Sadie's Mountain (30 page)

I find a path that we used to take from his house. I know where I’m going to go. The cave. The one that Dillon used to take me to that had the remains of some animal in it. That’s where I’m headed. I’m pushing through the branches. Listening to my breaths. Seeing them puff out of me under the lamp light of the moon. I turn and run toward the cliff. The cave is just right under the lip of it. I find it covered by overgrowth. I don’t care. I just want to be safe. Alone. 

I rip away the foliage. Duck under the lip and cast myself onto the ground. I roll into a fetal ball. I’m rocking back and forth.
Break his link with me. I’ll break more than his link with me.
I’m going to expose him and when he comes after me, I’m going to kill him. I will do what I have to do to survive. If that’s the only way to be free.

“Sadie,” I hear Dillon calling me. I don’t want to talk to him. “Sadie!” He sounds frantic. I remember him sounding like this before. It’s like a flashback. Everything is a flashback tonight. I can’t believe I let Donnie get so close to me again. He touched me. He was savoring me in that bathroom. He’s never going to let me go.

“Sadie, darlin’. Please!” I don’t want to scare him. He’s been through enough.

“Dillon,” I say, but not loud enough. “Dillon!” I shout and stick my head out of the cave. He’s past me on the trail and he turns around. I go back into the cave and sit down. I hear him walking toward me. I keep my head down. My heart beats through my chest. What am I going to say?

“Sadie, don’t do this to me again,” he says, hastily sitting down in front of me. Grasping my face between his long thin fingers. “The last time you ran off...,” he starts.

“I know, Dillon. I’m sorry.”

“You asked me to tell you,” he says. “In the restaurant.”

“Tell me. It’s okay,” I say, as he puts his legs on either side of me.

“After I touched you, you ran. But I didn’t go after you at first. I was really pissed off at myself because I’d always promised to treat you right. I spoiled it. I felt so guilty. I didn’t even realize until I did it. I was euphoric after kissing you. And you were letting me look at your panties,” he says, with a slight grit to his teeth. He’s remembering them bloody just as I am. I can feel them pushing up against my hip through the pocket in my jeans. “I just reached down and swatted the mosquitoes. It didn’t feel wrong until I saw the look on your face.”

“I remember. I felt like we’d gone too far. I felt guilty.”

“I couldn’t see where you ran to. But I had this knot in my throat. Like I knew something was off. I can’t explain it. When I kept calling you, I was sure you’d come out. Smack me on the chest and pout. I could say I was sorry and then you probably wouldn’t have let me kiss you again for a long time,” he says, with a slight giggle. “I would take that scenario in a minute if I could.”

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” I say. “How there’s this whole other life we could have lived if I hadn’t been raped.”

“That’s exactly how I see it, Sadie. Like the life I wanted with you was robbed from us.”

“I know. But we can make it right. I’m here now. I’m not going to leave you again. I can’t.” He looks down, rubs his chin.

“I went to the shed. I thought I’d heard something in there. But it was locked so I left. I went down to the creek, but you weren’t there. I checked this cave even. I was looking for it right now. But I couldn’t find it,” he says. “When I came back, the shed door was wide open. That’s what I was thinking about today. You said ‘the shed’ up on the mountain. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe that it was my shed. The one me and Donnie built with our dad,” he says, shaking his head.

“When I found you, baby,” he says, and puts his fist up to his mouth. He takes my face again in his hands, lightly, lovingly. “You were,” he stops to take a breath. “You were floating face down, bumped up against a log. I ran into the water. Pulled you out. You were so cold.” His eyes change. They look vacant. Numb. “You were dead.”

 “What did you do?”

“I did CPR. I learned it at school the year before. I worked on you for probably three minutes before you took a breath. I died a thousand deaths in those three minutes.”

“Three minutes,” I say.
I had no idea.

“And then your daddy whipping you. All the blood in the house. I didn’t see all the blood out in the dark. You were covered, I was covered in it.”

“Where did you go when Momma made you leave?”

“I slept on your front porch,” he says. “I couldn’t leave you. Your momma found me out there in the morning. Told me you were okay, to go get cleaned up. She hugged me while I cried. It wasn’t the manliest thing I ever did,” he says, with one of those laughs used to mask the sound of tears stuck in the throat.

“I’m sorry, Dillon,” I say, running my fingers along his wet cheek. I guess I hadn’t realized how much pain Dillon experienced over this. The guilt he feels is just like mine. “Please, don’t feel guilty. You saved my life.”

“I wasn’t quick enough. If I’d ‘a ran after you right away.”

“You can’t think that way. It happened. There’s nothing that’s going to change it. There’s no reason to go back to that day over and over. The past will never change, Dillon.”

“The past will never change,” he says. It seems like a light bulb moment for him.

“All we have is the future,” I say. “Just give me time to sort this out. But you can’t fly off the handle like that again. I need you to be calm if you’re going to help me. Okay?”

“I’ve never been that angry in my life, Sadie. It’s like the past caught up with me and exploded
inside my body
.” Inside my body. That reminds me.

“Do you want a baby, Dillon?”

“What?”

“I just have this weird feeling like I’m going to have one. I haven’t taken a test or anything. It’s only been a few days but I feel like my body is shared with someone.”

He blinks a few times, leans forward and kisses me then. It’s that kiss where he’s asking for something again, and I want to give it to him. That’s when I remember the verse in the Song of Songs.

I pull away from him and say,

“My dove in the clefts of the rock,

in the hiding places on the mountainside,

show me your face,

let me hear your voice;

for your voice is sweet,

and your face is lovely.”

I don’t wipe his tears. I let them fall down on me like love—absorb them into my skin, into my soul. “Promise you’ll never leave me,” he says, his voice and face so earnest, so true.

“Never,” I say, and he pulls me toward him by my hips as I wrap my arms around him and kiss him, slowly, purposefully to show him I mean it. Here in the spot where we used to giggle and play rock, paper, scissors, Dillon and I are going to make love for the second time.

We stand up and undress each other. There’s an intensity between us as we do. His eyes never leave mine. We have a shared past. A shared future.  It’s chilly out as he lays our clothes on the rocks. But I’m so connected to him that I feel heat coming up through my pores. He sits down and eases me into his lap so that I’m resting on his thighs and open to him.

He readies me with is hands, the tips of his fingers, his mouth until I’m begging him for more. He fills me up, slowly, deliberately, as I offer him my bare neck to tease with his warm lips. With every movement, he fills my spirit with a radiant heat.

“Look at me, baby. Please,” he says, tilting my chin down to his gaze. My lips tremble as he looks right into the deepest part of me, the most wounded part, and loves me anyway.

He holds my back with both hands so that our chests are pressed together.  I’m looking into his blue eyes as the light from the moon flickers around inside our cave. He kisses me, our tongues dancing, whispers sweet nothings in my ear, and rocks with me slowly until I know I’m going over the edge with him. My body is shared with someone. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Chapter Twenty-Four—The Overlook

As we walk along the old path, my hand entwined in his, we are careful to avoid the smoldering shed that neither of us wants to deal with right now. I’m thinking about what we’ve just done.
Who does a thing like that?
But for us, it was so easy. It’s like we are in our own world, just he and I. A world where rosebuds bloom into beautiful flowers, not withering and dying like in my dream. The outside world is where sheds burn down, where shadows come to life and hurt people. Inside our room, in the cave, we are an unattainable force of nature.

 I wish it could just be the two of us. That it could be simple. That there could be no secrets between the two of us. That’s my goal: to be free and able to have the life with Dillon that we both deserve.

Once again, we’ve used no protection. It’s nearer to when my period’s due, so it’s likely that we could have a baby. I want to smack myself on the forehead.
What am I doing?
Bringing another life into this tragic situation. It’s definitely not the smartest move I’ve ever made. But, that makes me resentful because Dillon and I should be parents. We should have all of those things just like normal people.

Donnie has taken so much from me. Not this, too. I will have babies to fill up that house. I don’t want to wait. I want it all—now. I won’t let Donnie take another thing from me.

 As my mind travels back to the cave, blood pumps through my veins like medicine for the faint of heart. I can still feel him. Everywhere he’s touched is tingling. When we share ourselves with each other like that, there’s nothing that can disturb the peace we feel in our hearts. It’s perfect. Untainted.

Thinking of hearts has me remembering the little one embedded into the white pile of sheets on the floor in our room. How odd it is that both brothers made me bleed. But the experiences cannot be more different. I’m in possession of evidence of the first. This could be just the thing I need to catch him so we can be free.

That’s when it hits me. I know where I’m going to hide the evidence. The letters Dillon wrote to me before I moved to California are hidden under a board in my old bedroom closet. Tomorrow I’ll have to figure out who I can trust to take the panties to so that they can be tested. For now, they are going in that old cigar box just nestled under the wood plank.

“I’m just going to run inside for a minute and say goodbye to Missy and the boys. Will you wait for me a minute?” I ask, just outside of my childhood home.

“Sure,” he says, visibly puzzled that I don’t want him to come in.

I run up the steps and into my old room. I’m moving old boxes of my clothes out of the way so I can get to the board that pulls up in the back left corner of the closet floor. I stick my fingernail under the plank and wiggle it free. Inside is the brown metal cigar box. I pull off the lid and stare at the love notes from Dillon wrapped in a green ribbon that he wrote to me while I was disoriented and shattered. It was the only way he could communicate with me. So, he did it often.

I pull the panties out of my pocket and look at them in the light. Panties an innocent girl wore right up until the end. They are a light pink satin with deep stains the color of ripe beets. Hard spots that have congealed and dried up like a dead rose petal—sort of like the dead flowers from my dreams. The right side is cut by his knife. The left side is ripped and jagged.

 It makes me wince. I can feel his knife pulling against the fabric. The warm trickle of blood down my leg right after. I can feel the cold blade pinching across my neck. Feel my neck weeping warm blood down the front of my dress. I wrap them up inside themselves and place them in the box.

After I’ve secured them under the plank, I scoot out of the closet only to find Dillon standing behind me. I jump like a kid just caught stealing money out of their daddy’s wallet.

“What are you doing?” he asks, his voice soft but confused. Oh, crap!

“I was looking for some clothes,” I try.
I feel so guilty.

“Why’d you ask me to wait outside?”

“I thought I’d just be a minute,” I say.

“I wish you’d just tell me, baby. Aren’t you tired of hiding everything from me?” he asks, disappointedly, as he walks away. I shuffle behind him. I say nothing as I wave goodbye to the boys, Missy, Dale, and the kids. I’m sure they want to know what happened to the shed. I’ll just tell them tomorrow.

We are silent all the way home. I reach for his hand. He feels stiff when I bring his hand to my lap.

“After the wake, you’ll tell me everything?” he asks, unsure.

“Yes.”
Oh, God!
I did promise him that.

“What if you don’t have everything sorted out by then?”

“Well, that all depends on your ability to control yourself.”

“I’ll work on that, if you’ll work on trusting me with the truth.”

“Deal,” I say. I feel him relax in that moment. He feels like him again—not a stiff ball of resentment.

After we take a bath in the too large tub, he sings me to sleep. Soft cooing lullabies I can imagine him singing to our child—children even— in a life I am working toward deserving. He’s worth it, and I want to believe I am, too.