Craving Constellations (22 page)

Eventually, I stopped crying and just lay there, staring at the baseboards in the hallway, my mind finally going blank when I couldn’t take any more.

That was where Casper found me hours later.

I didn’t sleep. I just laid there, the last five years playing and replaying in my mind. What I hadn’t told Dragon was the agony of falling down the slick carpeted stairs in Tony’s parents’ house. I hadn’t told him how I’d crawled to the phone and called an ambulance myself. That I’d laid on the floor until they got to me and how they had broken down the front door to get to me because, at that point, I was in too much pain to get to the door to let them in. I didn’t tell him about the guilt I had about walking on carpeted stairs in nothing but my socks. If I would have just put on shoes, I wouldn’t have slipped, and our child wouldn’t have been born too early to survive.

I hadn’t told him about how scared I was when they loaded me into the ambulance, when they moved around me using medical terms I’d never heard, but instinctually, I knew they were bad. I hadn’t told him how when we’d reached the hospital, I’d told them Tony’s phone number, so they could call him, but he never came. I’d been out of my mind with fear when they took me directly to the labor and delivery floor instead of keeping me in the emergency room.

I hadn’t told him that my doctor was the only person in the sea of faces I’d known. I’d used her as a talisman as they’d stripped me down and got me ready for a C-section. I’d stared at her mouth as she spoke to me, but I hadn’t heard a word she’d said, and eventually, they put a mask over my face, and I didn’t see anything more.

I hadn’t told him how I’d begged and pleaded with the nurses to go see my children on a different floor of the hospital, how they’d told me I had to wait. I didn’t explain my escape from the labor and delivery floor to the upstairs nursery. The nurses had eventually given up on trying to keep me in bed, and after that first trip, I’d had a nice orderly who came to my room with a wheelchair whenever I’d asked, day or night.

I hadn’t had a chance to explain how alike our children were or how terrified I was for both of them. That when I’d looked at them I couldn’t see any difference in the frailty of their bodies even though I knew Trix was thriving and Draco was not. About how I’d only held him twice, and each time a nurse said he had to go back in his bed, I’d plotted murder. I didn’t have a chance to explain how thin their skin had been, how tiny their ears and fingernails. How Trix’s eyes had looked brown from the very beginning, but Draco’s were that slate blue color that eventually turned into something else.

I hadn’t had a chance to explain how badly I’d wanted my pop. How I’d never let myself cry until that final day because I knew once I started I wouldn’t be able to stop. I hadn’t had a chance to tell him that Tony visited me only once in the hospital. Me—not the kids. And
I’d never forgiven him.

I hadn’t told him how badly I’d needed him. How I’d wanted him to show up without me having to call him. How I’d waffled back and forth about calling him and eventually came to this conclusion: I’d never see him again. He would never know that he had any children. He would never know the absolute gut-wrenching, chest-hollowing, full-body grief that I would feel. He would never feel it. As much as I needed him, as much as I wanted him to come and save us, I had to give him the peace of never knowing. So, that was what I did.

When I heard someone come in the front door, I didn’t have it in me to get up off the floor. I hoped Vera wouldn’t just let Trix barge in here if they were back. Dragon must have called her earlier, or she would have been here hours ago.

I heard the thick stomp of motorcycle boots coming toward me, and I didn’t care. I was done. I had nothing left to give.

“Brenna, what the fuck happened?” Casper asked me as I looked up into his pretty blue eyes. He crouched down beside me and slid his arms under my body, lifting me gently. “Grease! Get in here,” he called toward the living room as he walked back that way.

I’d known Grease for a very long time. He was a partner in crime when I was a kid. Though, once he started being interested in girls, that all changed. But I knew him. To his bones, I knew him. Though I hadn’t seen him in five years, I knew the look on his face when he caught a glimpse of mine—fury.

“Give her to me, brother,” he rumbled as he took me away from poor Casper.

The kid was probably wondering what the hell was going on.

“Call Poet and Vera and get ’em over here.”

“I’m okay,” I whispered as he sat me at the kitchen table and tilted my chin up.

“Baby, you’re not okay. You got one hell of a shiner. I’ll get some ice for it,” he told me as he kissed the top of my head and headed to the fridge.

I was freezing. The comforter was still wrapped around me, but I couldn’t get warm even though I could feel the sweat sticking my hair to the back of my neck. I wasn’t looking forward to having the frozen peas he pulled out of the freezer anywhere near me.

“You gonna tell me what happened? Like to know why I’m killing a man,” he told me as he sat in a chair, facing me. His knees surrounded mine as he reached up and held the peas wrapped in a kitchen towel against my face.

“Don’t do anything. This is between him and me. It’s none of your business.”

“You think I’m gonna let this go? Fuck that. You got bruises anywhere else?” he asked me as he tried to unwrap the blanket.

“Quit it! No, I don’t have bruises anywhere else. For God’s sake, he smacked me once. That’s it! Then, he took off.” I pulled the comforter back around my shoulders.

“The fuck happened, Brenna? Dragon’s been walking on fuckin’ clouds the last couple of days even though he just got the shit kicked out of him less than a week ago. I was assuming that was your doin’. But now…” He shook his head.

“Is Casper calling my pop and Vera?” At his nod, I nodded back. “I think we better wait until they get here before I explain. I’m not doing it more than once.”

I was emotionally and physically exhausted. I was so exhausted that I didn’t know how much longer I could stay upright at the kitchen table. I made Grease follow me into the living room, but even though there was room on the couch for both of us, he dragged a kitchen chair with him and swung it around to straddle it backward.

I lay curled in the corner of the couch, my face resting on the bag of peas, until Vera and Pop showed up within minutes of each other. The expressions on the faces of Pop and Vera couldn’t have been more opposite. Vera looked at me with a sort of resigned pity. It was the look of a woman who had seen her fair share of swollen cheekbones and tear-drowned eyes. It was a look of commiseration.

My pop’s face looked like I imagined the wrath of God would. His eyes were narrowed, his lips were thin, and his hands were tapping against the sides of his legs as if playing an imaginary piano. I had only seen his hands look like that one time before—when I was eleven and a rival gang dared to breach the front gate and killed one of the recruits.

Grease spoke up, breaking the silence, as we all just looked at each other. “Still the fingers, Poet. Let’s hear her out before we kill him.”

“Son, you think I’m gonna let you do shit? You’re outta your mind,” he replied. Before I could breathe a sigh of relief, he continued, “He’s mine.”

As they started talking, Vera broke away from Pop’s side and slid in next to me on the couch. She put one arm around my shoulders, and as she pulled me in close, she ran her fingers gently down the side of my bruised face. “I’m sorry this happened, baby girl.”

I shook my head at her. “Where’s Trix?”

“Tommy Gun’s old lady’s got her. She was at the club, so I had her come on over to the house. Trix is fine. She’s playin’ outside.”

I nodded and started to speak, but Pop cut me off as he pulled another chair out of the kitchen.

“What’s goin’ on, Brenna? Ain’t never seen that boy hit a woman in his life. Just don’t have it in him.”

I cleared my throat. “I know. I never thought he would either.” I glanced at Grease, who stared back with no expression on his face.

My head was on Vera’s shoulder with her cheek resting on part of my hair as she spoke from above me. “They all got it in ’em. Just takes more for some than others to make it come out.”

“Yeah, I’d say this was, um…more,” I told them, bracing myself for the fallout of what I was going to reveal.

As I told the story, I started at the beginning, and I didn’t leave anything out. I told them about the night we met, how I’d wanted to stay, but I didn’t. I told them about my decision to marry Tony and the repercussions of that. Some of the story Pop and Vera had already heard, but it was all new for Grease, who had started pacing restlessly. I told them all of the things that I wished I had told Dragon. About how much I missed my son. About how after we were home from the hospital, I’d wake up at night in a cold sweat because I’d thought I could feel him moving around in my belly.

When I started speaking of Draco, I heard Vera sob once above me, but when I tried to lift my head, she just held me closer. When I told Pop how much I missed him, he cleared his throat and walked out of the room and then all the way out of the house. Eventually, he reappeared, once again stoic.

I didn’t leave anything out, even the confrontation between Dragon and me that morning. I told them everything. I wasn’t sure what I was trying to do by being so transparent.

I was so mad at Dragon. I was in shock that he’d hit me and hurt that he’d left me lying on the floor. But overwhelming all of those feelings was a knot in my stomach that reminded me how badly he was hurting. I didn’t want them mad at him. I didn’t want them looking for retribution.

I wanted them to understand all of the things that led up to this overwhelming betrayal. This wasn’t a smack because I’d looked at another man or burned dinner. He hit me because right now he was out of control, completely lost and hurting, and I was the reason. He was lashing out because it was too much to deal with. I understood it as much as I hated it.

He was like a wounded animal, and I was the hunter who’d wounded him. I didn’t know if he would ever forgive me, and that hurt worse than the betrayal of my swollen face.

If he’d wanted to hurt me, really hurt me, he could’ve. I had no illusions that if Dragon decided to beat the hell out of me, there was nothing that could have stopped him. He didn’t. He hit me once, almost in reflex, and then pulled back as if he were surprised. I’d seen the look on his face.

Even though I knew all of these things, even though I knew that there was nothing left on earth that would make him swing his arm back and bring it across my face again, I didn’t know if I could ever forgive him. That hurt worse than the thought of him never forgiving me.

I hit her. I fuckin’ hit her.

Fuck me.

When I left the house, I called Casper to come keep an eye on things. As furious as I was, I wasn’t about to leave Brenna unprotected. Unprotected—what a fucking joke. I wasn’t any better than her douche bag of an ex-husband. I’d seen the look on her face.

When I’d opened up Brenna’s box of
important papers
, I thought I’d just grab Trix’s birth certificate and head over to the club to meet with our lawyer. The suit we did business with was a good guy, but he didn’t usually handle custody shit. For what we were paying him though, he could hire outside help.

I was getting annoyed with the amount of shit Brenna had in the box when I finally found it, all by itself in a brown envelope. I stuffed everything back in the box and carried the certificate into the kitchen. I wanted some fucking coffee, but I couldn’t look away from Anthony fuckin’ Richards’s name on my child’s birth certificate. It burned in my gut that Brenna had allowed it.