Sign Here(93)

“Dad,” Sean whispered behind the sounds of the forest. “Let go for a second.”

Silas shook his head sharply, holding tight to his son’s arm. “Absolutely not.”

“Do you think just because she’s dead, all that pain you caused just went away?” Gavin went on. “No, it didn’t. It got passed right down the line. She died, and now all of that pain is mine, my children’s. Right on top of the pain of missing her, of knowing I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”

“Please,” Sean said, his breath against Silas’s shoulder. “I have an idea. Just trust me.”

Silas looked out to the lake, but it was still, as far as he could see. No splashing, no swimming. He looked at Gavin, who was still holding Ruth’s head against his chest, so tightly his knuckles in her hair shone in the moonlight like bare bone.

Slowly, heart in his throat, Silas let go.

“Distract him,” Sean hissed, before he took a small step backward, out of the flashlight’s beam.

“I hear you,” Silas said to Gavin, taking up as much space in the flashlight beam as possible. “I do. And I will have this conversation, or whatever else you want it to be, right here, right now. But let’s let the kids go. Okay? I’m sure you don’t want them getting hurt any more than I do. Ruth, tell me where Mickey is.”

Gavin stood up then, leaving Ruth in a heap on the ground, and turned to face him. Silas could recognize Sarah in his mouth, the shape of his jaw. But not in his eyes.

“So,” he said. “This is where it happened. That’s the float out there, huh? Where you left her to die?”

Silas felt his words like a sharp, sudden blade to an artery. A pang of cold steel, followed by a sensation of draining that promised to be the gray side of pleasant, should he only give in to it.

“I asked you a fucking question,” Gavin said, aiming the gun at Silas’s skull.

“Jesus.” Silas exhaled, never having predicted that he would be a last-minute believer. He tried to listen for Sean in the woods but didn’t hear anything human. “There is nothing I can say right now that could make what happened to Sarah all right—”

“I didn’t ask you to make it right. I asked you if this was where it happened.”

Silas nodded. “Yes,” he said, forcing himself not to whisper. “And like I said, I’ll do whatever you want. Let’s just get these kids out of here. Okay?”

Gavin was quiet for a moment, loosening a rock from the firepit with his toe and rolling it beneath his shoe. Then he tilted his head up to the sky and took in a long, deep breath.

“We’re not there yet. First, I have something for you. Something I’ve been holding on to for a very long time.”

Gavin let the gun drop to his side as he dug into his pockets, and eventually he pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. Silas squared his shoulders and took the remaining steps to Gavin’s outstretched hand, the loosened rock inches from his foot.

“I got it in the mail a few days after the verdict. Thought it was about time you saw it too.”

When Silas saw the handwriting on the piece of paper, everything else went very, very still.

For Silas, one of the hardest things about loss was knowing that he already had every piece of his brother he would ever get. All the words he had ever written, all the tools he had ever cleaned after working on his bike. Everything Philip touched Silas had since touched so many times that, by now, all that was left was Silas himself.

So at first, he couldn’t even take in the words on the paper; he was just so elated to have something of his brother’s that was new, something yet to be tarnished by the hungry eyes of a scavenger, remembering.

But then he started to read.





PHILIP





Dear Gavin,

You deserve to know the truth. I am sure you won’t believe me; you might not even read this, even if it does reach you. I don’t know how reliable the prison mail system is. But I am praying—a new and confusing thing for me—that you will get it, hear me out, and decide what you think for yourself.

I loved your sister. (Fuck it’s hard to write that in the past tense.) But I did; I do. And she loved me. Differently from how I loved her, I’ll admit that. But she still loved me. Maybe she told you? She talked about you all the time. She loved you the most in the whole world. She was so proud of you, her “genius twin brother.” “He’s going to get out of this town,” she used to say. “He’s going to be president.” She told me about how she would wake up when your parents started fighting and you would already be there next to her with your Discman, ready to share the headphones. She said you saw through the bullshit. I’m hoping that skill of yours will help you believe what I’m saying here.

Yes, some of what they said at the trial was true. I wanted her to want to be with me, and she didn’t. And yes, it was that weekend when I told her how I felt, and she told me she didn’t feel the same way. But honestly, it didn’t matter. Of course it stung; of course if I could’ve done something to change her mind, I would’ve. I was sad and maybe even a little pissed, but never at her, just at myself.

Ultimately, it didn’t matter, because even if she didn’t want to be my girlfriend, she still wanted to know me. She told me she valued our friendship too much, and I know that sounds like a line, but I believed her. I know you were at another school, but you had to know what people said about Sarah. Guys treated her like garbage; they always had. But I didn’t, and she valued that. She said sex (sorry) would make it complicated, would ruin it. That was the last thing I wanted. I loved Sarah not because I thought I could get her to put out, but because she was the funniest, smartest, realest person I had ever met. She made life . . . livable.