Page 2 of Fear Me, Love Me

I give Barlow a kiss on the top of his head, inhale his sweet baby scent, and make my way to the front door.

Dad’s angry voice breaks over me just as I get the door open. “Why do you keep letting her in here? She was holding Barlow, wasn’t she? I told you she can’t be trusted.”

He’s not even trying to keep his voice down so I don’t hear him. In a softer tone, I can hear Samantha pleading with him.

Humiliation washes over me. I close the door behind me and disappear out of all their lives for another week. If I cross their minds in the meantime, the thoughts won’t be happy ones. Right now, Samantha will be pointing out to Dad that if he doesn’t want me to come over, he has to tell me himself. Dad will slam things and shout, but he’s a coward, and he doesn’t want to say it to my face. He wants me just to stop coming so he can pretend he’s not the bad guy. I’m pretending not to notice what he wants so I can keep seeing my brother.

I will just have to hope that, in time, what happened last year will begin to fade into nothing, at least for them, anyway. I can go back to being an afterthought instead of a liability. Just like how it was four years ago when I was fifteen.

I touch my ribs briefly as a spasm of pain goes through me.

It used to hurt being a postscript in Dad’s and Samantha’s lives, but now I look back on those first months in this house with longing.

Chilly fall wind whips the leaves along the street, and there’s the sharp scent of a coming frost in the air. Summer is definitely over. I pull a cape coat around my shoulders to keep warm, and my brown leather satchel bounces gently against my thigh as I walk. Henson is often gloomy and it frequently rains, but for now, the sky is clear and the sidewalks are dry.

A few minutes later, I arrive at a stone arch and a wrought iron gate with lettering that reads East Henson Cemetery. As I walk through the open gate, I see that there aren’t many people around on this cold Sunday afternoon. There are glossy, modern graves and showy rose beds with colorful, fragrant blossoms at the front of the cemetery. Farther back and closer to the church are the older burials. I love it there among the faded, mossy headstones where wildflowers grow between the graves.

I sit cross-legged in the long grass, take out my sketchbook, and contemplate the stone angel in front of me. She’s a hundred and forty years old and is lying over a casket with her head on her arms as if she’s weeping with her long dress spread out around her. The fabric is intricately folded as if it’s been woven from silk rather than carved from stone. Her spread wings are bleached white and crumbling at the tips, but I can still make out many of the painstakingly carved feathers.

My fingertips tingle as I pick up my pencil and start to draw, and I’m flushed with excitement and happiness for the first time today. I’m studying costume design and art history at Henson University, and I draw whenever I’m not sewing. I got in on a scholarship. There’s no way Dad could afford to send me to college, and certainly not one as prestigious and expensive as Henson, and even if he could have afforded it, he never would have spent that much on me. Mom never set up a college fund for me either. I lived with her in Los Angeles for the first fourteen years of my life, and she was too addled by alcohol and drugs to remember to put food in the fridge, let alone consider my future. When Mom overdosed and died, Dad collected me from Child Protective Services and brought me up here to Washington to live with him and his new wife.

I remember how shocked he was that I’d grown up while he wasn’t looking. He kept saying things like, “Vivienne, wow. You’re so tall. I remember when you were up to my knees,” and “You’re really in the ninth grade already?” On and on like I was tricking him somehow, or I’d grown up behind his back just to startle him. He could have come to visit once or twice. It’s not like he didn’t know where Mom and I lived.

In Henson, Dad was awkward but welcoming, and Samantha was pleasant and kind. They didn’t tell me they loved me or fall over themselves to take an interest in the small, serious, dark-haired girl who was suddenly in their midst. I didn’t mind, as I could listen to them talk to each other about their days while we sat together at the dinner table. Other people filled the house with noise, turned the television on, and left their shoes by the front door. There was a shopping list stuck to the fridge, and the things written on it would appear inside a day or two later. I had never been part of awebefore. Anus. A family. No one called us a family out loud, but I sidled up to the idea like a mistreated stray cat and hoped we were one.

I was almost happy for a time. Almost.

Then when I was fifteen, everything went wrong. Things grew dark inside my head after that, but I found ways to let the darkness out quietly so that it never bothered anyone else. I mustneverbother anyone else. I must be grateful for what I have because I know that things could be much, much worse.

It took me a long time to get used to the cold and the wet in Henson. The quiet roads and the noisy home. I was used to things being the other way around. Highways roaring with noise while the house or apartment Mom and I lived in was sad and silent. Mom tried her best for me, declaring again and again that she would get clean, but the siren call of drugs and alcohol always pulled her back, and she consumed whichever substance was easiest and cheapest to get her hands on. That’s how Mom and Dad met, all those years ago. A match made in addiction. Dad cleaned up his act a few years later but Mom never did, and in the end, it killed her.

These days, Dad’s pretty reliable, until suddenly he isn’t. I’m never sure what will trigger one of his binges and neither is Samantha. It’s probably work stress, or a yearning for the good old bad days, or both. One day he’s a good husband and an interested father to Barlow, and the next, he disappears and comes home three days later with bloodshot eyes, reeking of stale whisky or vodka. Never out of his mind on drugs, but the alcohol is bad enough. Dad cries and says he’s sorry and promises Samantha he’ll never do it again. Samantha knows he will, but she always forgives him.

Last year, he spent most of one binge in a club on the seedy side of town, racking up an eye-watering bill, thanks to top-shelf drinks and the illegal gambling tables. Twenty-nine thousand dollars blown in three days. Dad only had six thousand in the bank, and he’d picked the wrong club to party in and then forfeit the bill.

Someone came knocking, and he wanted his money.

Someone with a steely blue glare and a ruthless edge to his temper. His fury was an out-of-control twenty-ton truck, and I stepped right into its path. My afterthought of life turned into a nightmare, but my mistake wasn’t drawing all of Tyrant Mercer’s merciless anger down on me to save my family.

My mistake was believing my family would thank me for my sacrifice.

The stone angel emerges on my sketchbook page, along with her dress and the ivy growing up on the casket to twine around her wrists. I find myself leaning farther and farther over the page until I realize why I’m struggling to see what I’m doing. The sun set while I was drawing. Dusk is rapidly bleeding into night, and the graves all around me are disappearing into the darkness.

With a whispered curse, I hurriedly pack up my things. The main gate will probably be locked by now, but if I run, I should be able to make it out the back gate by the church. The peace I knew while sketching the stone angel fades away, replaced by the memory of Samantha taking Barlow away from me. Sooner or later, they’re going to tell me they don’t want me coming around anymore. I can feel it, as inevitable as the falling night.

I’m so consumed by that sad thought that when I get to my feet and turn toward the back gate, I don’t realize there’s someone in front of me until I nearly bump into him. I move to one side to step around him, only to find that way blocked by someone else. A third figure presses in behind me.

I thought I was alone in the old part of the graveyard, but suddenly there are three boys surrounding me. They’re all around my age, eighteen or nineteen, dressed in dark clothing. The meanest-looking one, wearing a black sweater, holds up his hand with a nasty grin and shows me what’s in it.

A knife.

It’s not as impressive as some knives I’ve held. The blade is a stubby and unremarkable shape, and the honed edge doesn’t whisper like a lover or hum an enticing note when the light strikes it just so. The boy holding the knife doesn’t even look like he knows how to control a weapon like that or understand what it can do.

He jerks his chin at the boy in a blue T-shirt standing to my left. “Give him your bag.”

I clutch my satchel tightly against my chest and shake my head. I don’t care about money because I don’t have any, but my sketchbook is filled with thousands and thousands of hours of daydreams and wishes.

“I said give it to him,” snarls the boy, brandishing the knife in my face.

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