Chapter Twenty-Seven

NOW

 

“What do you want to know? Everything you need is in the police report I had to give.”

“We’re not interested in the police report, Lyric. We want to know what really happened.”

“Well, I wasn’t there…”

A beat passed between them, almost as if the officers didn’t believe him.

“I wasn’t. I don’t know what happened. They had an accident.”

“Why weren’t you with them that night?”

Now, it was Lyric’s turn to pause. A long heavy pause that spoke volumes without uttering a word. Lyric shifted in his chair, feeling warm and suddenly uncomfortable in his own skin.

“Lyric, what happened the night of the accident?” she repeated.

“We had gotten in a fight.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“I had just gotten home. It was dark. I was high as a kite. I had gotten into an accident in the car and smashed the whole front. All the lights were out and broken. Cedar was so angry with me. Disappointed. He kept calling me worthless, and a waste of space.”

“Go on.”

“We fought. Like we had been so much lately. I had been really trying to get my act together. I felt like my last stint in juvie had put me straight. But then that night I was out with some mates and got wrecked and crashed the car while trying to pull out of a parking spot. So stupid.”

He felt the sting of tears behind his eyes once more.

“Cedar had been waiting for me to get home so he could pick up our parents from a party they were at. I was late. Obviously. He stormed out of the house and got in the car to go pick them up. I didn’t think anything of it, until it dawned on me that he’d be driving in the dark with no lights…”

“You let him drive the smashed car…”

“He shouldn’t have. He said it wasn’t that far and he didn’t have money for a taxi. I should have stopped him.”

“What happened, Lyric?”

“He was gone for over an hour. He should have been back by then, but he wasn’t. I was still so fucked up, I didn’t realise what time it was. I had passed out on the sofa watching TV and…”

“And?”

“And then I got the call. The police. They had found the car.”

The female officer looked down and read from the official report. “The driver, Cedar Reed, aged eighteen, and passengers Linda and Stephen Reed, both fifty-five, were killed on impact as their vehicle collided with a passing vehicle on the highway between Cala Llonga and Cala San Vicente at approximately 9:15 P.M. The family were travelling in a Toyota Yaris that had sustained substantial damage to the front bonnet in a previous accident and was without the use of functioning headlights. The driver of the other vehicle was unharmed…”

Lyric was quiet, except for the sound of his tears that came more freely now, rolling down his face and pooling in his cupped hands in his lap. The words from the report pelted him like hailstones as the officer read them out robotically and without any human emotion.

He remembered being called out to the accident. Identifying the bodies of his brother and parents. He remembered the feeling of emptiness and loss that had encased his every nerve. He remembered being on the brink when a police officer drove him to the scene.

He closed his eyes now and he could still see the wrecked car, the spilled blood; hear the wail of the sirens. He could see the bodies laid out on slabs in the morgue like show pieces at a deranged art gallery. He remembered the feeling of emptiness. Such hollow emptiness, as if all emotion and feeling had been drained out of him, dying with his family.

His family.

As Lyric sat there now before the officers, he wiped a hand across his face and nose, ridding it of the tears that exposed him for the vulnerable victim he’d started to feel like.

Cedar. His mother. His father. The institute. It was all too much. He wanted to forget, not to remember. He didn’t want to go there again. Not after he’d worked so hard to push the memories down. It was the only way to survive. The only way to remain him.

He closed his eyes again, squeezing them tight. He started counting down from one hundred and clasped his hands tight together in his lap, praying that the panic would subside.

He straightened in his chair, wrung his hands and looked up.

But when his eyes met with those of the officers seated across from him, something shifted. The two figures began to blur before him, their edges becoming fuzzy, and their features became lost in a cloudy haze. Then he smelled it.

Vanilla.

A sweet waft that filtered through his nostrils and made his body feel weightless, like some sort of toxic helium. He tried fighting it. Tried to refocus his eyes and return to his counting. But it was futile. He was already drifting from where he sat, looking down on himself and the officers, an observer on the situation, a third party in the room. The blackness was almost here.

His features twisted somehow, his eyes darkening and changing shape slightly. His mouth moved and inched into a sideways grin that was more menacing than pleasant. He sat forward for the first time since the interview started and he began to drum his fingers impatiently on the Formica table, the sound disturbing the silence and visibly startling the officers, who sat back as if animals protecting themselves from a predator.

The energy in the room shifted, as did the dynamic, as the interviewee seemed to supersede the interviewers.

No one moved for a moment. There was a battle of the wills as the officers stared at this new presence before them in surprise and awe, unsure as to what had just happened.

The female officer was the first to speak.

“Lyric?” she attempted through tight lips.

But he didn’t move. He didn’t blink. He just continued to stare, more between the two of them than directly at them. The officers exchanged nervous glances as they silently reassessed the situation at hand.

She opened her mouth to try again.

“With whom am I speaking?”