AFTER HUNTER LEFT, BRENNAN PEEKED IN ON HER MOM. IT may as well have been a photograph of any other night from the past few years. Brennan never knew if she was breathing; the covers were so thick, they didn’t stir. But she didn’t check. Was it because she didn’t want to wake her or because she’d rather find that her mother had passed with sunlight streaming through the narrow sliver she left in the curtains? Why even undertake the exercise of going to her mom’s place if she didn’t check? More questions Brennan couldn’t answer.
Like Hunter’s: “Where do we start?”
“I don’t know,” she had said. Then, like a good lawyer, “Let me think about it.”
He said he’d give it some thought, too, but she knew she’d have to make the plans.
Brennan crept into the second bedroom her mother used as an office before she’d given up—before her illness kept her from working. She pulled a set of pajamas from the drawer she’d taken over and tossed her clothes into a laundry basket tucked into the corner. She had trouble keeping the location of her clothes straight, so much had gotten split between her place and her mom’s.
Where to start investigating? Thirty years later, three drinks into the night—no, four drinks, she’d poured herself another after Hunter left—the question was overwhelming. They’d taunted each other for decades with the same arguments. She didn’t expect anything to be different tonight. Except it had been. Brennan told herself to start with the basics: Who, what, when, where, why?
Brennan pulled a pillow out of the closet along with the spare set of sheets and blanket. Her mother didn’t have a bed for guests. Why hadn’t Brennan just purchased an inflatable mattress or cot for the office? Why pretend that her mother would magically recover and need her office again for work?
She remembered a day her parents took her to the park. They’d gone with their neighbors and their son. Brennan didn’t remember their names. Hunter must have been there, too, but she didn’t remember him, only the neighbor boy. The boy challenged her to a race—some tree in the distance and back. She kept pace most of the way, but he was a year older and she was in sandals, and when he passed her laughing on his return leg after touching the tree, she stopped running.
She walked back to where her parents stood. Her father waited for her apart from the others. Her face burned with frustration. She held her arms out to him—she’d never wanted anyone to pick her up so badly—but he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder and met her eyes.
“It wasn’t fair,” she started.
“Life’s not fair.”
“He’s bigger. I couldn’t beat him.”
“Doesn’t matter. Stop talking and listen.” He waited until she wiped a hand across her eyes, then continued. “Maybe you couldn’t win. But you will lose every single race you stop running. Do you understand me?”
She nodded.
“You’re the big sister. You need to set an example for your brother. I don’t want to see you quit ever again.”
Her embarrassment metastasized to shame.
Her father stood up and walked back to the other adults, the mass of his disappointment generating a gravity that pulled her along after him.
Brennan settled onto her mother’s couch, the weight of the memory and whiskey pressing down on her chest. She reached up to switch the lamp off, telling herself the heat in her cheeks was the alcohol and not the flush from his rebuke decades before.
Why that memory? And why now? Her father had been full of hugs and kisses, Brennan recalled. So many, she couldn’t remember any one in particular, just the comfort of all of them at once. Even the last kiss he’d given her was indistinct. All she knew for certain was he’d whispered something to her like “I’ll see you again” while he held her. Maybe. The memory was so ephemeral, she worried that she’d dreamed it as a child, that it never occurred. But the hug she lost that day in the park, down to the feel of the plastic sandals on her feet, was as real to her as the blanket she lay under.
After he was gone, Brennan would lie in bed wondering whether, if she had just held him longer or harder or said some magic words, she could have kept him there. She made mystical bargains with herself all through school. If I get an A on this test, I’ ll see him again. If I just finish this last mile, he’ ll be waiting for me. His failure to return hadn’t dissuaded her. One more hour on this essay, that’s what will do it.
“Why, though?” Hunter had shouted at her one day when they were teens. He stood in the doorway of her room—her father’s old office. She stood on a chair, hanging a photo she’d found of her father, probably taken while he was in law school. She climbed off the chair and shut the door in his face. She didn’t have an answer for him other than that, when she looked at the picture, she remembered that he loved her the best that he could, which was more than she could say about her brother or her mom, who somehow rode her all the time even though she was always at work. And the only thing he’d asked of her was that she not fucking quit trying to accomplish whatever task she started.
Even now, tucked into her mother’s couch, she understood that she’d devoted years of her adulthood, her entire career, trying to accomplish the same spells she’d attempted as a little girl. If I can win this case, help do this little bit of justice, he’ ll see that I didn’t quit and I’ ll see him again. And now, tonight, with Hunter. If I can prove he was innocent, Hunter can love him again, and he’ ll come back. The fact that it wasn’t possible didn’t stop her from striking the bargain with whatever devil might be listening in the dark of her heart moments before sleep took her.
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The woman had a devil tattooed on one shoulder, an angel on the other. The devil—a voluptuous red figure—curled herself around a pitchfork, one leg raised suggestively. The angel sat, hands bound before him, gag tied into his mouth, wings pulled around his shoulders like a blanket.
“Which one do you listen to?” Hunter asked.
The woman pulled her black hair behind an ear as she cocked her head to look at him. They were the only two people left in the bar, except for the bartender, a twentysomething so generic looking he probably couldn’t pick himself out of a lineup.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’ll never tell.”
Hunter nodded. Another mystery he’d never know the answer to. He hated not knowing things. Who murdered the Notorious B.I.G.? What was the explanation for spooky action at a distance? Where was D. B. Cooper, who hijacked a plane in the 1970s before parachuting out over Washington state with two hundred thousand dollars in cash? When would the Knicks win a championship? Why had he agreed to help his sister investigate a murder when he already knew who did it?
By the time Hunter returned from his mother’s place, the streets looked like some ice monster had puked a rancid mix of dirty water, slush, and dog-piss snow all over the city. But when he opened the door to his apartment, the emptiness was worse. So he turned around and made his way to the first bar he could find and stayed until last call. He didn’t want to clear his head as much as flood it with enough stimuli that it would suffocate everything he didn’t want to think about.
Another failure, though. The bartender collected the signed bill and slid his credit card back to him. Hunter stood and fought his way into his coat. On the trek back to his apartment, doing his best to avoid slipping into filthy puddles, he remembered the aftermath of a snowstorm, walking with his family to Central Park.
The sidewalks had been mostly cleared, and snow piled on the curbside against the doors of the parked cars as high as the windows. Hunter was small enough that they were taller than him. At the time, it felt like he was in the Arctic.
The path they were on crossed over another running perpendicular. Snow covered the rails of the overpass in a long crest five inches high. Brennan scooped up two fistfuls of snow in her mittens, molded them into a snowball, and was about to throw it when their father grabbed her arm and shook his head. Brennan frowned and dropped the snowball. Their parents walked farther down the path, off the overpass, before stopping, backs turned. Their mom pointed to something in the distance until their father stopped to look at it.
Brennan trudged after for a few steps before returning to the railing. She glanced over to their parents and then shoved the piled snow off the railing. A loud “What the fuck?” boomed from below, amplified by the tunnel under the overpass. Brennan jumped back from the rail before their parents turned. Their father strode toward them, an approaching avalanche.
Brennan turned to Hunter. “Tell him the wind blew it down.”
Their father bore down on them. “What did you do?”
Brennan was silent.
Hunter said, “I think it was the wind.”
Their father looked around, then turned to Brennan. “Go wait with your mother.”
Brennan ran.
When she was gone, his father bent at the waist and tilted Hunter’s chin up, so he had to look him in the eyes. It was the last place Hunter wanted to look.
“That is a dumb fucking lie, Hunter. Look at the railing. No other snow is gone except where your sister was. She asked you to lie for her, didn’t she?”
Hunter would have nodded, except his father’s hand was lifting his chin, so instead he said, “Yes,” in a voice with no breath behind it.
“I want you to listen to me. We do not lie in this family. We don’t lie to each other. We don’t lie for each other. We are not liars.”
His father increased the pressure under his chin. “You’re a boy now, right?”
Again, Hunter said, “Yes.”
“And you want to be a man, right?”
“Yes.”
“Good men do not lie. Do you understand me?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re my son. My son is not a fucking liar.”
“I won’t lie again.”
“You’re fucking right. If you do, and I catch you, I’ll throw you off this fucking bridge, do you understand me?”
Hunter desperately blinked. He didn’t want his father to see him cry. If he spoke, he’d bawl. But he couldn’t nod with his head tilted so far back the top of his coat zipper dug into his throat. The cold seeping through his wet gloves and boots ran into his veins, and his tears froze in his eyes, and he said, “Yes.”
His father took his hand away. Something in his face changed. The anger and disappointment directed at Hunter was gone. No, actually, it was still there. Hunter felt it inside his father—it was just muted, a door closed on a burning room.
Entering his lobby decades later, the cold air chased Hunter in like a ghost. This was the man Brennan was trying to redeem? As he waited for the elevator, Hunter decided to leave her to her delusions. He didn’t owe his father anything. Or her. Or his mother. What comfort would certainty bring her in the time she had left?
He fumbled with his keys through the locks on his apartment door, distracted by the thought that Brennan wouldn’t let him live it down if he backed out. They’d probably go years without speaking, until on his deathbed, she’d bring the whole thing up again. She had him by the chin, same as their dad did. When the devil on his shoulder spoke, it was with his father’s voice. We don’t lie to each other. We don’t lie for each other. How could he not blame Brennan for lying to herself for her father? If he could prove his father did it, he could finally show her the fucking truth. It wasn’t his fault—it was hers. It was a mean, savage thought, but imagining the moment was euphoric. His heart thundered in his chest.
He waited for the angel’s counterpoint. When she spoke, it was his mother’s voice from earlier, muffled and weak, but they were words from his childhood. She’d pulled him aside as a teenager one night when he’d gotten home after leaving the apartment in a rage because Brennan hung a picture of their father in her room and slammed the door in his face when he’d asked why. “It’s not her fault she loves him.” The night his mother said those words to him, he’d retreated to his room without responding, turning off his lights and ignoring the tapping at his door until his mother gave up. He would not accept that it wasn’t Brennan’s fault for loving him—otherwise, wasn’t it his fault for not loving him? But even now, even drunk, there was nowhere to run from their mother’s voice in his head—“It’s not her fault she loves him”—so he lay, too warm under his covers, hoping sleep would claim him before she spoke again.