Winter four seasons 1, p.31
Winter (Four Seasons #1), page 31
“Her twin sister died when she was eight. Their parents had strychnine traps all through the crawl space under their house to deal with a rodent problem. The two of them crawled under there one day during summer and Chloe dared Michelle to eat the stuff. She didn’t realize it would kill her. Anyway, it changed Chloe. She became obsessed with her sister and the way she’d died. How it was all her fault. She wanted to relive it over and over again.”
I shiver, the horror of the story sinking deep inside my bones. Luke sees my reaction. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s all over now. She’s going to prison for the rest of her life. Let’s not talk about that.” He inches closer up the bed, a determined look forming. He slowly reaches out to stroke my hair back out of my face. I close my eyes and lean into his touch. My eyes are stinging again. Sadness weighs heavily on me, fear racing through me as I pluck up the courage to ask my next question.
“Luke, what happens now?”
His hand stills. “What do you mean?”
“Well.” My voice hitches. “The stuff my mom told me about you—”
“A little girl used to live next door to my family when I was a kid,” Luke says, interrupting me. “Rosie. She was three years younger than I was. She had all this crazy, curly dark hair.” He goes quiet, eyes locked on the scuffed kick plate at the bottom of the door to my room. “She was Emma’s friend, really. She used to come over and play with her after school. I’d tease them. Put dirt in Emma’s doll’s house. Chase them through the woods at the back of the elementary school, sometimes.”
I’ve been awake for all of five minutes. I don’t know whether I can handle hearing this, whatever he’s about to tell me, but if I stop him now, there might never be another time. I hold my breath, bracing myself.
“I was eleven when it started. My dad was supposed to be watching me and Emma while Mom was at work. He went out in the early morning and told me to keep an eye on my sister. He did that a lot. Rosie came over to play with Em. About three in the afternoon, Dad rolled home, steaming drunk. He never used to drink, but then all of a sudden he just … did. He got violent when he was like that. Emma and Rosie had fallen asleep in the living room. I was in the kitchen, making sandwiches for us because he hadn’t come home to give us lunch. I was going to wake the girls up when the food was ready. Instead, Dad came and found me, and he was holding Rosie in his arms. She was still asleep. He told me to take my clothes off.”
“What?” I want to pull my knees into my chest, somehow make myself small, but my thigh hurts too much. Luke doesn’t look at me. I don’t think he can. He closes his eyes. Swallows. “I was a funny kid. I thought I was a grown-up already. I didn’t want him seeing me naked. Didn’t want anyone seeing me naked. I told him I didn’t want to take my clothes off. Dad, he staggered over to the oven and turned on the stove. Gas stove. The biggest ring. He turned it up as high as it would go, Rosie still asleep in his arms, her head on his shoulder, and he got the metal spatula Mom always used when she was making omelettes. He held the flat end of it in the flames until the metal was glowing red, and then he said to me, you take your fucking clothes off right now, or I’m gonna put this on her fucking skin.” Luke stops again, clearly struggling. He blows out a deep breath. There are tears in his eyes.
“I knew he’d do it. He was fucking crazy when he was drunk. I didn’t want Rosie to get hurt, so I … I took off my clothes. Dad shook Rosie awake then. She didn’t understand what was happening. He told her we were gonna play a fucking game,” he spits.
I feel like I’m choking on my own breath. I cover my mouth, hands cupped over my face, dreading what’s coming. Suspecting it. Not wanting it to be true.
“And so Rosie says, what kind … kind of game are we playing? She was fucking … eight years old.” His voice is so strangled, he can barely talk. “And my dad, he says, you and Luke are gonna play and me, I’m gonna watch. He gets Rosie to take her clothes off because she doesn’t fucking understand what the hell is going on, and then—” Luke chokes on the last word, tears falling freely down his face now. He doubles over, shoulders shaking, body trembling uncontrollably.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. You don’t need to say anymore.” I shunt myself down in the bed, wrapping my arms around him, but he remains rigid.
“I didn’t fuck her. I knew it was fucking wrong. I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to, anyway. I was too young.” Luke’s face hardens. “Made him furious that I wouldn’t fucking try, though. Called me a fucking pussy. Told me I was gay. He picked up the spatula and told me if I didn’t touch her the way he wanted me to he was gonna hurt Rosie, and then he was gonna go wake up Em and hurt her, too.” Grief shakes him, shakes him hard enough that I think he’s going to come apart at the seams. “He stripped himself naked and jerked off while he watched us, and then afterwards he just left us there, naked in the kitchen. He went upstairs and passed out, snoring so loud we could hear him downstairs. That was the first time it happened. The second time, it was my twelfth birthday. I had friends over at the house. Once again daddy dearest got wasted. Rosie hadn’t been back to the house since the first time, she was scared, I think, but Mom had gone over and gotten her, said Em could have a friend over, too.
“Me and my friends watched movies at the house. Later on, when it was getting dark, we went out into the woods to play with the laser tag gear Mom had bought me. Ems and Rosie wanted to come too. Somehow, it all happened again. He found us, separated us from the group. I could hear my friends all around us in the dark, laughing and shouting at each other. They thought we were hiding, me and Rosie. When we didn’t come out after a while, the other kids ran back to the house. Their parents were there to pick some of them up. They came back with their kids to look for us.” He lets out a hard sob. “And they found us.”
“Oh, god. Oh, god, no, Luke. Luke, it wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t your fault.” He goes limp against me finally, collapsing as though under the weight of the confession. I press my face into his hair, crying with him. How? How could a boy’s own father do something like that to him? How? It doesn’t make any sense. “Where was he?” I ask, fighting to speak around the anger building in my chest. “Where was your dad?”
“He heard them coming. He left us there.”
I want to smash something. I want to break something. I want to scream until my lungs bleed.
“The parents called the cops. Said I was sexually abusing Rosie. I denied it, of course, told them about my dad, but he said I was lying. That I was always lying. The police couldn’t decide what was true so they did nothing. They let my dad go, and I had to start seeing your father. Community counselling, they called it.”
“And you told him everything that happened?”
Luke nods. He breathes in deeply, sitting up straight, then scrubbing away his tears with the back of his hands. “I was a child. And so was Rosie. Her family moved away right after. She … she died of leukemia when she was thirteen.” Luke looks at me, and I can see the self-loathing in his eyes. It’s heartbreaking.
“You’re not to blame,” I whisper. “My dad must have told you that?”
He looks away, screwing his eyes shut. “Yeah. Yeah, he did. He took care of me, Ave.”
My heart feels like it’s on the brink of shutting down altogether. All the times that I’ve felt cheated by the relationship Luke shared with my father feel extraordinarily petty now. Pathetic. I was awful to resent the kindness my dad showed to him. Luke needed him so much.
“I’m glad,” I say. “I’m glad he was there for you.” We sit together in silence, neither one of us moving, for a long time. Eventually, I lie back in the bed, exhaustion overcoming me. “We’re both pretty fucked up, aren’t we?” I ask. “But at least there are no secrets between us anymore. What happened, Luke … you were a victim of that as much as Rosie was. And it changes nothing about how I feel for you. I still … I still love you. I still want us to be together.”
Luke buries his face in his hands. He’s quiet for what seems like an age. When he turns his head, still resting it in his hands, to face me, he tries smiling. It’s a twisted, sad smile. “I love you, too, Avery.” He sighs. “There’s just one more thing, though. One more thing before all of this is over.”
“What? What is it?” Whatever it is, I can handle it. I know I can. After all of this, I think I can handle anything.
“Your dad,” he says, the sad smile still there. “Max has been cleared of killing the girls. The men in that warehouse. But he did kill one person, Avery.” I already know what he’s going to say before he says it. “Your dad killed my dad. And I loved him for it.”
Epilogue
Three weeks later
A lot’s changed while I was sleeping. It turns out Luke’s no longer a member of the New York Police Department. Well, he is, but he’s on sabbatical, taken a year off to go record an album with his bandmates over in Los Angeles. He still doesn’t seem sure about his decision, but there’s no backing out for him now. He’s packed up his belongings, and I’ve moved into his apartment. Since Leslie’s currently serving out an eighteen-month prison sentence for the supply of a controlled substance, I was without a roommate. I didn’t feel like waiting to see who Columbia sent to live with me, so Luke asked me to watch over his place while he’s gone. It’s an ideal set-up: rent free, and the apartment won’t get ransacked because there’s no one living there.
Luke grabs me from behind, wrapping his arms around my waist as I watch his bandmate and best friend, Cole, load up a rather fancy-looking tour bus that their record label has supplied. “Are you sure you don’t wanna come live out the back of a bus filled with stinky boys for a while?” he whispers into my hair.
“Um, no thanks?”
“Ahh, come on. It’ll be fun. You’ll be well versed in all the rock classics by the time we arrive in L.A. Plus you’ll know every single pick-up line ever created and used by man, too. Cole won’t be able to help himself.”
Cole hears this. He tosses a sleeping bag into the back of the bus, and then points an index finger at Luke. “It’s not my fault that you chose to hook up with a hot woman, Reid. I can’t help it if I notice her from time to time.”
Cole’s actually been a gentleman around me, which is apparently out of character. Luke grins at him. He does that a lot these days—grins, laughs, smiles. I notice myself doing it more and more, too. It seems as though the two of us are easing into ourselves a little more. With my father no longer held accountable for such unspeakable atrocities, I’ve come out of hiding. I’ve changed my name back to Iris—it was the name my father gave me, after all. When I was born, Amanda said she didn’t really care what I was called so long as I slept through the night. It was Dad who’d agonized over what I should be known as for the rest of my life. I always felt a little shamed that I’d adopted a new name to go by; it felt like I was disrespecting him. Now that I’m Iris again, everything just feels … right. I am who I’m meant to be.
Luke’s still Luke, but there are subtle differences to him now. Since I found out the awful things he went through when he was just a child, it’s as though there’s nothing holding him back anymore. He’s come alive, and so have I. We’re figuring out how to be alive together.
Does it matter that my father actually did murder someone? I don’t know. When Luke dropped that bombshell, I was shocked for a long time. I spent days wondering if it still counted, if Dad was still a bad person. But Clive Reid was a drunk who sexually abused two children. And when a young boy confided in my father all the terrible things he’d been made to do, my father did the only thing he felt would keep that young boy safe from further harm. Because it would have happened again. Clive was just that sort of person.
“You’re all set to start back at Columbia?” Luke asks. I nod, leaning back into him, enjoying the security of him pressed up against my back. The college administration decided that due to the mitigating circumstances of my absence from school, they would let me attempt to catch up on my own time. That way I wouldn’t have to restart the whole year … or lose my spot on the Journalism program. Professor Lang recommended me highly for the placement. Said he was interested to see how many fires I would start.
“And you’ll be coming out for the summer break?” Luke nuzzles into my neck, nipping lightly at my skin with his teeth. I feel like dragging him back upstairs to the apartment, but his bandmates are already pissed that he still can’t lift anything because of his injury. If we vanish off to have sex—again—there’ll probably be a full-blown riot.
“I’ve booked my flights and everything,” I say.
Luke squeezes me harder. “Good. I wouldn’t bother bringing many clothes. You’re gonna be naked most of the time.”
I don’t doubt that. I don’t object, either.
The time comes when they have to leave. I feel like I have a ten-ton weight on my chest as Luke kisses me and climbs up into the bus. “I’ll call you later,” he promises. “Don’t go falling in love with any other guys while I’m gone.”
“I won’t.”
“Pinky swear?” He holds up his pinkie, smirking like a fool. I loop my little finger around his, squeezing hard.
“Pinky swear.”
Cole guns the engine on the bus, hollering at us from the driver’s seat. “Come on, fucker! Let’s get this show on the road!”
Luke kisses me one last time. His hair’s so long now. Way longer than he was ever allowed to wear it as a cop. With his six o’clock shadow and all of those outrageously sexy tattoos on display, he’s beginning to look every part the highly sexed rock star.
“I love you,” he mouths as the door closes between us.
“I love you, too,” I mouth right back.
The D.M.F tour bus moves slowly off down the street. I stand on the sidewalk, watching it go, my heart breaking just a little. But despite how crappy being apart feels right now, this is something Luke has to do. I know that in my bones. And besides, summer’s right around the corner. I feel that in my bones, too.
Frankie Rose, Winter (Four Seasons #1)
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