Breaking Glass (40 page)

She settles beside me in the snow, silver light glinting in her eyes. She’s never looked more beautiful, and the animal urge inside my dying brain refuses to go quietly. She strokes my hair.

So much power, I think. Enough to give a dying boy a hard-on.

But I have no strength left to act on it. Even within the hallucination, I can feel the life force ebbing out of me.

“It only hurts a little after you cross over,” she says gently.

“Fuck you,” I spit. I hate her. Hate her for turning my love for her into a weapon. If it would do any good, I’d sock her in the teeth, but she’s a ghost, and I can’t move anyway.

“We’ll have so much time together, Jeremy. Isn’t that what you always wanted?”

“I didn’t know what I wanted, Susannah. I was just a horny idiot.”

But I know that isn’t entirely true.

It was just that I loved a different Susannah. The one who didn’t exist.

“No. You were different.”

I take in a shivering breath. My cells are shutting down one by one. This is it. I’m going to die for nothing other than my own stupidity.

Maybe fate always wanted this. I’d cheated death twice before.

Third time’s a charm.

“No. I wasn’t. I was just dumber. Why did you do this?”

Rage shudders through me.

It’s amazing the clarity one has in the moments before dying
, I think idiotically as my breaths wind down.

“You used me,” I shout.

A single tear rolls down her cheek. I gulp in one long shivering breath, then fade into darkness as the sky drops down on me.

C H A P T E R
t h i r t y - n i n e

Now (January 13th)

I wake to the sensation of being burned alive. I’m encased in plastic, the ground under me shuddering and grinding. A face peers down at me.

“Good thing you left your leg out there like that, kid, or you’d be a goner.”

I fall back into oblivion, convinced I’m in hell.

I finally realize what’s going on from the newspaper someone has left on the table beside my bed.

MISSING GIRL’S DEATH RULED A SUICIDE.

I don’t have enough strength to read the rest.

But it’s the notebook that has my name on it that tells the truth. Finally.

Inside is just one line.

A link to YouTube.

It takes a few more days for me to gather the courage to look.

Spake and I visit Ryan every day. He’s making slow and steady progress. He’s up walking, his wavering eyes have begun to focus better, and he’s begun to speak in a slow, halting, and somewhat garbled manner. And he smiles. A lot.

His night terrors are gone.

So are mine.

But I can feel her waiting. Waiting for my final act.

I know how. But Susannah still needs me to know
why
.

Susannah:
Then

I sat at the dining room table, head resting on my arms. When I looked up, Mother stood there, cradling a big white book.

“So,” she said, conversationally. “I just saw Ryan.”

“Oh, God. You were listening?”

“I tried to warn you, Susannah. I tried to help you understand that the Morgans are the devil’s spawn. But what did you do?”

She took a seat beside me, her voice suddenly dropping to a whisper. “Bitch. Slut. I heard everything.
Everything
.”

She set the book on the table. What I’d thought was a Bible was the furthest thing from it.

Mother opened the book, leafing through page after page of gruesomely defaced photos. She pulled out a firsthand account of the death of her high school sweetheart, written by Jeremy’s long-dead mother, Teresa. The note claimed that Mother’s long-ago boyfriend, Douglas Lewis, was left by Patrick Morgan to die in the icy waters of the reservoir.

I didn’t want to believe it.

Then she pulled an envelope out from the back of the album. On it, she’d printed in her same messy hand.
HUSH MONEY
.

She pulled out a thick sheaf of photocopied checks, some for as much as $5,000.

“If it isn’t true, why do you think he paid me all this money to shut me up? Who do you think owns the deed to this house?”

I stared at Mother, speechless, as she tossed the envelope with the checks into the fire.

“I’m sick of taking his blood money. Teresa took it, too. But then she stopped. We didn’t talk much, but she called to tell me she was going to go public.”

The blood rushed to my head and I felt dizzy. “What? What are you saying?”

“I’m telling you that the man you have been sleeping with is the monster who murdered the love of my life, and who ran Teresa Glass off the road to her death. And do you want to know why he killed Dougie? Do you?”

I tried to stomp out of the dining room, but Mother grabbed my wrist and squeezed with the strength of a man.

“He killed Dougie because one night, in some town upstate, Dougie watched Patrick rape, then kill, a younger girl. A girl of thirteen. Patrick always liked them young.”

I was sobbing, trying to free myself from her iron grip.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Mother’s voice grew progressively louder, until she was shouting. “To see your demon lover? He’s enslaved you, and now your soul is going straight to hell!”

“You’re crazy!”

“Am I? What do you think of your precious Patrick Morgan now?”

I pulled free and ran up the stairs to the bathroom, threw up my dinner, slumped to the floor, and cried some more.

Patrick Morgan, my savior, my surrogate father, the man I’d come to idolize, was a murderer. A monster. How could someone who could be that cruel truly love me?

He used me. Used me to punish my mother. Tormenting her and extorting her wasn’t enough. He had to destroy me, too.

And Ryan. His love for me was a sham. A masquerade.

What did that leave me with?

Only Jeremy. Who I cared too much about to taint with my poison.

I heard the clomp of Mother’s heels on the staircase as she headed to her bedroom and slammed her door.

In the medicine cabinet, I kept razor blades to refill my shaver. I sat on the tile, the sharp edge hovering a millimeter away from my wrist.

I would have sliced deep into the flesh, severing the vein. I would have bled myself out all over the bathroom floor.

But that would have been too easy.

A plan started to form.

Now:

At last, on the night before I’m to return to school, I click on the link.

Susannah speaks directly into the camera. Directly at me.

“Okay, so you loved me.”

She tightens her ponytail, clears her throat, and looks straight into the camera. Straight at me.

Straight into me.

“That was only because you didn’t really know me.”

Susannah looks away.

“I decided to end it all. Not in a fit of desperation, but in a way that would shame the people who’d wounded me to my core. Maybe, if I was really smart, I’d take them down with me.”

She looks at me again and I shiver at the feral coldness there, and wonder how I never saw this side of Susannah before.

“I had plenty of time to plan.”

A smile curls her lips and it’s even more chilling than her cunning stare.

“And you, Jeremy, would be my unwitting accomplice.

“If you’re as smart as I think you are, you’ll have unearthed the truth by now.”

She swallows, her voice is cracking. “And maybe, someday, you’ll be able to forgive me.”

Susannah’s image fades to black.

To the tune of a single lilting cello, words write themselves in white script across the black screen.

For Jeremy, with Love and Squalor

The writing fades, and a wavering, white line cuts across the black. Below the line, a single red seed pulses and sprouts hairline-thin roots that fill the black space in an intricate tangle of scratchy squiggles. Curling tendrils pierce the ground and draw a white tree, its branches fanning out like skeletal fingers.

The image dissolves and the cello music fades to silence.

I stare, unable to rip my eyes from the dark screen, paralyzed with emotions I can barely identify.

“Roots,” Susannah’s voice whispers. “You always loved history, Jeremy. But what if that history, and those roots, are the very things that want to strangle you? Drag you down back into the dirt with them? Jeremy, all the roots in this town, all the poison roots have a single poison seed.”