I nodded slowly. “Yes, I remember that.”
“Do you know what she said to me after she had taken you back to your room to calm down?” he asked.
“No. She never told me, and we didn’t speak about it again after that day. The only thing she ever said was that we wouldn’t be chasing butterflies together anymore.”
“That day was the reason that I ended up hating your mother so much,” David said.
His hand stopped putting the pieces together even though his eyes dropped and he continued to still stare down at the puzzle. I felt a kind of sick feeling in my stomach as I waited to hear what he was going to say about my mother. A small thread of fear tugged at my chest as I worried that this might be the part where he revealed the evil was still inside him prowling around somewhere deep where it would always remain.
Then, David started chewing on his lower lip. “While you were in your room, your mother came back out and talked to me about what I had done. You stayed in your room for a long time, almost the entire rest of the afternoon.”
“I know,” I said. “I was upset.”
David nodded. “I know. Your mother told me that what I had done was wrong. She said that I had killed so many tiny little lives and that it had scared you. To be quite honest, it had scared me too, and your mother could tell. I tried not to cry as I sat there and listened to her talk. If it had been my own parents scolding me, I would have gotten beaten if I had started to cry. So, I held in my tears as I listened to your mother tell me why it was wrong of me to have stuffed living things inside the suffocating depths of my pockets. I waited for her to yell and to tell me how horrible I was. I waited for her to tell me that I was never allowed to come over to play with you again. But she never did. Instead, after she was done explaining to me in a way that made me understand that I shouldn’t do it again, she hugged me, and we had a little ceremony for all of the dead insects. We dug a little hole in the garden and scooped up all the wings and pieces and folded them all into the dirt. And when we were all done, she made me chocolate milk and finished helping me put a puzzle together until my mom came to pick me up. I remember standing there when my mother asked how I had behaved that day and waiting for your mom to tell her about what had happened. But she never did. Instead your mother just smiled and said that I had been good and that we had almost finished the puzzle.”
David stopped talking and I thought he was just taking a pause before finishing the story. But when he started to return to doing the puzzle, I realized that was the end of his story.
And I sat there completely perplexed.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why would that day have made you hate my mother so much?”
David continued on with the puzzle. “That was the day I knew that she cared about me, like really cared about what kind of person I would grow up to be. It would have been easier for me to deal with the rest of my growing-up if I hadn’t known that there were other options to the awful things that happened inside my house. It would have tormented me less when she died if I didn’t know that she was the one and only person in the world that cared about what I became. It would have been easier just to shut off my feelings about everything as simply as turning off the tap. But I couldn’t. Because of your mom and the way that she cared about me, I couldn’t shut it off. I had to feel and think about and experience everything as if I were trying to keep myself from becoming what I knew I was doomed to become. And I just couldn’t handle it, Lisette. I wasn’t strong enough to feel it all and not let it get to me. I acted in the only way that I knew worked. The way our father acted—with cruelty.”
I swallowed hard. “You killed him that night because he killed my mother, didn’t you?”
I asked the question as everything finally came crashing down into making sense. Just like a puzzle, all of the pieces were fitting together and forming a picture for me to see.
And my cheeks twitched into what felt like the start of a smile. “It didn’t have anything to do with wanting his fortune. You killed him because you hated him for killing my mother and taking her away from you, too.”
David nodded slowly. “It was the only thing that made sense for me to do.”
He looked up at me and I saw clearly for the first time what my mother had seen in David all those years ago. She saw a boy that had a chance, but also a boy that needed help. She saw a kid that was sure to fall into the kind of violence and destruction that his parents surrounded him with, if someone wasn’t there to show him another way. She saw that he could do it, but that he needed her.
That’s why she kept having him over to our house.
And that’s why she kept him a secret.
She had been trying to save him from himself by using the one redeeming quality that she saw buried deep inside… trust.
I looked down at the completed puzzle and smiled.
“You really are good at puzzles,” I said.
“Thanks,” David said.
And when I looked back up at him, I saw my smile reflected in his eyes as he smiled along with me.
Later that night after dinner, I sat on the couch next to David while we all talked. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore, and I wasn’t angry with him anymore either. I would pick up where my mother left off. I would show him that he could trust someone again.
I think the guys became surprised when David started to live up to my expectations of being a better man. As all four of us started turning the little cabin into a comfortable home, David started to plant flowers in the garden with me and help the guys with the firewood and even took a few hikes with them in the mountains. After a time, Michael even turned the small, spare room into a bedroom for David. It started to feel like we were all making a life here together and that David was more like my brother and less like my half-brother. I even caught Adam playing chess with him one night and instead of getting mad when David beat him at the game, Adam laughed at the clever checkmate and gave David a brotherly pat on the shoulder.
“Your mother would be really proud of you,” Adam told me one night as we were standing outside together and looking up at the stars.
It was well into the late summer months now and soon it would be autumn again.
“I think she would be proud of David,” I said as I looked at the vast sky above us.
“I’m sure she would be, but I think she would be the proudest of you,” he said. “If I remember right, there was something your mother used to always say to the runaways at the shelter. She used to tell them that resilience was the key to affecting change. Even though she’s gone, you finished what she started. That was the best way to avenge her death and honor her life, if you ask me.”
And for the first time in what felt like years, the tears I shed as he held me against his side were tears of happiness.
Finally, it felt like the hellhole we had all dropped into was finally alleviating.
17
Now that the guys were a bit more accepting of David and less worried that he was going to attempt to kill me or create some sort of havoc, they eased up a little on their overprotectiveness.
They were still super watchful, but less suspicious and overbearing. I was able to get out of bed and go out to read by the fireplace in the morning without needing all three of them to escort me everywhere inside the house. It was a nice sense of balance and family that we had created.
When I crawled over their still-sleeping bodies in the morning, I went out to make coffee and then to see if David was awake yet. He had been working on a surprise in the garden the day before and I was anxious to see what it was. He wasn’t in his bedroom when I went to go check, which meant that he was probably already in the garden waiting for me to come out so that he could show me what he’d been working on.
The garden had become almost as special to us as our time building puzzles. We had long chats among the plants and flowers and there was something about getting your hands dirty in the soil that appealed to both of us. It was a sort of “grounding with nature” thing which I think made us both feel tethered a bit.
I went back to the kitchen to finish making the coffee before I headed out to the garden. When it was done, I poured us both a cup and went outside to see what surprise awaited.
The surprise that met me there sent both of the coffee cups crashing to the ground and my blood-curdling scream hurling through the mountainside.
