Battlescars (10 page)

Fortunately, the last foster home had been good to her. The woman had been taking care of kids for decades, and she tolerated absolutely no bullshit and harbored no lies. She didn’t ask Kayla what had happened to her, but perhaps that was because she had been dealing with the system so long that she had already heard all the horror stories. Instead, she gave Kayla her own room and told her that if anyone messed with her, Kayla was to come right to her and let her know, and the person who did it would be “sorry.” She said it with such conviction that Kayla felt safe for the first time in a long while.

Mrs. Carole. Kayla remembered the name and smiled. Kayla still got a Christmas card from her every year. It wasn’t a trite gesture – Kayla knew that if she went back to Mrs. Carole’s house, she would be welcomed with open arms, even now.

It was one of the few bright spots in the things that had happened to her since…well, since the really terrible things had happened.

Kayla thought about her mother. The smile slowly disappeared from her face as she stared at the ceiling and thought about the gentle woman with the light brown eyes, her happy smile and her strong hands. She thought about the way her mother would sing as she went about her chores, humming her own tunes that sounded just as good as any on the radio. Her mother had once had dreams of singing for a living, but then she had met Kayla’s father. She had gotten pregnant within a few months of dating him and then chose to keep the child – she had chosen to keep Kayla.

Maybe that’s why Kayla and her mother were so often the focus of her father’s wrath. It was the only way that Kayla could make sense of his anger. He saw Kayla as a trap, an anchor that weighed him down and kept him from living as he pleased. He saw Kayla’s mother as an evil harlot who had set out to ensnare him by purposely getting pregnant. Never mind that her mother had given up every one of her dreams when she realized she was pregnant. Never mind that her mother had settled for a man who she would have sworn was a mistake, if she hadn’t been so kind and kept her thoughts to herself. What her father never seemed to realize was that her mother could have done so much better, and would have, if it hadn’t been for her father’s deliberate, systematic campaign to keep Kayla’s mother under his thumb, scared and meek.

Despite her father’s temper and his insults when he was drunk, Kayla and her mother had made a pretty good team. They had done all sorts of things together, Kayla’s mother determined to give her child a good life even on a shoestring budget. They went to the theater on the cheap matinee tickets, spent time at the library, and jumped at every affordable opportunity to immerse themselves in culture. By the time Kayla was old enough to talk she knew the library as well as she knew her own house. One of her earliest memories was of standing on the broad, gleaming marble floor of the natural history museum, bathed in the sunlight that poured in through the impossibly high windows, staring at the skeleton of a creature that her mother called a dinosaur. It was only the first of many moments of awe. The greatest gift the Kayla had ever received was her thirst for knowledge, and that gift had come from her mother.

As Kayla got older, she realized that another reason for their outings was to avoid being home with Kayla’s father, especially when he had been drinking. There were nights, though, when he came home drunk, mean, and determined to pick a fight. Kayla remembered all those nights when her mother had desperately tried to protect Kayla from his fury, even deliberately provoking her husband to keep him from turning his anger on their daughter. Most of those nights ended in tears, bruises, and tearful apologies followed by promises to get sober. Kayla’s mother could usually keep the fight from escalating into violence against Kayla, but the nights when the money was short and the bills mounted too high, there was no defusing him. Kayla wondered why her mother never left, and she liked to think that eventually, she would have taken her daughter and put her bitter, abusive husband behind her.

She never had the chance.

The night that changed everything had started out better than usual. They’d sat down to dinner as a family – Kayla remembered that it was tuna casserole with peas, just the way her father liked it. Even though her father had kept pouring a steady stream of vodka throughout dinner, Kayla could remember wishing that every evening could be so peaceful.

She remembered her mother in her favorite red and white striped dress cheerfully bringing up that she’d talked to one of the neighbors who was willing to help Kayla’s dad fix the clutch on the old car that had been sitting in front of their apartment for months. The mood of the room changed in a flash, and in a flurry of angry words about nosy neighbors and shattered glass from the bottle of vodka, Kayla’s dad stood up from the table and ordered his wife outside.

His irrational jealousy had taken hold, and there was no way to stop it. He dragged Kayla’s mother to the car while she fought him, put her in the passenger seat and said he would show her that there was nothing wrong with the car, that he’d fixed it just as he’d told her he would. He shrugged off her suggestion that he’d had too much to drink, and he insisted that he could drive just as well drunk as he could stone cold sober. Kayla had tried to get in the backseat, to help her mother, but her mother had ordered her back to the house.

Kayla obeyed her mother, and her dad set off with squealing tires, Kayla left behind in the doorway begging them not to go. She began to cough from the dust left behind as they roared away from the curb, and somehow…

“I knew,” Kayla whispered softly. “I knew what would happen next.”

Maybe it was the look in her mother’s eyes when she told Kayla to get back to the house. Perhaps it was the way her father acted, this time even more belligerent and angry than usual. Maybe it was because their fight this time had drawn the attention of the neighbors, and there was an element of embarrassment to what he was doing, something that even got through the haze of the alcohol. Something was different, and Kayla felt it that night just as surely as she felt her own heart beating.

The rest of the night was a blur, her memories a swirling set of random impressions. She remembered the scratchy warmth of the blanket that someone put around her shoulders and the words “she’s in shock” echoing from the tall ceilings of the foyer. She remembered yelling at someone, an adult who was trying to talk to her, and then she felt ashamed, because her mother would have been appalled and told her to mind her manners. She remembered the sound of a computer keyboard clicking away as the police officer asked her questions. But mostly she remembered her father repeating, “I’m sorry” and wondered how many times she would hear that for the rest of her life, and did the police know that he was just running his mouth, spewing empty promises like always?

Kayla’s mother had died in the car crash. Her father, like many other drunks before him, had walked away with hardly a scratch.

To add insult to injury, he was charged with several crimes and bailed out by a woman, a woman Kayla had never met. She was the last in the string of women he had been sleeping with, though Kayla had known nothing about his infidelities until the days following the crash. The flood of information that had come out in the endless interviews with social workers hadn’t made Kayla’s plight any more manageable.

Her father had attended the funeral, made a big show of sobbing over his dead wife, and climbed into his girlfriend’s car at the end of the ceremony. It was the last time that Kayla had seen him. The legal wheels had turned, and in the end, her father was sentenced to two years in a state facility. He had been released in less than a year.

Kayla received what felt like a life sentence, becoming a ward of the state, and being shuffled from one foster home to another. The day she turned eighteen, she’d been emancipated, and she’d been on her own ever since. Though she didn’t have much of a support system, at least she had some peace.

Now sitting in bed in her tiny apartment, her eyes filled with tears, Kayla thought about how much it ached to remember. Her past held a whole lifetime of pain, and some days Kayla realized that she wasn’t sure if her future held anything but more pain. She felt alone, trapped in the cycle of memory and sorrow, as if she could somehow find closure by exploring the past.

She reached over to the bedside table and opened the drawer. Inside was a business card and a number she had often contemplated calling. She ran her fingertips over the raised print.

Richard Dawkins, Private Investigator.

Why did she even want to know where her father was? Why did she even care? She assumed he was beating up some other woman, treating her as though she was trash, and using her paychecks to buy his alcohol. She knew that a tiger didn’t change its stripes.

So why did it matter?

Kayla couldn’t exactly figure out why it did, but she knew that at some point, she needed to face her father. She deserved closure, and he was the only person who could give it to her.

She reached for the phone. She didn’t feel ready to make this call, but then again, would she ever be? She had been sitting on that card for over a year and she had yet to use it. Who knew? The guy might not even be around anymore. Kayla was still trying to talk herself out of it even as she dialed the number, and she was startled when someone actually answered on the first ring.

“Ummm…hello. Mr. Dawkins?”

“That’s me. What can I do for you?”

He sounded surprisingly young. Kayla took that in for a moment, and forged ahead. “I am actually looking for someone…I’m looking for my father. He should be pretty easy to find, but I’m not sure that I want to go through the channels myself…I don’t want him to know I’m looking for him.”

“I’m sure you have your reasons for that, Ms…?”

“My name is Kayla Moore.”

“Okay, Ms. Moore. I will be more than happy to track him down. What do you want me to do with the information once I find him?”

Kayla sighed. “I haven’t given that much thought, to be honest…I just know that I want to keep this confidential. He can’t know about it.”

“No problem!” The man seemed to be entirely confident. “Would you like to meet me somewhere tomorrow to talk about exactly what you want and what I can do to help you get that?”

Kayla smiled. This was easy so far. “Yes, please.”

“How about meeting for coffee? There’s this nice little place on the east side of town…”

He kept talking, giving her directions, but Kayla new right away which spot she was talking about. It was the same place she and Dyson had enjoyed an early dinner, where they had seen the couple getting it on in full view of the street.

“I can be there,” she promised.

“Good, Ms. Moore. Bring as much information as you have. I’ll see you then!”

When Kayla hung up the phone, she was flooded with emotion. Did she really want this? What would she do when she found him? Would he ever talk to her in a way that would give her the answers she needed? What would he think of her now – would he still be filled with contempt? Would she remind him of her mother? What would he…

The phone rang. Since it was still sitting right on her lap, she was startled and almost dropped it to the floor. She fumbled with it and answered on the third ring, sure it was the investigator calling back with a question.

“Hello?”

“So you’re awake, you sexy thing, you.”

The sound of Dyson’s voice filled her whole body with heat. She closed her eyes and savored the rush. “Dyson,” she finally said. “You called.”

“Of course I called. A promise is a promise.”

Kayla wanted to keep the warm feelings from last night, but now that she was thinking of her father, it was tough to focus on Dyson. She was happy to hear from him, but she wanted to just be alone with her thoughts.

“How is your day?” she asked, not sure where else to start.

“Good. Busy, though,” he said, and sure enough, he did sound rushed. “Listen, Kayla, how would you feel about lunch tomorrow? I know you might have classes, but I have a day off, and I thought it would be nice…”

“Lunch would be perfect.” She smiled into the phone, heart pounding and her father almost completely forgotten.

“Really?”

“Really.”

She hoped he wouldn’t say anything about the night before. She thought about the kisses, his hands on her body, and the way he felt when he pressed up against her. Everything he had was present and accounted for in that last kiss, when he pushed her up against the wall and showed her just what he wanted. She blushed hard at the thought.

“Okay, then…I’m glad! Remembering the conversation she had had just before Dyson called, she backtracked a bit. “Oh, but wait! I have an appointment at noon. But after that, we could meet. Say, around one?”

“Around one sounds great. Should we go to the same place we went to yesterday? The one with the umbrellas and the exhibitionists on balconies?”

Kayla laughed. “Maybe we can see another show.”

“Here’s to that!” Then Dyson became very quiet, so quiet that she could hear the sounds in the background. It sounded like he was at the gym. “I had a great time last night, Kayla.”

“You did?” she asked. “Even with the drunken girl hanging on you all night?”

She could almost hear his smile through the phone line. “That was the best part.”

Then there was another noise, this one louder, and Dyson cleared his throat. “Okay, so I have to go…but tomorrow, right? Around one at the usual place?”

The usual place. The implications of that made her heart sing. Try as she might to push away thoughts of having someone special in her life, Dyson was finding his way around the wall in her heart. She liked that he was doing it without even really trying – it was just happening. What a wonderful feeling!

“The usual place,” she repeated, and they said their goodbyes.

She listened to the silence for a moment before she hung up. She suddenly wished she had someone to share all this with. A friend, a pet, even a counselor.

A mother.

Kayla dropped the phone onto the bedside table and rolled over on the bed, pulling the pillow to her face. How she could go from elation to such sadness was beyond her, but it was happening. She let out a sob as she thought about the things she couldn’t share with the one person in the world who would have cared the most.