All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(123)
“He’s a very passionate young man,” Ginny said.
“He’s going to be unbearable for the next week. You saw him. You saw how proud he is of himself.”
Ginny laughed, and the sound rolled out into the Wyoming emptiness, stampeding through the darkness. “I suppose he is.”
“So,” I said, tracing the dwindling red chips of light that marked the Porsche as it sped away. “You’re taking me away from my dad.”
“In light of recent events and, of course, certain reports, the Department of—”
“Just say yes.”
She was silent for a moment. Then her big shoulders rocked back, and she nodded. "Until we can figure out what’s best.”
“What’s best?” I laughed, and then those two red chips of light vanished, and I couldn’t seem to laugh anymore. “When has that ever mattered?”
Ginny didn’t answer, but she beckoned for me to follow. We crossed the hospital parking lot together, and I climbed into a sky-blue Honda sedan parked with its nose buried in a grassy berm. Ginny eased the car off the curb with a long, grating noise, and we slipped away from the hospital and out onto the dark roads that ran through Vehpese. Tonight, they looked like rivers, these streams of asphalt banked by yellow paint. Rivers. Yes, that felt right.
I dropped my head against the window, and the cold of the glass spread through my ear and cheek. I should have been thinking about what had happened when Ginny touched me, when I tried to read her, and when she tried to read me back. But I was too tired, and somehow, I just didn’t care. Instead, I let myself sink into the seat and drift. Ginny’s car smelled like old Chinese food, although a sun-bleached air freshener in the shape of a girl in a grass skirt dangled from the rearview mirror. As she drove, Ginny hummed a tune that I thought I recognized, and her fingers tapped around the rim of the steering wheel, twelve to six and then six to twelve. Behind us, at least a dozen bottles of Aquafina rolled against each other on the back seat, providing a sloshing, splashing soundtrack that deepened the illusion of rivers.
The thing about rivers, I thought, studying the asphalt washing out in front of us. The thing about the rivers. The thing about rivers, that’s all I could come up with, because I kept getting to that word and thinking of—
—my brother—
—him, and that look on his face at the very end. Had something changed inside, or had that been an illusion? How much of what he had done was his responsibility? How guilty was he? And how much had been a childhood of abuse, and fear, and loneliness? At what point had he started on the course that ended in Austin Miller’s basement? And at what point had that course turned into something unstoppable, a kind of rushing forward with unbreakable momentum? I didn’t want to excuse what he’d done, but I wanted to understand it.
"They’ve got nowhere else to go.” The words emerged before I realized I was speaking out loud. That was the thing about rivers: they had that one finish-line, and they raced towards it so fast that they broke their necks when they got there.
“What was that?” Ginny asked.
I shook my head, and after a moment, her fingers tapped twelve to six and six to twelve again, in time with her soft humming. I didn’t recognize this part of Vehpese. We’d gone north, and the blocks had become irregular, chopped up by empty lots, and by tumbleweed, and by leaning fences topped with rusty barbed wire. From time to time, a cluster of small, yellow-brick houses would appear, all of them probably sixty years old and with their heads tucked together like blue-haired women in a bad part of town. Then those houses would drop back into the darkness, and we’d pass more empty lots, or maybe a single-wide trailer with a lone light, a light the color of the tall, dry grass, showing through thin windows.
She wasn’t taking me to some TV-friendly foster family. She wasn’t taking me to a house like Austin’s, or Becca’s, or even Emmett’s. She wasn’t, in other words taking me to a place that people loved and called home. During my last few weeks in Oklahoma, when they’d already taken me from Mom and hadn’t yet worked up the balls to send me to Dad, they’d bounced me around like they were playing a hell of a game of jacks. I’d figured out pretty quickly that the people who did foster care in Oklahoma were a mixed bunch. Some of them might have done it out of the goodness of their hearts, but a lot of them did it for the government check that came along. Did that make them bad people? Maybe not. But it sure didn’t make for a lot of warm cuddles. So that’s where she was taking me. Probably a trailer. Maybe a double-wide, if I were lucky, and I’d sleep in a room with another three or four kids. And there wouldn’t be clothes, or enough to eat, but at least I wouldn’t get my face turned to hamburger every other day. If we were close enough, maybe Austin would come visit. I laughed, tilting my head so that now the glass pressed against my eyes, freezing through the lashes. No, that last part was stupid.
But she kept driving. As we drove farther, and the last trailer disappeared behind us like water closing over a sinking ship, I realized there was no foster home. Not for me, anyway. Not for a kid who started fights at school, who had been kidnapped, who had been found with a dead body in the Miller’s basement. Jesus, why hadn’t I realized it? She was taking me to juvie. If I asked, right now, she’d say it was just for the night, and tomorrow they’d figure something out. But it would be for the next night, and the night after that, and on and on until I was eighteen.