Seed (17 page)

But he was at a dead end, and the last thing he wanted to do was send Charlie away. Despite their reasonable fear, he’d never quite forgiven his own parents for turning their back on him. They had given up and chosen the simplest solution: to get rid of the problem, you get rid of the kid.

Charlie and Abigail raced across the lawn in a bubble of laughter, Nubs dashing after them with his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth, his ears pulled back as though he was racing through a wind tunnel. They were playing hide and seek, and despite Nubs’ inability to grasp even the simplest concepts, he had somehow learned the rules of the game. Abigail had taught him how to hide behind trees, plopping his butt down on the grass and waiting patiently to be found. In that sense, he was the perfect dog; always ready, his tail wagging as gaily as it had when he was nine weeks old.

It was Charlie’s turn to be the seeker. She stood against the side of her grandpa’s car and covered her face, counting as loud as she could while Nubs and Abby searched for a hiding place. Abby was particularly good at finding random nooks and crannies to squeeze herself into, like a contortionist squeezing herself into a tiny box.

She’d once managed to get herself stuck beneath the front porch. Jack and Aimee wiggled her out into the open right before Aimee was set to panic, ready to call the fire department. Nubs, on the other hand, while good at hiding, was bad at finding new trees to hide behind. Predictably, he dashed to the same tree every time and sat wagging his tail.

Charlie reached fifty and yelled the well-known childhood battle cry of “
Ready or not,
” then dashed across the lawn. She searched the front side of the house, scouring all of Abby’s usual spots. When Charlie didn’t find her, she moved to Nubs’ tree. She let out a little yelp as soon as she saw him and ran at him, determined to tag him on his furry butt and disqualify him from the game. Nubs pressed his front paws to the ground, his hind quarters pointed toward the sky—a position that assured Charlie he was ready to play. She darted toward him and he sprinted away, stopping a few yards down the lawn, taunting her with that puppy-like pose. She ran at him again, and Nubs dashed around her. Jack was impressed by how agile the old dog still seemed to be, and relieved by how utterly normal Charlie appeared.

Charlie stopped to catch her breath. With her hands on her knees, she peered at Nubs from across the yard. This time, when she looked at him, Nubs’ tail stopped wagging. Instead of running, Charlie strolled toward him, sing-songing, “
Here puppy puppy puppy.
” At first the call was innocent, but Charlie’s tone changed when, a few feet from her target, Nubs dashed away yet again. Nubs’ body language had also shifted. Rather than his typical puppy-like jaunt, he ran away with his tail between his legs. Charlie stared at him from across the yard, her hands balling up in to fists as she stopped to consider her next course of action. Nubs laid down, his nose buried in the cool blades of bluegrass. He exhaled a quiet whine from deep within his throat.

The game had turned dark. Jack watched Charlie’s mouth curl up into a sneer, but he didn’t move. He wanted to leap from that front step and put an end to it, but something held him in place. The old Jack sat frozen in place while the new Jack watched the hunt with a sick sense of fascination, wondering if she’d manage to catch him, wondering if she’d let him go when she finally did.

This time Charlie took her time moving across the grass, taking step after slow step, as though trying to fool the stupid dog into thinking she was standing still instead of moving toward him. Nubs held his position; Charlie continued to inch closer. When she was only a few yards away, she lunged like a predator. Nubs scrambled to his feet, almost comical in the way his legs bent and wobbled beneath him. But Charlie showed no sympathy for her loyal companion, running after him despite Nubs’ palpable fear.

Just then, a UPS truck rambled down the far end of their road. Charlie stopped, waited, glared at Nubs while he panted in the sun. She waited until the truck was in the perfect position to leap again.

The dog ran from her the way an animal runs from a bigger, stronger opponent. Had it not been Charlie, he would have bared his teeth and dared her to come closer. But in his confusion—attacked by someone who he thought was his friend—he could do nothing but run. His nails clacked against the asphalt as he ran into the street, but the sound was muffled by tires skidding on pavement.

Charlie stood along the side of the road while the UPS guy bounded from his truck, yelling, “
Oh my God!
” with a heavy Southern twang. Abigail erupted from her hiding place, running at the truck with a strange sort of garbled scream; as though the scream was unsure of itself—as though reality was, for the briefest of moments, too horrible to be happening. Jack was off those steps right along with her, but Abby had become the fastest runner in all of Louisiana. She outran her father and reached the truck first. That’s when a genuine scream tore loose from her chest.

Nubs was wedged beneath a tire, his bottom half crushed, nearly torn in two by the impact. Surreal as it was, his top half was untouched. He looked as though he could have still been alive if you didn’t look at him from the waist down. He was dead before the truck ever came to a complete stop.

Abby wailed like a Greek at a funeral. Jack reached for her, but she shoved him away and ran back to the house, pushing passed Aimee, who was standing stunned on the front porch step. Jack stared at Aimee for a moment before she disappeared inside the house, rushing to their daughter’s aid. Charlotte was unmoved by her sister’s tears. She stood expressionless in front of the truck, watching the delivery guy freak out as though Nubs had been his dog instead of hers.

“I’m so sorry,” the guy kept saying. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry, mister.”

The guy eventually ran back inside the truck and grabbed a cell phone with a shaky hand, probably placing a call to his dispatcher. All the while, Charlie stood motionless, staring at the remains of a dog two years her elder without a scrap of despair in her eyes. Jack wasn’t sure she knew he was standing next to her—he wasn’t sure she remembered that anyone else existed at that moment at all. She was in a trance; a tiny zombie examining her handiwork. And as if it couldn’t have gotten any worse—that delivery guy yelling into his phone, Abigail screaming inside the house, Nubs torn in half with his guts spilling onto the road—the corner of Charlie’s mouth twitched, not into a frown, but a smile. And the voice whispered:

You sat there and watched her do it, because you’ve been mine all along.

Walking back inside that house was terrifying. Jack could hear Abby wailing long before he pulled open the screen door. Her sorrow was immense—powerful enough to seep through the walls and into the yard like vapor. Her despair twisted his heart into a knot, pulling so tight that his heart strings creaked. Standing motionless in the doorway, Abigail’s weeping slithered from inside her room and tied itself like a noose around his neck. The backs of his eyes burned. His sinuses sizzled with the sting of saline. All at once he was sure he was about to lose it—about to suffer the emotional breakdown he had feared since he had seen those dark, empty eyes a split-second before their Saturn had flipped through the air.

He turned away from the house, ready to sneak away until the sound of Abby’s tears were something he could handle. Then he saw Charlie standing on the top porch step, and he stopped short. She was staring at him the way she had peered at Nubs before running him into the road.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” she asked, ignoring her sister’s cries—weeping so loud it drowned out every other sound in the world.

Jack suddenly wanted to snatch her off her feet and throw her down those steps. He wanted to shake her so hard the Devil would scramble away in search of a place to hide. The little girl that, six years before, had redefined his entire life, now made his blood run cold. Everything about her, from her little-girl voice to the artificial innocence she wore across her face, made Jack hate her. At that very moment, had Charlotte turned and ran across the lawn into the trees across the road, he wouldn’t have followed her. He would have turned away and pretended he hadn’t seen a thing.

But Charlie didn’t turn, and she didn’t run; and Jack didn’t make a move to grab her the way he had imagined a second before. She remained on the front porch step, glaring at her father, those doe eyes narrowed into menacing slits. Her mouth curled up into that sickening smile. “Poor Daddy,” she whispered. “Sad about a dead fucking dog.”

Jack didn’t tell Aimee what he had seen—not the way the girls had been playing hide and seek, not the way Charlie had lunged at Nubs just as the delivery truck passed by. He was sure Aimee suspected the worst, but she hadn’t been there: it was his word over hers. For all intents and purposes, it was a horrible accident. Nubs had run out into the road on his own.

He knew it couldn’t go on for much longer. He was at his limit, sure that if things continued to escalate he’d be barring the girls’ windows, just as Stephen had barred his own. He’d blockade their bedroom door with his crappy piano until he could figure out what the hell to do. And yet, in the same instance he knew that would never happen. The longer it went on the less he did to stop it. The moment an exorcism had crossed his mind, he was assured that he wouldn’t be doing anything of the sort. He was nothing but an enabler—a facilitator of his own daughter’s demise.

That’s when the last viable option for Charlie’s deliverance came to him. If he couldn’t stop what was happening, he could reconnect with someone who possibly could. Sitting at the edge of Abigail’s bed, listening to her cry for the loss of her dog, Jack could think of one lone way out.

Go back and face the demons he’d run from nearly two decades before.

Go back home.

“I don’t understand,” Aimee muttered, gathering a few of Nubs’ chew toys off the floor. “This is really bad timing.” She was irritated; while Jack had been reluctant to seek help for Charlie before, he was suddenly gung ho about it now.

Jack had lied again. He told her that Sam, his boss, had dropped the name of a child psychiatrist, one of the best… one that just so happened to be in Georgia instead of Louisiana.

“It can wait,” Aimee said. “It’s waited this long so it can wait a little longer.”

“Sam already called,” Jack told her. Sam was notorious for taking extra steps to set up dates and meetings. It would be less believable if Sam hadn’t done just that—gone out of his way to schedule something that would inadvertently cause marital strife. Jack was about to use Sam’s good-hearted bad habit to his advantage.

“So call the doctor and tell him we can’t make it. Tell him your all-knowing boss failed to predict the fact that our dog just got flattened by UPS.”

“
We
can’t make it,” Jack agreed, “but
I
can.” It was the heart of his argument. There was no doctor, no appointment. There was only Jack’s old house—a trailer out in the middle of nowhere that may have very well been gone for years. All he knew was where it had been. And if it was gone? Well, the town wasn’t much bigger than Live Oak. It would take but a handful of hours to ask around, to find someone who knew Stephen and Gilda Winter.

Aimee grabbed a half-eaten squeaky toy off the living room rug. Destroying stuffed toys had been Nubs’ specialty. He had once eaten all of the polyester filling out of a stuffed hot dog. It had clogged him up for days.

“That’s what doesn’t make sense,” Aimee said. “What’s the point of you going by yourself?”

“It’s just a consultation. You can’t get in to see this guy before you meet with him first. Even if we all were able to go, he wouldn’t see Charlie anyway.”

Aimee looked down at the torn yellow duck in her hand. She frowned at it—partly in reaction to Jack’s explanation, but mostly because she remembered buying that toy for Nubs not two weeks before. It was strange how quickly life could change. One morning you get up thinking it’s going to be the same-ol’ same-ol’, and that same night you hit the bed emotionally devastated.

“And we’ll have to drive to Georgia to see him,” she said. “What, every weekend? How are we going to afford something like that? If he’s so good, how are we going to afford to see him at all?”

Jack exhaled a breath and lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But I have to do this.”

Aimee narrowed her eyes in a flash of suspicion. It was an odd thing to say, that
he
had to do it instead of
they
having to do it.

“For Charlie,” Jack added. “As her dad.”

“And leave me here with the girls.”

“Just for a couple of days.”

“When Abigail is a wreck, Jack.”

“Just a day ago we were worried about Charlie,” Jack reminded her.

She pressed her free hand to her forehead and squeezed the bridge of her nose, fending off an inevitable headache.

“Everything is falling apart,” she said softly. “Everything is completely fucked up.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I have to do this.”

After a moment, Aimee issued a single half-hearted nod.

“Okay,” she relented. “But only for a couple of days.”

“Just a couple,” Jack assured her.

“Daddy is going to be pissed,” she told him. “Just wait until he sees his odometer.”

Chapter Twelve

T
he drive to Rosewood was a long one—over eight hours one way, but Jack decided to get an early start and leave that night instead of waiting until morning. Getting there early would give him an extra half day of daylight, and though Aimee didn’t like the idea of Jack driving at night on his own, she was too tired to argue.

The Louisiana darkness was oppressive. If the night sky had torn itself open and bled ink onto the earth, it still wouldn’t come close to the depth of shadow that swallowed the levies and live oaks. It was liquid darkness: a darkness so heavy it blotted out the brightest headlights. But the weightiness of night was, for Jack, more than appropriate. It was the perfect backdrop to a battalion of unwanted memories; the perfect color for the nightmare that had become his life.