Gregg Hurwitz - Prodigal Son

Andre took the wheel, looked over, said, “Where we going?”

Evan stared at the freeway sign ahead, realizing only now the direction he’d unknowingly steered them, his unconscious pointing the way.

He nodded through the windshield, and Andre stomped the gas, throwing gravel as they merged into traffic.

Veronica opened the door and gasped. She wore a gauzy white bathrobe over a pair of cream pajamas. The wind caught the fabric, setting her aflutter, more apparition than human.

She ushered them into the Bel Air mansion, the door’s closing taking the life out of her clothing. Looking from Evan to Andre, she fastened a sash around her waist, settled into the calm of a person who’d known trauma well enough to persist lucidly in the face of it.

Evan’s good arm was hooked around Andre’s shoulder, but he was doing his best not to make him bear too much of his weight. Andre’s gaze darted around at the water feature of the foyer floor, the high ceiling, the yippy dogs. Evan could only imagine what the house felt like to him.

Veronica stepped in to help Evan, Andre slumping his shoulder to slide him off for the transfer. The scent of lilac emanated from her. She led them back, vast rooms opening one after another like chambers in a castle. Andre kept the trauma backpack on and his eyes wide.

Veronica deposited them at a kitchen table the size of a barn door, banished the dogs up a hall, and returned. They sat around the table like a normal family were it not for the combat knife rammed through Evan’s forearm.

He unwound the bandages, which peeled free with a wet crackle. When the gauze lifted from the incision, he finally felt the full measure of pain, a deep throbbing in the flesh.

Thanks to the sharpness of the combat knife, the wound was exceedingly neat, two inches on either side with minimal tearing. He set his arm on the table before him, centered like a meal. The intersecting blade looked ridiculous, a comedic prop. If it had split the radius and ulna, there’d be nerve and tendon damage aplenty, so he took a moment to be grateful for small mercies.

The surgical stapler, preloaded with thirty-five staples, came sealed in a plastic pouch. It was office-supply white and looked like a robotic garden-hose nozzle. There was a bottle of alcohol.

This was going to suck.

Before he could brace himself, Andre stood up suddenly, wobbled a bit on his feet. “I don’t … I’m not sure I can watch this.”

“Go into the other room,” Veronica said. “The last thing we need is you fainting and splitting your head open. I can help him.”

Andre hesitated, taking in the sunken living room as if it frightened him. Maybe it did.

Evan looked at Veronica. “If you don’t tell him, I will.”

Her eyes flared, big behind her painted lashes. On the inhale the cords of her neck came clear. But she didn’t flinch. She looked right back at Evan, and he could see in her face that she knew he was right, that it had to be dragged into the open.

“Tell me what?” Andre said.

But Veronica kept her eyes on Evan. For a final instant, they were sharing this, their secret, and something about that felt oddly intimate.

She tipped her head to Evan deferentially.

He cleared his throat. Blinked against the pain. “We’re…” He couldn’t say brothers . “We have the same mom.”

“What?” Andre said lightly. And then, “ What? Wait, who?”

No sound but the hum of electricity feeding the oven.

“Me,” Veronica said.

Andre coughed out a laugh. Eyes rolling and a touch wild. “Ms. Le— Veronica ? Veronica is my mother?” A ragged inhalation. “And yours, too?”

Evan couldn’t bring himself to say yes, so he nodded.

“Huh,” Andre said. “Ain’t that some shit. Ain’t that some real…” And then it began to sink in, and he pawed at his mouth, eyes welling, and walked quietly into the next room.

Veronica and Evan sat in the silence, bound by this confusing bit of drama, a shared allegiance of some kind. It felt like closeness. Was this another facet of what it was to be family?

He felt a sudden rush of regard for Veronica. She’d calmly accepted the situation, unrattled and unflappable. She’d asked no questions, focused only on Evan’s well-being. She’d passed no judgment on what had been brought to her door and seemed instead to be receptive, even appreciative for who Evan was in the face of what she’d launched him into. In her composure he felt a sort of acceptance that he hadn’t known himself to crave. But he let her gaze warm him now.

And thought of the man in the other room, his half brother by blood.

Veronica’s gaze moved to the doorway through which Andre had vanished.

He said, “Go.”

“Your arm.”

He looked down at the crosshatched handle scales of the knife. All he had to do was grip and extract. “I’ve managed worse. This is just pain. What he’s feeling is something deeper.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” he said, his voice threatening to crack, “I’ve felt it.”

A half hour later, Veronica drifted back into the kitchen.

Evan’s right forearm was tightly bound by cohesive bandages, triple-wrapped to form a flexible cast above the stapled incisions. He’d washed the knife and then, unsure what to do with it, placed it in the recycle bin.

The alcohol bottle sat empty on the table before him. He’d used it on the wound and then to wipe down the surface. He’d washed his hands, but still blood remained stuck in the seams of his knuckles.

“He okay?” Evan asked.

“Who the hell knows?” she said. “What a mess I’ve made of us all.”

“Did you tell him the whole truth?”

“So help me God. I figured I owed him at least that.” She adjusted her sash and kept on. “He’s washing his face, and then you’ll drive him back.”

She moved in a daze past him to the countertop, fussed with her pill bottles, then clapped her palm to her mouth and swallowed them dry. She set her hands on the tile facing away, her shoulder blades bunched, her head lowered.

For a time she breathed, emotion seeming to move through her. It was as though Evan could see the events of the evening catch up to her and settle inside.

She finally turned back, her eyes ablaze with an inner light that he mistook for indignation.

She moved closer, and he saw it was something else, something primal, a mama-bear instinct that he’d seen a time or two in mothers he’d helped when their desperation turned to fury.

“He told me what they did,” she said. “How they tracked you there. Tried to stab him in the throat. And that they want to … want to torture you both. There are more of them?”

Evan nodded.

“My son.” She rested a hand on his cheek.

The words arrowed right through the center of him. She meant it now in full, she’d earned it, and in a manner of speaking he had, too. He couldn’t find his voice, so he gave a nod.

“Are you as terrible as you say you are?”

“I can be,” he said. “Yes.”

Her eyes came alive, afire. She bent her head gently to kiss the back of his hand, and her lips came away faintly rouged with blood. She looked into his eyes, into the depths of who he was.

“Good,” she said. “Kill every last one of them.”

61Family

Evan finished duct-taping a bedsheet over the sole window in the tiny rented room. Andre sat quietly on his bed, hands folded calmly in his lap, and watched. Since that AA meeting, a peace had descended over him. None of his usual banter or fidgeting was on display, even after the news Veronica had dropped on him. In giving in he seemed to have located a kind of peace inside himself.

Evan thought about when he’d worked on Joey’s shoulder, how it had been tender to the point of intolerability. It struck him that the same law of physics applied to any injury, physical or emotional. If you babied it, it stiffened even more, spreading the pain through you. But if you yielded, if you were willing to endure the white-hot agony of making vulnerable what you sought to protect, you had a shot at releasing it.