“I slept on the front porch of our trailer more nights than I can even count. I’d get off the bus from school, and she’d be on a bender, nowhere to be fucking found. The door would be locked, and I didn’t know how to get inside. I stole to eat, I fought to survive. I’ve done things I’m ashamed of, that I’m disgusted by, because there wasn’t any other option. I’ve seen things that no child should ever fucking see. Experienced things that haunt me every single day, things that I will never forget. Things I will never heal from.”
“Oh, Wilder.” Her voice breaks, agony tearing through my name as it leaves her lips, and she presses her small body even tighter against me like she’s going to protect me, even from the past.
I clear my throat and gesture to the spot on my forearm, a red, raised spot that barely shows anymore beneath the ink, but it’s forever ingrained in my head.
“This scar, right here? Cigarette burn.”
Next, I point to the scar above my eyebrow. “This one? The time she threw a can of ravioli at me, and the top was open, so it sliced my head up. Needed stitches, but I got a dirty rag to stop the bleeding.”
Every place I show Maisie, she follows with her fingers, gently brushing her fingers over the scars like she’s trying to erase them. To take the pain away.
It makes my chest feel fucking tight.
“And this one?” I drag my fingers along the uneven, raised line on my throat. “I didn’t think I’d live through that one. One of the last times I saw her before CPS permanently took me away. Probably wouldn’t have survived it if one of the men she was sleeping with for drugs didn’t have the smallest semblance of humanity left in him. He called the ambulance so I wouldn’t bleed out.”
Maisie’s sobbing now, and I knew she would be when she finally heard it all, when she finally understood that I’m truly as fucked-up as I said I am.
“It was a childhood of horrors, and I relive it… every single day of my life. In the way I treat other people, in the behaviors I learned and I can’t seem to unlearn. In the way that I think of myself, the people around me. The future.” I laugh, hating how devoid it sounds. “I’m thirty-four, Maisie, and I can’t even imagine being a father. When I imagine it, I think about how my child will end up just as fucked-up as I am, and then I’ll have to live with the guilt that I brought a kid into this world, knowing that I’mrotten, that I inherited it from the people who brought me into the world. The only way to stop it from spreading is to kill it at the root.”
When she opens her mouth to speak, I shake my head. “Just let me… let me get it out, baby. Ineedto tell you all of it. If I stop, I might never be able to finish.” After a beat, she nods, and I drag in an uneven breath that feels as unsteady as I do.
My back presses to the shower wall, and I drop my head against the chipped tile. This is the first time I’ve said most of this out loud, ever, and it’s fucking hard.
Opening up to Maisie, even with how badly I want to, is still the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done.
I’ve kept so much buried away for so long that it feels like I’m ripping it out of the places it’s embedded inside of me, and fuck, the wounds are busted open and gushing.
The only thing that grounds me is Maisie.
Her fingers dragging along my skin. Her warm body pressed against me.
It’s hard, but she’s here, and I have to believe that she’s not going anywhere.
That she’s going to stay.
“I left New Orleans because I thought it was poison, passed down from my parents. But that’s the thing, Maisie. I realized once I left that the poison is running through my veins. It’s inside me. It fucked up the only thing I ever had, and I’m terrified it’s going to ruin you too.”
“No,” she says, vehemently shaking her head. “There’snothingrotten about you, Wilder. Nothing. You were abused and neglected, andnoneof it was your fault.”
“You’re right. Your mother is the one person in the world who’s supposed to love you unconditionally. But my mother abused me. Neglected me. She abandoned me because she loved drugs more than she ever loved me. She loved getting high more than her son. My mother showed me just how unkind the world was before I was even old enough to understand it.”
I pause, finally losing the death grip I have on my emotions, and I feel my eyes burning. “If everything she put me through wasn’t enough to scar me… I’ve always thought that because I loved my mother, even after everything she had done to me, that it made me weak. She hurt me, mentally and physically, and made me feel unworthy of even fucking living, yet Istillcouldn’t stop myself from loving her. I would lay down at night, and the prayers I said weren’t for new toys or food that I didn’t have tosteal. It was that, when I woke up the next morning, my mother suddenly wanted me. That she would finally love me the way a mother was supposed to. And each morning when I woke up and she was still the same nightmare I’d endured for so long… that’s when I realized love is a weakness. A weakness I couldn’t hold hope in any longer.”
I drop my head back against the tile behind me, trying to pull it back, to rein it in, but it feels fruitless.
“I was just a fucking kid who should’ve been playing with toy cars and climbing trees, but instead, I was hiding in closets from the men she brought home and trying to learn how to use the stove before I could even read. All I wanted was for her toloveme, Maisie. A fraction of the way I loved her even though she never deserved it.”
My breathing is labored as I sink down to the cold shower floor, hanging my head between my knees, which are still shaking.
Maisie follows, lowering herself beside me.
She pulls me into her arms, cradling my head against her chest like she’s not half my size, and she just… holds me.
“I’m so sorry that you’ve had to endure so much hurt. I wish that I could take it away. I know that I can’t, but I’m here, Wilder, and I promise I’m never going to leave.” The words are whispered against the top of my head. Her arms tighten as far as they can around my body, and Maisie holds on. She just holds on.
“What if I fuck it all up?” I swallow. “I’m scared that if I… if I love you, that this poison inside of me is going to ruin you. Ican’tfucking ruin you, baby.”
“Oh, Wilder, you’re not going to. I see what’s in here.” Her hand trails over my heart, stopping there. “I see you even when the only thing you’ve wanted to do is hide. Your past doesn’t define you, but it did shape you. It made you into the incredible,resilient, strong man you are today. And I’m so proud of you, for all of the things that you’re facing, even when they feel like more than you can handle. I’m not leaving you to face them alone. Never again.”
