Not that good, Brady thought.Wherever this story goes, I don’t think I can give this moment up or trade it in or regret it. I think from this moment, here, we are forever in the same car on the roller coaster, holding each other, keeping each other from falling off the ride.
“Maybe I’ll think you’re good too,” Brady murmured. “Don’t be afraid of me, Charlie.”
“Too late,” Eric said with a laugh. “But there’s different kinds of fear. My dad, he…. It wasn’t just that we were afraid of him forus, but we were afraid of him forotherpeople. My little sisters had learned to keep their heads down, but the first time I pissed him off or my brother, Andy, pissed him off, and he took it out on the little kids—we learned quick, you know?”
“God, abusers like that suck,” Brady muttered. He’d seen enough of them on the job. They were often clever manipulators, knowing which pressure points to apply to keep their victims silent. The common expectation for people to “go to the police” was a trap for their most vulnerable prey. It gave them anexcuseto be angry, and the wives and children often had nowhere to go where they couldn’t be found. “Did your mom have anywhere to go?”
Eric snorted. “He was a cop. Her father and brothers were cops. None of us had anywhere to go. He was fucking everywhere.”
Brady grunted. He wanted to ask, “Why me? How could you trustme, of all people? Why are you risking your life forme?” But this wasn’t about him. This was about Charlie, the boy who used to smoke cigarettes and play baseball and act in school plays.
And who grew up to be a very, very dangerous man.
“How’d you get out?” he asked instead.
“Well, like I said, he used to choose his victims. My mom—and not just with his fists. She… he wouldn’t let her wear pants. He wouldn’t let her wearunderwear. He’d…he’d drag her into the bathroom and bend her over and go. She… she just sort of complied. Probably easier than fighting him, by the time I realized that’s what they were doing. Anyway, he’d… he’d started telling my sisters they couldn’t wear pants anymore. I heard my mom crying every time he told her to stop buying them. I-I didn’t know what to do. I was a senior in high school bythen, and I thought, ‘Hey, I’m almost out!’ and then I thought, ‘Oh my God—I’m leaving them in hell.’ And the summer before my senior year, he sort of… took away the choices. We were in Boston, right? And we used to drive out to Revere Beach all the time on the weekends. Half the neighborhood would, to get out of the heat, to go swimming, to get the hell away from the parents. My best friend in high school was Jayanne Macpherson. She was….” He let out a sigh. “Did you have a female best friend?” he asked, almost wistfully.
“Not in Idaho,” Brady answered, going for forthright. “My folks didn’t know I was gay until I was out of college. No girlfriends, no friends who were girls—my whole high school experience, from basketball to softball to taking auto shop, was one amazingly boring sausage fest. With no juicy bratwurst and no relish. Why do you ask?”
Eric’s weak chuckle was an ample reward for his attempt at humor.
“Yeah, mine would have been too if it hadn’t been for Jayanne. She was in the drama club, and she’d had a crush onevery gay kid in school. It was amazing, she told me. The minute she got flushed and breathless around somebody, he was sure to come out or get caught blowing the quarterback or making eyes at the five male cheerleaders. We ended up getting cast as Portia and Bassanio inThe Merchant of Venice, and we had a couple of good practices. I was walking her out to her car one night, and I thought, ‘Oh no. This is it. She’s going to want to kiss, and I’m going to have to fake it.’ And we almost did—our lips almost met—and she pulled back and said, ‘Goddammit, not again.’”
Brady laughed outright and wondered if the sound carried across the desert. They could see stars through the windows from where they sat, and Eric reached beneath him to pull out the blanket that had gotten wadded into the crack between the bench and the back. No glass tinkled out, and Brady was relievedas he helped Eric spread the blanket so they could snuggle underneath.
“She sounds funny,” he said.
“She was,” Eric agreed. “So one weekend right before school, we’re at the beach, and her family is there too, and our parents know each other, and there’s a couple of other families—it turned into a big campfire, and everybody brought food. One of those big parties, you know?”
“Yeah—we used to have bonfires before football games,” Brady said. “Same idea. Whole neighborhoods would come to tailgate.”
“Fun,” Eric said on a sigh. “So Jayanne and I hang out the whole time, and then at night we’re all gathered around the campfire, and she excuses herself to the bathroom, and I don’t think anything of it. But fifteen minutes and she’s not back, and you know who else is gone?”
Brady had gotten so immersed in nostalgia, the realization of where this was going was almost a shock. “Oh no,” he said, numb and sad.
“Oh yes,” Eric responded grimly. “I went to find her, suddenly terrified, and I found them, in the weeds behind the bathroom. She’d been wearing a sundress over her swimsuit, and he had her on her face, his hand over her mouth, and she was sobbing. And he wasraping her.” Eric’s voice throbbed with righteous anger, and Brady wanted to cry.
“How’d you kill him?” he asked. There was nowhere else this could go, not knowing who Eric was now.
“With a big fucking rock.” Eric shuddered. “I tried to help her up, but she couldn’t stop staring at the body, and she was so freaked out. She… she was looking at me with such… such revulsion. I swear to God, I don’t know if it was becausemyfather had just raped her, or because I’d killed the sonofabitch, but she was going topop.”
Brady held him tighter, not sure if Eric realized that there were tears in his voice, but knowing there were tears in Brady’s throat, thickening his speech.
“What did you do?” Brady asked.
“I told her to give it a count of ten before she started screaming,” Eric said. “And then I ran like hell.”
“Did she scream?”
“She gave me a count of thirty,” Eric told him. “And given how shell-shocked she was, it was probably one of the bravest fucking things anybody has ever done for me.”
“Did you get away?” Brady was literally on the edge of his seat.
“Yeah,” Eric laughed bitterly. “I was out of there and hiding in an abandoned building in Southie by the time people figured out what happened. Jayanne and I used to go there a lot to hide from our families—her folks had their own problems—so I hid for a day and hoped. Sure enough, she managed to smuggle me food, clothes, some money… not a lot. Enough for a month, maybe, but her mother had given it to her to help me out. I changed neighborhoods and tried to figure out a plan. The cops—the cops weren’t buying the ‘Zack Grackle was a dirty fucking rapist’ angle—they were all for the ‘Well, every family has a bad seed, and his kid just up and fucking whacked him while he was talking to this girl’ story. I stayed gone. Traded blowies for flops and food. Thought about makingthata trade, if you must know the truth.”
“Food is food,” Brady said gently. He’d seen enough street kids to know this was reality. It seemed cruel to teach them that sex was a commodity at so young an age, but a body needed fuel.
“Yeah. Wasn’t my favorite, though,” Eric said on a bitter laugh. “So when Jayanne’s cousin came looking for me, terrified because her husband’s boss had assaulted her—wasstalking herand promised to do it all over again, well, I figured hey, I did it once, I could do it again.”
