“Mom, watch,” Millie calls from the stretch of grass behind the house and I tuck my phone under my leg. She throws the ball high into the air and does a little dance as she gets herself into position to catch it behind her back.
“Wow, that’s a pretty awesome trick,” a male voice sounds and I launch forward, my mom instincts mixing with my own startled system—ready to defend her like the night of the break in.
Jet saunters his massive frame into the back yard. Guys like Jet are allowed to saunter. When you’re shaped like a brick shit house you don’t have too much to worry about. I must have been so deep in my own thoughts I didn’t hear the tires on the gravel.
Millie clutches her glove to her chest, her cheeks pink with embarrassment.
“Fire it here.” Jet holds out a hand for her to toss him the ball. Millie’s unsure so I give her a reassuring nod. Jet’s massive but he’s a teddy bear. Large, fuzzy, and mean on the outside but completely squishy on the inside. He has the heart of a protector. He and Xan make the perfect Ryker team to keep their younger siblings safe and on track to becoming decent humans. Well I don’t know about Zeke—he was the most obnoxious ten-year-old I’d ever known. It stunned me to realize that the last time I saw Ezekiel Ryker he was Millie’s age.
Millie throws the ball to Jet and he spins it in his hand, shooting her a warm smile beneath a bushy beard. He’s handsome but not like Xan. Although I’d never seen a man more beautiful than Xan. He set a very high standard for me at a very young age. No guy I’ve ever dated lived up to it, and there were only a couple. Dating while living in an RV with a child is pretty tricky so I gave up. The handful of dates I went on were less than stellar, especially with Vince. The thought of him makes me shudder and grip my cellphone like it’s going to magically start ringing.
Jet lets the ball smack into his palm once more before throwing it behind his back so it pops over his shoulder and sails right into Millie’s glove. Her eyes sparkle with joy.
“Cool,” she says. “How did you do that?”
“I can teach you, if you come to practice tomorrow. I coach the coed team. You should come play with us while you’re here.” Jet shrugs, Millie beams, and I flinch.
We aren’t going to be here for long. Long enough to get the house prepped for sale and my dad back on his literal feet and then it’s highway time again. Hopefully my little problem will have blown over by then, too. Spring is almost over, summer is on its way and that’s when I get most of my sourcing done. I’m already very behind, according to Leslie.
I’m getting a lot of comments asking for new content for Wild & Free, some of them are getting a little aggressive. I’m mostly used to the haters but the people who really get me online are the fanatics. The people who OMG I LOVE YOU SO MUCH on everything I post until I say or make one thing they don’t like and their undying love turns to scathing hatred in a flip of a switch. Those are the people that scare me.
“Mom, can I?” Millie breaks through my thoughts again and I clear my throat.
“You can. We’ll take you in tomorrow. I’m sure Pops would love to see you play too.”
I’m trying. Goddamit, I’m trying so hard to give her what she wants. What she needs. But this place kills me. These memories suffocate me. The road isn’t safe for us right now, but this stagnant and stale small-town life has too many reminders. Reminders of lies and betrayals but at the same time intense passion and deep-rooted love.
My mother was distant and distracted, but she loved me. My father was harsh and strict, but he loves me. My life was not hard or painful like Xan’s. But it was hollow. Sunday dinners were blanketed with polite conversation, covering up festering wounds of insecurity and instability. I knew my parents loved me. What I wasn’t sure of was if they loved each other.
The real question is was our whole family was built on a foundation of lies?
So, when Xan fell at my feet and worshiped me mind body and soul I dove straight into that love hoping it was deep enough to swallow me whole. It was. Fucking hell, it was so deep I couldn’t find the surface.
“That’s great. I’ll expect to see you there.” Jet’s voice shifts from jolly and fun to stern. “Why I’m really here though is on official business to clean up this goddamned mess you made.”
It’s my turn for flushed cheeks and my slippered toe to dig in the crack of the wood porch.
“I was angry.” I have no real excuse, not that I think Jet would accept it. He’s like a human lie detector test that man.
“Xan told me.” Jet sits on the steps and I join him. We were silent for a while, watching Millie try the over-the-shoulder throw Jet did.
“And you didn’t know either?” I ask.
“I didn’t. None of us did. Not even mom. I think Dad was in cahoots with your mom over it.”
A snortle of a laugh burst from my lungs and I lean over to bump his shoulder with mine. “Did you just say cahoots?”
He leans forward, resting his elbows on his massive legs. “So, I have a niece.”
It isn’t really a question, so I don’t answer. Everything’s silent and still in the cool bite of the morning air except my gut, rolling and churning with warning before the guilt oversaturates it.
How am I going to be able to pack up my daughter and leave right after I show her that she has a huge family right here in Raston? Like stepping through a tree line into a wide-open meadow I suddenly realize how much more complicated this is than I originally thought.
“Well,” Jet slaps his thighs and stood. “Get your work gloves, Sweetheart, because you have some shit to do.”
Millie stops and frowns at Jet. She hates swearing. I have no idea where she got it from, because I swear like a drunken sailor who hit the tavern after six months at sea.
“You said a grown-up word,” I say to Jet with a laugh. “She doesn’t like grown up words.”
That’s what I called them when Millie was little. I refused to call them bad words. They aren’t bad. No curse word is bad in and of itself. The intention behind the word is what makes it hurtful. And that’s all to blame on the speaker, not the word.
Jet seems a little shamed which is hilarious on a man of his stature. Jet is an anomaly and I always liked him for it. He always keeps people guessing with his odd mix of traits.
“Is Xan coming out to help?” I ask, casually. Or at least it’s supposed to sound casual.
“Do you want him to?” Jet responds with zero hesitation.
My cheeks flare and I jog up the steps, slamming the screen door behind me to get changed.
#
The midday sun burns my bare shoulders and sweat sticks to my white-blonde hair to my forehead. I wipe at my face and lean against the edge of the greenhouse. Muscles hurt in places I didn’t know I have muscles and Jet moves around as if he’s doing some light tidying, like carrying an eight-foot beam on his shoulder.
“Do you ever tire?” I ask and he grins as he passes, tossing the beam in the trailer he parked in the back yard.
“Yeah, I just don’t like to stop moving.” He gestures to me, leaning as if I were slacking. Pinching my mouth together in annoyance I kick off the wall and get back to work. We’ve cleaned up all the glass—I mean I cleaned up all the glass—and took a shop vac to the stone path that surrounded the little run-down building. I pick little weeds and bits of grass that grew between the stones until Jet scolds me for nit picking.
We’re tearing the thing down so I don’t need to do it one blade of grass at a time, apparently. But the little path is cute, and I remember picking out the stones. Dad took the truck out to the Little Point Creek, which wasn’t little at all, and Mom and I would point out the stones we wanted, and Dad would haul them to the truck. That was shortly after mom was starting her research on climate change and the boreal forest. The greenhouse was a nursery for her trees where she tested out how they adapted to changes in the air quality.
I move to a small corner where a long planter bench sits rotting and overgrow
n with weeds. Beneath it are boxes of tools and supplies my dad was unwilling to deal with. I don’t think he stepped through this door once since she died. Even before that. This was mom’s space. If I was in here with her, I would sit on the stool in the corner and read or draw. I liked to be in here with her. It was the only time I ever saw her softer side, where her shoulders would relax and the tension she carried would drift up to the glass ceiling waiting until just before she left to reattach to her.
A strange sadness hits me and I drag out a few boxes from under the bench. A sadness that my mother was gone, physically, but also that it felt like she was never really here, that I barely knew her. She kept herself locked up and guarded and as an adult I see it so clearly and it breaks my fucking heart.
My child brain assumed she didn’t care about who I really was, just pushed me to be who she wanted me to be. But kneeling in the dirt surrounded by the things she loved I see her more clearly than I ever have. Because people are not simple. They’re not easy to understand. There is so much more to her that I never understood and even now her loneliness hangs heavy in this space, growing in the warmth of the sun, blanketing the dry cracked dirt that still sits in the planters.
Tears burn behind my eyes and a large but gentle hand on my shoulder grounds me in the present. Jet crouches down beside me with concern in his grey eyes.
“You okay?”
I clear my throat and wiped at my eyes even though there aren’t any tears. Tendrils of embarrassment slither under my skin and I nod. Jet doesn’t push me to talk. He simply takes the box of gardening tools from my hands and leaves me alone.
Jet’s always been good like this. Xan is the thinker, Jet is the feeler, and the youngest Ryker brother Zeke—well, I don’t know what he became.
The box left in front of me is filled with random things that don’t have much to do with gardening. It almost feels like a memento box. Small objects, unrelated to each other and at the bottom a folder that I scoop out. The folder falls open and bits of paper flutter down around me. Notes. Two different kinds of handwriting. Almost like a reflex, I check over my shoulder to be sure I’m alone before I read the note. I’m twenty-six years old and my mother’s dead but still I’m nervous about getting caught snooping through her things.
Tonight? It has to be tonight. I miss you so much.
I read the hasty heavy-handed note four time before picking up another, the writing much more delicate.
I saw you with her today. I hate her. I hate that she gets to touch you, to be with you in public, while I hide in the trees waiting for you.
At this point I’m rooted to the ground in my own shock and curiosity, sifting through the notes so fast I pick up only key words.
I wish she was you...I can’t pretend anymore...I’m sorry I got you were arrested...meet me tonight...where have you been...I need you...I love you...I’m done with her...it’s only you, it’s only ever been you.
I crush the notes in my hand and rest them in my lap. Labored and quick breaths pour through my teeth. The shock of what I read makes way for the realization of what it means.
These are notes between my parents. My mother was my father’s mistress. It’s so strange to even think it but the evidence stares me in the face. A time when my mother was passionate and articulate, before my time when they loved each other deeply enough to hurt the people around them to be together.
I can’t stop the flashes of my own life layering themselves on these notes. I wasn’t Xan’s other woman, but our love was still an affair. We were both betraying our parents, defying the social order, going against what was expected for us. My father arrested Xan once—more than once, but once because of me—because he’d caught us together. Xan was eighteen, I had just turned sixteen. Dad arrested him because I was a minor. They didn’t hold him, they had nothing to hold him on as I was over age of consent.
The sound of me screaming at my father from anger and embarrassment and complete helplessness echoes through my ears. What I said exactly isn’t clear but it’s the one and only time my father ever laid a hand on me, grabbing my shoulders and shaking me.
Jet’s footsteps sound on the stone path and I quickly stuff the notes back into the box.
“We’re not taking this greenhouse down,” I say with a hardness to my voice I only get when Millie hasn’t listened for the millionth time.
“Briggs” Jet sighs, but I cut him off with a shake of my head.
“I know I agreed, and I know that a greenhouse can make buyers skeptical if they think they need to use it. But we’re going to leave it up and restore it into a multi-use space. An art studio, a greenhouse, a writing shed, a pottery studio, whatever.”
I dust the dirt off my shorts and when I straighten up Jet’s intrigued which is better than the bored grimace he had while I explained why I changed my mind from the other day and wanted to take it down. Jet is so attentive to detail work so even though I haven’t thought it through for more than two seconds I know I can convince him.
“The skylight, the scenery, the location. Think about it Jet. The people who buy this place are going to buy it for its inspiration. We can give them a space to create an outlet for that inspiration in whatever form it comes.”
Jet scans the space in an entirely different way before he settles on me with a smirk.
“This would make an excellent jewelry making studio,” he says scratching his thick beard.
I laugh and crossed my arms. “You and your brothers gossip like fourteen-year-old girls.”
Jet shrugs and takes a walk around the small space. “Like a tiny house, feel?”
“Sort of, but rustic. That’s what the kids are into these days right?”
Jet snort laughs. “Yeah, no hipster kid could afford this place. You know how much your dad can sell it for, right? Land like this doesn’t exist anymore, it’s been subdivided for more profit.” He clenches his fist dramatically. “Fuck nature. Develop!”
I double over laughing at his absurdity and whack him in the chest. “Jet! Millie is out there. Watch your mouth.”
He joins me laughing, leaning against the bench and we stay there in silence for a long time after the laughter dies away. Jet and I were friends almost immediately. He became the brother I never had long before Xan became the love I wasn’t allowed to have. He always said that it was because he knew me right away.
You’re basically the girl version of Xan, he said to me once. I know you already. I like people like you, I understand your particular brand of fucked up.
At the time I was offended. Xan was a stubborn opinionated prick who shut out the world with anger and arrogance. That’s what I thought before I punched him in the face. When I really got to know him it didn’t take long to figure out what Jet meant. He was guarded, terrified, desperately trying to hold together his family and protect his siblings. He had more responsibility and pressure than anyone his age should have ever had. His parents were too busy falling apart to notice his anger.
It was something I understood. I didn’t have five siblings and the social misfortune of living in East Raston. I was the only child in a loveless middle-class marriage, I was also guarded and terrified and desperately trying to keep my parents together by being perfect at everything. I thought if I lived up to all their expectations and fixed all the things they criticized me for then we would be happy. That they would shower me with the loving affection and doting attention that the world would have you think a wholesome middle-class family has for each other. But my parents were too busy keeping appearances to notice my loneliness.
Then in a perfect storm of situation and circumstance I crashed heart first into Xan’s waiting arms and there was no place on the entire earth I belonged as perfectly as I did wrapped up in him.
As Jet wanders around the space making verbal plans my mind flutters back to the notes in the box that my mother and father wrote each other years ago. The words are full of emotion, the writing heavy and the language passionate. I feel the an
gst of forbidden love on each crumpled paper.
What happened to them? Maybe it was all in the chase. Once they ended up together it was no longer exciting, no longer forbidden.
I can’t help but wonder if that would have been me and Xan if I stayed. If things were different and I hadn’t listened to Mom—if I hadn’t been shipped out of town like a harlot off to have a baby in shame—would we have become my parents?
The hitch in my stomach says yes. We could have been two people drifting apart but held together only by the thin fragile thread of our daughter.
I have no idea how to feel about this entire complicated situation but the thing that keeps me moving forward stays steady and true. Millie.
She deserves to be the most loved child on the planet. I kept her away from the people I assumed didn’t want her.
No matter how uncomfortable it might be for me, no matter how hard I have to work to get to a good place with Xan, I’ll do it for Millie.
But the moment her happiness is threatened, I won’t hesitate to pull her out of Raston. I will do anything to protect her. Especially from a family that doesn’t want her, because I know how it feels to be rejected by a Ryker.
Chapter Nine
XAN
My parents’ house is the biggest in Raston’s west side, one of the first homes built here at the turn of the 19th Century when the town was settled. That’s how long my family has lived in this three-story house and as I stand on the sidewalk scrutinizing the peeling yellow paint, I wonder how it fell into such disrepair.
I mean, I know how I just don’t know how I’ve never noticed it. The shutters are cracked or missing. The porch is creaky and desperately in need of a stain. The light beside the door doesn’t work and I don’t remember it ever working. The glass is streaky and shingles fraying.
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