Promise (43 page)

“That’s
him,
” Jeremy squawks.

The dark-haired uniform takes another step forward, and I square off. Right now my focus is on the venom leaking from the serpent’s mouth across the table, but I’ll take on Goliath right now if anyone tries to fuck with me.

“It’s okay.” Jeremy leans back in his seat, hands behind his head once he sees he has armed guards to back him up.

I bite the inside of my cheek until I taste blood to keep from launching into him and tearing flesh from bone.

“I bet she never told you, did she? About everything.” The fucker smiles at me.

“What
the fuck.
Are. You. Doing. Here.” I may not be able to tear his throat out with my teeth right now, but he sure as shit isn’t getting me to back down.

“
Here
, see for yourself. Give that to him.” He swats a stack of papers across the small table. The stack is a half-inch thick, held together in one corner with a black, metal office clip.

“Man, you okay?” Louis’s frantic voice introduces itself from behind me.

I don’t acknowledge him as the officer picks up the bundle of paper and sets it into my hand. I’m having a hard time breathing as I see her name on the reports.

For the next three minutes, I absorb this new hell that engulfs my life. I’m reading and want to kill someone.

“Suspect admits to having doused the paper towels with gasoline, and then struck a match and reentered the residence at 21164 Tennent Street where she currently resided with Alan and Patricia Reynold’s as a ward of Child and Family Services of State of Ohio. The fire consumed the garage and a portion of the residence of a one Ms. Caroline MacGuire.”

The walls are bleeding, the floor is moving. My feet are no longer attached to my legs.

The memory of that night drowns me even as I pretend this isn’t happening.

The night when I followed the two punks to the back of the house, I smelled it first, and I froze. Every nerve ending in my body lit up like the fire that consumed my skin the night everything in my life went to shit.

By the time I came up to the back of the house where they had turned into the gate, the flames were already curling around the back of the house across the alley from where Promise lay, unknowing her fate.

I heard Caroline McGuire’s scream. The frantic pleading. More screaming. Her terrified voice is rising over the crackling flames, begging for someone to save her son. Her son that was trapped in the back room of the house where the fire lapped at the roof, and the devil laughed at me.

I made a choice. I sacrificed Promise to save that little boy. I remember telling her, ‘I’m sorry,’ as I exploded into a run toward the burning house. I broke the back window of the engulfed room with my bare fists and crawled inside. The familiar blast of heat is hitting me at the same moment my lungs remembered how it felt to gasp and be denied the comfort of breath. My mind spinning as I flashed back to when I held the lifeless body of my sister with my father screaming that it was my fault they’d died.

You made the wrong choice. You killed them!
His words still echoed.

I saved Caroline McGuire’s three-year-old son that night and threw Promise to the wolves.

I’m still thumbing through the report in my hands. It seems like hours, but I glance at the clock, and I’ve been reading only a couple of minutes. It’s incredible how much information the brain can absorb in such a short period of time.

The reports are copies of copies, and the scrawled letters are missing tops and bottoms, fading into the white paper, but somehow my brain is able to insert the missing parts, and then I see it.

How could the worst day of my life get worse? How deeply does God hate me?

The two words that send me falling back against Louis.

“Camden Apartments.”

This isn’t fucking happening.

“Camden Apartments. Units 13, 23 and 27 damaged. Fire originated in apartment 13 and spread upstairs to the unit where a Mr. And Mrs. Fitzgerald—”

I heave the report back at Jeremy as his face twists into a sadistic smile.

He dodges the paper projectile with a blink. “Something wrong?” He smirks, and Louis tries to catch me as I’m halfway across the table, my hands finding his throat. I want to hear the sound a neck makes when it breaks more than I want to breathe.

I’ve done things. Things I’ll never tell anyone. Things the government told me to do. Encouraged me. Sanctioned me.

The uniforms are on me, Louis has me in a headlock.

“Get him out of here or he’s going to end up in cuffs,” one of the officers yell.

“I got him.” Louis’s voice struggles with the effort of dragging me backward.

No one understands what it’s like to try to live in a world where a fuck like Jeremy deserves to have the life snatched out of him yet, in that world, I’m the criminal.

The next several minutes are filled with a wrenching pain so deep; even the darkness cannot save me. I remember every moment, every way the pain discovered new and deep ways to cut into my soul and carve her out of me.

I’m eviscerated. Laying open for hell to come and play whatever other games it chooses.

I remember that deal I made with the devil the first time I kissed her, and he’s come to collect.

I am no longer who I was before her, and I’m not who I became with her. I’m no one. I’ve ceased to exist.

Promise

Some promises start out broken.

And stay that way.

My body has become a vessel for the tears. I don’t even try to stop them anymore.

It’s who I am now. Liquid. Only this time, it’s not because I am caught in his wake. It’s because it’s all that is left of me.

The wrenching sounds rise up and come out like an earthquake that draws on my pain shaking me from the inside out.

Heaving. Brutal. Unending.

I have no hunger.

No thirst.

No need to breathe except to feed the unending sobs that are now who I am.

Bruce carried me from the car to the couch. I didn’t know who else to call to bring me home. He’s standing over me. I know he’s speaking, but my brain cannot put together the sounds into meaningful words.

He covers me in a blanket because I’m shivering. This is a new kind of pain. One I didn’t know until I let myself love him.

Love is like a flash of lightning in a clear, dark sky. Something so infinite and beautiful you want to reach out and grab it. Only when you do, it kills you.

Now I’m dead.

My fingers are dead.

My eyes are dead.

I can even feel the way my skin is dead.

Bruce slumps down and huffs at me. He’s watching me as he crosses his long legs and starts wiggling his brown loafer. His sky-blue eyes hide a hint of his irrepressible smile, and I wish I could hug him. He’s looking at me like I’m on life support and my next breath could be my last.

And that’s exactly how it feels.

“Do you think I qualify for hospice?” I manage to ask.

“No sweetheart. Afraid not.”

“I’ve lost everything.” The words come out in gasps as the sobs take over again.

At the police station, Jeremy had been allowed to come in and talk to me. He still wants me. Still thinks we belong together.

He told me the adoption is going through, and Jordan will permanently belong to those horrible people. The court date is set for a month from now. My petition for custody has been dismissed, and I might not even be granted visitation.

Not after what is bound to be my arrest for arson or even murder.

Murder.

I don’t even understand the word. It isn’t a real word, is it?

“Girl, you still have the name of that attorney? Because it looks like you need a good one.”

The pain in Bruce’s eyes is like a mirror for exactly how desperate my situation is.

“I can’t afford an attorney. Besides, he’s a custody attorney.” I pull the blanket over my head.

“I can afford it. Call him. Right now. If he can’t take the case, get a recommendation because we need to go
today.”

I’ve only been questioned at this point. But from the way the interview went, Bruce is right. I need a lawyer.

Why, though, I wonder? Why do I care if I exist inside or outside prison walls? I have nothing left to lose.

“And just in case you’re getting crazy ideas, Jordan still
needs you
. No matter what happens. Tomorrow or ten years from now, he’s going to need you, and you need to pull up those granny panties and make sure you can be there when he needs you. You hear me under there, Sylvia Platt?”

For the next hour, I hate Bruce. With daggers and hot tar—I hate him.

He forces me into the shower, then into clothes, then into the car. I don’t even care that he’s seeing me naked. Modesty is the least of my worries.

The vision of Beckett’s painful eyes and beautifully scarred face in the window of the door where I sat inside being interrogated won’t stop dancing in my mind.

“Some things are so broken, they can’t be fixed, can they? And, I don’t mean just you. I mean me. I mean us. Goodbye, Promise.”

They wouldn’t let him in the interrogation room, so he’d scrawled those words on a piece of paper and slipped it under the door as I sat alone inside the white painted cinder block room. He’d given me one more glance, his face framed in the tiny window of the metal door before he turned and was gone.

Bruce manages to get me in the car. My head rests on the cold window as I hear the ignition spark the engine and his loud sigh before he puts his little silver Nissan truck in drive.

I don’t remember the ride there, but the next thing I remember, I’m inside the attorney’s office. I answer as best I can amidst the unending tears that are now who I am.

The pitching, noisy sobs have stopped, but the tears come in streams even as I feel nothing.

Can nothing be felt?

Yes.

Yes, it can.

Beckett

I’ve got fifty-five minutes left.

Fifty-five.

I’ve been counting each minute of every hour.

It’s been two weeks since I told her good-bye, and sometimes I can’t imagine getting through one more minute, so I count the seconds, trying to decide if getting through is something I want to do.

Louis has been blowing up my phone the last few days. I’ve only sent him quick texts, telling him I’m fine, working on the book. Delaying.

In an hour, it will be too late. I just need to get through the next hour.

I don’t need more lectures. I don’t want to learn more about the case or what he knows. I don’t want to hear her name or why maybe I’m the asshole.

It doesn’t matter. Maybe I am, maybe I should have given her a chance to explain. But, I don’t want to. It’s too dark. Too much. God is having fun with me.

There are some cliffs that can’t be unjumped. I read the reports again. She admitted to both fires from when she was younger, and I don’t even want to know anything else about the fire in the loft.

She lied. She didn’t trust me with everything, and that’s what I demanded from her. Everything.

I’m part of my darkness now. It no longer overtakes me; I’ve joined forces with it.

I quit fighting it, and I want nothing more than to hold onto it and to never see past its protective curtain again.

As George Lucas taught us, the dark side is strong, and I’ve decided it’s where I belong.

I don’t even care about killing that shit Jeremy anymore. Let him live. I feel nothing.

If you take my pulse, it’s probably not there.

My skin feels cold.

Every breath I take is slow and even. I seep indifference out of every pore.

Louis will show up at the station office on base; I'm certain of it. So, I’m gonna get there early. Just in case. I’m going to get my name on that dotted line and my duffel bag on deck before he can try to talk me down.

He’s sent me five texts and left six voicemails today, and it’s only 8:30 in the morning.

I've been packed and ready to ship out for two nights. I’m ready; I need this. I need to vent my hatred among those who welcome it.

Reward me for it.

Twenty minutes later, I’m at the gateway to hell a whole half-hour early, and the papers are marked with an X, waiting to take another four years of my life. I know it’s where I belong. My brothers need me, and I understand this life. I don’t fit anywhere else. I’ve been on this side of the desk before. I know the drill.