Abandon (17 page)

“Why do you hate her?”

I turn around and find Molly sitting on the sofa with her shoes off and her feet propped up on the coffee table.

“Don’t put your feet on the table. This isn’t our house.”

She rolls her eyes as she removes her feet. “You didn’t answer my question. Why do you hate Elaine so much?”

“I’ve already told you. She’s a worthless junkie who treated us and Grandma like trash.”

I sit next to her and the first thing I notice is that there’s no TV in the living room. Chris and Claire must be getting it on a lot in their new place.

“She did something to you, didn’t she?”

“What? Who?”

“Don’t play dumb with me.”

I kick my shoes off and put my feet up on the coffee table. “Let’s eat first. Then I’ll tell you everything.”

Holy shit.
I need to find Tristan and Molly.

“I’ll be right back,” I say, pushing box-head out of my way as I stalk off toward the main hospital entrance.

I need to call Tristan and I need to call a cab so I can go get my car. I dial Tristan’s number, but he doesn’t answer. Tristan hardly ever has his ringer on. Most of the time, he doesn’t even have the phone set to vibrate. It’s just completely silent. He doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s practicing or socializing. But I made him set the phone to vibrate when we got off the plane earlier, in case Molly or Grandma Flo called him. If he’s not answering, he’s probably just ignoring me. Asshole.

I get his voicemail greeting and I try to think of what I’m going to say during the brief seconds while I listen to his voice:
I’m not available. Leave a message. Beeeeep.

“I … I think there’s something you’re not telling me and I just want to know how I can help.”

I hang up the phone and try not to cry as I think of the little human swimming inside me right now. He or she is doomed to have a fiery temper with Tristan and me as parents. I wonder if she’ll have Tristan’s golden-brown hair or gray eyes or if he’ll be a clone of me, the way Abigail is a clone of Claire.

I wish Claire weren’t on her honeymoon. I need her. I need to know that this isn’t the end. I need to know that being this scared is normal.

I wipe the tears from my eyes as I walk past the Heart Center and Children’s Hospital where I brought Claire to see Abigail almost three months ago. I think I’m finally beginning to understand Claire more than I did just a few weeks ago. I just wish I could understand why Tristan is the way he is with his mother. There has to be more to his hatred than a tragic story of abandonment.

I open the browser app on my phone and begin searching for taxi companies. The smell of fresh snow in the courtyard is such a fresh, calming scent. I wish I could bottle it up and take it home with me. I close my eyes and breathe it in, let it wash away the doubts I have about my future with Tristan. I don’t see the patch of ice on the concrete stairs. One second I’m falling, falling through the smell of snow. The next second, everything is gone.

Molly’s golden-brown eyes are locked on me as she listens, rapt with attention as I prepare to tell her everything I probably should have told her years ago. I think I never wanted Molly to know because I was afraid of Grandma finding out. I don’t think Grandma would judge me, but I think it would destroy her to know that the daughter she still loves very much would do something like that.

“I showed up at Elaine’s house and, at first, she didn’t know what to do with me. She put me to work cutting the lawn and delivering packages, which I assumed were filled with drugs.”

I close my eyes and grit my teeth as I think of the fear that twisted my stomach into knots as I made those deliveries. But even with all the fear that consumed me, there was still an element of excitement to it. And the money was pretty good: $25 per delivery, which usually took less than an hour to complete.

“I thought to myself: I can do this. I can deliver stuff on my bike. It was summer. If I weren’t at Elaine’s, I’d probably be riding my bike around town every day anyway. But this way, I was making money.” I look at Molly and she’s biting the corner of her lip nervously, like she knows what’s coming. “But the deliveries didn’t last. She came to me and told me she found a place for us to live – just her and me. She said she needed to make enough money for the first month’s rent and deposit. We needed two thousand dollars and we could leave. All I had to do is have sex with a girl who actually
wanted
to have sex with me.”

Molly’s face contorts as she begins to cry quietly.

“She told me that we wouldn’t be able to get the apartment in time just doing deliveries. It would only be a few times and we’d make enough money to leave … I told her I’d never had sex with anyone and I didn’t want to do it, but she wouldn’t let it go. She had a couple of her friends talk to me about it. And one of the younger girls who lived there – I think her name was Cecily, or something like that – she was a heroin addict who was actually kind of pretty. Anyway, she got me drunk and we started making out. Then she just got up and left and I thought maybe I did want to have sex. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.”

I draw in a deep breath and I close my eyes so I don’t have to see Molly’s face when I continue.

“I had sex with the first girl that night. I never found out her name, but I didn’t need to know it. We were both there for the same thing, to get paid. Only thing was she was getting paid in drugs and Elaine was getting paid by … by the guys who came in and watched us.”

Molly has the heels of her hands pressed into her eyelids and I can’t bring myself to touch her to comfort her. I feel filthy, as if the guilt is seeping through my skin. The shame is something I’ve lived quietly with, but talking about it now … it’s so fucking loud and vile. I don’t want to go on, but I know I can’t stop now. She needs to know.

“The first two times were horrible, but the last girl …” I let go a deep sigh as the first sign of tears form in my eyes. “You remember Ashley, don’t you?”

She uncovers her eyes and looks at me with pure shock in her eyes. “Ashley?”

I cover my face to hide the tears. “I hate myself for what I did.”

“Oh my God, Tristan. You … you’ve been living with this and I never knew? All this time, I thought you were mad at Elaine because she’s a piece-of-shit junkie.”

She grabs my hands and pries my fingers away from my face. “Don’t do that,” I say, pushing her away.

She sniffs loudly, her lip trembling as she looks me in the eye. “I hate her.”

“Don’t say that. She didn’t do anything to you. That anger is mine to carry, not yours.”

“Yes, it is! She hurt you and now I’ll never be able to look at her again. I hate her! Oh my God, I hate her so much.”

The mixture of rage and agony in Molly’s face kills me. I don’t want her to be consumed by this the way I have been. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her anything.

“Hey,” I say, grabbing her arm to turn her toward me. “Don’t let her do this to you. She did it to me for way too many years … It’s time to let it go.”

Her nose is starting to drip from crying so hard and I get a strange urge to use my sleeve to wipe it clean, the way I used to when she was a kid and I was too lazy to get a tissue. I get up from the sofa and head for the kitchen to get a paper towel. When I come back, her eyes are closed and her head is leaned against the back of the sofa. Her chest stutters as she draws in a deep breath.

I tap her arm to get her attention and she takes the paper towel from me. She shakes her head as she wipes her face clean.

“Take me back to the hospital. I’ll go with a foster family for a couple of days. I just don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“You’re not going to live with strangers. You’re staying with me tonight.”

“You can’t pretend that nothing is going to happen to you if you keep me here.” She turns to me and fixes me with an intense glare. “And you need to apologize to Senia and tell her everything, or I’m not living with you.”

I can’t help but chuckle at this threat. “You really like her, don’t you?”

“What’s not to like? She puts you in your place and she has the best drunk stories.”

“She does.”

I pull my phone out of my pocket to listen to Senia’s voicemail, when I notice I have a text from Elaine.

Elaine:
Your girlfriend fell outside the hospital. She’s in the emergency room. It don’t look good.

“Molly, Google shortcuts. Look for open fields or parking lots that I can cut through. Hurry up!”

She pulls her phone out of her pocket and her fingers fly across the screen as she attempts to find a shorter path to the hospital.

“I don’t know! I don’t know what any of this means. I don’t know how to read a map!” she cries.

I take the phone from her hand and attempt to keep my eyes on the road as I also search the map on her phone for open spaces. There’s nothing I can cut through. The path to the hospital is almost a straight line. I’m fucked.

Twenty-seven minutes later, I pull my car into a Wal-Mart parking lot just in time to get it into a parking space before it dies. I yank the key out of the ignition and turn to Molly.

“As soon as I get out of the car, lock the doors. Call Jackie to pick you up. She should be home from Vegas. And if she’s not, call Elaine.”

I leave her my key so she can arm the car alarm, then I take off running in the direction of the hospital. The buildings and trees on New Bern Avenue are a blur in my peripheral vision as I haul ass down the sidewalk. And at that moment, it dawns on me. I should have responded to Elaine’s text to ask her to tell the hospital staff that Senia’s pregnant.
Fuck!

I have to get to her. I have to tell them so they can make sure everything’s okay with the baby.

I’m thankful for all those morning workouts in my home gym because, by the time I reach the emergency-room entrance, I’m on such an adrenaline high, I still feel as if I could run a marathon if that’s what it took to get to her. I tumble through the sliding doors and into the emergency room and I’m not sure I’m making sense. But the nurse must understand all my frantic words and gestures because she leads me into Bay B of the emergency room. The curtains are drawn on most of the beds, and I want to tear them all open to find her, but I restrain myself. The nurse is looking straight ahead, so I have a feeling Senia is in the bed near the back of the room where the curtain is open.

I walk a few steps ahead of her and when we reach the last bed, the space is empty. There’s no bed or Senia.

“Where is she?”

The nurse looks confused. “Hmm … They must have moved her.”

She turns around and heads back toward the nurses’ station. “Why would they move her? Is she okay? What does her file say?”

She looks at the file in her hand and flips through a couple of pages. “She was unconscious when she came in. She presented with what looks like a broken finger and a pretty bad laceration and contusion on the back of her head.”

“And the baby?”

“She’s pregnant?”