No evidence. . .

“Give me that.” Jacob’s blood was frigid lava.

Joshua leaned back against a faded pillow, cracked the book to somewhere in the middle, and began reading, all trace of his rural accent gone.

“‘January 17: Cold and gray. Looks like snow. Joshua got me in trouble in school today. He marked over part of my homework and drew pictures of naked girls. He made an A and I got sent to the principal’s office.’”

Joshua looked past the diary, his grin that of a devilish boy’s. “Hey, I’d forgotten all about that. Good thing you wrote it down, or it might never have happened. What else did you say about me?”

“That’s none of your business. Give me that.”

Joshua flipped through a couple of pages, the paper rustling like the lungs of a dying man. “Oooh, here’s a good one. ‘February 3: Cynthia Chaney sat with me at lunch today. I had peanut butter and jelly. She gets free lunch because her family is so poor. Cynthia said she’s scared of Joshua because he spies on girls going into the restroom.’ Hell, brother, you ought to give up real estate and go to Hollywood. With some of this stuff you make up, you’re bound to be a hit.”

“That really happened. It’s all true.”

“Bullshit. I was the one who ate lunch with Cynthia Chaney. Walked her home. Screwed her in the bushes behind the trailer park. She had this crazy idea that I was gonna marry her and rescue her from her pathetic excuse for a life. Dumb bitch.”

“Cynthia was a nice girl. She couldn’t help it that you ruined her.”

“Cry me a goddamned river. Any girl that spreads her legs when you whisper the word ‘love’ deserves everything she gets.”

“She had to move to Florida after the abortion.”

“If you believe all the other stupid sluts. I’d bet money she was looking for an excuse to drop out of school and came up with that one because nobody would blame her. People are real good at arranging the truth to fit their needs. And I wasn’t the only one to ride that little pony, anyway.”

“The next day . . .” Jacob looked out the window, the anger seeping out of him along with his strength.  “Cynthia thought I was you. She came up to me behind the gym and kissed me on the mouth, said meet her at lunch and make plans for running away together.”

Joshua laughed. “Told you she was a dumb bitch. You probably felt sorry for her. Shows how messed up you were back then. Hell, I knew it two years before the doctors did. Didn’t take a college degree to hear those loose screws rattling around inside your skull.”

“Give me the diary.”

“Wait. We’re about to get to the good part. ‘March 3: I wonder what it’s like to be Joshua. They say twins often share a psychic bond that goes beyond anything that DNA can explain. This book I read said that’s why twins separated at birth will often lead lives that seem amazingly parallel.’ Hey, that’s a good one. ‘Psychic bond.’ Do you really believe that crap, or is it some screwy shit the doctors told you?”

“We’re alike in a lot of ways. In ways that make me ashamed. But Dad thought I was the troubled one. I guess you’re right about people seeing what they want to see.”

The sun was slanting through the window at a low angle, illuminating the dusty clutter under Joshua’s bed. That thing about monsters under the bed, the hand rising up to snatch children away to that dark land beneath, had been nothing but a story. Yet as the shadows of the room grew deeper, Jacob sat on his childhood bed and had to fight an urge to pull his feet up from the floor and tuck them under his knees. The monsters were long gone, their power to scare sealed away in the dead hollows of closets and empty toy boxes.

Joshua turned a few more pages and a piece of crinkled celluloid fell out of the diary. Joshua picked it up, glanced at it then spun it over to Jacob as if it were a square Frisbee. Jacob caught it. The Polaroid portrayed him and Joshua in matching blue sailor suits, aged about seven. It must have been early summer, because neither wore shoes. It took Jacob a moment to recognize himself as the one on the right, the one who held a small sailboat. Jacob had loved that sailboat and had slept with it on the windowsill at the head of his bed.

Then one day Joshua had torn it from his hands and set it loose in the river, where it plunged over the tumbling, rocky currents and headed for a plunging froth of falls. Jacob had raced after the boat, almost jumping in the river to save it, but he couldn’t swim and the water was fat and brown from recent rains. He ran along the riverbank as the briars and scrub locusts ripped jagged red lines across his arms and legs. He finally watched, helplessly tangled, as the sailboat careened against a protruding monolith of granite and shattered into bright scraps of painted wood and cloth.

“‘April 11,’” Joshua read. “‘Mother is sick again. She stayed in bed all day and I had to bring her soup. She wouldn’t eat any solid food. Medicine and wine. Her face is pale and her hair somehow turned gray over these past few weeks. Father stays downstairs in his study. Joshua hides when it’s time to take food to Mother. We should get a nurse for her.’”

Joshua slammed the diary closed. “Mommy’s little pet, weren’t you?”

“It was an accident,” Jacob said, looking out the window, seeing the broken sailboat in his mind, splinters in the foam.

“Nothing’s an accident. We get everything we deserve.”

“No.” The river rose up, dark waters rimmed with white teeth.

“You pushed her, Jacob.”

“No.” The river opened like a large mouth, the cold current inviting him inside.

“You killed your own fucking mother.”

Jacob rubbed the bottoms of his fists against his eyes, trying to wipe the sight of that broken sailboat out of his mind. Somewhere, far from here, its wreckage must have reached the bottom of a calm sea.

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Renee drove by the remains of their house Wednesday just as the sun hit the far tops of the Blue Ridge. She had meant to keep going, but found herself turning into the driveway as if she were back from a run to the grocery store. The block footprint of the building lay like a lidless coffin. Yellow plastic tape still stretched around the charred wreckage, though it was ripped in places, the pieces fluttering like the tails of tangled kites.

At the rear of the backyard, a small storage shed had been blackened but otherwise undamaged. The branches of the oaks and maples nearest the house were stunted and bare, crippled fingers among the vibrant spring foliage. A split-rail fence along the western side of the property had been knocked down, probably by one of the tanker trucks. The front yard was crisscrossed with ruts, the sidewalk cracked, mail-box leaning like a penitent drunken priest.

A few blackened timbers poked up from the sunken pit of debris. Twisted metal and smoky stones were scattered in the dead embers. The refrigerator had once held pictures of Mattie in her soccer uniform, foolproof recipes, wrinkled tests with red letter A’s circled at the top, all stuck to the door with colorful magnets. Now the rusty appliance lay on its side, adorned with nothing but shards of gray glass.

She shouldn’t have come. The fire chief, Davidson, had told her the scene investigation was complete, though some evidence was being tested in the state lab. She and Jacob were welcome to salvage anything they wanted. Davidson said they could even come in with a front end loader and dump truck and clear the remains, get a fresh start on the existing foundation.

Remains.

Easy for Davidson to say, a woman who was married to her work and whose only responsibility was to duty. Maybe Davidson, in the privacy of her lonely bed, could cry over firefighters killed in televised tragedies or mourn victims of distant wars. But Davidson didn’t have some of the flesh of her own flesh seared into these ruins. Renee did. She wore the smoke like a burial shroud, and the loss was a hot bed of eternal coals in her chest.