Forgiven (Ruined) (17 page)

             
I wanted to get back into real life.  I'm starting to suspect this is what real life is – one challenge after another. 

             
Let's hear it for fantasy, then.

* * *

             
Friday night.

             
"You can come with us, you know, Willow," my mother says.  She looks fabulous in a tan linen dress, stiletto heels, a simple strand of pears around her neck.  There's not a single thing I own that could make me look refined enough to go with her.  Bruce comes into the living room and takes her arm.  He's been much cooler to me since I went to his office.  Which I don't get.  All I did was fall in love with his son.

             
"I've got homework," I tell her vaguely.  I do.  I just won't be doing any of it.  Carmelita's off for the night.  I finally have the house to myself.

             
The sound of the car dies away while I'm still standing on the porch, breathing in the evening air, watching the last of the light on the water.  It's so beautiful here, and peaceful.  Earlier this year I would go out every morning and stand on the porch and drink my coffee and just breathe in the sea air.  It centered me enough that I was able to face my day then, to put aside the guilt for what I'd done and the ache of missing my father.

             
The past months everything has changed.  I feel like I've been traveling instead of staying home, and I feel like I've been moving very fast.

             
When the cooling evening air has sunk into me, I finally turn and go back inside.  My parents will be gone for hours.  The big house around me is already starting the nighttime noises, the ticks and clicks of evening.  It doesn't feel as welcoming as it usually does.  Kellan having come and gone into and out of this house has changed it.  The reaction of my stepfather has changed things.

             
I stop by the sweeping staircase, one hand on the railing.  I could go upstairs, take a long bath in my sumptuous private bathroom.  Or spend the night looking for apartments I can't afford unless I get a job or make DCTV start paying.  Call Emmy and suggest we get a place together off campus.

             
Call Kellan and suggest the same thing.

             
Or make myself understand that he left.  Without telling me where he was going.  Without even telling me that he was going to go.  I have no way of knowing he wanted to protect me with his actions.

             
Maybe he just wanted to get away from me.

             
There's nothing that says I have to use this opportunity to look through Bruce's office.  But even as I think that I'm moving down the hall, past the staircase, to the back of the house where his windows look into a shadowed garden, big palms and all kinds of beautiful, deadly flowers.  Standing inside his office, I crack my knuckles. Stare around myself.  Where do I even start?

             
With the desk set under the window.  The one where he often sits.  The one where, before Kellan came home, before I even knew about Kellan, I'd sometimes find him, contemplative.  Quiet.  A little sad.

             
Sitting at his desk, looking back at the door, I understand who he is, but can I put myself in his place, this man who walked away from his only son when that son made a mistake Bruce couldn't accept?  Who never visited his son in prison?  Who barely welcomed him home?  He was grateful, then, that I wanted to spend time with Kellan.  He hoped that we'd get along, we're close in age, and in the same household.  That's all Bruce knew at first about our similarities. 

             
I thought I knew Bruce better, before this.  But is he helping Kellan get back on his feet?  Or just getting him out of the house?

             
I open his top drawer.  There's a photo of my mother.  Odd to have it put away, but there are others on the walls.  On his desk.  Top middle drawer seems to be a catchall drawer.  Lots of USB cords for electronics. 

             
The second drawer I open reveals a checkbook.  I know that Bruce has the whole big checkbook, the kind bigger than a notebook, the kind held together with pegs.  But that's at his office.  To pay for his son's living expenses, I fully expect to find a personal account, with a small cheap checkbook cover, something issued by the bank.

             
That's exactly what I find.  I don’t know why it bothers me.  Bruce's business is a corporation.  Even I know enough to understand a corporate account can't be used for personal payments.  So he's created a separate account to pay for Kellan's expenses.  That's good, right?

             
If nothing else, it makes my search easier. 

             
There are some great architecturally beautiful old converted houses on Bee Street, and some interesting lofts and great apartments.  I wonder whether it was Kellan's idea to rent a nondescript cookie cutter place?

             
Or his real estate mogul father's?

* * *

             
Now that I know where he is, what do I do with the information?

             
If he wanted to talk to you, Willow, he would.  He knows where to find you.

             
I did not think this through.

* * *

             
When in doubt, work.  I go in to the station Saturday just to get out of the house. 

             
First thing I find?  There's another letter.  Postmark Charleston.  No photos this time.  The letter reads: How could you do what you did?  You had
everything
.  I would give anything for what you had.  You were the chosen one.

             
It makes me sound like a character from a science fiction movie.  What is it the reader thinks I had?  A normal life.  A mother who was never home because she had to work so much to make up for the money my father didn't make.  He was the basketball coach in the high school, a teacher, but he never advanced, never saved, never really provided.

             
There's no way to write back to this person.  No way to ask Who are you? Why do you think I did what I did?  It was self-defense.  Everything you think I had?  A lot of it wasn't anything anyone wants.

             
Who is it you think I am?

* * *

             
Getting away from thinking only works for so long.  By Monday I can't stand it anymore.  He hasn't contacted me at all.

             
I take a taxi to Bee Street.

* * *

             
From Kellan's doorstep I can watch the sun set.  His neighbors go in and out.  They keep asking me if I want to be let in.  What's the point of having a locked building if just anyone can be let in by just sitting outside on the low cinder block wall? 

             
Maybe nothing is safe.  Waiting for Kellan, I watch traffic, people on foot, dog walkers and runners, everyone moving purposefully.

             
About a dozen times I almost run away.  There's time to disappear down the street, go somewhere and find a taxi, go home.  He's told me to back off, followed that up with silence.  What's the point?

             
"Do you want to go inside?"  a woman asks, heading up the stairs.  Big sunglasses, scarf over red hair.  I shake my head, mutter thanks, and go on waiting for Kellan.

             
And where is he?  If he's working at the VA Hospital, like I suspect, his shift work could be nights for all I know.  He's not in school yet.  He could work any hours.  He could be home right now in his apartment, in bed, asleep.

             
He could be out on a date.  That makes me stop moving.  I freeze in place, as if I can become invisible.  Just in case I'm not only right but he appears right then.

             
He doesn't.  But I'm losing my nerve.  Where do I draw the line between pursuing life and knowing the man I thought I was going to be with doesn't want to pursue life with me?

             
I have to get out of here.  It's 5:30 in the afternoon.  The street is really busy with people on foot and in cars, coming home, going out, dropping off passengers.  I should be able to disappear into it.  Kellan's building is dead smack in the middle of a block, but I can move fast to one end, turn onto a side street, start looking for a convenience store or some other landmark and call a cab from there.
             

             
"Do you need to get inside, dear?"  An older lady, bent and wearing black despite the warm of the day.

             
"I’m OK.  Thanks."  I really am.  Maybe I just needed a sanity check.  Sitting waiting for someone who is not appearing and doesn't seem to want to see me seems to have done it.

             
I get up fast, hands in pockets, heading upstream in the direction traffic is coming from.  I'll call him from home.  Leave a voice mail if he doesn't answer.  Tell him what I think I've found out about Aimee's sister Stacee.  Can't decide yet if I'm going to also tell him I won't call again or text, that I'm waiting until I get some idea from him what he wants.  I'll decide that when I call him.

             
Merging into the stream of foot traffic I swing to the outside of the sidewalk, making room for a young mother with a stroller.  There are parked cars along here, no way to give her more room, but just ahead there's a cross street, my chance to duck out of sight in case Kellan comes along.  I've made it to the intersection where there's a red light preventing my crossing when someone says, "Excuse me."

             
A woman's voice.  Next instant hands slam into me.  I rock forward, one foot slipping hard off the curb.  I catch myself, hands jerking up for balance, one foot in the gutter, the other on the curb.  Cars are passing inches from me.

             
Angry, I'm starting to turn, about to demand, "What the hell?"

             
Hands again.  Shoving hard.  My knee buckles.  The foot on the sidewalk loses purchase.  I pitch forward.  I'm falling. 

             
There's a scream of brakes.  It's not going to be enough, or soon enough.

             
I both feel and don't feel the concussion.

* * *

             
The next few minutes are a confusion of voices.  Legs move around me.  Car doors slam.  My head throbs like I'm in a dance club.  Noise is blurry, uncertain.  My right leg throbs.  My hands feel skinned.  My head aches.  I didn't have a headache today, did I?

             
The voices repeat the same things.  They're not talking to me.  They're talking to each other.  That means I don't have to answer.  I'm not responsible.  I could close my eyes and sleep.

             
Except the voices don't like that.  I hear
keep her awake
and
they're coming
and a voice that sounds all wrong, not human.

             
Oh.  That's probably a siren.

             
My heart jackhammers.  Sleep is no longer a problem.  I'd tell the voice that didn't want me to sleep, if only I could focus.  I'm awake.

             
I'm awake, and I've killed my father.  My mother has just gotten home from work and found us.  I'm kneeling on the kitchen floor.  The butcher knife is close to my hand. My father, no longer the monster who hit me and shouted and raged in the evenings, lost to alcohol and self-loathing, lies on the kitchen floor in a spreading pool of blood.  The same body is my father who l loved, the father who told me I was his Willow tree, that I was strong and brave and could bend without breaking, that father lies on the kitchen floor in a spreading pool of blood. 

             
My mother kneels before both of us.   Screaming.  Her hands are on her face, then on his shoulder, turning him onto his back.  Then on her face.  Then on his belly, trying to stem the blood flow that no longer flows.

             
It's only been a couple minutes.  Later, minutes or years later, someone will explain what the knife hit.  Why he bled out so fast.  Even later than that they will tell me it wasn't my fault.  They'll explain that my father had taken a chemical called bath salts, the same drug that turned a man in Florida cannibalistic.  The bruises on my neck where my father tried to kill me will tell the story. 

             
I'll tell my own story.  That I was just trying to cut him.  I thought if he was afraid I'd kill him that he'd back off, I could get to a phone, call

             
Call 911.

             
They're already coming.

             
That's the sirens.  They're close now.  How is it the voices can't hear them?

             
Because they're afraid.