The Years After (Sister #5)

by Leanne Davis

  Why should I believe you now? What point is there in rehashing all this?

  I’ll tell you the truth. As much as I know. The point is: you deserve whatever answers you want.

  I don’t believe you’ll ever be honest. But I guess it doesn’t hurt to read a few texts from you. So… Quentrell was really your brother?

  Yes. He took over my dad’s operation after I killed him. My mom gave me to him to “work.” That’s what she called it in exchange for keeping her supplied.

  Quentrell didn’t care you were his own brother?

  No. It was a sick game to him. I’ve been shitty to Max. I didn’t protect him, or even get to know him. But I never wanted him doing the things I was. I thought by protecting Max from Quentrell, I might make up for some of the things I was doing. But I see now, it didn’t.

  What kinds of things did your dad do to you?

  He liked to hit and kick all of us. So did my mom though. He was just stronger and could really hurt us. They didn’t protect us from anyone. None of the shits that dealt for them, or the ones they were hooking up with. I was weaned on that stuff.

  You were beaten? What else? What else did they do to you? Tell me, I need to know.

  Everything. They did everything a parent could do to kids. Quentrell was big and mean, always, even then. They ignored him. Max was small and quiet, and I tried to deflect their wrath away from him. It was me who my mother hated most. I was beaten. I was even raped by one of my mom’s johns. I was neglected. I was shot full of drugs when I was eight to shut me up when I got too loud one time. The list goes on. Do you really want to hear more?

  Yes.

  Why?

  To understand. To understand who I fell in love with. You were raped?

  Yes. Can you understand why I don’t want to talk about it?

  Yes. But ignoring it or lying about it doesn’t erase it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. How old were you?

  Twelve.

  Her heart twisted and bile climbed up her throat. I had no idea.

  It’s why I’m such a lousy person.

  Did you really kill your father?

  Yes. I really did.

  Do you regret it?

  I regret everything I’ve ever done. Even you, and everything I did to you.

  How could you lie so long?

  Years of practice. It’s no help, but I only lied when it came to drugs or Quentrell. Lying is the only thing I’ve ever really known. The guilt about it, towards you, didn’t come until later, after I started to understand what lying was. What loving someone was supposed to mean. I didn’t know, Olivia. I never loved anyone. Not my parents, not even my brothers. If Max and I did, we never learned how to show it.

  It hurts me to think of you being beaten and abused and neglected and raped. It hurts me so much.

  Long pause, during which she wondered if she’d lost him. Thank you. No one’s ever known. No one’s ever hurt for me.

  You hurt me.

  I hurt me too.

  She closed her eyes at his simple sentence and stared at it long and hard. Tears filled her eyes and dripped over her eyelids. God it was all so horribly difficult.

  She glanced down when another text came through. Please show these to Tony. Ask if it’s okay if I contact you. If he says no, then you’ll never hear from me again.

  Her eyebrows shot up in surprise. You want me to ask my dad if I can talk to you?

  Yes. I have terrible judgment of right and wrong. You might not have clear judgment when it’s about me. Tony does though. He’ll know. He’ll tell you the truth, which is what you need.

  OK. Have to say, you don’t sound the same.

  I’m not the same.

  She stared at the conversation for half an hour. Then she surprised herself by going downstairs and showing it to her parents. They both sat down and a strange silence filled the kitchen. Gretchen rubbed her eyes. “Shit. This is… tragic. How can I hate him? I want to hate him.”

  Tony nodded and rubbed her neck. Then he leaned over and touched Olivia’s hand. “I know. That’s what I felt too. Will says he caught him in a severe panic attack a few weeks ago. He is seeing a therapist now. Will says he isn’t well. This, what happened to you, really changed him.”

  Olivia shut her eyes as the horror of it all filtered through her head. She blinked her eyes a few times to hold the tears back. She was tired of crying for herself and Derek, and now, just for Derek. “He was raped. How does a twelve-year-old boy handle that?”

  “Lie, cheat, steal, act out, some do drugs.”

  “Can he ever be normal?”

  Gretchen let out a huge sigh. “If I say he can’t, I am denying the purpose of my entire life’s work, which is all I’ve ever focused on. No one is too broken. Everyone can be fixed. So…yes, I have to believe he can. Do I want you to be the one involved in his rehabilitation? No. But…”

  “But you can’t decide that for me,” Olivia finished in a hollow tone. Her heart squeezed and more tears filled her eyes. She whispered softly, “I’m still…”

  “We know, honey, we know you are,” her mom said as she got up and came around to hug Olivia against her chest.

  It became much harder to hate him as she did before. He kept contacting her, and she kept letting him. She showed his texts to her parents. Never again would she be blind-sided by him. But neither could she ignore him totally.

  It turned out what he told her was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of terrible things Derek Salazar suffered, or witnessed. She learned all of it over the next few months. Small snippets started to emerge although most of their correspondence started out with how was your day? She learned he was often locked in a closet, and learned to hide in his room, afraid of seeing the raging fights in the living room between his parents. Or his parents and someone else. He described how the walls vibrated from the impact of bodies being smashed against them along with grunts and groans. Everything could be heard from where Max and he usually hid in the corner of his room, behind the door. One incident after another was reported in detail. It usually correlated to something he was discussing with his therapist.

  They never talked to each other. Not once, no matter how heavy or terrible a situation they were discussing, neither of them lifted up the phone. Their correspondences were nearly anonymous and exclusively through text messaging. He didn’t lie when he wrote to her, not like he did so easily when speaking to her. He seemed to know that too.

  Why did she talk to him? She didn’t really have an answer to that. Was it because she still loved him? Yes. No matter how much resentment and hatred she felt, she also had an unending amount of empathy for him. That led to understanding, which led to forgiveness, which led to hope… which she immediately tried to squash. No. No. No! Finally accepting what happened to her was definitely not the same as opening up her heart and being with him.

  Still, his life was a freaking Shakespearian tragedy. It wasn’t funny. There was nothing kind or decent or moral about it. How could he have done any better? The few redeeming personality traits he possessed were more an accident of nature rather than from any kind of nurturing by another person. He raised himself. He believed when he was younger, his mother was a little better. There was some love from her, until he was around eight. That was when her drug addiction completely took over her life. That Derek wasn’t hurt or killed despite the war zone he called his childhood said a hell of a lot about his survival instinct.

  She almost felt guilty for the life she’d been given. She could have been Derek. When her grandma died, she was only eight years old, and there were no other relatives. She could have easily fallen into the labyrinth of foster care and who knew where her life would have gone? It certainly would not have been the happy, decent, wonderful childhood she enjoyed with Gretchen and Tony.

  Her parents. Yeah, maybe she was overly close to them. But how many adults choose their child? She was selected by them. She was rescued from the nightmare of institutions and it was something she woul
d never forget. The thing was: everyone was having difficulty in shutting off that urge to help, only it was with Derek now.

  Tony had just heard from Will and Lindsey, who knew a lot about Derek. Olivia knew more than most girls might know about an ex-boyfriend whose brother tried to overdose her.

  Still, she continued texting with him.

  ****

  Things went okay for a few months, although the weird panic attacks still happened. However, he learned a few things that alleviated the pain and made him feel a little less like he was dying in the next moment. He wasn’t very good at practicing the techniques to deal with it, at first. He even thought at the times when he was calm that they sounded stupid and too ridiculous and easy to do. But in the heat of the attacks, when he needed to use them, they became nearly impossible for him to implement. Eventually, however, the exercises began to work. He learned to breathe in, through his nose, while counting to five, then letting it out just as slowly with a hand on his chest. He tried isolating different muscles in his body, and focusing all of his concentration on tightening and relaxing them until the symptoms lessened. Sometimes just walking around prevented them from occurring.

  He confessed more about himself and his childhood to his therapist and texted over his phone to Olivia than he had ever strung together during his lifetime. It was a pretty horrific picture. Even he recognized that.

  He also knew there was a lot that wasn’t his fault. However, what he did now with it was entirely his responsibility. He was aware of that new and profound reality: he just had no clue what to do about it.

  Then Max came home one evening very late and Derek was the only one home. Max ran in and straight up the stairs. Derek followed him only to stop dead in the doorway as Max was throwing his meager items into his dirty backpack.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Leavin’”

  He watched Max’s desperate movements. “Why? Where do you think you’re going?”

  He stopped and threw the bag down. “I got caught.”

  “Caught? Doing what?”

  “Fightin’. Principal’s gonna be callin’ ‘em. J-j-just gettin' out before they find out.”

  “Fighting! Shit! What did I tell you about that? Was it for money?”

  “’C-course. Why else do it?”

  Derek almost turned and grabbed his stuff. His heart beat louder and began escalating. Run. Max was right. Just run. Something bad was bound to happen. They were doomed to fail. They were doomed. Period. Living this kind of life was hard. And would have to end at some point, so why not end it on their terms?

  But then again, where would he take his thirteen-year-old brother?

  “We can’t just leave. There’s nowhere left to go, Max. This isn’t Marsdale. I have no contacts here. I have nowhere to go, and no wheels to get there.”

  “They’re not keeping us. Get a c-clue. Better now than later.”

  “Max?” Noah’s voice thundered from behind Derek, who flinched as he turned. Noah was striding down the hall. “I got a call from the school principal.”

  He stopped dead in the doorway and his eyes scanned the scene in front of him. “What are you doing?”

  “J-just leavin’. Don’t worry; I’ll be gone so you don’t have to deal with it.”

  He tried to push past them, and Noah let him. Then he followed Max down the stairs, just as Lindsey was coming in from the kitchen. Her eyes grew wide when she noticed what Max carried. Derek followed, unsure of what he should do, and what their reaction could be.

  He had no idea if Noah and Lindsey would say to get out. Or maybe, Lindsey, being so nice and all, would beg Max to stay. He didn’t know what they’d do with the rules they so clearly set down being so flagrantly broken. He didn’t foster much hope. After all, wasn’t all of this based on one chance? Don’t fuck up? Well, Max had knowingly fucked up.

  Lindsey put her hands on her hips. “What are you doing? Put that bag away right now, and get in here. We’re having a discussion, young man, about why you will desist from this moment on in running fight clubs at school.”

  Max stopped on the bottom step, clearly confused. He glanced at Derek who shrugged back. Noah came up behind them. “What Lindsey means, is we are not allowing a thirteen-year-old to go running out of here in the middle of the night in the dark. Now—”

  “No. What I meant was very clear. Get in there, sit down and take your punishment. You have to quit being such a little punk and running away from the smallest battles. You too, Derek. GO!”

  Surprisingly, Max set his bag down and shuffled into the kitchen. Keeping his head down, he flopped into a chair, his arms crossed over his chest and a scowl that appeared menacing as he glared at the table before him.

  Derek stood back, ready to finally protect Max when they kicked them out.

  “Did you miss the lecture we gave about fighting?”

  “N-n-no. I heard it.”

  “So you deliberately chose to disobey us?”

  Max shrugged. “You’re n-n-not my parents. You’re n-n-nothing to me.”

  “Correction. We are your guardians right now. Who else is going to do it, Max? Derek? Your former drug-dealing brother who is as lost and alone and confused as you? Get real. We’re not letting a little kid take care of another little kid. Now, why the fighting?” Lindsey crossed her arms over her chest and waited for an answer.

  “Stop! You can’t throw him out, Aunt Lindsey! It wasn’t his fault.”

  The front door suddenly burst open and Christina came running in with Will on her heels. Will threw an apologetic glance at Lindsey. “I’m sorry, she’s freaking out.”

  Lindsey grabbed Christina when she threw herself at Lindsey, crying hysterically. As she spoke, her words kept running all over each other. “You can’t just throw him out! You can’t. It wasn’t his fault. The kids are so mean. They make fun of how he talks. I tried to stop them, but they just keep teasing him. He just—” She was still sobbing as she buried her face into Lindsey’s chest. “It’s so mean. Why would anyone be so mean?”

  Derek watched Will and Lindsey and Noah exchanging glances. Their concern over Christina’s outburst seemed genuine enough, but Derek was on edge over where all of this left Max.

  She pushed Christina back and put her hand on her chin, lifting her face up. “No one is getting kicked out of anywhere.”

  Max hunkered down further in his chair as Christina spoke. Derek could guess by the look Max first gave Christina that he liked her, and having her feel so sorry for him was humiliating. Probably worse than the names he was called.

  Noah stepped forward, “Look, we don’t have any real authority over either of you. But we are not willing to let you go out into the night. We just need to talk about what behavior is—”

  “Why can’t you just adopt him? Let him stay here for good? How is he supposed to behave properly when everyone is so mean to him? There’s no one he can count on. Just adopt him!” Christina interrupted, and her tone was sincere and impassioned. Everyone, even Max looked at Christina, and all were stunned.

  Lindsey swallowed as she finally tried to collect herself. “Honey, we’re not going to be here next fall. I told you, we’re going to start gearing up for the senate race. That means we’re moving, honey. We can’t—”

  Derek had no idea what they were talking about. Senate race? Was she for real? Was he living with a woman who might possibly become the next senator? His mouth dropped open. But Christina wasn’t done.

  “So quit! It’s just some stupid race. You don’t have to do it. Someone else can. But who else can take care of Max?” Christina looked from Lindsey to Noah to her dad. “No one! There is no one. I’ve heard all of you talking. I’ve heard what Derek was and what happened to Olivia. What about Max? What will become of him?”

  “Christina,” Will said in a stern, fatherly tone, “Enough.”

  She was crying still. “No! It’s not enough. Not enough was ever done for him and so now he fights ‘cause he’s
hurt and angry. And even now? There’s not enough being done.”

  “Tiny, it’s a complicated situation. You can’t just adopt a kid. He already has a mother. We don’t know where this will go, but—”

  “I could find her.” Derek spoke before he realized what he would say. He was shocked when all of the eyes in the room were instantly pinned on him, and even more shocked he’d spoken. He cleared his throat and continued, “I could find our mom. I could make her sign off or whatever you need for custody or whatever. I mean it, she won’t care. She’d do it for a few hundred dollars or even a couple of fixes.”

  He kept his gaze down and could not believe what he just said. The room grew as silent as if it were underwater. Only the clock in the next room that kept ticking broke the overbearing silence.

  “All right.”

  His face jerked up, as did those in the entire room, and they all looked towards Lindsey. She shrugged and a slow smile started on her lips and ended in her cheeks. She spread her hands out in front of her as she stared at Noah. Derek glanced at Noah. His eyes were fastened firmly on Lindsey and they were nodding at each other.

  “All right, what?” Christina finally asked. She lifted her head off her dad’s chest and stared at her aunt and uncle for a long, solemn moment.

  Derek didn’t even know how to hope. What were they talking about? He couldn’t even begin to comprehend.

  “All right, we would be willing to adopt you, Max.”

  Derek’s ears started to ring. No. No way. He didn’t hear that right. This decent, typical, nice couple, who ate normal meals and worked good jobs, and never seemed to hit each other or anyone else surely did not just say they would adopt Max?

  Max’s gaze shot to him, looking for reassurance, as well as normalcy. His expression was panicked, and Derek felt it too. What was the trick? What was the catch? People didn’t do things like that. People didn’t just help others for free. Not without some great benefit to themselves. What could they possibly hope to get out of Max?

  But he’d been around them enough to know if there was some strange perversion, hadn’t he? And… well, Tony recommended them, and he just didn’t think Tony would let Max stay somewhere unsafe.