shadow. Mother had seen me take my journals to the car. She must have
known what that meant, must have sensed the farewell in it, because she
fetched my father. He gave me a stiff hug and said, “I love you, you know
that?”
“I do,” I said. “That has never been the issue.”
Those words are the last I said to my father.
I drove south; I didn’t know where I was going. It was nearly Christmas. I
had decided to go to the airport and board the next flight to Boston when
Tyler called.
I hadn’t spoken to my brother in months—after what happened with
Audrey, it had seemed pointless to confide in my siblings. I was sure Mother
would have told every brother, cousin, aunt and uncle the story she had told
Erin: that I was possessed, dangerous, taken by the devil. I wasn’t wrong:
Mother had warned them. But then she made a mistake.
After I left Buck’s Peak, she panicked. She was afraid I might contact
Tyler, and that if I did, he might sympathize with me. She decided to get to
Tyler first, to deny anything I might tell him, but she miscalculated. She
didn’t stop to think how the denials would sound, coming from nowhere like
that.
“Of course Shawn didn’t stab Diego and threaten Tara with the knife,”
Mother reassured Tyler, but to Tyler, who had never heard any part of this
story, not from me or anyone else, this was somewhat less than reassuring. A
moment after he said goodbye to Mother, Tyler called me, demanding to
know what had happened and why I hadn’t come to him.
I thought he’d say I was lying but he didn’t. He accepted almost
immediately the reality I’d spent a year denying. I didn’t understand why he
was trusting me, but then he told me his own stories and I remembered:
Shawn had been his older brother, too.
In the weeks that followed, Tyler began to test my parents in the subtle,
nonconfrontational way that was uniquely his. He suggested that perhaps the
situation had been mishandled, that perhaps I was not possessed. Perhaps I
was not evil at all.
I might have taken comfort in Tyler’s trying to help me, but the memory of
my sister was too raw, and I didn’t trust him. I knew that if Tyler confronted
my parents—really confronted them—they would force him to choose