The Bargaining Path Read online

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  The banging on the door in the middle of the night woke me from my sleep. At the first hard knock, my heart was besieged by a cold, paralyzing fear that snatched my breath. My entire body was saturated in sweat as my mind was barraged with images of him from all those years ago, sloppily unlocking the door, pushing open my bedroom door, blood all over the bathroom floor, Rachel whispering, “We’ll have our own someday, I promise…”

  “Brynna!”

  It was James’s voice, and he was yelling so loudly that surely everyone on our block could hear him.

  “Brynna, open the door! I need to talk to you!”

  In utter rage, I threw myself out of bed, pulled on my pants, and stormed out to the door. Violet was shambling out of her room, her body moving slowly but her mind alert.

  “Brynn? What’s going on?” Penny asked, as she walked out, her eyes wide in the darkness and her new patchwork blanket clutched tightly in both of her shaking hands.

  “Put Penny back to bed.” I told Violet, “It’s alright, baby. It’s just James being silly.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  When I threw open the door, he fell over the threshold, immediately filling the room with the stench of cheap liquor.

  “You have got to be kidding me.” I murmured in irritation as he tried to rise onto all fours. Little black journals and papers were spread all across my floor, and before I could reach down and pick them up, he was on his knees and his arms were around my middle.

  “How could I not have known? God, he was obsessed… It’s so sick, Brynn. It makes me sick.”

  I pushed him off of me, and he crashed onto the floor. Kneeling down, I grabbed a scoop of the papers in my hands. At first, I read the writing but halfway through the line, my eyes blurred, and my stomach turned over. Some were letters to her. Others were drawings. Some were stories written about her. On page after page after page, Rene had poured his deepest and sickest thoughts about my sister.

  “Cleaning out his room, and I found them… God, Brynna, what was he? Who was he? I don’t know. Oh, God, it’s so sick…”

  “Pick them all up.” I said, and he started to go about doing it, but he was taking too long. I got down on my knees and together, we crawled around the floor, picking up everything he had dropped.

  “Give them to me.”

  He did, and I stormed over to the fireplace, grabbed the bark from the flare tree and ignited a blaze. Then, I scooped up everything he had brought, all of that evidence of Rene’s obsession, and threw it into the fire.

  “What are you doing?!” James exclaimed, and he crawled over to me, “Brynn, if they ever find out you did it, that will prove you had a reason!”

  “No one will ever find out, and if they do, I will tell them why I did it, and they will believe me. If not on their own, then I will broadcast mine and Rene’s final conversation to them, and they will see it. I will not risk her stumbling across these things, James!”

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I thought you had lost your mind, and I told you I thought that you had lost your mind, but you didn’t tell me why you had done it. Brynna…” His voice broke, and tears began to streak down his face. “What has happened to us? It’s been a month. I feel like I don’t even know you anymore. I don’t know anything anymore. Everything is so fucked up! Baby…” He reached out abruptly, and I jumped. He took both of my hands. “Please let me come home. I need you so bad right now. Everything is so fucked up, and I need to be here with you and the girls. Please let me come back. Please…”

  “You need me? You need to be here with me because you do not know how to deal with all that has happened? With this revelation about your best friend? With the fact that I ripped him apart? James, I hate to play tit for tat, as they say, but I needed you. Instead of helping me in overcoming my issues, one of which was my fear of physical intimacy, you went and were physically intimate with someone else. So, no, you cannot come back. No, I will not sit here and coddle you. You are a grown man, and you will start acting like one.”

  “I love you so much…”

  “Yes, and I love you, too, you stupid fucking son of a bitch!” I screamed at him, but I stopped, took a breath, and swiped at my eyes, which began tearing the second I yelled. “I do not appreciate that you woke up this entire house, and more than likely, this entire block. So I will put you up in the guest room and then explain to Penny tomorrow that you were feeling sick, and you needed me.”

  “I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”

  “But you will be gone by the time she wakes up tomorrow. Do you understand?”

  “Can I please sleep in bed with you?”

  “No. Now come on.”

  I pulled him onto his feet and walked him slowly into the guest room. I untied his shoes, pulled them off of his feet, and then unzipped his jeans and pulled them off. I had to sit him up to maneuver his shirt off of him, and by the time I laid him back down, he had passed out completely.

  Before going into Penny’s room to make sure she had fallen back asleep or going into Violet’s room to explain that James was drunk and stupid, I went back to the fireplace and made sure that all of the papers and journals had burned. Sure enough, the only evidence left of them was ash in the grate, and one last page with just her name written on it burning away into nothing. I watched her name as it turned orange first and then black, and then, I doubled over, my stomach screaming, my legs carrying me quickly into the bathroom, where I threw up until there was nothing left.