The Bargaining

For Matt, always

“Do not despise the lore that has come down from distant years;

for oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of

things that once were needful for the wise to know.”

—Celeborn,
The Fellowship of the Ring
, by J. R. R. Tolkien

Prologue

2004

T
HE FIRST THING
I
SHOULD
see is Pop with his belt. He called me from the top of the stairs, so that's where he should be waiting, leather and buckle in hand, knuckles bulging against his grip.

Instead, he's in the living room, standing by the door, his hand in his pocket jingling the keys to the car I didn't leave a scratch on, so how the hell would he know? I consider telling him the side of the story he won't care about, but I know it's useless.

I'm taller than most kids my age. It's not like I can't reach the pedals. A real dad would have taken me out by now, nudged me with his elbow and tossed me the keys with one of those Don't Tell Mom winks. But Pop's not that kind of dad, so that's how I know this whooping is going to be the worst
I've ever had. I had a full day of knowing how it felt to be in control of something bigger than me, and I think I'd trade my whole life just to know what one more day would feel like.

“How's about we go for a ride, boy?” Pop asks, leaning toward the door.

Pop isn't known for asking. And I know this isn't really a question, either. He only ever calls me “boy” when he's ready to put his fist through something. It almost makes me glad that's the closest he's ever come to giving me a nickname.

Still, his asking makes me nervous.

“Where're we going?”

Pop shrugs, his shoulders the only parts of his body that are fluid. Everything else stands at attention. His stiff spine and locked knees fight against the way he rocks on his heels, back and forth like one of those toy birds that bends for water over and over. His hands are uneasy, searching for places to go.

“Just a drive,” he says.

I look around, still not used to the new silence of our house, the way the walls even seem to hold their breath now.

“Where's Miller?” I might have guessed the minute he saw me slip Pop's keys into my pocket this morning that Miller would tell. He was born that way, his mouth wide open, ready to spill every truth that isn't his. But because I'm the only one who ever teaches him a lesson, he never learns. Lessons
are what big brothers are supposed to teach, not that anyone ever did that for me.

“Never mind Miller,” Pop says.

He always criticizes Mom for babying Miller, but Pop treats him like he's made of glass. We'll see how breakable he is later.

“What about Mom?”

“So many goddamn questions,” Pop says and opens the door. “Get your jacket.”

I pull my coat from the hook by the couch and shove my hands in my pockets, thumbing the pencil stub and loose button floating around in the left one, remembering again to tell Mom before she asks me about it. I could lose an arm, and the first thing she'd notice is the string on my coat that used to hold a stupid plastic button.

In the car, I rehearse the usual debate before I open my mouth. If I tell Pop everything now, maybe he'll keep the whooping to a minimum. But if I don't say anything, he doesn't have to know everything. The wild card, as always, is not knowing how much Miller spilled.

This time, I decide to go for broke.

“I bet you'd have let
him
drive it.”

I see Pop's fingers curl tighter over the steering wheel.

“Don't talk about him,” Pop says.

“And I didn't do anything to it,” I push on. “I even put the seat back where it was.”

“Stop talking,” Pop says, his growl crackling under some internal fire.

“Why can't I just—?”

It's dark out, and it's even darker in the car, so I don't see his hand leave the steering wheel until it's inches from my face, and by then I can't duck. Light enters the car in one hot flash. I cover my mouth with the back of my hand, pushing in on the part of my lip that split on my tooth, forcing back the wave of pain that'll roll in soon.

“You never listen. It's like nobody else is even there. Like you're alone in your own little world, and to hell with the rest of us,” Pop says, his reasoning a familiar epilogue.

Pop's never needed a location for my whooping before. The living room or the bedroom or the garage has always sufficed. The clock on the dash reads 6:32. Mom will be putting dinner out any minute. She's probably asking Miller if he wants milk or water right now. I smelled pot roast in the slow cooker this afternoon.

When we hit the fork in the road, Pop takes the path to the right, the one that isn't paved.

He's taking us into the woods. Which means Miller told him everything. Not just the car. He told Pop about
the old house. The spiders. The shed. All of it.

I watch as the remaining light from the outside gets swallowed up, and pretty soon, just the shadows of evergreens my pencil's drawn a million different ways fill the spaces in the car between Pop and me. The wheels struggle over chunks gouged from the makeshift road.

“Where are we going?” I ask, knowing I've used up all my questions and fully expecting another crack in the mouth.

But Pop doesn't say anything. Just grips the steering wheel, his face fighting some sort of battle with itself.

Branches are slapping against the car I was so careful to keep from damaging, and I grip the handle on my door to keep myself from flinching at each smack.

After we've gone as far as the trees will let us, Pop stops the car and opens his door without a word. I'm supposed to follow, but all I can do is grip the handle. When he opens my door from the outside, I'm still holding it, and he wrenches my hand away and yanks hard enough for me to hear a pop somewhere near my shoulder. I stumble out of the car and look around, telling myself the usual things.

The sooner it starts, the sooner it'll be over.

He'll break skin if you swear. Don't swear.

You'll teach Miller a lesson later. Later.

Biting your lip just makes your lip hurt.

But as I wait for Pop to rip a switch from one of the hundreds of trees eating up all the light, I run out of things to tell myself. And he's just standing by the car, looking at me like he's trying to figure out what I am.

I'm your son.

It's in my throat, and I open my mouth to release it, but a puff of white air is all that escapes.

I've never waited this long for a whooping, and maybe that's Pop's new form of punishment. Making me wait. Except that now he's getting back into the car.

I blink for a second. I missed it somehow. I blacked out. The whooping came and went, and I'm stunned or delirious or whatever. I take a step toward the car, but Pop says something that stops me where I stand.

“I'm sorry.”

They're words he's never said before, not that I've ever heard, and I put my hand gingerly on the backs of my thighs, my lower back. I feel for the welt marks that should be there, but all I can feel is the sting of cold starting to seep through my clothes.

I take another step toward the car, but I hear the locks drop, their heavy thud echoing through the doors' metal.

Pop looks straight ahead.

It's not about the car. This is my punishment for going
into the woods. He wants to show me I'm not such a big man. He wants to scare me. But the woods don't scare me. They scare him, but they don't scare me.

They don't scare me at all.

I shove my hands into my pockets, the detached button cold against my skin. I turn it around between my thumb and forefinger, hating my hand for shaking.

“So leave then,” I say, maybe loud enough for him to hear me through the glass. Maybe loud enough for me to believe I want him to.

As if he was waiting on my command, Pop throws the car into reverse and backs down the narrow road, bumping his precious car through the holes and cracks, keeping his eyes ahead of him like something out there is going to tell him this is okay.

My feet betray me, running for the road toward the car, my hands stuck in my pockets. Something else is in my throat now, something that dislodges against every effort to keep it in. Something infantile, cracking the hard surface it pushes against in my mouth.

“Don't!”

Then I can't see his car anymore, and I know he really left me.

Part of me wonders why I'm so surprised. But I am, and
for a second, I can't breathe. The air is right there, but I can't remember how to use it. And when I do figure it out, all of it hurts. Inhaling. Exhaling.

He left me.

The woods start their creaking. That's what I remember from last time, and nothing has changed since then. I read in some story when I was little that it's the sound of trees counting their leaves. I don't know why that always stuck with me. It's not like I believed it. I guess I didn't like the idea of trees counting anything.

Or maybe I've just been listening too much to what ­people around here say about what the trees do in these woods.

The longer I stand here, the colder I get, and I think about following the road back out and walking the rest of the way home. But it's colder than balls out here, and besides, maybe Mom will freak when Pop comes home without me, and good. I hope she suffers a little before I finally do show up. It's not like she was there to stop him. It's not like she's ever there anymore, even when she's standing right in front of me.

The branches snag my jacket, and I push them away too hard, earning a couple of scratches. The trees in these woods hit back. I'm sweating a little, and only when my lungs start to ache do I notice that I've been running this whole time.

The roof of the old house is low, but the trees clear enough
of a path for me to see just above their tops by the time I get to the outskirts of the drive.

The air feels thicker here, and I wonder how that could be with the trees finally giving me some breathing room. I listen for the creaking again, but this time all I hear is the sound of my own breath, the back of my throat clicking the way it does sometimes when I'm . . .

Quit being a pussy.

But I can't tell if those are Pop's words or mine. He's probably halfway home by now.

I walk around the back to the kitchen door and wedge through the crack I made last time, the bar locking it from the inside groaning against the strain.

It smells the same. Like sewage and absence. But this is closer than the shed, and besides, I think I'm done with that place.

I take the stairs two at a time to the upper level, breathing into my hands. Maybe I can dig up an old blanket or something. The last owners left pretty much all their junk.

I pull a mattress down from its place against the wall, and when I realize I'm not tired at all, I pull a few more down, and before I know it, I have a shelter even better than this pile of firewood that used to be a house, a tunnel starting at the wall with the window, leading all the way back to the closet
on the other side of the room. I haven't built a fort in years, and it feels good to do it without Pop telling me to grow up. I slam one more mattress to the floor and scoot it to the back of the tunnel. It fits almost perfectly in the closet once I move the rest of the garbage from the floor. My hand brushes a little box in the farthest corner of the closet. I know what it is before I even pick it up. I'd know that rattle anywhere.