“Thing is, I was already big at that point. And I was…pissed. I’d started going to Ricky’s gym, every day after school. Learned boxing and kick-boxing and jiu jitsu and I was kicking ass in the ring. Real quick. Tommy, now he’d played college football. He was big, too. And the bastard had a gun.”
A chill slides up my spine. “The night it happened, I’d just turned seventeen. I was fuckin’ feral at that point. Barely at their house, spending nights in the gym, like Travis. Went home forclothes or to get Mom to sign things for school, and she was in bed. Bleeding. Face just…” His exhalation is controlled, quiet. “He’d beaten her to a pulp. I should have gotten her out of there—I wanted to—but she wouldn’t come. And he wouldn’t let me. Pulled that fucking pistol out. I was so beyond everything, so enraged that I went after him anyway. We fought. I got a few hits in. Got him on the floor. Broke his nose, his teeth. Messed him up. Went to get Mom and she…she wouldn’t come. Wouldn’t leave him. She was mad. Atme. I had no right, she told me. No…noright.”
I look down at where his hands are gripping his jeans-clad knees. I want to hold one. I want to holdhim.
“Tommy Bentley wasn’t just a big, privileged fish in our little pond. He was a lawyer. Lots of lawyer friends. Judges, too. I was sent off real quick. Tried as an adult. Treated like absolute shit.”
“What about your mom?” I ask, though I’m pretty certain I don’t want to hear the answer to this question.
“Mom? Oh, Mom sided with him. With the cops. With…the judge. Every step of the way, she upheld that asshole’s testimony. Only person who showed up for me was Ricky.” He gives a quick, spare nod. “Ricky.”
I reach out and put my hand over his. He looks down and stares, then after a second or two, turns his hand over and returns my squeeze.
“I was sentenced to five years for what should have been a misdemeanor. He, uh, claimed self-defense. Said I had the gun. Mom…” He turns and looks right at me and there’s something so shellshocked in his eyes, so vulnerable, that all I want in this moment is to comfort him.
“Come here.” I lean toward him, put my hands on his cheeks, pull him down to my level. Not for any reason but to be here. To show him that I’m here.
His forehead thunks lightly against mine and we’re close, close, sharing air and warmth and this tiny space between us.
“She died, Kit. Mom died while I was inside. She got cancer. She was…riddledwith it. That’s the word I remember. Riddled.”
“Oh, Jake. I’m so sorry.”
“I can’t forgive her,” he whispers, barely shaking his head, barely speaking. “Even after all the therapy, all the fucking work, I still can’t.”
“You don’t have to,” I reply.
“She came to see me once. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do it.”
I’d thought Clark broke my heart. I’d thought he’d cracked it right down the middle, but that was nothing to how this man’s just pulverized it. In my chest, there’s nothing left but powder.
“See now? See why I can’t do the whole family thing?”
“Yeah.” I laugh-sniffle, only barely conscious that tears track down my face. “I totally get it. I do, but…you cared, Jake. You were the only one.Youwere the family. You, on your own, trying to hold her up, hold the whole thing together. You were there for her and she…her fears or whatever kept her from doing the right thing.”
“Fuck, you’re just like Frank.”
“What? No way. Frank’s annoying.”
“Frank said the same shit. Told me I was the only right one in that whole mess.” He glances up for a split second. I think this is the closest I’ve ever really looked at him, in bright light, and his irises are as delicate as cracked ice. “Frank also taught me to stay alive inside. I owe him my life.”
“You don’t owe him.”
“It was bad, Kit.”
“Frank wouldn’t expect anything in return.”
“Pretty sure he’d expect menotto knock his sister up.”
Almost smiling, I look at him, close up, those long lashes, the very faint fan of laugh lines around his eyes, and I have sucha depth of emotion that, for a handful of seconds, the world around me corkscrews. It’s the worst kind of vertigo. The kind that doesn’t settle after you blink. The kind that isn’t just a momentary lapse, but a permanent shift. A pressure change that reaches all the way to my marrow.
He hasn’t broken my heart, I realize, drinking up every detail of his face. He’s dug it out of the rubble it’s been hiding in all this time. Forced it out into the light, where it’s tiny and weak and shivering from cold, but also weirdly whole.
“What happened with Frank,” I share, a paltry offering in return for the confidences he’s just given me. “When he was sentenced and went to prison, I was a mess, you know. I lost my brother to a system that isn’t remotely kind or fair. My parents were gone. They’d died.”
“Frank told me. Car crash.”
I keep going, because I want him to understand. I want him to see how I got here.
