Gun Shy(43)

I clench my teeth, my fists, my entire body, to stop myself from rushing over to Hannah and shaking her until she tells me everything. I count to five in my head as I continue to listen to my sister speak.

Amanda asks her when he started visiting. Hannah doesn’t know how to reference time that well, so Amanda helps her to describe the weather.

It was hot because the AC was broken and Ma asked him to pay to fix it. He started “visiting” Hannah at the same time.

Did my mother know what was happening?

Hannah says the leaves crunched when Carter stopped visiting her.

Fall.

He was visiting her in summer, the very time she would have gotten pregnant.

The guy who fathered Hannah fifteen years ago is the same guy who fathered Hannah’s baby, while I rotted in a jail cell and Pike sold meth in Reno.

Hannah.

I was always so careful with her. She never had any fear as a baby, the way she’d toddle around, her hair in pigtails and her eyes never quite managing to focus on anything. She would have walked straight into that goddamned creek and drowned if it weren’t for me keeping tabs on her twenty-four hours a day. She was my sister, but she was mine. I fed her bottles in the night. I changed her diapers. I brushed her hair and tied her shoelaces.

I thought I’d protected her. Now, I can see how woefully inadequate my quasi-parenting was. I didn’t protect her at all. I left her, a lamb among wolves, and as soon as I was gone she was fair game.

All I can see is red, all I can feel is this yawning chasm sucking me in. I’m going to kill him. I’m going to die in prison because I have to kill him for what he did to my sister.

Hannah goes back to the iPhone — a pair of headphones over her head, this time, snug from ear to ear — and Amanda guides me back into her tiny office, closing the door behind us. Her expression is grave, like the hole I’m about to dig for Hal Carter. My hands are shaking.

“Leo,” she says, just as I punch my fist into the wall. It hurts, but I do it again, and again. Amanda grabs my arm and I don’t struggle. I struggled once when Ma grabbed me, and I ended up giving her a black eye by accident when I swung my elbow around to push her away. I was only a kid when that happened, but it’s scarred me, the way she grabbed her face and screamed. When you’re raging on an inanimate wall and a woman grabs you, you freeze.

I go rigid, staring down at my knuckles as blood swells up and drips down my wrist, down the arm of my shirt where it forms a wet, sticky puddle between cotton and flesh.

“Leo. Please look at me.”

I do. I look her straight in her bloodshot green eyes, and she doesn’t flinch.

“We can figure this out,” she states, and suddenly it’s like someone has given me a dose of Percocet, a hit of weed, something that makes me sag against the wall I was just assaulting. The fight’s out of me. My eyes are burning, there’s a hard lump in my throat that no amount of swallowing can will away. I don’t think anyone else has ever taken charge like Amanda is, even if it’s just for a moment. Nobody except Cassie, that is. She was always the problem-solver, always the one who fixed everything, but aside from her, it’s been me. Just me. Trying to make sure nobody gets hurt, or dies, or worse.

“If what Hannah’s saying is true, we will get him arrested. Okay? But we can’t do anything until we’re sure. Do you understand, Leo? You cannot go and see that man until DNA tests are conducted until we have proof. Because Hannah is beautiful, and she is special, but we cannot take her word as gospel.”

I shake my head; she has no idea about Hannah. About where she came from.

“Hannah doesn’t look like our mother,” I say, in a voice barely above a whisper. “And she didn’t look like my father, either. You know who Hannah looks like?”

She stills; I can see the connections firing in her eyes.

“Hannah looks like her father. Her real father.”

“You’re not saying—”

“I am.”

“The mayor—”

“Hal Carter is Hannah’s real father. He’s a sick, mean old bastard. And if she says he did this to her? I take her word as fucking gospel.”

Amanda’s face is ashen; she keeps doing this thing where she holds her hand to her mouth. Her fingers are shaking. I think mine are, too. Shaking and bleeding. Fuck.

“What are you going to do?” she asks me. “You can’t go back to prison, Leo. Your sister needs you, now more than ever.”

She’s right. I hate it that she’s right. I hate it that no matter what I do, I’ll always be the lowest common denominator. I hate that if I do something to Hal Carter, he’ll get off scot-free and I’ll be the one who gets punished.

“It’s not fair,” I mutter.

“Life’s not fair,” Amanda says. She might as well have poured napalm on me.

“FUCK!” I yell, kicking the wall. “FUCKFUCKFUCK!”

Somebody knocks on the office door. I throw the door open, feeling sorry for whoever it is because now I have to kill them, too, for interrupting my boxing session.

Cassie. When she sees me, she steps back as if she’s been burned.

“I heard yelling,” she says.

“Everything’s fine,” Amanda says dismissively.

Cassie looks at the small puddle of blood my bleeding knuckles are creating. “You sure?”