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

Ricky made his face look innocent. “Yeah, but like, aren’t you scared of the dark?”

“Richard!” Mom scolded, setting her fork down loudly. She gave him one of her looks.

Had she told him about that? How I used to leave all the lights on when she was cleaning Dr. Richardson’s office? “I’m not a little kid anymore,” I said. I pushed my plate away and stood up. “And it’s not like I have to worry about Walter or one of his sisters coming after me with a knife while I’m sleeping.”

“That’s enough,” Mom said.

Ricky nodded at me, considering. “Touché,” he said.

Back in April, Ricky had woken up one night to find Darius leaning over his bed with a knife. He wanted money. When Ricky told us the story, I figured he was downplaying the actual details, giving us a watered-down version for Mom’s sake, but it was still scary. Ricky had been able to talk Darius down, although he did end up giving him forty bucks. What was strange about the whole thing was that Ricky and Darius hadn’t spoken in years.

“How did he know where you lived?” I’d asked.

“No idea. Someone obviously told him. Or dropped him off. I’d like to find whoever that was.”

Stan was pissed when he found out. He told Ricky that if his druggy friends were going to start showing up then he’d better find a new place to live. My biggest fear upon hearing Ricky retell the story wasn’t that my brother could have been hurt, or worse, but that if Stan kicked him out, he might move back to Dunford.

Darius never came back, though, so Ricky stayed in Leeville, where it was easier for me to pretend he didn’t exist.

I WENT ON THE CAMPING trip with Walter’s family in August. Our site bordered a small lake and the three days we spent on that little patch of wilderness were, up to that point, arguably the best three days of my life.

I envied Walter the uncomplicated relationship he had with his family. There was an easy camaraderie between all of them that was evident in the way they worked together to set up the campsite. I fumbled around, trying to be helpful, but felt very much like I was in the way.

“Why don’t you see if you can start us a fire, Zoe?” Mr. Bronson suggested.

I gathered up handfuls of small twigs and arranged them in a teepee in the fire pit. Walter’s mom gave me a pile of old newspapers so I crumpled a few pieces to jam under my twigs. The first two matches I lit went out before I got them to the paper, but the third, with a weak little flame that wavered uncertainly, lasted long enough for one of my crumpled papers to catch. I lit another match and held it to the opposite side of my fledgling fire. Soon the twigs were burning and I began adding the thin slivers of kindling that Walter’s dad had chopped earlier. As I watched my fire grow, I was so damn proud I could have cried.

“You’re a natural,” Walter’s dad said.

On our second night, after a full day of canoeing and hiking, as we sat around the fire under a thick blanket of stars, I looked from Walter to his two remaining sisters to his parents and almost said the thing that I’d carried in my heart like a blade for so many years. I felt, in the warm glow of those flames, that I was with people I could trust, and there in that remote place, so far from everything I was in Dunford, I could finally unburden myself.

Remember when that little girl Amy went missing? I wanted to say. She lived on my street. I think my brother and his friend — what? What did I think, exactly? That they had driven off with her and killed her? I had never put my suspicions into words. I had never articulated them to myself as a complete thought. Because I didn’t really believe it. I couldn’t. And I certainly could never voice them to Mom.

“Is it time for s’mores?” Sheila suddenly asked, breaking the spell of silence and infinite space into which my confession might have fallen. And just kept falling.

Walter’s sisters got up to grab the graham crackers and the chocolate. I stuck a marshmallow on the end of my roasting stick and concentrated on browning it evenly, being careful not to hold it too close to the flames.

CHAPTER SEVEN

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I HAD HIDDEN BEHIND A fog of intentional ignorance for a long time, but when I got to high school something changed.

“Zoe Emmerson? You related to Ricky?”

I turned around slowly. I didn’t recognize the guy talking to me, but I answered him anyway. “He’s my brother. Why?”

“What’s the matter with him? Can’t find a girl his own age?”

I scrunched up my face, pretending to be confused.

“Tell him the next time he crashes a party in Dunford to keep his hands off my girlfriend.”

I nodded, then quickly walked away. I’d heard that Ricky was hanging around with some of the seniors at Dunford High. His name came up every so often in connection with a party or a girl or several girls, and just like that, he was back in my world. We didn’t see more of him at home, but because of his weird association with the high school crowd, he clung to the periphery of my awareness.

I made it through grade nine successfully, relatively unnoticed. Then, in grade ten, our history teacher gave us an assignment that required us to search for local records on Dunford during the Second World War — how many of its citizens had served, what the war effort looked like at home, that kind of thing — using the microfiche in the school library. When I realized I had access to all of Dunford’s archived newspapers, something inside of me twigged. Instead of going back to the war years,