The Knight Brothers

05

Chapter Five

April

Eleven and a half months ago

When I was eleven I almost died.

It was New Year's Day. Sam and I had each received the most perfect pair of white leather ice skates for Christmas. In typical stuck-up Sam fashion, she thumbed her nose at the gift and threw the skates in the corner of her closet.

"Oh my gosh, Sam, don't you love the skates? They're my favorite present!" I squeal.

"Love them? I hate the cold. It makes my skin dry," she says in her snotty-ass voice.

She never took them out of the box. Once.

I, on the other hand, loved mine. As usual, we each had a giant pile of presents we didn't need and most I probably wouldn't use. The skates were the least expensive of my gifts that year, but I treasured them as though they'd been dipped in gold.

I remember that year as if it were just yesterday.

Both Jon and Jordan had been distant. Jon turned sixteen in September and had gotten his driver's license. He was never around. He'd dropped out of our homegrown band, which we thought we'd smartly named DeKnights, a combo of our last names. And since he was the drummer and none of the rest of us could play drums, DeKnights fizzled shortly thereafter.

Jordan had started high school that year, ninth grade, and was starting to change. He was in football, which took up a lot of his time. When that ended, he immediately picked up basketball. He didn't get home from school regularly until at least seven and then he had homework. I was lucky if I saw him once a week.

I terribly missed not only the boy I crushed on but my best friend, too. I specifically recall feeling as if I was the little kid being left behind while they grew up. And my sister was a raving bitch, as usual, never giving me the time of day.

I was lonely inside. I think that's what prompted me to go out that day even when I knew I shouldn't. I was smart enough to know better.

It had been cold and snowy early in the season, bitterly so, and the ponds and streams had frozen up ahead of normal. But we'd had a warm streak for the two weeks leading up to Christmas. Temps soared into the forties and even fifties on a few days. In that atmosphere, thin ice melts rapidly.

I was dying to try out my new skates, begging every single day. Both my parents had told me no. "It's not safe, Tenderheart," Daddy said. He'd even gone so far as to hide mine because he knew me. He knew I'd do what I wanted when I wanted. But I knew all their hiding places. It took me all of three minutes to locate the box in the shed on the top shelf behind a box of Halloween decorations.

So that morning, while Daddy went deer hunting and my mother rode out a New Year's Eve hangover, I tied the strings of the skates together, threw them over my shoulder, and headed out.

When I was a kid, I loved the isolation of rural Massachusetts, especially because we lived on twenty acres on the outskirts of town. Right next door to the Knights.

I loved the silence. The peace. The freedom. The centering I felt going on inside me when I just sat, listened, and took in the fresh, clean air. I loved the color of the sky, the sound of crickets chirping, the crackling of bonfires at night. Everything about living in the country made me feel whole and present. It was a balance I couldn't find anywhere else.

And that day, the second I'd crossed our open lot and set foot into the dense woods behind our house, obscuring me from the real world, I felt better. Calm. Like I'd stepped into a dream.