“No, I went—” She catches her breath and bites her lip, and I see tears in her eyes, but she wipes them away. “I went to go look at our house. That’s all. I met her there.” She glares at me with such sudden venom that I feel like she’s hit me. “Why don’t you go read your stupid book!”
I’m so mad by then that I slam it down on the table, and I say, “It’s your stupid book, didn’t you even notice?” Because it is. It’s the book that she was reading on the day that our lives went wrong. She was reading it, and she didn’t look up even when Mom stopped the car for the police, and all I could think about was what was so great about that book, because she was reading it the day Mom got arrested, the day our house and our dad got taken away from us. She was reading this book on the last day when there were no monsters, and parents could still protect us. I rescued it when she threw it away. I wanted to hold on to something, something from home. Something from before.
I’ve kept it.
I’m shaking now. And I’m breathing really fast, so fast my stomach hurts. I’ve been reading and rereading this book for so long that pages are falling out of it, and two of them have broken loose and are sticking out like broken teeth now.
Lanny reaches over and draws her fingers over the cover, like touching the face of someone dead. Then she takes the book and she walks over to the fireplace, and I realize she’s going to burn it, and I charge over and rescue it and hold it close to my chest.
We don’t say anything. We just look at each other. And then she slumps down on the floor and starts to cry. I’m her brother. I should try to make her feel better. But I don’t.
I go into my bedroom and slam the door and lock it. I can still hear Lanny crying. I pace back and forth, and then I grab my coat from the closet, and my gloves and hat.
Kezia’s been watching the fight from the kitchen table, not interfering, and when I walk out in my winter gear, she says, “It’s freezing out there, Connor.”
I don’t feel like Connor right now. I just want something warm.
I want my dad.
“I won’t be long,” I tell her. Boot has come up out of his lazy sprawl by the crackling fireplace, and he’s bouncing around my legs. “Boot needs to go out.”
She doesn’t like it, but she nods finally. “All right. Inside the fence only.” She stares at me for a few long seconds, and I don’t dare look away. “Connor? Can I trust you?”
“Yes,” I tell her. I mean it. She can trust Connor. Just not Brady.
“Okay.” I can tell by the way she looks toward Lanny now that she believes me.
As I open the door, she’s already putting her arm around my sister, who’s crying like her heart has broken.
I go outside, and she’s right, it’s freezing—the kind of dense, damp cold that feels like snow is falling even though it isn’t. The clouds overhead are deep gray, so heavy they seem ready to crash down on top of us. Mist hangs in the top of the trees. It’d probably be foggy on the lake today, too, and starting to freeze over.
Boot is bouncing up and down, and I pick up an old, badly chewed tennis ball and throw it for him. As he’s gnawing happily on the toy, I put the book in my pocket, and I take out the phone. This time, I don’t worry about it. I don’t think about what if or why not. I just dial my dad’s number.
He answers on the first ring. “Son?”
I feel pressure behind my eyes, and in my throat, but I’m not going to cry, I’m not . . . and then I am crying, like Lanny was, and I say, “I just w-want it all b-back.” It bursts out of me, this thing I’ve been holding back for years. I want to go home to Wichita. To have my old name back. To live in our old house and have a mom and a dad and for things to be right.
My dad sounds worried when he asks, “Did something happen, Brady? Are you okay?”
“N-no.” It was a good answer to both those questions. “Where are you, Dad?”
It’s the second time I’ve called him that, and it comes naturally now. I needed to hear his voice, to hear him really care about me.
“You know I can’t tell you that. I wish I could. But you can tell me where you are. I can come see you if you want me to—but only if you want me to, okay? I’d never do that without your permission.”
I try to remember the last time my mom asked me for my permission. She didn’t when she moved us, or when she told us we’d have to get called by different names. She didn’t when she brought us here and went off without us. Mom orders. She orders, and she lies, and she was never what she pretended to be.
Dad’s asking.
But I’m not that dumb. However I feel right now, Dad’s a criminal on the run, and I can’t just tell him where I am—not because of me, but because of Lanny. Dad would never hurt me, I know that, but there’s something that whispers deep inside me that I shouldn’t take chances with Lanny’s safety.
“Son?” I’ve been silent too long. Dad’s voice is shaking again. He coughs. “Son, I swear, I don’t mean you any harm. You don’t have to go anywhere with me. I just—I just want to see you, that’s all. I miss you so much. You’re important. I want you to know that. Believe that.”
I’m not important enough to Mom to make her stay here. But Dad thinks I’m important enough to risk being caught to see me.
It matters.
“I can’t go with you, Dad,” I tell him. It hurts, but it’s fair. I don’t want to lie to him. “I do want to see you, though. Can we just . . . talk? Just one time?”
He’s quiet for a second, and then he says, “Yes. Yes, I can do that. But, Brady? We have to be very careful about this. If you tell anybody about it, even your sister, you could get me killed.”
“I won’t,” I say. I sniffle and wipe my nose on my sleeve. “I won’t tell anybody.”
“Not even your sister?”
“No.”
“I love you. You know that, right?”
I change the subject. “So . . . when?”
“I have to ask you where you are to tell you that. Is that okay?”
“Don’t you know?” I’m surprised. I think he’s probably been tracing my phone. Mom always said he could do that.
“I don’t,” he says, and I believe him. “I wouldn’t try to find you without your permission.”
She lied about that, too. I’m too angry to care about whether it’s right or not when I say, “I’m in Norton. In Tennessee.”
He’s quiet for a few seconds; then I hear a quiet little laugh. It sounds bitter. “She never even moved you away, did she? Smart. She knows everybody will be looking other places. Not so close to where you were last living.”
I don’t want to talk about that. About Mom. It makes me feel terrible. “So when?”
“I’m not that far away right now,” he tells me. “Listen, son . . . we’ll meet somewhere you feel safe. Where is that?”
I don’t feel safe anywhere, ever, but I don’t tell him that. I try to think of somewhere, and the only thing that comes to mind is what Lanny said. She met Dahlia at our old house.
That’s safe. Kind of. And it doesn’t give anything away.
So I tell him, “Come to our old house at Stillhouse Lake. You know where that is?”
“I can find it.”
“When?”
“I told you, I’m not far. So . . . how about in a couple of hours?”