Brother (15 page)

“Oh no. I didn't ruin it for you, did I?” Alice matched his frown with her own. “I mean, it's just my interpretation. It doesn't mean you have to watch it like that. It could mean whatever you want it to, I guess.”

Michael wondered if there was some truth to Oz. Perhaps longing for his own escape seemed full of wonder because it was nothing more than a pipe dream. Maybe if he ended up going out in the world, all he'd want to do was crawl back to Momma and Wade.

Alice opened her mouth to say something else as Michael held fast to his silence, but the lowering house lights cut her off.

He sat through the majority of
The Shining
with his eyes wide and his mouth slightly open. The movie itself paired with the scope of that massive screen transported him to the Overlook Hotel. For nearly an hour he sat motionless, having forgotten all about his TaB and the beautiful girl on his right. She nudged him, holding out a half-empty sleeve of popcorn, her own gaze fixed forward. When he turned to look at her, the way the lights danced off her face, the way he could see the movie reflected in her eyes, overwhelmed him with the sudden urge to kiss her. His heartbeat drifted down his chest and settled low in his stomach, throbbing like an electric pulse. His face flushed at the memory of one particular girl—not nearly as pretty as Alice, but the prettiest one he had seen up until then. She had smelled of oranges and pine and had given fourteen-year-old Michael an ache at the very base of his guts. It had been an urge that he soothed by standing in the farthest, darkest corner of the basement, snuffing it out with anxious abandon, his eyes fixed on her dead and naked frame.

Alice noticed him staring. She pulled her attention away from a wild-eyed Jack Nicholson, and gave Michael a faint smile. Leaning in, she whispered into his ear. “Are you having a good time?” Michael nodded, and her smile brightened a notch. “Me too,” she murmured, catching her bottom lip in her teeth. And then she slid her hand into his.

 • • • 

The credits rolled and people began to shuffle out of the theater. Some were grinning and chatting. Others looked dazed, like they'd just sat through a three-hour lobotomy that would leave them forever changed. Michael couldn't believe it was over, which was part of the reason he hesitated getting out of his seat. He wanted the projectionist to play the movie again so he could figure out exactly what he had watched. Part of him loved the fact that Wendy and Danny had escaped Jack's wrath. But the other half of him—the darker half—couldn't help but think their escape was nothing but wishful thinking.

“Bullshit, right?” Rebel asked with a laugh, suddenly standing next to Michael and Alice's seats with Lucy hanging off his arm. “There ain't no way those two would get out of there alive. No way. That Wendy was too stupid.”

Michael looked over to Alice. She shrugged, but she was grinning. He grabbed his nearly empty cup of soda and took a watered-down swig.

“So, what did you think?” Lucy asked, her gaze fixed on Michael. “First time at the movies. . . .”

“I wanna see it again,” he said. Lucy and Reb laughed at his response and exited with the rest of the crowd, leaving Michael and Alice alone again. When Michael glanced over to her, Alice nodded at him.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “I want to see it again too.”

 • • • 

Lucy and Reb debated about it the entire way back to the Dervish. Was Jack Torrance insane, or were the things he had seen real? Was it all in his head, or was the Overlook actually haunted? Michael and Alice sat quietly in the backseat, listening to them banter back and forth. Two blocks from the record store, Alice scooted more toward the middle of the seat, letting her thigh press against Michael's leg.

 • • • 

Rebel flipped down the driver's seat and left the door open for Michael and Alice to crawl out, then followed Lucy across the parking lot to her car. When Michael made a move to step out of the Delta, Alice gently caught him by the wrist to stop him. Her eyes lingered on Reb and Lucy in the distance before they focused on the boy beside her. Michael's pulse whooshed against his ears, her touch electrifying him, making every hair on his body stand on end.

“I had fun,” she said softly.

He looked down at the seat, his hair curtaining the sides of his face. She leaned in, her hands rising to pull his hair back, her fingertips sweeping across each cheek with a butterfly's touch.

“I like that you're shy. It makes you special.” Her lips grazed the corner of his mouth, her warm spearmint scent drifting across his skin. His fingers curled against the upholstery of the backseat before daring to graze a denim-covered knee. And for a flash of a moment, he pictured her dead on the basement floor, stripped and cold-skinned, her eyes wide open, her lips a grayish-blue. He pulled back, simultaneously revolted and undeniably turned on. He yearned to touch her, but the idea of doing it while she was breathing scared him. It was different when there was potential for humiliation, rejection, disgust.

Alice nodded faintly when he pulled away, as if to say she understood. “See you soon, I hope?”

“Yeah.”

She hesitated, as if contemplating something, then slipped out of the Oldsmobile without another word.

 • • • 

When Rebel finally slid into his seat, he smelled like Lucy's perfume. Michael had switched back to the passenger side. He had watched his brother kissing and groping through the windshield while Alice waited in Lucy's Honda hatchback. He couldn't shake the fact that he had pictured Alice dead—a murder victim laid out on the basement floor.

“What's wrong?” Reb asked. “You say something stupid?”

“I don't think so,” Michael murmured.

“Then what?”

Michael shook his head, not daring to explain.

Reb rolled his eyes and slid the key into the ignition. “Yeah, bet you said something dumb, but whatever—she likes you.”

Something fluttered inside Michael's chest—hope, elation, an eagerness to come back and see her again, even though they had yet to leave the parking lot.

Reb gave Michael a skeptical glance. “You like her?”

“Yes.” The word was almost breathless.

Reb pulled the Delta onto the road, smiling to himself. “Good,” he said beneath his breath. “Glad to hear it, brother. Glad indeed.”

M
ICHAEL SPENT NEARLY
all of the following day sitting at his desk, scribbling pictures into the margins of old newspapers. He used whatever blank space he could find to draw panels like the ones he had seen in Alice's sketchbook while music cut through the silence of the upstairs rooms. Neil Diamond's “Cherry, Cherry” filtered through the wall on what seemed like endless repeat. His sketches weren't much more than crude line drawings, like primitive art scratched onto a cave wall. Because Alice had drawn her own life at the Dervish, Michael decided to follow her lead and draw things about himself as well. They were things he'd never be able to show her, but putting them on paper made him feel closer to her. He sketched himself sitting in the Delta with Rebel behind the wheel. He drew them both lying on their stomachs on top of a hill, spying on the next mark. There was the farmhouse and Misty Dawn dancing in the backyard, Momma with an angry face, looming in the background, watching her from the shadows.

By the time he had switched from sketching the subtle horrors of his own life to the tall buildings of New York City, Reb barged into his room. The smells of that evening's dinner drifted in behind him. Michael jerked his head up from its unnaturally bowed position and winced at a sudden bite of pain. He'd been huddled like that for so long his poor posture had given birth to a wicked crick in his neck.

“What've you been doin' in here?” Reb asked, stepping behind Michael and snatching the sheet of newspaper off his desk. “Haven't seen you all day.” Michael made a swipe for the paper, but Reb twisted away, peering at the doodles in the margins. He gave Michael a weird smile. “Don't Alice draw stuff like this? You fallin' madly in love, little brother?”

Michael didn't respond. He simply extended an arm for Reb to return what was his.

“Must be nice knowin' someone's taken an interest in you, huh? Must feel good to get some attention instead of bein' ­ignored all the time.”

Rebel's tone was strained, and Michael could smell the alcohol wafting off of him—a sharp, fermented stench. Reb acted strange when he'd been drinking, seesawing between self-pity and aggression. Sometimes he'd ramble on about how nobody appreciated him. Once, during a particularly rough night, Reb stood on top of his chair in the middle of dinner and announced that he was nothing but a slave. Used and abused. Never paid. Undervalued. Wade had laughed. Misty had rolled her eyes. Momma had told him to get his dirty goddamn boots off her chair, as though she hadn't heard a word he'd said. But Michael had felt bad for him. Even if the declaration held no merit, the fact that Reb had said it meant he felt it. Michael didn't know much, but he knew feeling that way couldn't have been good.

“You're drunk,” Michael murmured, catching the paper by its corner, but Reb yanked it away again.

“You don't think you've got a real shot with her, do you?” He tossed the newspaper at Michael's outstretched arm.

“Why not?” Michael turned his back on his brother, smooth­ing the wrinkles out of where he had crumpled the page in his hand. “If you can get with Lucy, why can't I get with Alice?”

“Because you ain't
me
, you stupid shit.” Reb smacked the back of Michael's head with an open palm. “We ain't even related by blood. Think about it.” He gave his own forehead a few rough taps. “Can you think about it, Mikey? You able to process that little nugget of hard fuckin' truth?”

“What do you want?” There was only one reason Rebel came into Michael's room, and that was to tell him to get ready to hit the road. Sometimes their trips would be quick. They'd get lucky and find a girl wandering the side of the highway, hitching in the dark, a thumb pointing upward whenever a pair of headlights shined along the horizon. On those nights, they were back home before the sun came up, but hitchhikers weren't that easy to find. Reb said they were like winning cash at a card table—if you knew what you were doing, you could usually get lucky. But even lucky players came up empty now and again.

“First, I want Miss to stop playin' that goddamn song. How many times has it been now?” He scowled at the wall that separated Michael's room from his sister's. “Then I want you to stop askin' stupid questions. But since
that
ain't happenin', I want you to get your shit and meet me downstairs.” He turned to go, then paused in the open bedroom door. “We're out of tape. Grab a fresh roll.”

Michael frowned at his poor attempt at artwork while ­Rebel's boots banged down the stairs. When he had drawn himself and Reb in the Delta, he had imagined them driving to the Dervish to see the girls. But the more he looked at it, the more he understood that wasn't what was happening in the picture at all. Ray looked too serious, his expression both determined and hungry. Michael appeared too defeated to be excited by the prospect of seeing Alice again, his gaze turned out the window. Those two crudely rendered people weren't headed toward social interaction. They were speeding down a darkened highway toward screams garbled by fear and desperation.

Michael had drawn them on the way to work.

I should really quit my job.

Rebel called up from the first floor. “You comin' or what? Jesus Christ, Misty! Turn that shit off!”

Michael gritted his teeth. He jerked his desk drawer open to clear its top. He grabbed a broken red crayon from the corner of the drawer and scribbled red wax over Reb's face, pressing down as hard as he could. The red blotch spread involuntarily, spilling onto Michael's drawn face. Onto Misty Dawn dancing in the yard. Across the entire sheet of newspaper. He pushed into the desk until his hand ached, the crayon wearing down to a nub within seconds. The newspaper was suddenly in his hands. Crumpled. Torn. Strips of black and white and red flying through the air, Neil singing
She's got the way to move me
over and over and over again. Breathing hard, he shoved himself away from the desk, his pulse blinding him with its bass-like thump. His fingernails bit into the flesh of his palms. And then, just as quickly as the rage had consumed him, it was gone. ­Michael turned away from the mess strewn across the floor and left the room.

He grabbed a roll of duct tape from the hall closet and stepped into the night.

 • • • 

The little house with the green shutters looked different in the dark. Michael couldn't decide whether it was because he hadn't seen it at night or because of the angle. He'd only ever peered at it from the hill that was now behind him, not from the crushed gravel of the driveway that rolled out toward the garage. A few lights shone through curtained windows, and the flicker of a TV screen flashed against the interior walls in shades of blue. He'd wrapped girls up in tape dozens of times, but he'd never been brazen enough to pull someone out of their home. Something about abducting a woman out of her living room felt like far worse a crime than shoving a hitcher into the car trunk. Home was supposed to be safe. There was no place like it.

“I'm goin' in.” Reb buttoned up his jean jacket as if doing so would somehow conceal his identity. “You watch the clock, give me ten minutes, then come in through the back.”

“How do you know it's gonna be open?” Michael asked.

“Gotta hunch.”

“But what if she ain't alone?” Michael's gaze flitted to the front window. This whole thing still felt premature. Sloppy. If Rebel walked in and found the woman lounging on her couch with a man at her side, Reb would either end up seriously hurt or the man would end up dead. Michael assumed the former was more likely, though he'd never tell Reb that to his face. And if that woman
did
have a boyfriend or a husband, he was probably a logger or a miner, a tough West Virginian son of a bitch who'd swat Rebel across the room like a fly. His brother wouldn't stand a chance, and Michael wouldn't have enough time to get the hell out of there before Mr. Miner came running into the yard. Teeth bared. Big arms held over his head like a grizzly. Ready to crush the skull of whoever had thought they could screw with his woman.