Save Yourself (38 page)

“There’s somebody else in there,” Eric said.

“That’s unfortunate,” Justinian said.

Mike hefted the baseball bat in one hand. “I brought this,” he said, “because I knew she’d go straight to whoever she’d been with and I wanted to bust their head in.” He stared at Patrick, looking bewildered. “Tell me I’m wrong, dude. Tell me this isn’t happening.”

Caro pushed Patrick away. “You’re a prick,” she said to Mike. That high-pitched strangeness was gone. She sounded sharp and alive. “I just came here to ask him if I could buy his car, that’s all. And he saw that I was upset, and he gave me a hug. So sue the guy, he’s got a tiny little shred of empathy.”

Mike looked at him. “Is that true?”

She was trying to give him a chance. Patrick could hear the strain behind her words, could see it in the hunch of her shoulders. When she’d pushed him back he’d felt her fingers linger on his arm for barely a split second. He could still feel them there. They had been smooth and soft.

But there were no half-truths. There was truth, and there was what you chose to do about it. Living with yourself afterward; that
was where the
half
came in. Because you could half-live pretty much indefinitely. You could half-live until you died.

He sighed. “No. It’s not. Sorry.”

Next to him, Caro let out a long, shaky breath. Like she was deflating.

“What’s the other option?” Layla said.

Justinian glanced at Verna. “Verna can do it.”

“No,” Verna said, at the same time that Layla said, “She can’t. She wouldn’t.”

“If killing him could guarantee the lives of other people she loved, I think she might.” He looked at Verna. “Wouldn’t you, Verna?”

Verna was horrified. “I could never kill anyone.”

“What other people?” Layla said.

“Your parents, to start with. Because if Verna can kill your friend inside, then maybe their brainwashing doesn’t go as deep as I’d thought. Particularly since killing a complete stranger who’s never done anything to you—like she’d be doing—would be a lot harder than killing somebody who made you feel as dirty and violated as you’ve been saying all week.”

“Let me do it,” Criss said. “I’ll kill him. I will.”

“No. It won’t be the same.” The expression on Justinian’s face was a reasonable facsimile of heartbreak. “Don’t think I want to do this, Layla. I don’t. I love you more than anything in the world, you know that. But this life that we’ve chosen—it’s not easy. If you don’t have the strength for it, then love won’t be enough. We can’t risk having you with us. So you can kill him, and show us that I’m right about you, that you’re strong enough to do what needs to be done. Or you can stand by while Verna does it, which would take a different kind of strength from both of you—strength for her to kill him, of course, but also strength for you to risk letting her be the powerful one for
once, now and in the future. I think killing a stranger might change Verna in some very interesting ways, don’t you?” He looked at Verna. “You might even find that you want your parents dead, after this. Once you see how easy it is.”

“No,” Verna said.

He said nothing.

“Not much of a choice,” Layla said, her voice almost a whisper.

Justinian and Eric exchanged a look. Justinian sighed. “There’s a third option, if you want to take it. It came to me in a dream last night. We were in the clearing, all of us, drinking from you. Like tonight, except at the same time.” He paused. The sorrow in his voice was convincing and, numbly, Verna wondered if, on some level, Justinian was truly sad.

“In the dream,” he said, “I was making love to you as your heart stopped. It was beautiful. I woke up crying.”

“You weren’t surprised,” Mike said slowly. “When I told you she didn’t want to marry me. You weren’t surprised at all.” He gripped the bat so hard that Patrick could see the bloodless moons of his knuckles. “Did you sleep with her?” His eyes, fixed on Patrick, were desperate.
Say no
, his face begged.

“Yes,” Patrick said.

Caro made a faint, exasperated noise, almost a moan. In front of Mike’s body, the bat drifted as if in a breeze. “Why?”

Patrick marveled at how the opportunities to walk away kept coming, like easy pitches right over the plate. Even now he could say,
Because she threw herself at me, dude, she came into my room at night. She’s a liar. She’s no good
.

But he and Mike had lived this moment before. And that time, when Mike had said,
Why, little brother?
Patrick had answered,
Because it had to be done
.

“Because I wanted to,” he said now. “Because I love her.”

Caro flinched. As Patrick watched, Mike’s eyes filled with tears.

When Mike spoke again, his voice was thick. “I spent my whole life taking care of you, you ungrateful little shit. Ever since Mom died. Even after what you did to Dad. And the moment I get something for myself—the moment I’m happy—”

“I didn’t do anything to Dad,” Patrick said.

“Bullshit.”

No. Patrick had betrayed Mike. He would take that guilt; it was his and he would accept it (because he did love her, even now as she stood between them with her wild eyes going from brother to brother; because loving her was the best thing he’d ever done). Not the other, though. Not Ryan Czerpak. Not the old man. “He killed that kid. He knew it and he didn’t even stop.”

“It doesn’t matter.” But Mike’s jaw was tight and the bat was shaking.

Patrick took a step toward him. “You never looked at the car. It sat in our garage all night and you never even looked.”

“It doesn’t matter!” Mike screamed. The sound ripped through the stale air. Thick cords stood out on his neck.

Patrick spoke softly. “There was a baby tooth stuck in the grille, Mike. A little, tiny, broken-off tooth. Looked like a pearl.”

Justinian said, “It wouldn’t be like dying, Layla. You’d be inside all of us, forever.”

Layla’s face was desperate. Verna thought of the eternal life she’d always believed in, and imagined spending eternity inside the sinister red canyons of Justinian’s veins. If hell was the absence of God then life in Justinian’s world, that was hell—but as Layla stared at Justinian, her lips parted, and scared as she seemed Verna thought she saw something helpless and yielding there. Layla was trapped. She couldn’t see her way out, couldn’t see a life beyond him. If he told her that bleeding to death in the clearing was the right thing to do—

“I’ll do it,” Verna said. “I’ll kill him.”

Criss gasped. “Right on,” Eric said, sounding impressed.

Layla grabbed at her hand. “Vee—”

“But not my parents.” Verna’s own voice surprised her, how strong it was, how certain. “You leave my parents alone. That’s the trade.”

Justinian smiled. “Like I said, you might feel differently later.”

“No,” Layla said. Her nails dug into Verna’s hand and words tumbled out of her. “No. I’ll kill him. I never loved him anyway. I always loved you. Let me do it. I want to do it.”

“It’s too late.” Justinian pulled the trunk release lever. “You made your choice. Verna made hers.”

“She’s not like me,” Layla said. “She’s too good. It will destroy her.”

“Let Verna out, Crissy,” he said.

Verna slid out, awkward because of the handcuffs and not sure that when her feet touched the ground she wasn’t going to crumple to meet it. Justinian helped her, lifting her by the elbow like a child, and she walked with him to the back of the car, where he removed the handcuffs from her wrists and pulled out the case Verna had seen earlier, the one that had reminded her of a guitar case.

“He works here, so he’ll be wearing some sort of uniform. The spray pattern on this thing is huge. Just point it at him and fire. It’ll be quick.” He unzipped the case and took out the shotgun. The lights over the gas pumps gave the long, dark barrel a reptilian sheen. Verna half-expected it to wrap around his arm and slither up to his shoulders. He showed her how to hold it, where to put her hands. The endless world stretched around them but Verna didn’t run.

She searched his face for the Justinian who had loaned her books and played music for her on the loading dock. “Don’t make me do this,” she said.

He reached out and touched her wrist where it was still sore from the handcuff. She flinched away from him but he didn’t seem to notice or care. “I’m sorry about the handcuffs. That’s not how I planned
this. But they’re off now, right? We don’t need them. We trust each other, don’t we?”

Verna said nothing.

He glanced at the store, at the road, and then looked back at her. “Look, I’ll make you a promise. Do this well and when it’s done, we’ll get in the car and leave town.”

“You’ll leave my parents alone,” she said, uncertainly.

“If that’s what you want.”

“Of course that’s what I want.”

“Then you want the wrong thing. They don’t care about you.”

“What about the other people inside?”

“They don’t care about you, either,” he said, and she said, again, “Don’t make me do this.”

“I’m not making you do anything. You understand the situation, and you’re making a choice. A strong choice.” He put his arms around her. The long, brutal line of the gun between them was hard against her body. This hug smelled like every other hug he’d given her; it felt the same, with his rangy body pressed against hers and his wiry arms strong around her. The Justinian she thought she’d known had been a lie. Verna wanted to die. She hoped she would die.

He told her he was proud of her, then put the gun into her hands. He said that she had to carry it in.

Mike raised the bat up over his shoulder, like he was waiting on a low inside pitch. Not that he would know that. Mike had never given a shit about baseball. Baseball had been Patrick’s thing, Patrick’s and the old man’s. Like horror movies and metal music and why was he thinking about this right now? “You and me, Pat,” Mike said. “We’ll go out back and I’ll do what I should have done a long time ago, and kick your ass.” The tears had dried on his cheeks. His eyes never left Patrick’s face.

“Not exactly a fair fight,” Patrick said, “me against you and that
bat.” But his fists were clenched, his arms aching to swing. For all of it. For his whole life. It wasn’t Mike’s fault but Mike was here, and Mike was ready. Patrick was ready, too.

“This isn’t a fair fight.” Mike’s voice was even. “This is you getting what you deserve.”

Caro yanked the baseball bat from Mike’s hands and threw it to the floor, where it hit the linoleum with a hollow aluminum ring. It was a sound Patrick associated with sunny weather and endless bitter scrambles in the dust. “Yeah?” she said. “And then what?”

Mike stared at her. His hands hung in the air, as if the message that they were empty had yet to get through. “What do you mean?”

“You take him out back, you beat the shit out of him. Then what? Go back home, watch a little tube, drink some beer? No harm, no foul, and he got what he deserved?” Patrick had never seen her like this. She was so angry she was practically spitting. “What about what I deserve? If Patrick deserves to get his head knocked in with a baseball bat, what about me? I cheated on you, Mike. I’ve slept with more guys than I can even count. What do I deserve?”

Hands still hovering, Mike said, “I never hurt you. Not once, in all the time we were together.”

Going home, watching TV, drinking a little beer. Wistfully, Patrick thought how easy those things would be. But when Caro said, “Not being hurt isn’t enough,” her voice overflowing with weariness and frustration and sadness, he knew that going home might be easier but it would also be death. Parts of him had already died. In his own way his earth was just as scorched as Layla’s and Caro’s and even Mike’s, although Mike would never realize it. The dead parts grew heavier and harder to carry each year, each day. And some of what was left was callused and corrupt, some of it had led him to Layla and allowed him to sit in the living room drinking beer with his father while the dead kid’s blood dried on the Buick; but some was still good. It had to be, or Caro would not have given everything up for him, or he would not have given everything up for her.

Patrick realized: he was giving everything up for her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. He wasn’t sure who she was speaking to.

“There’s no settling this, Mike,” Patrick said. He was surprised to find that what he felt wasn’t anger but resignation, and maybe a dying ember of sorrow. “You want to beat me up, fine. But it won’t change anything. It won’t do a damn thing except screw up your knuckles and my face.”

“It’ll teach you a lesson,” Mike said, and Patrick said, “Not this time.”

Caro closed her eyes.

Mike’s eyes were flinty and hardened. “Fine. Fuck both of you.”

The door jingled. All three of them turned.

Standing at the door, just next to the height strip, were two teenagers, a boy and a girl. The boy was tall. His sallow cheeks were speckled with the stubble of a patchy adolescent beard, and his dyed black hair hung lank in his face like crow feathers. With him was a girl whose hair was an unnatural burgundy and whose face was an unhealthy white.

The boy’s weird blue eyes cruised over Mike and Caro and then fixed on Patrick.

“There,” Justinian said. “You see him?”

One of the men in front of them wore a candy-striped shirt: the uniform Justinian had told her about. His dark hair needed badly to be cut and his face was narrow and ferretlike. Verna was only vaguely aware of the other man in the store, or the woman. Her eyes were too full of the man she had to kill. She had never seen him before. In the car, killing him had seemed terrible because killing was wrong but he had just been an idea, a concept that had thrust them all into this nightmare by having sex with her sister. Now, in front of her, he was human.
His dad was the one who killed Ryan Czerpak
, Layla had said, and Verna hadn’t absorbed the meaning of the words then, but she did now. Nothing changed.

She did not want this to happen. It was happening anyway.

There was nobody to stop it, nobody to save her.

Verna lifted up the gun.

“Oh, what the fuck,” Mike said, contemptuously, and Patrick understood why. This wan mouse of a girl, dwarfed by the shotgun in her arms, seemed too comical to be threatening. But the more he stared at her the more familiar she looked. Something about her, the creep standing next to her. Then the dots connected and Patrick understood. This boy was the monster. Which made the fearful girl standing next to him, the girl at the end of the gun—