The Last Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

look of pained understanding, the kind of expression grown-ups gave to kids who didn’t quite get how the world worked. But Johnny understood. He knew the look and he hated it.
    “You should have never said the things you said.”
    “Johnny…”
    “It wasn’t his fault that she got taken. You should have never told him that.” She stepped toward him. Johnny ignored the gesture. “He left because of you.”
    She stopped midstride and ice snapped in her voice. The sympathetic twist fell from her lips. “It
was
his fault,” she said. “His fault and nobody else’s. Now she’s gone, and I’ve got nothing.”
    Johnny felt tremors start low in the backs of his legs. In seconds, he was shaking. It was an old argument, and it was tearing them apart.
    She straightened and started to turn. “You always take his side,” she said, and then was gone, into the house, away from the world and her last child’s place in it.
    Johnny stared at the faded door and then at his hands. He watched them shake, then he swallowed the emotion. He sat back down and watched wind move dust on the roadside. He thought about his mother’s words, then he looked up the hill. It was not a pretty hill. There was an edge of ragged forest dotted with small houses and dirt drives, telephone lines that curved between the poles and looked especially black against the new sky. Nothing made the hill special, but he watched it for a long time. He watched it until his neck hurt, then he went inside to check on his mom.
     
     
     

CHAPTER TWO
     
     
    The Vicodin bottle sat open on the bathroom counter; the door to his mother’s room was closed. Johnny cracked the door, saw that it was dim inside and that his mother was under the covers and still. He heard the rasp of her breath and beneath that a deep and perfect silence. He closed her door and went to his own room.
    The suitcase under his bed showed cracks in the leather and a black tarnish on the hinges. One of the leather straps had broken off, but Johnny kept the piece because it once belonged to his great-great-grandfather. The case, large and square, had a faded monogram that Johnny could still see if he tilted it right. It read
JPM
, John Pendleton Merrimon, same name as Johnny.
    He dragged the case out, got it up on the bed, and unfastened the last buckle. The top swung up clumsily and settled against the wall. On the inside curve of the lid were a dozen photographs, a collage. Most showed his sister, but two were of them together, looking very much like twins and sharing the same smile. He touched one of the pictures briefly, then looked at the other photos, those of his father. Spencer Merrimon was a big man with square teeth and an easy smile, a builder, with rough hands, quiet confidence, and a moral certainty that had always made Johnny feel lucky to be his son. He’d taught Johnny so many things: how to drive, how to keep his head up, how to make the right decisions. His father taught him how the world worked, taught him what to believe and where to place his faith: family, God, the community. Everything that Johnny had learned about what it meant to be a man, he’d learned from his father.
    Right up to the end, when his father walked away.
    Now Johnny had to question all of it, everything he’d been taught with such conviction. God did not care about people in pain. Not the little ones. There was no such thing as justice, retribution, or community; neighbors did not help neighbors and the meek would not inherit the earth. All of that was bullshit. The church, the cops, his mother—none of them could make it right, none of them had the power. For a year, Johnny had lived the new, brutal truth that he was on his own.
    But that’s the way it was. What had been concrete one day proved sand the next; strength was illusion; faith meant shit. So what? So his once-bright world had devolved to cold, wet fog. That was life, the new order. Johnny had nothing to trust but himself, so that’s