In the Blood (37 page)

Me and Beck? I don’t know. It’s weird. But it’s definitely love.

“I always knew you were a boy,” she told me. “Maybe at first I thought you were a lesbian. But I never thought you were just a regular girl.”

“I never thought you were a regular girl either,” I told her. And she found that funny.

“I wanted you right away,” she’d said.

She was a little angry that I couldn’t say the same. So bound up, wound up, repressed, confused was I that I didn’t even know what I wanted, if I wanted anything at all. I was a twenty-two-year-old, mentally unstable virgin, with gender confusion. I didn’t want anyone to touch me. I didn’t even want anyone to stand too close to me. If anything, Beck’s physical presence had made me extremely uncomfortable. But, for me, maybe that ranks as attraction.

What I could tell her was that I’d always loved her, which made her happier. And it was true.

“I’d still have loved you if you were a girl,” she said. “All I see is you.”

I don’t know if that’s true for me, but I love the way Beck loves. If everyone loved like she did, the world would be a better place.

As I rode my bike through town, I was thinking about Luke, as I had every day since I learned he was my brother. They carted him off screaming that night, and I could still hear him at night after I fell asleep.
IhateyouIhateyouIhateyouIhateyou,
he’d yelled into the night. I didn’t know if he meant me or his mother or the world. Maybe he meant all of us.

That night, as the cavalry arrived, I was the only one who could explain what had happened when Detective Ferrigno came on the scene. So I told him—everything. I told him who I was (he didn’t seem too surprised—either he already knew, or he was one of those guys that had seen everything). I told him about my panicked flight to Luke’s and why, what I had found there, and why I had come to this place in the woods.

I told him about Langdon, and how I thought he might either be obsessed with or associated with my father. That he had been obsessed with me. Finally, I told him and the other officers about Luke. It all sounded totally crazy, of course. And the look on Detective Ferrigno’s face, a kind of mystified, angry frown, told me that he wasn’t quite buying the story. They took Beck and me to the hospital, but a police officer was stationed outside my door. It was a few days before they decided that I was victim and not perpetrator.

“Don’t tell them anything without a lawyer,” said Rachel as I was being led away. Which I thought was a strange thing to say. I couldn’t answer her; I couldn’t even look at her. Were the things Luke said true? “Your father wouldn’t want you to do that.”

She stood watching me as the paramedics walked me down the path toward the ambulance that waited. Beck had been airlifted away from me. And I just remember feeling nothing but that familiar numbness. I turned to look at Rachel one last time, and I had a strange thought.
What does she know?

I passed the Kahns’ house on the way to Dr. Cooper’s. There was a “For Sale” sign in the yard, and the place had a strange air of desertion. I knew that Luke had disappeared into a kind of catatonic state. (Yeah, right. Everyone else seemed to believe that, but I knew that little freak better.) He had been committed to a mental health facility about forty minutes from The Hollows. Langdon was in a coma, having suffered catastrophic brain injury from Luke’s blows with the shovel. A full recovery was not expected. How do I feel about this? It sucks. I hate Langdon; I miss him. I wish he was here to talk all this through with. I hope he lives so that he can be punished, and to answer all the million questions that I have.

So Beck and I were the only ones able to tell the tale. And neither of us really knew the whole story, just our pieces. And Rachel was playing the suffering mother, completely innocent in the whole matter. She was, she claimed, as mystified as everyone else about how Langdon and Luke connected and conspired to torture me, and why. Her decision to move to The Hollows was just for Fieldcrest; neither she nor Luke had any idea I was here, hiding from my ugly past. Yeah, sure. I don’t believe her. Jung didn’t believe in coincidence, and neither do I. What he believed in was synchronicity: the experience of two or more events that are causally unrelated or unlikely to occur together by chance, and yet are experienced as occurring together in some meaningful way. In other words, the universe conspires—our minds, ideas are linked, suggesting a larger framework, a kind of neural web where we are all connected. I’m not so sure about that. But people conspire, that I know. Especially people like Luke.

The Kahn home was now behind me. And even though I was just a few blocks from Dr. Cooper’s, I found myself turning around.

After I left her alone in the woods that night she disappeared, Beck sat crying. (Would she ever forgive me? I really don’t know.) Eventually, she grew cold, calmed down, and started to pull herself together.
I hated you,
she said.
I was going back to tell everyone that you were a boy. I was going to set your whole life on fire.
Would she have done it? Probably not. Beck burns hot but cools down fast.

She heard Luke approach and she thought that I had come back for her.

“He was small, just a kid,” she said. “But he looked so much like you, it was stunning. How could you not have seen it?”

She knew so much about the case—everything really. She said that she’d suspected all along that there was something strange about me. That’s why she liked me. Once she knew about my aunt, it was just a quick Google search to find her blog. And once she knew who Bridgette was, it was pretty easy to figure out who I was. She read all the books, the articles. She’d seen all the news documentaries, the made-for-television movies. She knew immediately who Luke was when she saw him. She knew that he was my father’s other son.

“But he’s not like you,” she said. “He’s heartless; I saw that right away. He’s evil.”

But he had approached her sweetly. “Are you okay?” he asked. “You’re upset?”

“What do you want?” she’d said. “Who are you?”

She tried to walk past him when he didn’t answer her. But he followed her. When she started to run, he gave chase. “He was laughing,” she said. “It was just this little-boy giggle in the dark night. It was nightmarish.” In her mounting panic, she lost her footing and fell hard.

“When I pulled myself up,” she said, “Langdon was ahead of me. And Luke was behind.”

“He doesn’t love you,” Langdon said. “He can’t. He belongs to me.”

He caught up to her fast, and hit her with something she didn’t see. After that, things came back only in her nightmares—dark, fairy-tale memories of being carried through the woods, Langdon sticking a needle in her arm, Luke sitting inside the mine shaft, staring at her. He brought her candy and water; she remembered that. She lived on mini Mars bars. Why did they keep her like that?

“I think they were enjoying it,” she said. “Like a kid keeps a lizard or a frog.”

Dr. Cooper thinks I should worry less about the how and why of things. How did Rachel and Luke find me? How were they connected to Langdon? What kind of an agenda were they running? What did it have to do with my father? Who was manipulating who? She says, for my purposes, it doesn’t matter. But it does. Between Beck’s nightmares and my obsessive thinking, neither one of us may ever sleep again. I felt myself getting more ragged. It was killing me. I had to know the answers; it was part of the reason I needed to talk to my father.

I stopped my bike in the street in front of the Kahns’ house. Rachel’s car wasn’t in the driveway. And I was thinking about that journal. Surely, Rachel had changed the locks. Still, I just happened to have that key in my pocket. What if it still worked?

Dr. Cooper and Sky had both asked me for different reasons to stay away from Rachel Kahn.
She can’t give you what you need,
Dr. Cooper warned.
Everything you need is inside you. Her reasons,
her answers, whatever they are . . . they matter to your psychological wellness not at all. It is only the here and now that matters. You’ve come through tremendous trials, internal and external. And you’ve survived. You’re on the road to healing yourself. Stay focused on the present and the future.

But the past, the present, and the future are not a straight line. They’re all woven together, the strands twisting and turning through each other. How can you walk into the future without understanding your past? I said as much.
Your past is important to process, yes,
she said.
Not Rachel’s. Not Luke’s. Yours.

That desire I had on first meeting Rachel and Luke—I so badly wanted to help, to be there for them. Did something deep inside draw me into their lives? Was there some psychic and/or biological link that attracted me to Luke? When I thought of my time in the Kahns’ home, at their table, it was the most comfortable, most happy I had been in my adult life. I fit into their little union. However twisted and strange that is, it’s true.

I felt my phone vibrating, and I pulled it out and answered without checking the caller ID. Only a few people had the number of this new phone: Beck, my aunt, Dr. Cooper, Detective Ferrigno, and Sky.

“Is this Lane? Lane Crowe?”

It was strange to hear my real name, so long had I hidden behind Lana Granger. It was everywhere now, my real name. I was Lane Crowe, hero, freak, lady boy, transgender poster boy for the bullied, for the gender dysmorphic. I was derided by the gay and lesbian community, the feminists, the Republican pundits. I was the number one most-wanted guest on all the major talk shows—I’d be the biggest hit since the pregnant man was making the
rounds. The new cell phone I had was the third I’d had in a month.

“Who’s calling?” I asked, ready to hang up and get a new phone.

“It’s Paul Rodriguez,” he said. “I worked for your father.”

It was the private eye who had been calling for some time.

“Don’t hang up,” he said quickly. “I think you’ll want to hear what I have to say. The cops won’t listen. They’re sick of me.”

I held the phone to my ear, kept my eyes on the house. “I’m listening.”

“Your dad fired me because I finally figured out who killed your mom. I’m sorry to be so blunt with you. You’ve been through a lot. But it was what happened to you, with that kid, that made me realize. I can’t believe I didn’t see it years ago. She was investigated and cleared. She had an alibi.”

“Okay,” I said. He was dragging it out. “Tell me.”

“I know you’re going to talk to him in a couple of days, right? I want you to know the truth. Maybe you can convince him to save his own life.”

It didn’t take him long when he finally got to the point. As he spoke, I saw Rachel move into the living room window. She lifted a hand to me, gave me a weak smile. My breath was coming out in clouds.

“Thank you, Mr. Rodriguez,” I said.

“Can you talk to him, kid?” he said. “I think he wants to die.”

No, that’s not what he wanted. I finally understood it after all this time. What he wanted was to take care of his children.

“I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Hey, Mr. Rodriguez, can you do me a favor?”

“Sure,” he said. He sounded like the kind of guy who would do you a favor and never ask for anything in return.

“Can you call Detective Ferrigno at The Hollows PD, and tell him what you told me?”

“Hey, wait a second,” he said. He must have heard something in my tone that he didn’t like. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay?”

But I ended the call and stuck the phone into my pocket, then I walked up the path to Luke’s house.

I remembered the shoes. The small pair of practical walking shoes I saw the day my mother died. Not shoes that belonged to a man, but to a woman. The voices downstairs, as I had hid under my bed, were panicked and arguing voices. I had heard my father and a woman. Rachel. It must have been her.

Now, years later, she opened the door wide for me, and I stepped inside. I’d always felt welcomed here, as though I belonged. And that’s because I did belong among the murderous and psychotic. They were my peeps.

She walked into the kitchen and brewed me a cup of tea—peppermint with honey, just the way I liked it.