Shine Your Light on Me (6 page)

She looked at the little girl for a moment, too long, almost aggressively, and Jessica buried her face into her dad’s arm. Mitch said, “There’s no reason to scare her. Relax.”

She walked into the dining room, and Aiden heard his dad say, “I know.”

Mitch turned to him and said, “Go grab extra blankets and pillows.”

But they didn’t have any. They never had guests, especially not ones who came to make their home a prison. He heard the phone ring, heard his mother answer it in an irritated tone. A few seconds later she came in and said, “It’s Emmy. If you can’t speak then I don’t see the point of her calling, do you?”

Aiden wanted to hear her voice. He pushed up from the couch quickly and stumbled into the kitchen. The phone was on the counter. He breathed heavily to let her know he was on the line. She said, “Aiden?”

He tapped the casing by the mouthpiece with his fingernail. Her voice sounded broken, and he could tell that she’d been crying. She said, “I know you can’t answer me. I just wanted to let you know that I’m worried about you. My family is talking, everybody is talking...”

About me
, he thought.
I know. I know. And they’re going to take me from you and from my family, somebody is, and it won’t matter to them whether I want to go or not. The only thing that will matter is what they can take from me
...

She said, “I love you, and I wish I could be there but my dad won’t let me leave the house right now, you know? He says he doesn’t want me around you right now until everyone knows what’s going on. I’d be there if I could, but, you know, I can’t. Not until he’s okay with it. And then all of my friends are calling...” she sighed. “Don’t listen to what people say. What you did there, it doesn’t matter how you did it, it was incredible and it was beautiful, and I’m going to be here as you go through it. If we can find a place to meet where nobody can bother us, that might work, don’t you think? It couldn’t be for too long, but we’d get to see each other, and maybe you need a shoulder to cry on, right? How are your parents handling it?”

We could meet at the water tower
, he thought. He even mouthed it, silently. He tried screaming it but only produced a burning in his throat and the tingle crackling like a steady current of bare electric wire through his breastbone.

“I have to go,” she said. “We’ll figure something out. I think Elroy is going to come to your house. He could be like our go-between. I mean, we could tell him he’s like a spy or something, he’d love that.” She laughed, but it sounded weak.

He thought:
I love you. I didn’t realize how much before. But stay away, because I don’t want anybody to hurt you
.

“I love you, Aiden. Write a message for Elroy and he’ll bring it to me. Goodbye.”

After she hung up, he turned around and saw Mitch standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He said, “How do you feel?”

Aiden set the phone back on the receiver and walked stiffly to the small table his mother used when cooking. There was a notepad and pen there. He pointed for Mitch to sit across from him. Mitch did and looked at the pen and paper. He said, “Write down exactly what happened before the miracle.”

Aiden wrote in tiny, neat script:
No
.

He turned the pad to Mitch, who read it and shook his head. He frowned and then said, “You don’t know what happened, do you? Not a clue?”

Aiden pointed at the word he’d written.

Mitch nodded and looked around the kitchen. He said, “Can I tell you a secret?”

Aiden wiped his forehead. His fever seemed worse. His sharp hearing seemed muffled, as if someone had dunked him underwater and held him there. He fought for breath. He thought the thing was going to manifest itself again, but Mitch started talking.

• • •

Jack was surprised when Mitch came into the dining room and asked him to watch Jessica for a minute while he talked to Aiden in the kitchen. There was a humbleness there, almost as if he were asking a favor he didn’t want to ask. Jack said, “You ask a lot of a man.”

“No more than anyone else does.”

“I think you got your wiring crossed.”

“Will you watch her for a minute?”

“Sure, but don’t put too much pressure on my son. He means to me what your little girl means to you.”

Mitch nodded. He went into the kitchen. Jack pushed himself into the living room. Jessica was sitting on the couch with her eyes closed, and for a second he suspected she’d fallen asleep, but then one of her lids opened slightly and he smiled at her. She was a cute kid. He wheeled over by the coffee table and said, “Are you doing okay?”

She looked beyond him, for her father, and then back at Jack.

He said, “He’ll be right back. Are you thirsty? Want anything to drink?”

She shook her head.

“Have anything you want to say to me?”

She shook her head.

“Okay.”

She looked at his wheelchair. Jack wondered if she knew her father had put him in it. He doubted it, but children were usually more observant than the adults in their lives gave them credit for, especially those around Jessica’s age. Her eyes were wide and clear. He said, “It’s not as bad as you’d think, being trapped in this thing. People leave you alone for the most part. You like being left alone, too, don’t you?”

She just stared at him. He couldn’t read her, figured her dad couldn’t either, and it might have been driving Mitch a little crazy the past couple months, trying to raise her on his own; or even worse, with Aria’s help.

Jack said, “It will get easier with time. You’ll always miss her, but other people you care about a lot will help you cope.” He chuckled and said, “Am I just talking to myself here?”

Jessica rubbed her nose and leaned back into the couch cushion. She stared at the blank, paneled wall. Jack watched her for a moment longer and then turned back toward the dining room. He didn’t know where his wife had gotten off to, couldn’t hear a peep from her, but he could hear Mitch’s muffled voice in the kitchen. Caught snippets of what he said and felt himself cringe inside, knowing that there was a person inside there after all. He didn’t like to think that, it was easier to believe that Mitch was simply Pine with more class, better social skills, more patience.

He listened, glanced over his shoulder to see if Jessica had moved at all. She hadn’t. Looked like she might never rise from the couch and set down the incident that had scarred her. Too young for such pain, Jack thought, but it happened every day. He’d meant what he’d said to Mitch about them destroying their kids as much as they destroyed themselves. He didn’t want her or Aiden to suffer due to his or Mitch’s obsessions, but he couldn’t see any way around it.

He thought:
You two will be okay, you’re young enough to bounce back from anything
...

• • •

Mitch figured the best way to get the kid to understand why this was important to him was to just tell him the truth. It didn’t make it easy to do though. He wasn’t sure where to start, and he didn’t like admitting his faults.

Aiden stared at him. Mitch placed his hands on the table. He said, “It’s like this... I took my daughter for granted for most of her life. My wife too. I think my main focus was on impressing my father. I was working when Rebecca fell asleep at the wheel, and I was working when they found her car, her corpse, and our daughter catatonic in the back seat.

“She wouldn’t even let me hold her at first. All she could do was cry soundlessly. It’s the worst non-sound I ever heard, worst thing I’ve ever seen. Worse than watching my brother nail your dad to that tree. Worse than seeing her mother on the side of the road with a sheet covering her.

“She didn’t understand, we never talked about death, we were too busy living. She’d never had a pet. I kept her away from other kids because I didn’t want her repeating anything she might overhear from me or Pine or Aria or my father.

“I preferred her to be seen and not heard. That’s what fucking kills me. And she has been lately. I don’t want that anymore. I want to hear her laugh, and ask me questions, any questions, even the hard ones, and I want her to smile again and giggle and for her to be able to be a normal little girl.

“She’s more important than my dad or his business, more important than all the things I used to give priority. You’re her chance. Her only chance, I think, so do that good thing, the right thing, to make her whole again, and I will give you everything I have.

“If you don’t, I will take everything you ever cared about and dash it to pieces. It’s your call. I’ll give you a little time to think about it, kid, but you don’t have all night. I want results soon, in the next few hours or I’m going to have Pine come over here and do what he does best. Do you understand?” Mitch nodded to himself. “Good. Write down everything that happened a half hour before you healed all of us. Don’t leave anything out.”

Aiden leaned back in the chair and threw the ink pen at him. It hit Mitch in the chest.

“I deserved that, and more than that, but the sooner we dissect what happened and you recreate it, the faster I’ll be out of your family’s hair, so relax, all right?”

Aiden got up and went to the fridge, his back to Mitch, his thoughts suddenly still. He could hear well again, better than before, and there were voices chanting, drawing closer, and the snow was falling heavier, the rain gone, the wind dying down.

Mitch saw his shoulders tense, and asked, “What is it?”

Aiden closed the refrigerator, grabbed the pen from the floor, and wrote on the pad quickly:
A bunch of people are coming
...

Mitch was confused for a second, a bit doubtful once he understood what Aiden was saying. He stood and grabbed Aiden by the arm and said, “Take Jessica into your room and lock the door.” He pulled his cell from his pocket and dialed a number.

He was waiting for Aria to answer when Jack’s wife rushed into the kitchen carrying a shotgun and leveled it on his midsection.

• • •

Aria went back to Mitch’s house. Pine wasn’t there and she had no idea where he’d gone. He didn’t drive a car; no way would any of the family let him have that much control, or range. But he had a four-wheeler and she had seen its tracks, muted, in the recently fallen snow.

She went to Pine’s room quickly. She’d never been in there, never had reason to. If she’d had to guess what it would look like, she’d have been able to do so easily and quickly. She would guess that it was packed with horrendous artifacts which reflected his chaotic mind; piles of soiled clothing, ripe with his heady funk, by the end of the bed; a hidden altar in the closet where he prayed to an insatiable deity, one with a lean face, the hard, inhuman blue eyes, a mirror image of the worshipper.

The entire room would smell of the intense musk he secreted, and the sheets on his bed would be rumpled, stained, and damp with his sweat. She had never met another person who perspired as much as that boy.

But standing in front of the closed door, she hesitated, uncertain when Pine would return and what he would do to her if he caught her in his personal space, snooping through his keepsakes. Yet she couldn’t let him go on hurting Jessica. However long the child had been a victim of his lusts was already sickening, already too long.

She listened intently for the sound of his four-wheeler. All she could hear was the steady thump of her heart and her shallow breaths. She opened the door and turned on the light. His room was clean, orderly, the bed tightly made. Besides the night table, there was only a dresser. For a second she wondered if she might have mistakenly entered the wrong room, that Mitch might have moved him to another.

She could smell him though. She went to the dresser and opened the top drawer and saw an assortment of knives laid out with equal distance between each blade, a dark piece of cloth underneath them. There were seven instruments. They gleamed dully, and all showed signs of heavy use. Their handles were worn, and the blades had been sharpened so many times they were half what she guessed was their original width. The points of each were like needles. The thought of touching any of them turned her stomach. Plus, with the attention Pine gave them she figured he’d know the instant he slid the drawer open that someone had handled them.

She wanted to leave the room undisturbed if she could.

She closed the drawer and opened another. Pants. Another: Shirts, all neatly folded; the next was full of comic books. There were only two bottom drawers left and she considered forgetting them, and instead looking under his mattress and in the closet, but she moved stiffly to the window and opened it to rid the room of Pine’s stink and to alert her if he approached the house. The air was cold against the tips of her fingers and she rubbed her hands together as she walked back to the dresser and knelt in front of the two bottom drawers. She tried the one on the left first and found it wouldn’t budge. The one on the right offered the same kind of resistance.

She stared at it for a minute and then removed the drawer above each and set them to the side. She placed her hand inside the hollow and groped for a small lever, cold steel, and found it, about the size of a quarter. She frowned and pressed the button and the bottom drawers clicked open a half inch. She teased the one on the left open slowly.

He’d collected trophies. But, as with the contrast of how she had expected him to keep his living quarters to their actual condition, his memorabilia was orderly despite being grotesque.

Dozens of 8x10 photos were perfectly stacked and held together by a paperclip. There were strips of clothing tacked to a 4x6 inch piece of black felt; a small Tupperware container held bits of dried gristle Aria could only assume Pine had flayed from his victims.

She could not pierce his psychology. As far as she knew he had never murdered anyone, preferring instead to make them wish that he had. He liked to make people beg, and everyone had a point where their begging ended and they accepted their fate, but then it was no longer fun for the boy.

She pulled the stack of photos out and flicked each corner, counting them. Forty. She succumbed to the impulse to peruse them although when she came to a photo of Jack LeDoux nailed to the old oak, his blood pooled and dark against the trunk of the tree and the dried leaves, her heart ached and bile rose in her throat. His face was bloodless and slack in the picture. Any fight in him had long since passed. The quality of the photo was incredible, taken just as dawn broke, the first rays illuminating Jack’s new life and his horrible, accepting face.