Friendly Fire (10 page)

Well, except his life. But that wasn't on such a bright course as it was.

“Okay,” he said. “You're right. I have to trust someone and you're it.”

* * *

“I was stupid,” Ethan said. “You hear all that stranger-danger bullshit from your parents and from teachers, and you just let it roll out of your head unheard, you know?”

“There's nothing stupid in being a victim,” the doctor said.

Ethan felt a swell of anger. “Been a victim much yourself, Doc?” he snapped. He didn't want to be rude—in fact, he really wanted to like this one—but that was such a shrink-like thing to say. “I know what I did, and I know it was stupid. I'm not making excuses for the shitheads who did what they did to me, but I was there, and you were not.”

Dr. Adams seemed startled. “I was just—”

“You were just trying to get ahead of me. You were just preventing that moment when I say something self-destructive. I've been to this well before, you know. How about you let me talk and you sit there and listen?” That was a lot of anger—much more than the situation warranted—and he didn't know where it came from. He considered apologizing, but that impulse came and went.

“I was supposed to be at football practice,” Ethan explained. Only he decided to skip out on it. It was too hot out and more and more, he just wasn't that much into football. The friends he'd known for as long as he'd known anyone had all started to grow at twice the rate that he was, and where he used to be the best athlete among them, now he could barely hold his own. It was embarrassing. His mom had tried to tell him that it was all so very natural—he was at that
awkward age
—but that was embarrassing, too.

So, he'd pedaled his bike from the house to the end of the street, and then off to the 7-Eleven down on Hawkins Turnpike, way the hell and gone from anyplace he was ever supposed to be. Times were tough back at the house with Mom and Dad tearing at each other over whatever it was that parents who love each other hate each other about. Ethan wasn't in much of a mood to keep them happy, so this was the afternoon of his rebellion. Not just skipping out on practice, but then going to a place he wasn't supposed to be to buy the most enormous, highest-sugar Big Gulp that he could afford. It was the stuff of his mother's nightmares, and that was just fine.

Once he got to the 7-Eleven, it was Slurpee time. He was drawn to the blue raspberry flavor, until he realized what color that was going to turn his mouth. It was fine to take chances and risk getting in trouble, but it would have been stupid to stain your lips and teeth and tongue, and therefore guarantee trouble when he got home. Lemon-lime would have been the smartest bet, but it made no sense to be a pussy about it. He chose the Coke, a Slurpee that was only slightly smaller than the galvanized trash can he had to drag back and forth from the curb every Sunday and Thursday night.

“The owner was an old fart,” he explained, drawing a smile from Wendy. “I tried to hang around to drink it, but he said I couldn't loiter, and that I had to leave the store. I could stand outside if I wanted to, but I couldn't take up space inside.”

The problem was, it was still hot as hell outside and he had five pints of flavored ice chips to get down before they melted. After a brain freeze that felt like his skull had been cleaved with a dull hatchet, he surrendered his mission as a lost cause. Plus, he still had a half hour of pedaling to do to get home by anything close to the dinner hour. To be home later than seven o'clock was the Falk family equivalent of treason, and the penalties were similar.

“Mom would go ape shit if I was even a minute late. It was my responsibility to call in. She said that one minute of worry on her part was more of a problem than any inconvenience I might have in finding a pay phone to call home.”

“No cell phone, then?” the doc asked.

Ethan coughed out a laugh. “Clearly, you never met my mom. No, no son of hers was going to be distracted from his school work by a phone.” That sounded too harsh under the circumstances. “But remember, this was a long time ago. Pay phones actually existed back then.”

“But you didn't call,” Wendy said. “Surely there was a phone at the 7-Eleven.”

“What was I going to say?” Ethan countered. “By then, it was a little after six, I guess, so I still had time to roll the dice.”

What he hadn't counted on was running over a nail in the road. In all his years of biking, he'd never had a blowout. He'd never even thought about one. And he sure as hell had not been prepared to lose a front tire going downhill. He didn't remember a
bang
or even a
pop
when it blew. All he knew was that the steering wobbled for maybe two seconds, and then the handlebars jerked hard to the left, and he was airborne.

“All that talk about accidents happening in slow motion is bullshit,” Ethan said. “I mean, it was like a snap. I was in my seat, and then I was flying. And then I was on the ground, half on the gravel and half on the grass.”

By some miracle of good luck, he flipped in flight, landing on his back and shoulders, thereby sparing his face and his teeth. That was the first time he'd ever had the wind knocked out of him. As he struggled for the next breath, he remembered thinking that he was about to die.

“I was scared,” he said. “Really, really scared.”

“Were you badly hurt?”

“Nothing broken,” he said. “And I don't think I hit my head all that hard, but I had a lot of road rash. Even that, though, wasn't horrible. No streaming blood anywhere.”

“You were lucky,” Wendy said, and immediately tried to pull the words back.

Ethan gave a genuine laugh. “Yeah, lucky. And you've even read ahead in my story.”

She was pretty when she blushed. “I'm so sorry. That's not what I meant.”

“I know what you meant. So, now I was stuck on the side of this road with a broken bicycle, skinned up everywhere, and with only one shoe.”

“What happened to the other shoe?”

“I have no idea,” Ethan said. “Weird, the things you remember. Somehow, I got blasted out of my shoe, and I couldn't find it anywhere.”

“Was there any traffic?” Wendy asked. “Didn't anyone try to help you?”

“Just one car,” Ethan said, and his mood darkened. “One goddamn car.”

Chapter Ten

I
t
was getting late, and Ethan was getting scared. The window of opportunity for arriving home without punishment had closed, and the sun was beginning to dip low. You'd think that a place with the word turnpike in its name would have more cars driving down it, but that was not the case for the Hawkins. This was a country road where no one who lived along it had any place to go, and knew no one who wanted to visit them. A long stretch of loneliness.

* * *

“I guess that's when he hit me,” Ethan concluded. “I remember it as a flash of light and the smell you get when you hit your head really hard. Blood, I guess.”

Dr. Wendy's face had folded into a raisiny scowl. He couldn't tell if it was sympathy or distrust. She hadn't said anything in a long time.

“What?” Ethan said. “You don't look like you believe me.”

“Is it safe for me to assume that Joey was in fact the man you killed in the parking lot?”

Ethan inhaled to answer, but something broke free in his head—an image he hadn't thought of until this very minute. “No!” he proclaimed. He could hear the excitement in his own voice, and he could see that it startled her. “No, he wasn't. That guy—the guy I killed—called himself Bill. I never believed that that was his name, but that's what he called himself.”

Now Wendy looked confused. “I don't remember any mention of someone named Bill,” she said. “Not in as many times as you've told the story.”

“I know!” Ethan said. His heart pounded. “I just now remembered that. There was more than one guy involved. There were a bunch. Maybe four. I guess they just ran together in my head.”

“Bill,” Wendy said. There was that look again.

“You
don't
believe me.”

“It's not that I don't believe you. I just haven't heard any mention of Bill before.”

“We've never spoken before. Plus, I just told you.”

“Suppressed memory,” Wendy said. “You've told your story to a lot of other people, though. You've never mentioned a Bill, but now in a flash, you do. At just the right time to start building that insanity defense that you said you didn't want.”

Anger boiled in Ethan's gut. He was being played. “I thought you said you were the one I could trust.”

Wendy's features didn't change a bit. “I am,” she said.

“But you don't believe me.”

She rolled her eyes. “And you keep coming back to that. Do I believe you? I'm trying to, but every word you say is fantastic—in the sense of the word that it has no basis in verifiable fact. It's fantasy.”

The anger bloomed larger. Ethan felt himself shutting down.

“You're getting pissed,” Wendy said. “Your body language says that you're done talking, that you're going to punish me by keeping your story to yourself.”

“What's the sense of telling it?”

“As opposed to which alternative?” Still, her face showed nothing. Not disinterest, exactly, but in-your-face brutality.

Then an internal switch flipped or something. She abruptly sat up straight, and patted the table with both palms. “Nope, we're not doing this,” she declared. “We're getting unnecessarily crosswise. Hand to God, I don't know yet whether or not your story is credible, but I can tell you this: I am one hundred percent convinced that you one hundred percent believe every word you're telling me. You're not spouting a line of bullshit—at least I don't think so. How's that?”

Ethan remained passive. It was too early to commit.

“Okay, fine, hold your cards tight,” Wendy went on. “I get it. You're angry, and you're frustrated. Not just about this, but about a lot of things in your life. If you let me, we can explore all of that, and I promise that I will try to help you cope with whatever you need to cope with. But the first step is to be forthcoming, and that's the ball that you seem particularly adept at dropping. I said at the beginning of this meeting that I wanted you to trust me. That means giving me a break.”

Ethan was tired of the lecture, so he took a breath to speak.

“I'm not done yet,” Wendy said, cutting him off. “You, young man, need to recognize that this is a two-way street. You can't treat every question as an affront. This interview process is in fact how truth is discovered. That means not getting pissy at every other sentence.”

“This is hard,” Ethan said. “This is shit that I've spent the past eleven years trying to forget, and you and the others are doing everything you can to bring it back to life.”

“You want exculpatory evidence, don't you?”

“I want it all to be a bad dream!” He knew he'd said the words too loud, but she needed to adjust, too. “Those assholes ruined everything. They ruined . . .” He was surprised when his voice disappeared. He took a moment. “They ruined
me.
”

The words just hung there. Neither of them said anything for the better part of fifteen seconds.

“So, do you want to know what happened next?” Ethan asked.

“No,” Wendy said. “We'll get to that in time. Tell me about your previous encounters with mental health professionals.”

Ethan's shields flew up. “Why?”

She waited for the answer.

“Okay, they were bullshit,” he said. “Nobody really wanted to hear what happened—well, okay, at first, I wasn't willing to share what happened—but folks don't want to hear about an eleven-year-old boy getting ass-raped. You bring that up, and they reach for their prescription pads. But there's a world of difference between dulling a memory and coping with it.”

“Why do you think you weren't willing to share?” Wendy asked.

Ethan fought the instinct to throw out an I-don't-know. “Because it hurt, I suppose.”

She waited for more.

“And because I was afraid.”

“Of?”

Ethan's mind raced. Did he want to go here? It was the room in his memory that he'd promised years ago never to open. And when he did, there'd be no going back. But if not now, then when?

He settled himself with a breath, and looked over his shoulders to verify that they were still alone. “How much time do we have?”

“As long as you need.” Dr. Wendy looked like she was preparing herself for an interesting story. She had no idea.

“Ask me what happened to Joey,” Ethan said. “Ask me what happened to all the others.”