Facade (24 page)

“I love you, Mom. Take care of yourself. I can’t help you do it anymore.”

For the second time in a week, I leave when someone tells me to, only this time, everything inside me doesn’t wish I could go back.

I drove until I was almost out of gas, pulled over to fill up, and started driving again before I stopped at some nothing town in South Carolina. I haven’t left the tiny, dark hotel room since I got here.

Money’s tight and soon I won’t have any more, but I don’t care. Don’t fucking care about anything.

I haven’t smoked weed since before I left. Not like I couldn’t find it if I wanted to, but it was never about a need for me. It wasn’t about addiction. It was about forgetting and now I can’t let myself forget. It’s there in my head all the time, raining down on me. Flooding me and I’m drowning in it.

I’m ready to let myself sink.

My eyes sting because I don’t close them for long. Every time I do, I see Ash. See him smiling at me. See him fucking loving me as the car is coming at him. His little body on the ground and knowing that I failed him.

Except now it’s not a guy behind the wheel. It’s Laney and it makes the loss multiply until I feel nothing but the pain.

Daddy, daddy, daddy.
His voice is in my ears and his face in my head and sometimes it makes me smile because I think it’s real. Think I hear his voice or see his face, but even in those dreams or thoughts where we’re not standing in that yard, the car always comes and it always takes him from me.

I grab Ash’s shirt and push it into my pocket, needing to get out of the room. Pulling the door open, everything freezes inside me at the same time I’m burning alive.

“Motherfucker.” I lunge at Delaney’s brother as he stands outside my hotel room. My forearm goes straight to his throat as I back him up against the brick wall and hold him there. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I’ve been following your ass through two states.”

“How the hell—”

Maddox cuts me off. His voice is rough as it tries to squeeze out from under the pressure I’m putting on him. “I left, but I was worried about Laney so I asked around about where you lived. It wasn’t hard to find out. When I got there, you were leaving. I started to follow you and for some reason, I just kept going. When I finally decided to talk to you, it was kind of hard to catch you since you’re not man enough to leave your room.”

Jerking my arm away from him, I let my fist fly right into his face. Blood rushes out of his nose and I flash to Ash, which gives him the delay he needs to run at me. He slams me into the wall on the other side of the walkway, before he hits me back. With everything I have in me, I push off the wall and we hit the other one, then the ground, both of us swinging at each other. Neither of us getting anywhere, besides trading blows.

“You’re a bastard and you don’t deserve my sister. She doesn’t deserve to get hurt for trying to make things right,” he says between punches.

“She fucking lied to me. She was playing games the whole fucking time!” I groan when his fist slams into my stomach.

“If you think that, then you definitely don’t deserve her, because you don’t know shit about her.”

And damned if I don’t know he’s right. If I don’t know those ghosts in her eyes were because she was just as haunted as me. If I don’t remember how she touched me and how she looked at me and the gift she gave me… but still, all that time she knew.

I pull my fist back to hit him again and he doesn’t try to stop me. He just lies there, and I want to hit him so bad. Want him to feel some of the pain I do, but instead I push off him and sit against the building. We’re in an outside hallway. I’m surprised no one came out with the fighting, but don’t care either.

“Knowing her or not doesn’t matter. It’s not enough.” I’m breathing heavy. My face and body are killing me.

Maddox curses before grabbing a backpack from the ground. He pulls something out of it to wipe the blood from his face before he sits across from me. Neither of us speaks for a long time and then he reaches into his bag again, pulls out a fifth of whiskey, takes a pull, and then hands me the bottle.

It takes me a second, but I grab it, take a drink, and then hand it back.

“She cares too much,” he finally says. “She’s sweet… despite all the shit we’ve been through. I know it doesn’t make sense, but in her mind she thought it would help. She wanted to believe she had the power to make it better.”

I grab the bottle from him and take another drink. I know he’s right. Know she wanted to try and fix it. That was one of my favorite things about her, wasn’t it? How sweet she was. How innocent. But then I see Ash again and the pain squeezes me so tight I can’t breathe. “It’s still not enough.”

“Then you’re a bigger pussy than I thought,” Maddox says.

“And what are you running from? Don’t sit there and pretend you’re not fucking weak too. Don’t pretend she’s never shed tears over you.”

“Touché.” He takes a drink. “Did she tell you she found Mom the first time she tried to kill herself? That Mom knew Laney would be home soon. That she’d be the one to find her, yet she still slit her wrists in the unlocked bathroom right before Laney got home. That my little sister was scared to death her mom would die and she sat in her blood with her mom’s head in her lap and when she was okay, that same mom yelled at her for saving her. That she was pissed she was alive and blamed Laney.”

“Fuck.” I drop my head backward. Look at the ceiling. I knew she had tried to kill herself, but I didn’t know the details.

“I know you lost someone but you’re not the only one. She watched her mom almost die, more than once. She still loves her and cares about her, even though she always gets shut down. She lost her dad that day too. She lives with those memories. Lives with the knowledge that her mom will never love her like she should, yet she’s a whole hell of a lot better than we are. She doesn’t fucking run. She’s stronger than we could ever hope to be.”

Maddox pushes to his feet, hands me the bottle, and grabs his bag. “And for some reason, she loves you. Hurting you will be something else she lives with. It will eat her up inside and it will kill another part of her, like Dad and Mom did. Like even I do, but she’ll keep on living. I wish I was that brave.”

I watch as her brother walks away, leaving a trail of blood behind him as he goes.

* * *

I jerk upward and jump out of the hotel bed. The empty bottle of whiskey is sitting there. It sounds crazy, but I swear to fucking God I feel him. I remember how it felt to have him in my lap and to have his arms around me and to play with him and the exact sound of his voice when he said
I love you
.

“I like Daddy’s stories,”
he’d said, and suddenly my fingers itch to write. I pull open all the drawers until I find a pad of paper and a pen and I start filling it. Writing on the front and back of every page. Writing to Ash. Writing about Ash and life and poems and stories. Whatever comes to my head, I write it.

When the paper is gone, I run out of the room across the street to the corner store and buy every notebook I can find before I’m back in the dark room again writing to my son. About him.

I’m doing it for him. For me. For Angel. Hell, maybe even for my ghost. I only know I have to do it. That I can’t stop. With each word I see his smile and I feel him again and I know I’m doing what he would want me to do.

I write that I’d always wanted to be a good dad to him, better than I had been, but I haven’t been doing it. I tell him how young I was and I didn’t think I was ready to be a father but that I want him to know how much I wanted him. Even if I wasn’t ready to at first, he stole my heart and made me wish to be a better man. That if I had it to do over again, I would be different. Would be what he deserved. That all these pages and all these words and my hands that cramp and hurt are my apology. They’re my way of being the person he deserved for me to be.

* * *

For the first time in four years, I stand in front of the house I shared with my sister. I look like shit. I haven’t slept much. I’m screwed up from my fight with Maddox, though in the week I’ve been writing and then driving here, the bruises are fading.

But I’m here. Looking at a new fence around the yard. The new speed bumps on the street and at the signs that say to go slow. That say traffic fines are double and children are at play.

They have my son’s name on them. They’re for him.

And I know that’s what my sister has been doing to be okay. That’s how she’s been fighting for Ashton. While I’ve been running and… fuck,
dying
, she’s been living for him. It’s not like she’s ever had much. The house is tiny and it’s in a shitty neighborhood, but she still did something. She fought, probably with all she had, for my son.

It took me long enough, but the notebooks full of our story are the start of my fight.

I let myself in the gate and walk up to the front door. That ache in my chest spreads being here. Looking at that spot I held him last and where I played with him in real life and in my dream. I almost can’t breathe.

The steps still creak like they used to as I walk up them. There’s a weight fighting to pull me back because I need to do this. I have to. For Ashton.

My fist comes down on the door in a knock. It’s only a few seconds later I hear my sister say, “Hold on!”

Four years. I haven’t talked to her in four years. I left her right after she lost her nephew. What was wrong with me?

Less than a minute later, she opens the door. Her hand shoots to her mouth, covering it and it’s shaking.

“Hey,” I say. She doesn’t look much different. I notice her hair’s a little longer and that she has her ears pierced. She never had them done before.