“They’re regular kids.” Like I’d know.
Henderson was shaking his head. “No, they’re not. The girl is…I guess I don’t know any teenage girls, but she’s…sometimes the way she looks at me.” He stopped. “And those boys, if they talk at all, they ask weird questions.”
Well, that was true enough. Curiosity stirring, though, Conall asked, “Like what?”
“Since I go to church, can I tell them what happens to souls when people die. Or whether it’s true that fingernails keep growing after you’re dead.”
Conall’s mouth crooked into a smile. “Those sound like pretty normal questions for kids who’ve had a parent die to ask. And, okay, where souls go is hard to answer without sounding glib, but the fingernail question is easy enough.”
“Easy?” His partner stared at him as though he was crazy. “I’m supposed to talk about gruesome stuff like that to an eight-year-old kid? I asked where he’d heard that and all he did was mumble, ‘Dunno.’ So I said no, it’s not true, and he said how do you know? Had I ever looked at anyone when they first died and then a week later to see if the fingernails and hair and stuff had grown.”
“They’re thinking about death a lot,” Conall repeated. “I think maybe they have to have answers, or they’ll keep wondering. Answers let them, I don’t know, process their grief.”
“How do you know that?”
He shrugged, uneasy but not wanting to give that away. He said abruptly, “It makes sense, that’s all.”
He’d had a lot of questions about prison the first time his dad was sent away, too. The Washington State Correctional Institute was a great unknown to him, maybe not so different than death. Dad was just…gone.
Mom had shut Conall down every time he asked questions. In those days, he hadn’t had the internet to look up answers. He’d found a couple of books at the library and secretly studied them, but they were about correctional institutes in general and not the one his father was at in particular. He hadn’t been very satisfied with them. In retrospect he realized the books had been dated and he’d known that without putting his finger on what was wrong.
He hadn’t thought about any of this in a long time. He hadn’t remembered, either, that it was Duncan who’d finally told him what he knew. Mom had dragged Duncan, the oldest, on a couple of visits to Dad. Duncan told Conall he was lucky he hadn’t had to go. That it was scary going into that place with buzzers going off and heavy doors closing with muffled thuds behind Mom and him as they worked their way through security. That knowing they were locked in, too, made Duncan want to run out screaming.
Duncan scared. Conall had marveled at the concept. Hell, he still marveled at the concept. Didn’t Duncan face life square on? Had he ever once in his life flinched?
Feeling that streak of bitterness surprised Conall, and for the first time ever, he was ashamed of it. Yeah, Duncan was all about duty and doing the right thing, but that didn’t mean he was never scared or uncertain or furious at fate. He had to have been furious when Mom ditched them all.
I’ve held a grudge all these years over nothing, Conall realized. He should be ashamed. It seemed like every time he dredged up memories, Duncan was at the heart of them. It wasn’t his fault that Conall had felt inadequate in comparison. It was probably even natural, given the age difference between them. How did a kid that much younger ever equal the big brother whose achievements loomed so large?
Conall had known all this intellectually. Even known that if their family hadn’t been so screwed up and Duncan had gone away to college, Conall would have been grateful when his big brother called or noticed him during school breaks. They might have grown into friendship later, as the years passed. But as things had been, even before Mom walked out, their relationship was doomed. Conall could close his eyes and recall what an explosive mass of anger he’d been. Duncan had saved him. The fact that he resented being saved had never made sense.
But that crawling sense of shame gave him a clue. Until then he’d been able to pretend he was keeping his head out of the water on his own. From the instant Duncan sat him down to say, “Mom’s left us,” Conall had known the truth. He was drowning, and his only chance of survival was the brother he admired so much, the one who was having to ruin his own life because he had to rescue Conall—the pathetic, scrawny, excuse-for-a-MacLachlan youngest boy. He’d known Duncan despised him even as he felt obligated.