Little Black Box Set

by Tabatha Vargo

  “I’m not saying forget; I’m saying allow yourself to heal. You can still find happiness, Sebastian, even though those bad things happened.”

  “How?”

  He chuckled, leaning back in his chair as the sun sliced across his cheeks.

  “There’s no magic answer to that. You just have to take it one day at a time.”

  “One day at a time and never forget,” I repeated his advice.

  He nodded.

  “That’s all you can do, son.”

  The tension between my shoulder blades slowly eased away. Him calling me his son even after knowing my deepest, darkest secret somehow altered me.

  He shifted in his chair until he was sitting forward. A yawn spilled from his mouth as he scratched at his beard.

  “Was that everything you wanted to tell me?”

  I nodded as exhaustion slowly moved in on me, as well.

  “Yes.”

  And it was.

  If I had known how much better I would feel after telling someone, I would have told Clive long ago. But I was so afraid of being turned in—afraid of prison—of facing the truth and having everyone else know what I had done.

  He patted my hand once again.

  “Good. Now get some sleep. Our appointment with David isn’t early, but considering you’re going to sleep as the sun comes up, I’m sure it will feel that way.”

  I stayed seated as he stood and headed for his room. I was too stunned by the moment to move.

  “So we’re still going then?” I asked.

  He stopped just outside his bedroom door and looked over his shoulder with a smile.

  “I told you it wouldn’t make a difference, Sebastian. Family sticks together, and that’s what we are … family. Get some sleep.”

  He went into his room and shut the door. Once his door was shut, I went into the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water. Staring at my reflection in the mirror, I watched as the icy droplets ran down my cheeks and off my chin.

  I looked younger as if the burden I had been carrying around had turned me into an old man. The secret had been inside me for so long, and I felt relief knowing that I had released it into the world.

  The second I was on the couch and my head hit the pillow, I was out. And for the first time since the night that changed me forever, I didn’t have a single nightmare.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “CHANGE OF PLANS,” Clive announced when I got downstairs the next afternoon.

  Change of plans or change of mind?

  It would be my luck that Clive had woke up having changed his mind.

  Maybe what I had told him this morning really did make a difference?

  Either way, I had to deal with the consequences.

  “What do you mean by change of plans?”

  “My lawyer dropped off the paperwork here. We’ll sign it later and then make it official.”

  I wanted the nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach to be wrong, but I knew there was a real possibility that despite what he was saying, Clive had changed his mind.

  “Go grab your coat. We’re going out.”

  I panicked.

  What if he was turning me in?

  Where were we going?

  He slid a piece of paper down the bar toward me, and I picked it up. There was only an address written down on the front.

  “What’s this?” I held up the paper.

  “You’ll see. Let’s go.”

  When we pulled up to the cemetery gates, my heart was in my throat. I looked over at Clive, but he was expressionless behind his aviator sunglasses. He drove through the gates with no hesitation as if he had been there a million times.

  “Do you know where you’re going?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  A moment later, he pulled up alongside a random curb and cut the engine. We didn’t move or speak as we stared out the windshield.

  “You ready?” he finally asked.

  “Nope, but let’s go anyway.”

  He walked beside me, and I was relieved I didn’t have to face the past alone.

  He led us to two graves side by side, and we stopped in front of them. The names etched into the shared headstone hurt my eyes, and I had to close them to relieve the pressure building.

  I was grateful that Clive had brought me to visit them, but at the same time, I felt as though my heart would stop every time my eyes moved over their names.

  And then it all made sense to me.

  Coming to their graves wasn’t to ease the guilt. It was to make sure I was feeling the full extent of what we had done that night.

  I wasn’t alone in this.

  I hadn’t pulled the trigger.

  But I was just as much to blame.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered, wishing I wasn’t saying those three words to tombstones. “You didn’t deserve this. Your kids didn’t deserve this. I never wanted to rob you of your life together. Please forgive me.”

  The words came out broken as my sobs slipped free. My remorse—the guilt—shook my entire body as I stood there and cried. An emotional breakdown was long overdue.

  I cried for them—for their children—for myself. And as I did, Clive put his arm around my shoulder and held me as I shook.

  “Thanks for bringing me here,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “You needed this, son. You can’t ever undo what happened, but you can do your best to make it right. Let this push you to be a better man than you already are. Let this steer you in the right direction.”

  I nodded, agreeing with him completely.

  Something good had to come out of all of this, and I was hoping that something good would be the changes I would make to give myself a better life.

  Maybe one day, I could reach out and help a kid like me the way Clive had helped me.

  He was right. I couldn’t right the wrong, but I could spend the rest of my life trying to make up for what happened.

  “Let’s go home, son,” he said, turning me toward the car.

  After everything I had done, Clive saw beyond my past. And when we got back to the bar, we signed the paperwork to make it official. I was no longer some kid on the street. I was no longer alone. Once we’d signed those papers, I was Sebastian, Clive’s son.

  It was the happiest moment of my life.

  I finally had a family.

  I returned to the cemetery at least once a month after that. It felt right to visit them and bring fresh flowers. Usually, I found myself alone with flower arrangements and headstones as far as my eyes could see, but that changed when I pulled up.

  I spotted them the second I pulled Clive’s car up to the curb. At first, I wasn’t sure if they were standing at the very graves I was there to visit, but then I saw her blazing hair and I knew it was her.

  The little girl from that night.

  The daughter.

  The person whose world I had destroyed.

  I wanted to go over and tell them I was sorry. I wanted to drop to my knees and beg for their forgiveness, but instead, I sat there, watching them grieve for the very lives I had taken.

  I didn’t leave the car. I couldn’t force myself to open the door. It hadn’t occurred to me that they would visit their parents, but it obviously made sense that they would.

  Starting the engine, I put the car in drive and drove away.

  I would visit another day.

  I was too much of a pussy to face them.

  When I got back to the bar, Clive wasn’t in the front.

  “Clive?” I called out, but I was met with steely silence.

  Moving toward the hallway at the back of the bar, I heard him coughing. It didn’t register as off until he was coughing so hard he couldn’t catch his breath. Alarm bells went off, and I moved quicker to his back office.

  Poking my head through the door, his back was to me, and he was leaning forward, coughing into a napkin. When the episode subsided, he spun around in his wooden desk chair so fast I didn’t have time t
o prepare either one of us.

  “Hells bells, Sebastian!” he snapped. “What the heck is wrong with you? Why are you standing there without saying anything?”

  “I literally just poked my head in, old man. Relax.” I looked him over. “Are you okay? I heard you coughing.”

  He waved his hand in the air and stood, walking past me. “You said it yourself, son. I’m an old man. We tend to cough, fart, and drool a little more than we’d like to.”

  I smirked. “Thanks for the overshare.”

  “Well, if you’re going to be making a fuss over a little cough, you might as well be aware of everything.”

  “I wasn’t making a fuss. I was just asking.”

  “You have better things to be doing. Like getting us ready to open.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, making my way to the supply room.

  I didn’t want to fuss over Clive, but that cough sounded serious.

  In the end, I decided to just keep a closer eye on him. If it got worse, I could always make him go to the doctor. And since the adoption was official, he had to listen to me. Seeing as I was his son now and all.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I WOKE WITH A START, the blanket sliding down my chest and letting the frigid air of the room hit me like a block of ice.

  Sitting up, I blinked until the small room became clear. It was still dark, and I rubbed my eyes to clear my sleepy haze.

  I wasn’t sure what woke me, but I was left with an uneasy feeling as I listened to my surroundings.

  The room was quiet … too quiet.

  I missed the obnoxious hum of the heater running throughout our apartment. It had finally given out on us after having survived two decades with Clive.

  We were left to survive with small portable heaters and the gas stove until we could get a new unit put in.

  The end of the year wasn’t a busy time for Mike’s. Most of our regulars were off enjoying the holidays with their families instead of getting sloshed at the bar, so it would be at least a month before we could afford a new unit with the bills piling up.

  I wasn’t worried about me. I could handle the cold conditions. I had lived through far worse before I met Clive. But I was worried about him.

  From the couch, I could hear him coughing, the hard, strangled sound echoing throughout his room and working its way out into the hallway.

  I shivered, realizing that apartment was at least a couple of degrees colder than it was before we went to bed. Noting that the small heater next to the couch was off, I grumbled to myself, knowing we had once again blown the breaker.

  It was like the tenth time in the past three days, and it was annoying as fuck.

  The quick drop in temperature in the city, along with the unit going out, had resulted in a cold for Clive. He swore he was fine, but his cough wasn’t getting any better. I was starting to get anxious it would turn into something worse, but getting him to agree to go see a doctor was next to impossible.

  Clive was my father—I had the paperwork to prove it—and I worried about him as a son would. I owed him more than I would ever be able to repay him. And if getting up to flip on the breaker was all I had to do to give him comfort, then I was doing it.

  The floor was freezing, and my breath hissed from between my teeth when my bare feet touched it. I moved through the darkness toward the breaker box and flipped the switch until there was a low buzz, and the small heater beside the couch lit up.

  Making my way down the narrow hallway, I stopped at Clive’s door. It wasn’t shut completely, and I stood there listening to Clive’s shallow breathing. The hoarse sound made a knot form in the pit of my stomach.

  Pushing the door open, I stepped inside the room. It was colder inside his room than the entire apartment, and I shivered.

  “Shit,” I cursed.

  How long had the fucking power been off?

  I made my way toward the small heater next to his bed. It hadn’t turned on automatically as mine had, and I cursed again. Some nights, Clive would just fall into bed without turning it on, and it had been one of those nights. No wonder his room felt like the North Pole.

  I made a mental note to make sure he turned it on every night from then on. The last thing Clive would want was to feel like he was being babysat, but that was too damn bad.

  I turned on the heater, but five minutes later, the room still wasn’t warm enough. Making my way back into the living room, I pulled the plug from the wall to the heater by the couch, ignoring the spark as the plug came free.

  Back in Clive’s room, I plugged it in and turned it on high. After twenty minutes, the room felt like a small tropical island. I was satisfied, so I pulled the door closed. Before heading back into the living room, I grabbed another blanket from the hall closet and settled back on the couch. Under a mountain of four blankets, I finally started to get warm.

  Sleep quickly claimed my warm body, but not long after, I was being woken up by Clive in the kitchen only a few feet away. Pans clanged together, and the water was running. He stomped around, making the apartment feel as though it was shaking. There was no way I could sleep through that.

  “Are you trying to wake the entire neighborhood or is all that noise special just for me? What time is it anyway?”

  Twisting, I reached for the alarm clock above my head. The time read twelve, but it was blinking, and I remembered that the power had gone out and reset the clock. Putting it back, I threw my long legs over the couch, and my foot hit the heater that was now back next to the couch.

  “What the hell are you doing sneaking into my room in the middle of the night?” Clive snapped.

  He was usually a morning person, but someone had clearly woken up on the wrong side of the bed.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it sneaking, old man. The breaker flipped again, and I went in there to turn on your heater that you forgot to turn on before you went to bed. Your room was freezing, so I put mine in there, too.”

  “It was like a freaking sauna in there this morning. I woke up in a puddle of sweat thanks to you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I answered sarcastically.

  I wanted to pull the blankets back up over my head and attempt to get another hour of sleep, but with Clive’s bad mood and all the noise he was making, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  I got up and made my way down the hallway to get in a quick shower before I headed down to the bar, but apparently, Clive wasn’t done bitching.

  “I didn’t ask for you to creep into my room in the dead of night and check on me so you can take—”

  I slammed the bathroom door without bothering to listen to the end of his rant. He was being a damn baby, and I knew it was just better to ignore his whining. By the time I got downstairs, he would be over his attitude.

  At least I hoped he would.

  Thirty minutes later, I emerged from the bathroom, and Clive was gone. I knew he would be busy with getting the bar ready for open, and if I didn’t hurry and get my ass downstairs, I was only going to give him another reason to bitch.

  When I reached the bottom step, I could hear the racket Clive was making in his office from across the bar. I moved in that direction, and as I got closer, I could see Clive bringing in a shipment of liquor. I picked up the pace so I could help him with the last few boxes, but before I could reach him, he did something that scared the shit out of me.

  I stopped in my tracks and watched as a fit of coughs rattled his old body. He stopped, clutching the box in his arms as he lurched over. Soon, the coughing became too much, and the box tumbled from his grasp and crashed to the floor.

  Using the doorframe as support, he clutched the wood to hold up his weak body while the fit of coughs shook him. Finally, they let up, and he was able to move away from the doorframe, but I didn’t miss the way his feeble body seemed slower. It was as if his health was declining right before my eyes.

  At that moment, he saw me standing there watching. His eyes clashed with mine, and we stared each other down for
a moment. The knot that had started to form in my stomach the night before grew into a dark fear—a fear that I had never known before.

  He looked away, breaking our eye contact, and disappeared into the supply room.

  I followed him in, and without a word from either of us, I started to help him unload. Once we finished unloading, I grabbed a mop and broom and began cleaning the broken bottles and wasted liquor from the floor where he had dropped the box.

  I wanted to beg him to see a doctor, but I knew that would only make his mood worse. I needed to wait until the perfect time if I was going to get him to agree.

  Clive was a proud man, and he wasn’t going to take my concern without a fight on his end. He didn’t like being fussed over, and he was definitely not going to like me questioning his health. But honestly, that was too damn bad.

  It was his own fault I was so invested in whether he lived or died. He made the choice to take me in and make me a part of his family, which meant now he was stuck with me and my nagging. We had just become a family. I wasn’t about to lose that because he was too proud to take his ass to the doctor.

  Later, after we had closed the bar and were upstairs in the apartment going through our nightly routine, Clive was drinking a beer and watching whatever had caught his attention on his tiny black and white TV, which annoyed the fuck out of me. Trying to watch my cartoons with no color was a bitch.

  “I made a doctor’s appointment for next week,” he said without taking his eyes away from the screen.

  His announcement took me by surprise. I had spent most of the night preparing myself for a fight. I expected a lot of screaming and cursing, but none of that was happening. Relief flooded my veins knowing he had taken the initiative to get himself checked out without me having to step in.

  “You did?”

  He scoffed at the TV, but he meant it for me. “Yes. If it will keep you out of my room at night, I figured I’d better make it soon.”

  I grinned. “You’re a stubborn old man; you know that, don’t you?”

  He shrugged and took a long swig from his beer. “I’ve been called worse.”

  The following week, Clive stuck to his word and went to see the doctor. I wanted to go with him, but he wasn’t having it. I could have argued, but I knew it would be a waste of my breath. So I kept my mouth shut and waited patiently for him to return.