted to comfort her, but I held myself back. There was a hard knock on the door then.

“Hollows PD,” came a booming voice. “Open up.”

She looked up. “You already knew,” she said. “You called them.”

“Are you ready to tell your truth?” I asked.

She gave a faint nod, had the pale, trembling look of fear. She grabbed my hand. This time I held hers tight, gave her a comforting squeeze. I know how soul wrenching it is to face the truth, the past, everything you’ve sought to hide. It’s vertigo, standing on the edge and looking over, imagining the fall, the impact. But at first, it feels like flying.

“Will you take care of him, Lane?”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll take care of him. I promise.”

33

Langdon Hewes died. It was written in the headlines of The Hollows Journal: HEWES DIES FROM ANEURYSM. The words, so stark on the page, so devoid of all the layers of incident that led to them, made me angry. I folded the paper and tossed it to the floor, where it lay soft and harmless in the morning sunlight.

And even though I have no reason to wonder, I do. Langdon’s injuries were extensive, but the last I’d heard he was showing some improvement-some movement, some speech. Then, suddenly, he died. Some would say that his death was a blessing. That’s what people say when something has gone on too long for their comfort. It was a blessing. He’s at peace now. It’s for the best. Of course, none of us knows if that’s really true. What awaits Langdon on the other side? Who can say?

It is September now, autumn in The Hollows. It’s still warm outside, and the days still seem long and lazy. Beck and I are back at school. She’s redoing her last semester. And I am beginning my master’s work in abnormal child psychology in the graduate program at Sacred Heart, working at Fieldcrest as part of my study. My mother wanted me to help people, and I want that, too.

It’s the work you were born to do, Beck always quips. Psycho.

It had been an Indian summer day like this when Elizabeth went missing. I still think about her and how her life was cut short. Her case was never reopened, and the ruling of accidental death still stands. Once it was understood that I had nothing to do with Beck’s disappearance, there was less reason to take a fresh look at the events of that night. Another loss for the world, another beautiful girl gone. But was she a victim of fate or a victim of violence? I have tried to remember that night. Did we fight? Did she somehow know about me? Did she run away from me that night and not her boyfriend, as some witnesses claim? I pray that my dreams of her crying are just that, and not memories. I do know I never would have hurt her, not on purpose. Which doesn’t make anyone feel better, does it? Death by accident is as cruel as murder would have been, just as merciless.

Speaking of bad intentions: Luke still resides at a mental health facility about forty minutes from The Hollows where I visit him every other week. And today is visiting day.

Beck has already left for class. So I shower and get dressed. She was angry with me this morning, picked a fight over who was supposed to stop at the store yesterday and get the coffee. We were forced to drink the dregs from yesterday, because whoever it was (Beck) forgot to run the errand. She’s always mad at me on visiting day, consistently creates some kind of drama. She doesn’t want me to visit with Luke, and she hates that I consider it an obligation.

He’s my brother, Beck. Who is left to care for him?

Um, his father.

My father can’t even care for himself.

Why is any of this your problem? Your brother tried to kill you. Your father might as well have murdered your mother even if he wasn’t the one to push her. This is nuts. How are we ever going to have a normal life?

We’re not, I told her. Nothing about our life will be normal. Ever. If you wanted normal, you picked the wrong guy.

She left in anger, which she had promised before that she would never do again. But we break our promises, don’t we? All the time.

I head downstairs, hop into my new hybrid, and putt-putt out of town. I wanted a muscle car, one of those new Chargers, to connect with my newfound maleness. But I guess, ultimately, I’m too crunchy, too concerned about the planet. Beck and I shopped for a hybrid and wound up with a Prius, which looks more like an orthopedic shoe than a car. But, fine. See, I told her as I signed the paperwork. This is normal. We’re buying a car.

Fuck off, she said. But she smiled. Who knew that beneath all the tats and piercings and bad attitudes, my girl just wanted the things all girls are supposed to want. She wants to be loved, to be safe, to have a home and a car. And she wants those things with me. I can give her some of it.

I cross the town limits and wind through the outlying suburban developments. Eventually, those give way to farmland. Then I’m heading through a thick, wooded region. And the trees around me are starting their show of gold, orange, red, and brown.

I wish I could say that the sight of it fills me with joy, a sense of peace or renewal. But that’s not how I feel. Let’s face it, not that much has changed. I am still in therapy, still need medication to control my various problems. Beck and I… well, our relationship is exactly what it has always been. It’s intensely loving, but we still have the same degree of heat, the same arguments that escalate instead of wind down. My coldness sometimes makes her cry.

I think of her parents’ relationship, stormy, on-again, off-again. I think of my parents, often resorting to violence. How will Beck and I learn to love each other differently? We both know we have to try, and we are trying. But it’s not all hot sex and hybrids.

At least I’m whole, fully realized, as Dr. Cooper is quick to remind me. I’m not hiding. I’m not lying. And I have made my home in The Hollows. I feel like it has closed around me, ensconced and protected me. I feel like I can live a real life here. Untethered from the past, I can walk into the future.

I approach the grounds of the juvenile facility that houses Luke. It tries hard not to look like what it is. The landscaping is lovely. The gates manage to seem ornately decorative, even though I know them to be electrified-like a mansion (for maniacs) or a country club (for nutcases). And the man who greets me at the gate is armed. He knows me, this aging guard with his slick gray hair and formidable paunch. He waves me in, and I feel a familiar lurch in my stomach. I hate this place. And I have grown to hate my brother.

My father is ill. He has liver cancer and very little time to live. I have taken the trip to Florida to see him after he was released from prison and admitted to a hospital not far from where he spent the last seven years. The visit, without my going into too many details, was awkward. He apologized for all of his mistakes.

I’m sorry, son. I can’t count the ways I failed you and your mother.

Dr. Cooper urges a journey toward forgiveness. It’s a concept that I don’t really understand. What does it mean to forgive someone? It only means that you release the anger, the hatred. It doesn’t mean that you’re saying it’s all right now, or that you’ve forgotten the wrong. It just means that you’ve drained the boil. When you touch it, it doesn’t hurt as much. That’s all.

But I am not angry. I do not hate my father. I miss my mother, every day. I wish everything about our life together had been different. But I do not blame him, or her, or even Rachel. Really, I blame myself. Maybe if I had been a different kind of child, they would have had a different kind of life. Dr. Cooper says we need to work on my thinking.

It’s all right, Dad, I told him. I failed her, too.

He tried to argue with me, but he was just too physically weak. We made peace, I think. We are bound by blood, but we are strangers of circumstance. We are so far apart that we cannot come together now. If I could feel more, I imagine I’d feel deeply sad about that.

I had one request for him, and he was happy to comply. A couple of weeks later, the paperwork came in the mail from Sky. It has been signed by all parties.

They always have Luke and me meet in this comfortable, sunny room. They call it “The Morning Room.” There’s a fireplace and some plush couches. Fresh flowers in plastic vases are placed artfully on end tables, books are arranged carefully on shelves. It is a soft and comforting place, pretty even. Except for the armed guard that sits just outside the door.

Today, Luke is sitting by the window when I arrive. His twelfth birthday has just passed, and it’s interesting how he seems to change every time I visit. He is growing up, getting bigger. It fills me with dread.

Usually, we just sit. I talk about innocuous things-the weather, events in The Hollows. I avoid anything loaded. I don’t talk about our father, or his mother. I don’t talk about Beck. I talk about television shows, movies, and video games. He stares blankly out the window. He hasn’t uttered a word since the night he was admitted.

But today, there’s an electricity in the air, something palpable that I can feel. When the door closes behind me, the hair on my arms stands on end, and someone walks over my grave.

I take my usual seat as far away from Luke as the room will allow.

“Hey, Luke,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

How can you live with it? Sitting there and talking to him after what he did to you? To me? Beck asked me this morning, tears in her eyes.

“It’s still pretty warm out,” I go on. “But a cold front is moving in.”

He’s a monster.

“Did you hear the news?” he says.

I practically jump out of my skin. I haven’t heard his voice in over a year. It sounds strange, a crackly high and low to it. I try not to show my surprise.

“What news?”

“The nutty professor bit it.” He is still looking out the window.

“Where did you hear that?”

“I know people,” he says. “People tell me things. I think you know what I mean.”

“I have no idea what you mean,” I say. But I do. I know exactly what he means. He means that he is manipulating the staff.

“And it sounds like dear old Dad’s not far behind.” He has a young boy’s voice, but an old man’s cadence and phrasing. Very unsettling.

“He’s not well, no,” I say.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” he says. “You can take the man out of death row…” He lets his voice trail off.

“I have a friend here,” he says when I remain silent. “A nurse. She’s a sad person. She lost a son about my age a couple years back. I don’t think she’s over it.”

What is he trying to tell me? I feel myself go very still. The air in the room grows thick and overwarm. Again, I think silence might be the best answer.

Eventually, he turns to look at me. His eyes are glassy, probably from the medications they are giving him. I know the list, since I consult with his doctor every week. I disagree with his being medicated. There is no medication for someone like Luke. He is a psychopath, a ruthless, calculating machine with no empathy or feeling for other people. Whatever window might have existed to teach him something that approached empathy, as Dr. Chang insists is possible, has closed. Luke is a tiger cub in a cage. He will only grow and become a stronger, more efficient predator. He will never be anything other than what he is. He can only be managed.

He shifts in his seat, keeps his eyes on me as if waiting for me to speak. He wants me to ask the questions he knows I have. But I don’t say anything. I want him to start, know he will.

Then, “You know they lied to me? My mother and Hewes-they tried to trick me. But I knew right away who you were.”

“How?”

He wrinkles his nose at me. “I recognized you. Ever heard of Google?”

I think of the searches I have seen on his computer. There are no secrets anymore, not really-not even from an eleven-year-old.

“And I made sure he knew I figured it out during our private sessions.”

“Your private sessions?” The thought of that is creepy on so many different levels. I can just imagine the two of them, each of them running a separate agenda, manipulating and using each other. Who was the predator and who was the prey?

“Once I figured it out, he told me that he’d been talking to our father, that he wanted to help us reunite as brothers. But I knew he was in love with you-which is sick. And weird. I mean who could love you?”

I smile a little at that. He can’t hurt me but he still wants to.

“So you talked about me? In your private sessions?”

Luke shifts again, as if physically uncomfortable. He is growing more agitated, more restless.

“He never cared about me at all,” he says. “He never wanted to help me get better.”

He seems upset about it, which takes me aback. Does Luke know that there is something wrong with him? Has he hoped to get better? I keep reminding myself that he is just a child. I had been no less ill at his age. We aren’t the same, of course. I’m not a sociopath. I have problems, but I can feel, love, have empathy. I don’t see others as pieces in a game I play. That’s why therapy and guidance and medication help me. Can he be helped? I don’t know.

I still keep silent. There is so much I want to know, but I won’t give him the satisfaction of asking.

“I followed you; I was always following you. Do you know that?”

I shrug. I’d guessed as much, thinking back on the dirt on his tires. The form I saw in the woods that night at the graveyard.

“And that night I saw you go into the woods; I could tell you were upset and then that girl followed you. I called Hewes on my mom’s cell phone, which I’d lifted, and we went together. We saw you. We saw you with her. It was gross.”

“Why did you follow?”

“Why not? It was an opportunity. He wanted to know you. I wanted to hurt you. We both got what we wanted. Only, he didn’t get what he expected. And he went a little crazy after that. I wanted to kill her. He wanted to wait until the anniversary of the night your mother died. Which I had to admit was pretty good.”

The crazy leading the crazy. Wow. It is amazing any of us has survived. But because I’m not as crazy I still have to ask.

“So what was it all about?” I ask finally. “What was the point?”

It is part of the reason I keep coming here week after week, not to take care of him, or to let him know he isn’t alone. I know one day he is going to have to crack and tell me all the things he must be dying to tell me. The corners of his mouth turn up in an ugly facsimile of a smile.

“Langdon, the scavenger hunt, kidnapping Beck,” I say, just for clarification.

“The point?” he says. He seems annoyed. “I thought you knew.”

“Enlighten me.”

“The point was to win.” His lips are dry, chapped white. His skin has an unhealthy gray pallor. But he undeniably looks like me, except he will be much bigger than I am when he finishes growing.

“It was a game,” I say, just to clarify.

“You know it was,” he says. “You agreed to play. You wanted to play.”

I almost laugh. “And who won?”

“I did, of course.”

I sweep my arm around the room. “How do you figure?”

“I exposed your secrets,” he says. “That was the first thing. You were a liar and a poser and I wanted the whole world to know it.”

He looks at me, waiting for a reaction like any little boy. I don’t give him one. “P.S.,” he adds. “I think you looked better as a girl.”

I offer him a wan smile, which he doesn’t seem to like. He shifts uncomfortably and leans forward in his seat.

“Langdon is dead,” he goes on. “He’ll never be able to tell anyone how I used and manipulated him, teased him into helping me. Not that anyone would have believed him. No one ever believes a pedophile.”

“Was he that?”

“He was if I say he was,” Luke snaps. He is getting wobbly, not enjoying my flat affect. Rachel was emotional; she’d admitted as much. She responded to Luke, gave him a lot of energy when he acted out. He liked that, because it fueled him. But he will get nothing from me.

Maybe Langdon had been a pedophile. He was obsessed with me, that was clear. I was a girlish boy, or a boyish man-in either case, pretty much a freak. So maybe that’s what he liked-not men, not women exactly. Or maybe he was trying to help me at first. But he was unstable, and Luke pushed him over the edge. Now that Langdon was dead, there was no way to know. Okay, Luke, you won that one.

“He got me the key to the caretaker’s building, by the way,” he says. “The Hollows Historical Society has an office on your campus. It was nothing for him to take the key.”

He is true to his word: I’ll give him that. He’d promised to tell me everything when the game was done.

“My mother is in prison,” he says, ticking off another win. “So I’m out from under her.”

Here, I smile a little. I can’t help it.

“And soon our father will be dead.”

“So?”

“So, I’ll be an orphan more or less,” he says. “A filthy-rich orphan. And our good friend Sky Lawrence will make all the arrangements for me to be well cared for. Once I’m well, of course. And I have been feeling better.”

Of course, Rachel and Luke knew Sky. He managed my father’s money and Luke was one of the beneficiaries of his will.

“So all of this was about the money?” I say, playing dumb.

“No, stupid,” he says. His voice goes up an octave. “This was about me being able to do whatever I want. Kids never ever get to do what they want. I told you that already. Weren’t you listening to me? I’m free. I’m rich. I get to do anything I want to do from now on.” He is actually gritting his teeth, sticking his jaw out at me. It isn’t pretty.

I stand up from my chair and put on my coat.

“Well,” I say, “congrats, kiddo. You win again. I’m not a sore loser and you played a good game. The long con, right? Nice one.”

I move toward the door, and I can feel the daggers of his gaze on my back. I rest my hand on the handle and turn around.

“There’s just one thing,” I say. “I went down to Florida to see our father. Man, it’s hot down there. I don’t know how people do it.”

His face goes slack.

“He signed over your guardianship to me,” I say. I love the feel of those words on my tongue. “Your mom? She knows she’s not going to be in a position to care for you for a while. So she signed, too. I’m your primary guardian. And the guardian of your trust.”

His whole body goes rigid, and what little color he has drains from his face.

“You’ll be a legal adult at the age of eighteen,” I say. “But I’ll control the money until you’re thirty. And there are lots of conditions built into the trust, which we will discuss when you’re feeling better. Nothing big-do well in school, stay out of trouble, community service, therapy-stuff like that.”

He makes a move toward me, but I hold up a hand and he freezes. “Before you get any ideas,” I go on. “If anything suspicious happens to me, to your mother, to Beck, or to anyone or anything I care about-all of that money will be divided equally between Fieldcrest and Dr. Chang’s school in Florida. You won’t get a dime.”

He is a quivering statue of rage, his mouth hanging open in a silent scream.

“Do you understand me, brother?” I ask.

He comes racing toward me then, issuing a kind of strangled warrior’s cry, but I am already out the door and close it quickly behind me. He crashes against the glass, his face a red mask of fury. The guard, who had been dozing, rises quickly to his feet.

Our faces, mine and Luke’s, are inches from each other, separated by thick glass. I look him right in the eyes and mouth the word I have been dying to say since our first afternoon together.

“Checkmate.”