by Dani Wyatt
No one understands what it’s like to try to live in a world where a fuck like Jeremy deserves to have the life snatched out of him yet, in that world, I’m the criminal.
The next several minutes are filled with a wrenching pain so deep; even the darkness cannot save me. I remember every moment, every way the pain discovered new and deep ways to cut into my soul and carve her out of me.
I’m eviscerated. Laying open for hell to come and play whatever other games it chooses.
I remember that deal I made with the devil the first time I kissed her, and he’s come to collect.
I am no longer who I was before her, and I’m not who I became with her. I’m no one. I’ve ceased to exist.
Promise
Some promises start out broken.
And stay that way.
My body has become a vessel for the tears. I don’t even try to stop them anymore.
It’s who I am now. Liquid. Only this time, it’s not because I am caught in his wake. It’s because it’s all that is left of me.
The wrenching sounds rise up and come out like an earthquake that draws on my pain shaking me from the inside out.
Heaving. Brutal. Unending.
I have no hunger.
No thirst.
No need to breathe except to feed the unending sobs that are now who I am.
Bruce carried me from the car to the couch. I didn’t know who else to call to bring me home. He’s standing over me. I know he’s speaking, but my brain cannot put together the sounds into meaningful words.
He covers me in a blanket because I’m shivering. This is a new kind of pain. One I didn’t know until I let myself love him.
Love is like a flash of lightning in a clear, dark sky. Something so infinite and beautiful you want to reach out and grab it. Only when you do, it kills you.
Now I’m dead.
My fingers are dead.
My eyes are dead.
I can even feel the way my skin is dead.
Bruce slumps down and huffs at me. He’s watching me as he crosses his long legs and starts wiggling his brown loafer. His sky-blue eyes hide a hint of his irrepressible smile, and I wish I could hug him. He’s looking at me like I’m on life support and my next breath could be my last.
And that’s exactly how it feels.
“Do you think I qualify for hospice?” I manage to ask.
“No sweetheart. Afraid not.”
“I’ve lost everything.” The words come out in gasps as the sobs take over again.
At the police station, Jeremy had been allowed to come in and talk to me. He still wants me. Still thinks we belong together.
He told me the adoption is going through, and Jordan will permanently belong to those horrible people. The court date is set for a month from now. My petition for custody has been dismissed, and I might not even be granted visitation.
Not after what is bound to be my arrest for arson or even murder.
Murder.
I don’t even understand the word. It isn’t a real word, is it?
“Girl, you still have the name of that attorney? Because it looks like you need a good one.”
The pain in Bruce’s eyes is like a mirror for exactly how desperate my situation is.
“I can’t afford an attorney. Besides, he’s a custody attorney.” I pull the blanket over my head.
“I can afford it. Call him. Right now. If he can’t take the case, get a recommendation because we need to go today.”
I’ve only been questioned at this point. But from the way the interview went, Bruce is right. I need a lawyer.
Why, though, I wonder? Why do I care if I exist inside or outside prison walls? I have nothing left to lose.
“And just in case you’re getting crazy ideas, Jordan still needs you. No matter what happens. Tomorrow or ten years from now, he’s going to need you, and you need to pull up those granny panties and make sure you can be there when he needs you. You hear me under there, Sylvia Platt?”
For the next hour, I hate Bruce. With daggers and hot tar—I hate him.
He forces me into the shower, then into clothes, then into the car. I don’t even care that he’s seeing me naked. Modesty is the least of my worries.
The vision of Beckett’s painful eyes and beautifully scarred face in the window of the door where I sat inside being interrogated won’t stop dancing in my mind.
“Some things are so broken, they can’t be fixed, can they? And, I don’t mean just you. I mean me. I mean us. Goodbye, Promise.”
They wouldn’t let him in the interrogation room, so he’d scrawled those words on a piece of paper and slipped it under the door as I sat alone inside the white painted cinder block room. He’d given me one more glance, his face framed in the tiny window of the metal door before he turned and was gone.
Bruce manages to get me in the car. My head rests on the cold window as I hear the ignition spark the engine and his loud sigh before he puts his little silver Nissan truck in drive.
I don’t remember the ride there, but the next thing I remember, I’m inside the attorney’s office. I answer as best I can amidst the unending tears that are now who I am.
The pitching, noisy sobs have stopped, but the tears come in streams even as I feel nothing.
Can nothing be felt?
Yes.
Yes, it can.
Beckett
I’ve got fifty-five minutes left.
Fifty-five.
I’ve been counting each minute of every hour.
It’s been two weeks since I told her good-bye, and sometimes I can’t imagine getting through one more minute, so I count the seconds, trying to decide if getting through is something I want to do.
Louis has been blowing up my phone the last few days. I’ve only sent him quick texts, telling him I’m fine, working on the book. Delaying.
In an hour, it will be too late. I just need to get through the next hour.
I don’t need more lectures. I don’t want to learn more about the case or what he knows. I don’t want to hear her name or why maybe I’m the asshole.
It doesn’t matter. Maybe I am, maybe I should have given her a chance to explain. But, I don’t want to. It’s too dark. Too much. God is having fun with me.
There are some cliffs that can’t be unjumped. I read the reports again. She admitted to both fires from when she was younger, and I don’t even want to know anything else about the fire in the loft.
She lied. She didn’t trust me with everything, and that’s what I demanded from her. Everything.
I’m part of my darkness now. It no longer overtakes me; I’ve joined forces with it.
I quit fighting it, and I want nothing more than to hold onto it and to never see past its protective curtain again.
As George Lucas taught us, the dark side is strong, and I’ve decided it’s where I belong.
I don’t even care about killing that shit Jeremy anymore. Let him live. I feel nothing.
If you take my pulse, it’s probably not there.
My skin feels cold.
Every breath I take is slow and even. I seep indifference out of every pore.
Louis will show up at the station office on base; I'm certain of it. So, I’m gonna get there early. Just in case. I’m going to get my name on that dotted line and my duffel bag on deck before he can try to talk me down.
He’s sent me five texts and left six voicemails today, and it’s only 8:30 in the morning.
I've been packed and ready to ship out for two nights. I’m ready; I need this. I need to vent my hatred among those who welcome it.
Reward me for it.
Twenty minutes later, I’m at the gateway to hell a whole half-hour early, and the papers are marked with an X, waiting to take another four years of my life. I know it’s where I belong. My brothers need me, and I understand this life. I don’t fit anywhere else. I’ve been on this side of the desk before. I know the drill.
“Glad to have you back, Captain.” Lt. H
enry Warden hands me the pen.
I watch as the first dot of ink spreads where the paper and pen connect.
Goodbye, Promise.
Those two words splinter like glass inside my head, pulling me down as I fight back the sting in my eyes.
“Hey!” A fist slams into my shoulder, and I spin around in the chair, ready to lay out whoever is fucking stupid enough to sneak up on me.
It takes me a split second before my brain catches up with my instinct.
Louis is puffed up, his eyes lit with something like napalm, as he snaps at the Lieutenant on the other side of the desk. “I need him. He’s not signing yet.”
My former mentor and savior has me by the back of my neck the way he used to when he would pick me up as my court liaison, trying to make sure the dark rebel in me didn’t blot out the potential in me.
“I’m good right here.” I twitch my neck and give him a snort. “I’m right where I need to be.”
“No, you’re not.” Louis’s voice is heavy. His usual humor absent and, in its place, there's a commanding depth that I’ve never heard. “You can sign that when I’m done talking to you. You owe me that. I’ve been on your ass for a week, and you’ve been hiding like a pussy. Five minutes. I need five minutes, and then you do whatever the fuck you need to.”
I want to tell him no. Whatever he needs to talk about is irrelevant. Insignificant to my need to be a nameless, faceless member of a team that knows only order. That allows me to release my vitriol on the world. The violence inside me is chewing at my heart, and I need to let it out.
“Take five.” Lt. Warden nods at Louis as he opens the glass door to his office and gives us the space.
“Man, nothing you’re going to say will change my mind. This is me. This is who I am. I need to go back. I made a mistake. I thought I could live like other people; I can’t. Look what fucking happened. I suck at real life, man.”
“Yeah. That’s not how I see it. I see you. I see you like no one else does. And, I see you got your face smashed in by a sea of shit that no one saw coming. You didn’t deserve it, but that's life. It was a pile of shit that fell down around you, and it’s over. But, you’re forgetting one thing, aren’t you? You forget that since you came home, you’ve never been happier. You’ve tasted it, man. It was real. I can see it in you. She needs you. You need her.”
My stomach rolls and cramps. How can he think there’s anything left for me with her? I can’t even say her name.
“Naw. Naw . . .” I shake my head and laugh, the joke too revolting to take seriously. “You’re losing your damn mind, Louis. Why are you here? You’ve left that shit on my voicemail already. I’ve got a thirty-six-hour commute to look forward to. I’ll listen to it on the way. Now go. I’m signing, I’m leaving. Today.”
“No, you dumb fuck. I’m here to give you a wake-up call. And, if you’d bothered to listen to any of my fucking messages, you would know why I’m here.” His face is red. I don’t ever remember seeing him this angry in all the years I’ve known him.
My neck is jerking, and I look at the one person who has had my back, always. Even in the darkness, I know I owe him my attention, even if it is the minimum amount.
“Go. You have something to tell me, I’m listening for the next four minutes.” I look down at my watch.
He shakes his head, and then I hear the deep, ragged breath, see the darkness under his eyes. I can almost hear the drumroll because something is fucking coming, and I probably don’t want to hear it.
“Jordan is my son.” Louis enunciates every word, slow and clear.
That was not what I was expecting.
“What the fuck?” I squint one eye at him, waiting for whatever comes next because I have no fucking idea what to say right now.
“Yep. I’ll make this short since I only have three and a half minutes left.” His sarcastic sneer tells me he’s not happy with me.
“You know I worked with CPS back then. Well, I met Promise’s mother there. Back before she lost her permanently, CPS was on her for years. It was a short, fucking intense affair. She was stunning, like Promise. I fell fucking hard, and by the time I understood the level of her dysfunction, we were already broken up. She disappeared without another word. I switched offices after Jeremy tried to push me out. I never saw her or Promise again until your Dad’s funeral. She looks so much like her mother, it fucking scared the shit out of me, Beck.” His voice shakes for a split second. “And you know there is no mistaking her. No one else in the world looks like her. When we were talking that morning after the service, waiting for you, she mentioned this deal with her brother. How her mom left them and the court came in and how she’s been fighting for custody the last few years since she turned eighteen. I asked her how old her brother is, and I fucking counted backward.”
I can hear where this is going, and I lean back onto the desk before I fall over.
“Are you really fucking telling me you’re Jordan’s father? How can you be sure?”
“I already had a DNA test done. I wanted to tell you sooner, but not until I was sure. Test results came in a few days ago. He’s mine. No one knows yet besides me, my attorney and his case worker.” I see something in his face I’ve never seen before, and I can’t place the emotion. “And now you.”
“Fucking Jesus. I don’t know what the fuck to say, man.”
“Don’t say anything. You’re talking on my time.” He cracks a smile. “I have two minutes, and I’ve got more.”
My heart is using a sledge on my chest wall, and my hands run up and over my forehead, and then I’m holding onto the back of my neck to keep my head attached.
“I did some investigating of my own on these fires and on Jeremy. I did some covert shit, and all my damn arrows kept pointing toward him. I called the owner of the building across from mine. One of the security camera’s across the street from the loft picked up Jeremy climbing the fire escape and breaking the window into your dad’s apartment the night of the fire. It shows you and Promise leaving, and him sneaking in. That’s all I needed to take to the cops for them to serve a search warrant on his house. Guess what they found?”
I can’t help the waves of sickness coming over me. I’m not fucking sure what is going on. “I don’t like guessing games.”
“They found all sorts of records on his computer. Pictures of Promise from when she was little. He’s been following her, stalking her. He kept notebooks full of letters to her, things he wanted to do to her, things he told her to do. Like set fires. He even showed her how. Bought her the lighter fluid, the matches, drew her maps showing her where to start them. It was fucking him. She was a kid, man, a vulnerable, broken, little kid, and he pretended to be her savior. Told her when she wasn’t happy in one of the homes he put her in, to set a fire. He thought eventually, he would be able to take her in himself . . . If you leave now, you’ll be lost. Forever. And so will she. You know that; I know that.”
“Your time is up. Are you finished?” I stare him down, and he shakes his head in exasperation.
“Are you really that far gone? Nothing matters? Not her, not the book, your art, all those kids, nothing I said changes anything?” His dark eyes flash with anger.
“I just asked if you were finished, because now it’s my turn.”
Louis crosses his arms over his chest, puffing up ready for me to lay into him.
“Where is she?”
Beckett
I push through the front doors at Windfield. April is tossing a blast of spring into Cleveland, and the sun comes in right behind me.
“Hey, is Bruce around?” The receptionist is wide eyed as she traces an obvious gaze over the colorful ribbons and medals that decorate me today.
“Sure, let me page him. Your name?” The Ariana Grande look alike twirls a lock of hair between her fingers.
“Beckett Fitzgerald.” She smiles when I give her my name, and within two minutes I hear Bruce’s voice coming from around the corner as he playfully chastises someon
e named Marvin for giving a member of the staff a pat on the ass.
“Just keep your hands to yourself. Didn’t they teach you that in like kindergarten?” I shake my head as his smile and snorting laugh introduce him to the great room and everything looks a little brighter. I extend my hand, and he smiles back.
“You here to see me? I’m flattered.” That boyish charm takes over the room as he sets one hand on his hip and shakes mine with the other.
“Not today, my friend. She here?”
“Yep. Dang, you are puttin’ on the dang Ritz today.” He eyes me stem to stern, and I roll my eyes because I can see from his look, he’s not done. “Wow, I need a second. You are workin’ it today, aren’t you?”
“I want to surprise her. Can you tell me where she is? Don’t call her down, okay?”
He shakes his head because he knows this could blow up for me.
“You’re brave. You’re going to need all those medals and some armor.””
“Yep. I’m ready. Whatever happens, but just do me this one last favor.”
He rubs his bald head with a snort.
“Come on. She’s just getting off shift, but she started a reading group. She reads aloud to a group every Tuesday and Thursday. Wonder where she got that idea?”
Wow, I love this girl.
I’ve got a nervous smile plastered on my face as I stride the halls. The older faces either smile back or barely notice me. There are tasteful, floral sofas and bookshelves down each hall. The faces each tell a story, and I’m hoping today will be a big part of mine someday.
Bruce steps with me chattering on the entire time we wind through the hallways, but I don’t remember anything he says. I’m rehearsing.
I hear her ten steps before we get to the doorway.
I’m drunk instantly. Her voice is intoxicating. Blood is rushing through my ears, and it’s hard to stand. It’s hard to live right now because I don’t know if I’ve fucked up my life beyond all recognition. But, I’m about to find out.
I listen for a few minutes and peek inside the room from a spot where she can’t see me. She’s reading Gulliver’s Travels, and there are ten faces fixed on her as she sits with legs crossed, pushing her hair back over her shoulders every few sentences.
