“Your honesty makes me cry, my poor sweet Max. You think it hurts, and if I were alive, maybe it would. But now acknowledging your truth only fills me with joy. It means someday you’ll heal.”
“And the truth shall set you free?” She laughed hoarsely. “That’s a crock of shit.”
“It’s not. That’s why you’re so damn scared. Now tell me why rape is nothing to you.”
She swallowed, snagging the lump in her throat. Why? Because ... she’d given up the right to hurt years ago. When she was thirteen and committed the crime that made her as bad as those who’d committed crimes against her. Everything else had been punishment meted out by a God thirsty for justice. Or vengeance.
She didn’t have to speak aloud; she could never really hide from Cameron, or from what he thought was the truth. “Your uncle never gave you a choice about the baby.” His words fluttered through her hair.
She shut her eyes against the word, the image, the sensation of the being that had been inside her. She’d made a choice all those years ago. She could have run away. She could have felt some emotion about the murder she’d done. Instead she’d willed herself to forget it. She’d refused to pay her penance with remembrance. Perhaps that was what Cameron’s death was really about. Karma. What goes around comes around. She got what she deserved. Cameron’s murder she could never forget, as hard as she’d tried. Perhaps she’d even been the one to bring Bud into their lives.
“Stop. The next thing you’ll lay claim to is Christ’s death on the cross.”
Maybe she would. She’d worn a figurative trough in the floor, and the conversation was getting them nowhere. “I can’t stay here and do nothing.”
“You promised Witt.”
“Under duress.”
“Let it alone for now.”
“What if I can’t?”
“There’s a plan, Max. Let it unfold.”
“All my life I’ve let things unfold.” Her mother’s death, her uncle’s nighttime visits, that horrible trip to the doctor when she was thirteen. She’d done nothing to stop any of it. Guilt by inaction. Max sat on the bed, hugged herself, the warmth of the cat along her thigh failing to penetrate the bone-deep chill. Even Cameron had bulldozed his way into her life. She hadn’t wanted what he brought, not his love at first, and not his death and all the pain in the end.
“Self pity is unbecoming.”
He was right. “Tell me about this plan you think is out there.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Liar.” She spoke without compunction, without much feeling.
“I don’t know,” he repeated vehemently. “God set it in motion the day that man walked into our lives all those years ago.”
Max drew in a deep breath, waited, knowing there was more.
“Do you know what day that was?” His voice was suddenly all around her, inside her head, her body, filling the room, making her skin buzz as if she were a live wire.
“No.” The whisper echoed in the room.
“It was the day you were born, Max.”
Chapter Twenty
Max fell headlong into sleep with her legs pulled to her chest and her arms wrapped around her knees. In that tight fetal ball, she tumbled into a particular dream, one she’d had before, Wendy’s closet dream, Wendy’s nightmare, and the original reason Max had vowed vengeance against Bud Traynor. This was the dream where she’d learned first hand the things he’d done to his daughter.
The dank air inside the closet suffocated her, yet she stayed hidden. Her knees ached from holding them so tightly to her chest.
He was out there, the bad man. The bad man, no name, that’s how she thought of him, the bad man, as if he were an eight-year-old child’s nightmare.
But she was thirteen; the bad had rubbed off on her long ago.
“Why are you hiding?”
Because he was the devil. Worse, he brought the devil out in her. She didn’t answer, held her breath so he couldn’t hear her. Useless. He jerked open the door, stood staring down at her, that glitter in his eyes.
The organ she called her heart sank down into the floorboards beneath her butt. The look in his eye had a life of its own, and it meant he planned something special, something especially awful.
He crooked his finger. “Come here.”
She did what he said. She’d been doing what he said for so long she didn’t believe there was a choice anymore.
“Get on the bed.”
Her legs shaking, she did that, too, falling back on her pillow. She closed her eyes. The bed dipped as he climbed aboard her.
“Look at me.” He held himself in his hand, glistening in the strips of streetlight beaming through the closed blinds.
She put the pillow beneath her hips because he’d want that.
“Are you ready, baby?” He always called her baby. Baby, as if that were her name.
She nodded because, again, it was what he wanted.