I felt a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe, feeling my muscles clench tight in my chest. My heart beat rapid as I pictured his face. His sad face. His sweet face. His lonely face. I tried to swallow, but the spit wouldn’t go down my throat.
Closing my eyes for a moment, I tried to block out the image but nothing worked. I looked over at Blaire. She was on her phone, trying to text one-handed. And a thought appeared out of nowhere. That very thought caused the panic to calm down just a bit.
“Is that Matt?” I whispered.
Her eyes cut over in my direction. “Yeah.”
“Is he in Norman right now?”
“Yeah. Why?” She paused, giving me a skeptical glare.
“Tell him to go to Bricktown. We will be at the Starbucks by the movie theater in about forty minutes.”
“Whoa! Just wait a minute,” she gasped.
“Just tell him that, Blaire. I want to take you to meet Matt. I need to do this,” I pleaded with my sister. “One of us should get a happy ending today.”
She stared at me, contemplating my words until finally nodding her head. Blaire typed across the little screen. Her terrified eyes looked back up at me. “He said yes.”
“Good.” I wiped another tear off my cheek before starting the engine. Everything still hurt, but helping my sister made the clouds not so gray.
We didn’t speak on the drive down the interstate. She periodically picked up her phone, glaring at it like she planned to type some apologetic message to back out of the meeting. But each time, my sister grumbled under her breath, slamming the phone back down in her lap.
Blaire’s eccentric antics kept my sanity in check. This was better than just driving home. This was better than sitting on the couch, trying not to picture him alone. This was better than thinking about Wyatt.
When we reached Starbucks, I had to practically drag my sister from the car. “I can’t, Emma. What about this thing on my arm?”
“It’s a good conversation topic.” I felt a brief grin on my lips. As we walked in the door, I recognized Matt immediately at the table next to the register. I pulled her along until we reached him. He got up and greeted us shyly. Matt didn’t look at me. He only looked at Blaire.
Excusing myself, I drifted away out of the picture and placed an order at the counter. I took a seat toward the back of the store, holding a latte with a dash of cinnamon. Inhaling a deep breath, the smell filled my nose with sweetness. I took a sip, letting the hot liquid run over my swollen throat.
My sister glanced over in my direction a few times. I smiled at her. They seemed to be hitting it off. After all her terror-filled moments of dread, she was doing just fine with Matt. They were in the beginning stages of their friendship or relationship or whatever my sister decided to call it.
In the midst of the broken pieces of my heart, I felt a surge of happiness. And something clicked. I would survive. We all would survive. Even Wyatt.
THE HOLIDAYS CAME AND WENt as the months passed with a blur. I never saw Wyatt or even heard his gruff voice through the phone. I wrote him letters, but he never wrote back.
The lack of communication was painful, but I understood. He needed this time to help reconcile some demons inside of him. And I knew it was difficult for him to share his daily world. The very thought made my gut clench up in fear. I was afraid for him. I was afraid for his safety. I was afraid for him being alone.
I would do anything to touch him. So I touched him in the only way I knew he could feel. I kept writing. He needed me right now more than I needed him. I knew Wyatt kept my letters. I knew they were tattered on the edges from where he held them tight. I knew because Diana told me.
Even though Wyatt and I didn’t speak directly, she kept me updated on him. Her emails always ended with something like, “The kid’s hanging in there, and he said to let you know that he’s okay and he loves you.”
At first I cried, seeing his little messages come from Diana. But as the months passed, they eventually made me smile. I’d never pegged him as a guy who wrote his deep thoughts down on paper. It must have pained him to say those words to Diana’s face so that she could pass them along to me.
As for the incident at the kennel, everything was eventually settled. Wyatt didn’t have any extra time tacked onto his sentence. However, Kurt received ten years for drug charges. And Diana was allowed to give a guy on parole the job as caretaker of the kennel.
After twenty-two years of being joined in the womb and in life, my sister and I finally went our separate ways. I moved out in the spring after getting into a nursing program in Tulsa. It was a strange day for both of us. Lots of awkward shoulder shrugs from Blaire. Lots of body-crunching hugs from me. Lots of tears from my mom. Tulsa wasn’t that far away, but she acted like it was at least three states. And I promised them both I wouldn’t talk to strangers.
I rented a one-bedroom old house with a fenced-in backyard full of trees. The fence was a necessity since Charlie came with me. We didn’t have much in our tiny house, but I felt older and wiser. I was no longer living on the fringe of where I was supposed to be in life. I was finally on the right path, going in the right direction.
About a month after I moved into the house, I got a call from Diana. Things were going pretty well with her new kennel tenant with one exception: Cye. After Wyatt and I had disappeared, the poor dog had slowly regressed. He wouldn’t allow the new guy to touch him and he eventually disappeared into the back corner of the pen. Diana asked if maybe I had time to visit him.
The next Saturday, I made a trip back down that long, dusty road. It was strange driving to the place, knowing Wyatt was no longer waiting at the end of the grass path. I parked outside, seeing the same old trailer, remembering all the times I’d stood on the steps—sometimes yelling angry words and sometimes breathless as Wyatt kissed me against the old door.
The new guy was nice, but this time, I didn’t ask questions. Going inside the kennel, I grabbed a leash from the hook on the wall. As I walked down the aisle, I saw the familiar faces, pressing against the gates along with a few new ones. I pulled a dog bone from my pocket as I reached his pen.
Cye was hunched down in the back corner. His sad, lone eye caught mine, yet the dog didn’t move an inch. Opening the gate, I went inside, crawling slowly on my hands and knees. I placed a bone a few feet from the poor dog. He stared at me. And my heart broke.
Very slowly, he inched forward, taking the bone between his teeth. I scratched behind his ears, feeling the familiar dents in his skull. The dog eventually rolled over on his back, letting me pet his fuzzy belly. I clipped the leash on his collar and he snapped to his feet. After I’d received the call from Diana, I knew there was only one option. I had to take Cye with me.
We left through the gate and down the aisle and out to my car. Placing him in the backseat, I shut the door and took one more look at the kennel. The memories were fresh. They were painful. But that wasn’t the part that pulled at my heart.
Before I could stop myself, I went back inside, taking another leash from the hooks. Her face was still pressed against the gate from where I’d left her. I knew she was his favorite. I knew that toothless pit bull must have waited every day trying to figure out why Wyatt had abandoned her. Lola licked my hands as I fastened the leash to her collar. My house would be busting at the seams with dogs, but I knew I couldn’t leave her here.
It was a peaceful drive back down the dirt road with Cye and Lola in the backseat. I returned to our house. I had always considered it our house, even when I signed the lease with just my name. I wanted Wyatt to eventually come home to this place.
I missed him. Some days, I missed him more than others, but I never missed him less. And some days I still cried as his presence hovered just beyond my reach. But I had Charlie and now Cye and Lola to keep me company. Even with the ache in my heart, I was doing okay.
It didn’t take long for the new dogs to get settled into my routine of school and work. I installed a doggy door for the
long days I worked at a new nursing home. But I spent most of my evenings in the living room with Cye draped across my feet, and Charlie in my lap with Lola under my arm. The three dogs and I would cuddle up on the couch, reading a book out loud—waiting for Wyatt to come back to us.
That’s another thing that came with me from the kennel. The day I moved in, Diana had arrived out of the blue in her big truck, hauling his bookcase and several boxes. She had helped me set it up on one side of the living room.
I loved the feel of having that piece of Wyatt in this place. I loved knowing that he’d read each and every one of those stories. Every time I looked at that colorful shelf of books, I heard his deep voice, drifting out across the moonlit kennel.
I know that place had been considered his confinement. But for me, I had good memories of being with him at the kennel. I had wonderful memories because that was the place where I fell in love with Wyatt. It was the crazy and unusual beginning of our story, but I knew it wouldn’t be the end.
PRISON WASN’T EASY. I WON’T lie and sugarcoat it with a bunch of colorful shit. Those days were hard, and the nights just about wrecked me. I was alone. But it was a different kind of alone than at the kennel. I never felt more isolated in my life despite the fact I was surrounded by hundreds of men. Some were better than me and some were much worse. But none of that really mattered on the inside of the razor walls because all of us had ended up in the same damn place: our new home of suffocation and redemption.
My chest always felt tight. The claustrophobia festered inside my lungs, making me restless. Somewhere in my gut, I thought prison would alleviate some of my guilt. Maybe if I finally served my time. Maybe if I finally sat in the exact spot Fred Tucker had wanted me to be all these years, then I would eventually lose some of the boulders shackled to my feet. But none of that happened. I was still just as twisted with guilt as the day I entered through the door.
I think the real answer rested with the ideas I’d shared with Emma. Prison was my punishment, not my salvation. That part would come once I was on the other side. Redemption would be determined by the person I became out there in the world. At least that’s how I imagined Emma saying it to me.
My beautiful Emma. I missed her. I missed her skin. Her lips. Her annoying questions that made me think clearer. I missed the one piece of my life that had leveled out the bad. I missed the part that made me feel like I was worth saving.
That girl had swallowed me with her big heart. She had wrapped that love around me until I felt her in my mind and my thoughts. She had consumed me, making the darkness disappear. She had made everything brighter, softer, and sweeter. She had made me feel alive again.
I missed Emma so damn bad. I thought telling her goodbye in the courthouse would have been the worst part. It wasn’t even a sliver of the pain I’d felt the days and months that followed. The agony of our separation felt like a knife right in my heart, twisting and stabbing, around and around in my chest. Each night in my cold bed, I tried to fall asleep with a fucking knife jammed down in my heart. It hurt like hell.
But I couldn’t show my pain. And I damn sure couldn’t show my fear. I just had to learn to deal with the emotions and keep my head down. Day after day, I trudged along, not making eye contact. It was my way of trying to survive. But that wasn’t always good enough. Every so often, survival required actual fists and bloody faces and broken fingers.
But in my darkest moments, I still found the strength to endure. And that strength came in the form of her letters that arrived each week. Emma told me about her life. She made sure I knew everything that was happening while I was gone. And sometimes she penned sappy lines I could only read at night when no one else would see the tears run down my cheeks.
I loved her with everything in me. I loved her enough to make her stay away. It was so damn hard. I was alone, and it was a daily struggle just to stay afloat. Sometimes in my depressing pain, I almost asked Diana to bring Emma. I just needed to see a glimpse. I just needed a little taste of her lips. But I never gave in to my weakness. Seeing her beautiful face would just make the ugliness around me a darker shade of black.
So I kept trudging along, reminding myself this sentence was only for a year. I could survive three hundred sixty-five days behind bars if Marcus could survive the rest of his life in a wheelchair. I could survive this time without Emma if Willa could live every day in fear of having another attack.
I could do this. I would do this for them. In some strange twist of fate, I had been the only person not permanently destroyed by the accident. It wasn’t fair. Nothing would ever make it fair. But when I finally left this place, I would do everything in my power to be a better person. I would be someone worthy of this second chance.
THREE HUNDRED AND TWO DAYS later, I walked out the door on early release, feeling the sunshine on my skin.
“Good to see you, son.”
I stared at my dad for a moment before giving him a tired smile. “Good to see you too.”
Getting in my father’s truck, we got on the highway for the drive to my parent’s house. He talked while I listened. The man had visited me every week over the course of my incarceration. And now our relationship was different.
I can’t say every grain of it was perfect, but I respected the man. After he had lost his job as police chief, my family moved to Stillwater. The town was a little bigger than Gibbs, and he had gone back to being just a police officer. His loss of command had been another causality of my actions.
No one ever thinks about the aftereffects. When a rock pings a windshield, it doesn’t create a big hole that brings down the glass. It’s the rings radiating out from the initial impact. My actions had cracked across my whole family, especially my father. It had brought us all down, as they were forced to move away while I’d turned my back on them out of shame and grief.
But now it was different. We had repaired some of that damage. My father wasn’t a commanding asshole, and I wasn’t a stupid jackass.
My father parked at their new house. It was my first time to see the place. I gazed at the unfamiliar front porch. While I was away, my family had moved from the only home Willa and I had known as kids. Seeing the smaller house, I felt the damn guilt hit me right in the gut.
“You coming?” his gruff voice asked.
“Yeah.” I took a deep breath, shaking off the past. “Hey, Dad?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.” The emotions made my throat ache. “For not giving up on me. I’m sorry that it . . . um . . . that I—”
My dad hugged me across the console of his truck, cutting off my words. I truly was sorry that I’d cost him so much of his life and career. He held onto me for a moment.
“I’m sorry about Willa,” I whispered.
He let go, looking me right in the eye as a tear fell down his cheek. “I know.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. This part was the hardest. I had finally said it to him. I had finally addressed the awful cloud that had hung over our entire family. “Why didn’t you hate me?”
“You’re my kid. And I don’t love one of you less than the other. I hate what you did. And I hate that you hurt Willa. But I still love you too. You’re my son. Always will be. And you fight for your kids. Even when they don’t want you to.”
I couldn’t stop the tears from falling down my cheeks. He hugged me again. I was crying damn tears as my dad held onto me.
After a few minutes, he let go. “We better go inside before the girls come out here.”
“Okay.” I wiped my face against my sleeve.
Climbing out of the cab, I surveyed the street. The warm September air made beads of sweat form on my forehead. My mom came out the front door with Willa running at a dead sprint behind her. My sister latched herself around my neck in a death grip.
“Oh my gosh. You’re here. Like, really here,” she squealed.
I smiled at her, hugging her back. My mom waited until Willa got through mauling me before getting a turn.
She cried. Maybe she thought this day would never happen.
I spent the evening with them. I didn’t talk much and I think it made my family slightly nervous. My mom wanted my return to be perfect while I tried to wrap my head around everything seeming so normal. It was hard when I didn’t feel normal on the inside.
My emotions were a little numb after being away for three and a half years. Between my time at the kennel and then prison, I’d forgotten what it felt like to have complete freedom.
After the first week, I contacted Diana for the address of a certain house in Tulsa. Part of me had wanted to run straight to her the moment I was free. But I knew my family deserved some time with the prodigal son. And I enjoyed spending time with my parents and Willa. We played games and had dinner and watched movies late into the night until I fell asleep on the couch.
And then Willa had her first attack while I was at home. I stood there terrified while my mom acted like it was no big deal. I guess her episodes had gradually become part of their normal life. After it was over, I locked myself in the bathroom, crying so hard my chest physically hurt. The past would always be right in front of me. But I knew they had moved on and accepted it. I must too.
I found Willa lying on her bed with Gus. “Hey.”
She opened her eyes. “Hey.”
The fatigue was visible in her smile. The seizures had always worn her out, making Willa sleep for hours after an episode. I lay down beside her on the bed. “You care if I hang out here for a while?”
“I think Emma might care if you stayed with us too long,” she teased.
“I meant in here with you, dork.” I let out a deep breath. It was hard to act normal with her, knowing I was the reason she was like this, but I needed to try for her sake.
“As long as I never hear you say I’m sorry again.”
The emotions got tight in my chest. “Okay.”
“And you better go see Emma soon. I don’t want you messing that up. I like her a lot, Wyatt.”
Waiting for Wyatt (Red Dirt #1) Page 32
