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Eight. I was eight.
I flinched and looked away, only to screw my eyes shut.
“You keep quiet, my darling. Do you hear me? We both keep quiet about this. Shh, my darling. You don’t want to go to hell, do you? That’s what happens to people like Grandpa. You don’t want to be like him, Jake.”
“Jake—are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I gnashed my teeth and swallowed against a sudden bout of nausea. Holy fuck, it almost made me gag. Her fingers in my hair, her soothing voice—except, there was nothing soothing about what’d happened. I’d been so fucking scared that I’d been shaking. She’d held something. I remembered the stifling heat in the room and the smells billowing upstairs from the kitchen. She’d been in the middle of preparing dinner. She’d ripped…fuck, what was it? A magazine? A newspaper? A picture? She’d ripped something from my hands, and she’d squeezed me tightly. The gleam of a knife—that was it. She’d had that fucking knife in her hand when she’d hugged me, and I wasn’t sure I could even call it a hug. Just a painfully hard squeeze oozing of desperation and threat, with that damn knife in my face.
“We’re never gonna talk about this again, my darling. We keep quiet. You forget what you saw. He’s a sick, sick man who will burn in hell. And you don’t want that for yourself. You don’t want to burn, do you?”
“I need a minute,” I managed to get out and rose to my feet. “We’re changin’ the topic when I get back.”
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
I pressed a fist to my mouth and stalked behind the van, ignoring Roe calling for me, worry evident in his voice. I needed air. I needed to breathe. Twigs broke under my boots, and I planted a hand on a tree as I moved past it. Just a few feet into the woods, and then everything was dark. Deep breaths. The cold air helped at the same time as it drove tiny knives down my throat. My hands prickled and stung, as if they were going numb. My mouth felt dry. My heart pounded furiously. I blinked and had to steady myself against another tree.
I’d kept my promise. I’d never uttered a word to anyone about that day. I’d buried that memory so deep that I still didn’t fucking remember what I’d stumbled upon. Why was Grandpa George a bad man? Given…all the circumstances, I didn’t have too many options. In fact, I could only think of one thing that would cause such a reaction from my mother, but it felt so damn impossible.
Had my grandfather been gay?
A strangled sound escaped me, and I covered my mouth with my hand again. No, Jesus Christ, that was absurd. Give me a fucking lobotomy—I felt insane for just thinking about him in those terms.
“Please don’t go too far, Jake!” I heard Roe holler. “I’m sorry if I said something wrong. I’m so sorry.”
“I’m so sorry, Mama.”
A sharp pain radiated from my chest, and I collapsed against the tree with a single thought blaring through my skull. Heart attack, heart attack, heart attack. My vision blurred and blackened, but maybe I had my eyes closed. I didn’t fucking know. I sucked in some air and clutched my chest, paralyzing fear rendering me useless. I was on the ground; I must’ve slumped down or fallen on my ass. Holy shit, it hurt. I was having a goddamn heart attack, wasn’t I? I was gonna die in fucking Norway, in the middle of nowhere, to the memory of my mother holding a knife to my cheek.
Not a knife.
But something sharp. I could feel the edge of…
Deep breaths.
No. It hadn’t been the knife. I’d seen the knife. Flashes of yellow invaded my brain, and I knew those walls. The guest room. The room in which Ma’s folks had stayed when they visited. Why had I been in there? What had I found—
“You forget you ever saw this picture, Jake. You hear me?”
I touched my cheek, feeling something wet—and that edge. The edge of paper, photo paper. A picture. God, I didn’t wanna remember another fucking thing. I groaned at the out-of-control spin of countless fragments of memories. Until those fragments began coming together. Haley had been nearby. In the next room, crying in her crib. I’d thought she’d been the most boring little sister ever because she didn’t wanna grow up and play with me. So I’d run into the guest room, hoping to find Grandpa there. At least he would play cards with me.
That was it. That was why I’d looked through his suitcase on the rocking chair in the corner—to find his cards. The deck with cool trucks on the cards. Instead, I’d found a photo of two men kissing on a beach.
The nausea exploded within me, and before I knew it, I leaned to the side and threw up.
