Forgiven (Ruined) (24 page)

             
I hear Balliol on the other side of it, pounding.  "Open up!"

             
The girl reaches me, fists flying.  She's pounding me.

             
I cover my face, trying to protect my head, shoved into the metal handle of the door.

             
I could drop one hand, unlock the door Balliol's pounding on from the other side.  But enough's enough.

             
Both hands drop from my face and head.  I swing to my left side, putting the weight on my good leg, and one of her blows goes wild, smacking into the glass door.  She grunts in pain.  Before she can regroup, I use both hands flat out in front of me to shove her hard in the sternum, pivoting my weight forward as I shove.

             
She flies backward off me, catches her heel on the linoleum, and goes down.  She's still shouting, though the breath's been partially knocked out of her.  She'll be back up in a minute.  Before she can, and without bothering to let security in, I move to her more easily than I've moved since the walking cast went on, and drop to one knee beside her, one hand pressing down on her diaphragm, driving out the air she just started getting back so she has no choice but to lay there, panting.

             
"You think I had it great?  Is that it?  You think I should have what, taken responsibility for a sister I didn't know existed?  You think you missed out on what, ponies and parties and princess dresses with daddy?  Think again!  We never had enough money.  It was a little house in a run down track.  My mom was the one who went out every night working because dad just wasn't going to make it as a teacher and coach.  Everybody loved him, sure, but he was barely keeping it together.  It wouldn't have been long before night after night of drinking and exploding at me had brought it all crashing down.  Because I would have called the police.  Or he would have drank himself to death.  Or gotten in a wreck.  Or racked up the DUIs."

             
She's getting her breath back.  She looks so stunned I actually put my hands under her lower back and arch it a little.  "It'll help you breathe."

             
Behind me I can hear Balliol and her partner now.  They've got keys to the building and the door is open.  I turn my head just far enough she can see my face and mouth,
Wait
.

             
There's silence then, though this girl has to know they're there.

             
"The night I killed him?  He was on bath salts.  He'd been coming home roaring drunk every night.  My mother, who had no idea yours ever existed, was working nights to support us, to pay off the insane credit card bills my father's drinking ran up – "

             
And a thought there – how could she not have known?  What did she
think
he was buying?  But love is blind.

             
I should know.  I kept myself blind for how long?  Making excuses for his behavior.  Taking the nighttime abuse, the screaming and slamming doors and breaking things, because I thought I had to keep the family together.

             
I was fifteen.

             
I blinded myself to the things he had done, said he was loved in the community so clearly I was wrong and the community was right.  Said that this was the father who maybe didn't provide ponies and princess parties when I was little, but who loved me.

             
The father I loved.

             
The father whose death I've been feeling guilty about for far too long now.

             
I drop tiredly onto the floor beside my sudden sister.  My casted leg is out at an angle.  The other leg I pull up close and wrap my arms around.

             
"He came home that night, and he tried to kill me."

             
She's sitting up now, just flat out the way children sometimes sit, like an abandoned rag doll.  Her eyes widen at what I've just said.

             
"He tried to kill me.  He wrapped his hands around my neck and the world started graying out and I knew if I passed out, he'd never let me wake up."

             
Balliol takes a breath and moves behind me, one hand on my shoulder.  I reach up gratefully and squeeze her hand.  Her partner is still straddle legged, his weapon drawn and held in both hands, but now pointing down.

             
"I didn't know," the girl says.  She still sounds angry.

             
"Now you do.  Know too my mother didn't know Bruce Avery yet.  That wasn’t until we moved across the country.  She didn't just leap at the chance to remarry. She worked hard and with intent to make new lives for us.  She'd just lost the husband who had been sinking but wasn't lost to her.  He never let her see that side.  But she still stood by me."  I shake my head in wonder.  "I don't think she ever once doubted my story."

             
I look at her where she's sitting and add, "I didn't mean to kill him.  I wanted to drive him back so I could run and call 911.  But he lunged at me and fell on the knife and bled out before anyone could get to him."

             
Silence.  Balliol squeezes my hand more tightly.

             
"I still have nightmares."

             
Whatever I might have expected would happen, it doesn't.  The girl doesn't say anything after-school-special like
But now we have each other, we'll be sisters!
Or
I forgive you utterly, whatever your name is now.

             
My name is Willow and it will stay Willow.  I can flex.  I can ride storms.  I can bend without breaking.

             
The other things I'd like to expect – Kellan sweeping through the door to gather me up and comfort me, Emmy appearing, Reed, my mother, even Bruce – none of that happens.  I get to be the grown up, talking with security and then with the police.  They're taking the girl into custody and I'm not arguing against it.  We'll be in touch with the police.  I'll tell my mother and Bruce about this or the police will or someone will, and we'll sit down with –
the girl
and figure out what happens next.  I don't see a Hallmark movie with us adopting her and her becoming my new best friend/best sister.

             
But stranger things happen every day.

             
I get home quite late to discover Mom and Bruce left during the afternoon and are going to be away overnight.  Fine by me; I'm so tired I can barely keep my eyes open.

             
The police eventually arrived to collect Holly, my father's daughter by another family.  Turns out all that time he was coaching basketball and on away games, sometimes was real, sometimes wasn't.  His other family was quite poor.  Why they never contacted us or came forward I don't know.

             
Why Holly never acted until now?  Probably because that's when she got her license and, at 17, earned enough money to hire a private investigator to find out where we'd gone.

             
That's all I'd learned from her, except the obvious: that she seemed to see me as living some kind of coddled princess perfect existence that she, Holly, never got.  Maybe it's even a little bit true, at least after Bruce swooped into our lives and took us to his "mansion" on the beach.  But things were pretty fucking hard before that, both with and without my father. 

             
Things have been pretty fucking
interesting
of late, too.  As my throbbing, exhausted right leg will attest.  And of course there's no way Holly could have known I'm determined to make my own way, not make it seem like Bruce married both my mom
and
me.

             
And a big
ewww
for something that came out totally unlike I meant it.  But Bruce Avery married Pam Lambert, and didn't necessarily need her nearly grown daughter as a package deal.  I was grateful for the move, the great house to live in, the opportunity to go to college.  But I'm paying for everything I can and plan to pay back as much of the rest as possible, though Reed says a journalist isn't the way to go if I want to pay back the
millionaire
who's paying for my college.

             
Holly didn't know all that.  Which in no way made me hesitate about pressing charges.  Holly was arrested for breaking and entering, assault and battery, and for stalking.  The latter might not stick, even though I have the letters and photos, and I'm not sure I'll press those charges.  I don't need more of the Seattle history coming to light. 

             
With Mom and Bruce not home, the whole conversation about Holly can wait.  Poor Mom, she's going to have to deal with knowing Dad cheated on her, and learn about it four years after it's too late to do anything about it.  Not just cheated, but had an entire second family, one living in very bad conditions, as if he'd wanted them to hang on, never quite making it enough to move on.  If I had to guess, I'd say Holly's mom was a drug user.  That would have made her vulnerable, and grateful for whatever time, money and attention my father did pay them.  It also explains his getting more and more involved in drugs, and why even though he had a job (even if he never advanced) we never had enough money for Mom to quit working. 

             
Wherever my mother is tonight, this can all wait.  Let her have a good night and maybe, if I'm lucky, she'll look at it the way I'm already looking at it: as answers to questions that had remained unanswered, and the final ending to that chapter of our lives.

* * *

             
Kellan's home, though, when a police car drops me off at a little after 2 a.m.  He's on the porch before I can get to the stairs.

             
"What happened?  Are you all right?"  He meets me on the sand and I let him fold me into those strong arms and block out the world.

             
It only takes a minute, though, and I'm steady again.  Maybe I've had so many shocks to the system lately I'm growing inured.  Or maybe I'm getting tougher.  Coming out of my past.  I saw an inspirational poster type thing online one night while touring a Tumblr site that read something to the effect of if you're thinking you're not going to survive your depression, just think that so far your success rate has been 100 percent.  Or something like that.  Everything I've gone through?  I've gone through it.  And come out the other side.

             
Maybe I'm finally on the other side and ready to meet life without blinking or wincing or hiding.

             
As Willow Blake.  Because I like Willow Blake.

             
Because I
am
Willow Blake.

             
I pull away from Kellan, who has been so vastly ashamed and worried since my accident that he's constantly trying to do things for me and treating me like delicate china until I finally snapped at him to cut it out and act like himself.

             
I'd seen the tiniest gleam in his eyes then, when he fell back on his latest: "How do you know this
isn't
myself?  You haven't known me very long."

             
True, I'd acknowledged, but if this
was
who and how he was, I was sorry, but I didn't think we had a future.  I like consideration, but this guy, this namby-pamby –

             
He'd interrupted me then to laugh at my choice of words.  I'd slapped his bicep, then gotten distracted by its size and shape under my hand.  He'd laughed and misquoted some old sitcom about rattling a headboard like a sailor on leave, which had made me laugh and then demand he prove it.

             
Now we were back on more even footing.  Standing on my own two feet in the sand, I looked up into his face.  "I'm all right," I tell him.  "I'm better than I've been in a long time."  The thing that had bothered me the most over the years had been when I killed my father the monster, any hope of the father I loved went too.  Now I know that father never stood a chance of stepping into the role and staying there.  He probably loved me – I'm not prepared to think my entire childhood was a lie – but nothing about him had been real.  Everything about him had led, inexorably, it seemed, to what had happened in Seattle.

             
My father had tried to kill me in more than one way and I was through letting it happen.

             
"Let's go inside," I tell him.  The October night is cool and damp.  I'm already missing the blazing heat of the South Carolina summer. 

             
Once inside, I pour myself a coffee, offer some to Kellan, who declines, choosing a soda.  We sit together on the big couch in the darkened living room, a candle on the coffee table, lights shining from the kitchen, and I tell him all of it.