Beneath the Trees by Laurel Saville

Author:Laurel Saville [Saville, Laurel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kindle Press
Published: 2017-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

14.

Brayden had dreams not of what his father had done to him, but of his own rage and escape from unseen tormentors. They were not nightmares but live-action sequences from a movie where he was the star scaling walls, leaping across an abyss, scrambling up and down ladders and fire escapes and in and out of windows. There were also dreams where he screamed at someone whose face he could never see, dreams from which he woke sore and hoarse, as if, indeed, in his sleep, his voice had ricocheted from his throat to the walls of his cave.

Lying there in the damp darkness, trying to rouse himself from the fog of an unrestful night, thoughts of his sister always came to him. Memories of her played in his mind like a ribbon in the wind, twisting, turning in on themselves, pausing just within reach and then dashing away.

There was the time Belinda had crawled into bed with him in the middle of the night and held on to him until dawn, their breaths silently syncing as they lay, wakeful, together. He had thought at the time that she was there to comfort him, that she knew what their father was doing and thought by being there herself, she could keep him away. There was the time he saw the tracery of fine scars across her forearms, and he didn’t ask her what was wrong, just rubbed his forefinger over the crosshatches and watched as tears dripped from her eyes. The time he found her shoving her belongings into a suitcase, and the way she watched him with such deep resignation as he took everything back out and returned it to her closet and drawers. And then the time that he was walking down the long, silent hallway, thick with pale carpeting, and saw his father—his adoptive father, he always reminded himself; he shared no blood with this monster—come from the bathroom, pull the door closed behind him with a hard finality, and then rub his hands together as if he was drying them. Brayden was seventeen years old. His father had given him a hard look and said, “Don’t go in there. Your sister’s using it.”

That time, outside the bathroom, in the hallway, Brayden had quickly turned, frightened of his father, and gone back to his own room. Where he’d recently installed a lock. Which he slid shut before crumpling all of his six-foot-four frame into a puddle on the floor and sobbing with the sudden, guilt-racked realization that she was getting it, too. She hadn’t been trying to help him; she’d been trying to get help from him. He’d been so stupid, so caught up in his own pain. He’d never told her what their father was doing to him because he didn’t want to burden her. He’d also assumed that if the same things had been happening to her, she wouldn’t be like him. That she would tell someone. Because he always thought that she had more courage than he did.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.