The Masked Truth(87)

River is still talking, faster now, eager to convince me. “Only you wouldn’t tell Aimee anything about what you saw, so they figured maybe you’d talk to another girl in therapy: Brienne.”

Which makes sense, and I don’t blame him for buying it. I prod him for more on Aimee. He says he broke into her house hoping to learn more about her, and maybe that suggests he’s not as stupid as he seems. That he suspects there’s more to this than he thought. He’s just hoping he’s wrong. I’m about to shatter that hope.

“You said there was no reason why they’d send in Brienne to question me if they planned to kill me, right?”

He nods.

“So it’s just a coincidence, then? You work for hit men. I witnessed a hit. Your sister overheard it. Now she joins up with me at therapy for one weekend, and it’s the same weekend that someone chooses to randomly murder a group of kids?”

Sweat trickles down his cheek and his gaze shoots to Max. “He doesn’t need a reason. He’s nuts. A psychopath.”

“Does he look like a psychopath?”

River gives an abrupt laugh at that. “You think killers look like killers? You really are a sheltered rich kid, aren’t you? In your world, the bad guys walk around with sneers and scruffy beards. It’s not like that, little girl. Not at all. If you saw the guys I work for …” He shakes his head. “Believe me, there’s a reason you passed one of them on the street and never took another look. The face of a psycho looks like everyone else.” He peers at Max. “Like you. You look normal, but you’re crazy.”

“Could I kill someone if I’m not on my meds?” Max says. “Yes. Could I slaughter six people? I’d certainly like to think not, but I suspect, once it snaps, there’s no difference between one and six. If I could tell the difference, I wouldn’t even kill one, would I?”

River just stares like he’s speaking Greek.

“I could kill someone if I was in a psychotic state,” Max says. “Maybe even six people. But do you know what I can’t do? Switch it off and act normal again a few minutes later. I almost strangled my best friend because I thought he was possessed. When they caught me, I kept trying to strangle him until they pulled me off. I didn’t deny that I did it. I didn’t make excuses. I just kept on acting crazy, because that’s what crazy is. It’s your reality at that moment. I didn’t go into a fugue state where I had no idea what I was doing. I remember every last detail as if it happened two hours ago, because for me, it did. It happens over and over, and I cannot get it out of my head, because I can’t pretend it was someone else—it was me, and I remember what it felt like to have my hands around his neck. I remember the girl screaming when she found us. I remember the look in my best friend’s eyes. I remember the smell of him when he shat himself, because he was so sure he was going to die.”

Max has to stop for breath, and I … I want to cry. I see the look in his eyes, hear the pain and the guilt and the self-loathing in his voice, and I want to do something, anything, and I can’t, because this isn’t therapy. It’s everything he should have said there. Everything he couldn’t say, and now I know why, because if I can’t talk about the Porters—what it was like to see their bodies, what exactly I feel—then I sure as hell can’t expect him to share, because his private hell is ten times worse.

He couldn’t spew that anguish to strangers in therapy and then watch them awkwardly try to deal with it. He does it here because I can do nothing. No, that’s not true—this isn’t about me. He does it because he needs to explain this, to make his point to River, and he can say it without fear that I’ll make noises of comfort and understanding about something I can’t understand, not really.

He pauses only a moment, enough to catch his breath, before he goes on. “What happens to me, it doesn’t come with amnesia, temporary or not. I don’t pass out and forget what happened. It’s not an alternate personality. It doesn’t feel like something from a half-remembered nightmare. It’s reality. And it doesn’t switch off like a light bulb. If I shot Brienne and the others, the police wouldn’t have found me jumping in front of a car, desperate to get an ambulance for Riley and your sister. I wouldn’t have made up some wild story about a hostage-taking. I certainly wouldn’t have had the mental wherewithal to persuade Riley that such a story was true. I’d have been running down the street, holding a bloodied knife and a smoking gun, ready to tell the world that I’d rid them of aliens posing as teenagers or some such rubbish. I would not realize I had done anything wrong.”

He stops again. He’s shaking, and I want to reach for him, but I know I can’t. Not now. What he needs now—what he needs always—is support and understanding, not sympathy, because he hates the sympathy and the poor-you as much as I do. It feels like putting on the mask of a crying child and convincing the world you deserve their sympathy when it’s the last thing you feel you deserve.

“Do you understand that?” I say to River.

He nods dumbly.

“Max didn’t do any of it, and I think you already suspected that, regardless of what you said in the hospital yesterday. There is a way this wasn’t a coincidence. And a reason why—if it’s the guys you worked for—they’d shoot Brienne.”