by M. L. Ray
Jenna watched him for a moment and then called after him, “Where are we going?”
“The bridge, of course. Where else?”
Jenna laughed, something she hadn’t done in a long time. The bridge was an old wooden structure that had been her and her girlfriends’ refuge since they were little girls. They learned to skip rocks there, practiced braiding each other’s hair, and planned elaborate weddings there on the stained wooden boards.
“You know about the bridge?” Jenna asked Trey.
Trey came back towards her and leaned down to whisper in her ear, “All of the boys knew about the bridge. We used to sneak along the river bank until we were hidden underneath the boards and sit there for hours listening to you girls talk.”
“You spied on us?” Jenna pretended to be outraged.
“We didn’t consider it spying, just making sure we were well informed. It came in rather handy through the years.” Trey gave her a smile filled with secrets and she couldn’t help but respond.
The boys had been listening to their crazy bridge conversations? I wonder if the other girls know about that. How embarrassing! Jenna shook her head as she briefly recalled some of the conversations they’d had on that bridge. One conversation came rushing back to her mind and she felt herself blush beneath Trey’s warm gaze.
“If you could kiss anybody in the world, who would it be?” Michelle asked.
“When you say kiss, do you mean on the lips and all that mushy stuff?” asked twelve-year-old Jenna.
“Yep! Come on, now. Who would you kiss?”
“I know who I’d kiss,” piped in Michelle as she lowered her voice and softly whispered, “Tyler.”
“What?!” exclaimed Brooke. “Why on earth would you want to kiss my brother? Ewww!”
Tyler and Trey were both two years older and in high school, making them perfect targets for the crushes of the pre-teen girls. Brooke seemed upset that Michelle would be interested in kissing her brother, and Jenna watched and listened as the two bantered back and forth for a few moments.
“Okay, Jenna. Who would you want to kiss, and please don’t say my brother?” Brooke pleaded.
Jenna shook her head, “Okay, I won’t. I want to kiss Michelle’s brother.” She’d said it partly in jest, just to see the reaction she’d get from her friends, but as the next few years flew by, the idea took on more merit. Up until the time her mother died, and all thoughts of boys and her future shriveled up and died with her.
“Jenna?” Trey asked, having watched her become lost in her memories and enthralled with the way her emotions played out across her face. She still had a soft smile upon her face, and it did Trey’s heart good to see that a little part of the Jenna he remembered growing up with still existed.
He let his eyes take a closer inspection of her, frowning slightly at how slim she was. Has she been getting enough to eat? Where has she been living? What has she been up to these last seven years and why didn’t she ever come home? Shaking his head, he reached out and touched her shoulder slightly, “Jenna?”
She lifted her eyes and blinked up at him for a moment before she realized they were still standing on the sidewalk. The suitcase in her hand made its presence known and she shrugged her shoulder to try and alleviate the strain of holding it all this time.
“Jenna, we don’t have to go to the bridge…”
Jenna shook her head, effectively cutting him off. “No. Sorry. I guess I kind of drifted off there for a moment.” She took a breath, looked him straight in the eyes, and then smiled, “Okay. The bridge it is.”
Trey reached over and took her suitcase from her hands, transferring it to his right hand and offering her his left one. “Come on then.”
Jenna looked at his hand for a moment before gingerly placing her own in his light grip. She hadn’t held hands with a boy since she was fourteen and Billy Ryan had asked to walk her home from the school dance. That had been before her mother’s death and her father’s defection. Life had been perfect and she had been a perfectly normal teenager.
They walked in silence as they crossed the last intersection of downtown and then headed for the dirt path that led down to the river and the bridge. Jenna glanced around, noticing how everything looked the same, and yet different. This was the first time she was seeing the bridge from the eyes of an adult, and the bridge looked somehow smaller and more decrepit than she remembered.
“Is it safe to walk on?” she asked, as she surveyed the stained and rotting wood.
Trey looked at the bridge and then chuckled, “Safe as ever. I guess it probably looks much worse if you haven’t seen it in years.”
“Much,” Jenna agreed, following behind him as he walked across the boards to the covered portion where the girls had placed logs years before. The logs had been replaced over the years, and she smiled fondly as she remembered the hours she’d spent in this exact location – happy and content with her life. Where did those days go and how do I get them back?
Chapter 5
Trey looked at the beautiful woman sitting in the shadows of the bridge, her large blue eyes still having an injured look about them, and the light of moments ago only lingering in their depths. She had her light brown hair pulled up into a half-ponytail, loose strands falling over her forehead and framing her face in soft curls. She hadn’t gained much height since she was sixteen, the top of her head barely coming up to the bottom of his chin.
“So, where to begin?” Jenna asked Trey, losing some of her confidence now that a little time had passed.
“How about why you never came back? There were people here who loved you and missed you.”
“It didn’t feel that way. After you left, one of the staff members started doing a physical assessment of my injuries. She discovered that I had several broken ribs. At some point during the exam, I turned the wrong way and ended up puncturing one of my lungs. They called for the air life helicopter and took me to the hospital.”
Jenna heard Trey’s exclamation upon hearing of her injuries but she didn’t stop or give him time to interject anything. Now that she had started, she needed to finish telling him everything.
“I spent three weeks there healing. When I was discharged from the hospital, the Four Corner’s shelter didn’t have any free beds, so they put me up in a local Denver shelter for teens.” Jenna grew silent remembering how scared and alone she’d felt during those days. “I would have given anything to get a phone call from someone back home.”
“They tried, Jenna. Believe me. They kept running into the same roadblock at every turn. You were an underaged minor in protective custody of the state. No one could tell us anything.”
Jenna slowly nodded and wished she’d known. It might have saved her years of destructive behavior.
Trey watched her as she sat there and felt sorry for the young girl who had found herself virtually abandoned, injured, and away from home. “You must have been terrified.”
“I was.”
“Why didn’t you call one of the girls? I would have driven them to Denver!”
Jenna shook her head, remembering all of the rules she’d been suddenly faced with and the depression that had descended over her in giant rolling waves she couldn’t escape. “Phone calls were for good kids. You had to earn the right to use the phone, and then the counselor’s had to approve who you wanted to talk to.”
“What?!” Trey questioned, outraged to hear that she had been treated so poorly. “How…”
Jenna continued as if she hadn’t heard him, “I finally figured out how to play by the facility’s rules, and after being in the local shelter for two months, I ran away. Being good also got you day passes to leave the shelter without being constantly watched. I hitchhiked my way to Ridgway and then used the payphone at the motel to call my dad. Collect.”
“You spoke to your father?” Trey asked, wondering why the man had never said anything about that. Michelle had been sure Jenna would try to reconcile with her father, and had stopped by their
home after school every day for the first few months to inquire if Jenna had called yet. The answer had always been a resounding “No” followed closely by the slamming of the front door in her face!
An action that had landed him in jail four months later when he’d pushed Michelle off the porch before slamming the door in her face. Taylor’s dad hadn’t been amused, and Jimmy Baxter had spent the next 90-days in a rehab facility drying out and coming to terms with his wife’s death and how he’d treated his only child.
Upon his sober return to Cathedral Hills, he’d tried to find Jenna, contacting the Four Corner’s shelter and getting nowhere. It seems that in-between the time Jenna had been taken there, and her father’s call, the facility had fallen victim to arson and burned to the ground. They had lost all of their records, as the incompetent facility director had made backups of their computer files, but then kept them locked up in her on-site office!
He’d even hired a detective to try and find her, but had come up empty almost every time. The only lead they’d even found was that of a young girl who was doing court ordered rehab for drugs and alcohol in the Denver area. While the young girl was of the appropriate age, she had been part of the Denver juvenile court system for long enough that no one ever followed up, as no one had ever thought their Jenna Baxter would have done those things.
After that disappointing lead, he had run out of funds and out of hope. During the last several years of his life, he had diligently prayed that Jenna would try to come home again, but it had never happened and he had died a lonely man. Trey decided to keep that information to himself for the time being, somehow knowing Jenna needed a chance to talk.
Jenna nodded, “Yeah. I left the shelter and this kid there told me about a church that would help buy me as bus ticket home, so I went there and they were happy to help. I called my dad from Ridgway and asked him to please come get me.” Jenna stopped as she remembered the hatred that had spewed forth from the phone. “He was drunk, of course. He said so many hateful things to me that day. Including the fact that he no longer had a daughter and never wanted to see me again. He blamed me for killing my mother.”
It’s a good thing the man is already dead, or I’d have to kill him! Trey was amazed at the violent emotions her story evoked. He was a peaceful man for the most part, but he had compassion for those around him that were hurting, and Jenna was hurting more than most. Father, help me maintain control and know how to proceed here? I’m really out of my depth.
“Where did you go from there?” Trey asked, proud of himself for how calm his voice sounded in the face of her story.
Jenna looked at the man sitting next to her and wondered what her life would have been like if her mother hadn’t died and she’d been able to finish growing up in Cathedral Hills. I bet I would have gotten a chance to kiss Trey at some point during high school!
Jenna slowly began to speak once again, her voice softening as she shamefully told him about her descent into the world of drugs and alcohol. “For the first few days, I didn’t go anywhere. I hiked down to the reservoir and one of the yurts was empty, so I broke the lock and holed up there for a few days.”
“Jenna, why didn’t you call Michelle? She would have come and gotten you, or had me do it.” Trey couldn’t imagine what must have been going through her head that she would have just ignored the fact that she had friends back home who cared about her.
“You don’t understand! I’d already been hurt by the fact that no one ever called me, or tried to come see me. I didn’t know you all were trying; I just knew that I had been left alone in that shelter. For weeks! My father said some really hurtful things and I believed every last word.”
Trey’s heart hurt as he listened to her speak about being discovered in the yurt by one of the park rangers and forced to leave.
“It probably wouldn’t have been quite so bad if it hadn’t been raining that day. I was soaked to the skin and I started heading towards Montrose. This van load of kids pulled over after about an hour and offered me a ride.
“I took it, but they didn’t stop in Montrose. They headed up into the mountains to a campout with other kids like them.”
“Like them?” Trey questioned, not liking where her story was starting to head.
“They were potheads, and they’re goals in life were to listen to loud music, eat junk food, and stay high for as long as possible. When they offered me my first joint, I was already high off the second hand smoke and readily took it. I don’t even remember how long we were in the mountains before everyone headed back to town.
“The driver, I don’t even remember his name, he got pulled over, and while most of them got sent to jail, I was underage and the shelter had a missing persons report out for me. I got a one way ticket back to Denver.”
Jenna took a breath and then looked around at her surroundings. That seemed so long ago!
Chapter 6
“So what happened back at the shelter?” Trey tried to keep his voice even, as he made a mental note to make sure whichever park ranger had kicked a teenager out into a rainstorm wasn’t still working in the area! Her story gave new meaning to kicking someone when they were down!
Jenna shrugged her shoulders, “Not much. I got lectured about trying to screw my life up even more by getting mixed up with those kids. I never told anyone that I’d made it all the way to Ridgway, or that I’d spoken to my father. It hurt too badly back then. As far as they knew, I only made it to Montrose.
“They pretty much kept me under surveillance until I turned eighteen, and then they handed me a hundred dollars, the few articles of clothing I’d been wearing from the thrift shop connected to the shelter, and told me to find a job and try to make something of myself.”
Trey fought the urge to pull her into his arms and comfort her. He’d had no idea the system worked in such a callous way. “Was this a State institution?” Trey asked, having trouble believing such horrific treatment of minors was allowed to continue.
Jenna shook her head, “No. I started out in a State run facility, but after I ran away, they shipped me off to the mountains outside Colorado Springs to a privately run facility for wayward youth. It was more like a prison for juveniles than a half-way house like the State facility.
“The people who operated it were only interested in keeping us there for as long as the State would pay them, and then we were out!”
Trey was shocked and asked, “Did you even finish high school?”
Jenna smiled, “Oh yeah! That’s where the hundred dollars came in. If you studied and earned your GED, they gave you a hundred dollars when they kicked you out. If you asked me, it was hush money more than a reward. If you didn’t get your GED, you got nothing! Needless to say, everyone earned their GED while I was there.”
“A hundred dollars doesn’t go very far. Where did they expect you to live? Or eat?”
“At the grown-up shelter, of course. They very kindly drove us into Denver and dropped us off a few blocks away from it. We were encouraged to check in there each night, find a job to work during the day, and work our way back into decent society.”
“They actually used those words?” Trey asked, longing for the chance to tell her how unfairly she’d been treated.
“Pretty much! The workers at the youth shelter made sure we knew that we probably wouldn’t ever make it off the streets. I don’t know that any of them actually wanted to be working there. It wasn’t until I tried to kill myself the first time and ended up in the state hospital that I met a counselor who truly seemed to care about me as a person. Attempted suicides almost always involved calling for the paramedics and they were mandated by State law to seek appropriate help for us then.”
“You tried to kill yourself?” Trey scooted his log stool just a bit closer, “Jenna, why would you do that?”
“Don’t look so shocked, Trey! It was pretty much commonplace in that facility. As to the why…Because I couldn’t live with what I’d become. If it’s any consolation, I only tr
ied killing myself once while I was in the juvie facility.”
“And after you turned eighteen? What happened then?” Trey asked.
Jenna shrugged, “Things got more real. I struggled along for the first eighteen months, working as a hotel room cleaner in one of the truck stops along I-25. That wasn’t so bad, until I started drawing unwanted attention from some of the drivers.
“I quit that job, and found another one soon after that. I either slept at the shelter, or sometimes I’d find other girls like myself and we’d pool our resources together and rent some run-down place for a few months.”
“It doesn’t sound like a very good way to live,” Trey commented, hoping she didn’t take his comment as a judgmental one.
“It wasn’t living, it was existing! That’s all any of those girls and boys do when they’re put in that situation. Luckily, I read that the private facility was shut down by the State several months after I left, and the owners are doing time.”
“That must have made you happy.”
“Not really. At that time, I was too busy trying to keep myself alive to care about anyone else.” Jenna trailed off as the hopelessness of those days came back, but instead of overwhelming her, she was proud of the fact that she could now remember those bleak days, and realize she had risen above them.
“One day, a few years ago, I was walking through one of the city parks, drugged up and feeling pretty good about myself because I’d made a few extra bucks the night before. I remember the sun was shining, and the grass was all green.
“I saw this group of teenagers having a picnic and stopped to watch them. They were all laughing and joking with one another, and they reminded me of myself before. They kept teasing each other, and after a little while, a group of boys joined them, and they set up a net and played some volleyball. They were having so much fun, and they weren’t that much younger than I was.
“A passerby saw me watching them from behind a tree and yelled at the kids they needed to keep an eye on their stuff so it didn’t get stolen. She was referring to me as being the potential thief, and it hurt. I watched as the fun and laughter faded from the kids’ faces and they packed up their stuff and went away.
