It's One of Us(79)
A slight frown of confusion darkens Perry’s brow.
Oh, damn. “You don’t know, do you? Crap. Park will kill me if he knows I’ve said something.”
“Awful phrasing, babe. I thought Park was an English professor?”
“He is. He’s just on a sabbatical right now, doing a side project. Can you just pretend you didn’t hear me? I’m stoned. I’m rambling.”
“A side project, writing books? That’s...amazing. He always wanted to be a writer.” Perry sounds genuinely surprised and happy. Despite the brothers’ distance, their competitive streak, their furious hatred of one other, they are still brothers, twins who shared a life before Olivia. One that has more secrets than she ever knew.
“When we were growing up, remember he was always dragging around that old journal? Thought he was Hemingway. He kept saying we needed to move to Spain and become matadors.”
“I didn’t know that,” she says. “I remember the journal, though. He has stacks of them in his office. They take up three shelves.”
“Oh, yeah. Being a matador was his dearest wish.”
“I can’t even imagine.” Can she? Can she envision Park, stable but broody Park, strutting around an arena with a red cape, challenging a beast? Standing his ground as a thousand pounds of fury stamps and snorts, waiting for the perfect moment to charge?
She can’t. She truly can’t. And that he’d never told her...maybe he couldn’t imagine it, either. Maybe she killed that dream for him.
“Just do me a favor and pretend you don’t know anything about it, okay? It’s top secret stuff.” At least she had herself together enough not to have mentioned that Park was a ghost. That really would have been a betrayal.
Perry settles himself on the end of her bed, pulling the throw up over her feet.
“What a mess,” she says quietly. “If it isn’t bad enough that Park’s spawned all these random kids, now we have to deal with the media reporting about it and thinking he’s some sort of monster.”
“We’ll fix it. Don’t worry.” A beat. “Are you okay?” he asks. An impossible question.
“I’m fine. A bit worried about the deer,” she says ruefully.
“I’m not talking about the accident.”
“I know you’re not.”
They trail into silence, and Olivia can’t handle the quiet. Perry has a stillness inside him, a peace that she wants to touch, to wrap herself in like a cozy blanket and relax into its warmth. He always did have a gentleness, a reserve, but now it’s the assurance of a life well-lived, a man content with his choices. He is a man now, no longer a boy, and she can’t help but feel like she’s lost him, though he wasn’t hers to lose. These emotions are confusing her. That she’s still so attracted to him, all these years later, even after all they’ve been through, makes no sense. She’s sitting here half-stoned, in pain, stinking of betadine and hospital, blood in her hair, and she’s wondering what it would be like to lean over and take him in her mouth, coax him to life, graze her teeth along the length of him until he cried out her name.
“Why didn’t you ever come home?” she asks softly.
His eyes spark with something like pain, but he doesn’t answer. Instead, he takes her back to St. Louis.
“When we were boys and that girl went missing, Park was beside himself. Absolutely wrecked. With the neighborhood moms jumping all over us, all of our friends looking at us like we’d done something wrong, it got worse and worse. He felt so attacked—I mean, we both did, but he had it worse. He was always so sensitive about things. I knew we’d done nothing wrong, so I ignored it, but Park, he got paranoid that everyone was out to get him, that the police were going to come arrest us. He obsessed about the girl, riding his bike by her house, going to the library and getting on the computers, reading all the articles in the paper. He tried to talk to her parents, to assure them he’d had nothing to do with it. They threatened to get a restraining order, and that got him upset. He withdrew from everything, from everyone. He was really depressed. So much so that it scared me. I told our parents, and Mom took him to our doctor. He sent them to another doctor, a psychologist, and she got him straightened out. She was the one who suggested to Mom that we move, that Park would be better off in a new environment, one without the constant reminders. Dad didn’t want to, but Mom insisted. And it worked. We moved here. Park was able to put the worst of it behind him and move on. Meet you. Fall in love.” A hint of bitterness in his tone.
“He’s never told me any of this.”
“Why would he? When we met you, you became his new obsession. It was like St. Louis had never happened. From the moment he set eyes on you, that was it. You were his future, he knew it, and he didn’t care about anything—or anyone—else. He never mentioned Annie Cottrell again.”
She feels betrayed, but also protective. This illuminates so many little things about their lives together. Park has willingly gone to therapy on and off throughout their marriage, jokes that this is why he is so stable. It’s why he encouraged her to, as well. He never said he started going as a child. She just assumed it was something that started after Melanie’s death.
Now, the pattern revealed, she finds it disconcerting. Girl goes missing. Park goes to therapy.