I nodded. I was too scared to say anything else.
After a few minutes, Tomás got up and retrieved the bottle of vodka from the card table. “You want some?”
“Yeah.”
We passed it back and forth, foolish maybe, but it was the only warmth available.
“So is it true what they say about twins?” I asked, after a moment.
“Is what true?”
“That you can feel each other’s pain.”
Tomás snorted. “Hell, I’m always in pain, man. How would I know which was hers?”
I didn’t have an answer for that but that Chatterton poem he’d always been so enamored with floated through my mind. So I spoke the words aloud: “But ah! my breast is human still;
The rising sigh, the falling tear,
My languid vitals’ feeble rill,
The sickness of my soul declare.”
Tomás gave me a funny look, but then dipped his head, seemingly appreciative of the effort if not the delivery.
“Can’t believe you remember all that,” he said. “I thought you hated that poem.”
“I do. That’s why I remember it.”
He laughed, and I continued to drink and he drank more. I was buzzed in no time—there was nothing in my stomach—which turned out to be a good thing. It kept my mind off Rose and fear and loss and a martyr’s march into the quiet death of snow. Not to mention the unfortunate fact that my arms and legs were itching like crazy.
“Hey, Ben?” Tomás asked.
“Hey, Tomás?”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Anything you want.”
“Hold on.” He held up the vodka bottle while rummaging around in his sweatshirt pocket. Finally he pulled out a pack of American Spirits and a Zippo. “Want one?”
“Sure.” I wasn’t a fan but was in no position to deny myself heat. “What’d you want to tell me?”
Tomás lit his own cigarette before handing me the lighter. “Shit.”
“What?”
“It’s not going to be easy.”
“Telling me something’s not going to be easy?”
“Confessing,” he said. “I need to confess something to you.”
I burst out coughing, the cigarette more harsh than smooth. “I hate to break it to you, but confessing’s not supposed to be easy.”
“Why’s that?” he asked.
“Because it’s meant to make you feel better after you’ve done it. You’re not supposed to enjoy for its own sake. That’s why it’s a virtue.”
“Confessing’s a virtue?”
“Honesty is.”
He blew smoke from his nose, letting it mingle with his frosted breath. “You really think that’s true?”
“I’m probably the wrong person to ask.”
“Yeah, you are, aren’t you?”
I was silent for a minute, thinking of all the sins I’d confessed to in my lifetime and all the ones I hadn’t. “You know what I do believe, though?”
“What?”
“Confession only makes you feel better under one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“That you’re sorry.”
At this, Tomás leapt to his feet with a shudder. After another swig of vodka, he began to circle the fire, walking around and around—a restless route, his shoes squelch-skidding in the icy slush as he paced. He wouldn’t look at me, but more than once I watched as his gaze darted to where Abel’s rifle hung from a tree branch above us.
“Ben, you’ve killed someone, right?” he asked. “I mean, we’ve never talked about it, but everyone knows. You shot your stepfather when you were ten. It was an accident, I know, but still . . . you killed him.”
“Yeah,” I said flatly. “I killed him.”
“So how do you live with yourself?”
“Jesus, Tomás, I don’t know. I try and forget about it most of the time.”
“Can you really forget about it?”
“Sure. In a way. But I don’t feel sorry for what I did. I hated him.”
“Did he hit you or something?”
“No, not really. A few times, sure. I mostly stayed out of his way. He hit my mom a lot, though. When he thought she wasn’t respecting him. And he did . . . other stuff to her. All the time. And the worst of it was, I couldn’t do anything to stop him, because no matter how much he hurt her, she . . .”
“She what?”
I stared hard at the fire. “She believed she deserved it. She wanted him to care enough to hurt her. That’s really fucked, isn’t it?”
“I killed Archie,” Tomás said. “And I almost killed you. That’s what I needed to confess.”
—
My mind didn’t comprehend the words he’d just said. “You what?”
“I killed him. I mean, he’s dead, right? You were there. He stayed on that mountain in the middle of a blizzard with no shelter or warm clothes or food, looking for some hidden money he thought was up there. So he’s dead. He has to be.”
“I believe so, yes. But, Tomás, you didn’t—”
“I did!”
I drank more of the vodka, burning my throat. I didn’t know what to say.
Tomás kept pacing. “You really want to know where I was that night? While Mr. H. and Dunc were getting shot? While everything was going to shit?”
My eyebrows went up. “Uh, yeah, I do.”
“Well, after we left you up in the meadow, we all walked down here, just trashed off our asses, and I knew it was stupid. I knew the whole time. I mean, yeah, I care about Clay’s sister, but that’s no excuse. Or maybe it is. I don’t know! But I wanted to somehow stop them before we actually did anything, only I couldn’t. Even Rose wouldn’t hear of it, which really pissed me off. Because it wasn’t like coming down here was a decision any of them would’ve made on their own, you know? They could’ve only made it together. With Archie. There’s a word for that, isn’t there? Being stupid as a group, but not as an individual. What is it?”
“Groupthink?” I offered. “Risky shift?”
“Yeah, maybe. One of those. I mean, that night when it came to risk, all bets were off. I kept telling Archie we didn’t know for sure who these guys were. I mean, we really didn’t. We were basing it all off a hunch that I think you told us, you know?”
A swirl of dread went through me. “Wait, are you saying—”
“Let me finish, okay?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Well, I had my phone with me, only there’s no reception out here. And we were nearly to the junction when Archie told me if I was so worried about what we were doing, that I should run down to the staging area and see if I could get a signal there. Then I could look up these fugitives online and see what they looked like. That would tell us. I agreed, of course, and Archie said he’d wait for me to get back.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s what you did? You walked all the way down to the parking lot? That’s like two miles.”
“I know.”
My heart sank. “Shit, Tomás. You could’ve gotten help. You could’ve left and—”
“I know. I mean, I didn’t have the keys and I didn’t know what had happened. But . . . yeah.”
“Archie didn’t wait for you, did he?”
“Of course not.”
“What an asshole.”
Tomás stopped walking to light another cigarette, a flame in the darkness. “We all were.”
“What’d you find out?”
“It wasn’t them.”