Strong Enough(59)

My fingers ache from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. I’m already thinking through possible scenarios and possible outcomes, preparing myself, expecting the unexpected.

“Reach in the glove box and hand me the gun in there,” I bite off to Muse. She quickly and quietly does as I ask.

“Jasper, what’s going on? What do you think has happened?”

I grind my back teeth together, praying that I’m wrong about what my gut is telling me, what my heart is telling me. The thing is, neither one has ever been wrong before.

I take a deep breath, reaching for the level head, the eerie calm that has helped make me so good at what I do. I need my skill. I need my sharp senses.

“There was an explosion to the west. My childhood home . . . my mother is still there. A little house, west of my cabin.”

I hear her gasp. I smell the fear. I suck it in like cocaine. It burns through my blood, triggers a rush of adrenaline that pushes me into a razor-sharp focus.

Minutes tick by like centuries, but I finally turn onto the old, dusty road that leads to the place I grew up, the place I spent a thousand sleepless nights and cried what few tears I’ve ever shed.

The glow is getting brighter. The acrid tang of smoke and things burning that shouldn’t be burning fills the interior of the car. I steel myself for what I know I’ll find, for what I did everything in my power to prevent. I faked my death so my mother would be safe, so she could finally live a happy life. Free. But someone knows. Someone found her. Like someone found one of my friends.

Before the familiar busted-cement driveway appears, I see bits of smoldering debris littering the street. Some shingles scattered across the drive, a piece of guttering, a couple of smoking two-by-fours, still nailed together and now lying in the middle of the road in the shape of a cross. I weave around it all.

And then I see the flames.

They lick up at the trees like the tongues of a dozen snakes, flickering sharply against the night sky. It’s when I make the turn that I finally see it—the house. I see the house that I was born in, the house that my brother died behind, the house that held so much good and bad, all but destroyed. Half of it has been blown out and the other half is engulfed in a writhing blaze.

I ease to a stop, taking in the dead space that was once the living room and, beyond it, the master bedroom. They’re gone now and the emptiness inside me tells me that the woman who lived there is gone, too. A strange numbness emanates from my chest.

I look into the darkness where my mother used to park her car at the back edge of the house, nearest the kitchen door. I see one taillight and the corner of a pale blue hatchback peeking out from behind the ruin.

She was here.

Was.

A piece of wood burns on the trunk lid of Mom’s car. It makes the whole scene even more surreal, unbelievable.

I shift into park and get out to walk slowly across the yard, picking through small fires scattered around the grass as I approach the front door. I feel the heat of the flames, but it doesn’t penetrate the cold that’s seeped into my skin. I feel it burn my eyes and throat and nostrils, but I don’t veer from my path. It never occurs to me that I should. I’m not afraid of dying.

As I take in the wreckage, I feel detached, robotic, like I’m watching a bad movie through a crystal-clear camera lens. It isn’t until I stop at the closed front door that I start to feel the cold recede, and then I almost wish it hadn’t.

I reach for the knob, wrapping my fingers around the scorching metal to test it. It’s locked.

Pain threatens to explode from my chest, to shred muscle and bone. If my mother had been able to escape, she wouldn’t have turned and locked the door behind her. She’d have run. But this door is locked. That means my mother is dead.

My boot against the front door is like a shotgun blast in the night. It gives easily and I walk over it as though a violent fire isn’t raging all around me. I scan the mostly intact dining room. Empty. I walk toward what’s left of the kitchen. Empty. No sign of my mother, dead or alive. She must’ve been in one of the obliterated rooms. And now she’s obliterated, too.

With the crackle of support beams giving way overhead, I head toward the bedroom I slept in as a child. Even filled with smoke I can see that she hadn’t changed a thing since I was here last. She preserved it for her dead youngest son just like she’d done for her dead oldest.

Despite the suffocating air, it still feels like home, like all the memories I left behind are housed in the wood and the plaster, in the grass and the leaves and the trees outside. They were all I had left. Them and the tiny woman who lived here.

I feel all the angst I lived with as a child. I feel all the desperation and anger. But I also feel a bone-deep sadness, a sense of loss that comes from the death of the only person on the planet I’ve ever loved.