Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

“What is it about him you find worthwhile?”

“Goddamn it.” She knocked back half her drink, her words only now coming slurred. “You’re so arrogant, Jacob—”

“Jacob?”

She rubbed her forehead, confused. She wore a sleeveless blouse, her arm wobbling beneath it, not toned as Evan had thought but frail, wasted. “It’s easy to have empathy for something we understand. But there’s a spectacular array of suffering out there.” She waved her glass vaguely in his direction. “Not all of it is your flavor. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth your empathy.”

“You don’t know what I’ve been through. You don’t know anything about me.”

Her lips were trembling, an uncharacteristic show of anger, of vulnerability. “The hardest part of trying to become an adult is realizing that your suffering doesn’t entitle you to anything.”

“You’re not the person to tell me that.”

“I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about me.” She breathed wetly in the pause. “You don’t realize it until you’re alone and there’s no one there to hear you complain. Just you and, hmm, fate.”

“What are you talking about?”

She set her drink down uncertainly, knocking over one of her orange pill bottles. “You struggle with Andre because he reminds you of your past.”

“No.”

“He reminds you that despite everything you left behind, you’re still the same person you’ve always been.”

“No.”

“We all are,” she said. “We don’t leave anything behind, don’t you understand?”

Evan felt his molars grind. “You’re not hearing me. I’m done with this. I’m done with him.”

“You can’t be.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she said quietly, “he’s your brother.”

She faced away from him, her hair tumbling down across one eye, the side of her face. It fluttered at intervals with her breaths.

Evan couldn’t register his own breathing or the room or the words he’d just heard. All he sensed was his heartbeat thundering in his ears, a waterfall rush of blood moving through his system, keeping him upright. His flesh felt numb.

It occurred to him that this is what full-blown denial felt like. Groping in the dark, searching for old bearings that no longer existed.

Without knowing it, he’d taken a step back.

The story beneath the words unfurled like a banner, spelling out the trauma writ large.

He relived everything now through a new lens, one that brought all the blurry edges into focus. How vividly Veronica had described the rape of Andre’s mother. She had bruises around her wrists where they’d been held down. And she was wearing the shirt still, torn at the collar where it had been … Broken fingernails from trying to fight back. A clump of hair missing where it had been yanked out. It was brutal. Savage .

Not someone else.

But her.

She took those damn tests every few days, like playing a lottery you don’t want to win. But sure enough, she won. And even though this was a child born of violence, it was still a child. And she decided she wanted to bring this child to term .

She’d been telling Evan her own story the only way she knew how.

She tried to raise this baby who’d done nothing wrong, who deserved so much more. But she found she didn’t have the strength to look in that child’s face every day and be reminded of what had been done to her. I remember her telling me that she could see in his features the face of the man who’d attacked her. Imagine living with that.

He couldn’t.

So she’d put Andre up for adoption. But not right away.

She fought herself for a year. And gave this child care. But she also detested him. And it was tearing her apart. I’ve never seen a person so conflicted. So, yes. But by then he was a toddler, and the problem with that is …

Evan had finished the sentence for her: The older a kid is, the less anyone wants him .

He’d spoken from personal experience. But Veronica had tried to do it right the second time. With him. She’d tried to place him as a baby, where he could be loved and accepted into a real family. But the placement had fallen apart and he’d been consigned to the same fate as Andre.

His numb legs moved him cautiously across the savanna-tan carpet to the sweeping embrace of the couch. He lowered himself onto it, felt his muscles let go a bit.

His heart was still beating hard, too hard, the tuning-fork vibration from the revelation still humming in his bones.

When he lifted his gaze, Veronica was looking at him from the bar. She wasn’t crying, but she was on the verge, her face altered, swollen, holding back a body full of emotion.

He looked at the gin and tonic, for once untouched at her side, and thought about Andre and his rum, himself and his vodka, the pull of their shared genes toward liquid medication, toward elusive comfort, toward forgetting.

“Sweet boy,” she said, “I never wanted you to find out this way.”

He had never been called a pet name. Not one single time.

It felt awful and beautiful and terribly confusing.

He said nothing. He still couldn’t find his voice.

“He was searching for me, but I couldn’t tell him,” she said. “I didn’t want him to know he was a child of … of…”

Andre had already completed his childhood quest. He’d found his mother. He just didn’t know it. And now Evan was tied to him, his half brother. It felt like a burden and a violation.

Desperately, desperately, he wanted it not to be true.

“The whole time he was looking for me”—Veronica’s breath hitched, but through some deep-summoned strength she suppressed the sob—“I was looking for you.”

“You knew where I was,” Evan said. “All that time.”

“Yes, but I couldn’t find my way to you. I … I couldn’t.”

“After the…”

“Yes. After Andre. And the circumstances surrounding him. With you—you were so pure. Those few days we had together, I never put you down. But your father, he was never going to be there. I barely knew him. I was alone again with a baby. It all felt so familiar. And I thought after Andre, I didn’t…”

“What?”

“I didn’t deserve you. After what had been done to me, after what I’d done to Andre, how was I supposed to give myself to this new baby boy? How was I supposed to ask him to give himself to me ?”

Evan had never had a mother because of Andre.

If she’d never been raped.

If she hadn’t tried to raise Andre first.

If she’d found Evan worth it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and there were tears on her cheeks, held perfectly suspended. They were clinging there in place as if they’d been painted on.

Evan rose on unsteady legs and walked out.

56Help on the Ground

Even after he drove back to Castle Heights, Evan still felt altered, moving through a fog of anger and denial. He vaguely registered Lorilee in the lobby, bantering with Hugh Walters and the Honorable Pat Johnson over near the mail slots. Someone might have called out to him, but then he was on the elevator heading up, alone with his breath and his heartbeat.

The twenty-first-floor hallway was empty as always, a blank carpeted run to his penthouse. But his front door was ajar.

He froze as the elevator closed at his back. He had literally never come home to find it open.

The ARES unholstered with little more than a whisper. He quickly ejected the mag and pressed hard on the top cartridge with the tip of his index finger. Little play, full mag. He clicked the magazine back into place, gave a swift tug on the baseplate, reacquired his grip, and moved stealthily up the hall.