Page 16 of Road to Absolution

CHAPTER 5

How the Crossroads Collided

Sometimes, it is downright amazing how the mind works. How it reveals realities once certain details have been uncovered. Is it complicated? Bet your ass it is. But isn’t that the magic? Isn’t that when you learn what you’re made of? Possibly one of the strong? I say the answer is yes to those questions. I say, sometimes you have to be daring enough to see that in order to move forward, you have to take a few steps back. That’s exactly what all this was leading to. Now, I had to know why and what steps back to take.

When college ended, Delilah and I moved back home, but we were far from the same people. We had grown. The best part of that growth was that we had done it together. Delilah and Maverick were the small-town kids who had now survived the big city of Washington DC.

We weren’t home to lick our wounds. We were engaged and ready to grow roots. With Lilah’s business degree and my engineering degree—which I had no intention of putting to use until after boxing ended—we were ready.

Or, at least, I had thought we were.

Steps back…

It seems, even with an engineering degree, I had failed to appreciate that you can’t build anything without a solid foundation. You can’t truly soar when trapped by clipped wings. Lilah and I had relocated for college, but had yet to deal with base problems.

It was unnerving to witness her regressing once we returned. She would startle easily. She would get lost in thought, even while in mid-conversation with me or someone else. When asked what was going on, she would dismiss the fact there was an issue.

Although these ‘issues’ needed immediate attention, life propelled us forward, even as I was looking over my shoulder, saying, “Wait! I think we forgot something back there!”

While Lilah and I saved money and searched for the perfect piece of land so that our roots could dig into Mother Earth, we would either stay in my bedroom at my mom’s, or in her old bedroom. To me, it was comforting to be within old walls again, but Lilah’s nightmares began to return. Most of the time, she wouldn’t even wake from them. As she struggled in her sleep, I would lay in bed, holding her and whispering, “Talk to me, baby. Ya gotta tell me what is hurting your beautiful heart.”

One night, I woke to find I was actually alone in her bed. It was 3:33 AM when I made my way out of her room to find her sitting on the floor, in the dark, across the hall from a shut bedroom door.

Not just any door.

Kenny’s door.

Even though years had passed, no one had cleaned out that room. It was still as Kenny had left it the night he died. I’d never even been inside it.

Not bothering to turn on a hallway light, I quietly sat next to Lilah.

Staring at the closed door like she was, I rested my arms on bent knees, realizing that room was a tomb of the past. One that no one seemed willing to enter.

Tucker had loved Kenny like a brother. John had loved him like a son. But they both knew something was desperately wrong. There was no denying it. Delilah and Kenny had been a young couple when he took his own life, running Lilah’s car into a huge oak tree on Highway 94.

Throughout the years, Tuck and John tried to get Lilah to talk to no avail.

Was she simply too scared to speak the truth? Or did she know that the truth was so far from what we could’ve ever imagined on our own, that she chose to keep it locked up inside to spare us?

Sitting in the hallway, Delilah’s head tilted to rest against my upper arm. I kissed her soft hair and quietly said, “The first night we ever made love, you cried.” Her head nodded but stayed leaning on me. “You also, umm, you said,” I struggled to acknowledge a suspicion, “that you had… been with him, once.” I pointed to the door, even though we both knew who and what I was speaking of.

I wanted to discuss what else she had said the night we’d made love, but she wouldn’t give me the chance. Instead, she said, “I wish we could’ve met that night in Daytona.”

Lilah was talking about the spring break trip she took her junior year. It was a celebration because it was the last year Tuck would be in high school with Kenny and the gang they’d grown up with, including Lilah and Viola. That following summer, Tucker was moving on to college. The gang would be left behind to live out their senior year—the year I would join them—and find the huge gaping hole that was Kenny.

During that same spring break in Daytona, I was young, wild, and free. My father was still alive, so I was on top of the world. Clueless to my upcoming tumble from my throne. That’s why when an older woman, in a bar I was in illegally because I was underage, asked me to dance, I said, “Hell yeah!” The way she was gawking at me, I knew I was about to taste my first cougar. Score!

That same night, unbeknownst to me, on that same dance floor, also illegally in the same bar, was my future wife and my two future best friends. It was Viola who had spotted me dancing with my cougar. V had claimed my hazel eyes were the ones Delilah had searched for due to her romance novels.

Even though Delilah and Kenny weren’t a couple yet, he was there, too.

Kenny: a young man I had never met and never would. Yet I would live in his shadow for the rest of my life.

Now, on the hallway floor, that shadow loomed…

Lilah whispered, “Had I met you that night, it could have changed my fate.”

I opened my mouth to ask again if I would ever be let inside that past, but Lilah hid her face in my shoulder, silently begging me to drop the subject. She also asked for comfort, snaking her arms around mine.