It was too soon, though. I’d barely got him within my teeth. He could still choose to run. He needed to be completely caught in my trap before I showed him what I really was. Helpless little rabbit at the mercy of the wolf.
It wasn’t fair, I knew that, but I could see it in him. Pain like my pain.
He was hurting, like me. Maybe our pain wasn’t the same, but both did what all pain does—it isolated. It was why Jonah lashedout, why he glared and snapped at anyone who got too close. He’d been alone in his pain for far too long, like me. Sure, he had Becca, but she didn’t have what we had. She wasn’t broken. She couldn’t understand him like I could, and so he couldn’t ever truly escape his loneliness with her. He could with me.
He’d deny it I’m sure, but I knew Jonah acted the way he did because he wanted people to notice that he wasn’t okay. He wanted to drag his pain out into the open and force everyone to look at it. They didn’t want to look at it. They never do. But I was looking. Isawhim.
When he understood that I saw him, truly, as he was, and I wouldn’t leave him no matter how ugly his pain might seem, then he’d stay. He’d be mine. Only then would I show him my own, because I knew he’d understand that too. He’d see me too.
Dropping my cigarette, I stomped it out right above where the bastard’s head would be. The first body. Beneath the dirt, leaves, and roots. One day I’d bring Jonah here, where I’d never brought anyone else, because he wouldn’t ever truly know me until he knew this place.
It was where I came when the nightmares happened. The oneshe’dgiven me. Memories that played on a loop, reaching through time and dragging me back into a much smaller body. I came here to remind him, to remind myself, that he was gone—that he couldn’t hurt me. I just wished I’d been able to kill him myself.
Tonight’s nightmare hadn’t been from him, though, not exactly. It was from her.
It was the night I’d had to bring him here. The scene was still so perfectly clear in my mind, like it had only just happened instead of all those years ago.
“DEXTER!” my mother had screamed, and just the sound of her voice was so loud, so hysterical, that it made me want to puke. I had to be quick, and I had to be cautious as I made my way towhere her voice had come from. Downstairs. Kitchen. I couldn’t keep her waiting.
Even though I never had any idea what to expect when it came to her, I never would have imagined what I found that deceptively sunny afternoon.
Her eyes were manic, her chest heaving and fingers trembling as she shakily lit a cigarette.
Before that moment, I hadn’t known it was possible to smell blood so strongly, but it made sense when there was so much of it. I’d stared down at the body, my back pressing against the wall beside the entry, trying to stay as far from the situation as possible without leaving the room. His face was completely mangled, though it was hard to really see the damage underneath all the blood. Beside him on the ground was a pink stiletto shoe, its heel and sole covered in blood. So were her hands.
I’d fought to keep the bile down as I’d met her gaze again. The only question running through my mind was…am I going to be next?Was that why she’d called me into the room? My mother had finally snapped and was just going to go on an unhinged murder spree until the cops gunned her down?
“You need to fix this,” she’d told me as she took another drag from her bloodied cigarette. Hair that had been bleached too many times was pulled back in a messy bun and splattered with red.
“Fix… this…” I’d echoed, wondering how the fuck I was supposed to do that. “He’s… dead.”
“No shit, Sherlock. Fucking king of observation, aren’t you? Do something about it.”
“Do… what… exactly?”
She’d looked at me like I was the crazy one, like I should know exactly what to do with a dead body. Like any of what had happened was fucking normal.
“Just… get rid of it.”
“Get rid of it,” I’d repeated dumbly, and she’d thrown a half-full box of cereal at me from the counter. Its contents spilled out onto the floor, soaking up the red that pooled around the man I’d hated but she was supposed to have loved.
“You deaf as well as stupid? Yes. Get rid of it.”
“It,” she had called him. Like he wasn’t the man she’d allegedly been in love with, like he wasn’t her entire world until she had jammed the heel of a shoe into his face over and over and reduced him to nothing but “it.” A problem to be dealt with, apparently by me.
If she could be so cold with him, I wondered what she would have done if it were me lying on the floor.
I’d known then, despite his fate, that he’d been right. That the secret we shared, the one he’d forced upon me, could never be revealed to her.
I knew at that moment without a doubt, whatever compassion my mother may have at one time possessed, the drugs and alcohol had devoured it. It had died a slow but complete death until we’d ended up here. She was no longer my mother, but a monster wearing her haggard skin.
I’d listened to her. Of course I had. I’d rolled his body up in the living room rug while she chain-smoked by the window, watching on with disdain—for me or for him, I didn’t know. I’d taken my mother’s car and started driving, so sure I was going to get pulled over and arrested, for driving without a license at the very least, and if they’d found the body in the trunk…
Hours of driving with no other destination butaway, I’d followed back roads and streets with no traffic until asphalt turned to gravel turned to dirt. Until my mother’s shitty Corolla was bouncing along a rocky path, dodging trees and large stones, where I was certain no car had driven before and I prayed no car would go again. I drove and drove until the car got stuck and I couldn’tgo any further. Then I cried. Cried until the night passed into morning.
When I stopped crying, I started digging. Deeper and deeper. My hands were bleeding by the time day turned to night again and I finally felt brave enough to open the trunk.
When he was buried, the disturbed dirt covered over as best I could manage with dying leaves and forest brush, I’d set the car on fire. I’d used my father’s lighter, the one I’d always kept with me even before I’d started smoking.
