Chapter Twelve:
A Dark Place
It rained, for days on end. The front hall was mostly flooded—I had only observed this because I had to trudge through some of the gathering water while I skipped to meet Cameron in the kitchen in the morning. Otherwise, the rain went mostly unnoticed by me.
Early mornings were my favorite. It was the only time that I had alone with Cameron, before the rest of the house awoke, before Rocco would start following us around from room to room, from couch to kitchen.
I noticed things. Spending every waking moment with Cameron had opened my eyes. First, Cameron was timid, almost as painfully as I was. When it was just the two of us, there would be moments when we’d be sitting at the table, quietly eating our cereal, and he would all of a sudden look down, or break a small smile and his cheeks would blot red, for no reason. I was resigned to having my cheeks and neck permanently tattooed of scarlet hues.
When it wasn’t just the two of us—and these moments were too numerous—he was mostly quiet and watched from the sidelines, like he was trying to fade into the wallpaper.
Then there were the other darker times, fleeting moments when he became distant. A glaze would awash his face and the premature wrinkles around his eyes resurfaced. I hated these moments. Eventually, his eyes would find me, and he would come back. I’d wonder where he’d been—what dark corner he had come out of.
The second thing I noticed was Rocco’s immeasurable attachment to his older brother. Wherever Cameron went, so did Rocco, faithfully, eagerly. Cameron would secretly smile at me while his brother tried to impress with his newfound fighting skills, or tried to match whatever weights Cameron was lifting in the workout room. And we watched a lot of TV, spent our days moving food from the kitchen to the kitchen table to the couch.
Carly and Spider would join us once in a while. One was never without the other. They mostly kept to themselves. I really liked Carly. Spider was tolerable.
With the torrential weather, I had expected the house to be bustling with people trying to get out of the rain. Yet the house was quieter than usual. Guards only came in for mealtimes and sleep.
The third thing I noticed was that even the mid-rankers ate in the basement kitchen. It seemed that when Cameron was around, guards stayed away and all meals were eaten as a family. I loved this.
I briefly saw Griff a few times, rushing in and out of the wet weather for his meals. He’d glance at me, but ignored me otherwise, as if I weren’t there at all. I felt guilty, like I had abandoned him. He was obviously upset … I couldn’t confront him without making Cameron wary or Spider unnecessarily suspicious. Although Spider had somewhat started to relax around me, which seemed to please Cameron and Carly, I didn’t want to give Spider any ammunition to speak against me anymore.
The last thing I noticed was that I slept—dreamlessly and peacefully. Every night, I dreaded leaving Cameron to get some shut-eye; he would practically have to drag me off the couch. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I was out. Not even Meatball’s snoring could wake me. Maybe it was the soothing way the rain pelted against the tin roof, like drops hitting a champagne glass. Maybe it was something else.
One evening, Rocco had fallen asleep on the couch with the remote control tightly clenched in his hand and the channel stuck on the weather. Cameron had disappeared. I was considering resuming the stalking when he reappeared, soaking wet.
“Holy cow! What happened to you?”
“I had to run to my car,” he told me breathlessly. “I have a surprise for you.”
My heart dropped. The last time he had a surprise for me, it ended up costing him, or me, three hundred thousand dollars. The Maserati was still stuck in the mud.
“Don’t worry,” he encouraged. “You can’t crash this one.”
Although Cameron had told me that he couldn’t read thoughts, I had started to wonder if that was the whole truth.
He pulled a box out and handed it to me. “Coppola,” he said, like this would mean something to me.
I looked down, then up. “They made a movie about Rumble Fish?”
“Now you can finally find out how the story goes.”
Cameron had put his finger to his lips and led me out of the living room.
Hanging out with Rocco was great, but finding time alone had become an art.
“Don’t get too excited,” he warned as we walked upstairs to his room and he read my mind again. “The kid at the video store said it’s pretty old and filmed entirely in black and white.”
The thudding in my chest had nothing to do with the movie.
We sat down after Cameron stuck the disc in the player, throwing our feet on the coffee table. When the opening credits rolled, Cameron did something that I hadn’t been prepared for. His hand crawled over to mine. His fingers slipped between mine. He squeezed in. I looked straight ahead, feeling the demolition crane pounding against my chest.
I peeked at him from the corner of my eye, which was what he had been waiting for.
“Is this okay?” he asked shyly, lightly lifting our intertwined hands.
I imagined that my face was a bright crimson. My tongue was out of order. I conceded to a daft nod of my head and a fresh flow of blood to my face.
Holding Cameron’s hand was much more nerve-racking when he was awake to witness it.
Then my eyes were drawn to a movement over Cameron’s shoulder. Beyond the wall of windows, I saw Carly and Spider by the pool outside. They were walking together very closely but never actually touching—something else that I had noticed them do. They closed the door to the pool house behind them.
“Do you think that Carly and Spider are dating now?” I wondered aloud while I tried to persuade my heart to lighten the thrusts of blood so that my head and hand would stop pulsating like jungle fever.
“I know they are,” he said chuckling. “They try to hide it, but everyone around here knows, we just let them think that we don’t notice.”
I couldn’t understand why Spider would go through so much trouble trying to hide something that he had waited his whole life for. I knew I couldn’t. “Why do they try to hide it?”
“They don’t want the fact that they’re … together to be held against them.”
“I don’t understand,” I confessed, as I often did around him.
He took a long, ragged breath. “In our line of business, if someone sees that you care for someone else, it’s a weakness—something that people will use against you, or try to control you with.”
“How?” I asked him.
I looked earnestly at Cameron while he fidgeted in his seat.
“Well, think about it. What if somebody threatened to hurt someone you cared about … like your parents or your brother for example? What would you do to keep them safe or prevent them from getting hurt?”
“Anything,” I whispered with concentration. I had often lain in bed at night, asking myself what I would have done differently if I had had a second chance at saving my big brother’s life. The answer was always the same—anything and everything.
“Right,” he agreed reluctantly. “So somebody who knows that—”
“Somebody like who?” I interrupted.
His face hardened. “A bad person.”
“How bad?”
“The worst,” he muttered.
I knew I ought to be scared, but that was never the feeling I had around Cameron. “You were saying?”
He looked at me blankly.
“That the bad person who knows who you love—” I incited.
“The very bad person will use that to control you,” he finished with growing reluctance.
He squinted. “Can we stop here?”
“No. We can’t.” I was unwavering. Cameron’s world had once been my brother’s world—I needed to know, however dire. I needed to know where Bill had been, where Cameron still went.
He sighed and paused the movie. He let go of my hand and rotated his body toward me, resting his elbow on the back of the couch and leaning his head against his lifted fist.
“Imagine what Spider would do if someone ever took Carly and threatened to hurt her if Spider didn’t do what they wanted,” he put to me.
The image of a crazed Al Pacino brandishing a machine gun in Scarface came to mind. “Okay …”
“Someone … a bad person, who knows that Spider would do anything to keep Carly safe will use it to control him by threatening to hurt Carly and force Spider to do something that he doesn’t want to do or can’t do.”
“So people use other people as leverage to get what they want.”
Cameron slightly cleared his throat. “Right.”
“People do that all the time, Cameron,” I informed him. “It’s not the end of the world. People can move past it.” I had hoped to be proof of that … someday.
“It’s not worth hiding your love away,” I added, artfully.
“This is why I don’t want to talk about this with you,” he said with exasperation. “You’ve got this cute view of the world.”
I took a quick affronted inhalation and narrowed my eyes. His smile was warm, but his eyes were tight.
“You’re beautifully naïve, Emmy … I don’t want to change that.”
“I’m not naïve,” I huffed. “What did I say that was so naïve?”
“In my world,” he unwillingly shared, watching my face, “when a loved one gets … taken … they don’t come out of it unscathed … if they’re lucky to come out of it at all.”
“You mean people lose their lives in the process?” I tried to keep my voice professional, non-scared, non-naïve.
“Sometimes …” he admitted with a murmur.
“How often?” I quickly questioned.
He didn’t need to answer. The look on his face was enough response.
“Why—” I had to curtail my tone again. “Why wouldn’t they just let people go once they got what they wanted? Why does anyone need to get—”
“It’s more complicated than that. Sometimes you can’t do what they want you to do without getting a whole lot of other people killed. And sometimes the person you love is killed … just because you love them.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
He leaned in, and his eyes held mine. “What would you do if the person you loved was hurt? What would you do to the person who hurt them?”
“I would hunt them down, hurt them, kill them.” I was taken aback by the violence in my own voice.
“And then you would have gang war, which was probably what they wanted in the first place.”
“Like street shootings and stuff like that?”
“That’s the stuff you see on TV—the unorganized street gang stuff. In the real organized world no one sees gang wars. You don’t hear about mass shootings … you might hear about weird disappearances or house fires or car accidents or robberies gone bad. Normal stuff that could happen to anyone on any day.”
He paused. His face was impenetrable.
“What are you thinking about?” he questioned.
“You tell me. Can’t you just read my mind?” I mocked, though my voice cracked.
He rolled his eyes.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, but I know that every time I open my mouth you get a little more nervous and eager all at once … I don’t understand it.” He shook his head and waited.
I hadn’t realized that I was holding my breath. He was very observant.
I exhaled and swallowed. “Why would anyone want a gang war?”
He shrugged lightly. “For the same reasons that the rest of the world starts wars—because they want something. Territory, power, money, intimidation … there are a lot of reasons that people start wars. But in our business, they’re usually a bad idea—eventually they attract too much attention.”
“Like when too many weird things start to happen to too many people,” I mused.
“Precisely.” His face was getting increasingly tense. “We wouldn’t start a war unless everyone agreed.”
This peaked my interest even more. “Who’s everyone?”
“Let’s just say it’s a bunch of bosses who sit down and make all the decisions for the best of the business.”
“Like a board of directors?”
He chewed on this and smiled. “Sure. Let’s call them the board of directors.”
“Are Carly and Spider on this board?”
“No, they work directly for me.”
“But you’re on the board,” I said.
He smiled wryly. “Kind of.”
“What happens if the directors don’t agree?” I couldn’t imagine that the vote would be put to the stockholders.
“Majority rules usually,” he told me. “Otherwise, there’s one person who runs the board and who has the right to make the final call.”
I was amazed by how it all seemed abnormally normal. “Kind of like a CEO?”
“CEO? That’s a good way of putting it.” His eyes lit up a bit. “You seem to know a lot about this stuff.”
“Looks like I was born to do this. Maybe I could start working for you too,” I jested, though part of me was serious.
Cameron’s face became severe. “Don’t ever joke about that, Emmy. That will never happen.”
My heart was pouting. I decided to move away from the job hunt and continue the inquisition. “What happens if someone doesn’t follow the rules? What if they don’t follow the board’s decision or just do what they want without going through the board?”
“You mean, what happens when someone goes rogue?” he clarified with intensity. “Then you have a big problem. The board has to decide what they want to do about it.”
“Can they decide to kill that person?” My voice was barely audible.
Cameron had started fidgeting again.
“Yes. They can,” he answered, also whispering.
“Have you ever had to make that kind of decision when you were on the board?”
Cameron eyed me and pressed his lips together. “I don’t want to lie to you.”
“So don’t. Just tell me the truth,” I pleaded.
“I can’t. There are some things that I can’t talk to you about.”
“I need to know,” I admitted. And I admitted more, “I need to understand you, Cameron.”
“That’s the problem, Emmy. You’re trying to understand me, but what I do isn’t who I am.” The full power of his eyes were on me now. “The thought of you seeing me in this way, of knowing this other side of my life that is so … it makes me feel sick.” Cameron took both my hands in his. “I trust you, and you can ask me anything you want. But please don’t ask me that.”
A moment of wordlessness passed between us. I looked at him, and I realized that I already knew the answer, and that I wished I didn’t.
“The night I got here, Rocco said to Carly that she wasn’t supposed to use real names.”
“Carly’s temper gets her in trouble a lot.” Cameron breathed a short sigh. “Nicknames are insurance. We come into contact with a lot of people every day. Anyone of them could snitch on us, sell us out. It’s a lot harder for cops to narrow their investigation down on some guy called Bubba or Tiny or Kid.”
I thought about this. “What’s your nickname?”
He shrugged. “I never really got the chance to get one … but your brother used to call me Kid.”
This touched one of the strings of my heart that were attached to my tear ducts. I glanced away. The sun had set behind the black clouds. Other than the eerie blue screen glow of the TV, the room was quite dark.
Cameron started the movie and, in another unexpected move, put his arm around me. In the almost darkness, it wasn’t as awkward, I wasn’t as nervous anymore. But I wasn’t paying attention to the movie either.
He had killed someone before—I had witnessed it with my own eyes. It had never really occurred to me that the man in the cemetery hadn’t been Cameron’s first … kill. I started wondering about those people—who they were, what they might have looked like … then I stopped myself. It was too disturbing to think of Cameron in that way.
I closed my eyes and nestled my head, inhaling my favored fragrance. I could hear his heart pound, quick beats at first; after a while, the booming in his chest steadied and sounded more like a lullaby.
The next time I opened my eyes, everything was dark. I couldn’t see a thing, yet I felt surrounded. Slowly, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the half-moon shapes of tombstones appeared around me. I was in a graveyard, and Cameron was standing in front of me with his back turned. He was looking at something on the ground. I approached, putting my hands on his shoulders and standing on the tip of my toes. I peeked over him to see what he was looking at. There was nothing there.
Cameron swiveled and faced me. He smiled. When I smiled back and reached out, his face started to change. It became deformed, monstrous. A gun materialized in the monster’s hand. I could hear someone screaming behind me. Run, Emily! I couldn’t move. My feet were stuck in the mud. I heard gunshots—and nearly fell off the couch.
I woke up, gasping for air. Cameron was holding me by the shoulders, trying to prevent me from falling face first into the coffee table. Burning tears were streaming down my cheeks.
I twisted—there were no monsters, just Cameron’s panicked gaze. “Emmy … Jesus! You were screaming.”
Apparently the person screaming behind me in my dream had been me. I looked at Cameron, and, while the daze of my nightmare wore off, I could feel the flow of tears involuntarily increasing. Cameron clasped his arms around me and held me while I buried my head.
“It was just a dream,” he shushed, almost abrasively.
I recovered slowly and lifted my head. Embarrassment colored my cheeks, and Cameron looked ill.
“Sorry,” I sniffled. “I didn’t mean to scare you like that.”
Cameron’s lips were pressed together in an unconvincing smile. “Well, looks like we’re good at scaring each other.” There was no humor in his voice. “No more talking about what I do, otherwise you’ll never sleep again, and you’ll give Meatball a heart attack.”
Meatball was stationed by the coffee table with his ears flat to his head. I called him, drumming my knee, and he pattered over. I reassured him with a rub of the ears.
“Cameron, this had nothing to do with you … I dreamt that I was falling out of an airplane,” I lied in vain.
“Don’t worry about it,” he reassured while the dark veil was expanding over his face.
He fingered his watch but didn’t look at it. “It’s getting late.”
He got up, hesitated, and listlessly grazed my shoulder. “Get some sleep,” he ordered.
Without saying good night, he left the room. I heard the door gently click behind him.
I rubbed Meatball’s ears until he was well recovered and sat in the darkness of Cameron’s room.