Harkham's Case (Harkam's #1) (27 page)

She could hear him moving on the other end. “I got that—me too!”

“That’s what I figured. You probably were on an almost empty stomach, and after not having processed sugar in so long, it was like a narcotic hit to your system and when you crashed from the sugar high, you got emotional and out of control.” She leaned against the windowsill. “Samara told me that you went a little nuts that last time I gave you a soda.”

“It wasn’t so bad.”

“Tell me . . . I wanna know exactly what happened.”

He told her what happened that day and the next when he had to skip school, and how it had nothing to do with sugar intake. “It wasn’t as bad as when my mom left, though. Not anywhere near as bad as that.”

“Do you want to tell me about that?”

“No. I’m not good at telling stories like you are,” he said, his voice stiff.

“What if you write your story in an email like I’m doing for you? We can both purge, tell each other the bad stuff we don’t want to say out loud?”

“Will it make you hate me?”

“Never, Adam. Never . . . That’s simply not possible.”

* * *

Mari’s dad left halfway through the day. He couldn’t take it anymore. Just as she’d predicted, he cried, pleaded for her to stop, but she kept going.

Her room was cleaned out, but now she was tackling the kitchen—the worst spot in the house in terms of trash lying about.

The other rooms were filled with clutter, but this room smelled like rotting food and feces. It was enough to make her vomit, and vomiting would make her trip out—episode again.

She tightened the bandanna around her mouth and dug through the dishes in the sink, setting them on the counter so she could fill the sink with soapy water and start cleaning them.

Creeeeeeeaaaak . . .

Her head snapped over her shoulder only to find Vic standing there with work gloves and a bandanna around his neck. “I’m sorry . . . About last night, I don’t know what I was thinking. I know it’s hard for you to come here. I just . . . I miss you a lot. I was mad you didn’t miss me back.”

“Do you want me to apologize for not wanting to be here in this sty?” Her eyes traveled around the room.

He gripped the door and leaned into it. “No. But I wish you cared about me at least a little . . .” His head titled down and angled to the side a little as he looked at her, studying her reaction.

“I can’t care about anybody here—it only makes it all hurt worse. I have to feel disconnected or I’d never survive coming back here.” She opened the cupboard under the sink, found the dish soap and squirted some into the sink. She went about plugging it and filling it with water.

“Can I help to make up for being a bastard last night?”

“You can make up for it by not dwelling and forgetting about anything other than helping my dad out. That’s all that matters.” Right now all she cared about was cleaning this place up so it was at least halfway livable.

He nodded and they went to work, scrubbing and telling lame jokes.

“I tried to get clean for you, ya know,” he said as they finished putting away the last disinfected dish.

“Why would you do it for me? Do it for yourself.”

“I don’t care about me. Nobody does. You think my dad gives a rat’s ass if I’m falling down drunk on the couch?” He snorted.

“I suppose not, but you can leave. Get out of this place. Graduate, figure out what you want to do.” She nudged him with her shoulder, then handed him a garbage bag to start filling.

“I have no idea what I want to do.” He shrugged.

“Start a mechanic shop. Fix cars. You fix yours all the time.” She grabbed her own bag and started throwing trash in by the handfuls. She moved toward the table. She was determined her dad would eat there tonight.

“I hate fixing that piece of scrap metal. It sucks. I only do it because I can’t afford to pay for a mechanic.”

“You do it because you waste your money on drugs. Stop paying for that fucked up shit, and save your money. Come to Phoenix. Go to school there. Open a shop where there are plenty of customers. This is a go-nowhere town. There’s skiing and nothing else. You and I both hate skiing, so there’s nothing for you here.” She tripped over the corner of a ratty old throw-rug. She’d try to wash that thing later and see if it was salvageable.

“What about you?” He shot her a wry look. “What does Princess Mari plan to do after she’s done with high school? You don’t seem to like Phoenix that much at all.”

“What I’d really like to do is backpack across Europe. They like women with meat on their bones—they don’t expect women to be impossibly thin with big boobs.”

He laughed, and she tossed a tennis shoe at him. His reflexes were good, and he dodged it.

“But since I don’t have the money for that, I’m hoping to join the peace corps for a few years if they’ll have me.” She shrugged with her right shoulder.

“What happened to wanting to be a teacher? You used to talk about it all the time, how you wanted to teach kindergarten.”

Her left eyebrow rose, her lips pursed and her right hand landed on her hip. “What
do
you
think?”

“Oh, yeah . . . Right. Sorry,” he said sheepishly. “But if that . . . incident hadn’t happened, would you have become a grade-school teacher?”

She sniffed, moving the bandanna to cover more of her nose since it was slipping. “Probably. I love kids. Always have—always will.”

“Maybe someday you wi—”

“No, Victor. That dream’s dead. I can’t ever be around kids for any length of time on my own. It would kill me.”

“I hear ya. And just so you know . . . I do feel guilty. Every damn day, and it’s worse when I see Owen or Claire. They look right through me like I’m glass.”

“Do they still talk to you?” She got a little choked up just thinking about Owen and Claire. They were such good people. They’d simply made some poor decisions when they were younger.

He paused and sat on the floor. “Yeah. They try to act like it never happened, like their baby Megan never existed, but I can see it in their eyes. They keep talking about going away to college together, but they don’t. I think they worry if they leave, they really will forget their baby girl.”

“I doubt anybody will ever forget her. I know I never will . . .”

They went silent and resumed cleaning.

The work went so much faster with Vic here to lift heavy objects and help her clear surfaces.

They were three fourths of the way through the kitchen when her dad came through the door, a gun pointed at his daughter.

“Put that bag down,” her dad said through clenched teeth. Tears squished into the creases on his rounded face.

“I’m helping you, Dad. That’s all I’m doing,” she said and carefully stuffed a sock into the bag.

“These are
my
things. I want to keep them.” He stepped closer, the gun steady.

“You’d shoot me to protect your stuff?” She shoved in an empty can next. “You’d pick objects over your own flesh and blood?”

“I don’t know you anymore. You’re a stranger to me. You come here, bully me by kicking me out and then throwing away the treasures I’ve collected over the years.” His hand shook now as his eyes went to slits. “A lot of the stuff I own is invaluable—very priceless. And
I
found them.
Me
! I took the time to discover them—worked hard to collect all of this.”

“I didn’t kick you out.
You
left.” She frowned.

Victor was slowly making his way to stand between her and her father.

She shooed him away with her hand behind her back. This was nothing he needed to be involved with.

“I helped you! I’m the one who made sure they didn’t press charges when you murdered that little baby. I’m the one that fed you, clothed you, helped you to get over it all.” Her dad’s face turned red as he shook all over.

“No, Dad. You’re the one who tried to medicate me with fatty food like you were doing to yourself. It didn’t make me better, it made me worse. I started doing more drugs so I wouldn’t gain more weight.” She settled the bag on the floor, put her palms up so he could see she stopped. “I was miserable, but I knew it hurt you to see it, so I pretended everything was fine for your benefit. When you weren’t looking, I was out partying with my friends, getting hammered.” She shifted to the side to block Vic’s view. She opened the collar of her flannel shirt so he could see the scar on her chest. “I tried to kill myself. I used a knife, but I missed. Mom never told you. It happened after rehab, after I ran away and came back. I wanted to die, but did it wrong, because I knew I deserved to live in my misery.”

He dropped the gun, hunched over as his eyes scrunched tight and he covered his mouth as he sobbed.

Victor bolted after the gun and ran outside with it.

She refastened her shirt. “It was all worse than you thought.” She approached her father and stroked his greasy hair. He reeked of BO and had the beginnings of a beard.

“I didn’t know . . . I really didn’t . . . It was that bad?” he choked out.

“It was so bad I had no idea how to exist without either drugging myself up or hiding.” She crouched down next to him. “But I’m better now. That’s why I didn’t want to come here. Too many bad memories, too many friends here that are still on drugs, wanting me to join them. This place is no good for me. And I wish I could get you out of here, too.”

“No. This is my life. This is where I was born and raised. I have friends here,” he said.

She pushed off her knees to stand up straight. “Who is that, huh?
Who
do you hang out with and spend time with? Nobody comes over, because you won’t let anybody inside the door. You’ll probably die here when your junk avalanches on top of you and you can’t move to call for help.” It was cruel, but he had to hear it. “I love you, Dad, and I’m sorry you had to watch me self-destruct, but I learned that from you. Time to stop doing this to yourself. You’ve been slowly killing yourself for years.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He strained to get upright, but when she tried to help him, he jerked out of her hold. “I’m fine. I haven’t had time to clean lately, that’s all.”

“Why? Because it’s some other sports season you can’t escape from? Because your chair has swallowed your ass?”

He shoved a finger in her face. “You’re my guest here, and you won’t talk to me like that.”

“Then you’ll let me finish cleaning your kitchen, cook you healthy meals while I’m here, and I won’t touch any of your other rooms. I’ll even keep quiet about our issues, and we’ll go back to pretending like they don’t exist, even though they’re bigger than the mounds of crap in this house.”

He gripped her shoulder and leaned forward. “You
do
that, and tell Victor Acedo—that asshole—I want my gun back.”

“No.” She held her breath for a second. “You can have your gun back after I leave.” She shrugged his hand off her.

“I have more in the house.”

“I know you do, and I can get to them before you do and have them tossed out a window before you can do anything about it.” She smiled.

“You’ve become nothing but a tormenting snob, just like your mother.”

“I took the worst traits from both my parents—lucky me.” She turned and went out the side kitchen door to find Victor.

He rejoined her after stashing her dad’s gun in his car, and they finished cleaning the rest of the kitchen over the next hour, trying desperately to ignore how thick the tension was in the air.

When they were done, Victor took her grocery shopping.

She cooked them all a healthy meal, and both men complained about it.

When they were done eating, Vic left without even saying goodbye.

It was no big deal. She didn’t blame him. It was her job to clean up the mess by herself. Fine by her. She needed time to think anyway.

After the kitchen was clean, her dad was asleep in his chair, so she went through the entire house, documenting on her phone how her father lived.

It made her heart crash to her feet to see the stuff he thought was worth spending money on and keeping under his roof.

Boxes of old magazines nobody cared about were filling closets. Old rusted bicycles with missing seats or handle bars were hanging from the ceiling of his bedroom. The windows were cracked in there because he had crates of vinyl records and VHS tapes that had at some point collapsed into the panes.

Mountains of useless objects were everywhere. It was amazing he hadn’t fallen already and broken a leg.

As she went back out to the living room, she saw for the first time how swollen his feet truly were. The poor man’s ankles were bulging, and the rest of his feet were covered with red blotches—the skin all dry and cracking. It looked painful.

She kneeled down and examined closer. There were ingrown hairs that looked infected.

She almost gagged when she smelled that putrid odor.

Jesus. Why hadn’t he done anything about this?

And what the hell was he doing to himself to make it get to this point? She got up and walked swiftly to her room.