“No. I didn’t. And I don’t owe you an explanation, Bonnie.” And he didn’t. He didn’t owe her anything. At this point he figured she owed him. Big time.
“What did you do?” she asked, undeterred.
“I killed a famous country singer.”
Bonnie didn’t laugh. He didn’t blame her. It wasn’t very funny.
“How long were you there? In prison, I mean.”
Finn gripped the wheel and tried to rein in the helplessness that filled his chest and made the palms of his hands sweat. He didn’t want to talk about this.
But Bonnie did.
“Come on, Clyde. Tell me. You’ve heard my sad tale. Let’s hear yours.”
“Five years. I’ve been out for a year and a half,” he said, relenting, the response short and sharp, a verbal whip that left Bonnie temporarily stunned. But she was silent for all of five seconds.
“And you’re twenty-four?”
“Turned twenty-four in August. Eight, eight, remember? Heil Hitler.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Bonnie hissed, offended, just like he’d intended. He was angry. He wanted her to be angry too.
“You didn’t notice? I have a swastika on my left pec, and a double eight on the right. H is the eighth letter in the alphabet—Heil Hitler, HH, 88. The Aryan Brotherhood has all kinds of cute little symbols like that. It just so happens to correspond with my birthday. Nice, huh? Convenient too.”
“What did you do?” She went back to her previous question. Maybe the Hitler stuff was too much.
“My brother robbed a convenience store. To this day, I don’t know what he was thinking. I was in the car. I didn’t know he had a gun, and I didn’t know he was going to rob the store. Unfortunately for Fisher, the owner had a gun too. And he knew how to use it. Fisher got blasted. He ran out of the store, but not before he pulled the trigger too. I don’t know how he managed to get a shot off, because he had a huge hole in his stomach. But I heard the shots, and I saw him fall. I grabbed him, got him into the car. Took him to the hospital. He died on the way. And I went to prison.” Finn kept his voice clipped, his answers short, making it seem like it was no big deal, just water under the bridge.
“Your brother?” Bonnie sounded as stunned as he had been when she told him about her sister.
“My twin brother,” he answered, not looking at her. But after a few seconds of silence he had to look. She was staring straight forward, but tears streamed down her face, and her hand covered her mouth like she was trying to hold something in. He turned off the key, climbed back out of the Blazer, and shut the door behind him. He had to. He had to get away from her. Just for a minute. He knew he should have told her about Fish when she told him about Minnie. But he’d been too stunned. The similarities had felt wrong, strange, and even false somehow, and telling her then would have felt like he was trying to one-up her story after she’d bared all.
Fish had always done that. From the time they could talk, Finn would share something, and Fish would immediately have to top him. Finn would finish his dinner, and Fish would ask for seconds he was too full to eat. Finn would get a solid double in baseball, and Fish would kill himself trying to hit a home run. He kept track of all their stats, their grades, their girlfriends. Finn would tell him something, and Fisher would always come back with, “Oh, yeah? Well . . .” And Finn had hated it. He’d hated how competitive Fish was. How animated, how bossy. He’d hated how Fish could always wear him down. He hated how he always gave in to whatever Fish wanted. But most of all, he hated how much he loved him, and he hated how much he missed him.
Finn heard Bonnie behind him. The snow crunched beneath her boots, and her breathing was ragged. He noticed suddenly how ragged his own was.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I told you I had a brother named Fisher.”
“But a twin? Finn, I . . .” her voice trailed off. She seemed as lost for words as he had been. Then she slid her arms around his waist and pressed her face into his back. She never failed to surprise him. He thought she would grower colder with the revelation—that she would feel betrayed that he hadn’t shared all there was to share. Instead, she held onto him. For a long time, she just held on. And they stood there in the road, surrounded by white and nothing else.
“He died?” Her voice was a stunned whisper, more a statement than a question, though her voice rose a little on the end like she couldn’t believe it.
“Yeah. He did.” Finn hadn’t wept for Fish in a very long time, but his mouth trembled as he verified that truth. Fish had died. And that had been far worse than what had come next.
“Why did they send you to prison?” Bonnie asked, the question muffled, her face pressed into his jacket, but he heard her.
“Armed robbery. Seven year maximum sentence for a first time offender.”
“But you didn’t shoot anybody or take anything, right? You didn’t even have a gun.”
“I took the gun out of Fish’s hand. I threw it in the backseat on the floor. My prints were on it. I was there with him. I helped him get away,” Finn said humorlessly. He’d helped him get away. And Fish had gone far, far, away. “It wasn’t hard to assume I was in on it. We were both high. And Fish shot the owner of the store. The guy almost died.”
Finn could almost feel Bonnie’s dismay, her wonder, gauging his remorse, the truthfulness of his tale, but she stayed silent.
“They offered me a deal. It was three days after my eighteenth birthday, and I had no priors. Five years and no attempted murder charge if I would plead guilty to possession and armed robbery. I would have been out in less time, but I didn’t adjust very well.”