Between These Walls (2 page)

As you read this novel, I hope you know you are loved.

John Herrick

June 30, 2014

PROLOGUE

JULY 1995

If six-year-old Hunter Carlisle had secrets to hide, he would have kept them in this room.

Deep underground, the room had no windows along its walls. Were it not for the overhead lights he knew must exist or the handful of nightlights he spotted throughout this finished lower level, Hunter could imagine himself descending into cryptic, furry blackness. But surrounded by his brother Bryce and three other teenagers, Hunter felt safe.

Fourteen years old and too young to drive, Bryce and his friends found themselves stranded, limited by how far they could walk or ride their bicycles. Football practice had not yet begun. By this afternoon in early July, boredom had set in.

Today marked the first time Hunter had entered this house. Bryce’s friend Pete, who flipped on a light switch, had lived here for as long as Hunter could remember—a time period which didn’t stretch back far, but to Hunter, it seemed an eternity.

Hunter found the silence strange. He couldn’t recall walking into someone else’s house without finding an adult inside. For young Hunter, the rare occasions in which he couldn’t locate an adult nearby were when Bryce babysat him for a few hours.

Hunter could trust his big brother Bryce and felt secure in his company. Bryce was almost as tall as an adult and had muscles that peeked out beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt.

With Bryce around, no harm would come to Hunter.

Upon entering the house, the first thing Hunter had noticed upstairs was how sunlight gleamed through windows and cast shapes upon the carpet. He’d never given much thought to the noise that home appliances made, but in the stillness of Pete’s empty house, Hunter heard the low murmur of a refrigerator and the hum of an air conditioner. But he had seen neither en route to the basement.

Now, as Hunter reached the bottom of the stairs and peered around the basement, the room looked like a fancy cave. Its brightest feature, besides the lights, were its tan walls. The carpet was the color of the chocolate candy bars Bryce often bought with his allowance.

Drake and Ethan, Bryce’s other two friends, made a beeline for the air hockey table in the corner of the room and plugged it in. Hunter wandered over to watch, though the tip of his nose brushed against the upper edge of the table. Within seconds, he watched a plastic red puck dart back and forth across the slick surface. Puffs of air tickled Hunter’s nostrils as they blew through tiny holes that pockmarked the playing field.

With a tad too much aggression in his block, Ethan sent the puck airborne. When it made contact with Hunter’s forehead, Hunter giggled. No pain, not even a sting. In a way, it made Hunter feel part of the game, accepted by the older boys.

Ethan grunted. Hunter smelled bologna on his breath.

“Bryce, why don’t you grab your little brother?” Ethan shouted. “He just fucked up my shot over here!”

Hunter cringed. If Hunter said a bad word and his parents heard about it, he knew punishment would be imminent.

Drake snorted. “Whatever, man! Blame it on the kid because you can’t score a goal without a gallon of sweat dripping off your forehead. And that’s a foul. My move now.”

Bryce jogged over and put his fingers on the top of Hunter’s head like a suction cup on a science-fiction gadget. He turned Hunter around and guided him to the sofa, which sat in front of a big-screen television.

“Why’d you bring your brother along, anyway?” Ethan asked, waving off a cheer from Drake, who had scored a goal.

“My mom’s at the grocery store. I can’t leave him home alone.” Bryce turned toward Pete, who was on his hands and knees at the side of the sofa. “Pete, are we watching your Jim Carrey movie or not?”

Pete swiped his hand back and forth beneath the sofa. Hunter wondered why he would look so hard for a lost popcorn kernel.

“Not if I can help it,” Pete said, a strain in his voice as he thrust his arm behind Bryce’s legs. “Change of plans. My mom isn’t home. I’ve got something better for us.” At that, Pete grinned and let out a sigh of relief. “Whew! Thought they might’ve found it.”

“Found what?” asked Drake as he yanked the hockey table’s cord from the electrical socket. He wandered over and sat against the edge of the sofa, next to Bryce’s feet. Hunter bounced on the middle cushion beside his big brother. Ethan leaned on the back of the sofa.

Pete stuck a video cassette into the VCR, flipped off the lights in the room, raced over to the sofa, and plopped onto the remaining empty cushion. Though Hunter tried to hide it, he felt a bit scared in the pitch blackness. He wished the nightlights were brighter, but the older boys would laugh at him if he asked them to turn the lights back on.

“Check this out.” Pete aimed the remote control, turned on the television, and hit Play. The television emitted an initial gray glow, a comfort to Hunter. “My parents have no idea; I’ve been putting it together at night after they go to bed. They think I’m down here watching
Beavis and Butt-Head
till all hours.”

The first thing Hunter noticed about the program before his eyes was that it wasn’t
Beavis and Butt-Head.
It wasn’t even a cartoon. Squinting, Hunter leaned forward and tried to decipher the scene on the screen. In the background he saw an abundance of white and silver: a small white sink; a narrow, silver shelf with jars of cotton balls and cotton swabs; a white floor. He heard a high-pitched sigh, the sound of a woman, but she didn’t sound like she was in trouble. The camera panned left, where he noticed the edge of a vinyl cushion and—now he recognized it. It looked like a doctor’s office. The sighs continued and, once the camera finished panning left, he discovered the source.

The woman had blond hair that fell to her waist. Her fingernails, which she dug into the examination table, were a fiery red. Eyes shut, she tilted her head back, whimpered again, and smiled with a wide, open mouth.

She wore nothing. A fully dressed man pressed against her and smothered any view below her waist. But from under the man’s hands, Hunter caught a glimpse of the woman’s full breasts.

The woman tugged at the man’s tie. He loosened it, then tore it off over his head while the woman ripped open his shirt, button by button.

Hunter fixated on the images before him as the camera angle shifted to a side view. At this point, as far as he could tell, the man would take whatever action occurred next. So enthralled with the video, Hunter forgot about the other people in the room. Drake’s voice startled him.

“How’d you get this channel on cable? Did a storm knock it in?”

“My dad subscribes to this,” Pete said. “The channel has a parental control on it, but I figured out the code to unlock it. It’s the same damn code he uses for the garage door opener!”

Riveted, Hunter returned his attention to the screen, where the man had undressed almost all the way. Would he? Hunter couldn’t imagine himself getting undressed with someone else present in a doctor’s office. Curious to see what would happen next, he leaned forward. From the corner of his eye, Hunter noticed Bryce, who looked uncomfortable as he shifted in his seat. Bryce caught a quick glance at Hunter, then turned his attention back to the screen. Bryce’s foot tapped in furious rhythm on the carpet.

When the man on the screen took a half-step back, Hunter caught his first glimpse of the woman’s loins. Hunter’s blinked once and opened his eyes wider. His mouth opened into a round
O
. At the age of six, he’d couldn’t remember seeing a woman naked, except his mother once. But this woman looked different—fuller, perfect, with a different color of hair, even down there.

Sure enough, the man slipped out of his navy-blue briefs and—Hunter was shocked. The man looked different from Hunter. This man had hair down there and his—whatever had happened to him, Hunter could recall it happening to himself but he didn’t understand why. But this man’s was much, much larger than Hunter’s.

Bryce, Pete and Drake had leaned forward. Drake burst out laughing, pointed at the screen, and made a joke Hunter didn’t understand. Whatever it meant, the other two guys cackled, hurling comments at the woman as if she might hear them.

Before long, the man had begun to thrust himself against the woman. She still didn’t seem in trouble. She continued to make noise, but her noises had grown louder, closer and closer to a shout. And before Hunter knew it, it looked like part of the man, the stiff part, went missing. The man and woman moved together.

Pete glanced over the back of the sofa. When Hunter noticed Pete turning around, he broke eye contact with the television and followed Pete’s line of sight, in case Pete had decided to look for something else.

Pete looked confused. “Where the hell’s Ethan?”

“Shut up, man.”

“I don’t believe this!” Pete threw his head back and laughed, then returned his attention to the rear corner of the room. “Dude, are you seriously jerking off right now? Right here in my basement?”

“Shut the fuck up, man! You turned this shit on!”

Though that corner of the room was dark, Hunter caught sight of a figure with its back turned toward them. It looked like Ethan’s shape with one arm in vigorous motion.

Hunter returned his attention to the television screen.

Bryce peered down at his little brother and nudged him. When Hunter looked up, Bryce shook his head in a firm
No
gesture, but Hunter shook his head in response and looked back at the television to see what would happen next.

“Hey guys, maybe we should turn this shit off,” Bryce blurted out. “My little brother’s here. He’s only six.” With another nudge to Hunter, he whispered, “Hunter, are you okay?”

Pete rolled his eyes. “He’s okay. Look at him, he’s learning something. His eyes are glued to the TV. Hunter’s probably amazed at the
dude.
Tell the truth, Hunter. Your eyes are fixated on the guy’s pecker, am I right?”

Another round of cackles.

At that, the man on the TV separated from the woman and turned her around so she faced the table.

Bryce looked down at Hunter once more and shot to his feet. He lunged for the television and pressed his chest against it, blocking their view, stretching one arm across part of the screen as though to block more of the view. With his free hand, he started pushing buttons on the television until the screen went dark.

“What the fuck, man?! Turn it back on!”

Ignoring the remark, Bryce grabbed Hunter by the arm. “Listen guys, I’d better get him out of here. He’s too young to see this.”

“Hell, man,
we’re
too young to see this! Look at her—”

Bryce didn’t wait for a round of agreement. In an instant, Hunter felt Bryce’s hand under his armpit, hoisting him from the sofa and dragging him toward the stairs.

* * *

Bryce didn’t say a word for most of their four-block trek home.

The neighborhood remained the same, yet Hunter sensed from his older brother that something had changed. He sensed discomfort. Bryce’s strides seemed a tad longer than usual, judging from the way Hunter needed to take an extra step every few seconds to keep up with him.

Bryce towered over Hunter in height. Along the way home, Hunter peered up at his brother’s face and tried to decode what he saw. With a sober expression, Bryce fixed his eyes straight ahead. Was he worried? Fearful? Hunter couldn’t put a finger on it, but yes, something seemed wrong.

They passed house after house along the suburban street. After countless bike rides through this neighborhood, Hunter knew each house. He found comfort in the familiarity of its order: The two-story house with the maroon shutters sat beside the ranch home with the little pear tree in the front yard. Next came the two-story house with the rock garden on either side of the front door.

As he nodded at the pattern of homes, Hunter’s mind returned to Pete’s video. He’d never seen anything like it. What were they doing on that television screen? Why had Bryce gotten furious? Maybe it was Hunter’s fault. As Hunter thought back to the images on the television, his stomach grew sour, the way it had one summer afternoon when he’d swallowed two heaping tablespoons of butter.

Hunter didn’t know what was wrong, but judging from Bryce’s reaction, he had watched something bad.

As they passed beneath a tree, Bryce’s shoulder brushed against one of its branches, which sent the tree in a shudder. Its motion startled a bird, which darted out of the tree and escaped into the sky. Hunter listened to the frantic sound of wings flapping as it escaped from view.

At last, when they were yet a block away from home, Hunter felt his brother patting his shoulder. Though a gentle pat, the size of his brother’s large hand jostled Hunter’s tiny shoulder with as little effort as it had required to set the tree branch in motion.

Bryce broke the silence, his voice subdued, as if someone could overhear him through an open window.

“Look, Hunter, I didn’t know Pete was gonna put that stuff on TV. Mom and Dad would kill me if they knew about this, so you can’t say a word to them, okay?”

Hunter gazed up at his brother. He bit his lower lip in a childlike manner and nodded—anything to please his big brother. The broken silence brought comfort to his young soul, a return to normalcy. A barrier broken, Hunter hoped. The freedom brought a hop to his next step. He harbored so many questions about what he had seen minutes earlier and hoped Bryce would ask him if he had any questions. The awkwardness of the journey home had left Hunter afraid to ask on his own initiative.

“It’ll make sense when you’re older,” Bryce continued. “Just forget you ever saw that video, okay?”

And with that, the conversation ended.

Hunter never forgot the images on that television screen.

No matter how hard he tried.

PART 1

SECRETS
SILENCE

CHAPTER 1

Had Hunter seen what he thought he’d seen? Had he given Hunter a second glance?