Mom is sitting on a stool at the island, her eyes unblinkingly focused on the rooster-shaped clock on the wall instead of the pot threatening to boil over on the stove. Uncle Mike is on the stool next her, his hand making circles on her lower back as he speaks softly to her. He stills his hand when she starts at seeing us—even after all the time I’ve spent with Laura, she isn’t expecting me home from the prison yet—and Uncle Mike drops his hand like Mom’s back suddenly caught fire. For a moment it’s all I can do to stare at him.
He twists away and stands, putting a good six feet between him and Mom, as though the distance now will make anyone forget how close he’d just been to her. “Hey, kid. We weren’t expecting you home for a spell yet. Your mom and I were watching the clock.”
Mom was watching the clock, he means. We both know exactly what he was watching. And somehow, there’s room for that to hurt too.
Laura shifts closer behind me as Mom starts firing questions at me. “Why did you leave early? Is Jason all right? Is he hurt or sick? Why didn’t you call?”
Instead of answering, I turn my head to the stove. She follows my gaze and then leaps off her stool to turn off the burner and clean up the soup that started boiling over. Uncle Mike makes to help her, but I catch his eye and he wisely stays back. I grab a rag to help Mom and nod at Laura to go down and get Dad.
“Everything’s gonna be fine,” I tell her when she hesitates, and I see a flicker of her former strength spark in her eyes before she disappears downstairs.
“So,” Uncle Mike says, and I can hear the effort behind the lightness in his voice. “Your mom is real anxious to hear about your brother.”
“He’s fine,” I say, turning to put my rag in the sink so I can have a moment without seeing Mom’s worried face. “I’ll tell you everything when Laura and Dad come up.”
“—I’m in the middle of something,” I hear Dad say as he thuds heavily upstairs. “What’s so important that your mom needs me—”
“Not Mom,” I say. “Me. Me and Laura.”
Dad frowns, seeing me, not in anger or annoyance at having been interrupted, but in surprise. His gaze shifts to the clock too, noting the time and the fact that I’m home early. “Is it your brother?” His voice is even, but the muscles in his face twitch when he asks, telling me he’s as inwardly afraid of the answer as I am.
Beneath Dad’s calm exterior there’s always been a despair that shakes me whenever I glimpse it. His only son, the boy he raised to be good and kind, brutally murdered his friend. Mom may have been the one crying in the shower, but Dad has been grieving no less deeply. And for him, feeling impotent to make it better for any of us when he felt it was his job to safeguard us had made it all the more acute for him.
I’ve always struggled more with Mom. I don’t know why but I have. Dad’s and Laura’s behavior makes sense to me—their guilt and remorse caused them both to withdraw, because they didn’t know what else to do. In contrast, Mom threw herself into the futile task of forcing us all together and ignoring our efforts to stay apart, even Jason’s. For her it was like nothing changed when he admitted his crime and was locked up except his location. She acts like he’s innocent, and I can’t help but think I might have seen the truth, seen Laura’s suffering for what it was sooner, if she hadn’t.
I glance at Uncle Mike, who keeps glancing back and forth between my parents, between the one he so nakedly longs to comfort and the one who’ll never let him. He sags when Dad does what he can’t, moving to Mom’s side and tucking her under one arm.
I’ve never felt sadder for Uncle Mike.
But then Laura is next to me, and I don’t have any pity to spare for him.
My mouth opens and then closes and opens again. I don’t know how to say any of this, to explain something that parts of my brain are still railing against.
And that’s when Laura does it for me.
She tells them the story she told me about sneaking into Jason’s car that night, following him into the woods and witnessing him kill Cal. She doesn’t soften the details. She doesn’t stop when Dad’s knees buckle, not even when she has to raise her voice to be heard over Mom’s sobbing.
Somehow it’s worse, hearing it the second time, when I can anticipate her words and the blood-chilling horror they’ll spawn. And this time I’m afraid, because even though the redness on my cheek has long vanished, I can remember Mom slapping me.
I promised Laura it would be okay, that they wouldn’t blame her, but I know with sickening certainty that she’ll carry their response from this day to her grave.
And I don’t know if it’ll be the right one until Dad falls to his knees in front of her, gathering her up like a doll and Mom is only a heartbeat behind him.
CHAPTER 43
The first week of August is hard. Despite the truth being unveiled within my family...we’ve spent a year strangling that truth about Jason’s crime, even from ourselves. One tear-filled night doesn’t make it go away.
Things are better with Laura though. We’ve started meeting with Pastor Hamilton, as a family and individually. Laura and I have been spending a lot of time together and talking late most every night, sometimes until dawn. Sometimes about Jason, but mostly not. There’s a lot that has gone unsaid for too long. I don’t know if she’ll ever be able to do that, to reconcile the endless love she had for our brother with the way she feels about him now. I haven’t begun to try myself.
What I have done is skate. Laura says I’m an addict and she’s not wrong. I spend hours at the rink, as many as I can despite Jeff’s ever watchful and disapproving stare. But Maggie’s gone now—she finished her notice, and I haven’t seen her since. She hasn’t contacted me or shown up with her camera equipment in tow. It hurts to think I’ve truly lost her too. I know I could try to talk to her again, but I don’t know what I’d say. I’m not sure there’s anything I can say. I have no defense for my actions.
Jeff’s still looking for someone to replace her, and in the meantime he’s been filling in himself—driving Bertha, not cleaning bathrooms. But I don’t even mind his presence that much, because I’ve been skating in a way I haven’t since before Jason went away.
I work on choreography and jumps, on spins, footwork and combinations. I don’t consciously put an audition routine together, but that’s what I end up with all the same.
When Laura asks to see what I’ve been working on, I bring her to the rink one evening when it’s not too busy and Jeff is off.
“It’s just for fun,” I tell Laura as I finish lacing up my skates. “So don’t expect perfection here.”
