I don’t know why it worried me. I should have wanted him to die.
Daddy said, “Come over to the steps. I want to take a look at you.”
I pulled my eyes away from Ethan and staggered back to the shallow end, forgetting to duck as the chain-link grew low enough to scrape the top of my head. The contact with it felt like being branded. I groaned, went to my knees, and scrambled as best I could to the Shallow End steps.
Daddy was kneeling just above the wire. He wore a red-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt, mirrored sunglasses, khakis, and a big straw hat. He looked tanned and rested and proud. When he saw me close up his mouth made a little O of sympathy. “Looks like you had a rough day, honey. I’m sorry to see it.”
I tried to speak through my gag. “Wheeehhh wuhh oo?”
He understood me. “This dump has no running water and no well. The Bitch has to drive to town every couple of days, to fill up gallon jugs, and she was already almost out.”
“Unnh! Wheehhhh wuhhh OO?”
“Calm down, kiddo. You have every right to be a little annoyed. But it’s about a ninety minute drive, each way, and she wasn’t about to go all by herself when she was afraid I’d take advantage of her absence to help you out when her back was turned. We had to be fair about this. So I had to go along to help. And then while we were there we decided to surprise you by renting a tanker and hose, and the place made us wait almost four hours before one was available.” His mouth went grim. “Try to spend four hours with the Bitch trying to be civil in public. Just try. We even had to make nice over lunch in some diner with a one-eyed waitress. That was an ordeal you should be happy you missed.”
Something hiccupped in the back of my throat. My vision blurred. I didn’t know whether I was going to throw up or scream until the sound came out and it turned out to be laughter. It was the one-eyed waitress that did it, I think. I couldn’t help picturing a fat woman in pirate gear, complete with patch, parrot, and peg-leg, slinging hash while Daddy and the Bitch exchanged small talk over the menu. I even wondered if they’d tipped well. Probably. I didn’t know my Mom’s custom in that regard, but Daddy knew how to charm the ladies. He just didn’t know how to pick a good one.
Daddy perked up. “Anyhow, we’re both back for the duration now, and now that we’re here it looks like you’ve given as good as you got. You have a bit of an owie on the back of your head, but it looks worse than it is, and he’s got to be suffering from that mess you made of his face. Plus his burn seems to be shaping up even worse than yours. Pick your moment tonight, or at the very worst sometime late tomorrow, and I’m sure you’ll have no trouble putting him down for good.”
His eyes softened, turning moist in the way they only did in training, whenever I’d broken some new boundary with sweat and blood and back-breaking effort. He pressed his hand against the chain-link, and extended his fingers through the diagonal windows between the wires; I raised my head to feel the touch of his hand and almost moaned at the way even that soft contact tortured the taut skin of my scalp. He couldn’t tell that I wasn’t craving his love. I was just hoping that if I was nice enough he’d remove my gag and give me a nice, cold cup of water. The few drops I’d sucked down hadn’t come close to satisfying me, and the mere thought of enduring any more time without another taste was almost more than I could stand.
I argued my case through the gag, but my voice trailed off in a mouthful of dust.
“I’m so proud of you,” he whispered, turning away all at once so I wouldn’t see him cry.
The real suffering didn’t manifest until after the air cooled. But as the sky turned purple and then black, every part of me caught on fire, raging at the slightest physical contact. I could avoid most of the pain by simply not moving, but the straps that held the canvas bindings around my arms and the bit gag firmly planted in my mouth both felt like razors heated over an open flame. I couldn’t focus past it. It was like a landscape larger than myself, so vast in every direction that I couldn’t even see its furthest horizons. It only ceased to overwhelm when I moved an arm or leg and in that way distracted myself with some other pain just as large, just as unbearable. Daddy and the Bitch, who had returned to watching the show from their respective lifeguard chairs, must have been bored beyond reason for much of the early evening, as both Ethan and I spent those hours at opposite ends of the pool, unconscious more often than we were awake, trembling with chills even as we panted from the heat.
We must have resisted the inevitable for hours.
I don’t know what time it was when I crawled from the Shallow End steps, found the strength to get to my feet again and stagger, in a precarious lurch with only distant relation to the upright, to the invisible line separating the Shallow and Deep Ends.
Daddy called down from above. “Thattagirl. Show him what you’re made of.”
The Bitch summoned her own champion. “Don’t give up, Ethan! I’m proud of you!”
After a long, snuffling pause, my brother shuffled out of the darkness.
The darkness spared me actual eye contact, or even a clear look at his face. All I saw was a vague, threatening presence, still larger than myself, still more formidable than myself. All I heard was ragged breath and a weak, liquid bubbling that may have been heralded the return of the blockage in his nostrils. The stench was the worst, all sour sweat and festering waste, the perfume of a creature all but dead who had yet to lie down.
“Come on, honey!” the Bitch cried. “You can do it!”
Ethan shuffled forward another step, and then stopped, swaying.
I couldn’t see his eyes.
But the last day and a half had been a silent conversation between us, punctuated by moments of equally incomprehensible brutality and mercy. I didn’t need to see his eyes to know something I hadn’t really appreciated before.
He hadn’t ever really wanted to do this.
He’d offered me a way out, at the start, but I’d imagined it the kind of formality one warrior exchanges with another, in the last few minutes before any duel to the death. I’d believed him when he’d said that he had no other reasons for being born. But now that I’d spent twenty-four hours with him, in the shared hell we’d been training for all our lives, I found I knew differently. He’d meant what he said. He’d taken his last opportunity for escape, and I’d thrown it back in his face.
Had I accepted his offer of a quiet afternoon together, on our last day before our descent into the pit, he wouldn’t have stopped the jeep at those rock formations twenty miles away. He would have kept going, picking up a main road and staying on it until long after we’d left the State and the swimming pool behind. Daddy and the Bitch would have set up the chain-link barriers together, waited in vain for our return, and then come to the shared conclusion that we weren’t coming back. They might have been upset and they might have been disappointed and they might have been relieved that the contract between them had finally been broken by somebody other than themselves. They might have flayed each other with recriminations, each blaming the other for raising a child disloyal enough to break free. They might have parted as bitter enemies who no longer possessed the weapons they had honed to hurt each other. Or they might have descended into the pool themselves, with or without the hobbles they’d chosen for us, to finally face each other without proxies, on a battlefield that would have put a period to everything that had turned the air toxic between them. Whatever happened to them, I realized, would not have mattered. Not with Ethan and I already miles away, and adding more distance between our lives and theirs with every moment we breathed free.
He had tried to shock me awake, asking questions he’d already known the answers to.