She bit me. Hard, in the soft spot between my thumb and index finger. The pain was sharp and jolting; I bit down on my tongue in reflex and the taste of copper fills my mouth as I slammed Jenny’s pretty face into the passenger window, “Cunt!” The blow stunned her long enough for me to grab hold of the back of her neck and seal the rag over her face properly.
That’s enough for you, little bitch, I thought to myself, as she struggled under the chloroform-soaked rag in my hand. Sorry, babe. I don’t care about your life. I only care about the life I put inside you. The light in her eyes dimmed to a flicker as she writhed underneath my grip. She was terrified, and this is what you got when you threatened me. Silly girl. She should have known better.
Once she was passed out I lay her down on the seat beside me. Jennifer thought she’d kill my kid and go on to have a life away from here. Cassie thought she’d get to leave town eventually. Leo thought he’d get out of prison and continue his life, get to put his greedy hands on the people who belong to me.
I flashed my lights at Ray, his truck idling fifty feet from where we were parked, and he flashed his back. We were a team, me and my psychotic not-brother. Water is thicker than blood. Pine boxes are thicker than the lies we tell ourselves. The lines on a pregnancy test are things to be revered. And the lines we should never cross are thicker than any redemption we might think we deserve.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
DAMON
Did you love her, Cassie asked me once. Did you love my mother?
Of course I did. I just decided somewhere along the way that I loved Cassie more.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
DAMON
Starvation.
That’s how Cassie pulled the truth of my childhood from me, like strands of runner grass ripped out of the dirt. Telling her what I did to her mother, to Leo, to Jennifer. That wasn’t enough. That sated her reasoning for revenge, that drove away her doubt about locking me up, but it did nothing to quench her rampant curiosity.
My little Cassie was a voyeur, just like me. She wanted to dig around in people’s chest cavities, searching for the weak points, stealing all the secrets.
I didn’t want to give her my secrets. I didn’t want to ever think about them. But starvation is a cruel way to suffer, and so I gave her metaphorical breadcrumbs in exchange for real ones.
She tossed the Happy Meal box at my feet, and I was so hungry, I would have eaten her whole if she’d just come close enough. Not, like, in a sexual way — by that point, I was so hungry I would literally have bitten into her pale flesh, chewed and swallowed. She would have tasted good, too. She always ate well. She put a golden French fry in her mouth, and in the dark, my eyes could see so well the oil on that fry fucking shimmered. Those marketing people at McDonald’s would have been salivating over such an exquisite French fry.
Cassie settled in, cross-legged, just out of my reach. One day soon, I was going to get thin enough that my wrists would slip out of those damn cuffs, and then I’d rip her smug fucking face off with my fingernails while I laughed and she screamed.
She always ate in front of me. Cunt. A burger and fries, and then a caramel sundae. My favorite. I wanted to kill her. I should have killed her when I had the chance.
“You look angry,” she said, opening those gloss-covered lips long enough to deep-throat five French fries at once. Five. Greedy bitch. I only wanted one. One!
“This isn’t supposed to be fun,” she added, chewing noisily. “This is punishment, Daniel.”
I was going to kill her. She used that name and it was more painful than somebody peeling layers of my fucking foreskin off with tweezers. I’d tie her down, good and proper on the kitchen table, and play a very messy game of operation. I’d start with her fingers and toes first. Maybe her tongue next. It’d be a shame to never feel that tongue on mine again, though. Maybe I’d save her mouth until last, and take all the teeth so she couldn’t bite me.
She finished her own meal and went back for the brown paper bag. Dear God, if there is a God, I’m fucking sorry, okay?
“Are you praying?” Cassie asked, tilting her head back and laughing, a noise that I used to enjoy before. When I was starving, I’d prefer if she stuck a cockroach in each of my ears and let them race to see which one could claw through my eardrum and burrow into my head first.
I must have been muttering. I did that sometimes. I’d been locked in this room for an undetermined length of time. Give a guy a fucking break. She was a mean prison guard. At least I fed Jennifer and bought her as many audiobooks as she wanted. I knew Cassie had a little dark in her, but I didn’t know she was a fucking psychopath. If she weren’t using her particular methods on me, I’d have a hard-on at how cunning she is. Liquid food replacement? She bought those meal replacement shakes that cancer patients drink, and I had to suck it through a straw.
“Don’t think I’m going to let you die yet,” she would always say to me. “How long did my mother live on a liquid diet, stuck in a bed? Eight years?”
That was the thing that frightened me. Not dying. Dying is easy. No, I was always terrified at how much longer she’d keep me alive.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
DAMON
“Tell me,” Cassie insisted. “Tell me what happened.”
She had one of the milk cartons in her hand, and she turned it over, studying the picture of little-boy me.
“Why?” I asked her. “Why does it matter?”
“Because I want to understand,” she replied. “And you owe me that.”
After what felt like weeks in the attic — what literally must have been weeks — I told her.
“I was walking home from school,” I said, looking up at the ceiling. My words were flat, no emotion in them. I’d recited this story in my head for almost thirty years waiting until I found the right person to trust with my secrets.
“You were ten?” she asked.
I nodded. “I was ten.”
I told her everything.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
DAMON
It was Ray who lured me into the van, the van that would carry me to my death, to my rebirth. From my small front yard in Lone Pine, California, on my tenth birthday. My mother sent me to the mailbox. My grandmother had mailed me a package, she said, and I should check if it had arrived yet.
Ray was on the footpath. I never asked him what he’d been doing out on the street in front of my house. He was just there, a kid about twelve, poking cards into the spokes of his bicycle so they’d make a noise when he pedaled.
He stopped short when he saw me. “Hey,” he said, abandoning the bicycle as he walked toward me. “What’s your name?”
I didn’t answer. My mom always told me never to speak to strangers. I kept walking toward the mailbox, opening it with anticipation. My grandmother always sent me the most elaborate gifts, and they magically always appeared in our mailbox on my birthday.
“Daniel?” my mother called from inside.
“Coming!” I yelled back, closing the empty mailbox in defeat.
Ray shrugged. “You waiting for something?”
“A package,” I said. “It’s supposed to arrive today.”
“Are you Daniel?” Ray asked.
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
“My dad’s delivering packages!” Ray said excitedly. “Come on, his van’s parked right out here!”
I looked back at my front door, hesitant. Mom always said to never leave the front yard. But the van was right there. And it had my package from Grandma. I wanted that package.
“It’s okay,” Ray said, walking to the nondescript white van without looking back at me. He opened one of the doors and stepped in, offering me his hand. “See?”
I looked back at my house again, less than fifty feet away.
“Maybe I should get my mom,” I said.
“If you’re a little baby,” Ray said. “We might be gone by the time you come back, though.”
I puffed my chest out, offended. “I?
??m not a baby! I’m ten!”
I got into the back of the van. Ray pulled the door closed behind me. There were no packages. Just a man, a man whose face I didn’t even see, and a sharp pinch in my neck as he injected me with something that made the world go away.
I WOKE up in a pine box. The irony. I didn’t know where I was or how long it had been. I just remember feeling scared. I just remember calling out for my mom.
STEPHEN RANDOLPH.
That was his name. The man who took me was a very sick man, a man who should have been in a mental hospital for life. He saw things and heard voices that had convinced him he was a prophet of God, that it was his job to save the children of the world by delivering them to heaven.
I thought it was all a load of shit, but I was ten years old. I had no power. I had no currency. I did what I was told.
RAY and I were Disciples of God. That’s what Stephen Randolph told us when he beat us in the night. When we cried for our mothers. When we begged to go home. He didn’t like it when we begged to go home. He would hold our heads down in a bucket full of ice water when we begged to go home.
WE WERE THE ONLY BOYS. I wasn’t even supposed to be there — it was just Stephen and Ray — but Ray begged for a brother. I was Ray’s new brother. He named me — Damon — and Daniel Collins was never seen again. Stephen became Father. And we were a family of three, moving from place to place, stealing souls all along the way.
IT WAS our job to lure other children in. Girls, always girls. Pretty girls with shiny hair and little dresses that were edged with frills and lace. Father would choose the girls from the safety of the van, and we would have to scoop them up like little tadpoles in our net.
The girls never lasted long. We always needed to replenish the stock.
* * *
ONCE WE GOT A LITTLE OLDER, Ray and I used to play this game.
* * *
FATHER WOULD TAKE us to the park and wait in the van while we scoured the place for potential targets.
* * *
WE’D SEE who could convince a girl to get into the van first.
* * *
I ALWAYS WON.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
DAMON
We killed Father when I was sixteen and Ray eighteen.
He’d become spooked. He was paranoid, delusional, and he was convinced that the police were on to him. He had three girls at the time, locked away carefully in their little boxes, mouths taped over so they wouldn’t make a noise. We lived in a house on the Mississippi, and one by one, Father carried them down to the river and drowned them.
I’d watched him load his gun with three bullets, and I knew what he intended — one for me, one for Ray, and the final one for him. But Ray and I, we didn’t want to die. We were older and wiser, and we’d started to talk about how to get away.
We killed Father the same way he killed those girls. Ray knocked him out with a fry pan. We loaded him into the biggest box, the one Ray had first slept in when Father took him. We locked the box up, nice and tight, and as our Father screamed at us to let him out, we dragged his makeshift coffin down to the riverbank and pushed him in.
We had a choice: Go to the police and tell them everything. Or pretend that we’d died along with those poor girls, along with our kidnapper, and start our lives again.
Ray wanted to go to the police. I was the one who refused to do that.
All I could think about was my mother’s face if she knew the things I’d done. I’d have to tell her everything. I’d be in so much trouble for leaving the yard that day.
And so we became new people. And we never saw our families again.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
DAMON
It’s not the hunger that will kill you.
It’s the thirst.
Thirst will drive you to madness, but I’m already mad. I made my peace with my insanity a long time ago. I’ve known for a long time that I was never meant to exist.
I’ve been in this box, in this room for so damn long, I don’t even have words to quantify it anymore. I know when Leo isn’t in the house — because that’s when Cassie comes up here. That’s when we talk. And other things.
And then the nosey fucker found me in here. I bet Leo got the surprise of his goddamned life when he saw me, locked in a box like a goddamn corpse. I haven’t seen myself in a mirror, but I know I must look hideous. I’m skin and bones, I haven’t shaved in what must be months and months and months. And I’m crazy. Batshit fucking crazy. I have moments of clarity, but those are the worst. Those are when all the pain comes back. I prefer the crazy.
I heard them talking outside the attic door, hushed voices. He was angry. She was screaming. A few hours later, a drill, right outside the door. He’s replacing the lock, I realize. He’s locking me in. He’s locking her out.
I panic, briefly, but I’ve already been up here for days without food and I’m too far gone. The only sounds I hear after that are the guttural battle cries of a woman bearing down, the intensity and the volume increasing through the long, dark night. I cry then, but no tears come out.
I think of the girl downstairs, with the straw-hair and the green eyes, and I wish that I’d been born a different person, for her. I loved her. I still love her. And that’s the thought that gives me peace as I feel myself drift into a blackness only a boy in a box would be acquainted with as he rubbed his fingers down splintered wooden sides and sang the song his mother used to sing to him at night. I’m too weak now to sing anything, too weak to even cry real tears, but that’s okay because I can still hear my mother in my mind. I can see her in the distance in my mind’s eye, a tall glass of water in her hand, outstretched to me, and I run toward her. It is my tenth birthday again and I am strong, and I don’t get in the van with Ray, and I run to my mother as fast as a boy has ever run before. And when I get to her she’s beautiful, and the glass of water has transformed into a carton of milk, and the carton of milk has nobody’s face on it because this is heaven and nobody is snatched into a van in heaven and milk cartons do not come with the faces of missing children printed on the sides. I drink from the carton of milk and it tastes better than anything I’ve ever tasted in my life, and my mother watches me with a smile and hands me a slice of rainbow birthday cake, and everything is perfect.
It’s not the hunger that will kill you, Steven Randolph used to say to me.
It’s the thirst.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
LEO
If you’d asked me where I would have ended up in the world, the answer wouldn’t have been where I am.
I mean — I was never going to get out of this town, that much is clear to me now. It became clear somewhere in the moments between finding Damon King in a box in Cassie’s attic and then holding my newborn daughter just a few hours later. If the truth about Damon’s existence, about what he did, was the pile of bricks that weighed me down to this place, then baby Grace was the cement that filled up the hollow spaces and made sure I stuck.
I wanted to run away after she was born. I’m not proud to admit that.
I work at the garage most days, changing out oil filters and jump-starting cars for weary travelers who’ve left their headlights on too long while they grab a meal at Dana’s. The irony of where I work doesn’t escape me; smack-bang in front of the spot where the accident happened. Hell, I could throw a rock and it’d clear the stretch of highway where Damon tried to kill me — where he virtually killed Cassie’s mom — but that’s life in a town like Gun Creek. Everything and nothing happens on the same two-mile stretch.
I work because it’s something to do, because I need to keep my hands busy and my mind occupied because it’s too quiet in that house.
The night Grace was born, man, something flipped a switch inside me. Cassie was so fucking brave. So much pain to bring a baby into the world, so much anguish and all I could do was watch helplessly as she breathed and moaned and doubled over in pain in the bath, fetching her ice chips and massaging her back until
my fingers went numb. Cassie was born to be a mother. I saw glimpses of it when she was pregnant, the way she spoke to her stomach as I rubbed oil into her stretching skin. But when she bore down and gave that final push, when she reached down and pulled our baby from her own body, dragging the tiny thing up through the birthing pool water and onto her bare chest, I watched Cassie be reborn. It made me love her in a way I can’t even describe except to say that I’d tear the entire world down to keep her and Gracie safe.
Sometimes I think of what Damon did to her. How being in that accident and going to prison was nothing compared to what she had to endure, on her own, for all those empty years. I’m not a murderer. But I am a killer. I’d kill for my girls. I’d do anything to keep them safe.
Most often, though, I think of the way she sobbed when we buried Damon in the yard, under the chestnut tree. I told her I’d do it myself, that Pike and I would be able to dig the hole down faster while she stayed inside, but she insisted that she be a part of it. Of all of it. In the end, my brother was the one watching from the warmth of the living room window, little Grace in his arms, while Cassie and I lowered Damon King into his final resting place; the hollow in the earth where, as I’d found out only days earlier, Jennifer’s body rests.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
CASSIE
There’s an old chestnut tree outside our kitchen window.
When I was a girl, I’d sit in that tree and survey my kingdom, the fields that stretch out in every direction.
We’ve made love against it, Leo’s hands pressing my hips into the weathered bark until it cut the skin on my back.