“No! It isn’t! You got out. You left.” I open my mouth to argue again, but he shuts me down. “No. Wait. Just fuckin’ listen.” He rakes a hand through his curls and looks over at me. “Dammit, Grey. You were out of all this shit. Away from it. And sure, you’d come back summers. But you didn’t live here. You weren’t ever here long enough to let the stink of this place soak into you.”
“That’s not my fault! I wanted to be here. You know how bad –”
“Stop it! Are you even hearing what I’m saying? We were glad you got away from all this.” He gestures around. To the dock. And the boardwalk. The big black barrel. “We loved you, Grey. Shit!” He grits his teeth like something hurts him. Way down deep. “We love you,” he says. “Elora, especially. It almost killed her, cuttin’ things off with you last summer. Lettin’ it end that way. For a long while, I didn’t know if she’d survive it. But you were gonna come home. Turn eighteen and come back to this. And she loved you too fuckin’ much to let that happen. And me! God. Greycie. I love you so much. But all of us. Every goddamn one of us. We all fuckin’ love you.” He pauses to catch his breath. “So, you wanna know why we never told you any of this? We never told for the same reason Miss Roselyn never told you. Because we love you. And we want you to be okay.” His voice splinters like rotten wood, and he swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. “One of us needs to fucking be okay.”
My mouth is hanging open, but I can’t seem to make it work. I don’t have the will or the words to respond to that, so I sit there for a few seconds in silence watching Hart search his pockets for another cigarette. When he lights it up, I study the slow burn of the paper.
And that reminds me of my mother.
“What happened next?” I whisper. “After the fire?”
Hart gets up and walks toward the side of the dock. Toward the rotten, crumbling edge.
“They left it still smokin’。 Figured that was it, I guess. They thought Dempsey Fontenot was in there and that he was dead. For sure. So they came on home.”
“But that wasn’t it. Was it?”
Hart shakes his head, then takes a few long drags off his cigarette before he goes on. Like he needs to prepare himself for whatever he’s about to tell me.
“He showed up right here. On the boardwalk. Dempsey Fontenot. That very same evenin’。 About nightfall.”
I keep my eyes on the dark river so I don’t have to look at Hart the way he is now. All hollow and scarred.
“And I was there for this part,” he says. “Nobody had to tell me about it. I actually saw it happen. I remember it firsthand.” He finishes the cigarette and tosses it into the current. “Dempsey Fontenot blows in here that night like a hurricane. Bellowing like a wounded boar and carrying on like a wild man. And people start coming out to see what the ruckus is. So my daddy, he takes me with him. Just for the fun of it. He wants me to see, I guess. For whatever fucked-up reason. And Dempsey, he’s screaming about how they killed his kid. Murdered his baby. That’s what he kept yellin’。 Burned him alive, he said. And nobody would’ve believed it. Because nobody had any idea. About the wife. Or the son.” He corrects himself. “Sons, I guess.”
“Twins,” I say. “Like Ember and Orli.”
And Sera and Sander.
Elora and me.
Hart nods. “Only we didn’t know that. Shit. I never knew it until tonight. But he had the one kid, Greycie. The little boy. He actually had the kid with him. Had his body.” He stops and looks at me. “What did you say his name was?”
“Aeron.”
“Aeron,” Hart whispers. “I never knew his name. But I knew he was my age. Four years old.”
“Number twelve,” I tell him. And Hart nods again.
“And Dempsey Fontenot is standing on the boardwalk holding this dead kid. Screaming bloody murder. And this kid is . . . all burned up. You know?”
“And you saw that?”
“I didn’t just see it. I could feel it. I could feel that pain.” He shakes his head. “Strong enough to make me piss my pants. Right there where I was standin’。”
Evie’s wind chimes are whispering in my ear again.
“And that’s when the storm kicks up. Out of nowhere. I remember the rain. Buckets and buckets of cold rain. Huge waves on the river. This impossible flash flood on a clear evening. And the lightning and thunder. It was unreal. You could feel that electricity in the air. Strong enough to stand your hair up on top of your head.”