Brandon sticks his hands in his pockets and keeps walking, catching up to LeGrand. The train of his thoughts continues, crashing down a hill, engine on fire. “Jaden got her killed. Ava. Both of them, really. Sydney, too.”
“He didn’t know.” Mack wishes she could blame Jaden, but he thought it was a game. He was playing.
Then again, she knew. Just like she knew the game of hide-and-seek with their father had higher stakes than simply winning or losing when she stole Maddie’s spot. It was in his voice. She might have forgotten her mother’s laugh, but she hasn’t forgotten his voice that night.
People pretend things aren’t wrong, even when they can feel the truth, because they’re too afraid of what it means to look right at the horror, right at the wrongness, to face the truth in all its terrible glory. Like little kids, playing hide-and-seek. If they can’t see the monster, it can’t get them. But it can. It always can. And while you aren’t looking, it’s eating everyone around you.
So. Mack knew then, just like she knows now. And if Mack’s guilty in her sister’s death, then Jaden’s guilty in at least three women’s deaths here.
And Mack is guilty, isn’t she?
“Here,” LeGrand says. They’ve walked long enough. They’re far from the fence, far from the gun waiting there. Is the whole fence guarded? It has to be. The odds that there would be a guard on watch exactly where they appeared were too small. LeGrand wonders how they’ll sneak over, why they’re wasting time with Jaden, but Mack wants to check for Ava and Brandon wants to find Jaden, so who is he to argue?
They all stare up at the skeletal structure LeGrand brought them to. The swing chains hang heavily down, nothing drifting, nothing moving. That’s perhaps the most unnerving thing about it. A structure built for movement, for joy, rusted and stripped to stillness.
“He’s up there?” Brandon squints upward. “How?”
“Climbed the chains.” LeGrand stares upward, too. He’s good at climbing trees, but this is a very different skill. Mack certainly can’t do it. It’s nothing like scrambling up the water heater and climbing into rafters. Brandon grabs one of the chains, the whole structure shaking and groaning metallically as he climbs a couple of feet before stalling out and dropping back to the ground.
“So do we wait for night? For him to come down?” LeGrand asks. “Do we need to wait for him?” They’re wasting time, and LeGrand doesn’t want to be rude, doesn’t want to push them, but they only have this day and this night before the morning comes and resets everything.
“No,” Brandon says, and there’s a strange new quality to his voice, a sort of dreamy vacancy. Maybe the train has finally ground to a halt. “No, we can’t wait.”
* * *
—
Brandon’s father had another family.
Grammy believed in telling the truth, so she never lied to Brandon. His mother was a teenage dropout, and his father visited every time he was in the area on business. When she fell pregnant, Brandon’s father insisted she keep the baby. She had, of course, thought it meant he loved her and wanted a family together. Grammy didn’t agree. She knew that men like him didn’t have families with girls like her daughter.
But Brandon’s mother saw it as a fresh start. The beginning of a new life. So she kept the baby, and got a job at the local gas station, a way of passing the time until her true love left his other family and joined them.
He never did. But he did check up on them, keep tabs on them, stop by enough that she could never settle into another relationship, never give up the hope of him.
Brandon was six when she died. He took up his mother’s torch and spirit of infinite waiting. His father came once a year, spent a day with him, disappeared again. Brandon lived for those visits.
But between visits, he had Grammy. A kind, practical woman, raised on a farm, as blunt as the tools she used to help her family break the hard earth and coax potatoes free.
When Brandon was twelve, recently dumped back on his grandma’s doorstep after a day of fishing with his dad, bereft, knowing it would be at least a year until the next bright shining few hours with him, Grammy patted him on the shoulder.
“He doesn’t love you,” she said matter-of-factly. “He didn’t love your mother, either, and I don’t want you to spend your whole life waiting for something he can’t give. Men like that, people are things to them. That’s why he can pick you up and drop you as easily. But you’re not a thing, Brandon. You’re wonderful, and if he can’t see that, he’s broken. Not you. Don’t ever forget it.”