“It’s so strong, I couldn’t fight it.”
Cooper with his nose pushed to the screen, as if everything else in the room had evaporated, turning into nothing but vapor swirling around him. Watching my father, listening as he recited the same words Cooper must have recited to him when he had been caught.
“It’s like this giant shadow always hovering in the corner of the room,” he says. “It drew me in, it swallowed me whole.”
I gulp, summoning that final sentence from the pit of my belly. That sentence that had hammered the last nail into my father’s coffin, the rhetorical squeeze that drained the air from his lungs, killing him in my mind. That sentence that had angered me to my core—my father, placing the blame on this fictional thing. Crying not because he was sorry, but because he had gotten caught. But now, I know—that wasn’t the case. That wasn’t the case at all.
I open my mouth and let the words spill out.
“Sometimes I think it might be the devil himself.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
It’s as if the answers have been in front of me all along—dancing, just out of reach. Twirling, like Lena—bottle in the air, her ripped-up shorts and double French braids, the remnants of weeds sticking to her skin, the remnants of weed heavy on her breath. Like that ballerina, chipped and pink, spinning to the rhythm of delicate chimes. But when I had reached out, tried to touch them, tried to grab them, they had turned into smoke in my grip, swirling through my fingers until I was left with nothing.
“The jewelry,” I say, my eyes on Cooper’s silhouette, his aging face morphing into that of my teenaged brother. He had been so young, only fifteen. “It was yours.”
“Dad found it in my room. Underneath my floorboard.”
The floorboard I had told him about after I found Cooper’s magazines. I bow my head.
“He took the box, wiped it down, and hid it in his closet until he could figure out what to do with it,” he says. “But he never had the chance. You found it first.”
I found it first. A secret I had stumbled upon in my search for scarves. I had opened it up, plucked Lena’s belly-button ring from the center, dead and gray. And I knew. I knew it was hers. It had seen it that day, my face cupped against her stomach, her skin smooth and warm against my hands.
Somebody’s watching.
“Dad wasn’t looking at Lena,” I say, thinking of my father’s expression—distracted, afraid. Preoccupied by some unspoken thought tormenting his mind—that his son was sizing up his next victim, preparing to strike. “That day at the festival. He was looking at you.”
“Ever since Tara,” he says, the spider veins in his eyes flushing pink. Now that he’s started talking, the words are flowing freely, like I knew they would. I look down at his glass, at the puddle of wine left at the bottom. “He would just watch me like that. Like he knew.”
Tara King. The runaway, a year before any of this started. Tara King, the girl Theodore Gates had confronted my mother with—the outlier, the enigma. The one nobody could prove.
“She was the first,” Cooper says. “I had wondered, for a while. What it would feel like.”
My eyes can’t help but dart to the corner, to the place where Bert Rhodes once stood.
You ever think about what it feels like? I used to keep myself up at night, wondering. Imagining.
“And then one night, there she was. Alone on the side of the road.”
I can see it so vividly, like I’m watching a movie. Screaming into the void, trying to stop the impending danger. But nobody hears me, nobody listens. Cooper, in my father’s car. He had just learned how to drive—the freedom, I’m sure, a breath of fresh air. I can picture him idling behind the wheel, quiet, watching. Considering. His entire life, he had been surrounded by people: the crowds around him at school, in the gym, at the festival, never leaving his side. But in that moment, alone, he saw an opportunity. Tara King. A suitcase hanging heavy over her shoulder, a note scratched on her kitchen counter. She had been leaving, running away. Nobody had even thought to look when she vanished.
“I remember feeling surprised, how easy it was,” he says, his eyes drilling into the countertop. “My hands on her throat, and the way the movement just … stopped.” He pauses, looks at me. “Do you really want to know all this?”
“Cooper, you’re my brother,” I say, reaching my hand out to cover his. Right now, touching his skin, I want to vomit. I want to run away. But instead, I force myself to regurgitate the words, his words, that I know work so well. “Tell me what happened.”
“I kept expecting to get caught,” he says at last. “I kept expecting someone to show up at our house—the cops, something—but nobody ever did. Nobody even talked about it. And I realized … I could get away with it. Nobody knew, except…”
He stops again, swallowing hard, like he knows these next words will hit harder than any that came before them.
“Except Lena,” he says finally. “Lena knew.”
Lena—always out late, by herself. Picking her way out of her locked bedroom before running outside, wandering into the night. Seeing Cooper in that car, creeping slowly behind as Tara walked down the side of the road, unaware. Lena had seen him. She didn’t have a crush on Cooper; she had been pushing him, testing him. She was the only one in the world who knew his secret and she was drunk with power, playing with matches the way she always did, getting closer and closer before the fire singed her skin. You should pick me up in that car of yours sometime, calling over her shoulder. Cooper’s rigid back, hands punched into his pockets. You don’t want to be like Lena. I picture her lying on the grass, that ant creeping up her cheek—her, motionless and still. Letting it crawl. Breaking into Cooper’s bedroom, the smile that twisted across her lips when he had caught us—that knowing grin, hands on her hips, almost as if to tell him: Look what I can do to you.
Lena was invincible. We all thought it, even she herself.
“Lena was a liability,” I say, trying hard to swallow the tears crawling up the back of my throat. “You had to get rid of her.”
“And after that”—he shrugs—“there was no reason to stop.”
It wasn’t the killing that my brother had craved—I know that now, looking at him hunched over my countertop, decades of memories swirling around him. It was the control. And somehow, I understand it. I understand it in a way only family can. I think back to all of my fears, the lack of control I constantly imagine. Two hands wrapped around my neck, squeezing tight. It was that same control I feared losing that Cooper loved to take. It was the control he felt in the moment those girls realized that they were in trouble—the look in their eyes, the quiver in their voices as they pled: Please, anything. The knowledge that he and he alone was the deciding factor between life and death. He had always been that way, really—the way he had pushed his hand into Bert Rhodes’s chest, challenging him. Walking in circles on the wrestling mat, his fingers twitching at his sides like a tiger circling a weaker rival, ready to sink in its claws. I wonder if that’s what he was thinking when he had his opponents by the neck: squeezing, twisting. Snapping. How easy it would have been, the pulsing of their jugular beneath his fingers. And when he let them go, he felt like God. Granting them another day.