The Fireman's Son

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  She thought of things she’d been told over the past couple of years. Tools she’d been given. Visit the past when you must, if moving forward requires it, but don’t linger. Don’t glom on to it. Get right back out again.

  Stay grounded.

  She felt the wall at her back.

  “Frank had a need to dominate. As time passed, he grew increasingly aggressive.”

  Flashes of memory attacked. She refused to linger on them. The flashes came more rapidly. Lined in red.

  A leather strap against her hand. Against her naked backside.

  No!

  She’d promised herself she didn’t ever have to go back.

  “Elliott...”

  Fingers on her arms. Male hands. She was back there, feeling them gripping her firmly. She was that woman. The one who didn’t fight.

  But there was no pain now. These hands were warm and eased her gently down to the floor. She sat, head down, until Reese’s weight was there beside her, his arm around her, his hand guiding her head to his chest.

  “Tell me.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  IN HIS LINE of work, Reese had seen a lot of horrific things. He’d trained how to distance himself from them so that he could do his job. He’d mastered the art of compartmentalizing.

  He told himself he was only working—doing the most he could to help Elliott—as he sat with the mother of his son and listened.

  Understanding that he had to know what Elliott knew.

  “...leather straps...” He heard Faye’s voice. Swallowed back bile.

  He wasn’t there to slay Faye’s demons. Or to take on any more of his own. He was there to find out what gave his son nightmares, made him angry and kept him locked up inside.

  He was there to gain the knowledge that he needed to do his job.

  “He liked it when I cried. At first I tried not to, so he wouldn’t like being with me. I quickly learned that the faster I cried, the sooner it was over...”

  She was trying not to cry right then. He could hear the tears in her voice. He could hear her strength, too.

  It almost undid him. The way she was trying so hard to be just fine. To take care of everything. To make the world right no matter what.

  That inner determination of hers had been one of the first things that had drawn him to her. The way she didn’t cry over spilled milk but rather wiped it up, moved on and found a way to do without milk.

  In all the years he’d known her, she’d never once complained about having to be housekeeper, cook and high-school student. Never heard her rail at a world that had left her motherless. Or feel sorry for herself because she wore clothes from yard sales and thrift shops.

  She’d found ways to make them look good on her, with ties and dyes and whatever else she’d done...

  “When he was turned on enough, he’d start having sex on me...”

  He’d once gone into a burning house and found a child no one had known was there. The boy had been about twelve, a runaway. He’d still been alive when Reese had grabbed him up and raced out. But a good bit of his skin had been gone.

  He’d thought he’d never deal with anything worse than that.

  He’d been wrong.

  But he sat there, fighting the instinct to pull her fully into him. To take her pain inside himself. To share it so she wouldn’t have to feel it alone. He knew he couldn’t do it, didn’t have that kind of place in her life anymore. Knew that if he tried, he risked having her push him away completely.

  Risked having to hear all this from a stranger.

  As bad as it was, he needed to hear it from Faye. Needed to hear her.

  “The whole time, every time, he’d tell me I liked what he was doing to me. He’d make me tell him I did...”

  He pushed back against all emotion. He pushed back hard.

  “If I didn’t say it, he’d get rougher. And when I did say it, he’d tell me to speak up. To say it louder. He’d lean down and growl the command in my ear...”

  She shook her head. And then looked at him.

  The jolt that hit Reese would be with him forever. He’d expected to see tears in her eyes. And a plea for help.

  The self-recrimination...the eerie emptiness behind those eyes...

  He swallowed.

  “I did it, Reese. I had to make him stop. It hurt so bad...”

  Her voice broke. He thought he saw a glimpse of the old Faye in her eyes.

  “So I did it. I told him I liked it. Yes, yes, just like that. I like it.” Her voice took on a mimicking note.

  “He’d tell me to say it louder. And...God help me...I did.”

  He got it. Like a lead bolt in the head. That was what Elliott had heard. That was the demon they were fighting. A mother being raped. Repeatedly. Night after night. And her young son having to hear her say how much she liked it.

  May Frank Walker rot in hell.

  He couldn’t think beyond that. Faye...Elliott...they’d have been his family if he hadn’t asked Susan out...if he hadn’t panicked after seeing a veteran firefighter go down beneath that beam...if he’d done as Faye asked and gone to her Friday night homecoming party...

  She’d already been pregnant then.

  Reese didn’t know what to do. To say. He just sat there. Half holding the woman he’d once loved so fiercely and swallowing back tears.

  * * *

  “I’M SORRY.” THE WORDS seemed so menial, but Faye couldn’t find any others. Nothing was ever going to erase the past. Nothing could change it. She knew that.

  But she didn’t blame Reese for his silence.

  She’d robbed him of his son. Given the boy emotional issues that could ruin his life.

  Frank’s sick desires were not her fault. She’d had no way of knowing he’d lied to her about the night they’d met. His brother vouched for him. Even after the abuse had started, his brother—who’d long since broken up with Carrie—would hear no wrong about Frank.

  She couldn’t be held responsible for Frank’s treatment of her, either.

  She knew that. Not just because she’d been told that thousands of times over the past couple of years, but because it was true. What Frank had done was on Frank.

  Just as it was true that she hadn’t known her son could hear them. He’d been a sound sleeper. She’d put him as far away from the master bedroom as she could get him. Had a white noise machine play soothing sounds in his room at night. Had checked on him every evening after Frank went to sleep.

  He’d never given any indication that he’d been awake. Most nights, he probably hadn’t been.

  Unlike most men, Frank hadn’t been one to just fall asleep afterward. He’d want to hold her and talk about how great it had been. To tell her how great she was. To watch sitcoms on the television in their bedroom.

  As though they were one of those perennially perfect TV families.

  G-rated.

  The times Elliott had still been awake when she’d checked on him—as she’d later found out—he’d feigned sleep.

  Fear, his counselors had told her. He’d been afraid he’d be in trouble if she discovered he knew about her “other” self. Or maybe he’d been afraid of her. The counselors hadn’t said so but she’d wondered.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said again, sitting up. She stared at the opposite wall. At the tips of Reese’s shoes on the carpet in front of them. She was sorrier than he’d ever know. Because while Frank’s sins were not her own, hers were.

  “So sorry, Reese. I never would have knowingly endangered our son. I wouldn’t have hurt him for the world. I thought I was protecting him. As long as I satisfied Frank, he was a good provider. I thought he was Elliott’s father. And when I thought about how hard your father’s desertion was on you—how badly I’d needed a
mother growing up—I thought it would be wrong to rob Elliott of the man who gave him a good home. Frank was never short with Elliott. Never cantankerous with him. He just...ignored him. I thought it was because he was a little guy. That once he grew up they’d start sharing interests...”

  She was babbling. Justifying? This wasn’t about her, or why she’d done what she had.

  This was about the state their son was currently in.

  “Reese?” She finally looked at him.

  The moisture in his eyes wasn’t spilling over. But it cracked the hard place inside of her.

  “If I hadn’t gone out with Susan...”

  The words hit her hard. Knocked her senseless. She stared at him.

  Saw the pain on his face, knew only a small portion of it was showing, and laid her head back against his chest. Not for real. Or for keeps.

  Just for the moment.

  * * *

  “WHY DID YOU?”

  Reese wanted to ask what Faye meant when she broke a more-than-ten-minute silence. He knew they had to move, had to deal with life. He’d just been loath to shift her. Loath to stand and face her and know that they had to move forward.

  They couldn’t fix the past.

  But he owed her the truth.

  So he told her about the fire. About the beam falling on a man he was there to learn from, to someday emulate.

  “I thought I was fine, at first,” he told her. “And then I just...wasn’t my normal self.”

  “I knew something was different about you that week. I thought it was because you were two-timing me.”

  The word two-timing stung. Because it was true.

  “No, that was a result of me being different.”

  “So you see a guy almost die and that makes you unfaithful?”

  Feeling trapped—between the urge to let the warmth of her linger against him a little longer and to push her away and get the job done—Reese resisted the urge to lose his fingers in her hair.

  “It made me want to be certain that I wasn’t missing out on something in life.” He told her the bald truth. The easiest one of the two.

  The other truth, that as a firefighter he’d risk widowing Faye and any future family they had every single day when he left for work, he kept to himself. No point in going there. He’d already discussed his limitations with her.

  He’d already established that there would be no expectation of family or pretense of forever. He was a father. He would do all he could to help his son.

  Expectation ended there.

  The thought hiccuped in his mind. He pushed past it.

  “What did you find out?” she asked.

  “About what?”

  “About missing out. Were you?”

  She was focusing on things that no longer mattered. Things they couldn’t change. Things that weren’t going to change.

  When he didn’t answer, Faye pushed herself away from him. He missed her.

  “It is what it is, Reese. You found something better, that’s fine. I’d just like to know. I’ve spent a lot of time coming to terms with the past so I don’t continue to stumble over it all through my future.”

  “I didn’t find anything better.” And he felt like he’d just lost the last bit of warmth he was ever going to know.

  “So it was all for nothing?”

  He stood up. Held a hand out to help her up. She stood on her own.

  He’d thought that night with Susan had been for everything, not nothing. It had proven to him once and for all that in Faye, he’d had all he was ever going to need. He’d found out too late. By the time he’d heard from her again, she’d been done with him.

  She’d already been living her Frank nightmare.

  There was no point in doing this anymore. They had their answers. And they were going to have to live with their regrets.

  He did that by focusing on his work. On the good he could do.

  How she did it was up to her.

  Lord knew, he hadn’t been much help in that department.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BY THE TIME she left Reese’s, Faye only had an hour before she was due to pick up Elliott. She could stop by the drugstore, then grab Elliott’s favorite ice-cream cake as a treat for dinner. Those were the things she wanted to do.

  Instead, she drove straight home. Ran upstairs, stripped down and jumped in the shower. Turning the water on as hot as she could stand it, she stood there, crying, until the hot water ran out.

  She’d done what she had to do to be well for her son.

  By the time she went to get him, she was in control once again. Ready for whatever he might need from her.

  She was prepared to deal with a boy who’d just found out that the man he’d always believed to be his father was not. And that the man who’d fathered him was someone he barely knew.

  In the long run, having Reese for a father was going to be great for Elliott. She believed that with all her heart.

  In the short term—they had adjustments to make.

  Which meant she had to be willing to take Elliott’s guff. To stand up to his tests. As it had been explained to her, he was, in part, horrible to her when he was struggling the most as a way to test her love. Would she stay through the worst of him?

  As she escorted him out to the car, she was ready for anything.

  Or so she thought.

  The one thing she hadn’t expected was total silence.

  “We’ve had quite a day, huh?” she asked him. Sara had told her just to act normally. To let Elliott lead.

  How did you act normally when you knew your son had just met his real father?

  He shrugged. “It was okay.”

  “You’re doing okay?”

  Another shrug. “Sure. I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “You know, sure.”

  She had to start the car. Drive home. Fix dinner. Normal, Sara had said.

  “Did you tell anyone that Ree...Dad is your dad?”

  “Yeah. A couple of guys.”

  “What did they say?”

  “It’s cool.”

  “I just want you to know that if you want to see him, anytime you want to see him or spend time with him, it’s fine with me. Just let me know and I’ll take you over.”

  “He said he’ll come get me tomorrow to go to the beach if it’s okay with you.”

  She blanched. She’d been with Reese less than two hours ago and he hadn’t said anything.

  “When did he say that?” Whether it was right or not, she couldn’t help the wave of betrayal that washed over her. Why hadn’t Reese told her he’d had plans with their son?

  “When I called him.”

  Her heart settled into a more even rhythm. “When did you call him?”

  “When I was waiting for you.”

  Elliott sounded as though nothing more was happening than a trip to the beach with a friend.

  Sara had said to take her lead from him.

  She started the car.

  “So...can I go with him?”

  “Of course!” She put all the cheer she had into her voice. Elliott needed to spend time with his real father. To get to know him. To trust him. To learn from him.

  She wanted this more than anything.

  Which was why, as soon as her son was settled with a snack and his favorite TV show, she hid in her bathroom and cried some more.

  She was finally getting the help Elliott needed.

  And she’d never felt more alone in her life.

  * * *

  FAYE HAD JUST started to doze off that night when she heard Elliott get up. Not surprised, considering the change her son’s life had taken that day, she threw off her covers
. She and Reese were going to have to go over some things before Elliott stayed at his house.

  He’d need dead-bolt locks on his doors and a way to protect determined little fists from breaking the window to get out.

  When she’d been in Reese’s house that afternoon, both details had slipped her mind. Because it wasn’t real to her yet. The realization hit her between the eyes. She could decorate. But to think about dropping Elliott off for the night—giving his safekeeping over to another...

  Hoping Elliott was headed for the kitchen and something to eat, she pulled on her summer robe and headed toward the hall, almost running into the skinny boy heading toward her.

  She backed up, wondering where he was headed.

  “Can I come in your room?”

  He was awake. Wide awake. Looking her in the eye.

  His gaze filled with fear.

  No, not just fear. Worry laced with fear.

  It had been a while since he’d been emotionally open to her. She was a little rusty on reading him.

  “Of course you can,” she told him. For the first six years of his life, Elliott had been strictly forbidden from visiting his parents’ bedroom. It was a rule she’d upheld as firmly as Frank for fear that her son would inadvertently walk in on something hideous.

  “You are always welcome to come to me, Elliott. I mean it when I say that. Always.”

  She followed him back in and when he climbed on the bed, scooting his legs under the covers, she acted like it was the most natural thing in the world to climb in after him.

  He lay down, his head on the extra pillow on the other side of her bed. So she lay down, too.

  Ever since leaving Frank, she’d kept night-lights on in every room, partly so she could see Elliott when he sleepwalked, but mostly to make sure her own demons didn’t escape in the dark. She could see her son but didn’t face him. Didn’t want to push him too far. Or push him away.

  “I’m scared.”

  Lying flat on her back, staring at the ceiling, she prayed for guidance. “Of what?”

  “I want to go to the beach tomorrow and all, but...”