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Ben lets a smile shine through. This boy lights up the night when he smiles. “There’s no such thing as too much.” He drops a kiss on my forehead. “I like you too, Galway. A hell of a lot.”
He doesn’t leave until I’m inside the house with the door locked. I know this because as soon as the door shuts I immediately look through the peephole. Ben sees the shadow and waves. Then he disappears into the darkness.
And I’m left here, leaning against the door with my knees weak and a smile on my face.
Ben
When my parents met my dad was married to someone else and my mother had just dropped out of college. Her parents had drowned in a boating accident a year earlier and she’d learned that the upper class life she’d grown up with was a façade of staggering debt and bad business decisions. Penniless and not used to making her own way, she had no choice but to leave school and get a job. Fate led her to a receptionist position at the Drexler Group, one of the largest property developers in the tri state area.
That’s where she met Harrison Drexler. She was young and naïve; he was rich and worldly but unhappily married. She got pregnant and he gladly arranged for a significant divorce settlement in order to be free and marry her. I was their only child and grew up in a very ritzy beachfront community. The other two homes in our cul de sac were occupied by my father’s older brothers and their families. My cousins were all boys, all far older, and most paid me no attention.
Angus and Grey were the exceptions.
Fraternal twins, they were six years old when I was born and I understood from a young age that they were people to be avoided. Some family tension arose when I was five and came home covered in bruises after an overnight visit to their house. Later I learned of the ugly confrontation between my father and Uncle Gannon. The boys never laid a hand on me again but they knew how to carry out torment in other ways. Especially Angus. In time I figured out how to dodge my deranged cousins and after they graduated from high school they found better targets to zero in on.
I realize now that I was a spoiled kid. I’m sure I never gave a second thought about why I could have anything I wanted. And I might have enjoyed the rest of my childhood in that moneyed world, groomed as the next generation of Drexler leaders that had dominated the local landscape for nearly a century, if not for the Marshlands.
The Drexler Group had been trying to get their hands on the Marshlands for years. A thousand acres of undeveloped, swampy land surrounded by expensive real estate. Anything built there would be worth a fortune once the land was drained. But it was a state environmental protection zone, home to some kind of rare frog. When the Drexler Group bought off some politicians and tried to get the status of the Marshlands changed, there was a public outcry complete with protests and news coverage and a whole lot of pissed off people. There was a particular group who called themselves the Marshlands Protectors and they wouldn’t give up, not even when giant tractors arrived to level the ground. Things got ugly and people were pushed around and it became a national news story. Then the two main leaders of the Marshland Protectors, a married couple, just disappeared into thin air. The protests stopped and all the trouble seemed to be over.
But really, it was just beginning.
My dad became withdrawn, depressed. He began spending long, lonely hours in his private office. He drank heavily. Sometimes he’d cry for no reason; tears would just start running down his face while he was sitting at the dinner table and then he’d quietly leave the room. Then came the day when my mother stepped into my room, sobbing and distraught. We would need to leave, me and her. My dad was in the process of arranging it. Something terrible had happened, something to do with the leaders of the Marshlands Protectors. My dad knew a thing or two about their disappearance. And he would tell the authorities when he was sure my mom and I were safe. He did not trust his brothers. He would make no confessions until he was certain we were beyond the reach of the Drexler men. An old friend of his, a former intelligence agent, was already working on securing new identities for us.
To me, this news was outrageous.
I didn’t understand.
I was furious.
And I wouldn’t be going anywhere or cooperating with anyone. My dad must have lost his damn mind. That was the only explanation. I would go to my uncles. They would know what to make of all this.
I waited until midnight, long after my mother had passed out after swallowing a few of her favorite sedatives. I had two choices; Uncle Layton’s house or Uncle Gannon’s. With the Terrible Twins home from college for the summer I shuddered at the idea of going near Uncle Gannon’s house so I skulked through the back gate to Uncle Layton’s. I knew the security code but I didn’t need it because the back door leading to the kitchen was slightly ajar. The house was dark and no one was in sight. Uncle Layton’s four boys were all grown and long gone and his wife Marjorie was summering at a Mexican resort. I wasn’t even sure if Uncle Layton was home and I felt like a prowler as I crept from one room to the next, expecting an alarm to go off or something.
I can never forget pausing at the base of the grand staircase and hearing voices, voices I recognized.
I can never forget climbing the stairs one dreaded step at a time.
I can never forget the pleading tone of disbelief in my father’s words.
I can never forget the sight of my cousin with a gun in his hand as my uncles stood by and passively watched.
And I can never forget that when the gun fired I failed to shout or tackle them or fight back in any way.
No, the fourteen-year-old coward that I was ran back home and woke up my mother. Maybe that was the last remnant of my childhood, hoping that mommy would fix everything. She’d tell me it had all been a terrible dream and in the morning everything would be as it should.
But it was no dream.
The story they made up was that my Uncle Layton had arrived home to find his distraught youngest brother in his house with a gun in his hand. He said my dad confessed to cheating on my mom and to stealing from the business. And then he said my father committed suicide right in front of him.
I never knew what hatred really was until then.
I also never understood how evil people were capable of being until then.
And I wanted to tell. God, I wanted to tell. I wanted to scream the truth from the rooftops and call them murderers to their faces. I wanted to see them carted away in handcuffs and sent to the electric chair. Instead I stood beside my mother at the funeral, silent and grim, while she sobbed. And I knew I would say nothing. I would say nothing because I’d made a promise to my mother and I was all she had left.
“Bennet, sweetheart, please listen. They’ll kill you. They will. And I can’t lose you too. I won’t survive that. Do this for me.”
The day after the funeral we left everything behind. That old friend of my father’s, a big bear of a guy named Reginald, was eager to help. He would make sure we reached a safe location with new identities. Most of my father’s assets were tied to the Drexler Group but he had managed to squirrel away some cash in several safe deposit boxes. Before putting us on a plane, Reginald drove us across three states in order to cover the trail and along the way he informed us we’d need new names.
