You don’t need help, you don’t need help, you don’t need helpa thousand times over, when all he meant wasI won’t get you help.
Lee grabbed his father by the shirt.
He hadn’t expected it—no one expected Lee to do anythingquickly, or violently. He was someone who was barely there, a shadow that lingered in corners and would never amount to anything, would never touch anyone because the world slid through his fingers like sand.
His father was so startled that he didn’t even raise his hands to brace himself when Lee smashed his face into the edge of the counter.
His nose crunched against the marble edge and Lee tasted bright sparks of blood, and there was his roommate, shoving back against the banister. But Matt was blond, and Lee’s father’s hair was dark—one was the truth and the other was a lie.
Lee smashed his father’s face against the counter again, and this time teeth clattered to the ground, but his father pushed back. His face was a mask of blood, Lee could hardly even see his features anymore, he could have been anyone at all—James Baldridge, Matt Baldridge, Jim Turner, James Turner, Lee Turner.
Was this how he’d killed Lee’s mother? For trying to take Lee away from him? What a joke. He’d never even wanted Lee here. He just hadn’t wantedherto have him. Hadn’t wanted to be the man with the crazy wife and dead kid.
His father punched him in the face but he hardly even felt the impact. In that moment Lee was not a man, or a murderer, but a wild animal. His father struck him with fists while Lee’s teeth sank into his ear and pulled.This is what you made me, he wanted to scream, but he couldn’t, because his teeth were clenched around cartilage. There was a wet ripping sound, and then his father’s ear was in his mouth, and his father was on the floor and Lee was falling back against the counter.
His father screamed and clamped a hand over the bleeding hole where his ear used to be.You will never be normal again, Lee thought as he spit the ear to the floor. His father gaped at it dizzily, as if nauseated to see a piece of himself no longer attached, but then his gaze snapped to Lee, and his eyes burned.
He grabbed a kitchen knife, and before Lee knew what was happening, he jammed it into Lee’s stomach.
It slid in so easily—but of course it did, Lee Turner was not a real person made of meat and bones. He was an idea, a regret, a darkness. He could no longer feel pain, could no longer taste the blood on his lips or hear his father’s ragged breaths.
He shoved his father back and the knife clattered to the floor. Lee seized it before his father could, even with his trembling, blood-slicked hands, and plunged it into his father’s heart.
It was harder than he expected. His father was real, after all.
James Turner had aimed for his son’s soft, exposed organs in his lower abdomen, but Lee had to force the knife through the rib cage. It resisted, and his father pulled at his hands, but he plunged it in again and again and again, ravaging the heart that he once would have done anything to stop from breaking.
Soon his father stopped fighting back and the knife was too slippery to hold and Lee was too dizzy to stay upright. He collapsed against the side of the cabinet, his head smashing into the handle, his whole body made of television static. He pressed a hand to his stomach, and still he couldn’t feel any pain, which was probably a bad thing.
The kitchen was soaked with blood, splatters of it all over the walls, the counters, the cabinets, more than Lee had ever seen. His father lay dead on the floor, the warm pool of scarlet slowly yawning wider beneath him. The dark, narrow stain by the kitchen door was now vivid red. Had it been there all along?This is a dream, Lee thought, even though he knew that dreams could still be dangerous. Maybe it was the blood loss, but the whole world had a sepia haze to it, fading at the edges, a sure sign that Lee would wake up any moment now.
I need to clean this up before Hina comes, Lee thought, rising to his feet unsteadily. But who was Hina again? The name sparkledat the edges of his mind, but he couldn’t remember her face. Lee closed his eyes, tried to reach for the thought, but it slipped through his fingers like silk.
Where is James Baldridge?
The sword ferns shifted beyond the kitchen window, revealing the well in the yard glowing in the sunlight.
He grabbed his father by the ankles and dragged him across the house, leaving a red trail in his wake. He panted, shivering from cold sweat as he dragged his father off the back porch, across the yard, and hefted him into the well. He wouldn’t fit at first, so Lee had to shove him down until he folded in on himself like a shirt crammed into a suitcase, scraping down the side of the well and splashing at the bottom. He lay face up, green eyes staring toward a sun he could no longer see.
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Only then did Lee feel the pain of the wound on his abdomen. The warmth spilling down his legs was his own blood, not just his father’s.
I need to call someone, he realized. He didn’t think, in that moment, that they would arrest him for killing his father. He didn’t worry about it then, because there wasn’t enough blood in his brain to think of anything but his phone on his bed, of finding someone to stop the bleeding.
He tripped as he stepped onto the porch, and from there he could only crawl through the house, the world tilting violently beneath him. The brightness of the blood in the kitchen screamed at him, the only color he could still see. The world felt underwater, as if he was swimming through his own house.
He reached his room, and even though he could see his phone on the bed, he could go no farther. He crawled as far as his closet before his legs dumped him forward and he couldn’t move his arms to catch himself. His chin slammed against the floor and rattled his teeth. The ground scorched his cheek whereit was pressed against the tatami mats, but the rest of his body was freezing cold.
He reached for the closet door to pull himself up, but could only slap weakly across the paper, streaks of blood splattering across it as he weakly nudged the door open.
Another stain, he thought as the world grew cold and dark.
His blood seeped through the floorboards, through the cold dirt, and at last spilled across a small box with a turtle carved on the lid.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Sen
