Promise Me (2 page)

They usually smelled like alcohol and cigarettes, and they never really talked to Sara or me. If our mom ever had friends over during the day, she’d usually tell us to go play outside so they could have grown-up time. Mostly we just went to the park with Johnny, and we’d wait until the sun was going down to go home. By that time our mom was either at work or napping. If she was home, we had to make sure we were really quiet, because she’d get upset if we woke her up.

She didn’t yell often, but she did if we woke her up or if we didn’t obey her. Once when we were playing tag near our house, Sara had to use the bathroom. I told her to go in the woods, because Mom had friends over, and I knew she didn’t want us in the house. Sara had started crying, because she hated to pee in the woods, so I told her to go inside but to be as quiet as possible. As soon as she’d stepped foot in the trailer, though, our mom had snapped at her, asking what she was doing. I guess she let her use the bathroom after that, but when Sara came back outside she had a lot of questions about what my mom and her friends had been doing.

I was only nine at the time, but I knew enough to know that the white powder she’d seen sprinkled on the coffee table was drugs. As was the ‘candy’ someone had offered her before our mother had smacked their hand away and laughed about Sara only being seven. She’d told her friend to at least wait until Sara was a teenager. Of course Sara had wanted to know why she couldn’t have the candy right then and had pouted for the rest of the day when I couldn’t give her a good reason.

After Sara had stomped away mad at me, Johnny had just looked at me. I’d met his gaze and had seen the sorrow in his eyes. He’d always hated that I bared the burden for my family, but I did it because no one else would. If I wanted a hot meal and a clean house, it was up to me to make it happen. I didn’t have another option. By that time I knew my mother partied a lot, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. All I could do was what was in my control. She was going to spend our money on what she wanted, but at least she left me the EBT card to buy groceries. If she hadn’t, I wasn’t sure what we would have done.

But it didn’t change the fact that Johnny felt sorry for me. It was funny, because I didn’t expel a lot of energy feeling sorry for myself. I mostly spent my time feeling sorry for
him
. My mother might have been neglectful and selfish, but I truly believed she loved us, and our lives were relatively stable.

Johnny’s life was volatile and uncertain most of the time. Not only did he have to contend with his father being an abusive jerk, his family never had any money. His father didn’t work. Johnny said he got money from the government from being injured in combat, but Johnny and his mother never saw any of that money. She worked as a housekeeper when she could find work, but her income was barely enough to put food on the table and keep them from losing their trailer.

The two of us lived desolate lives in a small town in rural Indiana where most people didn’t have much money, but we were the poorest of the poor. It was all we’d ever known, though, so we leaned on each other, and we survived however we could, which included Johnny climbing in my bedroom window for a solid year after he’d finally told me what was going on at home.

After that first night, we didn’t talk as much when he’d come over. But at least four nights a week, I’d hear his father come home, I’d hear the yelling, and then I’d hear the tapping of Johnny’s small knuckles on my window. I’d just started leaving it open after a while, and he’d climb in without an invitation. Then he’d crawl into bed with me. I’d take his hand in mine, I’d tell him it would be okay, and then we’d lay there awake until the yelling stopped.

Once and a while, Johnny would threaten to fight back against his father. He’d call him a bastard, and say that one day he’d make sure that he never hit his mother again. And although a part of me liked the idea of his father no longer hitting his mother, another part of me wished for a solution other than Johnny getting involved.

He was a sweet, kind, sandy haired boy with freckles and a bright smile. He wasn’t a fighter, but he loved his mother fiercely, and I knew he’d only stand by for so long and let his father hurt her. In my heart I knew he’d fight back before he was ready, and I was afraid of what that would mean.

“I hate him,” he growled when he crawled into bed next to me one night in late March when we were twelve years old.

I looked over to see his hazel eyes so fierce with determination that it scared me.

“Johnny, he’s so awful,” I said, squeezing his hand, having heard his father’s hateful words coming from next door and the sound of him striking Johnny’s mother.

“I know he is, and he needs to be stopped.”

I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. Johnny was barely five feet tall. He had spindly arms and gangly legs. He wasn’t going to stand a chance against his beast of a father, but I knew in his mind, none of that mattered. I could hear it in his voice

“You can’t do it,” I told him, shaking my head.

“I have to do something, Kate,” he said, using the nickname only he’d ever called me.

I’d told him my name was Kaitlyn when we’d first met years earlier, and he’d looked at me introspectively and said, ‘You don’t look like a Kaitlyn. I’m going to call you Kate.’ I knew I should have been offended, because how dare he say I didn’t look like my name. I’d been Kaitlyn since birth. It was my name. No one had ever called me anything else. But at the same time, I was so flattered that he wanted to call me something different than everyone else.

Even then I knew Johnny was special. I’d been drawn to him from the first time I’d seen him tossing a half-deflated basketball up into the air outside of his trailer when his family had first moved in. It wasn’t like I was attracted to him. We were five years old, but he intrigued me back then, so I’d just watched him until he noticed me. Then he asked me if I wanted to play catch. He said we couldn’t bounce the ball because it didn’t have enough air in it, and he didn’t have a pump, but we could throw it back and forth. I remembered smiling at him, because he was so sweet, and he reminded me of myself in the way that he didn’t seem upset about having a basketball that really couldn’t be used to play basketball. He was going to make the most of the toy he had. It was something I’d done my whole life with the few second-hand toys Sara and I owned. I took in his tattered shoes, worn looking clothes, and it was like I’d finally met someone I could relate to.

I didn’t have many friends, because no one wanted to be friends with the poor kid who had a hole in the toe of the only pair of sneakers she owned. But Johnny didn’t seem to care about my shoes, and that made me feel a little less worthless than I’d felt since I’d started going to school a few weeks earlier and realized how different I was than the other kids.

As we’d stood there tossing the ball back and forth, laughing when one of us would drop it, I felt whole for the first time in my life. I had a friend. I was having fun, and that made everything that had been bothering me sort of fade away.

After we’d been playing for an hour, Johnny had told me his name, and then he’d asked me what mine was. He’d called me Kate from that day forward, and for a long time he was the only person who called me that. Everyone else continued to call me Kaitlyn, but to him, I was Kate, and I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. It was our thing, and I loved that we had a thing. It made me feel like we truly were best friends.

“I can’t let this go on,” he told me as we heard his mother cry out, and he pulled me back to reality and away from simpler times before his dad went off the rails.

We cringed together, and I squeezed his hand as I heard Mrs. Evans tell her husband to stop. Johnny buried his face in my shoulder as his father launched into a stream of obscenities, and I involuntarily wrapped my arms around him, holding him close and doing what I could to take some of his pain away, even though I knew I never could. There was just too much of it.

“I want to help her,” he said, his words muffled. “I just don’t know how. I feel like such a coward for coming over here, for running away, for leaving her alone to deal with him.”

“Johnny, you’re not a coward,” I told him, having said the same thing a hundred times before.

He took so much blame onto himself when he had done nothing wrong. We both knew if he tried to stand up to his father, it would end badly. His father’s rage showed no limits, and there was no doubt he’d lash out at Johnny. It was a wonder he hadn’t already.

“I wish she’d leave him,” he said, his voice sounding hoarse. “I hate that she stays, that she puts up with this, that she lets him hurt her. I hate it so much.”

“I know,” I said, stroking his back.

“Johnny!” his father suddenly bellowed, and Johnny went stiff in my arms.

We heard more banging around the trailer as his father continued to yell.

“No, John!” his mother cried out. “Leave him alone.”

“Where is he?” Mr. Evans bellowed.

“Oh shit. He knows I’m not home,” Johnny said, his voice suddenly trembling.

“I don’t know where he is,” Johnny’s mother said honestly, and I could hear the fear in her voice.

“Where the fuck are you, boy?!” his father boomed. “Why isn’t he in his goddamn bed?!”

Johnny’s mother must have responded, but we couldn’t hear what she said. All we heard was a loud smacking sound, and Johnny gasped in panic.

“God, I hate that sound,” he muttered.

“You’re mom’s tough,” I reminded him, knowing she’d dealt with worse over the years. We’d both heard most of it.

“He’s going to be so pissed at me,” Johnny murmured, shaking his head. “And he’s going to take it out on her.”

“It’s okay,” I told him. “It’ll be okay.”

“No, it’s not okay,” he said, his voice cracking. “I should go home and face him. I should just deal with whatever he wants to throw at me. I can’t let him hurt her because of me.”

“No,” I said firmly, wrapping my arms tighter around him. “Johnny, please. You can’t go.”

The whole situation was a nightmare, and it had just gotten worse. Usually if Johnny’s father was going to lash out at him, he didn’t wait so long. There would be a trigger that would set him off when he first got home, like Johnny forgetting to put the toilet seat down or forgetting to wash a glass he’d put in the sink. His dad would get mad, he’d burst into Johnny’s room, rage and scream and curse, he’d tell Johnny he was worthless, and then he’d make him get up and take care of whatever chore he’d missed. But after that he’d leave him alone. That was when Johnny would sneak over to my house.

This was different. Johnny’s parents had been arguing for a long time, and it was nearing the time of the night when Mr. Evans usually got so angry that he left, or he ran out of steam and simply passed out. But then he was suddenly screaming for Johnny for some unknown reason, and I knew all hell was about to break loose. I was just glad Johnny wasn’t home. With the sounds of rage and destruction we were hearing from inside their trailer, there was no way I would have wanted him to face the terror his father would have unleashed on him, because I knew it would have been ten times worse than anything he’d done in the past. His dad was furious.

“Where the fuck are you, Johnny?!” he roared. “Fucking bastard! Show your face, you fucking coward!”

“Stay here tonight,” I told Johnny, without thinking twice about what I was saying and that my mother would kill me if she knew I had a boy in my room. “Please. You can’t go back there when he’s that mad. I won’t let you do it.”

“I can’t–,” Johnny started to say, but then he broke off when we heard his father make something crash to the ground. His mother cried out for him to stop, and then he hit her again.

I saw the internal war Johnny was waging written all over his face. He didn’t want to go home, but his obligation to his mother was pushing him to intervene, to do something. I knew it wouldn’t do any good, and after a few minutes of agonizing internal deliberation, I think he realized the same thing.

“Okay,” he said resignedly.

“Tomorrow, we’ll talk to Mrs. Vine,” I told him. “We’ll tell her everything that’s been going on. She’ll help you. She’ll make sure you and your mom are safe.”

Johnny went stiff again. “What? No, we can’t tell her,” he said, pulling away from me and shaking his head.

“Johnny!” his father bellowed again. “When I find you, I’m going to kill you, you insufferable bastard!”

“John, no!” his mother cried out. “Please.”

“Shut up, bitch!” he growled at her, and then we heard him strike her once more.

She cried out, but then she said something that surprised us both.

“Get out of my house!” she screamed at him, which led to a flurry of insults and arguments, but then something must have happened because everything went silent.

“What the hell is going on?” Johnny whispered to me.

I shook my head, my eyes glued to where the lack of sound was coming from. “I don’t know.”

Then a few seconds later, we heard the front door of the Evans’s trailer open and slam shut. Johnny and I were both breathing heavily, waiting to see what would happen next. Had his father figured out that Johnny was with me? Would he come over to my house to find him?

My heart was pounding as I heard Mr. Evans snarl, “Fucking bitch. I’ll kill you and your bastard son.”