The Sins That Bind Us

by Geneva Lee

  “I met Faith at a party.”

  I freeze as he begins to tell their story.

  “I didn’t so much meet her, I found her in my guest room in a pool of her own vomit,” he says.

  “Most people would call the police,” I say coldly.

  “I’m not most men.”

  I know that, which is what is making this so very hard for me. I’ve watched Jude save everyone and stupidly believed he could save me.

  “As is usually the case in LA,” he continues, “there was a doctor at the party and he checked her out. When he assured me she wasn’t in any danger, I had my housekeeper clean her up and I put her into a bed. She slept for days and when she woke up, she looked like a wounded animal. She was as fragile as wayward baby bird. I couldn’t let the outside world break her any more.”

  “So you just let her stay?” I ask in disbelief.

  “Didn’t you?” he counters. “She told me about her family. How they always opened the door for her. She told me that they never gave up on her. There was so much sadness in her and I just wanted to fix her.”

  “You can’t,” I whisper. No one ever fixed Faith, and now no one ever would.

  “I know that now. It took me a long time to learn that. She stayed with me for a few weeks. Gradually she got stronger and we got to know each other.”

  I want to ask if he’s always taken in strays, but I know the answer. Jude: patron saint of lost causes. A man who will pull a stranger out of a bar. A man who comes over and fixes a single mom’s car window. A man who treats a child like he’s the most important person in the world. Jude collects people and tries to put them back together. He doesn’t simply believe in lost causes—he is one.

  “Did you love her?” I ask it even though I don’t want to know the answer.

  “I cared for her a great deal. There was something that drew me to her. She would show me parts of herself and then she’d hide them away again. I pretended we could be happy for a while. Maybe it was all a play. She told me she came to the party with a friend, and I never pressured her for more. I just gave her the space to heal. The first time I found her stoned out of her mind, I made excuses. I should have seen it coming.” His voice is hollow with the memories, trapped in a not so distant past. “I thought if I had been there, I could have stopped it. I didn’t really know what I was dealing with then.”

  “You were looking for her at NA. You were never an addict.” The realization dawns on me in horrifying clarity.

  He turns to face me. “Aren’t we all addicts? I am. I’m addicted to fixing people. I want to save them. I’m sure psychiatrists would have a field day with me. Imagine: a grown man with daddy issues. But I don’t need to pay someone to tell me I’m fucked up, Sunshine. Daddy hit me. He hit Mommy. I was too young to protect her and when I finally did, it was too late. I took one swing at him and she sided with him when he kicked me out of the house. He’d broken her, and I’d let him do it for all of those years.”

  “It’s not your job to fix people,” I say. “It wasn’t your responsibility to save your mother. It wasn’t your job to fix Faith.”

  “But isn’t it?” he asks. “Why do you go to those meetings? You have more self-restraint than any person I’ve ever met. What’s your drug?”

  I don’t answer him. We both know why I go.

  “You aren’t her.” Jude levels his gaze at me.

  “I’m sorry for that,” I spit back. I don’t need him to tell me that I’ve been living a lie or that none of this is mine. I built a life for her instead of for me. Faith got the second chance I couldn’t give myself.

  “When I first met you, I assumed she was the one who lied. She was so good at it. I honestly didn’t know for sure until today.”

  “Do you even know my name?” I whisper. I’ve shared this man’s bed. I’ve fallen in love with him, and I’m only a ghost now.

  “Grace. Of course I know your name.”

  Hearing it stabs me through the heart. “Why did you tell people she was dead?” he asks me, but I don’t answer him this time. He’s seen through me and in doing so, he’s unraveled me. I’m naked before him, completely bared through a truth I’d buried a long time ago. Grace has been dead to me for much longer than Faith.

  “I want you to go.” We stand in silence, our eyes locked but neither of us seeing one another. Jude doesn’t ask any more questions, doesn’t pressure me for the truth. Instead he walks into the night and leaves it behind with me.

  There are no answers at the bottom of the bottle, but that doesn’t stop me from looking there. Amie doesn’t think I know about her secret stash. I’ve never brought it up, because it’s never been an issue for me before. It wasn’t a problem knowing it was in the house, because I’m as big a liar as Jude. That stash never tempted me. That fact isn’t comforting. Tomorrow I’ll mourn my past and my future. Tonight I want to forget.

  I finish off one bottle of whiskey and reach for whatever else I can find socked away. I sit at the kitchen table and drink until I’m bleary eyed. A hint of my face reflects from the glass neck of the bottle. It’s warped and yet familiar like the smile on a strangers’ face.

  I don’t want to see her face staring back at me. Her name, her life, her mistakes. I’ve carried them all, and now I have to keep bearing her face.

  The bottle whizzes across the room and smashes against the wall before I realize I’ve thrown it. A minute later, the hall light flips on and Amie appears, holding a baseball bat. She’s still half asleep with her fiery hair piled like a bonfire on top of her head. When she spots me, she drops the bat.

  “Faith?” she calls as she makes her way to the kitchen.

  “Nope ...” I begin to laugh. It makes my head swim. “No Faith here.”

  “What the hell?” Her voice trails away as she takes in the shattered remnants of the whiskey bottle. She stares as if it will transform into something else, then she looks at me. Striding over, she grabs my cup and sniffs it. “Jesus, what is going on?”

  “I needed a drink.” I tell her, lounging back in the chair. “It has been a terrible day.”

  She puts the cup in the dishwasher and turns on me. “Is this about Jude?”

  “Yes.” I nod my head, then shake it, “And no. I mean, Jude is terrible, but I’m terrible, too. We’re actually made for each other.”

  “You’re not making any sense, honey.” She uses that sing-songy voice generally reserved for children.

  I wave my hand wildly in the air. “None of it makes sense. I mean, look at how many awful people have money. Or how many wonderful people get cancer. Life is a shit show, my friend. The lucky ones check out early.”

  Faith checked out early. She’s not the one here, disappointing her best friend. She’s not here pretending her heart isn’t broken. She doesn’t have to face the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow, even though it shouldn’t. “Come on,” Amie urges, trying to grab my arm and pull me to my feet. “Let’s get you to bed. You need to sleep this off. We can talk tomorrow.”

  “Lecture me now. Wait, I’ll do it for you. I’ve always been good at this.” I raise my finger and shake it as I start. “You have so much to live for and you’ve worked so hard. Everyone slips up sometimes. Our flaws make us human. What matters now is your choices. You can choose to be sober.”

  Amie raises an eyebrow, her lips pressed thinly together.

  “Did you hear that?” I turn my finger on myself. “I can choose to be sober, but tonight I choose to be drunk.”

  “I want you to start explaining right now.” Amie snaps her fingers, as though she could jolt me out of this.

  “Or what? You’ll call my mom? She’s dead. My dad? He’s dead. My sister? Turns out, also dead. My grandmother? As good as dead.” It’s a bit depressing to rattle off the list for her.

  “What do you mean your sister is dead?” Amie asks slowly.

  “I found her death certificate in my Nana’s sock drawer. Surprise!” I throw my hands up in the air in mock exciteme
nt. “All these years, I’ve been waiting for her to come back and be my family again and for the last year, my grandmother has known that she’s dead. Well, she hasn’t known. She couldn’t remember, after all.”

  Amie scoots a chair out and sits down at the table beside me. Taking my hand, she cups hers over it. “I am so sorry.”

  She’s writing off what’s happened as though I’m drunk because I found out about my sister. If only it were that simple, but I don’t think I’m up to explaining it to her right now. Instead, I stick to the facts.

  “Overdose,” I tell her. “No surprise there. I don’t even know how they found my grandmother. She never came to visit.”

  “I can’t believe they didn’t tell you,” Amie muses.

  I don’t tell her it’s because they couldn’t find me, because I spent years covering my own tracks. Or that I don’t know how Faith discovered where I’d gone. She sent a post card to Jude. Her death certificate found its way to my grandmother. She had known I was here in Port Townsend, and that I had her son.

  And she never came.

  “I want more to drink.” I whisper.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Amie pats my arm and suddenly, I am more pissed off than I’ve been in years.

  Slamming my fists against the table, I repeat myself, “I want more to drink. You can give it to me or I can just go and get it. Your choice.”

  Amie leans back and crosses her arms, “Takes a little bit more to impress me, honey.”

  “Fine.” I stumble to my feet and make my way out to the garage. I don’t even bother to look at what I’m grabbing. “I’ll help myself, then.”

  Her head falls forward as she sighs, “How long have you known those were there?”

  “Since I moved in with you.” I screw off the lid and drink it straight.

  “And you never…?” She’s confused now. I can’t exactly blame her.

  “Drank it? I don’t really drink. You see, it was my sister who had the drug problem,” I explain.

  “You’ve never done drugs?” Amie asks in a strangled voice. She stares at me as though she’s looking at a stranger.

  It’s how I feel when I look in the mirror.

  “Oh, I have,” I reassure her. “A little coke here. Some weed, of course—but that hardly counts. She was always the one who couldn’t say ‘no’.”

  “And you?” Amie asks softly.

  “I couldn’t say ‘no’ to her,” I confess.

  Faith was my addiction and I’ve been searching for it ever since.

  Chapter 22

  Before

  Faith came home. She always did.

  Sitting across from Faith was like looking into a funhouse memory. It was the same face, but now it was worn with experience. Wherever she had been—whatever she’d been up to—had prematurely aged her and she was trying to hide it. Her raspberry lipstick only highlighted her sallow skin and ringed eyes. She smacked her lips together nervously while her hands reached to fiddle with her hair. That was, at least, familiar. As far back as Grace could remember her sister had done that, but now her hair was cropped short and her fingers came up empty. She settled for drumming them on the tabletop instead.

  “How did you find me?” Grace had been forced to sell Nana’s house. It was the last place she’d seen Faith before she disappeared.

  “My boyfriend found you. I didn’t ask how.” Of course, she hadn’t. Faith never asked the uncomfortable questions.

  “Why are you here?” Grace had no issue being direct though. Her sister had returned for a reason. She suspected it was Max.

  Faith blew out a long breath and raised her eyes to Grace’s. “I made a mistake.”

  They said acceptance was the first step, Grace thought. She’d learned that much from the weekly support group she’d begun to attend. It had replaced the nightly meetings she’d gone to at first. The ones where she searched for answers about where things had gone so horribly wrong. Grace had brought Max to the meetings as a baby, but as he got older and she had discovered more about the cycles Faith was caught in she gradually figured out that she’d become addicted to her search—as addicted as she’d been to her sister in the first place. Spending every day dredging up the past wasn’t going to change it.

  Yet Grace continued to go if only to one. It was a sad thing to feel comforted by being near broken people, but she had slowly built a world from it that didn’t make her feel so alone.

  “Do you think?” Her retort came out more harshly than she’d meant. Perhaps because today she wasn’t feeling acceptance and forgiveness and all the things she had struggled to teach herself at those meetings. “I spent the last year wondering if the police were going to knock on my door.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.” Faith no longer looked her sister in the eye. “I want to see him.”

  “You want to see him?” Pressure swelled in her chest. It was all coming out now. The anger. The sadness. The terror and frustration that she would fuck things up and ruin an innocent life. “I spent the last year feeding him, taking him to doctor’s visits, and staying up all night with him. Where were you when he crawled or pulled himself up for the first time? Where were you when he had fevers from teething?”

  “I want to see him now,” Faith tacked on the now as if it held any meaning.

  “And before?” The words trembled from her. “Why not before?”

  “It’s complicated.” Faith licked her lips.

  “Enlighten me, because we have all the time in the world.” She didn’t add that there was no way in hell she was taking Faith to see Max. Not now. Maybe never.

  Cool down. She’s trying to do the right thing finally.

  Finally, but too late.

  “Jason and I are getting really serious,” she began.

  “Who’s Jason?” Grace interrupted.

  “My boyfriend. Well, more like my fiancé.” A slow smile crept across her pink lips as a chill crept up Grace’s spine. “Anyway, he really likes kids. He has two of them with his ex-wife. She doesn’t really let him see them. He can’t wait to meet Max.”

  Grace swallowed, but she couldn’t digest the meaning in Faith’s words. “How long have you known him?”

  Her tongue darted over her lips. “Years. He’s not just some guy, sissy.”

  If that was meant to reassure her, it failed on all levels.

  “And how long has he been divorced?” Grace asked softly.

  “A couple of months.” Anyone else might have blushed at this revelation given the previous answer, but Faith waved off the question flippantly.

  Grace didn’t bother to seek further clarification. It should have shocked her that Faith had been involved with a married man, but it didn’t. That was the problem. And if she really had known him for years, he’d seen her use. He might have even been the one providing. It really only left one more question.

  “Is he Max’s father?”

  “I thought he might have been,” Faith admitted, “but I knew when he was born that he wasn’t.”

  “How?”

  This earned a blush. “Jason is black. I didn’t really know until Max was born.”

  “Do you have any clue who his father is?” It burst from her, more accusation than question.

  “There was really only one other guy around that time.” But she didn’t share anymore, instead her voice pitched up an octave. “I want to see him, Faith. He’s my son. Have you told him about me? What did you say?”

  Grace’s head began to spin. She shook it but it didn’t grow any clearer. She closed her eyes and tried to stay calm. Faith was here for her son with some random guy and not a lot of explanation. “He’s too little to understand, but no, I didn’t tell him that his mommy took off when he was a week old. I thought it was better to spare him that, too.”

  “Too? What the fuck does that mean? What’s happened?” Faith’s palms flattened on the table and for the first time, since they sat down she stopped fidgeting.

  “He’s dea
f, Faith.” She dared her to ask why.

  But Faith sat back and frowned. “That’s okay. Jason has money. There are surgeries and stuff to fix those kinds of things, right?”

  “Highly invasive surgeries.” So Jason was a cheater with a lot of money who had known Faith for years. This time she couldn’t dismiss the pit widening in her stomach. “Don’t you even care why he’s deaf?”

  She looked momentarily confused. “I guess…Was there an accident?”

  “No, this was on purpose.” Now it was all coming out. All the things she’d wanted to scream at Faith as the doctors spoke about Max’s treatments. The fact that the police had shown up at the house looking for drugs. “It’s a birth defect. A direct result of his mother using while she was pregnant.”

  “I barely did.” But Faith’s defense was feeble and short-lived. She’d been pregnant when she returned to Seattle, but not very.

  “Did you use while you stayed with me?” It was all she needed to know. “After you found out you were pregnant?”

  “Grace.” Her eyes darted around the cafe as if she was checking for eavesdroppers. She licked her lips again. “Only a couple of times. You don’t understand how hard it is to just give it up cold turkey. I had to get by.”

  She was using now. Grace had suspected as much but in the last half an hour Faith had proved it. Fidgeting. Licking her lips. She was fucked up right now.

  “You can’t see him.” Her voice was as frigid as the chill overtaking her body.

  “I’m his mother,” Faith hissed. “You can’t keep me away from him.”

  “The court granted me custody when you took off.” It was a lie. Grace had simply pretended to be her. With the same face and identical DNA, it had been easy enough to just take over. Of course, it had also meant carrying the burden of Faith’s sins. Grace had been the one doctors silently judged. She’d severed ties with most of Faith’s old life—and her own, and took over caring for Max as if he was her own son. Somewhere along the line he had become her son. She no longer thought of herself as a placeholder in his life.

  “I’ll file a petition then. Jason has money, remember? I don’t want to have to get lawyers involved. I just want my son.”