Death In The Family

Chapter 23

"He was right."

Vidar kept looking out the passenger window, deciding whether or not to acknowledge what Anders had said after refusing to speak since reacting to news of Simone's kidnapping. He'd seen his brothers and himself break in more miserable and unfathomable ways than he had ever bothered to imagine, but it still unsettled him to see the cracks that had splintered from those jagged pieces of them. When Anders had crawled into himself, he didn't press or coax him to respond. He knew the dark space inside him he had to withdraw to for this to pass and now it seemed time to hear what he'd brought with him from that place. It was that firsthand experience that made him both able to sympathize with him and dread what was to come now. Ultimately, though, it was his own curiosity that decided for him.

"What are you mumbling about, Anders?"

"Leif."

That name still made Vidar clench his jaw against the fear it shot off in his mind. He watched the trees blur into a long cloud of green as they sped past them. Everything had become so muddled since he'd stopped sleeping. Clarity and lucidity had dwindled where he had never known it to be in such limited supply and dreams had begun to seep into these endless waking hours. He wasn't entirely sure if this nightmare was real, providing a buffer of disbelief that had helped him from cracking under the distress it should have warranted. Insomnia wasn't entirely without its uses in that way.

"He was right," Anders continued. "I'm a fraud and a liar."

"Maybe I should walk," Vidar said. "It's a nice day for it. Pull over and let me out."

"I fucked her before I even found out about any of it," his younger brother went on, his voice too loud and clear for Vidar to pretend to not have heard him. "None of this shit had happened yet. I got drunk and fucked her while everyone was asleep. Do you know why I fucked my mentally disturbed niece?"

The sour pit in Vidar's stomach did not want to know. He didn't want to know any of it, but it was either this or jumping out of the moving car.

"The way she would look at him, that... that connection between them," Anders said, the words drawing out of him slowly, almost wistfully. Road rash and a few broken bones weren't such a terrible alternative to Vidar now as he pressed his head against the side window. "I wanted that. I thought I was just curious, you know, what it would be like to have a child of my own who loved me that much... but really, I was jealous of him for getting to be a father when I was denied. I hated him for being a good dad, for giving up everything to take care of a daughter who loved him so much. I wanted to take it away from him. When I was fucking his kid, I believed I was giving her something he couldn't, but wow, was I wrong about that!"

"Why are you telling me this?" Vidar asked past the sourness crawling up his throat. "No, no, don't answer that, just stop. Wherever you're going with this, stop. You're almost home, do you think you can hold in your emotional breakdown for another five minutes?"

"I need to take responsibility for once in my selfish life and face that I'm not the person I thought I was."

Vidar pressed his hand to his pounding forehead and was surprised at how much anger bled into his tone as he snapped, "If you want to regret what you did to her, that's your choice, but don't talk to me about your fucked up fallen father figure bullshit!"

The car lurched to a stop at the light before the turn into their neighborhood and Anders put it in park, took his hands off the wheel and turned toward him. He smiled at him, a hollow expression that didn't touch his empty eyes as he said, "This isn't regret. I'm not even human enough to regret any of it. There's no redemption for either of us, but I don't feel damned. I feel free."