My jaw tightened. “I’m not a fan of secrets. Speaking of which, what happened to your arm?”
“I fell.” The excuse left his lips as easy as breathing. But I didn’t buy it.
“I’m not a fan of lies, either. Did Devon have anything to do with it?”
Markus grew quiet. When he spoke, he kept glancing at the bottom of the staircase, like someone might be listening. “If I told you that he did, what difference would it make? What would you do? Tell your dad? Tell the cops? If he broke my arm, he did it for a reason. If he broke my arm, it was because I did something I shouldn’t have done.”
“If he broke your arm, why would you stay friends with him? Are you that afraid of him?”
The room was cool, but nevertheless Markus wiped beads of sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. His eyes fell on the stack of newspapers beside me. “Do you ever wish you’d never come to Spencer, Stephen?”
“Every damn day. But don’t change the subject.” I hesitated before asking the question that was hanging in the air between us, and when I finally did, my words came in a whisper. “Now tell me the truth. Did Devon break your arm?”
A scream broke off our conversation and both of us scrambled up the stairs and bolted out the library’s front door. Standing directly outside was Ms. Rose, her hands cupped over her mouth, tears wetting her cheeks. She was staring across the street at the movie theater. The building’s roof was entirely engulfed in flames, and smoke poured out of every window. The town cops were keeping gawkers back from the fire with outspread arms and cautionary words, but there was no fire truck in sight. The old men from the gas station were manning several garden hoses, doing their best to soak the adjoining wall of the next building so the fire wouldn’t take out the whole town. I could hear sirens in the distance, but they were still pretty far away.
My memories flitted back to the night that I’d met Devon, the night we’d all broken into the theater. Memories, gone in a flicker of flame.
A small group of people had gathered by Ms. Rose to get a look at the fire. A man to her left said, “What happened?”
Someone else, a man with a deep, bellowing voice, responded, “It was the damnedest thing. Nobody was inside. She was all locked up, and this explosion just knocked the front door right off. Damn thing flew twenty feet and flames shot out from the building.”
The first man whistled in amazement. “Think it was arson?”
“Cops don’t think so. But it’s a real mystery how else it could have started. Mighta been an electrical fire. Power to the whole building’s been touch and go since Bert ran into that pole with his car.”
Flames continued to spread over the outside of the building. The smoke was thick and black. If fire trucks didn’t hurry, the building next to the theater was going to burn as well.
“Ain’t that the damnedest thing?” A woman dressed in blue sweatpants, an orange tank top, and pink flip-flops stepped forward, her gaze glassy.
“Freak accident. Dat’s what it is.” I couldn’t see him from where I was standing, but instantly I recognized the dollah-fiddy guy’s voice.
Horrible, acrid smoke smell filled my nostrils, and I had to struggle not to gag. I covered my mouth and nose with my hand and looked around. It seemed that all of Spencer had come out to witness the blaze.
Standing apart from the crowd, his head tilted at the scene with an air of curiosity, was Devon. Markus and I hurried over, but we weren’t the first to reach him. An older woman in bare feet and a blue, flowered muumuu stopped right in front of him, the expression on her face one of anguish. “You can stop this, you know. You can stop it all. You can end this.”
Devon glanced over at Markus and me before returning his gaze to the fire. He didn’t once look at the woman, so it was hard to tell if he was engaging her when he said, “I know.”
“So do it already!” She threw her hands over her eyes, sobbing. Another woman put an arm around her and drew her back into the crowd. As they departed, Devon pulled out a pack of clove cigarettes and popped one into his mouth.
He muttered, “I’m workin’ on it.”
“Working on what?” I asked uneasily. I wasn’t sure if Devon had meant for me to hear him or not. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer either way.
But Devon ignored my question. He turned to us with a wicked grin on his face.
“Anybody got any marshmallows?”
chapter 12
Water ran down my face, so hot that it burned my skin, but I continued to stand in the shower and let it wash over me and down the drain, hoping it would take my hangover with it.
After the fire yesterday, Devon had insisted on hanging out in the Playground, even though I wasn’t exactly in the mood. The sight of the building burning had set me on edge. The look in Devon’s eyes had set me on edge even more. But in the end, I’d decided it was probably safer if I kept Devon in my sights for the time being, so I went along and drank, just enough so that Devon wouldn’t know I was onto him.
I found my dad right where I expected to find him, sitting at the kitchen table, his hands folded in front of him. Steam rose from his favorite coffee mug—a black one that read Goonies Never Say Die. Beside it sat a paper plate with a small smear of butter and some toast crumbs. Mercifully, my grandmother was nowhere in sight. Probably out with her garden club or whatever else she did for fun.
Dad looked up at me, and right away he could see that I wanted to talk. He pushed the chair opposite him away from the table with his foot, inviting me to take a seat.
“Something on your mind, son?”
“Actually, yeah,” I said.
I sat down at the table, realizing I hadn’t quite figured out how to ask what I was wondering.
“It’s about Mom.”
He sucked in a breath and leaned forward in his chair.
“Well, I guess this has been a long time coming. I’m sorry the other night . . . well, I’m sorry your grandmother talked to you first.”
I shrugged. “I’m just glad she turned out to be lying. I’d never forgive myself if I was halfway across the country when Mom died alone.”
Dad winced. And okay, maybe I was being a little more harsh than I needed to—but only a little.
“She’s okay, you know. I just spoke to the physician in charge this morning, in fact. They’re trying a new medication. It has her pretty tired most of the time, but she’s not ranting for the moment, so that’s good.”
“I guess good is a relative term,” I said. “But anyway, that wasn’t my question.”
“What was your question?”
I took a deep breath. “How did you know it was time to lock Mom away? I mean, how did you know when she had crossed the line and become dangerous?”
Dad’s eyes widened. I could see him trying to decide whether I was still just being a smart-ass and trying to make him suffer, or whether I was asking a serious question. Something in my eyes must have told him how serious I really was.
“Did I ever tell you how we met, your mother and I?” He ran a finger along the lip of his coffee mug as he spoke. I didn’t nod or shake my head or anything, just watched him mindlessly touching his mug. He did a lot of things mindlessly, if you asked me. “There were reasons that I left Spencer straight out of high school. I never felt like I belonged here, or that anyone here understood me. Besides that, my dad ran out on me when I was six and my relationship with my mother was always . . . terse.”
Terse. That was a good one. I was pretty sure that old bat idled at terse.
“It was like we were two bitter strangers residing under the same roof, longing to be free of each other. So I worked hard, got good-enough grades to earn a scholarship to the University of Colorado, and never looked back. Second semester of my freshman year, I met the woman who would one day become your mom.” He smiled, and it felt like a blast from the past. I hadn’t seen my dad smile even once in the year since my mom got sick. Not a real smile, anyway. Not a smile that wasn’t
put on just to encourage me to smile, too. “She was beautiful. You know, the first time we met, she slapped me.”
I snorted. “Go, Mom.”
“Indeed.” His smile broadened briefly, before reality caved in on it and shut out the happy light in his eyes. “I had it coming. But that’s another story. For another time.”
“Or never might be good, too.” A small laugh escaped him when I said that.
“Everything was great for a while. Perfect, you might say. Well . . . maybe not perfect. What relationship is? But things were very good for a very long time between us. We were happy—happier than most couples, that’s for certain. We got married the week after graduation, and four years later, had you. I didn’t think life could get any better.”
“I miss her.” The words left my lips so easily. They sent an ache through me—the kind that can only come from a loss that deep.
“I know.” Dad’s eyes were bright with tears. He glanced down briefly at his hands before speaking again. “One night, about a year ago, your mother came home with this strange, wild look in her eyes, talking about another dimension that she had visited. Another world. Can you believe it? I thought she was kidding at first. Then I thought maybe she was on drugs. She kept going on about monsters with giant wings. And she was so unreachable. It was like I wasn’t even in the room with her.”
I shook my head. I remembered the night in question, of course. I’d been hanging out with a group of people I didn’t really like all that much, and I’d come home to an empty house and a different life. But I didn’t want to know this part—didn’t want to hear what it had felt like to be my dad in that situation. Only, something in me thought that I needed to.
“I can’t tell you how frightening that feeling is, Stephen, to not be able to connect with the person you’ve loved and lived with for over two decades—to not recognize the person who knows you better than you know yourself. It’s terrifying.” His bottom lip quivered, his eyes shimmering, and for a moment, I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. “I’d told her about Spencer and the ridiculous myth of the Winged Ones. When her mind broke, she must have clung to that image. Her brain twisted my stories into her perceived reality. For a long time, I blamed myself for her condition. I don’t anymore. But I did.”
Part of me thought he should. But another part of me told that part to shut the hell up.
“Right after she changed so dramatically, I took her to see a psychiatrist—I’m sure you remember. But Stephen, it was already too late. You know I tried everything to help her, and to keep her at home. All those medications, all that counseling. It amounted to little, if anything. The doctors even resorted to shock therapy for a brief, desperate time. But nothing worked. She’d be lucid for a few hours at a time, but then she’d go right back to raving.” A look of shame crossed his eyes, and I was glad to see it. They had done shock therapy on her? And Mom was the crazy one? He seemed to steady himself emotionally with a few deep breaths before speaking again.
“So, to answer your question, I’m not the one who decided she was dangerous. But it was the opinion of the psychiatrists—”
“Oh, Dad, take some responsibility.”
“Excuse me?”
“Next you’re going to tell me the psychiatrists are the ones who said we should move to Spencer. That they’re the ones who said if you just got rid of Mom, then poof, everything in your life would be better.”
“Get rid of? Stephen, what in the world are you talking about? You know very well I don’t plan to leave your mother alone any longer than I have to.”
“If you think I’m ready to move on and leave her in the past while you work some horrible job here, you are sorely mistaken.” The edges of my words burned with anger, but the anger was quickly doused by my tears. Roughly, I brushed them away with my hands.
Dad shook his head and proceeded gently. “I turned the power plant down, Stephen. You were right. No one’s asking you to forget your mother.”
I felt a surge of relief. That was good news at least. Still.
“Tell that to your mom.” I glanced up at where my mom’s teapot had been sitting.
“She just hates seeing either of us hurting, and right now, the cause of that pain is your mother, my wife.”
“You’re wrong. Mom’s not the one hurting me.” I looked pointedly at him. “You are.”
He frowned, but he didn’t negate what I’d said at all. “I realize that when you’re seventeen a move like this can seem avoidable, needless . . . even foolish.”
I snorted. “You got that right.”
“But when you’re in your forties and unemployed and the bills are piling up, you can recognize when your situation is desperate. We had nothing in Denver, Stephen. I’d been eating into our savings just to keep us alive, and the savings ran out. Hell, I didn’t even have the cash to move us here. But I called your grandmother—and you don’t know how difficult a phone call that was for me to make—and I begged her to please help us in any way she could. She offered to help us move to Spencer. And at first, I refused.”
Disbelief filled me. I’d thought that the first time we had been faced with real conflict as a family, he’d tucked his tail between his legs and run home to momma. But maybe I’d been wrong about that. It had been known to happen once or twice.
“I’d spent a good portion of my life fighting to get out of Spencer. Why would I want to come back? I certainly didn’t want to raise my son here. In this nowhere town, with zero opportunities for a smart, outgoing young man. People here focus on football and farming, and I wanted so much more than that for you. People here don’t leave. They just grow up and mimic those who came before them. They get stuck, and I fought like hell to get unstuck. Why would I want that for you?”
Something I’d wondered myself. I would have pointed that out, but my dad was on a roll. It had taken a long time for those floodgates of communication to open, but now that they had, there was no stopping the rush of information pouring out.
“I told her no. She could keep her money. She could keep her house. She could keep it all. We wouldn’t be moving to Spencer, and that was final.” As he said the last word, he pounded his hand on the table.
“Only it wasn’t final. The mortgage company sent me the foreclosure notice, and suddenly all of my friends’ phones in Denver had busy signals. That’s the funny thing about friends. When you’re really down, people scatter like rats on a boat. When you’re really down and out, family are the only people you can count on. I called my mother and pleaded for her help, which she offered up a second time—something I never thought would happen.” His voice had fallen to just above a whisper. “I’m sorry if it’s felt like I’ve dragged you here against your will, but it was against my will, too, son. I don’t care for Spencer, and it’s okay if you don’t, either. But while we’re here, you and I have to figure out a way to make it work.”
We looked at each other for a good, long time without saying anything. I was the one who broke the silence, hoping to ease some—but not all—of his burden. “I am making it work. Maybe it was hard in the beginning, but I have friends now. A girlfriend, even, which is something I never had back in Denver. And up until the moment she screwed it up, I even had a halfway decent interaction with your mother the other day. So I’d say I’m making it work, Dad. As best as I can.”
He gave my shoulder a squeeze. “I’m glad to hear that. And I’m sorry my mother is . . . the way she is. She’s always been that way, Stephen. Since I was a kid. Bitter, pinched, mean. It’s like she never wanted kids, but had one anyway.”
“It must’ve sucked to grow up like that.” I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like. My dad and I might not have always had the best relationship, but I never doubted that my parents wanted a kid.
“It really did. Everything I did was wrong. Everything I said was ignored. Everything I felt was discounted.”
I felt that way sometimes. Especially lately. Maybe the apple didn’t really fall that fa
r from the tree after all. “I’m sorry about your mom.”
Tears poured from his eyes down his cheeks. “I’m sorry about yours.”
I began to stand, not wanting anything to wreck this exchange. We hadn’t shared a lot of memorable dad-and-son moments, but this one I was counting.
“Actually, Stephen, there’s something I need to discuss with you, too.” Drying his eyes with his hands, he pointed to my chair again, and I sat. Then he pulled a stack of papers out from under a newspaper that was sitting on the table and set it in front of me. I recognized the papers instantly. They were hand-drawn copies I’d made of the sketches in Devon’s journal. No one was supposed to see them. My heart thudded in my chest.
“I found these in your room. And I want to talk about them.”
“What were you doing in my room?” When I looked from the drawings to him, I could see a look in his eyes that I recognized as guilty. “Dad, those aren’t—”
He tapped the papers with two fingers and looked at me pointedly. “Do you believe in these things? Do you believe in the so-called Winged Ones? I need to know, Stephen.”
Mouth open, I paused, not knowing how to answer him exactly. “I . . . no. No, of course not.”
But my pause had not eluded him. “Mental illness runs in the family, son. If you believe that these creatures are real, then I need to know. Your mother ranted about giant winged creatures, too. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t want her anywhere near here. Whatever she has . . . it might have been passed to you. But if we catch it early—”
“Dad, I’m not crazy!” I pushed my chair back and stood, slapping my palms on the table. I took in a breath and exhaled slowly, trying to remain calm. “Look, they’re not my drawings, okay? They’re just copies of something I found. I thought they looked interesting, I don’t know. But they’re not mine. They’re Devon’s.”
“Devon?” He looked at the sketches again and ran a hand haphazardly through his hair. He was quiet for a moment, and when he spoke again, his tone was tinged with worry. “I’ve heard some things about that Devon kid that I don’t care for.”