by Sara Arden
“Is that what you think I’m doing? In case you hadn’t noticed, this isn’t about either one of us. It’s about her.” He nodded down at the quivering bundle in his arms.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She felt so awkward, out of place. There was nothing for her to do with her hands. Her arms. She’d never felt so...alone.
“Did they call you?” Emma interrupted them from the doorway. She looked harried and scattered. “They called me, too. Something about your grandmother? I’m on her contact list.”
“Yes.” Gina shook her head.
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. Amanda Jane wanted Reed. So I called him.”
Emma pulled her close for another hug. “You mean you didn’t... Oh, honey.”
“I didn’t... I wanted... I...”
“You, you, you what?” Emma repeated back to her and cast her a knowing glance.
Gina realized that was the problem. All she could talk about was herself. She’d thought that she was this paragon of virtue raising her sister’s child, not taking things for herself—but all of this had always been for herself. A way so that she didn’t rot in the shadows. So she was important. So she was someone.
She was the good girl gone better. That was her role.
Reed had threatened that.
She didn’t like herself very much in that moment. Not at all.
“Let me take Amanda Jane,” Emma said.
“She wanted Reed,” Gina said dumbly.
But when Emma reached for her, the girl went willingly into her arms. It seemed that Amanda Jane wanted everyone but Gina. Maybe she could feel the turmoil that roiled inside of her.
“Reed—”
“We’re not going to do this here,” Reed said in a clipped tone.
“You don’t have to do anything. Why don’t you just go get some coffee and bring Amanda Jane a hot cocoa?” Emma offered.
“I know where they keep the good stuff.” Gina walked down toward the cafeteria and hoped that Reed followed her.
“This wasn’t okay,” he said, his voice calm and steady.
“I know.” She did, she’d known it while she was doing it. It wouldn’t have hurt anything for her to just tell him.
“And you did it, anyway.”
She stopped to face him. “I did and I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Why didn’t you just call me?” He searched her eyes. “To what? Prove that you didn’t need me?”
That was exactly why. She hated how well he knew her. Even more, she hated the pain that flashed in his eyes when he read her answer in his.
“I don’t care if you need me or not.”
“Don’t you?” she dared.
“No.” His voice was clipped, cool and composed. “Compared to that girl in the waiting room? Not one bit. If you’d have been thinking of her instead of yourself, you would’ve come and talked to me. We could have decided together—”
“And where have you been for the first six years of her life? Why is it suddenly okay for you to just show up and think that you’re entitled to make any choices for her just because you contributed some genetic material?”
His expression closed like the gates to some fabled city. They locked her out, showed her nothing of the man underneath. That was how she knew she’d wounded him.
“If I’d known...”
“If you’d known you’d what?” she spat, unable to hold back. “You’d have gotten high some more? You’d have come back to this town thinking that she needed you? You’d have worked some crap gas station job until you realized you couldn’t take care of anyone, let alone yourself, then you would’ve started dealing. So don’t tell me what you would have done, Reed. Because you wouldn’t. The only way that you’re the person you are now is because of what happened to you. If you’d have come back before that, Amanda Jane and Crystal both would be statistics.”
The venom that came out of her mouth now, she couldn’t believe how easily she took aim at the soft places under his armor and how cruelly she lobbed the spears.
“Whether you like it or not, I’m her father. Maybe you’ve taken care of her, good care of her up until this lapse in judgment, but you’re not her mother.”
“No, her mother is dead. My sister is dead.”
“Why do you think you’re the only one allowed to feel pain?”
“I don’t.” Only, maybe that was how she’d behaved. She wasn’t ready to see that.
Because she’d built it up in her head that it was Gina he wanted, not Crys. It was how she’d always wanted it to be. For him to have wanted her, to think that she was too good for him, too pure. That maybe she’d go on and do something better and he’d settled for Crys. That was really what was going on in her head.
She hated being forced to see this side of herself. It was ugly and wrong. She loved Crys. She loved Amanda Jane.
And she loved Reed.
But this wasn’t how things were supposed to happen.
She’d been so sure if she just did everything that she was supposed to, if she was good enough, that everything would work out to some happily-ever-after. Gina realized that she’d only been playing at being jaded the same way she’d been playing house.
“I’m sorry.” She deflated and leaned against him. “I’m so sorry.”
For a moment, she didn’t think he was going to return the embrace.
“Please don’t shut me out. Don’t leave me out here alone. Not now.”
His arms tightened around her and she buried her face in his chest, inhaled the safe, familiar scent of him.
“I can do better,” she said.
His fingers curled around the nape of her neck and he didn’t say anything.
She touched her lips to his cheek, to his mouth, looking for some connection, some reassurance that everything was okay between them. But it wasn’t.
He released her and put an obvious, calculated distance between them. “This isn’t how it works.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Whenever you feel something that you don’t like, or don’t want, you come to me. You want your hit so you don’t have to feel it.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You’re saying that you’re my drug? Please. That’s a little arrogant, don’t you think?” Her tone was sharper than she meant, but his rejection stung. It seemed that it was still like when they were kids. She was always chasing and he was always running away.
“Not me. I think it would be like this with anyone for you. Sex is great. Touch feels good. And when you’re screaming and clawing your way toward bliss, you don’t have to think about what’s wrong, what’s ugly or what hurts. All you have to do is fly.”
“Screw you, Reed.”
“I don’t think so. Never again.”
Her eyes widened. “Why would you say that to me? We were building something and you’re going to throw it all away because I made one mistake? I said I was sorry. I don’t know how many times I can say it that will make you believe me.”
“I believe that you are sorry, but that doesn’t erase what you did. Sorry fixes everything? That fixes what you said to me? That makes it okay that you want nothing from me as a parent for Amanda Jane except to write the checks.”
“You were the one who insisted we move in. You were the one who demanded I quit my jobs. You were the one who tried to buy her a pony. How does that have anything to do with me? Or this? You did that.”
“And you said that you didn’t want to need me.”
“I don’t understand.” Gina was lost and hoping desperately he’d lead her to what he was trying to tell her. She wanted to understand. She wanted to get it right.
“No, I don’t guess that you would.”
He turned on his heel and headed b
ack the way they’d come, leaving her standing there, broken and alone. Just like she always feared.
CHAPTER TWENTY
REED WOULD HAVE almost given her everything, but he could see now that she couldn’t be trusted with it—his heart. His hope. His future.
Because she didn’t want it. She didn’t want to need him the same way he needed her.
She didn’t want anything he had to offer her.
But she wasn’t going to keep him from Amanda Jane. She could do as she liked, until it came to his daughter. That was just it; it was obvious that Gina didn’t think of him as Amanda Jane’s father. He was just this interloper who happened to have what they needed to get by.
He’d begun to think that because she’d turned to him time and again that she’d started to rely on him, trust him—need him.
But it had all been dress-up in his head.
She’d never trust him.
And she had no reason to.
He was good enough to fuck, but not good enough to trust with anything important. Like her heart. Her well-being.
His daughter.
He took a deep, fortifying breath before going back into the waiting room. Amanda Jane was already upset. She didn’t need to see him upset. He could be strong for her.
When he went back into the room, she was sleeping on Emma, her first and middle fingers tugging on her left ear.
The sight of that kicked him hard in the solar plexus. It made him think of all those moments he’d already missed and why.
Maybe they’d been right to keep him away.
That thought rang with such clarity and truth and it threatened to drown him with it. His eyes burned and his chest pulsed, as if there was something trying to crawl outside his rib cage. He could only imagine that it was his heart.
“Is she sleeping?” he managed to ask, because he didn’t know what else to say.
Emma nodded and shifted, moving as if to hand her back to him.
Suddenly, it was too much. Crys hadn’t trusted him with their daughter, Gina didn’t trust him, these people didn’t want him here. So why was he fighting so hard to stay?
He shook his head. “I can’t.”
Reed fled the hospital as though the hounds of hell were nipping at his heels—and maybe they were. Their jaws were made of his past sins and their teeth of his regrets.
No, not his regrets.
His hopes.
There was nothing crueler than the sharp stab of hope, especially when it was in vain and he knew it.
This was what he never wanted to feel again, this was what he couldn’t stand digging into his soft places.
He wanted to be numb to it, wanted it to fade into some dusky oblivion where the pain wasn’t as sharp and his lens not so clear. It wouldn’t hurt as much if he couldn’t see it, if he wasn’t aware of every minute detail of his shortcomings.
As he walked, he thought about the needle and that was a bear he couldn’t fight. But a few shots of hot whiskey relief wouldn’t be amiss.
Fuck it.
Fuck it all.
He found a bar and went inside. It was one of those back-alley entrances and the bar was above one of those kitsch-charm downtown antiques shops. But upstairs it was all hardscrabble bikers and hipsters pretending to be cool.
Reed bought a double, but then said, “Just give me the bottle.”
He took it to a dark corner of the bar, away from the jukebox, away from the pool tables, away from everyone who’d get some wild hair to talk to him. He didn’t want to talk—he wanted to drown.
But only for a little while. Only until he could breathe.
He supposed that made no sense to anyone but him. The boa constrictor around his chest would release her hold when he’d numbed himself just a bit. Just enough to get her to let go so he could exist in his own skin.
For Reed, that was the worst place to be.
No matter how high he climbed, he couldn’t shed the image of being poor white trash from the wrong side of town. It wasn’t just Gina who made him feel that way or anyone else—it was himself.
He’d tried to outrun it, outspend it, outdo it. But he never could. That label was tattooed on his forehead and followed him like a ticker tape parade wherever he went.
Amanda Jane didn’t need that.
Gina didn’t need that. Gina had shed hers like a skin, like the skin of the snake that wrapped around his neck and chest, that choked the life from him. That stuffed him full of hope all the while it sucked him dry.
He could leave them and they’d be better, he decided. Everything would be better.
Promise you won’t leave me, Amanda Jane had said.
The girl was six; she didn’t know what was good for her.
But he did. What he was doing right now was a choice. He was choosing to drink, to numb his pain. And that was not the man he was now.
He handed the bottle to a group sitting by the door on his way out.
Reed had been given a chance to have the life he’d dreamed of and the first time things got rough, he’d fled, hidden.
She was right not to trust him.
Gina was right.
He was going to tell her so tomorrow. He’d give her the money, the house and whatever she wanted. He’d go far away where he couldn’t taint anything else, where he couldn’t wreck anything else.
Screw you, Gina had said.
Yeah, he’d screwed himself this time.
* * *
GINA COULDN’T DO this again.
She wouldn’t.
She was thrust back in time to sponging Crystal’s fevered brow, all the nights she’d spent making sure her sister didn’t aspirate her own vomit, waiting up for her wondering if this would be the night she never made it home and they’d find her in a ditch somewhere, needle still in her arm.
Or they’d never find her.
Someone would take advantage of her, she’d end up running with the wrong people.
After their mother died, she used to stay awake at night and watch Crystal sleep, just to make sure she was still breathing.
Just to make sure that she wasn’t going to die too and leave Gina all alone.
She could almost stand to do it if her vigil had done any good. If staying up and watching Crystal’s chest rise and fall with steady breath would’ve kept that breath in her body. Would have somehow anchored her.
But it didn’t.
There was nothing she could do. All she could do was keep her vigil, waiting to bear witness.
Gina had had enough of bearing witness, of watching those she loved die, lives wasted. She wouldn’t do that to herself again and she wouldn’t do it to Amanda Jane.
Don’t leave me.
Never.
He couldn’t keep that promise. No one could. A person shouldn’t be allowed to speak of things like promises and hope when they couldn’t follow through.
When he finally came through the door, his eyes were haunted and dark. But he was one-hundred percent Reed.
Maybe she had judged him too harshly.
He went upstairs and closed the door. It took her about a minute to decide to follow him.
“Are you okay?” she asked, sitting down on the edge of the bed.
“Yeah.”
They sat together in that awkward, dark silence for a long time.
“I’m sorry,” Gina said finally. “For everything. Maybe I expected too much.”
“Are you sorry for expecting too much or for making decisions about my daughter without even talking to me?”
She cringed and turned her head. She deserved that. Being sorry didn’t change the fact that she didn’t trust him. Gina knew she’d been in the wrong even while she was taking action, but that hadn’t
stopped her. She’d been so afraid to trust in him, afraid to surrender control. Afraid to give him what was rightfully his, a say in his daughter’s health and well-being. Her fear didn’t outweigh that, no matter how much she wished it did.
“For everything,” she said finally.
“I’m sorry, too. I didn’t expect you to be waiting up for me.” He was quiet for a moment. “Actually, I didn’t expect you to be here at all.”
His words were telling. Another proof, as if they needed it, that they didn’t have the foundations they needed not just to build a relationship, but a solid family unit. “After you left, I didn’t know what to do. I was so afraid for you. For me. For all of us.”
“I know. I shouldn’t have done that. Did Amanda Jane get to bed okay?”
“Yeah. She’s in bed now. Didn’t even wake up when Emma put her down.” For that, she was thankful. She didn’t want to try to explain where Reed had gone and that she didn’t know if he was coming back.
“How’s Maudine?”
“Resting comfortably, if unwillingly. She has her whole crew of the Grandmothers keeping her company and fetching things.”
“Things will look better tomorrow.” He nodded slowly and leaned back on the pillow.
“Yeah. Tomorrow,” she echoed. That magic place where all good things lived.
She lay down next to him and stroked her fingers through his hair. He lay still, stiff, like a dog who’d been kicked too many times to enjoy the petting. Gina smoothed his hair from his brow softly.
“I remember the last time you took care of me,” he said finally.
“You do?” she asked, as if she didn’t quite believe it.
“Yeah.”
“The first time you tried to get that monkey off your back.” She kept stroking. “You were so sick. I was sure you were dying.”
“I thought I was, too.” He turned in to her caress. “Your hands were so cool and soft. That was the definition of heaven for me. Heaven through the gates of hell,” he said quietly.
