Shine Your Light on Me (8 page)

It killed Bobby sometimes, watching his dad slap his mom. He’d never hit her with his fist, at least not that Bobby had seen, but it was even more belittling in a way, just smacking her. Everybody thought he was an amazing guy though. He had charm and a smile that made people feel like they mattered. He kept his calm and rarely raised his voice. Sometimes that was all it took to trick people.

Bobby had never gotten the hang of it. He wore his heart on his sleeve too often, and he was too unambitious to pretend for the sake of a certain end. He just wanted people to like him for who he was. He’d tested the hell out of Cindy when she’d first shown interest in him, couldn’t figure out what she wanted from him. Then, after he couldn’t get rid of her, once he realized that he kind of enjoyed her company, he realized she was lonely, and she could sense his loneliness, and it wasn’t so bad having somebody wanting to be with you if only for the sake of making each other smile and having someone to talk to.

It wasn’t like they were using each other. They both had their flaws, and he knew he judged her too harshly sometimes. If he had more time he told himself he’d have taken it easier on her, learned to be the better guy she deserved, but with that longing there was an equally strong desire to leave the world with a bang.

Suddenly.

Explosively.

Tomorrow morning.

He backed away from the front door and heard his mom pleading for something inside the house. Her voice was muffled but desperate. Bobby wanted to go inside, grab a butcher knife from the kitchen, sneak up behind his father and bury it between his shoulder blades.

But it’d break his mom’s heart, watching that happen, and he doubted she’d understand that he’d done it for her.

He circled the house, his feet wet and cold. The basement window was ground level, old, the latch rotted. He’d snuck in that way before, but with the rain and snow halfway up the glass he didn’t want to enter the house that way. Yet he couldn’t imagine an easier way to avoid his father, so he knelt there, cleared the snow away with his forearm and pulled his pocket knife and slid it between the sill and popped the latch. The window tilted in on two hinges along the bottom of the frame. The basement was dark. He tweaked the hinges until he could lower the window against the inside wall and slid in feet first.

Hanging there with half of his body pressed hard against the soaked lawn, feeling his heartbeat accelerate, feeling the relief in his chest as he thought this was the
last
night his dad would ever be in their lives, in anyone’s life, he dropped to the basement floor with one hand against the damp wall and listened to the noises above.

It was mostly his mother talking, but his father would interject sometimes.

She was saying, “You promised me.”

When he didn’t answer, she said, “Alex, you promised.”

“I’m done talking about it. Keep pushing me about this and see what happens.”

Bobby headed over to the steps, his hands stretched out before him until his fingers grazed the rail. He set his weight down gently on each riser. The voices above grew quiet and it seemed to increase the volume of his every movement. When he stopped at the door, he touched the old, unforgiving wood, and then the handle, cold as well, the wind coming in the basement and seeming to have followed him up the steps chilling his wet clothes.

For a moment, before he opened the door, he was hyperaware of his own physicality.

This body was a tender one, prone to sickness and injury, riddled with imperfections like his mother’s. It was one of his father’s favorite things to do, point out their imperfections, to contrast them against his own perfections. The slight gap in his mother’s front teeth; Bobby’s small chin; his mother’s veiny, working woman hands; Bobby’s laugh, which no one heard enough, and how it was more cackle than anything; how his mother walked—slowly, stiffly, weakly; how Bobby sometimes, under enormous stress, tended to get tongue-tied and the words got all mixed up between his brain and his mouth; his mother’s choice in clothing and how none of it fit her right when she gained an extra pound; his father’s judgment on Bobby’s frailty, frequently telling him that he looked like a fourteen year old girl; and many, many other opinions about the two of them that his father passed off with a laugh, ridiculing them, poking at them.

His neck felt overheated. He turned the knob and expected the door to be locked, but it opened soundlessly and he slid through a gap just wide enough for his body, and came out in the laundry room off the kitchen. He had to pull his boots off and set them on the steps because they were soaked. He slid his socks off too, and stripped down to his underwear and piled his clothing on top of his boots and closed the door softly.

His skin was pale and he looked at his ribs showing through and at his thin legs and knobby knees and lanky arms and felt utterly naked. He knew his father was right, he was sickly looking. Who would want a son or a friend or a boyfriend who looked like that? How could they not look at him minus clothing and break into a fit of laughter?

His cheeks burned. In the kitchen he grabbed a dish towel and dried himself. The television in the living room was on, broadcasting a show about the death of Christ. He caught bits of it and drowned them out. There wasn’t a god that cared. Hell, most people didn’t.

He snuck to his room, shut the door, and rifled through his dresser for warm, dry clothing. He doubled up on his socks (his feet were so cold he doubted they’d ever warm again), and he grabbed another coat from his closet and a hat and gloves and a blanket his mother had made and threw it into a backpack. He took the pillow from his bed. He had an extra pair of boots and put them on. After he’d changed, he stood near the door and looked at his room, for the last time, he figured. It wasn’t a bad room. If his father had done anything for him, it was to spend money on quality junk.

Sure didn’t make up for what he hadn’t given, but it could have been worse. That was something Bobby had learned early. Things could always be worse. And when he heard the door open behind him, he almost laughed out loud, and he cursed God under his breath and turned to face his father.

• • •

Aria got herself under control as Elroy came into Pine’s bedroom, his expression one of complete frustration. He knelt next to the drawers and said, “Do you remember exactly how he had this stuff arranged?”

Elroy had always been a good kid. Mickey sometimes teased him about being soft in the head and she could tell it got to the boy, so when she was alone with him, she’d always tried to compliment him on something, usually how he made people laugh, or the compassion he so boldly demonstrated in a world filled with men who judged compassion as weakness.

She said, “No matter what we do, we’ll never get it exactly as he had it.”

“What were you thinking?”

“What do you think of your brother?”

“What?”

“Do you ever think that some people are so much like a disease that it would be best to simply kill them?”

“No,” Elroy said. “I don’t think anyone should kill anyone else for any reason.”

“I think your brother needs a lobotomy.”

“Why are you talking about this?”

“You saw what happened at LeDoux’s. It was incredible, wasn’t it? And then, when you see something shortly after that is bad enough to begin with, you can actually see it for what it is. Does that make any sense?”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m not okay,” Aria said. “We need to do something about your brother, and I need to talk to your father about what happened with your friend Aiden.”

“We have to put this stuff back.”

“Did you know what he was doing to Jessica?”

“Who? Pine?”

“Yes, who else would hurt a damaged little girl like her?”

“What did he do?”

“I’d rather not talk about.”

“Tell me,” Elroy said.

“I caught him touching her in ways he shouldn’t have.”

Elroy thought about it for a second and then nodded, his expression grim. He looked much older all the sudden, and his eyes were bright. He said, “What do we do?”

Aria moved over next to him and gathered up all Pine’s trophies and looked again through the photos. She lingered for a moment on Jack’s suffering. She frowned and squared her shoulders again. “I already told Mitch, left him a voice mail. I thought you were Pine coming home, catching me in here, and I didn’t know what he’d do and I had to tell Mitch.”

Elroy stood and he pressed his soft body against hers and he lifted his arms and draped them around her. He was soft, and gentle, and it was the first time he’d ever hugged her.

She had always thought he had a secret animosity toward her, or at least complicated feelings, while Pine didn’t care if she was in their lives or out, and Mitch seemed to look at her more as a sister than his stepmother. She hugged Elroy back and her eyes were dry, but the poor kid sobbed against her shoulder and she felt his chest expand and deflate and she said, “I’m going to stop him.”

He held her a moment longer, and she let him, and when he let her go, he broke their embrace and stepped back and wiped his eyes with his fingertips and said, “He’s really dangerous, but I want to help you. There were a lot of times I’ve wanted to do something about him but he scares me. Even if he was dead, he’d still scare me.”

“Me too,” Aria said. “We need to turn this evidence over to the state police.”

Elroy nodded. “What about Mitch and Dad?”

“Mitch will want to kill him. I don’t know what your father will say, he’s been very quiet lately.”

Elroy studied her face. “Is it because you cheated on him?”

“Probably,” she said. “I wish I wouldn’t have.”

“Then why did you?”

“I don’t know. I just needed it, I guess.”

Elroy glanced at the evidence she held that would cause Pine all kinds of problems, and in turn, them. She studied his face. The kid was not cut out for hard decisions. He was made for laughing, and slow movements, and being cared for, and his faithfulness.

She said, “I can handle all of this, you don’t have to have any part of it.”

“It’s my niece, and my brother.”

She nodded. “I’m going to try and call Mitch again. Pine might be with him.”

“Mitch went to Aiden’s house. He’s kind of taken them hostage. I’m worried he might do something mean to make Aiden heal Jessica.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that. Mitch is level-headed.”

“Not right now he’s not. Nobody is,” Elroy said. “I’ll drive over there while you drive home. Call me and tell me what Dad says about Pine and the thing that happened with Aiden, okay? Be careful too. Women drivers, you know?”

She laughed and gathered Pine’s collection in a shoebox and followed Elroy outside.

• • •

Mitch had always taken his father’s belief of might makes right to heart, but when Aiden’s mother came into the kitchen and leveled the shotgun at his midsection, such a murderous look carved into her already severe face, he wished only for a few more seconds to hold his daughter in his arms.

Might did not matter in that moment.

Right did not matter either.

The crowd outside was a noisy one.

The muzzle of the barrel appeared as big as his fist. She was eight feet away. He couldn’t close the distance between them before she pulled the trigger. He’d never been an emotional man, some would say he was too practical, a little cold, yet he had to fight the urge to beg her to lower the weapon and let him explain himself. What could he say? The idea that someone might make his daughter whole in the blink of an eye had overcome his common sense.

Yes, he’d forced his way into their home and he planned to stay as long as it took, for one thing he was good to the end once committed, for another, it wasn’t right for the boy to have such a gift and refuse to share it with everyone who needed it.

And he’d offered them money, tons of it, yet Jack and the boy might as well have spat in his face.

Aiden’s mother cocked the hammer on the shotgun. It was an old breakaway, single-shot, the barrel about four feet long, probably loaded with buckshot, and it’d blow the heart clean from his chest and plaster bits of it on the wall behind him.

No way could she miss; no way could he talk his way out of it.

It was hard to hear anything over the voices outside.

He looked at the window over the sink and saw a few faces jostling to look into the room and catch a glimpse of the boy with the gift. They were stunned faces. He smiled at them, thinking that to go out in front of strangers would have never been his preferred route. He had dreamed of death sometimes. But it came whispering, not roaring.

Aiden’s mother said, “You might think this is personal, but it’s not.”

He turned back to her. “How’s that?”

Someone rapped on the window, trying to get him or her to look their way. Someone yelled something. She looked at them, and he expected her face to wilt, her shoulders to sag, the gun to lower, yet she had little give in her. If anything, she gripped the stock tighter and her finger brushed the trigger.

He said, “Murder is always personal, isn’t it?”

“I’m not going to murder you,” she said, “I’m just going to blow your legs off.”

“I’d prefer death.”

“So would have my husband.”

“I know,” he said. “I went out of my head. If I could take it back, I would.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“What reason do I have to lie? I loved her and he could see it, he already mentioned it. But she went to him, didn’t she? Don’t you think you’re pointing that gun at the wrong person?”

“Shut your mouth.”

“Do you still sleep in the same bed? Aria and my dad don’t. They did until Jack destroyed it.”

“She’s as much to blame as he is.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said.

“So, if you cripple me, you’ll feel better? I don’t think you will. Do you think I feel better? I don’t. If anything, every time I see him I remember their affair even more intensely. It only hurts me more. But none of that matters now. When your son lights up again, I think Jack will be there, and he’ll be as good as new, so why don’t you set the gun down. We need to deal with that crowd out there before they get it into their heads to come inside and carry Aiden away. Are you hearing me? I can help you protect him.”