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Three days after Sam leaves, John blows through the front door with the brute force and zero warning of a summer storm.
"Pack up!" he barks at Dean, then goes crashing past the couch Dean's sprawled out on and into their tiny kitchen.
Dean sits up slowly, hears the clink of a cap being violently removed from a bottle.
"We're leaving tomorrow," continues John. The long, wet noise of John drinking. Another violent clink. "Poltergeist in Little Rock."
"Pack up?" Dean repeats, two-steps behind. He's been dozing in the high Texas heat, with only a frozen bottle of water beneath his neck to keep him cool and keep him company. The light through the window blinds is yellow and dusty.
John appears in the doorway to the kitchen. Their single-wide is so cramped it means he's right at the end of the couch, towering over Dean like an Old Testament angel. A beer dangles from one hand.
"Did I stutter, Dean?"
"No, sir!" snaps Dean back, automatic.
John turns back to the kitchen.
"Just," says Dean, panic a low roil in his gut. What if Sam comes back, he thinks? What if Sam comes back and Dean and John aren't here? How will he find them?
The image fills him, then. Sam, skinny and contrite, blinking in consternation at the darkened trailer. Sam can't even fucking cook for himself.
"Dean," says John, voice the last warning sign before a cliff. It's gonna be a bad night, thinks Dean, and he immediately makes plan to make himself scarce. There's a bar down the road where the ponytailed bartender is already fond of him.
Dean squares his shoulders.
"What do we do with Sammy's stuff?"
John snorts and disappears the rest of the way into the kitchen.
"He didn't want it. So why should we?"
***
Dean sneaks back to the trailer about 3 am. The moon's a white afterthought crouched above the trailer park, and the light it gives inside is weak. Just enough for Dean to make out his father's sleeping form on the couch and a small forest of bottles on the floor. Five beers and a quarter empty bottle of Jack mean John’s in no danger of being woken up
Dean slinks into the room he and Sam shared, basically just a set of bunked beds nailed to the wall and enough space to climb up onto them, and switches on its one feeble light. The stuff Sam didn't take is still stacked neatly on the foot of the bottom bunk. A pair of pants Sam had probably already outgrown. Two shirts that had originally been Dean's anyway. Most of his weapons (Dean does a quick inventory and his gut spikes with relief that Sam seems to have taken a knife and a gun. He's not totally defenseless). A soccer trophy. Seven paperbacks, their spines creased white.
It’s not much. It’s all he has left of Sam.
He hovers over the books. One of them - To Kill a Mockingbird - tugs at his memory. An argument with Sam, maybe? But there have been a lot of arguments with Sam. He flips through the book. It’s annotated all over, and he skims the annotations like they’re code for why Sam left. But it’s all 10th grade English fumbling. Words like “metaphor” and “pathos” and “parallelism” litter the margins, a language Dean can’t speak and Sam’s always wanted to be fluent in. At the back of the book, there’s what looks like the outline for an essay. Only Sam would hold onto a book that was assigned reading for class.
Then something catches his eye – his own handwriting, near a passage at the end of the book. “What the fuck Sam” written in ballpoint pen. Dean marks the page and closes the book.
The clothes and books Dean can drop off at Goodwill, he decides. The weapons he and John will keep. The trophy they’ll have to toss.
He sighs and climbs onto the top bunk, but he takes To Kill a Mockingbird with him. He’s too buzzed from his night out to fall asleep yet. He might as well as read, figure out exactly what memory the book is pinging.
On page 56, Scout says, “It was then, I suppose, that Jem and I first began to part company.” Dean reads the line twice, stomach aching. When, exactly, did he and Sam start to part company?
He remembers the fight now; it had been about their dad. Dean had been giving Sam shit for liking the book so much, for liking Atticus so much, when their dad is the real living, breathing hero.
But Atticus is the kind of person Sam wants for a dad, the kind of person Sam thinks is waiting for him out there in the world – pacifistic, eloquent, book-smart, and preachy. It was Sam’s shit luck to be raised in a family that never says its love with words, and Dean doesn’t get how a kid so smart couldn’t interpret the ways Dean and John said it.
Maybe it’s Dean’s fault. He told Sam too many stories when they were little – trying to get Sam to shut up and go to sleep, trying to get Sam to stop whining in the car, trying to entertain both of them when the TV signal was on the fritz and John was halfway across the state, getting thrown into walls by ghosts. The Story Where Dad Wins the Lottery. The Story Where Dean Is a Superhero (and Sam Is Too, He Guesses). The Story Where Mom Doesn’t Die.
He keeps reading. It’s the kind of story that signals ghosts down the line – dark family secrets and a man who’s practically a ghost already, violence and grave injustices. Dean can already visualize driving into Maycomb County, all Spanish moss and poverty, Confederate flags decals and men still fighting the Civil War. Couldn’t Sam see that too? The evil men do can’t be redressed in this life and festers into the next. No amount of noble lawyering can change that.
He reaches the end of the book when dawn and birdsong just start filtering through the window. He glances over the outline Sam scribbled in the last couple pages. At the bottom, underlined three times and pressed so hard the page is pebbled outward, is: “Dean doesn’t get it!!!!”
Dean looks at the words for a long time before he goes to sleep.
***
John’s still snoring on the couch by the time Dean staggers out to piss. It’s gone half past one and the heat’s poured on like syrup. Hope waves a flag in Dean’s chest. They’re probably not getting out of town today. That buys Sam a little time to turn back.
A plan starts to click into place. He could buy Sam more time, easy.
He goes out.
***
“Dean,” snarls John, when Dean reappears at dusk. His eyes gleam like an animal’s in the low light. His breath is poisonous. “We were supposed to leave today.”
“I found another case here, Dad,” says Dean, going for instant mollification rather than an excuse. Texas is good for cases, blood soaked into the ground deeper than the oil.
John immediately snaps to attention.
“Arthur Radley,” says Dean promptly. “I think we’ve got ourselves a ghost.”
“Is that the name of a ghost?” says John, working his jaw like his mouth tastes like a graveyard. It probably does. “Or the name of the victim?”
“The ghost,” says Dean. He shoves a file at John. It’s full of newspaper clippings from the last fifty years, every time a kid went missing or died under mysterious circumstances.
John takes the file, frowning.
“How’d you hear about this?”
Dean grins. “Asked the bartender if she knew any ghost stories. She told me when she was a kid, there was a house she and her brother would never walk by cuz it was haunted. Said a man’d been locked up there by his family and had gone insane. Everyone thought he’d died years ago, but she swore she saw him in the window once.”
“Spooky,” says John dryly. “Is the house still there?”
Dean shakes his head. “Torn down about ten years ago.”
John puts the file down and frowns at him.
“This isn’t much a lead. What makes you think these – ” he points to the file “ – have anything to do with your bartender’s story?”
“That’s the part I didn’t tell you,” says Dean. He takes the file and finds an article in it – a kid in the late 80s who disappeared. “She knew this kid. He went missing the day after his brother dared him to go into the house.”
John takes the article and scowls at it.
“All right. We can look into it. It’s still not much of a lead.”
Dean smiles.
***
He keeps To Kill a Mockingbird with him for the next couple days like it’s a second amulet. He doesn’t let John see it.
It’s a frustrating couple of days. The family of the kid Dean’s bartender knew left the town in the nineties. And the only Radleys in the telephone directory don’t remember anyone in their family named Arthur, and are as about as far from “eternally locking your child inside your house” as you can get.
“Why would someone do that?” muses Dean, munching on a cookie as he and John leave the Radleys’. “Lock your kid up like that?”
“Because you know what the world can do to them,” says John, without missing a beat.
Dean looks at him askance, but John doesn’t say anything more until they’re back in the car.
“You should talk to the bartender again,” says John. “See if she can remember anything else, or knows anyone else who would remember her friend.”
“Uh, sure,” says Dean. “She’s probably on shift now.”
John nods and drives them to the bar, but doesn’t get out when they park.
“I’m going to go over the folder again,” says John, when Dean looks at him. He already has his journal spread out on his lap.
Fine with Dean. More than fine, really.
***
He swaggers out two hours later. The bartender he knows wasn’t in, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?
His heart sinks, though, as he approaches the car. John’s sitting in the passenger seat, reading a book. John looks up when Dean opens the driver side door and waves the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird at him. Dean remembers that he’d shoved it in the glove department that morning. His mouth goes dry.
“Your mother loved this book,” says John without inflection. “I thought I knew the name Arthur Radley from somewhere.”
“Dad,” says Dean, still standing outside the Impala. He gropes for some explanation that won’t make him sound pathetic. He comes up short and stares at John hopelessly.
“Get in and drive, Dean,” says John, curt.
Dean does.
***
When they get back to the trailer, Dean braces for the reprimand, but it doesn’t come. John looks at him like he’s an animal that’s just been hit by a car, still alive, but barely, and still trying to twitch its away across the road. Dean remembers suddenly, vividly, a story John told him once when he was pissed sideways – about a man he’d known in Nam who had his legs blown off, and had in the seconds before he died deliriously asked John to help him stand back up.
The look John gives him is worse than any shouting. Dean’s not something to be goddamn pitied. He’d rather hear about all the people who have probably died in the last few days while they were on a wild goose chase.
“Sam’s gone, Dean,” says John slowly. “He made his choice.”
He hands the book to Dean.
“Did he leave this?”
“Yeah,” says Dean, and “I know. I know he’s not.”
John’s kind enough to not ask him to then explain himself. There’s that pity again.
Dean goes to his room.
Sam’s not coming back. The realization is about as painful and sudden as a knife slotted between the ribs. He wants to howl like a dog. He wants to shatter every window in the singlewide. He wants to drive to Stanford in a day and night and drag Sam out of his dorm like the unrepentant runaway the little bitch is.
He throws To Kill a Mockingbird into a box with the other books Sam left. He doesn’t pause to read the titles this time. There’s no clue to Sam in them, no words that will bring him back. He left the books as easily as he left his family.
Dean throws the clothes over the books and then picks the box up and walks out to the Impala. He noticed a Goodwill in a gray shopping center the other day.
John watches him go without saying anything.
When Dean gets back, the soccer trophy is gone. John must have thrown it out himself.
End.