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Between all of the fucked up shit, there is just the two of them.
It’s all a mess, a mesh of scores gone wrong, alcohol and drugs, cash that only lasts them a few days, tears that Kate has forced down again and Seth distant and cold, staring out the car window. Kate’s heart is always so heavy and she tries to close herself off to it all, to remain stoic and push through the days but it’s so hard.
Kate sinks into motel beds and wishes they didn’t smell of smoke.
On this particular evening, Seth has promised her he’s not going to shoot up. They have to focus – or, he has to – he’s got a new job to focus on and Kate can feel desperation sneaking up on her like a spider crawling up her spine.
She wants to be out of Mexico. She wanted to be out of Mexico before they got there, before two brothers pushed her family over the border with guns to their backs, before the snakes and the late nights and the driving off into the sunset.
It sounded so much nicer when you put it like that. Off into the sunset, moving on, going to a better life. Truthfully, Kate could never quite explain to him why she stuck by his side or why she waited for him in the first place. He had asked before, and she could give excuses. Kate could play the blame card so easily that it’d even shut him up, for a little while, but there was something else. Something underlying.
She trusts him and she hates herself for it. Kate wishes she could hate him, that she could blame him but in some sick twisted way she understands him better than anyone now.
She thinks about Seth calling them a family, in that bar. If that was a family, then he was the only one left. Seth reminded her of that a lot, almost all the time. Rub salt into her wound because his own was gushing and they were drowning in it. The two of them bleeding for brothers that had left them, stolen by venom in their veins.
If Seth is her family now, what a fucked up thing for God to do to a girl who has already lost so much.
A girl who still can’t waver on her faith, who won’t.
She knows what the man she used to know would say. God has a bigger plan for her. This is God’s will. She should pray.
Every time she kneels in front of the bed, Seth scoffs. She’s taken to doing it when he’s not around. Or when she’s in the bathroom, jean clad knees down on cold tile as she shuts her eyes and angles her head down. Prayers are always whispered. She doesn’t plead for herself, she pleads for Scott. Even if he’s something unholy, because she knows he’s out there. She knows he needs her.
It was hard, at first, to see past it all, to still see her brother, but after her daddy she’d grasp at anything for family. To accept what he is, that would be the most palpable show of faith she’s ever performed. That would be the purest love, she thinks.
Night is setting in and the television is turned down low. Kate suspects that Seth likes the white noise to counteract the stuff in his brain. Personally, she hates it. She’s going to feel all of the dark, all consuming feelings either way. She doesn’t have his escape. Kate doesn’t stick needles in her skin for a high that won’t last her. She lives in her pain and she tries to push past it. She tries to grieve like a normal person, but there’s no normal.
In the end, it’s just them. Just them two, her on the left side of her bed and him on the right.
She rolls over and he’s already looking at her, stony faced. He blinks and moves his stare to the pillow underneath her head.
For a little while they are just like that. Quiet. Sad.
Kate rakes her hair with her fingers, pushing it up to it fans out on her pillow and doesn’t add to the warmth against her neck. It’s humid enough that Seth wasn’t wearing his usual wife-beater when he got into bed, and it embarrasses her still to let her eyes look anywhere but his face. All this time and she’s still feeling flushed over a shirtless older guy.
It’s easy to remind herself that she’s a teenager and that she’s not supposed to be able to handle everything. Not just Seth, but all of it, everything they’ve been though and all that they continue to endure, but she still expects more of herself. Frustrated to the point of kicking her feet underneath the sheets, she doesn’t know how much time has passed when she finally speaks up.
Breathing out like it pains her, she holds her arm tighter around her stomach. “Are you sure this is a good score?”
Seth doesn’t reply. He’s trained on the pillow. It looks like he’s in pain.
“Seth.” She calls out his name and brings him back from the edge in his mind. His eyes dart to hers and his shoulders slump like he hadn’t noticed that they’d been tensed.
“What? Yeah, Kate. I told you. I think this one’s gonna work out.” He nods, somewhat hesitantly and runs his tongue over his bottom lip.
Refraining from letting the words slip, she lets the doubts dissipate. They don’t need to argue. She hates to argue with him. They both are too tired for it, all pent up energy fading away as soon as they realise this is it. It’s just the two of them.
They don’t talk again for a little while. Or maybe it’s a long while. Time tends to just slip away from them. Before she knew it she’d spent a month in the desert with a Gecko and she couldn’t quite tell you how she got there. Everything was a change from her home, from the life she’d once had, but she supposed that life was all a lie anyway. Her mama, her happiness, the things that she thought mattered. Bethel was a fantasy, Bethel was safe and she was a child there.
In Bethel, no one ever punched a guy for her.
In Bethel, she wasn’t living with a thief who shot up.
In Bethel, she had never shot a gun or watched someone die.
Seth knows all of this, and he knows this because of the moments like this one. Well after dusk, and the alarm clock blinks red twelve because it wasn’t even plugged in when they got into the room. It’s late enough that they’re both drowsy, and Kate slips into sleep for a few moments and then she remembers everything.
“You remember when you told me you were married once?” It’s the first thread of a thought in her brain, the first she picks at until it unravels him. She rubs her eyelids with her fingers and sighs.
Seth rolls over, staring at the ceiling and raises his eyebrows. “Yeah.”
There’s a sense that he dislikes when she tries to talk to him like this, but she needs it so badly she’ll push past his hesitancy. She wants to know him so much that she’ll ignore the feeling in her gut. It’s almost pitiful, how much she cares, and over time it’s easily been blanketed by need to defend herself against him when he’s being cruel, but she still does. If she didn’t care about him, if she didn’t need him, maybe she would have left him long ago.
“What’s she like?” Her voice is gentle and quiet, moving across the room to him. Their beds aren’t separated by much. She always moves the bedside table out from between them when they get there. She’s never pushed the beds all the way together, but she’s thought about it before. It doesn’t matter, sometimes they fall asleep in the same bed anyway.
He chuckles under his breath and she narrows her eyes.
Once, when he was sloppy and drunk or maybe high. With his arm slung over his shoulder as she pulled him back into their room, he told her they were too green. His version of a hazy compliment.
“She was… Tough. Good at what we did. Smart too. Hell of a…” He narrowed his eyes and quickly picked back up. “Uh, didn’t like my brother.”
“Does anyone ever?”
“You did.”
Abruptly, Kate is left opening and shutting her mouth for a moment, her nose scrunched up in concern. It’s not something really understands, the memory of the earlier moments of that night. Maybe she’ll never understand them, or maybe they don’t matter. She doesn’t want to think about them. Instead, she thinks about the fact that he talks in past tense. Richie is always was, he never is. And that’s if he uses his name at all, let alone brings him up without Kate having to do it first.
“What was he like, before all of this?” She’s asked before, but not like this. Not with them both sunken into a state just before sleep, where it’s too late to raise their voices too loudly. There’s no threat of anything spilling over here, because come morning they won’t talk about it. The things that haunt them aren’t exactly good car conversations. No, these are the only moments for the hard things, and Kate tackles them as best she can, and sometimes Seth even lets her.
He exhales, long and slow and for a moment Kate thinks he might be asleep already. His eyes are closed, but he speaks. “He was… different. Took risks… Said some weird shit,” His lip quirks up for a brief moment, Kate thinks. “A lot of stuff I didn’t really get. Not a serial killer, at least not before I was locked up.”
“That was…” Kate hesitated to mention her name, even in their tired state. Seth sometimes seethed with rage at just the thought of the woman who, in his eyes, stole his brother form him.
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.” It was a real pity, because despite the fact that she too had lost her brother she had never had what Richie and Seth had. It made her want to reconnect with Scott even more. There was still that tether between the two brothers, it was as visible as anything else, to her.
She wouldn’t preach to Seth about it tonight.
“He did a lot of shit I never would have done. A lot of shit I didn’t know if I could forgive… I still don’t know.” Kate knows what he’s talking about, something she heard him rambling about drunk one night outside. She walked him to the car, he fell asleep in the passenger seat mumbling. His dad. Fire. Richie. It was a hazy story to her but every time she looked too long at his tattoo she was reminded.
So she asks, because she wants to know and because she wants to understand him. “Seth, what happened to your dad?”
“Richie… He…” It’s too hard to say it, Seth cuts himself off, staring down at his feet. “He told me, in that fuckin… The labyrinth. He killed our dad.” He said it like he was finding out for the first time.
Kate brought her hand to her lips, eyes big and filled to the brim with pity. The news washes over her and makes her legs feel numb, even if it’s not her tragedy to bear, if it’s tragedy at all.
He shakes his head and holds it to one side. He looks over at her, confusion in his eyes. “And you know the worst part? He did it for me. For the both of us, and I don’t know… How do you forgive that? Would your God tell you to forgive that?”
“Why would he…” Her voice was barely above a whisper.
“Y’know, maybe he was a little heavy handed with the punishments – and he had a cruel fucking mouth, but…” He takes in a quick breath, looking far away. He’s somewhere else for a moment.
Kate cannot comprehend having to make that decision, to have to think about that. She was lucky to grow up with two parents who loved her, who wouldn’t lay hands on her. In her mind, it’s easy to hate their father for doing that to them, regardless of anything they did to her, but Seth’s predicament isn’t that simple. Her heart breaks for him.
“I’m so sorry.” She nods and she reaches out her hand on instinct, between the two beds, the small space making it easy to reach for him.
Seth hesitates.
And then, in some blindingly bright miracle, he takes her hand. Turned on his side again, his elbow rests against the bed and he holds her hand in the middle. His hand is bigger than hers, and rougher. She smooths the pad of her thumb over the skin soothingly, her lids heavy despite the painful pity coursing through her.
She thinks on some sad level that she may love him.
They lie there like that till they fall asleep. When Kate wakes up to bright morning, her hand is hanging off the bed, alone.