Lisa Unger - Smoke

“You bastard,” she yelled. “You fucker.”

He held onto her and let her pound on him with her fists. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” She just kept saying it over and over, like the words could hurt him the way he’d hurt her, like they were blades she could throw at him. Finally, exhausted, she slumped against him, felt his arms around her. She heard Lydia Strong’s words in her head.

“Lily, I think he’ll come to you. He loves you and he won’t be able to live with himself without trying to make you understand why he did what he did. He’ll come for your forgiveness.”

She’d thought about it and knew Lydia was right .

“And when he does?” she’d asked .

What makes you think he’ll come today?” Jeffrey asked.

Where they sat in the Kompressor on the bluff, they could see Lily Samuels standing on the beach.

“The closing on the house is tomorrow; they have personal items they want to retrieve,” said Lydia, staring at the ocean. “It seems like a good day for contrition.”

Christian Striker sat in the backseat. “He’d be crazy to come back.”

“I think it’s safe to assume he’s crazy, Striker,” said Lydia. She caught his ice blue eyes in the rearview mirror and smiled.

“Look,” said Jeffrey. “She’s running. She’s running toward the house.”

Just then Lydia’s cell phone rang.

They killed my father,” Mickey said to Lily while she was still in his arms.

“And you killed mine,” she whispered.

“I didn’t kill him. He killed himself.”

The irony of his own words was completely lost on him. She pulled away from him and looked into his eyes. He looked a little unhinged, a little vacant.

“Mickey,” she said softly. “Your father committed suicide. No one killed him.”

“Their actions, their betrayal killed him,” he said, waving a disgusted hand at their mother.

“You father was unwell, Mickey,” Monica said softly. “He abused me. He abused you-”

“Don’t do that,” Mickey screamed. “Don’t tell lies to make what you did okay. You betrayed him, you tampered with my mind-my mind .”

Monica stood and reached for him. “We wanted you to forget, to move on and live a happy life. We didn’t want the ghost of that day haunting you.”

He pushed her away and she landed on the couch, put her head in her hands. “Get away from me,” he yelled. “Stay away.”

“You’re acting like a child, Mickey,” said Lily. “Grow up.”

He looked at her in surprise. The wind wailed outside and the smell of salt was strong in the air. The door stood open and the room was growing cold.

“You burned the house down, okay,” she said, spreading her arms. “Figuratively speaking, anyway. You’ve avenged your father; you’ve ruined your mother. You got everything you wanted, right? What I don’t get is-why me ? I’ve never done anything but love you.”

He looked as his feet, then up into her eyes. She saw shame and a pouty, childish anger there. She wanted to slap his face.

“You were the only thing they really loved,” he said with a shrug. “Their marriage went to shit. They thought I was dead, and they were about to lose all their money; Tim thought he might possibly go to jail, and they were still standing . It was only when Tim thought he’d lost you that he started to unravel, that he started bargaining with his life.”

She thought about it a second.

“So that was the deal you made. He ended his life and you spared mine.”

“He came to see us; he wanted to deal. He said if we killed him and made it look like an accident, that there would be insurance money. His cash and assets would cover his debt to the IRS and he knew he could get Mom to hand over the insurance money if it meant your life. He wanted to buy you back.”

“But it was never about money,” said Lily.

He shook his head. “I have money, Lily. I always have. I just wanted him to look down the barrel of that gun and see what my father saw: hopelessness, despair, the end of a life badly lived. I wanted him to die with all his sins and failings staring back at him from that cold metal eye. Just like my father. And I wanted her to be left with nothing. That was the deal, not some paltry insurance payout.”

“And he agreed.”

“As long as I promised to let you go when the deed was done.”

“How did he know you’d keep your word?”

“He knew I loved you. That was the only thing we ever had in common. We both loved you so much.”

Lily sank to the couch, feeling suddenly like her own legs couldn’t hold her. Monica wept quietly beside her.

“How did Rhames find you?”

“He always knew where we were. He was watching for years, waiting.”

He sighed, paced the room for a second.

“He came to see me when Body Armor went on the market. He was just in my apartment one night when I came home. I was terrified, thought he was some kind of maniac. But he knew things about us, about our life, about Monica and Tim. He knew everything . And then he helped me to retrieve my memories. Memories he had helped to erase.”

“That’s when you quit your job and moved to Riverdale, opened No Doze.”

He nodded. “I wanted to tell you but I knew you wouldn’t understand.”

She let out a little laugh. “You’re right about that.”

“That’s why I distanced myself from you.”

“You staged everything: the suicide, the journals.”

“I knew you wouldn’t believe I could kill myself. And I knew you’d come looking for answers. And you did. We always have known each other so well.” He came to kneel beside her but she stood and walked away.

“Who was that in the car? Who died there that night?”

Mickey closed his eyes. “I don’t know who,” he said, looking away from her. He walked over beside her and they both stared out at the surf. “Rhames took care of that. He made sure the face was unrecognizable, put him in some of my clothes, and staged the scene to look just like my father’s suicide. My fingerprints weren’t on record anywhere. There was no sign of foul play, so there was no investigation to be worried about DNA evidence. Just to be sure, they scrubbed my apartment clean and left traces of his DNA-hair in the brush, saliva on the toothbrush. Unless the police got creative and cross-referenced the DNA with Monica’s, the police would assume what was in the apartment belonged to me and if it matched the corpse, they’d consider that a positive ID. It never came to that. I left instructions in my will that I wanted to be cremated right away, my ashes scattered out there.” He nodded toward the shore and Lily remembered the day vividly as one of the worst of her life. “Whoever it was, he’s gone,” he said.

She felt a black hole open in her chest, a supernova that sucked all the hope and happiness out of her spirit. She’d never felt so angry and alone. Her mother wept on the couch, but Lily felt nothing but a kind of distant pity for her. She wondered if she’d ever feel anything else again. She was about to tell him what he’d done to her. She opened her mouth but he raised a finger and put it to his lips. He cocked his head, lifting an ear to the air. After a second, he smiled. She heard it, too, and held his eyes.

“Oh, Lily,” he said, with a sad shake of his head. “You didn’t.”

She removed the cell phone from her pocket and held it up for him to see.

“I love you, Mickey. I really do. But you have to answer for the things you’ve done. I’m sorry.”

He backed away from her slowly, shaking his head. The front door burst open and police officers entered clad in Kevlar vests, guns drawn. She saw Lydia and Jeffrey behind them, followed by another lean man with light blond hair who Lily thought she remembered as Striker. The air was still and they stood silent for a second; the moment seemed frozen where any outcome was possible. Then Mickey took a revolver from the pocket of his baggy jeans and smiled at his sister.