“Nobody needed to lure Dad,” he ground out. “Anyone with a thought in his head would run as far and fast from you as possible.”
She gasped, her hand flying up to cover her mouth in horror. “Don’t say that,” she cried past her fingers. “You were always so cruel to me. Always.”
“Alex,” Shane said quietly. “Come on. Let’s get outside for a few minutes.”
Shane. Always the peacemaker. Always trying to calm them both down. He was her accomplice just as he’d been all those years ago.
“I don’t need to get outside. I need to get out of town. She’s abusing the neighbors! This is insanity and you’ve been living in it so long you can’t see it anymore.”
Shane ignored that and walked toward the back door. “Come on.”
He almost didn’t follow. He almost spun on his heel and walked out the front door. He knew he’d keep on walking forever. This was it. Whether he left now or stayed for a few more days, this was the end.
He was right back where he’d been as a kid. Frustrated, furious, helpless. And now even more resentful that he’d been forced to deal with her irrational delusions for ten years of his childhood. Even adults couldn’t deal with her, and he’d had to live with her every single day.
It was the end of his family. So he figured he could humor Shane one more time. Then Alex could at least say he’d tried.
“Alex,” his mom started, tears thick in her voice. “You don’t understand. She looks just like her. And she’s a whore just like her. Everyone knows it.”
“Everyone knows because you tell them!” he shouted.
“If I have to!” She broke down into sobs.
Alex shook his head and headed toward the kitchen and the back door. He tried to ignore the piles of boxes leaking papers everywhere. Printouts of every half-assed lead she’d ever pursued. Newspaper articles. Police reports. Scraps with her familiar, frantic handwriting scrawled in different colors. Her life’s work was a swamp of meaningless words and pictures and she was going to drown in it someday.
He stepped out onto the back deck and took a deep breath. The backyard was overgrown and unkempt, but it was relatively clutter-free. Shane leaned against the deck rail and crossed his arms.
“Better?” he asked.
“No.”
Shane blew out a long breath and looked up at the blue sky. “Okay. Everything you said in there was true. This is insanity. She’s out of control. All that. But it’s not true that I can’t see it. Not anymore. That hasn’t been true for a long time.”
Alex walked to the far side of the deck and looked out at the lodgepole pines that towered over the neighbor’s house.
“I know you don’t believe me,” Shane said, stating the obvious. “You don’t have any reason to, but the minute you left, I saw how bad it had gotten. I saw what I’d done, Alex. Not just her, but me. I just...” He blew out another long breath. “Jesus. I wanted it all to be true. That Dad was still around. That he’d come back. That we could find him. I needed it to be true.”
“Yeah. I know.” He did know. Even as a kid, he’d seen it, but that had only made him feel more enraged.
“What I wanted blinded me to what you needed. I should’ve taken care of you, and I didn’t. If I—”
“I get it,” Alex snapped.
“No, you don’t. You think I’ve been playing this game with Mom the whole time, but I haven’t. I distanced myself. I changed my name. I moved on.”
Alex finally met his eyes. “Why’d you do that?” he asked, even though he told himself he didn’t care.
“I was done with it. The fantasy of Dad coming back. Mom’s obsession. Dad’s whole damn family and how they treated us after Dad disappeared. As soon as you left, I saw what really mattered. But it was too late to get you back, so my only option was to cut them off.”
Alex nodded, shocked that his brother had changed so dramatically that long ago.
“Alex,” he sighed, “I swear I wouldn’t have brought you back for this if she hadn’t improved. I wouldn’t have gone along with this dedication at all. But now...I think we just have to get through it. Fuck, I don’t know.”
Alex ran a hand over his head, scrubbing at the rough stubble until he could think. “Fine. But what the hell do you want fr
om me?”
Shane distractedly went through the same motion, rubbing both hands through his hair. “Her psychiatrist thought this would help. It’s obviously making it worse, but if we call the whole thing off, God only knows what will happen. She’ll go off. Concoct some giant conspiracy theory. Raise hell.”