“Say it,” he said.
But I was somewhere else. I was in the future. In a few hours, Shawn
would be kneeling by my bed, and he’d be so very sorry. I knew it even
as I hunched there.
“What’s going on?” A man’s voice floated up from the stairwell in the
hall.
I turned my head and saw a face hovering between two wooden
railings. It was Tyler.
I was hallucinating. Tyler never came home. As I thought that, I
laughed out loud, a high-pitched cackle. What kind of lunatic would
come back here once he’d escaped? There were now so many pink and
yellow specks in my vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe. That
was good. It meant I was close to passing out. I was looking forward to
it.
Shawn dropped my wrist and again I fell. I looked up and saw that
his gaze was fixed on the stairwell. Only then did it occur to me that
Tyler was real.
Shawn took a step back. He had waited until Dad and Luke were out
of the house, away on a job, so his physicality could go unchallenged.
Confronting his younger brother—less vicious but powerful in his own
way—was more than he’d bargained for.
“What’s going on?” Tyler repeated. He eyed Shawn, inching forward
as if approaching a rattlesnake.
Mother stopped crying. She was embarrassed. Tyler was an outsider
now. He’d been gone for so long, he’d been shifted to that category of
people who we kept secrets from. Who we kept this from.
Tyler moved up the stairs, advancing on his brother. His face was
taut, his breath shallow, but his expression held no hint of surprise. It
seemed to me that Tyler knew exactly what he was doing, that he had
done this before, when they were younger and less evenly matched.
Tyler halted his forward march but he didn’t blink. He glared at Shawn
as if to say, Whatever is happening here, it’s done.
Shawn began to murmur about my clothes and what I did in town.
Tyler cut him off with a wave of his hand. “I don’t want to know,” he
said. Then, turning to me: “Go, get out of here.”