A Map of Days (Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children, #4)(20)

I inched toward the edge of the bed. “He told you?”

“I think he tried to, once. But I must have blocked it out—or someone stole the memory from me. But last night—” He tapped his forehead. “Seeing those people jogged something loose in my brain.”

Now it was his turn to talk and mine to listen.

“I was around ten when it happened. Your grandfather would go on these long business trips. He’d be away for weeks at a time. I always wanted to go with him, and I used to beg and plead, but he always, always said no. Until one day. One day he said yes.”

My father stood up and began pacing, as if just remembering this was giving him nervous energy to burn.

“We drove up to, I don’t remember exactly, North Florida or Georgia. We picked up an associate of his along the way. I knew him; he’d been by the house a time or two. Black guy. Always had a cigar in his mouth. Abe called him H. Just H. Anyway, he’d been real friendly the other times I’d met him, but this time he had a weird energy and he kept looking at me, and a couple of times I heard him say to my dad, You sure about this?

“Anyway, it got dark and we stopped for the night. Some ratty old motel. And in the middle of the night my dad wakes me up, and he’s scared. He says, Frank, get your things, and he rushes me out to the car. I’m still in my pajamas, and now I’m scared. Because nothing frightened my dad. Nothing. Well, we tear out of that parking lot like zombies are chasing us, but we don’t get more than a couple of blocks before the car goes whoom—it just lurches, like something hit us from the side, only there were no other cars around. And then Dad hits the brakes and throws it in park and jumps out. He says, Get down, Frank, stay outta sight, but I can’t look away, and the next thing I know he gets yanked up into the air by something I can’t see. And he starts making these awful noises in his throat, and he drops back down to Earth, and he’s still making those god-awful sounds like an animal, and his eyes—I can see him in the headlights of the car—his eyes are rolled back in his head, all white, and his clothes are all stained with this black crud, and I get out of the car and start running, right into this cornfield. And I don’t look back. I think I must have passed out at some point, because the next thing I remember is I’m back in a motel room bed, and there’s my dad and H and two or three other people. And they’re so strange-looking. They’re all covered in dirt and blood, and the smell . . . God, the smell. And one of them—I’ll never forget—he’s got no face at all. Just a mask of skin. I’m so scared. Too scared to even scream. And Dad’s saying, It’s okay, Frankie, don’t be scared, this lady’s gonna talk to you now, don’t be scared. And this woman, she looked kind of like her—” At some point Miss Peregrine had cracked the door and leaned into the room, and my dad gestured at her. “She did something to me, so that the next day the memories were barely there anymore. Like it was just a bad dream. And my dad never ever spoke about it after that.”

“She was supposed to wipe your memories,” Miss Peregrine said. “It seems she didn’t quite finish the job.”

“I wish to God she had,” my dad said. “I had nightmares for years. For a while I thought I was really losing it. My dad told her not to get rid of my memories completely. Kind of a sadistic thing to do to a kid, don’t you think? But part of him wanted me to know. It was like a . . . a blackboard that had been wiped, but if you squinted hard enough you could still read it a little? But I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to know. Because I really, really did not want that to be true about my father. That he was . . . like that.”

“You just wanted a normal father,” I said.

“Right,” said my dad, as if, finally, I had understood.

“Well, he wasn’t,” I said. “And neither am I.”

“So it would seem.” He stopped pacing and sat on the edge of the bed, his body angled away from mine.

“Your son is a brave and gifted young man,” Miss Peregrine said icily. “You should be very proud of him.”

My father muttered something. I asked him what he’d said.

He looked up, and there was a look in his eyes now that hadn’t been there a moment ago. It was something like loathing.

“You made a choice.”

“It wasn’t a choice,” I said. “It’s who I am.”

“No. You chose them. You chose these . . . people . . . over us.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that. Either-or. We can coexist.”

“Tell that to your mother, screaming like a lunatic! Tell that to your uncles, who are—where? What did you do to them?”

“They’re fine, Dad.”

“Nothing is FINE,” he bellowed, jumping to his feet again. “You’ve destroyed everything!”

Miss Peregrine had been lingering at the door but now stormed into the room, Bronwyn close behind her. “Sit down, Mr. Portman—”

“No! I will not live in a madhouse! I will not subject my family to this insanity!”

“This could work,” I said, “I’m telling you—”

He came at me in a rush, and I thought for a moment he might hit me. But he stopped short. “I made my choice, Jacob. A long time ago. And now it looks like you’ve made yours.” We were chest to chest, my father red-cheeked and breathing hard.