Part 21 (2/2)

People were walking their dogs and paperboys were delivering newspapers. All of it as ordinary as vanilla ice cream.

Faulkner was probably home in bed, snoring away, while I was stressing over nothing. Except that nothing found me slowing up as I walked home, not quite anxious to get back.

I found my father parked across the street from Sam's house. He had his hands on the steering wheel, looking as if he was trying to make a hard decision. I knocked on the window and he jumped, then opened the door and got out. ”Cooper! Oh, thank G.o.d. Where have you been?” He hugged me tightly, then drew back, looking me over. ”What have you been doing? You're filthy.”

I let out a long sigh. ”You don't want to know, Dad.”

He put a hand on my shoulder and leaned down until his eyes met mine. ”Yeah, Cooper, I do.”

For the first time maybe ever, I got the feeling that my father was there. Really there. Ready to listen to me. Not to what I had to say about Hamlet. Or my English essay. But to what was going on in my life. And right now, I was so tired and so lost.

What if this wasn't over after all?

What I needed right now, more than anything, was an ally. A grownup on my side. Somebody to tell me what to do. To help me make sense of it all.

Somebody to tell me it would all be okay.

Most of all, I needed my father. Maybe I'd always needed him, but I hadn't known that until now. ”It's complicated, Dad.”

”That's all right, Cooper. I have time.”

So we got into his car and I told him. I started at the beginning, and I kept going until I got to dropping Megan off at her house. My father didn't say a word until I stopped. I stared at the worn gray carpet of his Toyota. ”That's it,” I said. ”I don't know where Faulkner is or if he's okay.”

”He's all right. He's at my house.”

I spun in my seat. Whipple, who had curled into a ball in my lap and gone to sleep, lifted his head, dropped it down again. Relief exploded in me. Faulkner was okay. He hadn't died. If my brother had been with us then, I would have hugged him, whether he liked it or not. ”He is? How'd he get there?”

”Your mother brought him over early this morning. Asked me to keep him at my house for a while.”

”Whoa. Back the truck up. You talked to her? You saw her?”

He nodded. ”She's at my house now. She told me a lot of the same things you just did. Let me tell you, that was a lot to swallow. This is the woman I was married to for eighteen years. And she's telling me she thinks she tried to kill my child?” My father gripped the steering wheel. ”It didn't go over well, but when she explained how it happened, I began to understand.”

”What? You understood? That she thinks she did this?” I wanted to shake him. To scream at him, to get him to wake up and smell the truth in his life. His ex-wife was a homicidal maniac. ”Dad, she did try to kill me. I was there.”

”I know, Cooper. But that wasn't her. It was something acting inside her.”

I let out a gust. I knew deep down it was true, but it still annoyed me that my father was defending my mother's murderous actions. I reached for the door handle, but my father stopped me.

”Cooper, listen to me. I know things between us haven't been that great, and I know I haven't been there for you like I should have. But this time, this moment, you have to listen to me.”

I stopped, but I didn't let go of the door handle.

”Your mother loves you.”

I shook my head. I wanted to believe that, but I'd seen different.

”That wasn't her acting like that. She's fighting whatever is inside her. You have to believe me. She wants to talk to you, so she can explain.”

I snorted. ”I don't want her to find me.”

My father grabbed my arm. ”Your mother loves you,” he repeated.

I stared at the street until it blurred in front of me. ”No, she doesn't.”

”She does.” My father kept holding on. ”Come on, Cooper, you know your mother. Think back-think of all the times we've had together. The camping trips. The vacations. The game nights. That's not her acting like that. There's something else a something controlling her. I think it's him.”

”The thing. This Place. This land. It's cursed or something.” The same thing that had controlled Gerard, that had whispered in his ear and had made him throw his own brother down that well.

”No.” My father paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was filled with a hatred I had never heard before. ”Him. ”

”Sam?” There was only one other person who would want me in that well. Whose self-interests would be served by having me become the next creature.

My father nodded slowly. Once. I got the feeling that if Sam had been there right then, my professor father might have strangled him. For ruining his marriage. For ruining his life. For ruining his family. And most of all, for trying to kill his youngest son. ”This is all my fault.”

”Dad, you didn't do anything.”

”That's the problem. I saw this coming. Let it happen.” He ran a hand through his hair. ”Well, I didn't see this, exactly, but I saw Sam was up to no good. Your mother a she just wanted to leave me so badly, and I didn't want to upset her. I never wanted her to be a”

”Unhappy.”

He looked at me and let out a sigh that sounded as if it weighed more than the whole car. ”Yeah.”

”That's the trouble, Dad. You never throw any rocks. Break a few windows. Get mad. Fight. It might do you some good.”

It might have done us all some good. Might have headed this off. Kept Sam from invading our lives like a cancer.

”I tried, you know,” he said. ”After she first left, I was here every morning for a month.”

”Here?”

”When you were at school and Sam was at work, I was here, talking to your mother. I nearly got fired because I missed so much school. I kept thinking if I argued with her enough, she'd see the light and come back, but every time I talked to her, she was a” He raised his hands in defeat.

”Like a cult member.”

”Exactly.” My father shook his head. ”I don't know what it is about him. He has this a power over her.”

”It was the wine,” I said. ”He gave it to her all the time, and after she drank it, she got all weird.” With Gerard, it had been the grapes, but with my mother, the wine. A special wine made from special grapes.

The monster's crop.

Wine was stronger than grapes, wasn't it? Fermented, concentrated. Maybe that's why Sam had used it. Because a mother's bond was so much harder to break.

”That makes sense,” my father said. ”He gave her some, you know, when she was a patient of his. Back when she first saw him, just before she got pregnant with you. Some newpatient gift or something. She drank a little of it and acted really oddly. The reaction didn't last long, but it was enough to really worry me. I dumped the wine down the drain. We had a huge fight. Your mother and I, we hardly ever fought. Every once in a while, Sam would contact her-a card, a phone call from his office-trying to get her to come back as a patient, but she never responded.”

He'd been trying all that time to get her back under his thumb. But without her drinking the wine, it had been impossible.

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