Still, the story that had emerged had been unnerving. Apparently it had taken two of Flick’s teammates to subdue me. How could I not remember that?
My fingers again traced the purple, swollen skin just below my eye.
“Hurt, Tristen?” Dad asked.
I looked across the table to see that he’d finished eating and crossed his knife and fork atop the plate. “Yes,” I admitted, dropping my hand. “A little.”
“Good. Maybe the pain will deter you from fighting in the future.”
“We can only hope,” I agreed.
Dad gave me a long level stare that made me regret even the hint of sarcasm.
Then, when he was sure his point had been delivered, he leaned back in the booth, adjusted his eyeglasses, and began drumming his fingers against the table, head cocked, observing me as if I were one of his patients. A particularly difficult case who showed no signs of progress, in spite of years of intensive treatment.
“Well, Tristen,” he finally began, “now that we’ve both had a chance to calm down, why don’t you explain—again—what happened at school today.”
I averted my eyes and fidgeted with my water glass, erasing the condensation. “I tried to tell you in the car. I don’t remember.”
Daring to check his reaction, I saw a muscle in Dad’s jaw twitch. A warning sign. “Tristen, please don’t start with that again.”
“It’s true.” I leaned forward. “Can’t you at least give me the benefit of the doubt?”
“No, Tristen,” Dad said, mouth set in a firm line. “Because if I validate this ‘blackout,’ then I am validating a component of the stories your grandfather filled your head with—”
I could feel the muscle in my jaw starting to jump. “Grandfather swore they weren’t stories. If you’d just listen—”
“Tristen, no.” Dad cut me off sharply, leaning in, too, so we were eye-to-eye. “For the last time—the very last time—there is no ‘Hyde curse.’ I will not speak seriously of nonsense!”
“But—”
“Your grandfather suffered from dementia in his final days.” Dad overrode me again, actually reaching across the table and clasping my arm. I suppose the gesture was meant to be reassuring, but he held too tightly, and it came off as confining, almost threatening. “Those ‘crimes’ he confessed to—they never happened. There was no ‘evil alter ego.’ No late-night forays that ended in violence. No ‘blackouts,’ for god’s sake.”
“But—”
Dad squeezed harder, his fingers surprisingly powerful, given that the only exercise they ever got was turning the pages of his academic texts. “The Case of Jekyll and Hyde was a novel, Tristen,” he said, boring into my eyes. “A work of fiction. A good book, with some admittedly interesting insights into man’s dual nature. But a tall tale. There was no ‘real’ Dr. Jekyll, no ‘formula,’ and no ‘real’ Mr. Hyde. And we are, quite obviously, not descended from a fictional character. It’s ludicrous!”
I stared at my father’s eyes, which were a peculiar metallic gray. Eyes the color of two padlocks and nearly as impenetrable. I had inherited my mother’s brown eyes. Sometimes when I looked in the mirror, I could almost see her in my reflection. I loved and despised those moments.
Where was Mom?
I watched my father’s opaque eyes, searching again.
When my mother had first disappeared, vanishing in the middle of the night three years before, the police had nosed around Dad, sniffing for signs of foul play. But they’d found nothing. Of course they’d found nothing, I reassured myself.
My father was imperious and overbearing, but my parents had loved each other, in their own curious way. Mom had understood how to tease out of Dad a gruff, grudging, but genuine affection that I never got to experience now that she was gone.
No, even if there was a Hyde curse—even if the Hyde men were descended from the evil “Mr. Hyde” and genetically doomed to commit unspeakable acts of violence—surely Dad wouldn’t have harmed Mom.
Then again, I didn’t believe Dad’s assertion that my mother had abandoned us of her own free will as part of some midlife crisis that she’d snap out of eventually. That was “ludicrous,” to use his own word.
Someone had harmed her. Killed her. But who?
I blinked at Dad, utterly confused, and pulled my arm free.
What did I believe?
My father seemed to sense that I was struggling inside and seized upon my uncertainty. “Tristen, I am one of the world’s best psychotherapists,” he said with his characteristic, shameless hubris. “I have spent my professional life exploring the workings of the mind. And I am telling you right now, there is nothing wrong with you—aside from the fact that you’ve let your grandfather’s ridiculous stories cloud your thinking.”
“But my nightmares,” I noted. “My dreams. Even Freud said dreams were important. That they are the subconscious expressing its true desires.”
And the dreams that I suffered—if they represented my true desires, I wasn’t just sick, or deviant, even. I was a psychopath. The nightmares had started out chaotic, little more than random images of gore. More recently, however, they had begun to coalesce into a narrative dominated by a river, a knife—and a girl’s pale, vulnerable throat.
“Oh, Tristen.” Dad smiled at his teenage son’s effort to educate the great Dr. Hyde about Freud, of all topics. “You talk as if you’ve never read Jung.” His smile faded. “The images that appear in our dreams are influenced by—complicated by—the dreamer’s history, his circumstances. And the images in your nightmares were placed there by my father. Your subconscious isn’t playing out its hopes. It is expressing your very conscious fears. You don’t secretly want to kill anyone.”
He did have a point. I didn’t want to kill. If anything, I desperately wanted Grandfather to be wrong. I just wanted to be normal.
My father sat back, looking out the window and shaking his head. “If I’d had any idea my father would have such a terrible impact on you, I would never have allowed you to visit him so often. I would have forbade
