Not One of Us(84)

Chapter 38


DEACON CORMIER


May 19, 2006

Having Mom record me with the prom corsage was so lame. Actually, the whole prom scene was lame, but if Jori wanted to go, then I’d make her happy. Last week, she and Mom had spent an afternoon shopping in Mobile for her prom dress. Mom had tried to pay for the dress, but Jori had insisted on using part of her savings from working at Winn-Dixie to buy it herself.

“Smile, Deacon,” Mom urged as she pointed the camcorder at me. “Hold up the corsage too.”

Dutifully, I held up the posy of coral and white roses mixed with clusters of baby’s breath. The sooner she finished filming, the sooner I could get out of this uncomfortable rented tux. Me? I’d much rather dance at the Pavilion in jeans and a T-shirt than get gussied up in stiff clothes to dance in a high school cafeteria. No amount of ribbons, balloons, and other fanfare decorating the room could disguise its true function. But no one had asked my opinion. So the prom it was.

“Louis?” Mom shouted over her shoulder. “Come down here and see your son all decked out.”

Dad was here somewhere, because his car was in the driveway.

But the house remained deadly quiet.

“Must be in the shower,” I offered.

She paused, cocking her head to the side. “I don’t hear the water running. Stay here while I go up and—”

A shot rang out from the backyard.

Mom and I stared at one another. Her eyes held shock, quickly followed by confusion, then rapidly shifted to fear, mirroring my own progression of emotions.

She screamed Dad’s name, and the recorder dropped from her hands.

The back door by the kitchen was yanked open, and a man—not my Dad—walked into the room, a gun by his side. Mom’s back was to him, and I stared into familiar eyes that held none of their usual frankness. A chill raked through me from head to toe. Something was very, very wrong. Where was Dad?

Mom whirled around. I opened my mouth to warn her, to yell at her to run, but no sooner had the thought formed when the opportunity to escape shut down.

It was too late.

The next minute of my life slowed down to a crawl. Every sensation of every moment crashed into me. My mind raced to catch up and filter out what was important. The view from the backyard, Mom’s roses and tomatoes and cucumbers all ripening at once. The black tilled soil, the sunny blue sky, a group of starlings flying from one tree to another. Moss hanging from live oaks and a car parked around back that I didn’t recognize. It didn’t belong there, just as this man didn’t belong in our house.

I knew him, of course, but something in his flat, emotionless eyes chilled me. It was as though he were a stranger. There was no flicker of recognition or human warmth in them. My gaze traveled down to the revolver he carelessly dangled in his right hand.

An initial wall of fear, then dread, slammed into me. My mouth opened to scream, but no sound emerged. I lurched forward to reach Mom. I had to protect her, to save her.

“Who are you?” she asked, face furrowed in confusion. The eminent danger had not yet sunk into her brain. “What are you doing in my—”

“Such a pity,” he mumbled with a tsk. He raised the gun.

My world exploded, roared in my ears as sudden and loud as though a freight train had crashed through the walls of our home. Burnt metallic sulfur assaulted my nose. Mom crumpled to the floor, a red bloom spreading across the front of her white shirt.

“Mom!”

I knelt down beside her. Her eyes rolled back in her head. I looked up, and the man raised his gun again to shoot, aiming at me. I read the intent in the hard set of his face. His finger pulled the trigger. Pain exploded in my chest, and I fell to the floor. My ears pulsed with a loud ringing. A death knell.

Blood gushed from my chest. So much blood.

The point of his dirty, scuffed boot poked my ribs and rolled me over, my face pressed to the floor, and my body went limp.

I don’t know how much time passed. I came to slowly. Swimming up from a quicksand trying to suck me back under, pulling at me mercilessly, relentlessly. It was eerily quiet now. Hadn’t it just been deafening? What had happened?

Panic electrified me to action, and I scanned the room. Was he still here? The man with the gun? No, I was alone. So alone. The madman had left me for dead. I laid my head back down on the hard floor. It was so quiet I could feel the blood thundering in my ears.

Mom was dead. I was dying. I must be in shock, because the facts registered, but I had no emotional connection to what was taking place.

In a single afternoon, my family had been wiped out. The enormity of that fact was crushing.

Why? Why us?

It made no sense. I wanted to curl into myself, deny what had happened. Go back in time to Mom filming me holding that corsage, thinking of Jori and making her happy. Turned out, I wanted prom after all. I wanted so many things I’d never have now.

I turned my head to the side and caught a glimpse of bits of baby’s breath that had fallen from the corsage and landed under the sofa. I touched a petal. Velvet smoothness. Jori would never see it.

A car motor sounded from the driveway. The man was coming back. I could feel an inner knowing of that fact deep in my bones. Probably to make sure we were dead and to clean up the crime scene. He’d get away with this. No witnesses, nothing to implicate him. No explanation for why he’d flipped his lid and turned into a killer.