“I don’t want you to think less of me,” Ella said. “Or of her.”
“I’ll try to keep an open mind,” Adam promised. “And you don’t have to worry too much, you know. I know what it’s like to be in a dramatic situation. I know what it’s like when things get out of hand.”
“I guess you did get a taste of that on the island,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you about Julie. But for this to make sense, I’m going to have to go all the way back to the beginning, when we were kids together.”
“Okay.”
“So.” She took a deep breath. “The first thing you need to know is that my parents were drug addicts.”
He turned to look at her. Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn’t that.
“Julie and I grew up in San José,” Ella continued. “We lived with our parents for about half of our childhood, I guess. Not a continuous half. We were always being removed, put into foster care for a while—sometimes together, sometimes not—and then our parents would get remorseful and get themselves into recovery and make enough progress that CPS would restore custody to them for a while.”
“That sounds like a hell of a way to grow up,” Adam said quietly.
“It wasn’t easy,” she agreed. “When you’re a kid, all you want is to make your parents happy. And part of the process of growing up is realizing that they don’t always know what’s best, that they’re just fumbling their way through a lot of the time.” She raked her fingers through her hair. “I guess that’s probably all the more true when your parents are addicts, though.”
“I’d say so,” Adam said, thinking of his own struggle with addiction. He knew that his actions while on drugs had harmed the people in his life. He’d made amends as part of his recovery. But how difficult would it have been if he’d had children during that time? They would have been fucked up irreparably. It was really amazing that Ella was as normal and stable as she was.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said.
“Do you?”
“It’s the same thing everyone always says when I tell this story,” Ella said. “They can’t believe I had to go through that. It must have been really awful. Am I close?”
“Pretty close,” he admitted.
“It wasn’t great,” Ella said. “Not for me or for Julie. But it probably wasn’t as bad as you’re thinking, either. My parents had their issues, bad ones. But I always knew they loved me. The thing that always compelled them to get sober again was when they lost custody of me and Julie. It was like their wake-up call.”
Adam nodded.
“And it sucks that they needed that wake-up call over and over,” she said. “But I don’t know. Kicking a drug habit is pretty hard.”
“It is,” he agreed. “I would know.” He thought of Cody, who had never been able to manage it. He thought of Chase McTerrell, whose desperation for drugs had led to his death.
“We were a good family,” Ella said. “When they were sober, when we were home with them…I loved our family so much.” Her voice broke a little, and Adam fixed his eyes on the road ahead, not wanting to embarrass her by looking at her while she was crying. “It always felt like one day they would get sober for good. One day everything would be fixed, and we’d be a family like all the rest. Maybe we’d still be poor—we’d definitely still be poor. But we’d be together, and nothing would ever drive us apart again.”
“So what happened?” Adam asked gently.
“At first, it seemed like I was going to get my wish,” Ella said. “They both went into a rehab program when I was nine. They got custody of us restored when I was ten. Julie was thirteen. And then…” she drew a shaky breath. “And then we just stayed. Julie kept saying they were going to relapse, that we were going to have to go back into foster care, but it kept not happening. Things stayed good for years. I remember my twelfth birthday. Mom baked a cake, and Dad decorated the living room with streamers…”
She stopped and buried her face in her hands.
Adam took her by the elbow and walked her to the side of the road. “Sit,” he said quietly.
Ella sat. Adam waited for her to collect herself.
“It was the happiest time of my life,” she whispered.
“And Julie?” Adam asked. “Was she happy, too?”
“She was…” Ella seemed to be struggling to find the right words. “She was never happy the way I was. At the time I thought it was because she was older. I thought she knew something I didn’t know. Now I’m not sure. I don’t blame her for what happened next, but I can’t help feeling, in my lowest moments, like she manifested it somehow. Like she was expecting it to happen so much that she actually brought it about.”
“Your parents relapsed?” Adam guessed.
“My father did,” Ella said.
“There’s nothing someone can do or say to make another person relapse,” Adam said. “That’s an internal thing. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“I know it wasn’t Julie’s fault,” Ella agreed. “I know that logically. But it’s hard to feel it sometimes. She was so negative toward him. Toward both of them. And I know she had her reasons—our childhood was really messed up. But they had made such progress. They were working so hard for us. And Julie kept making these negative comments, right to their faces, about how it was only a matter of time before we landed back in foster care.”
“That must have been hard for them to hear,” Adam agreed.
“It was a constant reminder of how they’d let us down in the past,” Ella said. “I just wanted Julie to look to the future. To let us all be happy now. But she didn’t want to do that.”
Adam nodded. “One thing they taught me in rehab was that we couldn’t expect people to be willing to forgive us immediately just because we were ready to face up to the things we’d done. That it might take a while to earn people’s trust again. Your parents would have heard the same thing if they were in a program. They would have been prepared for the way Julie was acting.”
Ella nodded. “I know it’s not the reason Dad relapsed. But it was just so shocking. It had been two years, and then one day I came home from school and he was just…clearly high.”
“Were you alone?” he asked.
“No,” Ella said. “Julie had come home with me. And…and Mom was there too.”
“What happened?” he asked gently.
“Drug-induced psychosis. Dad was raving, talking to people who weren’t there. My mom was trying to quiet him down. She knew—we all knew—that if the neighbors heard what was going on and called the police, there was every chance that Julie and I would be taken away again.”
“What did you do?” Adam asked.
“Julie dragged me to our bedroom and put me in the closet,” Ella said. “She told me to stay there. Then she ran off. I heard her going back down the hall.” She closed her eyes. She was reliving it, Adam realized. He wrapped his arm around her and felt her shiver against him.
“I heard a loud noise, and a scream,” Ella said. “I knew what it was, even though it had never happened before, and I understood right away. I left the closet and tiptoed down the hall and saw my mother getting to her feet. Her forehead was bloody.”
“Your father had hit her,” Adam surmised.
“He had never been violent before. Not with any of us. As bad as things had been, it had never been like that.”
“God. So what happened next?”
“Julie came running into the room,” Ella said. “Dad didn’t see her. Neither did Mom. Dad was coming at her again—I think he was going to hit her again—but he never got the chance. There was a sound like an explosion, and for a minute I thought the house had blown up or something. And then I looked at Julie, and…and she had Dad’s gun.”
Adam felt his eyes grow wide. “How did she know what to do with a gun?”
“She figured it out,” Ella said. “She’d been reading about it online, and then
she took it out to this field a few miles outside of town and practiced on soda cans. She…she made me practice too.” She shuddered. “She was so sure the day would come when we would need to defend ourselves against our parents.”
“That’s how you learned how to use a gun,” Adam said. “The Birkins didn’t teach you at all, did they?”
“No,” Ella said. “I just…I hate telling this story.”
“I understand.”
“I’m sorry I lied about that. I didn’t know what you’d think of me if I told you how I really learned.”
“I don’t think any differently of you,” he said. “You did what you had to do to survive. That’s all you could do.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But maybe Julie didn’t have to pull the trigger that day. Maybe I should have said no instead of going along with her when she told me I needed to learn how to shoot.”
“You were just a kid, Ella. You both were.” Adam squeezed her shoulder.
“Kid or not,” Ella said, “our father died. Julie shot him and he died.”
She said the words frankly. Adam supposed that was the only way to get through a sentence like that—without emotion. “That’s why you don’t speak to her anymore?” he asked.
“No,” Ella said. “It isn’t that.”
“There’s more?”
“The rest…well, it’s definitely not Julie’s fault,” Ella said quietly, looking down at the road beneath her. “My mom committed suicide a few months later.”
“God,” Adam whispered.
“She had lost us to the foster care system again,” Ella said. “Julie had been on trial for manslaughter. She was acquitted, but there was a bit of press coverage, and Mom didn’t come out of that looking very good. And she had lost her husband, and—God, it sounds so messed up to say this, but she loved him. They loved each other. He had never been violent with her before that night, and it was like…everything had just fallen apart so fast. I think it was just too much for her to take.”
“That’s awful,” Adam said. “Christ, Ella, I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
She nodded. “I know most of that isn’t Julie’s fault. But every time I looked at her or tried to talk to her, all I could think about was the fact that my parents were dead. I don’t know what I want her to have done differently. I’m not angry with her.”
“So that’s why you fell out?” Adam asked. “Because it was too hard to stay in each other’s lives?”
“No,” Ella said. “That’s not it either. I mean, it was hard to look at her for a long time. I was really devastated by everything that had happened. But the thing is, I knew that Julie was devastated too. We were moved into a group home together, and once Julie’s trial was over we started to recover from everything that had happened a little bit. We made some friends in the home—at least, I did—and we started to talk to each other about things other than the utter train wreck of our family life. I never told her I forgave her for what happened, that I didn’t hold it against her, but she must have known.” A look of uncertainty came across her face. “I think she knew.”
“It sounds like you were making the best of a terrible situation,” Adam said softly.
“I thought we were,” Ella said. “But that’s the thing. That’s the difference between me and Julie. I always thought everything was going to be okay. I always planned for a future where everything was okay. And Julie—she was always preparing for the worst.”
“Preparing for the worst, still?” Adam asked. “Even after what happened to your parents? Wasn’t the worst behind you at that point?”
“I thought so,” Ella said. “But I had thought that before, remember? I had thought my family was finally happy and functional, and that we were going to be okay. And that didn’t happen.”
“Right,” Adam said. “So what happened once you were at the group home?”
“It was a strict sort of place,” Ella said. “Living there put limitations on our social lives. Nothing egregious, but you know how teenagers are. Julie was held back from the normal teenage rebellion that a lot of kids go through. Her friends from school were partying on weekends, and she couldn’t really take part in it. And then…there was a boy.”
“A boy?”
“A boy she liked,” Ella said quietly. “A boyfriend, I guess. She didn’t tell me a lot about him at the time, and that’s part of why what she did felt so sudden to me.”
“What did she do?”
“She left,” Ella said. “She ran away from the shelter and moved in with her boyfriend. He was a little older—a freshman in college—and he was living in an apartment downtown. He moved Julie in with him.”
“She abandoned you, then,” Adam said.
“Not quite.” Ella’s mouth quirked wryly. “She asked me to come with her. To move in with her and Sebastian. She came to me with this idea one night, and she was practically over the moon. I still remember her bouncing on her knees on the foot of my bed as she told me about it. It was only a one-bedroom apartment, she said, but I would be able to sleep on the futon, and we’d go shopping for privacy screens so it would be like my own little bedroom, and wouldn’t that be wonderful? I’d never had my own bedroom before.” She inhaled shakily. “I swear, it was the happiest I had ever seen her. It was…wildly out of character.” She looked up at Adam. “I thought she’d lost her mind.”
“How old were you at this point?”
“I was thirteen,” Ella said. “Julie was sixteen.”
“Wow. You were really just a kid still.”
“Yeah, and I had never met Sebastian before. Julie had only mentioned him to me a couple of times. And now she wanted to uproot our lives again, only a year after the last time we’d been removed from a stable home, and go live with this guy.”
“What did you say?” Adam asked.
“I told her I wouldn’t go,” Ella said. “It was the first time I’d ever really stood up to Julie. I told her I didn’t want to leave the group home. It was a roof over our heads and three sure meals a day. It was a place where people were strict with us, but where no one would ever hurt us. The women who ran the place…they didn’t love me, but I knew they cared what happened to me. I felt safe there. I wanted to stay.”
“I’m guessing Julie left anyway,” Adam said.
“Yeah, she did,” Ella said. “I guess maybe a part of me thought that if I put my foot down, she would decide to stay, you know? I mean…I had never done that. I had never insisted that we do things my way. I’d always done what she wanted. And for once, I was happy, and I wanted to stay that way. But yeah. She left.”
“And that’s why you don’t speak anymore.” This time it wasn’t a question.
“I can sort of understand why she did it,” Ella admitted. “She was sixteen years old. She’d been starved for love her whole life. We both had. And now here was this boy who was paying attention to her and making her feel special. She wasn’t a robot. Of course it had an impact on her.”
“But you were only a kid,” Adam said. “It must have had an impact on you too.”
“It did,” Ella said. “Even though Julie had moved out—in my mind, she had chosen Sebastian over me—she never gave up on having a relationship. She called the group home every week. She wanted to talk to me, to know that I was all right, but I didn’t want to speak to her. I refused to take a single one of her calls. Maybe on some level I thought that if I showed her our relationship was over, if I demonstrated what she was doing to me, that she would change her mind and come back to the group home.”
“And did she?” Adam asked.
Ella hesitated.
“You don’t have to tell me,” he said.
“I promised you I would.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I understand the nature of the story now. It’s enough. I’ll come to Napa Bay with you. You don’t have to tell me the rest.” He felt awful for insisting on hearing this. It was clearly the most traumatic event of Ella’s life.
; But she was shaking her head. “I want to finish the story,” she said. “I’ve never really talked about this. It feels good to get it out there after all these years.”
“Okay,” Adam agreed. “Tell away.”
She nodded. “Julie did come back to the group home eventually—but not to stay. Two years had passed since she had moved out. I was fifteen, and she was eighteen. Old enough to be on her own legally. And we hadn’t spoken to each other since the day she left.”
“Wow.”
“I let myself be convinced to go and talk to her,” Ella said. “I thought maybe she was here to admit that she’d been wrong about everything. I remember sitting down opposite her at this little table—she looked so different from how I remembered her. So grown-up. She was wearing a suit, and she had all this paperwork…and she told me she wanted to become my legal guardian.”
“You’re kidding,” Adam said. “She must have been thinking about it all that time. The whole two years you were apart.”
“I know,” Ella agreed. “And she came in with all that paperwork, and dressed so professionally. She was prepared to make a case for it. And I think she would have won. I think she would have been permitted to take custody of me. If I had let her.”
“You didn’t want to leave the group home?”
“No, at that point I didn’t care about the group home. The problem was that I didn’t want to go with Julie.”
“Why not?” Adam asked. “Because of Sebastian?”
“No, actually she and Sebastian weren’t together anymore. But I was just…so angry with her.” Ella shook her head. “I screamed at her. I asked her how she could expect us to be a family after all the time we’d been apart. I said—I said that even Mom and Dad had never abandoned us to the system for as long as she had abandoned me.”
Adam let out a low whistle.
“I know,” Ella said, hanging her head. “I was awful. But I was so upset that she thought she could just…come back. After all that time. As if nothing had happened between us.”
“And what did she say?” Adam asked.
“She said the distance between us wasn’t her fault,” Ella said. “She told me she’d tried to stay in touch, and that I was the one who had refused to talk to her. That I had cut her off and not the other way around. She told me I ought to be grateful that she was coming back for me now.”
Escape The Dark (Book 3): Into The Ruins Page 5
