For the first time I saw my brother’s composure falter. I could still see only the back of his head, but his shoulders jerked once before he managed to relax them with an effort that was obvious in the tense line of his neck. “Why, Michael?” I prodded, the name unwieldy and strange on my tongue. I was going to have to use it for a while, and the best way to do that was to start thinking of him as Michael in my mind. It hurt. God, did it . . . voluntarily giving away one of the few slices of Lukas I’d had left. I just had to keep in mind I had the real thing now—physically. Mentally I would work on, no matter how long it might take.
“I didn’t hurt you.” He was barely audible, and I wasn’t sure I heard him correctly until he said it again, more loudly and more strongly. “I didn’t hurt you.”
I couldn’t believe it. A skinny kid and he thought he could hurt me. Worse, he thought he should. My road to Hell was paved not with good intentions but with indifference. The things I had ended up doing weren’t the result of making bad choices, but rather of making no choices. I had no one to blame but myself. I could, however, blame someone when it came to Luk . . . Michael. I didn’t know if I’d killed those men I had shot during the rescue, but with a savage passion I suddenly wished I had.
“You didn’t fail any test,” I stated firmly. “There is no test, Michael. I’m here to help you, nothing else.” He didn’t reply, and I let it slide for the moment. “You hungry? There’re some candy bars in the glove compartment. Help yourself.”
I didn’t expect him to immediately go for it and he didn’t. It was almost fifteen minutes before he would even look away from the side window and face the front again. His face was smooth and unruffled. I knew that he wasn’t frightened of me; I had my suspicions that he wasn’t frightened of anyone except the man who’d invaded the van. I was relieved he didn’t feel threatened by me, but I did wonder at it. You didn’t have to know me to think I was one scary son of a bitch. You only had to look at me. The scar, the gallows behind my eyes—Prince Charming they did not make. It was strange, damn strange, that he wasn’t more wary, but for now I was grateful.
“They’re Three Musketeers,” I coaxed. “You used to eat those by the pound.” I’d bought them at the drugstore the day before. They had been on the bottom row in their cheerfully shiny wrappers. It was ludicrous and a little pathetic, but bending over to pick them up was one of the harder things I’d done in my lifetime. Two candy bars that should’ve weighed literally nothing—why were they the fucking Edmund Fitzgerald in my hand? I’d almost dropped them back into their cardboard container.
I had bought them anyway, fighting against the superstitious certainty that I’d also just bought myself some bad luck. And now I watched as Michael finally opened the glove compartment and took out one of them. He turned it over cautiously in his hands as if he were defusing a bomb before ripping the wrapper neatly. The bite was just as neat and economical. A trace of surprise showed in the quirk of his eyebrows as he chewed and swallowed. It was as if he’d never tasted one before. He ate the rest of the candy bar quickly, and as an encore he polished off the second in fewer than four bites.
“Good?” I ignored the ripple of unease that passed through me. It was his favorite snack; yet he obviously didn’t remember it. Everything of Lukas was gone, large or small . . . gone. “Guess you didn’t get too much of the sweet stuff in that prison.” Moving my eyes from the stranger sitting next to me, I shifted my attention back to the road and reminded myself that it wasn’t forever. We’d get those memories back or we’d make new ones, whatever it took.
“You talk a lot.”
I couldn’t help the jerk of the wheel beneath my hands. It was the first genuinely unprompted comment that my brother . . . that Michael had made that didn’t involve the mysterious “tests.” “Yeah?” That was not a statement that normally would have applied to me, but in this situation he was right. I didn’t know what to say. How did you talk to a kid you couldn’t know, no matter how much you wanted to, and who’d been plucked from bizarre circumstances that you didn’t understand?
“It’s a sign of insecurity. All the more classic psychology textbooks say so.” He peered into the glove box once again. There was no sign of disappointment on that inscrutable face when no more chocolate was to be found, but I knew better. He was a teenager. Raised in a combination of a school, prison camp, and laboratory, that might be true, but some part of him was still a teenager, no matter how suppressed or denied.
“And what do you know about psychology, junior Freud?” Guiding the car with one hand, I dug under my seat. Bypassing cold metal, I pulled out a box of Double Stuf Oreos. We might be on the road for a long time and I’d stocked up on instant sources of cheap energy. Tossing them into his lap, I instantly heard the rustle of cellophane as he opened the package.