Cursed be the Wicked (29 page)

“We’re in the middle of this conversation about school and graduating and what we’re planning to do with our lives and out of nowhere, she looks at me like she never had before. I can almost see it in her eyes before she says it.”

“What?” Finn asks, just as anxious as I am for answers.

“She says, ‘I think I might love you Jack,’ just like that. Like it was just part of any other conversation we’ve had over the years.” He smirks. “Asked if that was okay with me.”

“And was it?” Finn says softly.

I wait for the answer but I already know what it is. He’s said it twice now.

Jack reiterates it for me though. “I’ve loved your mother forever and a day, Coop. When she told me that, I... I mean we kissed. One thing led to another pretty fast and, well-” he looks away, like he’s embarrassed.

“You said you never slept together,” I tell him flat out. I want to catch him in a lie.

“We didn’t,” he says, timidly. “Sleep that is.”

I want him to be making this up. I want to believe that my father, that
Ben
was wronged. That my mother wasn’t physically hurt by her own husband and that things did not go down like this. But when I search Jack’s eyes, I know he’s telling the truth. This isn’t someone who forced himself on my mother.

This is someone who adored her.

The hatred I experienced earlier subsides and I swallow it down, unable to say a single word at the moment. It’s just as well as Jack has a few more things to say.

“A couple weeks later I got my acceptance letter to Berkley,” he continues. “I should have been celebrating, and I would have been, except Mag Pie didn’t get one. It was as if a switch turned off for me, I didn’t want to go anymore, not without her. Not with how much had changed between us.”

He doesn’t wait for anyone to urge him on this time. He has to get it out at this point. He looks like he’s still trying to make sense of the next part.

“She started fighting with me after that, out of the blue. She told me she only thought she loved me, and that we weren’t very compatible, which was bullshit. Then she told me what a mistake it was to have ever given her virginity up to someone like me.”

Jack looks like he doesn’t want to tell the rest, but Finn takes his hand in hers, much like she’s done with me before. They stare at each other for a few moments before he nods.

Jack is only talking to Finn now.

“I tried to talk to her, to find out what in the hell she was thinking.” His eyes threaten tears, but I can tell he is refusing to let any of them fall. He pulls his hand away from Finn and throws it up in the air. “I mean, one second she’s completely disgusted with the guy, and the next she’s all over him.”

Finn wipes a tear away from her cheek.

“She broke me that summer,” Jack says with a crack in his voice. “But when it came time, I did it. I went to Berkley. I tried to forget her. She made her choice. Man, I struggled with not calling her. When I came home, I thought . . .”

He pauses with a deep breath in, then out. It’s like it hurts him to even talk about Mom now.

“I don’t know what I thought.”

“You mean at Christmas break, you tried again?” Finn asks. But Jack just shakes his head. “I didn’t come back until I was done.”

Shit.

“It was a hard pill to swallow, finding out she’d married the guy right after I left for college, and had a
baby
with him? I mean, hell, I just thought she was going through some phase or something.”

“Did she ever tell you why?” I ask, trying to keep myself from treading on the subject of paternity. Why did she do it? What made her change her mind so drastically?

He shrugs. “She saw me a few times. We talked. It was awkward. She’d always start out trying to tell me she didn’t care anymore, that I needed to move on but it always ended with her crying, telling me she was sorry.”

“I don’t understand this.” What was she doing? Just trying to make Ben jealous all those years before she finally accepted his offers? Why in the hell would she tell Jack she loved him, then drive him away?

Jack pulls me out of my thoughts with, “Welcome to the club.”

He breathes in deep, and tries to stand. It looks hard for him.

Finn gets up and helps him. I stand too.

“I couldn’t wrap my head around any of it, but in the end, I couldn’t watch her be in pain like that anymore, so I did what she asked. I left her alone. I stayed in Salem, though. I watched from the sidelines. I couldn’t leave her all together. I just couldn’t. I needed to make sure she was okay. To make sure Ben didn’t do what he ended up doing anyway.”

He trails off and I get a sick feeling in my stomach. It makes sense, why she’d distance herself from friends, why she’d hide doing what she loved, why she fought with me so much.

If I’m Jack’s kid, and she didn’t have feelings for him, no wonder she couldn’t stand looking at me half the time.

“All those years,” Finn whispers. “Never moving on.”

He stops a few rouge tears from sliding down his cheek.

“I loved her.”

He sighs. “The longer I stayed, the more I saw. The more I saw, the more I drank. I lost my job, my parents’ home, everything. But I made sure Maggie was alright, that was my job.”

He scratches an itch on the side of his face and tells me after, “You look just like her.”

Blood rushes through me. It’s clear Mom never told him he was my father and I don’t know what to do.

I look to Finn but can’t get her attention.

I’m not sure how to bring something like this up. I’m not even sure I should. For now, I don’t have to, because Jack slides back into the conversation with, “I might not have liked the guy, but I’m sorry you lost him, Coop.”

It’s enough to sidetrack my thoughts.

“So you’re saying you didn’t kill him?”

He scoffs. “Not that I didn’t try. When Maggie and I crossed paths that day, I saw that bruise under her chin. I lost it.”

“So you did go see him.” Finn notes.

“I went to his garage that night,” Jack admits, “I was planning to follow him and confront him right outside their house, but he didn’t go home.”

“He didn’t?”

He shakes his head. “He locked up, went to the shed where he kept some supplies. He had a makeshift room out there for the nights Maggie wouldn’t let him in the house.”

This grabs my attention. In a big way. This guy knows things about my family I had no clue about.

“Then what?”

“I was so damn mad by the time I knocked on the door. When Ben opened it, he actually laughed at me standing there, seething.” He explains to Finn, “Ben wasn’t afraid of me. But he had no idea what I knew. Or what I was capable of doing.

“He was on the phone with someone but he hung up fast when I told him I saw what he’d done to Maggie.”

The rage Jack felt that night shows in his face now. The anger behind his eyes reminds me of how I felt when I went looking for him tonight.

“Ben’s a good foot and a half taller than I am and about a hundred pounds heavier, but I didn’t care. I remember throwing punches. I remember pounding and pounding until he fell to the ground, then I remember kicking him a few times to make sure he stayed down.”

“He was bleeding all over himself, gurgling. I remember him begging for help. I think I cracked a rib. Maybe two.” He stops momentarily. “I was fed up with him. I told him to get his own damn help.”

“So you left?”

Jack nods. “I don’t know how I got home. At some point, I passed out. The next morning,” he frowns, “I woke up with aching knuckles. I started remembering pockets here and there of what happened. I still have some black holes though. Even to this day.” He rubs his face. “I don’t know, maybe it was remorse, guilt, something. I called 911.”

Finn and I lock eyes while he finishes his thought. “I think above anything else, I was worried about Maggie, knowing she’d be sick over it, wondering what had happened to him.”

He pauses. “No matter how angry she ever got at him, she always needed to know he was okay. Like it was her responsibility or something if he got hurt.”

“And?” I urge him, impatiently.

Finn takes my hand in hers. She’s impatient too.

Jack shrugs. He looks thoughtful again. “He was gone.”

“Gone?” Finn and I ask simultaneously.

“Yeah,” he says, as if he doesn’t believe it himself, still. “No sign of him
anywhere
. Even the cops couldn’t find traces of him. Or the fight.”

“Seems convenient,” I tell him.

“What about blood stains,” Finn suggests but Jack shakes his head to that too. “Nothing. It was like it never happened. They told me I was a drunken ass and I was lucky they didn’t arrest me for calling in a false report. Then they left.”

He looks at his hands.

“I questioned it
myself
for a while, except for the fact that I had bruises on my knuckles from fighting him.”

Finn pushes. “Didn’t you try to tell them?”

“I tried to tell them a lot of things,” he says, irritated. “They didn’t listen.” He looks down at his feet. “They didn’t want to listen, maybe.”

“That’s nuts.”

“Tell me about it.”

I think about how insane this all sounds. I’m stumped. How does Mom fit into this scenario?

“They never found his body, though.” I don’t mean to say it out loud, but I do, so I voice the rest of my concern. “I don’t get why she’d confess if there was no body, and she didn’t-”

Jack stops me from going any further with that thought. “Even if she didn’t, she thought she did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He ignores the question and tells me, “I saw her, you know. After they couldn’t find him. After her confession. After her arrest. After the trial.”

“No you didn’t,” I tell him, but he nods.

I don’t want to believe my own mother would refuse to see me but allows not only my aunt, but also Jack in to visit.

He sniffs and rubs at his jaw, then his neck. He looks unsure of whether he should go on with the story and then finally, he does.

“She told me she cursed him, over and over, for a lot of years, trying to keep him from hurting you. She said that’s ultimately what killed him, no matter whose hands actually did the killing.”

I pull back. “Cursed him.”

“Yeah.”

Finn watches carefully, afraid I’m going to start round two of
things that don’t exist
. At this point, my brain is mush and I don’t know what the fuck to believe. I can’t buy into Mom being responsible for Ben’s death because she
cursed
him though.

“I guess it’s not important what anyone else believes,” I say to no one. Maybe I’m saying it to Mom.

“I tried to convince her she didn’t need to sacrifice herself for that asshole but she was adamant. She told me it was her fault, no matter what happened, and that I shouldn’t try telling the police anything different anymore. That it was no use. They weren’t going to believe me anyway. Then she told me how sorry she was that she’d hurt me, and to make sure you were okay.”

He eyes me when he says it and I’m that kid again. That thirteen-year-old boy whose mother won’t see him and has no Dad and the only person left to take him in is his bitch of an aunt, that doesn’t really want him anyway, but she takes him because “it’s the least she could do.”

“I tried you know,” he says. “To clean up my act, get you into a stable environment but it didn’t work out that way.”

He did?

“What? What happened?”

He snorts kind of and stuffs his hands into his pockets. It’s only now that I get a good look at the patch of the bear on his jacket. “Berkley” is printed underneath it. I try to imagine him as a whole other person, attending college, with so many possibilities in front of him, only to sabotage it all.

And for what?

“Guess Maggie didn’t think
some
things through,” he says. “Because she didn’t exactly get a say in what happened to you when they locked her up in that institution. And Liz didn’t feel much like giving me anything when I came around telling her what Mag Pie wanted for you.”

When I look into his eyes, I think I can see it. Me, only not me. I turn away to try and stop myself from going there. I wonder if there’s anything in Mom’s journals that mention her wanting him to take care of me. I need to straighten something out that my aunt told me earlier.

“Jack, why would Liz think you . . .” I stop. I don’t want to say it, but I have to. I take a deep breath. “Forced yourself on Mom?”

A sad grimace spreads across his face. He’s not surprised to hear this, apparently. “Liz never did like me. She always thought I came between her and Maggie somehow.” His shoulders roll. “Maybe she just assumed. Maybe she hated me so much that’s what she would rather people believe than the fact that Maggie chose someone like me over Ben, or
her
.”

“That makes no sense,” Finn huffs.

Jack shrugs. “Nothing Liz ever did made sense.”

“What do you mean?” I ask him.

“Well, for one thing, I always thought it was
Liz
that had a thing for Ben, so I was double confused why Maggie ended up with him. I thought well hell, they’re sisters, maybe it’s a rivalry thing. And I never quite understood why she gave a rat’s ass about me, but it was always really important to her that I was out of the picture. She was always feeding Ben information about catching me and Maggie together.”

Hold the phone.

“Liz had a thing for Ben?”

“That’s right.”

“How do you know that?” Finn asks him. I’m glad she does because my throat is dry all of a sudden.

Jack’s brow curls upward. “It was real obvious. To me, anyway. Maybe even to Maggie.”

Finn’s color fades as she listens.

Just as I’m wondering what’s wrong with her, I start putting some things together in my head.

I get a bad feeling in my gut. I’m just not sure what it means yet. Maybe I just don’t
want
to know what it means.