“Now wait a minute.” Dad slowly backs away, looking at me incredulously. “You really think I’d do something like that to her? You think I’d hurt you that way?”
“I don’t know, Dad,” I snap with frustration. “I don’t know what the fuck is going on. It’s like someone flipped a switch in her.” I throw my hands in the air and pace the length of my car. “She threw me out last night. She doesn’t ever want to see me again.”
“Last night? Where have you been since then?”
I hear the front door of the house open before Mom calls out to me, “Dante? What’s going on?”
She hurries over to us as Dad presses on with his questioning. “What happened with Lily? What did she say?”
“She said we can’t be together. She…” The words get caught in the tightening of my throat as I remember her painful jab directed at my family. “She said she’d never mix her DNA with that of a criminal.”
Mom immediately extends her arms toward me, but I only back away. I’m not deserving of her love and support. I’m nothing but a worthless human being.
I never should have even existed.
“Dante, please,” my mom begs, but my feet only take me further away. “Dante!”
I hear her yelling after me as I break into a run toward the woods, down the path I’ve helped carve into the cold ground through years of running from my life and hiding from the world in my only refuge from it all. I keep running through the bushes and trees, my lungs barely able to keep up with my need for oxygen, until I hit the small clearing and hear the sound of the nearby creek. My feet don’t stop completely until I’m standing next to the rock bench that has witnessed all the highs and lows of my life.
I stare at the ground next to it, to the place where only two weeks ago my parents poured their hearts and souls out to Lily retelling the story of the extraordinary circumstances under which they met, the hell they went through in the time up until my birth, and the life of hiding we’ve lived ever since. Everything about that memory is clear in my mind: the tears we cried one moment that turned to laughter we couldn’t hold back only minutes later, the relief we felt at temporarily stepping out of hiding for the first time, the joy of realizing that the two worlds I was trying to live in could be one in the same. As I stand here staring at the ground where that memory took place, all I want is to go back there, to feel that happiness and contentment again and let it wash over the hollowness and pain eating away at me from the inside out.
Shaking my head vehemently, I bolt into a run across the dirt and continue down the path with no idea where I’m going or what I’m doing. I come to a screeching halt when I hit the cliff’s edge at the waterfall. I look down at the pool of water below, and I can almost see us there, Lily and I splashing each other playfully or wrapping our naked bodies around each other. I can almost hear her laughter echoing off the rock wall behind the waterfall as she teases me and dares me to catch her.
As the memories of Lily and I together swirl around in the waters below, a numbness takes over my mind and body, and I like the lack of feeling. As it consumes me, I crave more of it. I take a step forward, my feet within inches of edge of the cliff. With another small movement, the toes of my shoes hang over the edge of the rock. I peer downward over the edge, my mind willing me to forget about the shallow rocks that I know are just beneath the surface around this edge of the pool.
Deep breath. Deep breath.
I step back and wind up my arms behind me.
A hand catches me.
Someone stops me.
Arms grip on to my chest, pulling me against a warm body to the ground. A rapidly thudding heart reverberates against me. Heavy breathing fills my ears. Wet tears drench my skin. A voice is talking to me, begging for me.
I need to listen.
“I won’t lose you.” It’s my dad’s voice. He repeats those words over and over again as he cries against me and doesn’t let me go.
The numbness is gone, vanishing out into the open air. The pain comes back to me tenfold as I realize what just happened.
I almost gave up. I was ready to throw my life away.
“I’m sorry,” I choke out, but I’m not sure my dad can hear me through his forceful sobs.
Mom appears at the path before throwing herself to the ground in front of us. Her arms are shaking as she wraps them around me and my dad. “Oh my God. Are you okay?”
“No,” I answer honestly. “I’m losing it, Mom. I’ve lost my fucking mind.”
“I’m here. We’re here for you.” She grips us even tighter as she begins to cry. “We’re always here for you.”
I nod against her and let out my own tears to grieve for the loss of the person I was yesterday morning, the man I will never be again.
26
I poke at the scrambled eggs on my plate with my fork but make no attempt to eat them. The couple bites of buttered toast I had were about all I could manage. These simple things like eating and breathing and existing seem pointless now.
My mother’s eyes are on me. They have been for at least a few minutes. I know she’s worried about my current state, but I can’t even find it within me to make an effort to alleviate her concern. Taking a few bites of egg is all I’d need to do to make her feel better at this moment, and I can’t even manage that.
“You need to eat something,” she finally prods, just as she has said the last three mornings after I’ve sat at this table and failed to eat more than a few bites of food.
Pushing the plate away from me, I shake my head. “I’m not hungry.”
Mom gets up from her chair at the table across from me and circles around until she’s hugging me from behind. “You’ve barely eaten anything in three days. You’re hardly sleeping.” She kisses me on the side of the head and squeezes me a little tighter. “You need to take better care of yourself.”
I sigh heavily. “It’s not that easy, Mom.” I glance at my cell phone sitting idly on the center of the table, somehow still believing there’s a chance it might ring. The device hasn’t left my side in days.
Mom lets go of me and takes a seat in the chair next to mine before taking my hand in hers. She seems to take a moment to think, clearly choosing her words carefully before speaking to me. “I don’t think she’s going to call.”
Her words sting as they smack into me, but my mind deflects them away. “She’ll call.”
“You need to start moving on, Dante.”
“No,” I counter forcefully.
“I know it’s hard, but you can’t keep living like this.” She looks away, but I can still see the emotion swirling in her expression. “I can’t watch my only son wither away before my eyes.”
“You won’t have to,” I say confidently, “because Lily won’t give up on me. She’ll call.”
Mom returns her gaze to me with hopeless tears lining her reddened eyes, and as much as her pained expression makes me want to start believing she may be right about Lily, I’m not ready to give up on her just yet.
She’ll call, I think to myself. She has to.
But she doesn’t call. Another week goes by, and my phone remains silent and I’m stuck in this house and my entire world becomes limited to this tiny, meaningless speck on the Earth. The leaves continue to fall outside and my refuge in the woods calls to me, but I can’t even go there alone to think and process and exist because my parents worry I’ll try to throw myself off that damn cliff again.
My feet are right here, firmly planted on the ground, yet why does it feel like I’m still falling?
Another week. More silence. I start to neglect my phone, forgetting to carry it with me everywhere like the extra appendage it was before. I’m eating more now, only because I have to in order to survive, because I need to be here and awake and alive when that phone rings. I have to be ready for it. I know it’s coming.
But it never does.
Only silence.
Silence and solitude.
Stepping out of my room for the
first time since breakfast, I saunter down the hallway, stopping briefly at the bathroom before making my way to the kitchen with my mind set on a glass of water. The moment I step out of the hallway, though, I’m stunned to a stop by the sight I find in the living room: my grandparents sitting on the couch and my parents in the chairs across from them. They’re all staring at me expectantly, and suddenly I feel a little ridiculous standing here in sweats with a frazzled head of hair and a week’s worth of scruff on my jaw.
My eyes are immediately drawn to Robert. His arm is finally out of its cast and the lacerations and bruising on his face have healed completely. I continue to feel guilty that I’ve only seen him during his visits to our house and haven’t gone to see him recently, but I can’t bring myself to make the drive. The thought of driving past the places that remind of me Lily along the only way to my grandparents’ house is just too much for me.
“Your arm is healed,” I comment as I approach the couch.
Robert nods and smiles, but the expression doesn’t reach his eyes. He’s not here for small talk or a family visit.
This is an intervention.
“It’s been three weeks,” Dad says firmly. “It’s over, Dante.”
Don’t say those words. I hate those words.
“We feel like we’re losing you,” Mom jumps in, her voice thick with emotion. “You’ve always been strong, not just for yourself, but for your family. Look at what you’ve accomplished for us.” She motions to my grandparents sitting across the room, living reminders of something amazing I did at great risk not just to improve my own life but the lives of my entire family.
“Things don’t always work out the way we expect,” Robert explains. “Despite everything we had been through, we were the happiest grandparents in the world up until the day the FBI came knocking at our door when you were just a few weeks old. It only took that one day for everything to change, but in the end we made it here. You and your parents stayed safe, and now we’re all free. It took years to get here, but ultimately we made it.”
Robert takes Cindy’s hand in his and they smile at each other before Cindy turns to me. “You’ll find your happiness. You have your entire life ahead of you. There’s someone for you out there. You just have to find her.”
I know this.
I’ve already found this girl.
Her name is Lily.
I sigh and run my hands through my hair, desperately trying to process all this under the scrutinizing eyes of my entire family. It’s hard to face the idea of giving up on the one person who I thought was it for me, but I can’t keep living like this. I’ve neglected my family and my loyalty to them for far too long. I owe it to them to make an effort. Hell, I owe it to myself.
“Okay,” I breathe out, that one word sealing my decision. “It’s time to move on.”
I can almost feel the blanket of relief settling not just over the room but over me as well. Inhaling a deep breath, I feel like oxygen is finding its way to my lungs for the first time in three weeks.
I tuck the pain away inside and try to focus on this moment and the people around me. I pull up a chair and spend the evening in the company of those who will never give up on me, temporarily forgetting all that I lost a few weeks ago.
Little by little the pain lessens. Within hours I find more peaceful slumber. Within days I’m almost back to eating normal meals again. Within a week I’m able to venture into the woods without my parents’ watchful eyes on me.
It almost feels like I’m back to my previous life, to the version of me who existed before the force that was Lily came crashing into my world, but it feels different now. Where life seemed empty and hopeless before, I see promise and potential ahead. The view is hazy, the future blurry and unknown to me, but I’ll take steps toward it anyway. At least I know something’s there waiting for me. I’m rapidly advancing toward it. I have been my entire life without even realizing it, and I know I’ll reach it.
Someday.
27
It feels good to have a hammer in my hand again. I realize this more and more each day I spend back on the job volunteering for Habitat for Humanity. It’s only been a little over a week since my family’s intervention that prompted me to take this transitional step back onto the path toward my future, but I’m already seeing positive results. The pain isn’t gone completely, but the overwhelming weight on my chest has lessened. I’ve accepted what happened, and though I may not embrace this diverted path with as much enthusiasm as the track I was on a month ago, I’m learning to live with it.
I’m slowly learning to live again.
I’ve spent the last hour nailing up crown molding in the kitchen of this current house project. It seems appropriate that I’m here building something significant and useful from nothing but wooden boards, nails, and drywall, similar to what I’m doing with my life right now. The bits and pieces of me have been strewn all over the place since Lily cut me from her life a month ago. I’m only now starting to put them all back together again, slowly building the new foundation for my life and my future.
When the final piece of crown molding is attached where the wall meets the ceiling above the kitchen cabinets, I step down from the ladder and assess my handiwork. As I take in the room that really just needs appliances at this point, it occurs to me that I’ve likely worked through lunch already. I pull out my phone to check the time and contemplate taking a thirty-minute break to grab something to eat.
My brow furrows.
I have a missed call.
It looks familiar. I swear I’ve seen that number before. It only takes a moment for my memory banks to place it though, because that number is tucked away in the forefront of my mind along with all my other memories I’m holding on to so dearly.
It’s the number for CJ’s Tavern.
My heart begins to race even though I have no idea what this missed call means. Just because the tavern called me doesn’t mean it was Lily dialing my number. Why wouldn’t she have just used her cell phone?
Unless something happened to her. Maybe she didn’t call because she can’t. Maybe she’s in the hospital right now and the staff at the tavern knew that I’d want to be informed. Maybe it’s even worse than that. She could be dead for all I know. That’s how truly disconnected I’ve been from Lily the last month.
I practically run out of the kitchen and down the hallway toward the empty frame that will hold the front door of the house. Brandon, the project coordinator for this house, is working on some electrical wiring in the hallway and gives me a funny look as I go by. “Everything okay, man?”
I stop and grasp the frame of the door with my free hand to look back at Brandon. “I think so. I need to make a quick call.”
“Take your time,” he says as he gets back to what he was working on. “You’ve put in more than your fair share of hours today already.”
With a quick nod, I take a few extra strides forward onto the dirt that will eventually become a beautifully landscaped yard for whatever family will live here when the house is done. My fingers hover over the keypad on my phone for a moment before I realize I’m not sure whether to call the tavern or Lily’s cell phone first.
I take the safer route, dialing the tavern and putting the phone to my ear cautiously as if it might jump out and bite me at any second.
It rings and rings until someone finally picks up. “CJ’s Tavern.”
It sounds like Jodi. I hope it’s her. “Jodi? This is Dante.”
A brief moment of silence passes, and for a moment I wonder if she’s already forgotten about my existence. “Dante? Wow, long time no talk.”
By the surprise in her voice, it’s clear to me that she’s not the one who called. I doubt any of the kitchen staff would even know how to get me on the phone, so that leaves only one person who could have dialed my number.
“Is Lily there? I had a missed call from the tavern. I think she called me.”
“She did?” There’s an unusual amount of surprise in Jo
di’s voice, and I don’t know what that means. “Um, hold on a minute. Let me get her when she comes by. She’s just running some food to a table right now.”
Jodi sounds nervous but excited at the same time. I want nothing more than to unravel that mystery and ask her what the hell is making her act this way on the phone with me, but I keep my mouth shut. I just need to focus on Lily and why she called.
Pacing my way back and forth across the dirt, I anxiously wait in silence for the twenty or thirty seconds that feel like hours it takes for something other than the garbled sound of voices and sharp clinking glass to fill the call.
“Dante?” Lily says my name with hope and light and life and I wish I could wrap myself around that word and hold on to it forever.
“Hey.” I pause, half-expecting Lily to burst into some frantic explanation or apology considering how we left things a month ago. When she doesn’t say anything, I force myself to speak, unable to stand another moment without knowing why she reached out to me now. “You called me? Is everything okay?”
The background noise of the tavern grows quieter before Lily answers me, her voice just shy of a whisper. “I need to see you.”
Warmth envelopes my chest and spreads throughout my entire body. “Okay. Where do I meet you?”
“Come to the tavern,” she says quickly, maintaining her hushed voice, “but don’t come inside. I’ll keep an eye out for you in the parking lot.”
I rush to think how long it will take me to get to the tavern from here, suddenly disappointed in myself for purposefully choosing to work on a project that was in the opposite direction of Lily’s place and the tavern. “I’m about thirty minutes away, but I’ll be there.”
“Good.” It’s such a simple word, but in those four letters and that one syllable, I can hear every bit of Lily’s relief that I’m coming to her, and it feels fucking amazing.
The call abruptly ends, but I don’t read too much into our non-existent goodbye. I’m still stuck on that four letter word that came out of Lily’s mouth.
Beyond Resistance (The Ransom Series) Page 20
