I stood in the shower, my head bent, the hot water pulsing against my body.
Besides dozing off in the M3, I’d been up now for just over twenty-four hours, and I was exhausted. But I knew it would be a while before I would have the chance to rest. I didn’t think I could go another twenty-four hours with no sleep, but I might not have any choice.
A younger version of me—right out of high school and straight into the military—might have been able to go days without needing rest. But I was no longer that younger version. Now I was practically twice that kid’s age, and I’d seen enough to understand that the bright and prosperous future we’d all been promised was a lie.
When I stepped out of the shower and began toweling off—moving carefully so as not to tear the homemade stitches—I paused to stare at myself in the mirror. This morning, when I’d gotten out of the shower at the Bellagio, I was a different person. Stephen Walker, a divorced business owner from a town I’d never even visited. I’d pieced together his entire backstory (undergrad from Ohio State University, die-hard Browns fan, drove a five-year-old Lexus IS 300), just as I’d done with the half dozen other aliases I’d used over the past year.
With the help of a hacker I knew from my previous life—someone who simply called herself Teddy—I managed to get my picture added to the landscape company’s website, as well as a LinkedIn profile and social media footprint that was several years old. They would be there for only a few days, enough time for the people I was hunting to do the barest amount of research, and then Teddy would delete them from the web, like they had never been there in the first place.
I toweled off and changed into the spare clothes I’d taken from the back seat of the M3—jeans and a dress shirt and sneakers, a casual look that didn’t feel right on Stephen Walker but felt right on me.
Heading down the stairs, I smelled eggs and toast and found a plate already waiting for me at the kitchen table.
“I normally do my grocery shopping on Sundays, so I didn’t have much in the fridge.”
Stephanie stood by the microwave, warming up some frozen breakfast sausages. When the microwave dinged, she deposited two onto each of our plates.
Then she paused, reconsidering mine.
“You aren’t vegan or anything, are you?”
I shook my head and dug in. I hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours either. I wanted to scarf everything down but forced myself to take my time.
For a minute or so, neither one of us spoke. Stephanie kept her focus on her plate, I kept my focus on mine. Until finally she’d had enough of the silence.
“So James passed away.”
A forkful of eggs paused halfway to my mouth. I’d known the question was coming, had known it ever since the words had inadvertently slipped through my lips, and I had been preparing myself for it all this time. Still, for a moment, I didn’t know what to say.
Setting the fork back down on my plate, suddenly having no appetite, I nodded and told her yes.
“I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
“No reason you should.”
“How long ago did it happen?”
“It’s been a few years now.”
“And . . . how did it happen?”
“Cancer.”
A hand went to Stephanie’s mouth, her eyes growing wide. Shaking her head slowly, she said, “I’m almost afraid to ask.”
“Brain cancer. It came out of nowhere, and by then it was too far gone for him to do anything about it.”
“My God. I’m so sorry.”
“You said that already.”
“I know. But I just . . . my mom died of cancer too, you know. Well, of course you don’t know—it happened ten years ago. The first time it showed up, she did all the treatments she could, and it looked like it was in remission. Then a year later it was back, and there was no stopping it.”
Her eyes had grown glassy as she stared down at her plate. Part of me felt that I should reach out, touch her hand, show some kind of support. But despite having known her at one time in our lives, I still felt like a stranger.
“After she passed away, my dad got really depressed. They’d been together for so long, it was like a piece of him had suddenly been ripped away. He wasn’t eating anymore. He wasn’t leaving the house. I don’t think my dad had ever felt depressed a day in his life until suddenly my mom wasn’t there anymore, and then it hit him hard.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s still living in Pennsylvania. Same neighborhood, same house. He’s gotten better now, I should add. Started seeing a therapist, which took forever to convince him to do because he kept saying there was nothing wrong with him and that if he went to a shrink people would think he had lost his mind. I don’t know, maybe it was a cultural thing for him, or just an old-man-being-stubborn thing. But eventually, he broke down and gave it a shot.”
“How’d you end up in Vegas?”
Stephanie snorted a soft laugh and shook her head, played with the food left on her plate.
“Long story.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
She looked at me then, as if for the first time. Taking me in. Studying me. Then she sighed.
“He was the first boy I truly loved. Your brother, I mean. I’d had other boyfriends here and there in high school, but it was serious with James. We actually said those words, that we loved each other. Did he ever tell you?”
Before I could respond, she laughed, shaking her head.
“Of course he didn’t tell you. You were, what, thirteen at the time? Something tells me your eighteen-year-old brother wasn’t confiding in you about his girlfriend.”
“No, but I could tell he really liked you. More so than any of the other girls he’d dated. You were special to him.”
Stephanie allowed a small smile.
“We talked about marriage. That’s how serious our relationship got. In retrospect, it sounds silly because we were just kids, but we had discussed skipping out on college and eloping. Maybe moving to Buôn Ma Thuột and staying with my grandparents for a bit until we got on our feet. But . . . we knew that wasn’t a good idea, not in the end. Like a lot of high school couples, we promised each other that we would stay together, even though we were going to colleges states apart, and for the first year or so, we really did try to make it work. But then . . .”
She fell silent, staring down at her plate.
“I remember when you broke up. James had just come home on break and I almost walked in on him crying in his bedroom. I managed to stop myself with my hand on the doorknob.”
“Did you ever say anything to him about it?”
“Of course not.”
“Did James ever get married?”
“He did.”
“My God. His wife . . . she had to watch him die like that?”
“Actually, no. They’d split before the cancer.”
“Did they have any kids?”
I shook my head.
“That’s good at least,” Stephanie said. She was quiet for a moment. “I looked James up once, a few years back. I’d just broken up with my fiancé, and I guess I was thinking about guys that I’d once dated who weren’t assholes. I saw James had started some kind of nonprofit that works with abused children.”
“It’s true. There are chapters all over the country.”
“I never knew he was interested in that type of work. From what I remember, he was going to college for finance.”
“He did. And straight out of college, he started working for a hedge fund. He made a lot of money, a lot of smart investments, but . . . the way he once put it to me was that none of it was fulfilling. He didn’t feel like he was making a difference. So he quit to start his foundation.”
“That’s amazing. Your mom must be so proud.”
“I’m sure she would be, but she passed away before any of that happened.”
I paused, not wanting to continue in this direction. I felt uneasy when the focus was on my family.
“So, again, how did you end up in Vegas?”
“I met a guy my last year of residency. We dated, got engaged, and when his job transferred him out here, naturally I came along. I never thought I’d live in Vegas, if I’m being honest. I came out here once for a girlfriend’s bachelorette party. It was fun, but I remember thinking this wasn’t a place to live. Kind of like visiting Disney World, I guess—it’s nice to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there. But the truth is, everything off the Strip is pretty normal. Pretty boring. I got hired at the hospital, started making some good money. And the guy I was engaged to? One day he decided he didn’t want to get married. Well, at least not to me. A week after we broke up, he started dating some woman at his work. Eventually the two of them married, moved to Arizona, and the last I heard they have two kids. I’ve seen pictures of him on Facebook. He looks happy.”
“And what about you?”
She blinked, startled, as if surprised somebody was sitting across from her. Her dark eyes took me in, cautious.
“What about me?”
“Are you happy?”
She didn’t answer. At least not right away. She stared back at me, as if considering the question, before she decided to switch subjects.
“You didn’t tell me about how your mom passed away.”
I thought about it for a few seconds, what to say. Whether I should say anything at all. For the past decade or so, I’d done a good job at forgetting my past. Like Olivia, I’d become a steel vault, with every raw emotion and terrible thing I’d ever done locked inside. I had no desire to open that door any further than it had already.
“Did James ever tell you about our dad?”
“Not really. I know he’d passed away a few years before James and I started dating. That he’d had a heart attack or something.”
“He was a monster.”
Stephanie’s expression made it clear she hadn’t been expecting me to say something like this.
“A monster?”
“For lack of a better word, yes. You hear those stories about men who drink too much and then get angry and beat the shit out of their wives and kids? That was our dad.”
I had a flash of our father in his factory uniform, reeking of dried sweat and oil when he got home from work. Ignoring our mother and heading straight for the fridge to grab a beer. Popping the top and chugging nearly the entire can, then pausing as he noticed me, only four years old, watching him from the doorway. His left eye twitching as he said, What the fuck are you looking at?
“I’d never known him to be a happy man. I guess he had been once, before I came along. James had told me how our dad used to be . . . normal. He’d take James fishing or to baseball games, and they’d have a great time. But then after I was born, something changed.”
“How so?”
“Around that same time, he was laid off at work, and it took a while before he found a new job, one that didn’t pay nearly as much. He started drinking more, and he started fighting more with our mom, and then he started throwing things around the house until . . . he started using his fists.”
I had a flash of one Saturday morning after listening to our parents arguing the night before, entering the kitchen with my brother for breakfast, and how our mother kept her face tilted down or looked away as she placed our food on the table. That was until she sat down with us and could no longer hide the black-and-blue bruise haloing her left eye. James asking our mother if she was okay and our father, his attention on the morning paper, telling him to shut his fucking trap.
Stephanie said, “James never told me any of this. But I . . . I always sensed there was something he was hiding from me. We told each other everything, never kept secrets from one another, but I always had the feeling he was holding back.”
“I can’t speak for my brother, of course, but I imagine he didn’t want to have to relive any of what had taken place. For him, it was all in the past. Especially since he was the one who bore most of our father’s abuse.”
Another flash of our father, enraged about one thing or another, going after our mother while James and I were still downstairs. Our father throwing her to the ground, stepping forward to kick her in the stomach, then pausing at the sound of my crying to turn and level his angry gaze straight at me, still only five years old.
“Actually, he came after me mostly. I was the younger one, the weaker one. And, I don’t know, I think he blamed me in a way. Like I mentioned, right after I was born, he lost his job and suddenly everything changed. Obviously it wasn’t my fault, but I don’t think he could be rational, not when he was drinking. Later, he would always apologize, claim that he’d blacked out, that he didn’t remember anything he’d done. But every time he got into one of his rages and came for me, James stood in the way. He tried to fight back, and since he was bigger and stronger, he sometimes managed to get in some good licks.”
“Why didn’t anyone call the police?”
“Why do you think? He was our father. And our mother wouldn’t allow it. One time a neighbor heard the shouting, which was louder than usual, so they called the police. The cops had shown up but that was before our dad had really gotten into it. For a week or so after, he’d calmed down some, and foolishly I’d started to think everything would be okay. But then he started up all over again. It wasn’t too long after that he’d broken James’s arm.”
“Christ,” Stephanie whispered. “Your dad broke his arm?”
“James had to wear a cast for a good two months. The police had been called again then too, of course. And my parents had fed them some line about how he’d fallen down the stairs. And James had told them the same thing, just as he’d told Child Services when they came out to interview him. I was so little at the time, part of me wanted to tell the police and Child Services everything, but James had told me not to. I didn’t understand why but I trusted him so I did what he said. It was only a few years ago that he finally told me the reason.”
“Which was?”
“Right after he’d broken James’s arm, our father had told him that if he said anything to the police, he’d kill our mom. And . . . part of me wants to think that he wouldn’t have actually gone through with it had James told the police the truth, but then again, he might have done it. He just had so much anger in him, he didn’t know what to do with it all.”
I saw a flash of myself at the black site, sweat streaming down my face, my teeth clenched as I used a pair of pliers to extract teeth from a detainee.
“Not that I’m making excuses for him. But James was old enough to see it playing out in his head, I think. If he did tell the police, he and I would be taken from the home, but our mother would still be there, and in an empty house with just the two of them? James didn’t want to take the chance.”
“That’s awful. All of it. I can’t . . . I can’t believe James never told me any of that. But then again, I sort of do believe it. He was always a private person. But what does all that have to do with your mother passing away?”
“She’d sustained a lot of beatings for a lot of years. She never went to the hospital, never saw a doctor. I guess after a while all those beatings started to play havoc with her internal organs. Not too long after I graduated high school, she passed away.”
Stephanie shifted in her seat. She leaned forward, reaching across the table, and grabbed my hand.
“I am so sorry, Danny.”
It felt weird, her touch. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected it to feel like, but it didn’t feel right, so I pulled my hand away.
“It’s no big deal.”
“But it is a big deal. You were abused. James was abused. Your mother was abused. Nobody should have had to go through what you all went—”
She paused then, her eyes narrowing slightly. Cocked her head to the side, as if to listen to what I’d heard coming from the garage these past few minutes. Maybe that was why I’d told her the truth about my father, to try to drown out that noise, however faint it was, because at that moment I didn’t have a solid game plan on what to do next.
Or, well, maybe it was because I’d been living with the burden my entire life and hadn’t told a single person, not one soul, and now I suddenly felt the need to explain myself, to tell Stephanie the truth and hope she’d understand.
Stephanie’s chair scraped the kitchen floor as she rose to her feet. She started toward the hallway. I watched her, not sure what to say but knowing I needed to say something, and fast.
“What . . . what is that?” she asked, turning back to me. “Is that noise coming from the garage? It sounds . . . it sounds like someone is yelling, but it’s all muffled.”
I stared at her, not sure how to answer. I hadn’t been totally honest with her. Not like she had been with me. For some reason I felt I owed her honesty now, despite how she might react.
“That,” I said, slowly rising to my feet, “is the woman I have tied up in the trunk of my car.”