“I need one of you lads to come with me on a trip.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees, so that he was down on Seth’s level. “I don’t care which one of you. I really don’t. But it has to be one. Not both, not neither.” He held up a single finger. “One.”
“We can’t go anywhere,” Seth said. “Our mum is coming back for –”
“One of you is going to leave this house with me,” the man interrupted. “And that’s the end of the story.”
He stepped fully into the kitchen now. Seth backed into the oven, never taking his eyes off the man. Owen still held on to the door frame, his face bunched up, his skin white with fear and amazement at the stranger in their kitchen.
“Here’s what I’m going to do, Seth,” the man said, as if he’d just had the best idea in years. “I’m going to let you choose. I’m going to let you choose which of you two comes with me.”
62
“Oh, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says. “That is too, too terrible.”
“I thought,” Seth says, not able to meet their eyes. “I thought if I said he should take Owen, I’d be able to raise the alarm better. I’d be able to explain what happened faster and they could go after the guy and catch him. Owen was only four. He barely had any language at all, and I thought . . .” He turns back to the tombstone. “Actually, I don’t know what I thought. I don’t even know if that’s true or if it’s a story I told myself.”
“But it was impossible,” Tomasz says. “You were a boy. You were little boy. How can you choose this?”
“I was old enough to know what I was doing,” Seth says. “And the truth is” – he stops, having to swallow it away –“the truth is, I was afraid. Afraid of what would happen to me if I went, and I said . . .”
He stops.
Tomasz steps forward. “If he asks you now, this man.”
“What?” Seth says.
“If this man, he comes into your kitchen now, and he asks you this question again. He says to you, I will take you or your brother and you will choose. What do you say?”
Seth shakes his head, confused. “What are you –?”
“You are asked now,” Tomasz insists. “You are asked right now who to take, you or your brother. What do you say?
Seth frowns. “That’s not the same –”
“What do you say?”
“I say take me, of course!”
Tomasz leans back, satisfied. “Of course you do. Because you are man now. This is what a grown-up person does. You were not man then. You were boy.”
“You were only a boy in that room with your mother. You were going to try to protect her. I could feel it.”
“I was older. I was not eight. I was not boy.”
“You weren’t a man. You’re not one now.”
Tomasz shrugs. “There is space in between, no?”
“You don’t seem to get it,” Seth says, his voice rising. “I killed him. And I’m only just finding this out, don’t you see? I always thought they found him alive. Damaged and in need of rehabilitation, which was bad enough. But now. Now.”
He turns back to the grave. His chest begins to draw tight, his throat closes shut, and he feels as if he’s choking, as if his body has been clamped in a vise.
“Stop this,” Regine says, quietly at first, but then louder: “Stop this, Seth.”
He shakes his head, barely hearing her.
“You’re just feeling sorry for yourself,” she says, enough anger in her voice to get through to him.
He turns to her. “What?”
“You can’t possibly believe it’s your fault.’
Seth looks at her, his eyes red. “Whose fault is it then?”
Regine’s own eyes widen, as if stunned. “How about the murderer, you dolt? How about your mother for leaving you alone in a house when you were way too young to be faced with something like that?”
“She didn’t know –”
“It doesn’t matter what she knew or didn’t know. Her job was to protect you. Her job was to make sure you never had to face any kind of shit like that. That was her job!”
“Regine?” Tomasz asks, startled at her volume.
“Look,” Regine says, “I can see why you’d think this is your fault, and I can see how your parents might have made you keep on thinking that, but did you ever consider maybe it wasn’t about you at all? Maybe your mum just screwed up, okay? And sometimes that even happens to good people. So maybe the way they treated you wasn’t about you. Maybe it was about them. Maybe all that happened is that they forgot you were there because they were too busy with their own crap.”
“And you don’t think that’s bad?”
“Of course it’s bad! Don’t worry, I’m not trying to take away everything that makes you feel sorry for yourself, since you seem pretty damn good at that!”
“Regine,” Tomasz warns, “he has just found out his brother is –”
“But maybe,” she keeps shouting, “maybe their world didn’t revolve around you, Seth. Maybe they thought about themselves as much as you thought about yourself.”
“Hey –” Seth says.
“WE ALL DO IT! Everyone! That’s what we do. We think of ourselves.”
“Not always,” Tomasz says quietly.
“Often enough!” Regine says. “So maybe all this tragedy of how you made the wrong decision and your parents punished you for the rest of your life, maybe that’s a story you just want to be true, because it’s easier.”
“Easier? How the hell is it easier?”
“Because then you wouldn’t have to do anything yourself! If it’s your fault, that clears everything up. You’ve done this horrible thing and that’s easy. You don’t ever have to risk being happy.”
Seth stops as if she’s slapped him. “I risked being happy. I did risk it.”
“Not enough to stop you from killing yourself,” Regine says. “Oh, poor little Seth, with his poor little parents who didn’t love him. You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there’s always more than this. There’s always something you don’t know. Maybe your parents didn’t love you enough, and that sucks, yes, it does, but maybe it wasn’t because you were bad. Maybe it was just because the worst thing in the world had happened to them and they weren’t able to deal with it.”