The Good Son by Carolyn Mills (free e reader txt) 📗

have been so much worse for her family, being forced to stare at her empty bedroom, her empty bed, all her empty clothes.

At school, we continued to skip and sing, turning the rope faster and faster until the jumper messed up. I chanted the words along with everyone else:

Blue Bells, Cockle Shells

Evie, Ivy, Over

I love coffee, I love tea

I love the boys, and the boys love me

Yes, no, maybe so

I couldn’t listen to that meaningless rhyme without thinking of Amy. Somehow the image of her skipping with the other kids at the end of our street became tied up with the line “I love the boys, and the boys love me” and I would see her skipping down the sidewalk, getting closer and closer to the blue car that was waiting to swallow her.

After her body was found, the police set up roadblocks and began searching vehicles. They went door-to-door in the neighbourhood for a second time, looking for clues. And yet, in spite of all those efforts, in spite of all the officers out there looking, there was never any trace of Amy’s killer. No abandoned vehicles, no reported car thefts, nothing suspicious in any of the hundreds of blue cars that had been systematically pulled over and inspected. I was comforted by the thoroughness of the police investigation, although Mom did everything in her power to prevent me from following it too closely.

“You don’t need to know all the gory details,” she said. “It’s just going to upset you.”

I was already upset. Why hadn’t I looked at the license plate? Why hadn’t I stopped Amy from getting into the car in the first place? But mostly, why hadn’t I told the whole truth — why had I never admitted my terrible suspicion out loud? Every time I looked at Mom’s bandaged arm in those early days after the murder, I was reminded of her weak heart, about how she wasn’t supposed to get worked up. Besides, what if I was wrong? It was too big a risk to voice what I had kept secret all this time. Still, the weight of that secret left me numb. I could feel myself getting thinner, becoming flat.

Ricky didn’t say anything about the Nessors moving even though Mom was over there all the time helping Janet pack. When the family finally drove away in their station wagon, minus one child, Mom waved at them with this cheerfully determined smile fixed on her face. Her arm was better by then and she no longer had to keep it wrapped up, but the skin was wrinkled and discoloured from the burns.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN SOMETIME in April when Darius pulled up to our house in a pale grey Chevette. It was rusting around the wheels and a long crack ran across the bottom of the windshield, all the way from one end to the other. “How do you like my new wheels?” he asked. “Might not be pretty, but sure beats having to borrow my dad’s car all the time.”

I stood on the porch watching as Ricky slid into the driver’s seat and ran his hands over the steering wheel. He was grinning stupidly at Darius the whole time. I had a feeling that Mom and I would be seeing a lot less of Ricky now that Darius had his own car, and we hardly ever saw him as it was.

I knew that Darius’s dad’s car must have been checked by the police during their road blocks, and knowing that threw my disloyal suspicions about Ricky and Darius into a river of doubt. But I couldn’t drown my suspicions completely. My feelings about my brother during the months after Amy’s murder were unpredictable and confusing. I still craved his attention, but I also felt as if a black hole had opened around him that I was constantly in danger of falling into. We all were. I was desperate to protect him, to protect all of us — our whole little family unit.

The hate came later.

A NEW FAMILY MOVED INTO the Nessors’ house. They had twin boys, probably less than a year old, who couldn’t walk yet. Mom never made much of an effort to get to know the family; I can’t remember if she even brought over a welcome pan of anything: brownies or banana bread. She would have. Before.

The twins’ mom was a thin woman with a poufy perm that stuck out from her head like a cloud. She looked nervous to me, scuttling from the car to the house with her head bent low, carrying first one boy in, then the other. I often wondered whether or not she knew about the Nessor family and what had happened to the little girl who lived there before. She must have. It was all over the news. How would it feel to tuck your babies into their cribs in a murdered child’s bedroom?

I didn’t see the dad much. As soon as he came home from work, he disappeared inside the house. Even when the weather warmed up, I didn’t see him sitting outside or washing his car or playing with his boys.

One of the twins cried all the time. I could hear him whenever I played outside or walked past their house. Maybe it was both of them, and they took turns crying, but I had convinced myself that one of those boys was a quiet baby, and the other one was cranky and difficult. I felt sorry for the quiet one, the nice one, since there was nothing he could do about his brother and he was stuck listening to him shrieking for hours on end. I knew what it was like to have a brother you didn’t understand, one you wished sometimes would just go away. I knew what it was like to want to be the only child. The good one. The quiet one.

“WHOSE BIKE IS THAT?” RICKY asked one morning, nodding his head in the direction of a red ten-speed