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“What?” Swing.Thud.
“I freaked you out by pretending we were engaged.”
“That’s not why I was freaked out.”
“Why, then?”
“Because…” I swing the axe again, forcing myself to take deeper breaths. I wanted to clear my head out here, not die of oxygen deprivation. “Because I knew how pissed you were going to be, and then I thought about all those cops looking at you, and I wanted to get you out of that place before anything happened.”
“Nothing happened.”
“So much bullshit could have happened in there. You have no idea. Tommy’s a decent enough guy, but you can’t always count on cops to be trustworthy. And you were justin there,connecting yourself to me for some unknown fucking reason, and if anything had gone wrong they could’ve just kept me in there where—”
“Jameson.”
I’m already overheated from the chopping and the sun, and it gets worse. If I were a magnifying glass the forest would be on fire.
“Where I couldn’t get to you, and then I’d have had to—I don’t know. Then I’d have had to do something drastic, like dig through concrete with a fork to make sure nothing terrible was happening to you.”
“Jameson, it was fine.”
I mean to split the wood on the stump, but at the last minute, my arms rebel and I hurl the damn thing into the trees and round on Lily. I don’t want to tower over her because I’m not an asshole, and I’m not trying to scare her, I’m just ready to explode out of my own skin.
“Literally fucking nothing about today was fine.” I back up another step. My hands go up in front of me like she’ll be close enough to touch, but she’s not. I’ve made sure of that. I still want my fingers in her hair. “That was a nightmare.”
Lily shakes her head a little bit. “I thought you said things at the hospital were okay.”
“Theyweren’tokay. For fuck’s sake. I can’t walk into those places without being right back there at the—at the other—”
She bends down, and I can’t figure out why until the sun catches on her lemonade can. Lily abandons it in the grass and comes over to me as if I’m not an axe-wielding criminal kidnapper who let her get shot at today. Her arms go around my waist, and she presses her body up against mine, her cheek on my chest. I put one arm around her and fumble with the elastic in her hair until it’s loose again and I can curl my fingers through it.
Better.
That’s better.
“What did you remember?” she asks.
“It wasn’t nice. Before—when they took Mason, after the fire. It wasn’t a nice place or a private floor or anything. And the cops—”
It’s a little fucked up, actually, that I get arrested so often when it takes almost nothing to remember the red-and-blue lights flashing in our driveway.
“The cops came to the house to take us to the hospital. Gabriel and Remy and me. She was so scared, so I carried her. Even though she was six. It wasn’t like she was a baby. She kept losing her shit over and over again. People kept coming in to tell Gabriel things because he was the oldest one who wasn’t in surgery, and then they—”
Lily makes a bunch of noises that aren’t really words. They remind me of lullabies, or things I used to say to Remy when she woke up in the middle of the night. Most of them weren’t true at all. The lie I told the most was that everything was going to be okay. We were all going to be okay. She didn’t have to worry.
“We waited for a long time in this little waiting room, and then they came in and said they needed Gabriel to help with Mason, because he’d woken up too early. Something like that. He’d come out of the anesthesia early in the recovery room, and they thought it would help if someone from the family came to talk to him. So Gabriel went.”
Lily takes a deep breath and lets it out. “You didn’t go, though? You stayed with Remy in the waiting room.”
“Somebody was screaming.” The words don’t feel like they come from my mouth, necessarily. They’re just happening. “Somebody had been screaming, down the hall. Remy would get used to it, and then she’d notice it again, and then she’d cry, and that was the only time I couldn’t hear it, because she was so loud.” My throat feels likeI’vebeen screaming. “Yeah. Gabriel went, and we stayed.”
“Did he help, though? Was it worth it?”
“No.” I let out an unhinged laugh. “No, it didn’t help. He was gone for a while, and whoever it was kept on screaming and yelling. Remy passed out in the middle of it. She couldn’t stay awake anymore. But I was awake when Gabriel came back, and he looked…frozen. There was no color in his face at all. And I knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That it was Mason.” I’m looking at the cabin, and the backyard, and a little sliver of lake. I know that. But all I can see is the waiting room and the particle-board chairs and Gabriel staring down at me like I was a stranger. “He was the one screaming.”
