Steadfast (True North #2)

by Sarina Bowen

  She was crying absolutely silently.

  Acting on instinct, I hiked my body closer to hers, tucked her hips into my groin and dropped an arm over her waist. It was the classic position for offering comfort. Too bad I’d fucked up both our lives so completely three and a half years ago that I had no meaningful comfort to offer.

  Her next sob was not at all silent. It was a raw, primal sound.

  And it tore me right in half.

  “Shh,” I said, kissing her shoulder. That was all I had for her. A “shh.” Useless.

  “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  I couldn’t really disagree. She shouldn’t be here in my room or in my life. Crying was a pretty sane reaction. “I know it’s hard. Some shit is just sad, and there’s nothing you can do.” I felt my own failure in my chest like a knife.

  “I’m so angry at you,” she sobbed.

  “I know, baby. I deserve it.”

  “You refused my letters.”

  Shit. I pressed my hand against her back. “Soph, I didn’t throw them out of my cage like an angry monkey, okay? I was detoxing. Cold turkey. And there were all these things I was supposed to take care of—a visitors’ list and forms.” I swept her silky hair off her neck and squeezed the muscles in her shoulder. God, the view of her body lying here was so familiar it ached. But the ache was like a sore muscle after a workout—necessary and not altogether bad. “See, I was busy throwing up for three weeks. I couldn’t take care of business like I was supposed to.”

  Sophie seemed to calm down enough to listen to me. She sniffed quietly, and her breathing slowed.

  “Nobody really explains anything in there, either,” I said, whispering. “I hadn’t signed for your letters yet, and I wasn’t sure if I should. I didn’t think I deserved anything from you. And when I finally got well enough to ask somebody about them, they said it was too late. And I figured it was just as well. I wasn’t any good for you, anyway.”

  I could hear her trying to calm down. She took a deep, slow breath. “But nobody else was good for me either. I spent weeks wondering where you’d gone and what had really happened. Nobody ever answered my questions. And nobody wanted to hear that I was sad. No one will say your name at my house.”

  Who could blame them?

  “And you wouldn’t speak to me. That was just cruel.”

  The knife in the center of my chest gave a twist. All I could do was hold her a little closer and apologize again. “I’m sorry I left you all alone. But I chose that shit I was putting up my nose over everything else. I didn’t know how to stop.”

  Her voice was raw when she spoke. “You could have told me you needed help.”

  As if. Now I told her a big lie. “If I’d been able to admit it, you would have been the one I’d told.” But the truth was exactly the opposite. Sophie was always going to be the last person in my life to know. I’d have let everyone else down first. She’d always put me on a pedestal I knew I didn’t deserve. But it had been my plan to stay there. I would have never let her see my ugly side if I could help it.

  Turns out I couldn’t.

  “I loved you so much,” she said.

  Loved. The word made my eyes sting. Her use of the past tense wasn’t a shock. But it hurt all the same.

  Maybe she was waiting for a response from me, but I didn’t have one to give. And now I was just spent—drained both in body and soul. I lay there just holding her, struggling to keep my eyes open.

  “I need to go home,” she said eventually. “My father will freak out again if he comes home from second shift and I’m not there.” She sighed.

  That woke me up again. “Are you safe there?”

  She sighed. “Yeah. It was just a slap when I got in his face.”

  Damn it. Wasn’t that how it always began? “Why do you live there, anyway?”

  Her voice was flat. “My mother is not doing well. After sophomore year, I moved home to help her out. It’s a long story.”

  That was the only kind we had anymore.

  Sophie extracted herself from my embrace, sat up and flung her legs over the side of the bed. Then she grabbed her tangled tights off the floor and began pulling them on.

  I stumbled to a standing position and shook out her dress. She took it without meeting my eyes. I pulled on my jeans over nothing and zipped myself up. The aftermath. Sophie and I used to curl up together in my bed and fall asleep. This felt tawdry.

  After slipping on her bra and dropping the dress over her head, she sat there on the edge of my bed a minute longer, biting her lip.

  I sat down beside her.

  “Sorry I brought my bag of crazy to your door,” she said softly, her sad eyes finding me again.

  “My bag of crazy barely sneezes at yours,” I whispered. “And I hadn’t had sex in over three years, so…”

  She let out a strangled laugh, but her eyes got wet again. She jumped to her feet. “I’m going to go now. Maybe I’ll see you at the church.” Stuffing her feet into her shoes, she grabbed her coat off the floor. “Goodbye, Jude.”

  I stood up as she put her hand on the door. She hesitated for just a second, so I stepped into her space and I kissed her on the forehead. “Take care of yourself.”

  Her sigh weighed a ton and a half. “You too.”

  Then she was gone. And I was left with a bed that smelled like her and no reason to hope that she’d ever be back.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Jude

  Cravings Meter: 5-6

  “Who had a good week?”

  Very few hands went up in the basement of the church.

  “Who had a tough week?”

  I found myself raising my hand, participating for the first time ever. But how could I not raise my hand? This had been one of the longest weeks of my life.

  The discussion leader nodded. “That’s how it is the first week of December, my friends. The holiday season is hard. Every single year. The expectations. The family togetherness.”

  “The drunk uncles. The eggnog,” a guy in the front row put in. He received a quiet chuckle for his efforts.

  “Who wants to share how their week was difficult?” Ms. Librarian’s eyes locked onto mine. “Would you like to say something?” she asked me.

  That’s what I got for raising my hand for the first time. “My name is Jude, and I’m an addict. Started with opiates. In prison I switched to heroin.” I cleared my throat. “The cravings were bad this week…” That wasn’t a good explanation for the problem, though. “I mean… they’re always bad. It’s just that this week I felt like I forgot why it matters so much. It was harder to remember why I fight them at all.” Fuck. That was a little more honesty than I needed to spew. That was the trouble with participating. I could never figure out where to stop.

  “Okay,” she said. “Why do you fight the cravings? Tell us your goal. Saying it out loud helps me sometimes.”

  “I don’t want to go back to jail,” I said. That was a good enough reason for anyone.

  “Sure, but what do you want instead?”

  “Uh.” I regretted raising my hand. “I want the cravings to stop. I want a better job and a nicer place to live. Fuck, I might as well ask for a purple pony.”

  Several people laughed, but not Linda Librarian. “There are so many people in this town that have all those things. Why not you?”

  “Because I have a felony conviction?” Now I was scowling at a nice older lady. Nice. Note to self: do not engage. That way lies the abyss.

  “Be kind to yourself,” she said. “Especially this month. I’ve made a list for myself.” She pulled a piece of paper from her back pocket and read from it. “Watch an old movie. Eat a good meal. Get outside. Stay away from toxic substances and toxic people.”

  “Amen,” muttered someone else.

  I stopped listening. Some days I was able to get on the bandwagon and take some hope with me when I left this room. But today wasn’t going to be one of those days. The week had been a str
ing of long hours in the garage, each one of them tainted by the itch. It was like a fly buzzing in my ear. I’d swat at it, occasionally thinking I’d won. But a few minutes later it would be back, the sound of its tiny wings like torture.

  Sophie’s visit wasn’t exactly to blame. Her brief, explosive presence couldn’t make my body want drugs any more than it already did. But it had depressed me. Hearing her cry wrecked me. It forced me to see for myself how badly I’d hurt her. I couldn’t fantasize about her happy life in the big city anymore.

  I’d always thought that one of us could end up getting what we wanted. But even that was too much to ask.

  At the front of the room, someone prattled on about finding his purpose in life. I looked at the clock on the wall, counting the minutes until the hour was over. The week may have been grueling, but Wednesday night was almost here.

  Before she’d left my room on Friday night, Sophie had said, “Maybe I’ll see you at the church.”

  I’d thought she’d say please don’t come to the church. But she didn’t.

  And now the hour of power here in the basement was almost done. I sat up straighter in my chair and waited to be dismissed. Whether it was a good idea or not, I was heading up to the kitchen after this. I told myself that I needed to see her face and to know that she was okay.

  But, fuck. I really just wanted to see her.

  “Let’s not let this month undo all our good work,” the leader was saying. “We can handle this. It’s December second. We’ve got thirty days of the holiday season to survive. Next week I’m bringing cookies to rally us. But not holiday cookies! Fuck that.”

  She got a chuckle for dropping an f-bomb. But there was something else she’d just said that suddenly had me paying attention. It was December second.

  Sophie’s birthday.

  I sat there in my folding chair wondering how Sophie celebrated her birthday these days. The first time I ever watched her blow out a candle she was turning seventeen. That was six years ago, but it felt like a lifetime. We’d just started seeing each other, and she’d made sure I knew it was her birthday. I’d brought a fancy bakery cupcake to school in a plastic box so it wouldn’t get crushed. At lunch we sat in my car so I could light a candle for her and taste the frosting on her lips after she ate it.

  We’d been impossibly young.

  Twice more after that we celebrated her birthday together, each one involving greater amounts of nudity.

  While I was busy getting a little lost in my head, the meeting broke up. I stacked my folding chair with the others and followed everyone up the stairs. Maybe Sophie wouldn’t even be in the kitchen tonight if she had birthday plans.

  At the top of the stairs I headed down the hall toward the kitchen door. I peeked through the oblong window and saw her in there, spatula in hand, standing over the stove.

  The sight of her flooded me with inappropriate relief. It was stupid of me to care where Sophie spent her birthday. In fact, I ought to be rooting for her to have a night out somewhere with friends. But the sight of her made me happy. I lived for Wednesdays and Thursdays. Pathetic as that was, a weekly glimpse of Sophie (along with some quality time with the Shipleys) kept me sane.

  Instead of pushing open the kitchen door, I turned around and walked out of the church. It was five minutes after five. Where could a guy find a birthday cake at this hour?

  I didn’t have my car with me, so a trip to Foodway wasn’t going to work. And since Colebury, Vermont was postage-stamp sized, there was really only one option.

  Trotting the two blocks toward Main Street, I found the storefront I was looking for. Crumbs looked like an expensive little bakery. It hadn’t been here before I went to prison. And I was pretty sure I was on a fool’s errand. Indeed, when I reached the door, the little front seating area was dark. The sign in the window indicated they’d closed at five. But I still saw lights on in back. So I knocked on the front door. When nobody came, I knocked again. Harder.

  Finally, a harried-looking woman in an apron emerged, squinting at the front to try to figure out who was pounding. She walked over to the glass door but did not open it. “We’re closed,” she mouthed.

  “I really need a birthday cake,” I yelled. “Please?” I gave her my best harmless smile, but that wasn’t easy for me. I’ve never looked harmless.

  The woman wavered. I saw the indecision flicker in her eyes. “Come around back,” she said finally.

  She didn’t have to ask me twice. I jogged around the building, finding a metal door in the alleyway. She opened it, still looking worried.

  “I’m sorry,” I said immediately. “I forgot someone’s birthday, and she’s really important to me.”

  The woman rolled her eyes. “If this is some kind of trick, it’s pretty much the lowest thing I’ve ever heard. And karma is my middle name.”

  “Karma and I are well acquainted,” I assured her.

  She smiled. “When I said karma was my middle name, I meant it literally.”

  “What?”

  She tapped the nametag on her apron, which read K.K. “This stands for Katy Karma. Look.” She grabbed her pocketbook from under the counter and flipped it open.

  I peered at her driver’s license. Sure enough, it read Kathryn Karma White. “Shut the front door,” I teased.

  “Weird right? So which cake do you want?” She beckoned me over to a refrigerator with a glass door. “There’s a Black Forest cake—that has cherries in the middle. Or German chocolate. Both are twenty-five dollars. You got cash?”

  Shit. “I have ten bucks cash and a credit card.”

  She sighed. “Cash register is shut down already.”

  This was never going to work. Sophie, I failed you again. Story of my life. “Okay—I’ll leave my card here, and you can charge it tomorrow. And I’ll leave my ten bucks too.”

  She heaved a big sigh. “If you get me fired…”

  “I know. Karma.”

  “Which one do you want?”

  “Black Forest,” I said quickly. “She likes cherries.”

  “Lemme get a box.”

  Ten minutes later I was walking back into the church, feeling kind of stupid. Sophie probably had an entire birthday party planned. But hey, nobody could have too much cake. The other people in the kitchen would probably like it.

  “Please tell me that’s a pie and that Ruthie Shipley made it.” Father Peters came toward me in the hallway, his grin wide.

  “Sorry to disappoint.” His smile was contagious. “This is second best.” I glanced toward the kitchen. “It’s Sophie’s birthday. During cleanup, would you mind…” I held out the box. “It should be, um, from all of us.”

  Father Peters took the box from me, looking thoughtful. “I didn’t know it was Sophie’s birthday. I was with her mother a couple of hours ago, and she didn’t mention it.”

  “December second,” I said. “I’m positive.”

  The old man nodded slowly. “All right. I’ll dig up a candle.”

  Candles? Fuck! “Thank you, sir.”

  I washed my hands in the men’s room and then ducked into the kitchen. Sophie didn’t even notice. And that’s as it should be.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sophie

  Internal DJ tuned to: Ingrid Michaelson’s “Be OK”

  It hadn’t been easy for me to walk into the church kitchen tonight. My face was burning before I even preheated the oven.

  I’d gone to Jude’s place and begged him for sex. Then I’d burst into tears.

  Who does that?

  So much for showing him what he’d given up. The only thing I’d showed him was that I was nuts.

  To make matters worse, I’d had to arrive early to start the lasagna. It was a Community Dinner favorite, but it took a lot longer to make than our other dishes. So I had that much more time to let my embarrassment marinate. When five o’clock arrived, I browned sausage meat while watching the door.

  As always, I both dreaded and craved the moment that Jude w
ould fill the doorway. Lately I was even worse than I’d been in high school, when I used to live for the day’s first glimpse of him. Later—my first year of college in Burlington—I used to wish away the week’s worth of classes so that I could duck into his car on Friday nights and spend the weekend in his bed.

  Those were the days when I felt invincible. It had been Jude who finally convinced me to talk to my father about music school. “You can either keep doing what your parents want, or you can be a singer. At some point you have to choose,” he’d pointed out.

  He wasn’t wrong. So I’d screwed up my courage and brought up Juilliard to my father. To my surprise, he’d made a deal with me: if I completed two years at the University of Vermont with excellent grades, he’d pay for Juilliard, as long as I saved up to help with my New York City rent.

  And I was ecstatic. Suddenly, a life onstage seemed possible. The next few months were so thrilling that it took me a while to notice that Jude wasn’t doing so well. He’d seemed to retreat into himself. And eventually I’d figured out that the time he spent with his sketchy friends involved substances other than cheap beer and the occasional bong.

  Once I even asked him point blank if his friends were into pills. I’d seen things passed from hand to hand. But I was still trying to give Jude the benefit of the doubt. He’d brushed aside my question. “There’s some recreational stuff. Nothing to worry about.”

  So I didn’t.

  My bag of crazy sneezes at yours, he’d said the other night. But my training in social work had taught me that anyone can be tested by life. Nobody is invincible. Jude hadn’t handled his pain in a very productive way, but he also hadn’t had any help.