Page 6 of The Snake in the Grass: The Prequel

For a moment the Smith household was something next to heaven, a place where I rested my head and my heart alike. I knew a kind of peace: the repair of a friendship broken, forgiveness born of grace, and a place that felt like home. I let my guard down and dared to believe that everything would be alright.

There’s always calm before the storm breaks. It’s the only way you know the destruction is coming.

Chapter 5

He didn’t come home when he was supposed to.

Standing on the side of the road, cell phone in my hand, I frowned in the direction of the setting sun. Wally left to pick him up that morning with plenty of time to spare; they were supposed to switch turns driving on the way back with a rest in the middle. It was a long drive, but not that long. They were supposed to make it by sunset.

I called Wally’s number twice, but he didn’t pick up. Either he was using his phone so much that the battery died, and he didn’t bother to bring a charger—typical Wally behavior—or something was very wrong.

My anxious mind immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was the latter, insistently telling me terrible stories of my brother’s head going through a car windshield, or Wally getting them lost on the side of the road and murdered by escaped convicts.

To fight the catastrophe-related anxiety in my mind, I grabbed the old fixed gear bike from the garage and rode it around our cluster of houses beneath the darkening sky and time-activated street lamps. Its gear ran smoothly, pedals well-oiled by my brother’s careful hand. Even the little pink ribbon tied to the handlebars was bright, shiny, and brand-new looking.

At one point my mom came out, stood on the front porch, and called to me. “Brenna! Want any chicken pot pie? I’m about to put it in the fridge for later.”

I stopped and stared at her, the tips of my worn tennis shoes touching the ground. “Silas isn’t home yet.”

“He can reheat it for dinner. That’s the sort of thing he’ll have to get used to doing once he’s transferred to that new school.” The light in the middle of the lazy ceiling fan cast a warm orange glow across her face. “Don’t stay out here too late. Your father will want you to come to bed in time for nightly prayers.”

I nodded, not daring to speak out loud. Daddy insisted we were in bed at ten sharp every night so we could get on our knees and pray—a tradition he taught us when we were barely young enough to know the words to a single psalm. He almost never checked to make sure we were doing it anymore, but on those rare nights he came up the stairs at ten, we were either by our beds murmuring saintly words or would find ourselves yanked to our knees until reverence came pouring out.

I’d missed Silas that whole week as I knelt by my bed and spit out a penance half-remembered and never genuine in feeling. Normally we’d do our prayers—or his profanity-laden version of them—with our bedroom doors open, facing each other. For a while in middle school he spent every night inserting jokes into his prayers, insistently trying to get me to giggle, until Dad came home one night, went up the stairs, and put a stop to that.

By the time he declared he was heading to Coleridge, our prayers were more of a soft conversation filled with bits of truth.

“Lord Jesus, don’t let me fail this next test. I think if I do I might never get to go to college like my brother.”

“Grant me the patience to tutor my sister in math so I don’t have to support her financially for the rest of my life.”

“Forgive me for walking out on Jade when she needed me the most.”

“Don’t let my family fall apart while I’m gone. And... I hope this new school is worth it. I hope going there takes me out of this godforsaken shithole. No offense or anything, Big Man.”

“I hope tomorrow Dad is in a good mood.”

“I hope tomorrow Mom doesn’t have those sad eyes of hers.”

After we said our amens we let it all go and moved on like it never happened. He didn’t mention the fading bruises; I didn’t mention the extra makeup classes I was going to have to take in the fall. Prayer was how we talked about the hard things without ever really talking at all.

I didn’t really believe any of it had some sort of power. If God was looking down at us, I figured it was with indifference at best and scorn at worst. We were little more than ants whittling our short lives away.

But as the sky grew darker, my stomach grumbled, and the bicycle lost its appeal, I found myself praying for real. In quiet, silent bursts of plaintive words, I prayed that Silas was okay and that he would come home soon.

A dark little corner of my heart wanted to pray that he hated his week at Coleridge so much that he’d change his mind about going all the way up to Connecticut for school.

I refused to put those envious prayers into words, though. It was selfish to try to drag him down with me. So I acknowledged the best of myself in murmured words to a god I wasn’t sure existed, and looked towards the dim street, waiting for familiar headlights to come barreling towards the house.

I waited.

And I waited.

A stupid, panicked part of me started to really believe that the worst had befallen Silas, and he wasn’t going to come home at all. The fears that’d seemed so exaggerated hours before suddenly became plausible as the summer air cooled and the mosquitoes swarmed in the air, biting to the tune of cicada song. I tried to imagine my life without him and failed, my mind bumping up against the possibility with panic.

It was one thing to imagine losing him for a week, a few months, or two years. To lose him for a lifetime made every thought in my mind unravel around me.

Finally, just when I was about to give up and go inside, or ride my bike all the way to the police station to insist they dosomething, I saw those yellow-orange headlights and the front bumper of an old pickup truck chugging down the road. Dropping my bike carelessly in the grass, I ran up to the passenger side door as the truck slowed to a shuddering stop.

---