“Why are we climbing on top of the car?”
He shrugs. “Why not? I need a moment. I’m sure you do, too.”
I look at his hand, suddenly exhausted by all of this. By thoughts of my poor, worrying parents. By thoughts of how to keep them safe. How to get away. How to cope. It all seems so…insurmountable. I take his hand, allowing him to pull me up onto the hood of the car. I can feel the heat of the engine through the soles of my new Chucks.
Rebel lowers himself so that he’s sitting on the roof of the truck, legs kicked out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. Seems like an odd pose for him; he’s always so rigid, back straight, chest proud. Right now, he looks pretty much how I feel—like he’s on the brink of saying fuck it and giving himself over to the powers that be, because what’s the point in fighting anymore? He nods at the spot next to him, raising an eyebrow.
“You gonna sit down or what?”
I sit down. Arguing with him would be futile. We sit there, side by side, staring off down the arrow-straight road, and for a moment I don’t hate him. He pulls a cell phone out of his pocket and taps something into it, and then he turns to face me, frowning slightly. “You believe in vengeance?”
“You mean like revenge?”
He shakes his head. “Revenge is a selfish act. Retaliation for something. Vengeance is a different thing altogether. It’s about obtaining justice, usually for someone who can’t claim it for themselves.”
This is an odd line of questioning but I decide I’ll bite. Maybe I wouldn’t if he were being a jerk like he was a couple of hours ago, but that’s not what’s happening. He’s pensive, the live wire that apparently runs through him dulled for the moment. “I don’t know,” I say. “Probably, in that case.”
“What if I simplified the question? What if I say, do you believe in justice?
“Then, yes, I do believe.”
“Okay.” Rebel fiddles with his cell phone again, and then he’s showing me a picture on the screen—a picture of the silver-haired man I watched die back in Seattle. He has a huge grin on his face, wearing a really bad Christmas sweater with reindeer on it, and a small kid is sitting on his knee. A baby, really. A little girl. She’s smiling so wide her little fat cheeks are round like apples. Can’t be any more than two years old.
“That’s Maddie,” Rebel says. “She’s older now, but not by much. She’s my cousin, but she might as well be my little sister. Ryan,” he points at the man in the picture, “Ryan got married late. His wife Estelle was in her forties when she had Maddie—surprise kid. They found out she had breast cancer at the same time, and she refused treatment so she could keep the kid. She hung on for three weeks after, got to hold her daughter in her arms, be a mom a little before she went. I guess that’s some consolation.”
I look at the picture, knowing what he’s doing. He wants me to testify so badly that he’s willing to pull the old poor-kid’s-mother-died-when-she-was-born-and-now-her-dad’s-dead-too card. It’s shitty and it’s underhanded. And it’s kind of working. “Who’s taking care of her now?”
“The state of Washington Child Services. She’ll be placed into a care home soon. At worst, some fucking drunk with a penchant for touching small kids will get her. She’ll grow up thinking it’s normal for Daddy Steve to touch her in her special fucking places. At best, she’ll be given to some down-and-out family who don’t give a shit about her so long as the government keeps on sending through the checks.”
“And how will me standing up in court and testifying against Raphael and Hector change that? If you’re so worried about her upbringing, Rebel, why the hell aren’t you petitioning for custody of her? She’s your blood relative right? You just said she’s your cousin.” Which makes the man in the photo, Ryan, his uncle. Rebel’s refusal to let this drop suddenly makes a whole lot more sense. His uncle. God, this gets more and more fucked up by the day.
“I can’t have her with me,” he says flatly.
“Why not? You afraid looking after a kid’s gonna cramp your style? That’s pretty fucking selfish.”
He clenches his jaw, clearing the picture from his cell phone screen and sliding it back into his pocket. I can tell I’ve made him angry just by the way he’s pressing his knuckles into the roof of the car. “I have a criminal record, Sophia. I live on a compound out in the middle of nowhere with a group of people who all have rap sheets as long as your arms. I’m not fucking evil. If I could take her, I would.”