“Knew what? Knew what?” I beg. “Please, Wil. Tell me. Whatever it is, whatever you don’t want to say out loud—” I stroke the damp curls glued to his neck. “I want you to tell me.”
“I can’t,” he whispers. “It was because . . .” He wraps his arms around his middle like he’s going to be sick. “It was because of me. I could have stopped it somehow, and I didn’t. He’s dead because of me.” He releases a slow, painful noise that dies slowly.
“Listen.” I scoot close to him. I wrap my arms around his solid, safe body, and rest my chin on his shoulder. He heaves bottomless breaths between sobs. “Whatever you think you could have done, whatever you think you didn’t do, nothing that happened that night was your fault. It was out of your control, Wil. It was a freak accident that guy picked your house.”
“You don’t know. You don’t,” he says.
“So tell me.” I hold him tighter. “It’s me, Wil. It’s just me.”
He tilts his head to one side. His tears have made well-traveled roads across his cheeks, down his neck. I stroke his hair and his lips, and I rest my palm against his neck.
Wil rolls up the windows so we are alone. “It was so dark when he got home,” he begins.
I hold my breath. Steady myself. I’ll hold the weight, no matter how heavy. I’ll do anything for him.
WIL
Spring, Senior Year
I can’t feel my body.
One minute, I’m on the floor listening for him and the next I’m shedding my Generic Teenager skin, leaving it slumped on the floor next to the bed. I fly out the door and over the box maze and into the kitchen, waiting to feel my feet on the ground or hear the heart engine inside me (tickticktick). I feel nothing. I wonder if I am here at all.
The sick crack of a skull against the plaster wall makes everything sharp again. Real. I’m standing on the other side of the island, squinting through the dark. My dad palms my mother’s head like she’s a basketball. There are tulips and glass and water in the sink.
He throws her against the wall next to the stove again. Again. She isn’t screaming. Why isn’t she screaming? There is a thin river of blood creeping from her mouth. Her eyes are dead.
He says, “I love you, I love you. Why would you—I love you.”
It sounds like: Die, bitch.
I say, “Dad! Don’t! Stop!”
It sounds like: silence.
His back is shaking, heaving. He is crying.
“Dad!” I scream again. (Or maybe for the first time.)
I lunge for him, hurl the weight of my body over the island and collide with a cement man. I drag myself up with his shirt and wrap my arms around his neck and I squeeze, and for a second, he releases her. I see her and she sees me and then I watch her slide down the wall into a heap on the floor. She is shedding her skin, too. She is becoming unreal like me.
I squeeze harder. He throws me back, sends me flying—we’re in the public pool he took me to a few times as a kid. It’s bright and the water is blue and cold. He’s standing in the shallow end and he launches me up, like he is giving me to the universe. I slam into the refrigerator.
It takes too long to find my breath. By the time I’m up again, he has her by the neck. I am screaming for all three of us.
He holds her against the wall again, holds her by the neck, so high that her feet don’t touch the ground. So high that I can see the life leaking from her eyes, rolling down her cheeks in jeweled beads. Her mouth lolls open, searching for air. In the silent dark, she is the only sound. Gasping, gulping, straining for air. Until the moment her face relaxes. She goes slack. He is turning her from a human into a doll.
I search the kitchen for something to stop him, something that will press PAUSE, and there is nothing. It’s because of him that there is nothing—because clutter makes him insane, because the countertops must be clear at all times or else. Maybe this is ironic. I don’t know.
Now I am flying again, but it is harder this time. I am heavier this time. In the entrance hall, my hands find the golf clubs—find a single golf club with a bulb at the end—and I run back into the kitchen. They are on the floor now and he is on top of her, slowly turning off her life switch. Dimming her.
I want to stop him.
I only want to stop him.
I raise the golf club up and I bring it down between his shoulder blades. He crumples like paper and he curses. I bring it down again. He collapses on top of her. I was wrong about him when I was a kid. All this time, he’s never been anything more than a man.
My mother’s eyes are wide.
“It’s o—it’s o—” I wheeze. That’s it, I think. For now. And I let myself suck deep breaths like I will never see the surface again.
“You . . . sonofa . . . bitch.” My dad is up again, off her, swaying toward me. I can’t find his eyes. “I’ll kill you, too.”
I smell booze: sugar and sick.
“Back! Back!” The only words I can manage. I raise the club over my head.
I think, He never taught me how to play golf.
He comes for me and comes for me again, and I swing the club like a baseball bat. It slices through the air and collides with his temple.
He stumbles back, surprised. The corners of his mouth curl up like a smile. And he falls back into the island. His skull on the corner is the loudest noise I have ever heard.
We are all silent, all of us now.
My mother’s eyes are still frozen open, and I try to remember, try to remember whether people die with their eyes open or closed. I should have paid attention in class.
“Mom? Mom?” I drop the club and I sink next to her and I should scoop her up, kiss her, breathe into her, but her wax skin and open mouth terrify me. I slip my hand into her hand, and it is damp. She squeezes slowly three times, and I know.
BRIDGE
Summer, Senior Year
“NO,” I say. I say it again and again, until the word itself starts to sound wrong. It is an incantation. A desperate attempt to undo what has already been done. But Minna told me: I am not that kind of magic. “Wil. No.” Every part of me rejects the story he’s just told: my sour stomach and ocean-filled eyes, my tight fists and wet, panicked skin. I knew there was something. I never knew it was this.
Wil Hines killed his father. My mouth fills with bile, and I gulp it down. Wil’s face thrashes in choppy waters in front of me.