The whiskey helps, but not enough. Not anymore. I start taking pills—sleeping pills at first, the over-the-counter kind that make everything fuzzy and soft around the edges. When those stop working, when my body builds up a tolerance, I find something stronger.
A guy who lives down the hall at the Vista Inn sells Xanax without a prescription, and I start buying a few at a time, just enough to get me through the worst nights, just enough to make sleep possible.
I'm not trying to get high. I'm not trying to escape reality completely. I'm just trying to make the inside of my head quiet enough to surviveanother day. The pills don't make me happy—nothing makes me happy anymore, I'm not sure I remember what happiness feels like. They just make me numb, and numb is better than the alternative. Numb is better than the constant ache of failure and loss.
I keep searching for Ivan, but the hope is fading like a photograph left in the sun. He's vanished. I've tried everything I can think of. Ivan Allen Collins, born in Atlanta, entered the foster system at age seven, placed with the Hendersons in rural Georgia at age twelve. After that, the trail goes cold. The system swallowed him whole, and I can't find a way to dig him out. It's like he never existed.
Maybe he's dead.
The thought comes more and more often now, usually late at night when I'm drunk and alone. Maybe he left the system and disappeared into the streets, became another statistic, another foster kid who didn't make it. Maybe he changed his name, started a new life, became someone else entirely to escape the past. Maybe he's happy somewhere, with a family who adopted him and a future that doesn't include me.
That last thought is the hardest one, the one that cuts deepest. Not because I want him to be unhappy, but because if he's happy without me, then what was the point? What was the point of all those nights in the barn, all those whispered promises in the dark, all those facts we memorized so we could find each other again? If he doesn't need me anymore, if he's built a life that's better without me in it, then I don't know who I am. I don't know what I'm for.
The ceiling of my room at the Vista Inn stares back at me every night, the water stain dog watching with eyes it doesn't have. I lie there in the dark, waiting for the pills to kick in, waiting for the whiskey to blur the edges, and I recite Ivan's information in my head the same way I've been doing for years.
Ivan Allen Collins. September twenty-third, two thousand and six. Atlanta. Birthmark on the right shoulder blade, shaped like a kidney bean blob. Safe place is the barn, with me.
I wonder if he still remembers my name.
I wonder if he still says it at night, the way I say his. I wonder if somewhere out there, in whatever life he's living now, he ever thinks about the boy who promised to find him and failed.
I take another pill. I close my eyes. I try not to dream.
***
Mick starts giving me more responsibility at the shop as time passes. He's getting older, his hands aren't as steady as they used to be, and he needs someone he can trust to handle the complicated jobs while he deals with customers and paperwork and the business side of things. I don't know when I became someone he trusts, but somewhere along the way it happened, and now I'm the one rebuilding engines and restoring vintage bikes and turning wrecks into machines that purr like they just rolled off the factory floor.
I buy a motorcycle of my own—a 1998 Honda Shadow, beaten to hell and barely running when I find it at a police auction for next to nothing. I spend months bringing her back to life, replacing parts one by one as I can afford them, rewiring the electrical system, teaching myself things I didn't know I needed to learn. When she finally starts, when I hear that engine turn over for the first time and feel it rumble beneath me, it's the closest thing to joy I've felt in years. The closest thing to feeling alive.
I ride her at night sometimes, when the walls of my room get too close and the pills aren't working and I need to feel something other than the weight of my own failure crushing me. I take the back roads out of town, push the engine as fast as it will go, let the wind tear at my face and my hair until I can't think about anything except the road in front of me and the feel of the machine beneath me.
It's dangerous and stupid and I know I'm one wrong move away from wrapping myself around a tree or sliding under the wheels of an oncoming truck.
Some nights, that doesn't seem like such a bad thing. Some nights it seems like a mercy.
But I always come back. I always park the bike in the corner of the Vista Inn parking lot, walk up the stairs to my room on legs that shake with exhaustion, lie down on my bed and stare at the ceiling until the sun comes up and another day begins.
Because somewhere out there, Ivan might still be looking for me. And if there's even a chance—even the smallest, most pathetic chance—that he might find me someday, that our paths might cross again, then I have to be here.
I have to stay alive. I have to keep existing, keep breathing, keep surviving.
It's the only thing keeping me going. The thought that maybe, after all these years, he hasn't given up on me.
The way I haven't given up on him.
I keep his name alive in my head. I keep the promise alive, even if it's killing me.
Chapter 11: Ivan
The Reyes family is not what I expected.
I expected rules and the understanding that I was temporary, a guest who would eventually be asked to leave when my usefulness ran out or when they got tired of me. Instead, I get chaos. Beautiful, overwhelming, impossible chaos that makes no sense to someone like me.
Rosalyn and Mitchell have been fostering for over fifteen years, and when I arrive, there are three other kids in the house—twins Destiny and Diana who are four, identical down to the way they finish each other's sentences; and a little boy named Caleb who's a toddler and follows me around like a shadow from day one, his small hand reaching for mine whenever I'm near.
The house is loud and messy and full of life. Dinner is a production that requires two tables pushed together and a complex system for passing dishes that I don't understand for the first week, a choreography of chaos that somehow works.
I get Rosalyn, who hugs everyone every single morning like she's afraid we'll disappear if she doesn't hold on tight enough, who smells like cinnamon and warmth. I get Mitchell, who works in construction when he's not on the road as a truck driver. He comes home tired but always has time to help with homework or fix something that's broken or just sit on the porch and talk.
