“No secret,” Jason said finally. “Or if there is, I don’t know it, either. There was an accident, when he was a kid. He was at his grandparents’ place for the summer, and he fell off the tractor or something. Nothing too scandalous. It never stopped hurting him, though. He wouldn’t admit it, but…”
“But you could tell.” West had thought he was doing Nick a favor, not asking about it. He’d thought they both preferred pretending away the hard stuff. “Thank you. For telling me.”
“You’re welcome,” Jason said, and leaned in. And kissed him.
Lips and tongue and breath and flesh and a brush of hair against his forehead and the pressure of fingers along his jawline: this was, for a moment, all that mattered.
This felt good.
And then West remembered himself and remembered Nick, who was gone but still held a claim over him. West wasn’t about to betray him, allowing another set of lips and another pair of hands to make his disobedient body feel things it was no longer supposed to feel. He shoved Jason away, hard as he could. It didn’t erase the fact that he’d let someone steal Nick’s place. Or that he’d liked it.
“I’m sorry,” Jason said, smearing a hand across his mouth as if to wipe away the kiss. “I don’t know why I did that.”
Too late, West thought to check the street, which was still mercifully empty, but there were plenty of houses with plenty of windows. Even with the phones down, news in this town traveled fast.
“Get out of here,” West said. “Get away from me.”
“I didn’t… I wasn’t trying to…” Jason sounded more afraid now than he had when they were scuffling for the gun. “I wanted to see what the big deal was. You made him happy. Happier than I could make him. I wanted to know why.”
All of the pain that West had buried, everything he’d stuffed inside himself and hidden away, Jason was wearing it across his face. West hated him for that, for being what West, what even Nick, could never be. Someone with no secrets. It made him angry, and the anger made it easy to be as mean as he needed to be.
“He picked me over you. Deal with it.”
“I wasn’t in love with him, you know.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“We were friends,” Jason said. “Surely even a Neanderthal like you can comprehend the concept of —”
West snorted and turned away.
“Okay! Don’t go. I’m sorry, it… slipped out?”
“Yeah, I’m always calling people Neanderthals by accident.” But he stayed.
“We were just friends,” Jason said. “And then we weren’t. And yeah, that was because of you. I lost him. You got him.”
“You waiting for an apology?”
“I’m not saying I blame you. I’m saying…”
“What?”
“I lost him,” Jason said. “And now you lost him, too. We both did. I thought… I don’t know. That made us the same, somehow. That it would be better, to have someone else who understands.”
West was tempted. But what right had he to feel any better when Nick was in the ground?
“You should go,” he told Jason. All at once, his anger drained away. “And promise me you’ll stay away from Baz.”
“I told you, I can’t do that.”
“Then at least promise you’ll try.”
“Honestly, what do you care what happens to that guy?”
“Honestly? I don’t,” West said. “Not about what happens to him.”
“Oh.” He seemed unsure of how to take that. So was West. “I’ll do my best.”
West felt better knowing he had the gun. “And you ever jump me in broad daylight like that again, you’ll have bigger problems than Baz.”
Jason saluted. “Understood, sir.” He waited until he was halfway down the street to call back a jaunty “So it’s all good, then, if I wait till dark?”
Somehow, West managed to hold down the smile until he was safely out of sight.
It was ten days after the storm when Jule woke beneath a heavy weight, with the parasite’s callused palm over her mouth. He was straddling her; he was naked. She struggled beneath him, but, drunk and scrawny as he may have been, he still had several inches and at least fifty pounds on her, and he was unmovable.
She’d once, as a child, been in a minor car accident and woken to find herself stretched out on a morgue-like slab, trapped beneath a heavy lead apron that draped from her neck past her pelvis. There’d been a moment of sheer panic before the doctors’ words had sunk in, hospital and tests and don’t move (as if she could) and don’t worry (as if she could stop). It had, as she’d been promised, been all right.
This would not.
His face was nearly pressed against hers, with only his hand separating their lips, the hand that was muzzling her scream. She sucked in air through her nose, but all she could smell was his beery breath. She wondered what would happen if she threw up while his hand was over her mouth, if the puke would spill back down her throat and into her lungs, if there could be a more humiliating way to die.
She pushed at him harder then, harder than she thought she could, fired by an irate refusal to let this disease of a man defeat her.
He didn’t move.
It would be all right, she told herself. If she could simply survive this moment, and the next, cling to her life and her sanity until it was over, then it would be a memory. A memory couldn’t hurt her. The past could be forgotten, like it had never happened.
It was only a matter of waiting for present to become past.
One moment.
Then the next.
“It’s okay,” he murmured, smoothing her hair back from her forehead with his free hand. She could feel his thing twitching against her thigh. “We don’t have to pretend anymore. Your mother’s given us her blessing.”
Her scream came out as a muffled squeak.
Her mother had been holed up in her room for days. Sick, he’d said, and Jule hadn’t questioned it. But now she did, and wondered what he’d done to her.
Because he must have done something, or she would be here, right?
That was what the small, panicked voice at her center said, the child who had never grown up. Mommy would save me, that little girl screamed, and the parasite lay there, heavy and still.
“She wants us to be happy,” he said. “Now we can be.”
The little girl cried uselessly; the woman, who’d been grown up for too long, reached for the knife.
The knife that shouldn’t have been there, because it was only there in her dreams.
She reached with the arm that wasn’t pinned beneath his hairy chest, and tried to ignore what his hand was doing, as if it didn’t have anything to do with her, wasn’t her waistband he was probing beneath, wasn’t her body, was just some other unfortunate person, or less than that, some unfortunate, mindless object, its violation a petty crime of trespassing and vandalism but nothing more. Her hand dug beneath her mattress for the thing that shouldn’t have been there, and found its handle, and pulled it out, and stabbed it into his thigh.
Now he screamed, and rolled off her, and she pushed him onto the floor. He was flopping and thumping and bleeding like a gutted fish, cursing her, cursing her mother, and the knife wanted her to strike again. The hilt was warm beneath her fingertips, the blood gleamed in the glow of light from the hallway, and the parasite was no threat anymore, not tonight at least, but the knife whispered to her and wanted her to draw it across his throat. She wanted to do it. Oh, she wanted it so much. She maybe, almost, possibly would have given in, if her uncle Scott hadn’t bounded into the room, pulled it gently from her fingers, and done the job for her, whispering, “I told you not to steal from me” as the carotid artery split open and the parasite’s life spilled out.
“You killed him,” she said stupidly.
“No, you did that, Jaybird. I just put him out of his misery.”
She had never considered herself the kind of girl who would, like a delicate Victorian flower, fai
nt in a moment of bloody crisis. But a tingle of pins and needles crept down her arms and legs and a film of gray passed across her vision. As a swell of nausea brought the contents of her stomach hurtling into her mouth, she lost the thread. Scott’s voice, tinny and distant, warned of something she couldn’t be bothered to understand, and then that faded, too. The floor was rising toward her, and then bloodstained arms were around her, and she was gone.
Somehow, she was in the shower, the pink-marble-tiled shower in Cassandra Porter’s private bathroom, a cold spray blasting her face and her body, which was still in its clothes. The water pooling in the clogged tub was pink. It had all been real.
Uncle Scott was with her, holding her up. His fingers were stained with the parasite’s blood.
She gagged, and staggered out of the shower, reaching the toilet just in time to heave a thin stream of bile into its bowl. Scott rubbed her back.
“First time’s the toughest,” he said.
She didn’t know whether she was supposed to be grateful.
“Do I want to know how you got your hands on my knife?” he asked, and fortunately, she gagged again, saving both of them the answer.
He sat with her, and he waited until her hiccupy breathing smoothed and the dry heaving stopped. As she washed her hair and scrubbed her body and changed into fresh, unstained clothes, trying to ignore the body beside her bed, he washed off his knife in the sink, humming one of his country songs, as if he were doing the dishes. And when he decided she was ready, he informed her that they had work to do. Then pointed toward the body, with the knife.
She shook her head.
No.
No.
“We can’t just leave him here, Jaybird. That’d be worse than leaving him alive.”
“Self-defense,” she whispered, a half-remembered excuse from a half-remembered crime show.
“I don’t want to know what went on in here between the two of you. And I promise you, the cops don’t, either. You’re a Prevette. That’s all that matters. Hey now, don’t start that again.”
She wasn’t aware she was crying until he wiped the back of his hand across her cheek.
“He was stealing from me,” Uncle Scott said. “Your mother always did like the dumb ones. I was going to get around to it sooner or later. You just got there sooner.”
“My mother —”
“Your mother’s ruined,” Scott said. She didn’t want to know what that meant. There was only so much one night could hold. “And that’s another reason not to cry over this slug. Now take that sheet and help me wrap him up.”
“I can’t.”
“Sure you can.”
She shook her head, hard, harder, hard enough to knock the night out of her skull.
“He’s not going to get rid of himself.”
“Axe,” she said, aware she sounded like a child trying to weasel out of her chores. “Or Teddy. They can do it.”
“Yeah, they can. But you will. No more free ride, Jaybird. No more pretending you’re anything but what you are. You’re a grown-up now. Time to join the family.”
She literally couldn’t move. What would he do if she refused to help?
“You need a little fortification,” he said. “I get it. Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Come.”
Anywhere had to be better than this room, with its ripening smell of blood and guts. So she followed Scott down the hallway, pausing only to peek in on her mother. Annie Prevette lay exactly where she had the last time Jule spotted her, sprawled in bed on a spreading pile of clutter and filth, her face pale and sweaty, her limbs thrashing in time with the punk metal blasting from the speakers. “Sick,” maybe. Useless, definitely.
They ended up in Scott’s room, where his newest woman lay naked in his bed, her eyelids fluttering and a watery smile on her face. Giuliana had shown up at the house a couple of days before and never left; she rarely came out of the bedroom. Scott ignored her, and retrieved a small collection of items from the nightstand:
A strip of tinfoil.
A lighter.
A small plastic bag of fractured crystals.
A pipe.
Jule shook her head again. This would not be her life. She’d vowed that a long time ago. She’d stuck to it.
He put his finger to his lips and nodded to the woman, then led Jule back out to the hallway. He took a seat at the top of the stairs and patted the carpet beside him, waiting for her to join.
She was afraid not to.
“It will help,” he said. “Just this once.”
“I don’t need that. It’s fine, let’s just do this.”
He squeezed her wrist, too hard. “Jule, you got a man in your room who bled like a stuck pig all over your pretty pink floor, and unless you want that room to start stinking like the back room of a butcher shop, we gotta get that body out of there, clean up all the blood. Then load the corpse into the truck. Drive out to the swamps and make sure no one ever finds it again. Come back here, burn our clothes. Then tell your mother, if she ever bothers to ask, that we got no idea where her precious husband is, and let her think that he just ran off. Then you got to go back to that room, where you killed that man, and go to sleep. You think you can do all that without a little fortification, you tell me now. But I’m telling you, this will help.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You got no one in this world who loves you like I do, Jule.”
She had no one, period, she thought. If he loved her, he wouldn’t make her do this.
It sounded nice, and maybe it was true for the kind of people who lived in houses like this for real, who could afford to make pretty ultimatums and choose who was worthy of them. She wished Scott didn’t love her, because then she wouldn’t know that love looked like this. It was what she had; it was what it was.
And he was the one who had come for her.
She took the thin glass pipe and the foil from his large hand. “I don’t know how.”
So he showed her.
West took his time getting home. He’d found that a long, aimless walk, letting his feet go one way and his mind another, suited him nearly as much as those hours in the car. Things moved slower by foot, but he had nothing to outrun. Walking through the fields, the horizon drawing no closer no matter how many steps he took, was like being trapped in suspended animation, standing perfectly still despite the illusion of motion. It seemed fitting.
When he finally did make it back, his father was waiting for him on the front porch, two suitcases at his feet. His expression made the point perfectly clear: in Oleander, even with the phones down, bad news traveled faster than foot traffic. West wondered whether some nosy spy behind one of the windows on State Street had alerted his parents by semaphore. Or maybe carrier pigeon. Whatever it had been, the damage was done. West knew better than to expect a reprieve. Being a West meant honoring your promises and sticking by your choices. In doing neither, West had proved himself unworthy of the name. And if surviving this with his family intact required disavowing Nick, he wasn’t sure he could.
He took a deep breath, preparing for his father’s questions or accusations, trying to decide whether to deny or confess, and, lost in the labyrinth of options and consequences, he didn’t notice his father’s fist clenching and rearing back. It wasn’t until the roundhouse punch had knocked him off the porch that it occurred to him this wasn’t going to be a conversation.
“I really thought I could live with it,” said his father, who suddenly had a rifle in his hand. “Then you go and shame us like that? In public?” He whacked West in the shin with the butt of the rifle. A bolt of pain shot through his leg. “You shamed your mother.”
West raised himself from the ground enough to see his mother behind the parlor window, watching events play out. There was a distant, polite expression fixed to her face, as if she were watching someone else’s child in a school play and making the minimal effort necessary to pretend she was paying attention. He found h
er tears unbearable, but he would have preferred them to this.
His father just looked… empty. Vacant behind the eyes. The rifle came down again, this time on his shoulder, and West cried out.
“Shut up!” his father roared. “There’s only so much bullshit a man can swallow.”
Now, it was his leg again, with a sickening crack. West’s shinbone was on fire. His father’s face was unrecognizable.
“Please stop.” It was a whimper. It was humiliating. But he hurt so much, and now his father – his father – had dropped the rifle and was using his face for a punching bag, and cursing at him, and calling him disgusting, and West was big, maybe even bigger than his father, but he couldn’t hit back. He couldn’t do that.