Page 2 of Scarred By Sin

Her voice shook slightly as emotion took over. She was trying to steady it, struggling to reach for something normal to say, and she had landed on the only thing she knew how to offer him. The assurance that, despite the destruction around her, the household would continue to function.

Jacob didn't even acknowledge her.

He didn't glance back, didn't nod, didn't make any indication that he had heard her at all. He walked down the porch steps with the same unhurried ease, his sneakers barely making a sound on the cement steps.

His hands stayed in his pockets.

His shoulders remained relaxed.

He moved past the ruined garden without a flicker of interest, as though it were someone else's yard entirely. Brook observed him cross the lawn to the curb, where his Ford Taurus was parked. The dark sedan had been a graduation gift from their parents two months ago. Their father had been so proud to hand over the keys, had clapped Jacob on the back, and told him it was the start of his independence.

Jacob had smiled at that comment. The same kind he had just given Brook on the porch. He reached his car and opened the driver's side door. The expression he gave her over his shoulder all but sucked the last drop of humidity from the air.

He settled behind the wheel, and before too long, he'd pulled away from the house without hesitation. He didn't even bother to use a turn signal before disappearing around the corner at the end of the block.

While the sound of the engine faded into the stillness of the afternoon, a sprinkler hissed somewhere two houses down. A dog barked a few times and then stopped. When she turned around, she found her mother had lowered herself to the edge of the flowerbed, staring at the nearest rosebush as though willing it back into the ground.

Brook believed with absolute certainty that the Bushel boys hadn't destroyed the flowerbed. Neither had Max. The knowledge wasn't a suspicion or a guess. The way Jacob had stared at her and not at the mess was because he was already aware of what it looked like.

He'd made it.

But Brook wouldn't correct her mother's assumption. The truth would cause more heartache, and her mother was already in enough pain. Some truths were like that.

They didn't set you free.

They just made the cage smaller.

A trowel lay discarded in the overturned soil near the edge of the walkway. Brook bent down and picked it up. The wooden handle was warm from the sun, and dried dirt flaked off against her palm.

“I'll help try to save them, Mom,” Brook murmured as she knelt to the ground beside her. The gratitude in her mother's expression was unguarded, and for just a brief moment, Brook wondered if there wasn't a seed of doubt in the woman’s mind. Did she have any reservations about her son at all? “What should we do first?”

“Well, some of the bushes might still be okay if we get them back into the soil quickly enough,” her mother said as she stared at Brook's hands. “Go into the garage and grab my old gloves. These thorns are nasty.”

It didn't take long for Brook to collect a pair of worn garden gloves. She returned to the front yard, pulled them on, and lowered herself to her knees. The soil was dry and loose where the rose bushes had been torn up, but underneath the first few inches, it was still dark and cool.

Brook inhaled the rich, mineral scent of earth that had been turned over. It mixed with the sweet, wilting fragrance of the roses. Her mother's hands moved with care, cupping the root ball of the nearest bush and examining it for damage. She spoke softly as she worked, mostly to herself. She mentioned buying some fresh compost from the hardware store and how the ceramic border would need to be replaced.

Her father would be upset, but they could fix it.

Everything could be fixed.

Brook tried to salvage one of the few rosebushes that hadn't been pulled out by the roots. She packed the soil around the base and repositioned the bush as much as possible. She tried to shut off her thoughts about Jacob. She constantly struggled with the intrusive, horrible theories that invaded her mind while trying to fall asleep at night.

Why would he do something so horrible?

She'd even started locking her bedroom door at night. She didn't have words for what she understood about her brother, not yet. She couldn't have articulated his cruelty or the way he seemed to study the people around him for weak points, the way other kids studied for exams.

But Jacob was eighteen and leaving soon.

Their parents talked about it at dinner sometimes, their father offering advice about trade schools and their mother hoping he would stay close. Brook listened to those conversations and experienced two emotions simultaneously.

Relief that he might go.

And terror about what he might do before he left.

She feared that by the time Jacob was finally gone for good, he would do to their family what he had done to the flowerbed. Tear it apart at the roots. Destroy the very thing their mother had spent years nurturing and protecting, then walk away with his hands in his pockets and that same unreadable expression. And their mother would stand in the wreckage and find someone else to blame, because the truth was a door she could not afford to open.

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