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

I was kicking my soccer ball around, and while I’d noticed the bike, I hadn’t given it much thought. “Dunno,” I said. “You didn’t put it there?”

My brother gave me a look. “No, I didn’t put it there, numbskull. I wouldn’t be asking about it if I’d put it there, would I?” He opened the shed and dragged out the lawn mower.

I picked up my soccer ball and headed into the house. Now that Ricky had come outside, I wanted to be somewhere else. I was growing more and more uneasy around him, preferring my own company to my brother’s confusing presence.

Mom popped her head into my room while I was building a space station out of Lego. “I’m going out for groceries. Want to come?”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to be home alone with Ricky, but he was still mowing the lawn and I really wanted to keep working on the upper level of my control tower. “No, thanks,” I said, ignoring the flutter of trepidation in my gut.

I didn’t hear Darius pull up in his Chevette, but when the lawnmower cut out I could hear Ricky’s voice, raised and angry, drifting into the house from the backyard. I tiptoed into the kitchen and peeked out the window just in time to see Ricky pick up the ten-speed and throw it at his friend.

Darius jumped back and the bike landed with a bounce by his feet.

“I don’t want you bringing this shit here!” Ricky shouted. “This is not your goddamned dumping ground.”

“Relax. I just needed a place to park it overnight. No one can see into your yard. It’s fine.”

“I’m serious, Dare. The last thing I need is the police snooping around, asking questions. Zoe’s already seen the bike. My mom probably saw it, too. What if they asked my sister, huh? What if they talked to my mom?”

I ducked down from the kitchen window and crept back to my room. It seemed weird that Ricky had brought up the police. It made me think the red bike in our backyard was somehow connected to Amy. I didn’t understand Ricky’s anger or his fear about the police asking me questions, so his reaction became confused in my mind with Amy’s disappearance and all the questions the police had asked me then. While I sat on my bedroom floor sifting through my Lego, trying to make sense of everything, my own feelings of guilt quietly solidified.

THAT’S WHEN THE NIGHTMARES STARTED. There would be a soft sound, like a light knocking, at my bedroom window and when I went over to see what it was, Amy Nessor would be standing outside, tapping her dead fingers against the glass. I knew right away she was dead because even though it looked like she was standing, her head was sagging to one side and her body was hanging in the air, limp, as if she were being held up by invisible strings.

I didn’t tell anyone about the nightmares. I would wake up, heart pounding, sheets soaked with sweat, clutching my blankets to my chin. Then with my eyes wide open, I would start counting. One, two, three, whispering the numbers into the dark until my eyes drifted closed and my voice trailed off into meaningless mumbles. One night, I counted to over two thousand before losing track of where I was and falling into a restless sleep.

I ALSO STARTED GETTING STOMACH aches. I was in grade five by then and at first, Mom would pick me up from school and serve me ginger ale and crackers until my appetite returned, but since she worked part-time at the Dunford library, my frequent stomach complaints were becoming problematic.

“I can’t keep coming to get you, Zoe,” she told me one afternoon, while I lay curled up on the couch. Her voice sounded tired.

I didn’t want to make things difficult for her because I was worried it would make her heart act up again, but I couldn’t stop the stomach aches either. After maybe the fourth or fifth time the school called her, she took me to see Dr. Richardson. I sat on the paper-covered examination table and listened to him tell Mom there wasn’t anything wrong with me. He suggested that the next time my stomach hurt I should be forced to stay at school and tough it out.

“My guess is once she realizes she doesn’t get to go home, the stomach aches will go away on their own accord,” he told Mom. Like I was making them up just so she would come and get me.

I wasn’t making them up. They were real and I knew exactly what was causing them, but I couldn’t tell anyone. We had been assigned grade one reading buddies that year, and the very first time I sat down with the pig-tailed six-year-old assigned to me, I started cramping up. Kaleigh’s little voice twisted into my gut and when her wide eyes met mine I knew the nightmares were going to get worse. The stomach aches were one thing, but now Amy Nessor was showing up at my window clutching a book in her dead fingers that she wanted me to read with her.

“Please?” she begged.

I hid under my blankets, counting and counting and counting.

MOM WAS BADGERING RICKY ABOUT applying to college, but he wanted to take a year off to work instead. He wasn’t ready for college, he told her. He wanted to make some money first. I remember him being irritable a lot of the time that year, his final year of high school, at loose ends with himself, with everyone.

He spent even less time at home than he had before, but he wasn’t hanging out with Darius anymore. Darius had dropped out of school around the same time Ricky got a part-time job at Pizza Hut, and, when he wasn’t working, Ricky was usually out with some girl or another. Sometimes they came in groups, giggling as they picked him up. Other