Rush (9 page)

She beamed at me.

A man emerged from some back room of the
house and I almost gave a visible start. He looked exactly like Max, except
older. He was tall, with the same nearly-black hair and dark-blue eyes, the
same straight nose and faint dimple in his chin. He gave me a welcoming smile,
and more dimples appeared in his cheeks. He was like a picture of how Max would
appear in twenty years or so.

“Hi, Caroline. I’m Peter Kincaid,” he
said, extending a hand.

We shook, but I didn’t feel anything
like the energy I’d experienced coming from his son. “Hi, Mr. Kincaid.”

“We’re glad to have you join us,” he
said.

“Me, too.” I felt my face heating. Did
he know I was acquainted with his lost son? Did he know how much Max resembled
him?

“Now, let’s eat,” he said.

We sat down to one of the best
Thanksgiving feasts I’d ever tasted. The conversation, though, lagged. There
was so much I wanted to say but couldn’t. Max sat invisibly in one of the empty
chairs, like the proverbial elephant in the room, and I felt like we were going
out of our way not to mention him.

It probably wasn’t true. They were used
to pretending he didn’t exist. The elephant was really in my head, because I
kept trying to imagine Max here at this table, eating with them. With us. It
was hard to wrap my mind around the picture. Add in Carter in a booster seat
and my brain just froze.

“So what are you planning to do when you
graduate?” Mr. Kincaid said, interrupting my gloomy thoughts.

“I’m not sure yet.”

“I hear you’re a French major.”

“That’s right.” I glanced at Trent,
whose face was carefully neutral.

“There’s probably not a lot you can do
with that,” Mr. Kincaid said.

“You’ll figure it out eventually,” his
wife offered. She smiled at me. “And there’s always the wife and mother path.”

“Yes, there is that.” I took a large
bite of turkey and started to chew. They couldn’t expect me to talk with food
in my mouth.

They seemed to like me. His mom even
seemed to think Trent and I might get more serious, like engaged serious. I
wasn’t ready for that step.

Until I’d discovered he’d been hiding
the fact of his stepbrother’s existence, I’d been looking forward to maybe
getting more serious. I’d even had a few fantasies of marriage proposals. Now,
the idea made me squirm. We’d dated for a year and he’d never mentioned Max.
Not once.

How could I marry him? What else was he
keeping from me?

Finally the long dinner was over. I
complimented Mrs. Kincaid on her cooking and claimed exhaustion. They were so
understanding as Trent and I left the room that it crossed my mind they might
have been uncomfortable too. Maybe he didn’t bring many girls home with him. I
was one of a privileged few. Why didn’t that make me feel any better?

Trent came into my room with me. As soon
as he’d closed and locked the door, he started taking my clothes off. I let him
do it. I wasn’t in the mood, but then when was I ever?

Afterward, I stumbled into the shower
and got cleaned up before dragging on my nightshirt and falling into bed. Trent
had gone into his own room and I was alone. I fell asleep so fast I wasn’t even
aware of pulling the covers over myself.

***

Mom and Dad were arguing again. They’d
been doing a lot of that lately. Our rented house was small and cheap, with
thin walls, and even in my bedroom with the door shut I could hear them. It
scared me when they yelled at each other. Usually my parents were so quiet and
soft-spoken that yelling seemed foreign and startling.

My dad yelled something that ended in
“Jo.” They were talking about my aunt again. Lately, it seemed like she was all
they talked about. Could Jo hear them? They’d hurt her feelings, yelling like
that.

I sat up in my pink princess bed. I had
my own room because I was so much older than the twins, who slept with my mom
and dad. Moving slowly so as not to make my bedsprings squeak, I crept out of
my ruffled floral nest and went to my door to listen.

“She’d never hurt the kids,” my mom
said, her tone defensive.

“Maybe not intentionally, but you have
to admit she’s a bad influence,” my dad retorted.

“She’s not that bad.”

“I overheard her talking to her
invisible friends today.”

My mom sighed so loud I could hear it
even in my room. “Oh, no.”

“And yesterday, Caroline was talking to
someone I couldn’t see. She insisted there was a little girl in our kitchen
with her.” My dad sounded so angry.

I hadn’t meant to make him angry, and
I’d tried to introduce him to my friend Patsy, but he claimed she wasn’t there.
She was. I saw her and even touched her hand. She wore a pink dress with a
ruffled, white pinafore over it and old-fashioned black patent shoes with
straps across the top. Her socks were plain white. I saw her. But now my dad
was angry about it. Had I done something wrong?

“I’m sure Caroline was only playing,”
Mom said. “She’s very imaginative.”

“I don’t think so. She seemed to really
believe this little girl was there. She even had a name for her. Patty or
something like that.”

Not Patty. Patsy. Hadn’t he been listening?

“I’ll talk to Jo about it.”

“I don’t want her living here anymore,
Heather. She won’t get treatment and she won’t stop acting like a lunatic. She
has to go.”

No! He couldn’t make Jo leave. I loved
her. Who would play with me and tell me fairy tales at night if Jo left? Mom
and Dad never wanted to tell me fairy tales, and when I managed to pester them
into it, their stories weren’t as good as Jo’s.

“Where will she go?” my mom said. “She
doesn’t even have a job.”

“That’s not our problem anymore. We’ve
been more than patient. We’ve tried to help her get it together, but nothing
seems to work. We have to think of the kids.”

“Caroline loves her.”

“I know. That’s half the problem.”

It was my fault. They were going to get
rid of my aunt and it was all my fault because I loved her too much.

***

In the morning, there was a cardboard
box sitting at the foot of my bed. It was the kind that copy or computer paper
comes in, sturdy and white, with handles built in. Written on the side, in
somewhat messy black felt-tip marker, were the words “Max’s stuff.”

I sat up, frowning. Max’s stuff? Who’d
put that on my bed? And why? Had Trent come in this morning and done it as a
joke?

I didn’t really see the humor in it.

Sitting up, I tugged the box closer. It
made a sloshing sound as whatever was inside it slid around and hit the sides
of the box. Whoever had put it on my bed must have meant for me to look inside
it, or they wouldn’t have left it for me. The top had been folded shut but not
taped, so I opened it, my heart beginning to pound. I was about to see pieces
of a murderer’s childhood.

There was a loose pile of old photos at
the top of the contents. I pulled them out. They all featured Max at various
ages beginning from infancy, including school pictures, casual snapshots, and a
couple of family portraits. There were quite a few of them, especially the baby
pics.

Had they thrown every picture they had
of him in this box?

I held up each one in turn. He’d looked
happy as a baby, all smiles. Innocent. I wondered briefly what he’d think if he
knew I was looking at his baby pictures and grinned. If he was like most guys,
he wouldn’t be too pleased. He’d been a cutie, though, all black hair and huge
blue eyes, adorable dimples in his cheeks.

Did I have a crush on him? The thought
stopped me for a minute, made me put down the pictures. I shouldn’t be having
these thoughts about him. He’d killed his own brother, for pity’s sake. Plus I
was still attached to Trent. Sitting in Trent’s house.

But I couldn’t help how I felt, and Max
had been a beautiful baby. Also, a beautiful toddler, preschooler, and grade
school kid. It hurt to think of this innocent child becoming slowly warped
until he turned into a killer.

You could see the change in him, though,
in the pictures. His face went from happy to sad sometime in preschool, and the
pictures became fewer. Then, in grade school, he started to look like a
different person. Sullen. Angry. And there were hardly any photos of him from
this period.

After that, it was like no-one wanted to
notice him or look at him. I only found a handful of him in his teens. Not
surprising, considering what he’d done.

Or maybe they were stored somewhere
else. Maybe these were just extras and they had the others in regular photo
albums with the rest of the family pictures. I set the photos aside and dug
deeper into the box. There was a copy of one of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time
books and a concert t-shirt from a metal band I remembered being popular when I
was in middle school. Beneath that were several sketchbooks.

I pulled those out and opened the first
one. It was filled with drawings of typical boy stuff...dragons, motorcycles,
swords, cars, skulls. Lots of skulls. They were remarkably detailed, though. I
could see the talent and skill in them.

Leafing through the book, I found the
drawings increasing in sophistication as his skills grew. The second book was
darker, and the drawings more complex, more like complete compositions. Their
subject matter was often violent, although mostly fantasy stuff with armored
knights and castles. I could feel the anger coming off them, see it in the
dark, slashing lines of his drawings.

Flipping through pictures of knights
slaying dragons, demons abducting beautiful women, and dancing skeletons, I was
in reluctant awe of his artistic abilities. He was really, really good. I didn’t
want to admire him for anything, but it would have been impossible not to
acknowledge his gift.

Then I turned the page to a picture of a
fist breaking glass, finely rendered shards spraying across the paper. An
openly violent image, with no fantastic elements at all. It looked completely
realistic. Under it, Max had written “he broke my ribs today.”

I stopped and stared at the words, my
stomach turning. Someone had hurt Max. Hurt him badly. Who? Was it Trent or
someone else?

Until now, I’d imagined Max as the
villain, the aggressor. Maybe he hadn’t meant to kill Carter, but he had been
playing with a gun. But this...he’d been a victim too. A weight seemed to
settle deep inside me as I thought of him getting beaten so badly his ribs had
broken.

Should I sympathize with him? He’d
killed someone, after all, and Trent believed he’d done it on purpose. But Max
was human, too, and he’d been a vulnerable child once. Someone whose ribs had
been broken by another person. I wondered if anyone else, anyone other than Max
and me, had seen this picture.

The door opened. I started and knocked
some of the photos onto the floor. Trent barged into the room, a smile on his
face, stopping short when he noticed the box.

His smile disappeared as his eyes went
round and his mouth fell open. “What are you doing?”

“Looking at this stuff someone left for
me.”

“Where did you get that? His crap is all
in the basement.” He advanced on me, his eyes narrow now and angry-looking. “Were
you snooping around looking for Max’s shit?”

“No! I told you; someone left it for me.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and
scowled down at me. “That’s bullshit and you know it. Who would give you that
box?”

“How would I know? I thought you did it.”

Maybe there really was a ghost and he
was trying to communicate with me. No. Nope, not going to Jo-ville.

“Don’t lie to me, Caroline.”

I scowled back at him. “I’m not lying. I
woke up and this box was sitting on my bed. I thought someone wanted me to see
what was in it, so I opened it. That’s all.”

He gave me a disbelieving look. “What
are you saying? A ghost put it here?”

“No. I’m saying I don’t know who did.”

Trent picked up the first sketchbook and
leafed through it, then tossed it in the box with a snort of disgust. “He was
always doodling this crap.”

“He’s really good.”

“Oh? You like him? Is that why you’re
going through his things?”

I held up the picture of the fist. “Who
broke his ribs, Trent?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Really? You don’t know? Are you sure
you didn’t do it?”

Trent’s mouth fell open again. “What
kind of question is that? No, I didn’t do it.”

“And you have no idea who did?”

He looked down, avoiding my gaze. “No
idea. Anyway, he was always getting beat up. Nobody liked him.”