CHERISH (77 page)

Beckett

“
Beck
.” Her eyes are pleading, and I’m not sure I’m even still fucking alive.

“It’s okay, babe. We’ll figure it out.” The words fall flat from my lips. I can feel the darkness rising, a sinking, lifeless feeling I get just before I go lights out.

What the psychologist told me when I was fourteen was that the blackouts are a defense mechanism. Something developed when I was a kid when things happened that should never happen. Things you don’t want to know. Or remember.

The blackouts started when I was eleven—a year after I came to be in the kind and horrific care of the State of Ohio.

I woke up that morning in a house with my newest nine foster brothers and sisters.

Two of whom found it amusing the first day I was there to strip me naked and put me in a closet with a bucket of their steaming shit and lock the door.

The darkness is what I named it. It starts as this odd sense of detachment like I’m watching my life as a movie. Then, I see a black halo form around my field of vision. It narrows and narrows until I feel like I’m suffocating; then the curtain comes down. The world turns black, and then I wake up a few minutes later—or once, a few days later.

When they clamp the cuffs on her tiny wrists at the loft, I almost take them out right there. Luckily, somewhere in my fire-seared brain I know I can't help her if I’m locked up too.

So, instead of going all first-blood, I grab a shirt, throw myself into the Suburban and follow the police car with her frightened eyes looking out the back window to make sure I’m following. On the drive over, I call Louis. I’m not sure what the fuck is going on, but with his security and investigational resources and police contacts, I know I need him.

And I’m right.

Inside the station, my guts feel like they are rearranging themselves inside my body as I watch them take Promise to an interrogation room, her eyes darting over her shoulder at me. No way is this happening. No way it’s true.

An interminable hour later, Louis comes through the doors to the back room at the station. He gives me a tentative wave across the noisy room filled with desks. Cops are chatting with each other or sitting at their desks, tapping away on keyboards. Louis eyes me over the space between us with raised eyebrows as if to say,
stay put, I’m coming, I’ve got your back
.

He moves slowly and comfortably around the station. Shaking familiar hands and greasing the way before he settles in next to me in the little glass-walled room where my world just blew up all over the damn walls.

“
Fuck. What the fuck
?” I can barely form the words. I need info now.

Louis holds his hand up mid-chest and gives me the signal to keep calm. “Okay, I made some calls.” He raises that hand with a smile out the windows in casual greeting as a few plain clothes officers pass by. “They have evidence that the fire and the gas leak in the loft were deliberate. Right now, they’re investigating as a possible arson.
But
—” He stops short and looks at me to make sure I’m with him. I can see something in his eyes I don’t like already. “If they prove that someone set the fire and rigged the gas leak, that’s a murder charge.” I’m surprised when his voice cracks, but I’m too enraged to think about it. “They’re questioning Promise. They think it’s her, man. I’m fucking sorry.” I see something flicker in his eyes like he needs to say something else, but it’s too late.

The darkness slams shut and everything goes quiet.

“You okay?” Louis’s voice sounds far away.

“Yeah.” I shake my head and try to focus. Everything has a white haze around it for a second before I remember where I am.

“You went dark there, man. You gotta hold on.” His voice lowers to a hissing whisper. “You can’t go all Rambo in here.” His head swivels around, looking out the windows of the small room.

I turn my focus to the room’s insides. Both chairs and the table are now in various states of disassembly. They were fine when I walked in.

I know I did it, and I don’t give a shit. I look at my hands. My knuckles are split on my left hand, but I don’t feel anything. “What the fuck is going on? Why her? Why do they think it was her?”

“Man, they can’t tell me everything. But, I got some intel when I called Detective Prestwick. He moonlights with me on security stuff, so I pressed him as much as I could. Promise was the last one in the apartment?”

“What the fuck does that matter?” My fists tighten. I hate that I think about the moment she went back in the apartment that night to get her backpack. She was messing around in Dad’s little kitchen by the stove. “I could have been the last one there, too.
Jesus
Louis, this it complete bullshit. They have no reason to suspect—”

The way he blinks and rubs the scruff of his salt and pepper beard tells me there’s more.

“You gotta maintain, you hear me?” Louis sets a hand on my shoulder, and I can feel the heat coming up, threatening to ignite.

I bite down on my lower lip. The twitches take over. My head begins jerking and twisting until stars dot my vision.

“She’s got a
history,
Beck,” Louis says quietly.

I try to process those five words.

“We all have a
history
, Louis.
Fuck that
, I have a history.”

“No man,
listen
to me.” He swallows hard, his eyes wide. He hates whatever it is he’s about to tell me. “She’s a firebug. Three for sure when she was younger. I don’t know the specifics, but I pulled all the records I could get my hands on, then called Prestwick because there were some juvenile markers there without details. She’s got a
history,
man. You hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?” Louis locks eyes with me, and I want to punch him.

“But, fuck. Louis . . .” I run my hands over my head, back and forth, trying to get the pounding to stop. Trying to get everything to stop.

“There’s more.” Louis lowers his voice.

I roll my eyes and give my friend a dead stare.

“Fuck you, Louis.” I know it’s not his fault, but I hate him right now.

“The detectives been calling her the last two days. Trying to get her to come in on her own. Left her five messages. I take it she didn’t tell you?”

“No. She didn’t.”

I think about when she came out of the bathroom with her phone last night, her eyes as wide as moons. I asked her if she was okay, but she broke into a huge grin and ran over and jumped on me, and I forgot about everything else as her lips attached to mine.

I’m on my feet. I’m sick. As sick as I’ve ever been, and I can feel flames wrapping around me with every step I take out of the room.

Louis is saying my name from somewhere behind me, but I’m halfway down the hall. I hear people talking and the soft clicking of keyboards, the chuckles of folks clearly not here for the same reason I am.

How could she do this? I’m not talking about the fire. How could she hide this from me? Everything we’ve talked about.

Just when I thought I knew every kind of pain, Promise is taking me deeper. Showing me new levels of pain from which I will never recover.

It’s like I gave her a map to the places inside of me where she could hurt me the most, then handed her the razor and told her to start cutting.

People around me are going on with their day as I try to find my way out. I can’t be here. That black halo is forming, and this time, I know it won’t end with just a couple of broken chairs.

As I turn the corner and see the red EXIT letters, a voice slams into me from a room on my right, and I wonder if God is having fun.

“I
know
.” Jeremy fucking laughs. His sick, self-righteous voice has fire coming up around me. “I hated to have to do it, but it’s for her own good.”

“What the fuck is for her own good?” My voice is as dead as I feel. I wonder if he can feel all the ways I want to cause him pain right now.

Two officers, leaning against the wall listening to this piece of human shit spout off, jerk their heads around from Jeremy to me, then quickly back.

He flinches as I take over the doorway. I swallow the spit gathering in the back of my throat and feel like I’m going to combust.

“
You don’t know her like I do
!” Jeremy’s squeaks like a hamster and tries to look me in the eye but fails. He looks at the two confused uniforms glancing back and forth between us.

“Who’s this?” The uniform closest to the door points at me.

“That’s
him,
” Jeremy squawks.

The dark-haired uniform takes another step forward, and I square off. Right now my focus is on the venom leaking from the serpent’s mouth across the table, but I’ll take on Goliath right now if anyone tries to fuck with me.

“It’s okay.” Jeremy leans back in his seat, hands behind his head once he sees he has armed guards to back him up.

I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste blood to keep from launching into him and tearing flesh from bone.

“I bet she never told you, did she? About everything.” The fucker smiles at me.

“What
the fuck.
Are. You. Doing. Here.” I may not be able to tear his throat out with my teeth right now, but he sure as shit isn’t getting me to back down.

“
Here
, see for yourself. Give that to him.” He swats a stack of papers across the small table. The stack is a half-inch thick, held together in one corner with a black, metal office clip.

“Man, you okay?” Louis’s frantic voice introduces itself from behind me.

I don’t acknowledge him as the officer picks up the bundle of paper and sets it into my hand. I’m having a hard time breathing as I see her name on the reports.

For the next three minutes, I absorb this new hell that engulfs my life. I’m reading and want to kill someone.

“Suspect admits to having doused the paper towels with gasoline, and then struck a match and reentered the residence at 21164 Tennent Street where she currently resided with Alan and Patricia Reynold’s as a ward of Child and Family Services of State of Ohio. The fire consumed the garage and a portion of the residence of a one Ms. Caroline MacGuire.”

The walls are bleeding, the floor is moving. My feet are no longer attached to my legs.

The memory of that night drowns me even as I pretend this isn’t happening.

The night when I followed the two punks to the back of the house, I smelled it first, and I froze. Every nerve ending in my body lit up like the fire that consumed my skin the night everything in my life went to shit.

By the time I came up to the back of the house where they had turned into the gate, the flames were already curling around the back of the house across the alley from where Promise lay, unknowing her fate.

I heard Caroline McGuire’s scream. The frantic pleading. More screaming. Her terrified voice is rising over the crackling flames, begging for someone to save her son. Her son that was trapped in the back room of the house where the fire lapped at the roof, and the devil laughed at me.

I made a choice. I sacrificed Promise to save that little boy. I remember telling her, ‘I’m sorry,’ as I exploded into a run toward the burning house. I broke the back window of the engulfed room with my bare fists and crawled inside. The familiar blast of heat is hitting me at the same moment my lungs remembered how it felt to gasp and be denied the comfort of breath. My mind spinning as I flashed back to when I held the lifeless body of my sister with my father screaming that it was my fault they’d died.

You made the wrong choice. You killed them!
His words still echoed.

I saved Caroline McGuire’s three-year-old son that night and threw Promise to the wolves.

I’m still thumbing through the report in my hands. It seems like hours, but I glance at the clock, and I’ve been reading only a couple of minutes. It’s incredible how much information the brain can absorb in such a short period of time.

The reports are copies of copies, and the scrawled letters are missing tops and bottoms, fading into the white paper, but somehow my brain is able to insert the missing parts, and then I see it.

How could the worst day of my life get worse? How deeply does God hate me?

The two words that send me falling back against Louis.

“Camden Apartments.”

This isn’t fucking happening.

“Camden Apartments. Units 13, 23 and 27 damaged. Fire originated in apartment 13 and spread upstairs to the unit where a Mr. And Mrs. Fitzgerald—”

I heave the report back at Jeremy as his face twists into a sadistic smile.

He dodges the paper projectile with a blink. “Something wrong?” He smirks, and Louis tries to catch me as I’m halfway across the table, my hands finding his throat. I want to hear the sound a neck makes when it breaks more than I want to breathe.

I’ve done things. Things I’ll never tell anyone. Things the government told me to do. Encouraged me. Sanctioned me.

The uniforms are on me, Louis has me in a headlock.

“Get him out of here or he’s going to end up in cuffs,” one of the officers yell.

“I got him.” Louis’s voice struggles with the effort of dragging me backward.