Hold Tight by Harlan Coben Read Free Book Online Page A

She microwaved them. The twins were happier.
    “Dinner,” she called out.
    The twins ignored her. They always did. So had Spencer. The first call had become just that-a first call. They’d grown accustomed to ignoring it. Was that part of the problem? Had she been too weak a mother? Had she been too lenient? Ron would get on her about that, how she let too much slide. Had that been it? If she’d been tougher on Spencer…
    Lots of ifs.
    The so-called experts say that teenage suicide is not the fault of the parents. It is a disease, like cancer or something. But even they, the experts, looked at her with something approaching suspicion. Why had he not been seeing a therapist steadily? Why had she, his mom, ignored the changes in Spencer, written them off as just typical teenage mood swings?
    He’d grow out of it, she’d thought. That’s what teenagers do.
    She moved into the den. The lights were out, the TV illuminating the twins. They looked nothing alike. In vitro had gotten her pregnant with them. Spencer had been an only child for nine years. Was that part of the reason too? She had thought that having a sibling would be good for him, but really, doesn’t any child just want his parents’ unending and undivided attention?
    The TV flickered off their faces. Children look so brain-dead when they’re watching TV. Their jaws slackened, their eyes too wide-it was pretty horrible.
    “Now,” she said.
    Still no movement.
    Tick, tick, tick-and then Betsy exploded: “NOW!”
    The scream startled them. She moved over and clicked the TV off.
    “I said, dinner now! How many times am I supposed to call you?”
    The twins scattered silently toward the kitchen. Betsy closed her eyes and tried to take a deep breath. That was how she was. Calm followed by the blowup. Talk about mood swings. Perhaps it was hereditary. Perhaps Spencer was doomed from the womb.
    They sat at the table. Betsy came over and summoned up a plastic smile. Yep, all good now. She served them and tried to engage them. One twin chatted, the other wouldn’t. That was how it had been since Spencer. One twin handled it by totally ignoring it. The other sulked.
    Ron wasn’t home. Again. Some nights he would come home and park the car in the garage and just sit there and cry. Betsy sometimes feared that he’d keep the engine on, close the garage door, and do like his only son. End the pain. There was such perverse irony in this whole thing. Her son had taken his own life, and the most obvious way to end the ensuing pain was to do likewise.
    Ron never talked about Spencer. Two days after Spencer’s death, Ron picked up his son’s dinner chair and put it in the basement. The three kids each had lockers with their names on it. Ron had taken Spencer’s off, started filling it with nonsense. Out of sight, she guessed.
    Betsy handled it differently. There were times she tried to throw herself into her other projects, but grief made everything feel heavy, as if she were in one of those dreams where you’re running through deep snow, where every movement feels as though you’re swimming through a pool of syrup. Then there were times, like now, when she wanted to bathe in the grief. She wanted to let it all crash in and destroy her anew, with an almost masochistic glee.
    She cleaned up dinner, got the twins ready for bed. Ron still wasn’t home. That was okay. They didn’t fight, she and Ron. Not once since Spencer’s death. They hadn’t made love either. Not once. They lived in the same house, still made conversation, still loved each other, but they’d separated as if any tenderness would be too much to bear.
    The computer was on, Internet Explorer already up on its home page. Betsy sat down and typed in the address. She thought about her friends and neighbors, their reaction to the death of her son. Suicide truly was different. It was somehow less tragic, gave it more distance. Spencer, the thinking went, had clearly been an unhappy soul, and thus the