The Other Brother (Snow and Ash Book 3) (21 page)

“What are you doing all alone?”

I glance at the mirror, then back at her.

“It’ll grow back. Six months from now you’ll be dying to cut it. Look who’s come to see you,” she croons as though Leslie hasn’t come every day since I got here, and won’t be coming every day after that.

My mother’s stylist drifts in behind her and gives me one of those fake kiss-the-air hug things. I hate those, but I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I don’t resist. “Your mother said to say hello.”

I nod. Every day I wish Mom would sneak me a note or something, anything that I could hold and know it came from her.

“I’ll be back,” Janice says when there’s a knock at the door.

“She said to say she loves you and they’re treating her just fine.” Leslie reaches out and fluffs the sides of my hair. “You know, I bet if I trim this up a little, you’ll look really cute.”

She’s got to be kidding.

Her smile fades. “I know this is painful for you, honey, but your mother was hoping maybe you could tell us what happened to your sister.”

No. I step back.

“I know, I know, but Tish is her baby too, and she needs to know if there’s hope. Any hope—”

“I saw her come in here with my own eyes. Where is she?” a stern voice demands.

I make a sound, not anything loud, but after that no air moves in or out of my chest. The blood drops from my head, out of my whole body, to be replaced by the worst dread, the most hopeless yearning.

“I don’t know what you mean, Colonel. It’s just me.” Janice sounds calm enough.

“Move aside or I’ll have my men move you.”

I can’t. He’s… I can’t. I suck at the air but I can’t get any, and I bend double. I feel sick. I need to sit down, now. I need to scream.

“Shhh!” Leslie hisses, clamping her hand over my mouth. “Do you want him to hear you?”

“She’s been here four days in a row. Don’t tell me she’s not bringing messages. What are you planning? Huh?”

“Nothing! I…she…I don’t know what—”

A door flies open and slams shut again. Another. I roll my eyes shut as they blur, and my lungs explode in a loud, sucking sob. I can’t hold it. I can’t anything, and Leslie bears my weight.

“No one’s here?” he barks in that clipped, precise voice I know only too well. “Then what was that?”

My breaths come in shallow pants as the door swings open, and I am face-to-face with my worst nightmare.

“What the fuck?” His eyes widen and then narrow as his hands curl into fists. “You goddamn bitch! Is this where you’ve been?”

I can’t take my eyes off him. I so desperately love him, and I’m so frightened I can’t catch any air. I send out these dreadful sucking noises like some crazed beached fish, and I think I might die if he touches me.

He seizes my wrist. He squeezes right over the cuts and I cry out. He’s so beautiful and he’s here. He’s everything I dreamed of every moment of every day since I last saw him, and he’s touching me, hating me, hurting me, and everything that I am needs him to hold me, and oh God! Why can’t I wake up? When will it ever stop?

“You’re hurting her!” Leslie cries.

He shoves me against the wall, and my mind let’s go. I’m half screaming, half sobbing, and I can’t see for all the water in my eyes.

“This whole time we’ve been mourning you,” he sneers inches from my face. “Sending out search parties and…”

The expression on his face changes. He releases my wrist and studies his hand. Blood. He shoves my sleeve up, the other one too, and when he looks at me, I see crazy in his eyes. My crazy.

“What have you done?” Anger is gone and, in its place, shock.

I stop screaming, but these awful noises rise out of my chest and I shake. Hard. So hard. My jaw shakes too when I try to speak.

He grabs me again, but higher up on my arm, and anchors me in place. “Bianca, what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Let her go, Colonel.” Janice remains calm. “She doesn’t talk.”

“What’s that mean, she doesn’t talk?” he snarls. He thrusts me away, and instantly I ache for him.

Please let this go away. Eleven more hours of this? It’s too long.

“Someone brought her to the hospital like this a week ago.”

“Why didn’t someone inform me? What the hell happened to her?”

“Nobody knew who she was. Some man dropped her off and said they couldn’t help her anymore.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know.”

Kent rakes a hand through his hair. “So the hospital figured out who she was. How?”

“Her mother identified her.” Janice cocks her head like she’s not afraid of him or his questions, like she’s daring him to explode.

He snaps his head up and glares at me. His eyes burn; mine can’t focus.

“And no one told me, why?” He directs this to Janice. Leslie is busy keeping herself very small.

“Why would they?” Janice counters.

“Because she’s my wife!”

Joy shoves my stomach into my throat.

“No, Colonel, she’s not. You have a wife.”

A wife? A wife? A wife a wife a wife a wife… I sag against the dresser. I’m ice. I am ice in the Arctic Sea.

He grinds his jaw and turns to the door, then swings back to me and shakes his head. “Where were you, Bianca?”

He has a wife. A wife a wife a wife a wife…

“Bianca!”

I open my mouth and expel a breath of soul. My lips move. “Ice.”

“Ice? What the hell is she talking about?”

“I don’t know, Colonel. She’s lost her mind. Can’t you see that?”

His gaze takes in my slouch, my grip on the dresser, the whole she’s not right, and the pressure against my skull tells me it has to stop. I can’t. Live.

“What are you going to do now, Colonel?” Janice demands. “Try to kill her again?”

“You’re out of line,” he says, pointing a finger in her face.

They aren’t looking at me. I hold myself quiet. I feel for my back pocket.

Kent shakes his head like he can’t believe what he’s hearing. Seeing.

“Because she’s already tried that,” continues Janice, “and I need to know if I have to watch two of you now.”

I smooth the hair back from my face. Ugly. Sexless. Like I should be in a cage on a blanket of wool on my way to the middle of the woods.

Kent makes a fist and grinds his teeth. Then he throws up his hands. “Fuck. I have to go meet my wife.”

He spins on his heels and stalks from the room, and I step away from the dresser.

I’m a failure. A crazy, fucking failure and I’m useless to anyone. And he’s going to meet his wife.

“Put that down! Bianca!”

Leslie dives at me, but I deflect her as though she weighs nothing. “Shit, Janice, get her!” she cries.

“Jeffrey, help me!” Janice makes a grab for the file, but I shoot her a kick that sends her flying. It’s my last chance. It’s my only chance. I jam the file into my neck.

Or at least I try to. A grip stronger than any I’ve ever known forces my hand to my side and rips the file from my fist. Eyes of gunmetal-gray flash fear and disbelief, and for a moment I catch his scent. It’s the one that used to pull me in and bind me to his will. But I am ice. I float in the Arctic Sea.

I’ll never forgive him.

“Tilt your head back, sweetie. Now, close your eyes.” Mom hands me a washcloth, and I hold it to my face as she empties a pitcher of water over my head. She lathers her hands with some homemade soap, then starts scrubbing my scalp. Sitting in three inches of lukewarm water and having cool water poured over my head is a far cry from what I experienced in Asheville, but it feels right. The fact that my mother is here with me makes it even righter.

Mom showed up with two Barry soldiers a few hours after he left. They didn’t cuff her this time, and the moment she saw me, she enveloped me in the most beautiful serenity a hug can deliver. Immediately after I broke down and cried. For hours. Now she’s giving me a bath, just like she used to when I was little and she was getting me ready for bed.

“One more time.” I raise the washcloth to my face again as she rinses. My wrists are wrapped in old saran plastic, but I keep them out of the water anyway as Mom soaps up the cloth and scrubs my back. I don’t know how she manages to look at me without throwing up. I raise my arms when she tells me; I stand when she asks; I turn on command. She hands me the washrag so I can scrub the lady bits myself, for which I’m grateful. When I step over the edge of the tub onto the stained blue mat, she wraps me in a threadbare towel.

“There, now,” she says. “That’s much better, isn’t it?”

Her eyes practically beg me, so I nod. I allow her to dry my body, and when she hands me a pair of green cotton polka-dot panties, I put them on. I pull the tank she gives me over my head. She tells me to sit on the seat of the toilet, so I sit.

I’ve faced him. It’s over.

“Lean over, Bee. I need to dry your hair some.”

I want to tell her there’s no point. My hair is too short to hang. But I lean over and let her scrub the towel over my head, again and again until the thing’s so wet there’s no possible way it can be doing any good.

Mom hangs the towel on a hook and perches on the edge of the tub. She takes my left hand into her lap and begins unwrapping the plastic. She’s got the first one off and she’s reaching for the plastic bottle of moonshine/antiseptic when she hesitates, then drops her hand over mine.

“I’ve seen what they did to you. I know how much they hurt you, inside too. I’m here for you, sweetie. I promise.”

I want to say thank you, but it sickens me, knowing that she knows. I bite my bottom lip and peel off a tab of skin.

She sighs and begins tugging the wrap off the other wrist. “You just need to find yourself again. Remember how you were? You never let anyone get to you.”

She smiles as she flicks the wrap aside. She twists the cap off the bottle of moonshine, grabs a soft rag, and gets it good and wet. “You just need to find that again. Remember how you used to be? We could set the clocks by that rigid schedule of yours. All that training. You could’ve taken down a bear if you’d wanted to.”

The antiseptic stings, but I don’t so much as wince. I don’t want her to stop. I need her, no matter what it is she’s doing.

I bite off another tab of skin. “That was only after they came.”

Mom pauses, the cloth barely an inch over the newly opened wound. “Who came? The Barrys?”

I shake my head. I glance down at the wound and back up at her. I wrinkle my brow, and she starts dabbing again. “They only found me. They never found Tish.”

Mom collapses her hand in her lap. “What are you talking about?”

What is wrong with me? She can’t know. She can’t ever know. She thinks all this is her fault and it’s not. If I tell her about the rape…

I can’t be strong like she wants. It’s gone. I clutch her arm and apologize with my eyes. “I was glue, but Kent took it.”

Mom frowns, blinks a few times, and sighs. “I don’t know what that means, you were glue. What do you think you are, Bianca?”

The scars on my back itch. “Whore.”

Mom bites her lip, turns away, and wipes her nose on the back of her sleeve. I’ve never seen her do that. Not use a tissue, I mean. I’ve made her cry. I just wanted her to understand, and I ruined it. I bite the inside of my cheek and flick a glance at the glass-block window. It’s dark-time, but I close my eyes and think about sunlight. There are puffy blue cotton balls in the sky, and the sun’s to the south, winking through the trees. Somewhere a dog barks, and a chipmunk scuttles up a tree. My arms are freckling, but the cat is watching the bird. It’s better this way. Outside.

~ ~ ~

The following afternoon Mom is playing checkers. They let her come again, two days in a row now. I don’t care about the game, but it makes her happy to see me move the pieces, so I do it. I don’t want her to look at me and feel bad all the time.

There’s more I could do. I can’t. But if I could…

I sweat. I move a checker and then grip my hands in my lap. I make another move, and Mom does a triple hop. “Ah-hah!”

I scrape my lips with my teeth. My throat narrows up, and my spine fuses solid. I stare down at my hands and I… “They beat us. Then they burned us, and they shoved us in dog crates and took us to the woods. They were supposed to kill us because Kent couldn’t.”

Mom’s eyes shoot wide. She drops her checker and sags in her chair.

I don’t want to see her sad, so I stare at a framed print of a fat chef holding a loaf of bread. “They took her out of her cage and she fought. She made them mad. You would have liked that. They were going to shoot her, but the woods people killed them and took her away.”

I rub my lips together. I peek back at her now and find her mouth slightly open, the creases in her brow deep as the Grand Canyon.

Mom sweeps the hair back from her face. “Is she… Did they…”

I don’t want her to ask the question. Either one. I don’t know the answer, and I don’t want to know. “He said grit is good.”

My mother takes a deep breath, collects herself, and resettles in her seat. “Why didn’t they take you?”

I move a red checker, but then I remember I’m black, and I move a different one. I twist my hands together. There’s a spider in the corner. There are no chipmunks and no deer, and I haven’t seen a bug in years. But there’s a spider in the corner.

Mother presses. “Bianca?”

A knock at the door sends me to my feet. My skin flutters, and my heart thrums to life. I clutch the back of my chair.

“I’ve got this,” Janice says calmly. My eyes are negative to the door’s positive, and I can’t look away. I don’t want to, and I can’t.

But he has a wife. A wife.

When she opens the door, Janice blows out a breath and claps a hand to her chest. “Oh. May I help you?”

I sink like a rock in a river of disappointment.

“I’m here to see Bianca.” The voice is cheerful. Familiar. It’s evil, and my lungs stop moving.

Nico pushes past Janice and into the living room, and when he sees me, he smiles. His eyes sparkle like he sees something just wonderful.

I hug myself. There’s an ocean, and it’s gray like the Atlantic, and the water foams white where the waves crash. The sun bakes my shoulders, and the water’s cold but not too cold, and I let the surf tickle my feet.