Michael
There was a flood of relief as the words left his mouth, relief and horror that for the first time in thirty years he’d actually said them aloud. And yet deep down, he’d wanted to say them, had perhaps even needed to. A bead of sweat traced along his temple as the clock ticked and the silence yawned. Before him, Lane stood pale and disbelieving, back against the door, knuckles white around the damning flashlight.
“I don’t understand. Tell me why you were there.”
He couldn’t help it. He found himself grinning at her, a slow-spreading rictus that had nothing to do with humor and everything to do with the quiet rage still thrumming in his veins. It wasn’t new, this rage; he’d been living with it for thirty years, quietly ignoring it, carefully controlling it—or so he’d thought until tonight. Landon had been the touch paper, the bastard’s thinly veiled reference to his mother and the fire that had taken his brother’s life, tossed to the crowd like so much red meat, as if he actually gave a damn about the Rourkes, or the events that had torn them apart.
He hadn’t planned on losing it when he slipped out the back door and across the street with his flashlight. He’d gone there to be with his anger, to prove to himself that he could still live with it, control it. But that’s not what happened.
“Michael?”
She said his name as if she were calling him back from somewhere very far away, leery, tentative. He was scaring the hell out of her, he knew, but he was eager to have it all out now. The words kept coming, like water from a hose that had been clamped for years.
“I was born Evan Michael Rourke, son of the Honorable Samuel R. Rourke, Starry Point’s once-beloved mayor, and his mad wife, Hannah. The little ghost everyone’s so fond of talking about was my brother, Peter. Tonight, at the meeting, the crazy person Landon was talking about was my mother.”
A series of emotions played over her face: shock, pity, fear. She was shaking her head back and forth, slowly, as if trying to get the words to settle into some space in her brain where they might make sense. He wanted to tell her not to bother. He’d long since given up trying to figure out life’s brutal sense of humor.
“There’s more,” he said, and saw her go a shade paler. “Showing up here wasn’t an accident. I didn’t need a place to do research.” Was it possible she’d pressed herself even more closely against the door? “The truth is that for nearly two years I slept under this roof with a lot of other boys in what you now call the Tower Suite, and I needed to come back.”
“Why?”
Why indeed? He felt a wave of nausea as he flashed back to that night, to the mingled reek of vomit and whiskey and smoke, his mother clinging to him, wild-eyed with panic. How could he make her understand the shame of it, the guilt of an eight-year-old boy, carried with him still, not for some hideous thing he’d done—but for something he hadn’t? How telling it, even now, brought the terror of that night screaming back, until he could taste the ashes at the back of his throat, hear the terrified screams of the brother he couldn’t save.
She tilted her head, eyeing him warily. “What?”
“Something I left behind when I was a boy. I thought it might . . .” He let the words dangle. “It doesn’t matter.” But it did matter. It mattered a great deal, though even now he couldn’t say why. So he lied. Because it was easier, and because he wanted to believe it. “It was a lifetime ago, three lifetimes, actually. Hannah and Peter Rourke are dead, and I’m someone else now.”
Lane took a step forward, then checked herself. “Your mother was . . . sick?”
He nodded. She was putting it all together now. He could see it in her eyes. “For almost as long as I can remember.”
“And you blame her for Peter?”
“I blame myself.”
“But that’s—” She stopped midsentence and blinked at him. “Why?”
“I wasn’t there. When the fire started, I wasn’t there.”
“Where were you?”
He hated the gentleness of her voice, the carefulness of it, as if he were as mad as his mother and might suddenly snap. “I was in the greenhouse. I would go there sometimes. Hannah used to grow these flowers that only bloomed at night. Moonflowers, she called them. They were her favorite. She said if you waited for one to bloom and then made a wish, whatever you asked for would come true. So I was out there waiting to make a wish.”
Her face softened. “What were you wishing for?”
It was an absurd question, but one he had known she would ask. “For my mother to not be crazy anymore. It didn’t come true. I fell asleep instead, listening to the rain against the glass. When I woke up I saw the flames shooting from our bedroom window.”
She laid a hand on his arm. At some point she had put down the phone and the flashlight; he didn’t know when or where. Her eyes were wide and full of feeling when they met his. “That’s why you went there, why you smashed the windows.”
“I think I must have been waiting thirty years to do that.”
“Do you feel better?”
“No.”
“Michael, you can’t blame yourself for what happened that night.”
“I was supposed to be the man of the house. That’s what Hannah said when my father died, that it was up to me to look after her and Peter.”
“Yes. It’s what mothers say when they need their sons to be brave. But you were a child. She didn’t mean it literally. She couldn’t have.”
“You don’t understand. Hannah Rourke wasn’t like other mothers. There was talk, after my father died, and even before, about putting her away. ‘All those pills she takes, and who’s going to make sure the children are fed, and what if she finally snaps and hurts one of those poor boys?’ They never said any of it in front of me, of course, but even as a kid you hear things. They could have done it, too—she was that crazy. But she was married to the mayor. So they left her alone—or mostly alone. But things got bad after my father died. Hannah wouldn’t believe he was dead. She wouldn’t even go to his funeral.”
“I’m so sorry,” Lane said, and he could see that she was. She bit her lip, as if reluctant to say what would come next. “People say . . . I mean . . . I’d always heard that Hannah survived the fire. But just now you said she was dead. How did she die?”
“No idea. I didn’t ask for details. My mother—my adopted mother, I mean—told me she heard it from her attorney a few years ago. I think she was relieved. I’ve always had a hunch she was afraid Hannah would pop up one day to claim me, and there’d be a terrible scene.”
“She never did, though?”
“No.”
“Did you want her to?”
Michael turned away, splashing his untouched juice into the sink. “No.”
“It must have been hard on you.”
He heard her come up behind him, felt her hand on his shoulder. “It was harder on Peter,” he said bitterly, shrugging free of her touch. He didn’t want her pity, didn’t want to be consoled.
“Were you very close?”
“Of course we were close. He was my brother.”
“No,” she said softly. “I meant you and Hannah.”
“I don’t want to talk about her anymore.”
“It might help.”
“It won’t.”
“Sometimes if you talk things through you realize you’ve been remembering them wrong.”
He rounded on her then, feeling the memories like brands, as sharp and searing as fire across his right shoulder and down his back. “What do you want to hear, Lane? That I got there too late? That by the time I dragged my drunken mother out of her room the fire had spread too far? That the stairs collapsed while I was trying to get to Peter? That he died because I was out making a wish on a goddamn flower?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Forget it.”
Lane wound her arms tight to her body, shuddering visibly. “I don’t think I can. I don’t think you can either, though you’ve certainly been trying. Can I ask you something?”
He studied her face a moment, wondering what was coming, then decided the harm had already been done. “What?”
“That thing you do with your shoulders, the way you hunch them sometimes, like you’re doing now—I’ve noticed that it happens when you talk about the past.”
Michael went very still, taking careful inventory of his body. He wasn’t aware that he’d been doing that thing. In fact, he’d been doing his best to control the annoying and largely unconscious impulse that had plagued him most of his life. He hated that she’d noticed.
“I’m sorry. Was there a question in there?”
“I was wondering why you do it.”
Michael said nothing. No words could describe the reminder he carried on his shoulders, the thing that marked him with the horror of that night, that would never let him forget. His fingers went to the collar of his shirt, numbly working one button at a time, until he was able to slide the blue oxford down his arms. Shifting slightly, he turned his right shoulder to the light.
It was Lane’s turn to be silent, though her lips parted in a slow dawning of—what? Pity? Revulsion? He wasn’t sure. Becca had simply pretended not to see them, her fingers always careful to skirt the shiny patches of puckered flesh. To this day he couldn’t say for certain that she’d ever touched them.
There were tears in her eyes now, clinging to her lower lashes, making tiny spokes of them. “From that night?” she whispered. “From the fire?”
He nodded, about to pull his shirt back on when she reached for him. Her fingers were soft and cool, featherlight as they lit on his ruined flesh, a gesture of sympathy—and startling sensuality.
“Don’t,” he said, flinching, but made no move to avoid her touch.
“Please.”
The softest of pleas, little more than a whisper. Standing rigid, he closed his eyes, scarcely breathing as her fingers traced the shiny stretch of tissue, forcing himself to absorb all that was in the touch: recognition, acceptance—wanting. She wanted him. The realization was like a jolt of electricity through his limbs, undeniable and nearly crippling. Suddenly, he was shaking.
“Was it very bad?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.” It was all he could do to form the word, to deny the fever suddenly thundering in his blood. “They kept me in the hospital . . .” His words trailed off in a gasp as he felt the moist warmth of her mouth graze his shoulder, the caress of her cheek, pressed damply there and held.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed against his skin. “About all of it.”
Her arms came around him then, circling from behind, the thrum of her heart pounding against him and through him, matching the beat of his own. At his core, something feral breathed to life, uncoiling like a live thing: primitive, reckless, hungry. How had they come to this place, this blinding flashpoint of rawness and need? He didn’t know, and he didn’t care. Turning, he met her gaze and found the only answer he needed.
Yes.