by Jay McLean
*
We sat at the table in the corner of the room like we’d done many nights before, only it wasn’t Tuesday, and there wasn’t a takeout box in sight. I held the gold leaf in my hand, ignoring the pain as the edges dug into my skin. “You found her?” I asked Tiny, even though I was looking at Nate. His eyes were hooded as he tried to focus on the bottle in his hand. He’d obviously been drinking, so I had to assume that the contents of the envelope were the cause of his current state.
Tiny cleared his throat, and I forced myself to look away from Nate and over at him. “I’m pretty sure it’s her.” He pulled out a photograph from the envelope and placed it on the table in front of me.
I didn’t have to look at it for long before I spoke around the lump in my throat, “That’s her.”
Years of separation hadn’t changed her. In the picture, she was smiling, one hand holding a door open, the other holding the hand of a little girl no older than five. I smiled. I couldn’t help it. “Do you know who the girl is?” I asked Tiny.
Nate sat up, the bottle clutched to his chest, but still, he remained silent.
Tiny exhaled loudly, before answering, “That’s her daughter, Bailey.”
Nate dropped his gaze to the table while my mind whirled with questions. Then, suddenly, I gasped, as if reality had kicked me in the gut, punched me in my face, and I tried to hold on to the memories; summers by the lake, purple brushes through my hair, fall leaves, and declarations of love… I was her sunshine, her only sunshine.
Fuck that.
Tears streamed from my eyes, my sob escaping my chest, loud and unforgiving. I stood quickly, my chair tipping behind me. “I have a sister?”
Nate looked up, caught my gaze, then looked back down and pretended he hadn’t seen me, hadn’t seen my hurt. My pain. My goddamn suffering. “Why won’t you look at me?” I yelled, my voice breaking. “Answer me, goddamn it!”
His body jerked like a fire had been lit, blazing from the inside out as he stood up. Two steps were all it all took for him to get to me, his whiskey breath kissing my lips as he towered over me. “Now?” he said. “Now you want me to give you answers?” His voice mocked as he wobbled on his feet and pointed to Tiny. “What’s wrong with him now?”
“Nate,” Tiny warned, standing and making his way over to us.
I pushed on Nate’s chest. “Tell me the truth!”
He squared his shoulders, his jaw clenched. “Don’t fuckin’ push it, Bailey.”
I shoved him again, glad that I was finally getting a reaction. It was so much better than being invisible. He’d cast me aside, but I was in his face now, and he couldn’t fucking ignore me anymore.
He gripped the bottle tighter, his eyes filled with rage. “I mean it.”
I don’t really know what happened next, and I have no idea why we were so intent on hurting each other, why we used the only people we loved, the only people we had, to keep the fires of hurt and despair burning, but we did.
Over and over.
Words flew from our mouths, their sole purpose to destroy until pain overpowered our voices and anger overpowered our pain. “If you wanted an out, you should have told me!” he yelled, pointing to himself. “Me! Not Tiny. He’s not the one who put a roof over your head, who feeds you and gives you all of this.” He threw his arms in the air, whiskey spilling on the floor, mixing with my tears and the footprints of my existence. His voice was rough, unrestrained, penetrating my eardrums with the unexpected volume. “He’s not the one who fuckin’ loves you, Bailey. I do.”
“You have to love me!” I shouted.
Silence pierced the air, and my hands dropped to my sides, my chest rising and falling, aching from the power of my admission.
Nate kept his eyes on mine as he took a step back, shaking his head as he did. “Fuck you, Bailey.”
“Nate!” Another warning from Tiny.
Nate’s eyes snapped to him. “And fuck you, too.” He looked between us. “Fuck you both!” The bottle of whiskey spun in the air when Nate threw it across the room, smashing against the wall, shattered pieces of glass, just like my heart, left discarded on the floor. He stepped toward me, but Tiny held him back, his arms pinned to his sides.
I shrunk into myself, my hands going around my stomach.
“Look at me, Bailey,” Nate said, his tone clipped.
I did.
I owed him that much.
“You want the truth? I didn’t want to love you. I still don’t want to love you. But I don’t have a goddamn choice, Bailey. It would be so much easier if I’d never fuckin’ met you. If I’d never heard the gunshot and run toward the sound. I wouldn’t have to be looking over my shoulder every fuckin’ second of every day, hoping they don’t fuckin’ find you. I wouldn’t have to worry about you, wondering if you’re okay physically, mentally, all of it. But it’s been months. Months. You don’t think I see that you’ve checked out? That you don’t want to be here? That you don’t want me? I’m fuckin’ here because I love you. And it’s so pathetic—you standing there begging me for the truth when you can’t even look me in the eye and tell me one yourself. You want my truths? There it is. Now you owe me yours.” He paused a beat; his shoulders slumped as Tiny held on to him. His eyes were bloodshot, his breaths shallow, his words a prayer when he said, “Tell me you don’t love me.”
My breath caught in my chest, my eyes holding his. Tears flooded my vision as I gripped the gold leaf tighter in my hand. A thousand thoughts raced through my mind, but I could only focus on one. I couldn’t give him the truth he wanted to hear. It didn’t exist.
“Ti amo, Nathaniel,” I whispered, my hand going to my chest. I made sure to look in his eyes, so he could see the truth I was about to spill. “But I wish you’d pulled the trigger.”
*
The pain was almost instant, just like it had been when my mother left. The second Nate was far enough away, the tension of the elastic band that held us together snapped, and I’d felt the searing ache like a thousand stab wounds to my heart.
I watched Tiny come back down the stairs, food in one hand, envelope in the other. He didn’t speak a word as he set them both down on the table.
I looked back down at the floor. “Is he okay?” I asked, my voice hoarse from all the tears the guilt had forced out of me.
“Everything you need to know is in there,” he said, and I glanced up at him. He was already watching me, his head tilted to the side. Then he sighed, walked over and sat next to me on the edge of the bed, nudging my side as soon as he was settled. “Can we talk?”
I focused on the gold leaf in my hand. “Of course.”
Tiny leaned forward, elbows on his knees as he rubbed his jaw. “I’m not going to lie to you, Bailey. And please don’t take this the wrong way because I have nothing against you personally, but I support you being here only because I support Nate… as a boss, as a person, and as my best friend. When you asked me to find your mom, a part of me was hopeful I’d find something that might help the situation… that might help get you out of here, and help Nate separate himself from you. You have to be fuckin’ blind to not see how much he loves you, and I’m not saying that you don’t love him because you probably do, but it’s not healthy. Not for either of you.” He took a breath, and then a moment to formulate his next words. “But in this situation, my loyalty doesn’t lie with you. It lies with him. It will always lie with him. Nothing good can come of this. You have to be able to see that. Nate’s life may be his job, for now, but it won’t be forever. He’ll want a family. He’ll want kids. And there’s no way that can happen. Not with you. Not like this.” He cleared his throat as he stood up and turned away from me. “If you ask him to, he’ll risk his life to let you go because he loves you that fuckin’ much. But if he lets you go, Bailey, you’ll take his heart with you.”
37
Bailey
It didn’t matter how long I’d stared at the pages upon pages of information, how many times I read the lines now blu
rred by my fatigue. It didn’t matter how many tears I’d cried or murmurs of denials I’d whispered into the dead air… I’d wanted the truth, and I’d gotten it.
And now I wished I hadn’t.
I rubbed my eyes and wiped my nose, sitting up straighter when I heard the basement door open. I’d listened to the sounds of footsteps so many times that I could tell it was Nate. He appeared at the bottom of the stairs with our standard breakfasts in his hands.
Was it morning already?
I looked down at the papers spread out on the table, my heart growing heavier with each picture, each piece of evidence, and I held back on another set of cries.
“You’ve been up all night?” Nate asked, his voice soft.
I glanced up at him, a breath leaving me when I saw the dark circles surrounding his eyes and the mess of hair sticking up, no doubt from him tugging at it. He looked as bad as I felt and I was positive he hadn’t slept a wink either. “I guess I must have,” I whispered.
He seemed to hesitate a beat, before putting one foot in front of the other and heading toward me. I slowly picked up the pieces of my broken heart, otherwise known as my “mother’s” life and shoved them back in the envelope, making room for our meals.
We sat in silence as we stared down at the table, our forks poking and prodding but never lifting the food to our mouths. My silent tears unmasked by my almost silent cries filled the air, broken only by Nate’s sighs. Then he sat up, his forearms on the table as he leaned forward. “You should eat something.”
My head cocked as I took in his words, his appearance, and the genuine sincerity in both of them. I nodded as I held the fork tighter, pushing back a sob and I ate my food, little by little until my plate was empty, all while he watched me, his eyes never leaving mine. And when I was done, we both sat back, letting the silence drown out our heartache. It wasn’t until Nate reached over, his fingers on the edge of my plate that I finally spoke. “I asked Tiny to find her because I wanted the truth. I knew that if I’d asked you, you would try to shelter me. To protect me from the hurt. I thought it was what I wanted.”
He froze, his gaze lifting and locking with mine. “And now? What do you want now, Bailey?”
I covered my trembling lips with the back of my hand. “And now I want you. I want you to protect me, Nate.”
*
I sat on the bathroom counter like I’d done so many times before, only now it felt different. There was a nervous, unresolved tension between us as Nate stood between my legs—not close enough that he was touching me, but close enough that I could feel the heat from his body.
He seemed focused (almost too focused) on preparing my insulin. There was no skin on skin contact when he lifted my shirt, and he froze when my bare stomach was revealed. His eyes drifted shut as he licked his lips and squatted in front of me, his breath warm against my leg. I held my breath, my muscle tense with anticipation. My hands reached out, as if on their own, until my fingers met the soft tips of his hair. He looked up at me, and I hesitated, just for a moment, before lacing my fingers through his hair and pulling him toward me. And just like that, the tension left me, but so did the tears, and so did the words I’d spent the entire night denying. “My mother was a whore.”
Nate
Bailey’s mother was a whore.
Not in the insulting way.
In the literal way.
The mother Bailey had known, had grown up with, wasn’t her mother. Not by birth, anyway. Her birth mother had been a prostitute, a hooker, a whore. It didn’t matter how you spun it, or which word you chose to use; the truth was the truth and what’s worse—she’d been a cheap whore, working on the streets for very little so that she could maintain her crack habit.
Bailey’s mother was a crack whore.
Unfortunately, the man she’d known as her father was, in fact, her father. A businessman who worked in finance, but also had a craving for hookers and cocaine.
When Bailey had been born, she was sent to the children’s hospital, her tiny newborn body shaking uncontrollably as she suffered from withdrawals.
Bailey was a crack baby.
From what Tiny had found out, the arrival of Bailey flicked a switch in her father, and when he held her for the first time, he decided to set a different path for his life, and so he spent day after day, night after night, doing what he could for his and the crack whore’s crack baby, now known as his daughter: Bailey Ann Wright—the baby girl who spent months in the hospital under the care of doctors and nurses as they treated her like they did other addicts.
It’s strange—how love can form from the most fucked up of circumstances.
A crack baby + a weak businessman + a nurse who’d taken a liking to Bailey would one day become Bailey’s family.
Until one day, the businessman could no longer hold off on his need, his want, his addiction, and after a few years of living clean, started using again. The drugs came first. Then the whores. Then the crack whores.
And then one fall day, the nurse looked at the girl she’d lovingly called her daughter, and decided she’d had enough of being a mother to a girl who wasn’t hers, had enough of being a wife to a man who couldn’t keep his promise, and so she left… all while Bailey sat under a tree, a tree just like hotdogs and hickory, which would later become the holder of the greatest, and worst memories of her life.
“There’s no fuckin’ end in sight, Boss,” Tiny said, pulling me from my thoughts. “We killed his brother, isn’t that enough?”
I looked away from my phone, from the vision of Bailey provided by the basement security cameras she didn’t know existed. She was curled in a ball on the bed, and when I zoomed in close enough, I could see her thumb in her mouth, her tears on her cheeks, and I wanted nothing more than to order Tiny to turn around and go back home. I wanted to feel her fingers through my hair, feel her skin against my fingertips, her lips against mine.
“Boss?”
With a sigh, I put my phone away and faced him. He glanced at me quickly, his hands on the steering wheel. “You know what I’m going to say, Tiny.”
He sighed. “That it’s not enough, right?”
I nodded.
“Look, I don’t want to be the bad guy here, or even the voice of reason, especially after the night you’ve had with Bailey and everything, but…”
I slumped down in my seat, my head pounding as I rolled it against the headrest and closed my eyes.
Tiny continued, “I mean, you were young, Nate. Just a kid. And I understand that you feel like you need to get some form of redemption for your mother’s death, but are you even sure it was Dante Franco with your mother—”
“That’s enough, Tiny.”
“All I’m saying is that you deserve more than this life, with or without Bailey. This can’t be forever, Nate. At some point, this shit has to end.”
I sighed, frustrated. “Will you just fuckin’ drive?”
His mouth clamped shut, and it stayed that way while I directed him to our next destination. Once we pulled up outside Dr. Polizi’s practice, he turned to me, his expression worried.
“What’s going on, Nate?”
I ignored him and opened my door, and when I heard him do the same, I faced him, my words an order: “Stay in the car.”
“Nate—”
“At what point did you stop taking orders from me, Tiny?” I was tired, beyond exhausted, and I knew it wasn’t fair, but lately, everything had been setting me off. Everything. And while I tried to keep it contained around Bailey, I couldn’t do the same with him. It was too much.
*
Polizi’s practice was the same generic doctor’s office you’d see anywhere; white walls, dated art, even more dated reading material.
I’d barely sat down on one of the chairs in the waiting room when Polizi walked in, his smile as generic as his office when he called my name. Once in his exam room, he turned to me, the smile no longer there. “Your CT scan results came back. It’s getting worse, Nate.”<
br />
“No shit.”
“We’re already treating it as much as we can with medication.”
“Surely there’s something else.”
He rubbed his beard, his gaze dropping and his voice softening. “There’s open heart surgery. We can go in, close the valve, but I don’t recommend it, Nate. You’re only twenty-three. You could live a full life—”
“But besides cutting me open?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Nathaniel, I’d love nothing more than to be able to treat this for you, but it’s not on me. It’s on you. The stress, the anxiety, your work… it’s not good for you. It’s detrimental to your heart and your life. Yours is one of the most severe cases of MVP I’ve come across, and you’re not doing yourself any favors by doing what you do. You want me to give you a magical remedy? Get out of The Family. Live a normal life. Use your smarts for something better. Find love, find happiness, have children and love them the way you were loved.” He sighed as he leaned against his desk. “You keep this up, and you’ll be lucky to see your next birthday. I told your dad the same thing, Nate, and he didn’t listen to me. Now look where he is.”
38
Bailey
Months had passed since I’d found out the truth about my mother, and the lie about my life and I’d done everything I could to forget it, to act as if my mother wasn’t a crack whore and I wasn’t a crack baby and my life wasn’t doomed from the second I was born.
I thought I’d been doing a good job.
Obviously, I wasn’t.
Nate leaned forward in his chair, his elbows resting on his knees and his gaze locked on the floor. He was refusing to look at me. He’d been doing it since he got home, and suddenly, it all made sense.
“What do you think, Bailey?” Dr. Polizi’s question hung in the air.
I pulled the covers up to my chin and didn’t bother answering him. I didn’t need to. It didn’t matter what I thought.
