Lethal Control, page 18
part #3 of The DuPage Parish Mysteries Series
“I said I’m going to murder him,” I shouted over my shoulder. “This is why you’re such bad parents; you never listen to me.”
“Tell Eli hello,” my father called back.
“Hugs and kisses to Eli from both of us!” my mom shouted.
“It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours,” I said. “But when I come back after a week, I’m chopped liver.”
This time, I did slam the door. To teach them a lesson.
The day had a hard, cold grayness, like the sky had been detached and nobody had come along with a replacement yet. I drove north out of the city, into the smoke of stubble fires, the burnt-sugar sweetness of the canebrakes. I cut off on an old state highway, driving through a tunnel of trees—live oaks that were green and mossy, and willows and sugar maples whose leaves had turned a papery pink. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I smelled the old smoke long before I could see the burned-out shell of the house.
The thing that had called itself Richard York, the thing that we had called the hashok, the creature that Nelda Pie called the thing in the grass, had lived in a modern take on a farmhouse, a million-and-change stunner with white siding and huge windows. It had burned down to charred framing, collapsed rafters, and piles of scorched debris. The fire had been two years ago, but when I let the Escort roll to a stop, I was sure I could still smell the smoke, and ashes stirred in the wind off the Okhlili.
The manicured St. Augustine lawn had gotten shaggy and ankle high. The magnolia trees still held their leaves, but they looked dull and plasticky. The wind picked up again, and it sounded like a fire when it rushed through the tupelo trees. It sounded like a train. It sounded like something from the Old Testament, the Spirit of the Lord in the whirlwind, and it raised goose bumps on my arms.
Eli was sitting on a cut bank of the Okhlili, dressed in my po’boy sweatshirt and the camo pants and the waterproof boots. When he saw me, his eyes got huge, and he got to his feet and ran.
I ran after him.
He broke away from the river, heading toward the thick stands of pine and sugar maple, where the leaves were exploding in fiery reds and oranges. That was where we’d first met, where I’d found him that night two years ago, where the hashok had attacked us. In hindsight, I knew it had only been playing with us, but at the time, the threat had seemed real, and the danger life or death. Now, Eli shot towards the gloom thickening under the branches. He was faster than me. He was going to get away.
I pitched one of his running shoes as hard as I could. It hit Eli in the legs, and he stumbled and fell. He came up again a moment later, bouncing to his feet, his gaze sweeping the ground. Then his head came up, his mouth slanting with outrage.
“Did you just throw a shoe at me?”
“You’re so smart,” I said, dropping from my run to a walk, still moving toward him. “Figure it out.”
His face began to shutter again, the security measures falling back into place. He hugged himself and took a step back. “You need to go. I’m leaving—”
I hurled the other shoe as hard as I could. It struck him in the chest with a satisfying thump.
Eli’s jaw dropped. “Dagobert!”
I kept walking.
“That hurt!”
“Put them on.”
He rubbed his chest. We still had ten feet between us, but I was closing fast, and he shifted, not quite looking at the trees.
“Put the fucking shoes on,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
He checked my face and cut his eyes away. “I don’t know—”
“Put them on! You don’t have to know anything except how to put on a goddamn pair of shoes. Those are my boots; I want them. And I want my sweatshirt back. And I want my camo pants back.” He hugged himself tighter, and I said, “What don’t you understand about put those fucking shoes on?”
Eli did look at the trees then, but he must have figured I was too close now for him to make a break for it. He made a weird, helpless noise that was kind of a laugh, and then he balanced on one foot and started unlacing a boot. When it was loose enough, he kicked it in my direction—hard. I caught it. He repeated the performance, and then he stood on the St. Augustine grass in stockinged feet, folded his arms again, and set his jaw.
“Put. Them. On.”
This time, the noise in his throat was wild with frustration. He stepped into the running shoes, pulled the heels on with two fingers, and stomped his feet. “There? Are you happy?”
“No, I’m not happy, Eli. Are you happy?” He didn’t answer, so I said, “Now you’ve got your running shoes. So, there you go. Run the fuck away in your running shoes.”
He pulled the sweatshirt up to wipe his eyes. A minute dragged past, with nothing but the sound of the Okhlili, and the branches stirring in the breeze, and then the distant rumble of thunder. A landslide of storm clouds was moving in, the leading edge broken by blue-white bursts of lightning. The air smelled like a storm, like the sweet rot of leaves in autumn, a whiff of ozone that made the hair on my arms stand up.
Once more, Eli pressed his sweatshirt to his eyes. This time, he held it there.
“What are you crying about?” I asked. “What in the world do you have to cry about? I’m the one who should be upset. I still haven’t got my sweatshirt and my camo pants.”
“What in the fuck is going on?” He yanked the sweatshirt down, and his eyes were red. “Is this why you came and found me, to yell at me? Is that what you want?”
He was shouting by the end, so I shouted back, “I don’t know what I want! Maybe I do want to yell at you. Maybe I want a fight. You’re always talking about how we should have a fight. How do you like this one?”
“I hate it! It’s fucking awful! You’re being fucking awful!”
“You ought to know about that!”
He opened his mouth, and then he shut it again. Pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes, he was quiet for a long moment, and then he let out a soft, hurt laugh. “Ok,” he said. “Yeah, I guess I should.”
Thunder rumbled again, closer. The darkness came at us like a physical thing, stirring the grass, pulling on my hair and jacket, like it was sweeping everything else away until it was just the two of us standing on that patch of lawn screaming at each other.
Dropping his hands, Eli opened his eyes. He said, “If you want to yell at me, you should yell at me.”
“Jeez, thanks.”
“No, I deserve it.”
I shook my head.
“Do you want to hit me?” he asked. “Would you feel better? Because you can.”
“Good Lord, E, I don’t want to hit you.”
“But you can if you do.”
I dug a thumb into the corner of my eye and looked away.
The first raindrops started to fall. Where they struck the Okhlili, they hit hard enough to dimple the water, and their rings began to spread and intersect. I could see it for a moment, and then the storm swallowed the river, and I couldn’t even see that.
“Maybe you want to talk to me,” Eli said. He was looking down at himself, studying the front of the sweatshirt—my sweatshirt—and he brushed fingers over the photo-transfer of my face. “Maybe that’s why you tracked me down.”
“I tracked you down because I’m not going to have a boyfriend who keeps running away. I’m a decent person, Eli. I do whatever you ask me around the house. I’m nice to you. I talk to your friends even when that one kept calling me Grandpa. I don’t complain when you hide the TV or you suck up my notecards in the vacuum or put my textbooks in the dryer.” My voice broke as I said, “Posey likes talking about how I’m too soft, and maybe he’s right, but I don’t deserve to sit around, wondering if today’s going to be the day you run and never come back.”
He picked at the cuff of the too-big sleeve and whispered, “No, you don’t. You deserve a lot better.”
“I don’t deserve to—to have to feel like shit. I already had a boyfriend run out on me, in case you forgot. And now I’ve spent years wondering if you’re going to do the same. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“Awful, I guess.” In a tiny voice, he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry too.” Rain struck my face, my shoulders, cold and stinging. I wiped my eyes and fixed on the tupelos, their leaves burning and spinning like Pentecost. “Go on, then. Aren’t you going to go?”
“Do you want me to go?”
“I’m not doing that. Go. Or don’t go. But I’m not playing that game.”
Maybe it was rain, but it looked like he was starting to cry again. He snuffled into the sweatshirt some more. The storm started opening up, and to the north, ball lightning exploded over the bayou. We stood there getting wetter by the minute.
“If you want something,” I said, “you’ve got to ask. I’m not a mind reader.”
He was trembling—shaking inside the baggy sweatshirt. Then, wordlessly, he held out his hands.
I glanced at them, looked up at his face, and then snapped my attention back to his hands. I knew Eli’s hands. I’d spent a lot of time holding them, playing with his fingers when we lay on the couch together, kissing his palm when I walked by, watching him cook. He had beautiful hands, with long, graceful fingers. These weren’t his hands.
They were too big, for one. The fingers were even longer, and they tapered to thick, pointed yellow nails. Claws, my brain said. They’re called claws. The skin was mottled, and my first thought was that maybe it was vitiligo, with lighter patches mixing with the soft brown of Eli’s skin. But the lighter patches were dead white, and after a moment, I realized they weren’t…skin. Not human skin, anyway. The texture was wrong.
“It’s happening,” he said. The words had a slight distortion to them, the way they do when your lip is full of Novocain. “We knew it was happening, but now it’s—it’s actually happening.”
I thought of the night before, when he’d knocked me down without even trying, when his eyes had burned blue. He had hazel eyes, but they’d been electric blue. And glowing.
“So,” he said in a thick voice, “that’s why. Just so you know. It’s not about you. I love you—”
“You dummy,” I said and took him in my arms.
He tried to pull away once, and then he broke down, sobbing into my jacket, his whole body shaking like he was falling apart. The rain started coming down harder, big, fat pellets of it. His hair smelled like gunpowder and mud and pine resin. The wind wrestled the tupelo trees, and at the same time, something huge and invisible was wrestling in me. And then I wasn’t wrestling anymore. Gave up. Just done.
I picked a leaf out of his hair, and I said, “We’re getting soaked. Come on, let’s sit in the car.”
I kept one arm around him, and I carried the boots with my free hand. We’d barely gotten in the Escort’s back seat, Eli half in my lap and curled around me and trembling, when the storm cut loose. The rain fell like someone had tipped over a bucket, sheeting over the windows. I had that feeling that humans must have been feeling all the way back to the Stone Age: being safe and relatively dry while the clouds gutted themselves, a warm body pressing against mine.
After a while, Eli said, “I have to go, Dag. I hurt you last night. I could have killed you.”
“We said we’d figure this out together. We said that two years ago. I don’t know why you think things have changed.”
“I have to go.”
“You don’t have to do anything.”
“I’m a monster.”
“They were just notecards.”
He hiccupped a laugh and wiped his eyes on his shoulder. “You know what I mean.”
“It’s a virus. It’s like any other virus. There’ll be treatments. A cure.”
“It’s not like any other virus. You know that.” He shivered. One of his hands was behind my back, trapped between my body and the seat. I was aware of it, of its size and density, its unfamiliar roughness through the nylon of my jacket and my cotton tee. “It’s going to get worse. I’m dangerous.”
“Eli Prescott Martins, if you being dangerous bothered me, I would have broken up with you the first time you tried to hide my car keys. I like that you’re dangerous. Well, most of the time. If you’re going to leave, then you’re going to do it honestly—you’re going to leave because you don’t like being vulnerable, or because you’re sick of me, or whatever the real reason is. But don’t give me this bullshit about being dangerous.”
He was quiet for a long time. The rain drummed on the roof of the car, an unrelenting hiss. Then he said, “I don’t deserve you.”
“Knock it off.”
“I don’t. I should—I should have been so much nicer to you.”
“You’re plenty nice. But I don’t want you messing around with my school stuff anymore. That’s serious.”
For some reason, that made him smile, although the expression vanished into suspiciously familiar gravity a moment later, and he nodded.
“Dag, what if it’s me?”
“It’s definitely you. I saw all the glitter in the vacuum.”
“No, I mean—” He braced himself with a breath. “What if the reason I’m changing, or the reason Richard, the hashok, chose me—what if it’s because of who I am? I’m awful. I’m so awful to you. I’m mean to everyone, actually, and nobody can stand me. Well, you put up with me, but—”
“What? I’m too dumb to know better? Or I’m so desperate that I’ll put up with your nonsense? Or I’m a spineless sack of dog turds, like Posey says, and you can walk all over me?”
He opened his mouth, looked at me, and closed it again.
“Thanks a lot,” I said.
“Dag! You’re not any of those things. I just meant—”
“Then don’t insult me by saying everybody else sees how awful you are, but I’m too fucking dense to figure it out.”
“You’ve been doing a lot of swearing tonight,” he said in a low voice. “My dad barely talked to me at the end. Gard couldn’t stand to be around me. Richard literally only put up with me because he was fattening me like veal in a cage. There’s something wrong with me.”
“You’re a complicated person. I’m a complicated person. Everybody’s complicated. I think you’re all sorts of wonderful. You’re smart and strong and funny. You’re so compassionate, and you can’t help taking care of people.”
“I like it.” He wouldn’t meet my eyes, and the words were toneless. “When I feel like that, like I’m going to enjoy hurting someone. I know I shouldn’t. Part of me knows. But I feel strong and safe and—and in control. All the parts of me that hurt, all the parts of me that never shut up, the ones that all day are telling me I’m fat and ugly and worthless, they’re iced over. I can’t hear anything, and it’s so…good.”
I picked another leaf out of his hair. We’d done a lot of reading, both of us, over the last year. About eating disorders. About what was going on behind the scenes, so to speak. And, of course, it wasn’t simple, and everybody was different, and somehow I’d won the jackpot for complicated, beautiful men who kept a pair of scissors in their back pocket during football season and spent all of October and November threatening to cut the TV’s power cord. But since Eli wouldn’t go to therapy, we had to do something.
“When you started having issues with your body,” I said, brushing hair over his ear, “what was going on?”
He cocked his head.
“Answer the question, mister.”
“A lot, I guess. Gard and my parents were dead. I was—I don’t know, I was living with Richard. He was packing me with Prozac and ketamine. I spent all day in the house. Sometimes, I spent all day in bed. Ok, now that I’m hearing it out loud, I’m going to say, maybe not a lot was going on. Maybe nothing was happening at all.”
I played with the hair over his ear.
“It’s not the same,” he finally said.
“Why not?”
“I get what you’re saying, but it’s not the same.”
“Ok.”
“I was gaining all that weight because of the Prozac. I was depressed, seriously depressed, and I wasn’t getting any exercise. I didn’t like how I looked.”
“E, I said ok.”
He shook his head. The words sounded torn from him. “I felt helpless. I felt so fucking…powerless. Gard. And my parents. My whole life had imploded, and I’d been there, in the next room, while it happened, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. I couldn’t go back in time. I couldn’t fix it. I couldn’t even make myself forget it. All I could do was think about it, again and again.”
My hand slid down to his nape, where his skin felt cool, and I chafed him lightly.
“I could control what I ate,” Eli said. His voice twisted and bucked. “I could control when I ate. I could control if I ate.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
He ran the inside of his arm across his eyes. “Ok, so maybe I’ve got some issues with control. It’s what you keep saying: I don’t like being helpless. I don’t like being vulnerable. Big breakthrough.”
“You know, a lot of that stuff, what we’re talking about, it starts off as a coping mechanism.”
“And now, what? I’m coping with my utter fucking uselessness by—by liking the fact that I’m turning into a monster?”
“I don’t think you’re useless. Your Cajun pasta is even better than my mom’s. God, please don’t tell her that.”
The corner of his mouth turned, then fell again.
“After Lanny,” I said, “I shut my life down. I didn’t go anywhere except work. I didn’t see anyone except at work. I moved in with my parents. And at first, that was ok. It was a coping mechanism, and it worked—it helped me get through the first day, and then the next. And then, after a while, it wasn’t helping me anymore, but I couldn’t stop. It was safer to go to work, to go home to my parents, to live on autopilot, than risk getting hurt. And then I met you.” I kissed the side of his head. “Sometimes, things that start out as a way to help us end up hurting us. I’m not saying you like what’s happening to you. I’m saying we’ve been through this before, where you couldn’t trust your own brain to tell you if something was good for you or not. So, maybe, for now, you can trust me.” I raked my thumb lightly along the side of his neck. “Do you trust me?”
