“You think we’re actually going to get any rain this time?” she asked me.
“If we’re lucky.” But I kind of doubted it. Lately, we’d been getting storms that were more show than rain. Lots of flashing and banging, but nothing to soak the earth.
Natalie smiled, one of those rare smiles that actually made it all the way to her eyes. It lit up her whole face, even from across the room. “Wanna go outside and watch? We can sit on the porch.”
“You like thunderstorms?”
“Love them. At least the ones we get down here. We didn’t get anything like an Oklahoma thunderstorm back home when I was a kid.”
She wasn’t joking about the storms here. Every spring and fall, I was amazed by the intensity of the fronts that sometimes blew through Tulsa. No Hollywood magic needed here. This was the real deal—thunder, lightning, rain that came down in sheets, high winds and hail, and sometimes even more.
“Yeah, let’s go.” I grabbed a leash for Snoopy, because I didn’t want him to get scared by a crack of thunder and run off, and then I held the door open for Natalie.
She headed out before me and took a seat on the front steps of my porch, leaning her crutches against the railing. I sat next to her, loosely holding Snoopy’s leash so he could run off and explore several feet of the yard, his sniffer working overtime because of the crackling energy in the air.
The sun had almost fully set, but the sky was still more purple than black. Dark storm clouds were rolling in from the west, though, ominous and foreboding but somehow promising at the same time.
We desperately needed the rain. I hoped we’d get some.
“Where was home?” I asked, glad to be talking with Natalie about something other than doctors and hospitals and therapy.
Based on her soft sigh of relief, she was glad to be focused on different subject matter, too. She seemed more relaxed than I could ever recall seeing her before. “Ann Arbor.”
“Seriously? Ann Arbor? I grew up in Livonia, so we were practically neighbors. My mom’s still up there,” I added, almost as an afterthought.
And my father was, too. He was one of the main reasons I never went back if I could help it.
“My family’s still there, too. I think.”
My brain latched onto the last bit—I think. “You don’t talk to them?” I asked.
Natalie shook her head, staring off into the distance, where another flash of lightning lit up the night sky. “Not since…” Then she shook her head again.
But I didn’t need her to finish that thought. I could fill in the blanks well enough on my own.
“How long did it go on?” I asked.
Natalie blinked a few times, but I could see the flood of tears filling her eyes. She didn’t let them spill over, though, somehow holding them inside. I got the sense she had a lot of things locked up tight, keeping them under wraps.
She took a deep breath, refusing to look at me, her gaze never wavering from the electrical show in the heavens. “The first time he hit me, we were seniors in high school. It was right after our prom, actually, so not long before graduation. I had a nasty shiner when I walked across the stage to get my diploma. I tried to cover it up with makeup, but makeup can only do so much.”
Another crack of lightning split the sky, followed a few seconds later by a massive, rolling boom that shook the earth, but still no rain fell. Natalie shivered, despite the sweltering heat, but she didn’t shift to go back inside.
As long as I could keep her talking, I had no intention of moving a muscle.
“Why did he hit you that time?” I asked. Because if she was anything like me, she would remember every detail. They were all stored in my memory, in a place I kept them tightly under wraps. I could access them when I needed to, but I usually kept them locked away. I’d never forget, but I didn’t like to think about any of it too much.
Natalie looked down at her lap for a moment, and I thought I might have pushed too hard, asked for too much. But then she lifted her head and stared out at the rolling clouds again. “Because one of the guys from the basketball team asked me to dance with him, but I was Hayes’s date, so I wasn’t supposed to dance with anyone but him.”
“He hit you because some guy asked to dance with you? Not because you danced with him, even?”
“He didn’t really need a reason to hit me,” Natalie said. “He always gave me one, but he didn’t need one. He hit me because he got off on it. That night was also the first night he—”
But then she cut herself off, shaking her head, her lips forming a thin line.
Too soon to go there, apparently. That was all right. At least I had her talking now.
“My father didn’t need a reason to hit me, either,” I said, not ready to give up on this conversation.
Natalie’s head shot around to face me, her brows drawn together, forming a question in her expression.
“My dad beat the shit out of me for years. The first time I remember him hitting me, I was four years old, and I’d come in last place in a race across the pond with a bunch of kids who were older and bigger than me. They’d all been skating for longer than me. He told me that if I ever wanted to play hockey, if I wanted to be someone someday, I had to be faster than all the other kids, and that he’d beat me until I understood.”
A fat tear filled one of Natalie’s pale-blue eyes, growing to an impossible size before finally spilling over. I couldn’t stop myself from reaching up to brush it away with the pad of my thumb. For just a moment, she almost leaned in to my touch, but then she turned away to stare at the light show taking place in the sky, instead.
“Why do you think some men feel the need to hit people?” she asked. Her voice had gone soft and shaky, similar to how it had been after they’d taken the tube out of her throat. “Women and kids, other men? What do they get out of it?”
“I wish I knew. Power?” I suggested. “Maybe they feel like everything’s out of their control, and that’s how they try to reclaim it?”
“Hayes didn’t need to hit me to have control over me,” she said, but her voice was almost a whisper.
“He doesn’t have control of you anymore.”
She blinked a few times, as if trying to stop more tears from falling. “You’re wrong,” she whispered. “He’ll always be there. Always controlling me. He could be in another state or behind bars or even dead, but he’ll still be in control.”
“Only if you let him,” I pointed out.
“He’s still out there, though.”
“But he’s not here.” Once the team had suspended him, he’d packed up his shit and left. I didn’t know if he’d gone back to Michigan or if he was trying to get a hockey gig in Europe. And frankly, I didn’t care, as long as he wasn’t here.
“You don’t think your dad is still controlling you?” she asked, just as the night lit up like a Christmas tree, with a flash of lightning so bright and intense that it made me jump. The crack of thunder that followed it had Snoopy whimpering and racing back to jump into my arms, burrowing his face in my elbow.
“Not in the ways he wants to be,” I said. “He made me who I am today.”
Her brow furrowed in confusion, and she shook her head.
“Whether I liked his methods or not, I wouldn’t be in the NHL today if he hadn’t pushed me the way he did. And it’s because of all the shit he put me through that I’ve made it a point to never, not ever, lift a hand against a woman or a child. My kid’s not going to grow up being scared of me. This dog might be scared of thunder, but he’s not scared of me. My ex and I couldn’t make our marriage work out, but it wasn’t because I was abusing her. I wouldn’t be half the man I am today if it wasn’t for him.”
“I don’t believe that,” Natalie said, and she sounded so sincere it made my chest ache. “You’re a good man because of you, not because he beat it into you. You’re a good man in spite of him.”
“But still, he made me want to be better,” I insisted. “The way I saw it, I had two
choices: I could end up just like him, beating the shit out of my wife and kids, or I could decide to go a different way. ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,’” I quoted.
Natalie looked away again, watching the lightshow in the sky. “Did your mother know?” she asked.
“How could she not? He beat her, too. For all I know, he still does. Maybe more than ever since he can’t hit me anymore.”
“She’s still with him?”
I nodded slowly, even though she couldn’t see it other than maybe out of the corner of her eye. “I tried to get her to come with me when I got my first NHL contract.”
“But she wouldn’t come,” Natalie said, as if she’d somehow known the answer without me needing to put words to it.
“No, she wouldn’t come.”
“The same as I wouldn’t come with you that first night.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Maybe it didn’t need a response.
“Why do we do that?” Natalie asked. “Why don’t we try to escape, even when it’s that bad? Why do we hope everyone will look away, and why are we thankful when they do?”
There wasn’t a good answer for any of those questions. “Fear of the unknown? It’s safer to stick with what we know rather than face what we don’t know. At least that was what I used to think.”
“But you fought back,” she said. “You got out.”
“You got out, too.”
“Only because you saved me.”
“Only because you called me for help,” I pointed out.
Natalie blinked back some more tears, staring out into the night. It was fully dark now, despite the early hour. The clouds had completely blocked the moonrise. Thunder persisted, sprinkled with flashes of lightning, but there was still no rain.
“Kinsey knew all about how my father beat the snot out of me,” I said. “Carter’s mom. She knew it well before we got married and had Carter. She witnessed some of it for herself.”
“But she was never scared you’d be like him?” Natalie asked.
“Never. You’re not scared of me, are you?”
Natalie shook her head.
“Kinsey wasn’t, either. She knew me, really knew me. We grew up together. She was the girl across the street. I’d had a crush on her since before I understood what it was to have a crush. I sometimes escaped to her place when the beatings got too bad but before I was big enough to fight back. Her mom would put a steak on my black eyes and other bruises, or sometimes she’d give me a bag of frozen peas to slow the swelling. She cleaned and dressed my cuts. She showed me the kind of love and care I’d never known before. I told her they were hockey injuries. I don’t think she ever believed me, but she didn’t say anything.”
“I told my parents that I fell down the stairs at school the first time I came home with a black eye,” Natalie said. “Said my face hit the bannister and that’s why I had a shiner.”
“Did they believe you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. But they never intervened to get me out of that situation. I wanted them to help me. To see through the lies I had to tell them, but no one helped. Not until you.”
“People can be really blind to things that are right in front of their eyes.”
“But your ex’s family saw?”
“They saw, and they knew, but they still didn’t step in to stop him. I think they were afraid of what he’d do to me if they tried to get involved.”
Natalie nodded, slow and steady, as if soaking it all in and realizing she wasn’t alone. Maybe for the first time since her prom, she didn’t feel alone.
I wanted that for her. I wanted her to know she had someone she could count on. I needed her to believe she could count on me, that I had some idea of what she’d been through and I’d never allow her to end up in a situation like that again.
“At first,” I said, “Kinsey just watched her mother tend my cuts and bruises and shit without saying anything. But then one day, while her mother was dressing a particularly nasty cut on my cheek, Kinsey took my hand and held it in her lap, crying silent tears for me because I refused to let any of my own fall.”
Tears much like the ones currently falling down Natalie’s cheeks.
“How old were you?” she asked. “When it stopped, I mean.”
“I was fifteen the first time I fought back.”
“Why then?”
“Because I was finally big enough. He’d pushed me my entire life to be bigger, faster, stronger, better than all the other kids I was playing hockey with. But he never expected me to use it against him.” I stretched out my legs just as another crack of thunder had Snoopy diving back onto my lap, shaking in fear. I scratched his ears and tried to soothe him. “One day, I’d taken a bad penalty in a hockey game. On the way home, he got so mad that he pulled off the road and dragged me out of the car, whipping off his belt to beat me with it. But I wrestled the belt out of his hands and used it on him, instead.”
“That couldn’t have gone over well.”
I laughed, a dry, hollow sort of laugh. “That’s putting it mildly. He lost his shit. Got back in the car and left me on the side of the road. I was just a kid in nothing but jeans and a sweatshirt on the side of the road in the middle of January in Michigan with no way to get home. I walked a couple of miles to a gas station. Some strangers gave me a few quarters, and I managed to call my coach for a ride. But instead of going back to my place, I moved in with Kinsey’s family. And as soon as I got the chance to play in juniors in Canada, I was out of there and never looked back.”
“Do you ever wonder?” Natalie asked. “About your mother,” she clarified.
“All the time. When I got my first pro contract, I called her and asked her to come live with me and Kinsey.”
“But she wouldn’t come?” she repeated.
Sometimes, a person needed to hear the same thing over and over and over again before they’d believe it. Before it could sink in. So I said, “No, she wouldn’t come. You ever think about your parents?” Maybe understanding that she wasn’t alone, that other women in the same position she’d been in, would help Natalie to heal.
“All the time,” she said, echoing my earlier response. “But so much has changed now. He cut me off completely. Wouldn’t let me have any contact with them, and they refused to have anything to do with him, anyway.”
“Maybe you should think about calling them soon.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” But there wasn’t anything in her demeanor that said she intended to do it, nothing that led me to believe she would go through with it.
It killed me that they’d cut her off when she’d needed them more than anything.
Another streak of lightning lit up the sky, and Snoopy trembled in my arms, but the clouds still refused to release any rain. I scratched him behind his ears, hoping to calm him down.
“Seriously, though, why do you think that is?” Natalie asked. “Why do we stay?”
That was a question she’d have to answer for herself, in the end. I’d already taken one stab at it.
But maybe she just needed to hear it again.
I turned my head until I could meet her eyes. A fresh ache welled up inside me, from wanting to heal her heart but knowing no one could do that but her. “Because we’re scared that what we’re running to might be even worse than what we’re running from,” I finally said, not knowing any other answer. “Better the monster we know than the monster we don’t know. At least then we know what to expect.”
She nodded and stared up at the light show going on in the sky, lost in her own mind.
But I was lost just from staring at her.
I HADN’T REALIZED how much I’d come to depend on Ethan since being discharged from the hospital until he had to leave for a road trip with the team.
Physically, I could get along relatively well without him at this point in my recovery; I managed most things necessary to care for myself reasonably well on my own, and the other WAGs were more than capable of assisti
ng me with those things that were still problematic.
But my emotional state was another matter entirely.
Only two days had passed since the team had left, and I felt as though I were falling apart. I thought about Ethan constantly. I missed him more than could be healthy, and it wasn’t just because I felt safe when I was with him; I was getting attached.
I had no business getting attached to him.
Ethan had a son and a dog to worry about, not to mention a high-profile career. He’d been incredibly kind and generous to open up his home to me, but I couldn’t afford to fall into the trap of thinking this could be anything more than what it was—a good man offering a helping hand to me at a time when I was in desperate need.
If we kept going how we had been so far, at some point, I’d be taking advantage of his sympathy and compassion by continuing to stay. Maybe not yet, but I knew it was coming, and probably sooner than I’d like to think.
Snoopy and I had been staying with London so far during this road trip, but that arrangement was about to come to an end due to a sled hockey tournament her team would be participating in. When she dropped me off at the hospital this afternoon for outpatient therapy, she’d be taking Snoopy over to Ravyn’s house, and then she and Erik would be heading out of town for a couple of days. Ravyn would be picking me up later.
London’s house didn’t have any stairs for me to contend with since she had to get around in a wheelchair, but both of us were constantly checking to make certain Erik, her toddler, wasn’t underfoot or in the way of her wheels. He was almost as fascinated by my crutches and the cast on my leg as he was with his mother’s wheelchair, which was proving to be an issue.
We both spent an enormous amount of time worrying about crushing his toes under my crutches or getting his fingers caught in the spokes of London’s wheels, because that child never stopped moving and sticking his fingers into places fingers didn’t belong. He was a quick, sneaky little guy.
One second, he’d have us convinced he was content to play with his blocks and giant Legos on the floor, and the next, he would be climbing the entertainment center and dangling four feet from the ground, seemingly holding on with a single finger and threatening to topple the entire thing over on top of himself.
Rain Dance (Tulsa Thunderbirds Book 5) Page 9
