Off the Deep End (31)

I couldn’t help wondering why she’d given all that up to move to Falcon Lake and didn’t trust her motives with Shane for a second. The Harts had turned into celebrities overnight, and she was seizing the moment, clearly taking advantage of the opportunity. I’d watched as her Instagram followers skyrocketed these past few months. She went from a nobody to a somebody as quick as the Harts did. Her reels with Shane got hundreds of thousands of views. She gave the whole world a sneak peek inside the greatest tragedy ever to hit our community.

Was that going to be Mark in a few months? Coupled up with some twenty-year-old who was using him for the spotlight? I didn’t think he was capable of something like that, but I hadn’t thought Shane was capable of it either. Grief did funny things to people.

It changed Isaac in unfathomable ways. One of the downfalls of living in a small town was that everything you went through played out publicly, so Isaac’s change in behavior was on public display, just like the Harts’ marriage. Isaac had never been in the spotlight before, and he hated every second of it. Suddenly kids who’d never given him the time of day, even ones that had been mean to him before, wanted to be his best friend. In the days and weeks following the accident, they were always stopping by the house, even though nobody had invited them. Isaac begged me not to let them in or make him hang out with them, but I didn’t know how to tell them no. Part of me hoped it might be good for him.

“Mom, please don’t make me go down there and hang out with them,” he’d begged the last time they’d come by. They’d shown up at the front door five kids deep—two boys and three girls. One of the boys was the star quarterback of Falcon High. His perfectly made-up girlfriend hung from his arm like an expensive purse.

“Just go down there for a little bit. It’ll be good for you,” I encouraged him.

“I told you the last time they showed up that I was done sitting down there with them. I’m not doing it again.” He shook his head. His jaw was set just like his dad’s.

“It can’t be that bad. They’re just trying to be nice,” I pleaded.

“No, they’re not. They’ve never cared about me. Not even a little.” He shook his head. “Those kids hate me, and I don’t want to hang out with them, Mom.”

“Don’t be so negative. Maybe they realized how poorly they treated you before, and they’re ready to behave differently.”

He snorted and rolled his eyes.

“Come on, Isaac. It puts me in such an awkward position if I have to ask them to leave.” That was the real reason I wanted him to go down there. I couldn’t stand up to them any more than he could.

I badgered him into doing it in the same way they’d badgered themselves into the house. I’d tried telling them no when they showed up because I knew Isaac wouldn’t want to see them. I’d made up some excuse about him having a headache and lying down upstairs, but the petite one that chomped gum nonstop pushed her way inside like she’d been in my house hundreds of times. The rest followed her, and once they were there, I didn’t know what else to do.

I was in the kitchen cutting the vegetables to go with the roast I was making for dinner when Isaac’s bloodcurdling screams ripped through the house. I dropped the knife on the cutting board and went running for him.

“GET AWAY FROM ME!” he screamed as I rushed into the living room. He stood in the corner next to the fireplace with the metal poker clenched in his right hand like a bat. His entire body shook. His eyes bulged. At first, I thought he was screaming at me, but it wasn’t me. It was them. All the kids on the couch, scrambling to get their things as fast as they could. “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!” he screamed again, even louder this time.

“We didn’t even do anything,” one of the girls cried, flinging a backward glance at me as they hurriedly gathered their backpacks and stuffed their phones into their pockets.

“Oh my God, he’s totally losing it,” someone else said underneath their breath as they made a beeline for the front door.

I followed behind them, apologizing.

“I’m so sorry,” I said over and over again, but they all ignored me. Nobody turned around. Just as I shut the door behind them, the sound of glass shattering ricocheted through the entryway. I raced back into the living room. One of my expensive lamps lay in pieces on the floor. Isaac was hovering over it, the poker still in his hands. He raised his head to look at me. Angry red blotches dotted his pale face.

“I told you I didn’t want to hang out with them,” he said in a voice devoid of all emotion.

He’d never thrown or broken anything before in his entire life. Not even when he was a toddler and going through the terrible twos. We didn’t behave that way in our house either. Mark had been as disturbed by the outburst as I was, but we didn’t know what to do about it.

He withdrew even more after that and didn’t want to be bothered with anyone. He spent all his time alone in his room. He barely ate. He wasn’t sleeping well either. I checked on him almost every night, and his light was usually still on. I could hear him moving around in there, tapping away on his keyboard while he played games on his computer. The light from the monitor glowing underneath the door. Those were preferrable to the hours he’d spent crying in his bedroom with the door tightly shut, refusing to let anyone get near him. As horrible as those early weeks were after the accident, I was able to get through them because I kept telling myself they weren’t permanent. It was just the beginning phase of the trauma, and it would change. That’s what everybody else said too.