the other Son

1999

She was familiar with the concept of guilt and penance.

Her father liked to watch those true crime shows after dinner - the only pleasure he allowed himself she reckoned – and often times she joined him, silently curling up on the sofa where she was able to see his faces profile in the cold flicker of the TV. He drank Sherry or Cognac or Port and her fruit juice sometimes came close in colour.

It was really the only thing they did together – if one was inclined to stretch the meaning of 'together' to a point where it might snap and reveal the trench between them, the silence, the lack of a conversation, her efforts to breathe as soundlessly as possible as to not disturb him.

For her, it was enough. She took whatever she was given.

He wasn't a cruel man, just busy and caught up in century old gender roles and it was too late for him to figure out what to do with a daughter. She was a species no one had offered him a manual for, a thing he was expected to produce and then leave in his wife's arms.

She understood – it wasn't his wrongdoing.

She savoured their time watching trials in wood-panelled courtrooms where she was never sure whether they were staged or not.

The resounding bang of the hammer at the end was something she found very satisfying but on the other hand dreaded as well – it prompted her father to pick up the remote and switch off the TV.

Now, seeing three prepubescent figures appear up ahead in the setting light, she wondered whether Peter would feel guilt or penance, whether a stern but fair judge would ever determine the exact degree of his guilt and stipulate it with the irreversible fall of his hammer.

Personally, she didn't think he deserved a single ounce of forgiveness and the guilt should consume him alive like a horrible leech, the big, pulsing ones that clung to her legs in the summer whenever she waded into the small stream crossing through her parents' backyard.

Her fingers curled tightly around his akin to a cramp and then suddenly fell limply to her side, an early surrender.

Peter didn't look at her, didn't change his pace. His shoulders were in a tense line.

She stopped walking.

Hot chocolate threatened to spill across her lips as sickening nausea churned in her stomach, the sweet aftertaste suddenly poison on her tongue. She'd swallowed his poison as if it were nectar, blind and dumb and so horribly gullible.

Peter came to a halt as well while the group drew nearer.

She stared at his profile and tried to hate him.

His jaw twitched, working around unspoken words. "I'm s-"

"What a coincidence we ran into each other here," Creon exclaimed gleefully, finally close enough to hear over the gurgling river and the chirping birds.

She kept her eyes on Peter, lips drawing into a sour smile as she agreed, "Yes, what a coincidence."

Creon watched them curiously with those cold, blue eyes. She knew they were hardly more than an experiment under the microscope. Substances he threw together in a Petri dish, a controlled environment where he'd been in charge of the outcome all along.

She tried to hate Peter.

He still wasn't able to look at her, eyes either on the tips of his shoes or the water or the bushes. She hated it, hated how he was pitying himself for his own deplorable actions and his suffering only enraged her because he did not have the right to suffer, to feel uncomfortable when he'd known all along and still continued to feed her lies, to look at her with that glint in his eyes and the lopsided grin and all those beautiful things that had made her stomach erupt in nervous flutters and even now her body hadn't realized the graveness of the situation and hoped for his lilting words to deny the truth, to swear he hadn't known, hadn't trapped her with honeyed lies.

"Romantic, isn't it," Creon stated sweetly and his goons snickered as if on command. He looked at Peter who twitched and shifted uncomfortably.

"Yeah," he finally ground out, sand between his teeth by how rough it sounded.

"It's good you have such a strong lad with you," Creon complimented with a smile in her direction. "It gets dark so quickly."

In the distance she was able to hear people in the town's center, blissfully unaware of her predicament. She nearly laughed out loud when she realized the Reverend had been right. Although for selfish reasons his warning had been correct and she should've listened to him albeit the weight of his hand still burned on her thigh. For a moment, she wondered which was the lesser evil – this, Peter's treachery and Creon's cruelty, or the Reverend's clumsy, wandering touch. She knew with sickening certainty she wouldn't come out unscathed either way.

"Peter," Creon said, staring unerringly at her.

Peter flinched.

"Ever since she chopped off her hair I was wondering if she's done such an amateurish job down there as well."

The question hung heavily in the air and it took her several moments to comprehend what he was playing at.

Her heart skipped several beats, panic and indignation swelling in her chest at his innuendo.

Peter flushed a bright pink and studied his muddied shoes intently, almost obsessively now.

Creon grinned. "Only one way to find out, right?"