Rival

I clench my teeth, trying to stop my tears as I look at him. I love my father, but I can’t love him for letting my mother take me away. I guess in his head he thought it was a way of hiding me from his enemies. Did living with my mother make me strong? Of course not. Look at me, blubbering and ruined. I’m not strong.

“You don’t get to give up. You don’t get to quit!” he yells. “There will be other loves and other babies,” he growls, shaking my head between his hands and leveling me with his hard stare. “Now. Swallow. The. Pain!” he rages all around me. “Swallow it!”

His roar shatters my insides, and I stop crying, staring at him wide-eyed.

He holds my head tightly, forcing me to keep my eyes on him, and I focus, looking for something to grab on to. Anything. I concentrate on the tiniest point I can find, the center of his black pupils.

I don’t blink. I don’t budge.

The center of his eye is so dark, and I try to imagine that it feels like cruising through space at warp speed. In my world there is no one but him. The gold surrounding the black flickers, and I wonder why I didn’t inherit that in my green eyes. The white in his irises looks like lightning, and the ring of emerald, before you get to the white of the eyeballs, seems to ripple like water.

Before I know it our breathing is syncing up, and he’s setting the rhythm I follow.

Inhale, exhale.

Inhale, exhale.

Inhale, exhale.

Madoc’s face flashes in my mind, and I tighten my jaw. Memories of my aborted pregnancy crash into his image, and my teeth rub together. My mother’s voice enters my ears, and I suck my tongue dry, taking all of it, all of them, and swallowing the hard lump to the back of my throat, down my pipe, and I feel it all leave my brain.

It’s still inside me. Heavy.

But it’s quiet now, buried in my stomach.

My father releases my head and runs a thumb across my cheek as he holds my chin.

“Now who are you?” he implores.

“Fallon Pierce.”

“And where were you born?”

My voice is calm. “Boston, Massachusetts.”

He takes a step back, giving me room. “And what do you want to do with your life?” he asks.

I finally look at him, whispering. “I want to build things.”

He reaches to my side and picks a towel off the shelf, handing it me. I hold it to my chest, not really feeling the cold anymore. Not really feeling anything.

He leans in and kisses my forehead and then meets my eyes. “‘Nothing that happens on the surface of the sea can alter the calm of its depths.’” He quotes Andrew Harvey. “No one can take away who you are, Fallon. Don’t give anyone that power.”

I hadn’t cried since that day that’s suddenly on my mind. I’d come close, but two whole years and not one tear. My father kept me home for exactly one week to heal the injuries from the shards of glass from the windshield that had cut me up, but then he sent me back to boarding school to get on with my life.

And I had. That’s something everyone needs to learn on their own. Life goes on, smiles will come again, and time heals some wounds and soothes the ones it can’t.

I brought up my grades, made a few friends, and laughed a lot.

I simply couldn’t forgive, though. Betrayal cuts deep, and that’s what brought me back to town last June.

I just didn’t expect Madoc to still affect me.

He wanted me. I knew it. I felt it. But why? What did I really ever do to deserve him?

He’d been faithful to me when we were sixteen. Of that, I was pretty certain. I couldn’t hate him anymore for looking for a good time when he’d thought I’d willingly left him.

There are so many things I should tell him. Things that he had a right to know. And then I felt that I’d told him too much.

Madoc was better off without me. Our relationship started off in the wrong place to begin with. We had nowhere left to grow. He didn’t know me or what interested me. We talked about nothing.

Once he’d had his fill of the sex, he would leave. Not to mention the baby. If he ever found out about the baby, he’d jump ship. No doubt. Madoc wasn’t ready for anything that heavy. I wondered if he’d ever be.

I turned up “Far from Home” by Five Finger Death Punch and swallowed the guilt all the way back to Shelburne Falls as I drove home at my mother’s request. She’d texted this morning to let me know I had stuff at the house. If I didn’t come to collect what I’d left last summer, it was going in the trash.

I shook my head and ran a hand over my weary eyes.

• • •

Punching the gate code in, I inched Tate’s G8 forward as the black iron bars creaked open.

It was Saturday, late morning, and the October sky was lightly sprinkled with clouds. It was chilly out, but I hadn’t brought a jacket, opting for my black-and-gray-striped long-sleeved T-shirt and some jeans. My hair still hung loose from last night, but it’d been fluffed after my shower this morning. For some reason, though, I’d wanted Madoc’s smell to stay in my hair along with the tiny bits of grass I kept finding. My long bangs fanned around my cheekbones, and I picked my glasses off the passenger seat as I parked in front of the Caruthers’s house behind my mother’s BMW.

My glasses had been intended for reading years ago, but I took to wearing them almost all of the time. It felt safe somehow.

Walking into the house, I traipsed through the foyer and down the hall next to the stairs leading to the back of the house where I was sure to find Addie in the kitchen.

The quiet house seemed so different now. Almost hollow as if it weren’t filled with memories, stories, and a family. The bitter chill of the marble floors shot through my sneakers and up my calves, and the high ceilings didn’t magically hold in warmth anymore.

Looking out the glass patio doors, I saw Addie sweeping up around the pool that already had the cover rolled over it for the coming winter. When I looked farther out, though, I noticed that the Jacuzzi was covered as well. When I lived here, that continued to be used throughout the cold months as well as the lawn furniture and barbecue area. Madoc’s dad loved grilled food, and he and Madoc would venture out to throw steaks on the barbecue in the dead of January.

Now the entire patio seemed barren. Dead leaves blew this way and that, and it didn’t look like Addie was making any progress. It didn’t even look like she was trying to.

This house had problems, but it also had a history of laughter and memories. Now everything just looked dead.

I opened the sliding glass door and walked out across the stone tiles.

“Addie?”

She didn’t look at me, and her low, quiet voice wasn’t welcoming like last time. “Fallon.”

I took off my glasses and stuck them in my back pocket. “Addie, I’m so sorry.”

She folded her lips between her teeth. “Are you?”

I didn’t have to tell her what I was sorry about. Nothing escaped her notice in this house, and I knew she knew that the divorce mess was my fault. That Madoc being sent away was my fault.

“Yes, I am,” I assured her. “I never meant for this to happen.”

And that was the truth. I’d wanted to be the one to leave Madoc, and I’d wanted Jason and my mother to feel a pinch, but I didn’t know my mother would fight the divorce so hard or that Madoc would be caught in the middle.

Truth is, I hadn’t thought of Addie at all.

She exhaled through her nose, and her scowl stayed trained on her sweeping. “That bitch thinks she’s going to take this house,” she mumbled. “She’s going to take the house, sell off everything in it, and let it sit.”

I stepped closer. “She won’t.”

“It doesn’t matter, I guess.” Her bitter tone cut me off. “Jason is choosing to spend most of his time in the city or at Katherine’s house, and Madoc hasn’t been home in months.”

I looked away, shame burning my face.

I did this.

My eyes were starting to sting, so I closed them and swallowed. I’ll fix it. I have to. I should never have come back. Madoc was fine. They were all fine before me.

This house, once alive with laughter and parties, was empty now, and Addie’s family that she’d loved and taken care of was separated and broken. She’d been almost entirely alone these past three months. Because of me.

I backed away, knowing she wouldn’t want to hear another apology. Turning around, I started back for the patio doors.

“You still have things in your room,” Addie called out, and I turned back around. “And you have some boxes in the basement.”

What? I didn’t have anything in the basement.

“Boxes?” I asked, confused.

“Boxes,” she repeated, still not looking at me.

• • •

Boxes?

I headed into the house, but rather than go upstairs to pack up the clothes I’d left months ago, I went straight for the basement door off to the side of the kitchen.

It didn’t make sense for me to have anything down there. My mother threw away everything from my room, and I hadn’t come to live here with much to start with.

I walked down the brightly lit stairs, my feet almost silent on the carpeted staircase.

For a huge-ass house like this, it featured an equally huge basement with four rooms. One was decorated as an extra bedroom, and another was Mr. Caruthers’s liquor storage. There was also a room dedicated to tubs of holiday decorations, and then the large open area that held a gaming center with standing video games, a pool table, air hockey, foosball, a gigantic flat screen, and just about every other entertainment a teenage boy like Madoc could enjoy with his friends. The room also held a refrigerator full of refreshments and couches for relaxing.

But the only part I ever enjoyed about coming down here was when Mr. Caruthers decided that I needed my own outlet for activity in the basement.

My half-pipe.

He thought it was a way for Madoc and me to bond, and since I wasn’t making friends, it served to put me side by side with Madoc’s. While they played, so could I.

It didn’t work.

I simply stayed out of there when Madoc entertained, and I worked on my skills at other times. It wasn’t him so much but his friends. I found Jared moody and everyone else dumb.

Looking around the large area, I noticed everything was spotlessly clean. The beige carpets looked new, and the wood smelled of furniture polish. Light poured in from the set of patio doors leading outside to the sunken backyard off the side of the house. The tan walls still burst with Notre Dame paraphernalia: flags, pennants, framed photos, and souvenirs.

An entire wall was splashed with family photos, mostly of Madoc growing up. Madoc opening Christmas presents when he was eight or nine. Madoc hanging from the goal post on a soccer field at ten or eleven. Madoc and Jared under the hood of his GTO as Madoc throws a goofy gang symbol with his hands.

And then one of him and me. Right in the middle of the wall, over the piano. We were out by the pool, and Addie had wanted a picture of us. We must’ve been about fourteen or fifteen. We had our backs to each other, leaning against each other with our arms crossed over our chests. I remember Addie kept trying to get Madoc’s brotherly arm around my shoulder, but this was the only way we’d pose.

Studying the picture closely, I noticed that I was half-scowling at the camera. There was, however, a hint of a smile. I tried to look bored despite the butterflies in my stomach, I remembered. My body had started having a reaction to Madoc, and I’d hated it.

Madoc’s expression was . . .

His head was turned toward the camera but down. He had a tiny smile on his lips that looked like it was bursting to get out.

Such a little devil.

I turned around and ran my hand over the old piano that Addie said Madoc still played. Though not anymore, since he was away at school.