I heard a few Jesses called out from Neil and Rose before the sound of a serious brawl came through the open kitchen window.
I tried shooting up in my seat again. Lily caught me and pulled me back down. “Lily!” I said frantically. “Let me go. I’m not going to let Jesse get hurt over me when I could go break this up.”
The sounds of glass breaking and things clattering to the floor, interlaced with the sounds of punches being thrown and followed by loud grunts, came next.
It sounded like everyone was shouting in the kitchen. Even Mom and the two youngest girls.
“Trust me. You don’t have to worry about Jesse in a fight,” she said, wincing when a particularly loud shattering sound came from the window. “I’d worry about the other guy.”
I could never find one scrap of worry for the other guy. Not in this lifetime.
The clattering and shattering came to a sudden stop right before the back door off the kitchen busted open. Jesse had Pierce by the hair and arm, dragged him down the steps, and down the driveway. Neil and Rose charged out the door right after, followed by Mom and the girls. All Pierce could do was stumble along and try to stay upright. His suit was rumpled, his dress shirt stained with food and blood, and he’d be sporting a couple of black eyes for the next few weeks.
Other than enraged, Jesse didn’t look like he’d just been in a fist fight. As they passed us, Jesse stopped and lifted Pierce’s head so he looked my direction. “I want you to look her in the eyes. And I want you to apologize.”
Pierce was scared. Frightened. Like he was the one who’d been thrown to the ground and hovered over. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t say anything. I forced myself to look at him so I’d remember him that way: scared, beaten, and repentant.
“I want you to swear that you will never, ever come anywhere around her again,” Jesse seethed. “Ever! Because if you thought the beating you took tonight was bad, just you come within a state of her again and I’ll show you bad.”
When Pierce stalled, Jesse drove a fist into his side. Lily and I covered our mouths. Neil moved closer, lifting his hands. “Easy, son. You’ve taught him a lesson. It doesn’t need to go any further.”
“It’s going to go plenty further if he doesn’t swear he’ll never show his face around Rowen again!” Jesse shouted.
“I swear it,” Pierce said instantly. “I swear I’ll stay away from her. She’ll never see my face again.”
Jesse released him and shoved him down the driveway. “Now get the hell off of our ranch.”
Once Pierce lifted himself from the ground, he fumbled in his pocket for the keys and hurried for the car. Mom broke away from Rose and the girls and marched up to Jesse like she was about to slap him.
That got me off of the steps. Lunging toward Jesse, I pivoted in front of Mom and caught her hand mid-air. Instead, she lifted her other hand and slapped me hard across the cheek. I whimpered, and Jesse pulled me out of reach and threw himself in front of me.
“Rose was wrong. You haven’t changed. And you never will,” Mom said.
The words hit me like another slap to the face.
“Neither will you,” I replied, moving up beside Jesse. His arm pressed out in front of me, blocking my way. I wasn’t sure if it was because he didn’t trust what my mom would do to me or what I’d do to her.
Neil, Rose, and the girls huddled off to the side, watching the whole scene with confusion and sadness. They didn’t need to know what was going on to realize something was extremely wrong.
By that time, Pierce had crawled inside the car and was blasting the horn.
“Rowen. Get in the car,” Mom demanded, grabbing for my wrist. I swiped it away, and Jesse blocked my mom when she tried again. “You are leaving with us right now, young lady. I don’t want you staying with these people another second longer.”
My blood boiled when I realized my mom wanted to take away the one good thing I had going in my life: that place and those people. “These people?” I said, crossing my arms and glaring at her. “The kind of people who love me? You know, the unconditional kind? Oh, wait. Never mind, you’re not familiar with that kind.” I shook my head and stepped toward her. I wasn’t backing away. I wasn’t running away from her. I was standing up to her at last. “The kind of people who trust me? The kind of people who would actually believe their daughters if they ever told them they were almost molested?” From behind us, I heard Rose gasp. “The kind of people who wouldn’t bring that same man back into their lives years later and expect everything to be all right? Are those the kind of people you’re really so concerned about leaving me with? Because from my point of view, you and your boyfriend are the most concerning people I could ever be around.”
I was venting years of baggage, years of frustration, and it felt freeing in a way I’d only dreamed of.
“You stay here,” Mom replied, her face every shade of pissed, “kiss art school goodbye.”
My dream. The whole reason I’d sucked it up and gone to Willow Springs in the first place. “Bye, mom.”
Her eyes flashed onyx before she spun around and marched toward the car. As she swung the passenger side door open, she said, “Goodbye, Rowen. Have a nice life.”
“I will,” I whispered as they peeled out of the driveway. Mom never looked my way again.
Jesse draped his arms around me and pulled me close. “Rowen, I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so damn sorry you had to go through that.”
I nodded into his shirt, feeling a couple of tears about to leak out. “Are you all right?” I pulled back so I could examine his face. His hair was a little rumpled, but that was the only sign he’d been in a fight.
“He never even landed a punch,” he answered, running his thumbs under my eyes to wipe the tears away. “I’m just fine.”
“Sweetheart,” Rose said, tears streaming down her face as she approached us. “Oh, my sweet, sweet angel. I didn’t know. I never would have let them come if I’d known—”
I shook my head. “I didn’t even know until he walked into the kitchen. I’ll be fine. Really.” No one, least of all Jesse, looked convinced. “If you all don’t mind, I just need a moment.” I walked away. As Jesse started following me, I clarified, “Alone. To sort a few things out.”
Jesse’s forehead lined, and Rose looked like she was fighting her instinct to wrap me in her arms.
“I’m fine,” I said before turning around and heading for the barn. I didn’t want to go back into the house to witness the mess I’d inadvertently been responsible for, so the barn would have to do.
I jogged inside and checked once over my shoulder to make sure no one followed me. Everyone was filing back into the house. Except for Jesse. He camped out on the porch steps, watching me like he was fighting his instinct to come after me. But he did as I asked and stayed.
I wandered down the row of stalls until I found a clean, empty one with a few bales of straw. It looked like the perfect place to “have a moment” and let everything that had just happened catch up with me.
A few of the horses in the nearby stalls whinnied a welcome, but, other than that, the barn was silent. I dropped down on one of the bales and leaned my back into the stall wall. The thought that kept bursting to the forefront of my mind was how hard I’d worked all summer to make myself better, how I’d actually succeeded, and my mom saw nothing but the troubled juvenile delinquent she’d always seen in me. I knew I could never do anything that would impress her, never do anything to earn her unconditional love and respect.
I’d have to learn to accept that, but I wasn’t sure if I could ever make peace with it. Could a person ever truly heal from that kind of a wound? Only time would tell.
The next thing that worked its way to the front of my mind had me lifting my legs up to my chest and curling into an upright ball. It was a thought, or a realization, or a damned epiphany that I didn’t want to have, but I had it nonetheless. No matter how hard I worked to overcome that troubled girl I’d been, she
’d always be hiding just below the surface, ready to pop out when something set her free.
That person I’d been for so long was not removable. She was a part of me. Forever. That girl could rise to the surface before I could stop her. She’d push people away before they got too close, hurt them before they could hurt me. I couldn’t allow myself to be the toxic person to Jesse that my mom was to me. I couldn’t poison his life the way she had mine.
I’d made myself into a better person, I knew that, but no matter how hard or long I worked, I couldn’t risk that dark side of me striking out when I least expected it. I loved Jesse too much to put him through the pain or chaos of my life.
Who knows how much time had passed, but the longer I was alone, the darker my thoughts got. The farther down that trail they went. Only when a hesitant body slipped inside the stall did a ray of light cut through my blackness. Cut through, but didn’t remove it.
“Did I give you a long enough moment?” Jesse asked, standing in the doorway of the stall like he was waiting for an invitation. “Because I can give you more time if you want.” He hitched his thumb over his shoulder.
“Come on in,” I said, patting the bale beside me and scooting over. “I’ve had more than enough moments to think.”
“How are you doing?” he asked, taking a seat next to me. “Wait. That was a stupid question.” Jesse shook his head and looked at a loss for words. “What’s been going through your mind? Besides everything?”
I gave him a small smile. “Besides everything? I suppose realizing the worst part of the night wasn’t Pierce showing up.” I played with a piece of straw. Jesse shifted closer and draped his arm around my shoulders. “The worst part was that my mom invited him here.” Jesse stared at the ground and nodded. “What Pierce did was not right, I’m not excusing that, but he was basically a stranger who had no interest in my life. My mom . . . She’s my mother. She’s the person who’s supposed to love me first, and last, and best. She’s the person who’s supposed to fight with her life to keep scumbags like Pierce out of her child’s life. She’s supposed to . . .” I had to swallow to get the word out, “care.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, kissing my temple.
“I just don’t get it, Jesse. It’s so goddamned unfair. Why? Why does my mother hate me? Why do I feel like the biggest screw up when I’m around her? Why, after everything, do I still want her to look at me and say she’s proud of me and give me a honest to goodness hug?” Another set of tears dripped their way down my face. “I’ve got so many ‘whys’ I’ll never have answered, they’ll probably drive me insane.”
Jesse waited for me to catch my breath and dry my tears before he responded. I was so exhausted, I just sank into his arms and rested.
“We’ve all got questions. We’ve all got dark parts of us that we wonder how they got there,” he said slowly. “We all, at times, feel like the positively most screwed up person to have ever walked the planet. But you know what, Rowen? We don’t always need to know the answers. We shouldn’t get hung up on the questions we can’t answer because life, by definition, is confusing. We’re never going to have all the answers. Never. We should focus on the questions we can answer and make peace with the ones we can’t.”
It was a lovely thought and it would have looked great on an inspirational poster, but Jesse’s life was so very different from mine. His questions he couldn’t answer were easy to move past because they didn’t consume him the way mine did me.
“Jesse, I love you and I love those things you just said, but how could you even think you could compare the questions I have from my fucked up life to the questions that have cropped up during your next-to-perfect life?” I knew Jesse had experienced pain and heartache, every human did, but there was pain and there was PAIN.
Jesse let out a long sigh. “I know my life seems idyllic, Rowen. I know you probably think I’m an idiot for drawing a parallel between your life and mine. But my life wasn’t always so great.” He paused and didn’t say anything else for what seemed like forever. “My life didn’t begin the way it is now. In fact, my life couldn’t have been more different than it is now.”
My brows came together. “What do you mean?” I looked up at him, and his eyes were somewhere else. Somewhere frightening.
“Neil and Rose are my dad and mom, Rowen. I want you to know that because that’s one of the truest things I know. But they didn’t become so until I was five years old.”
“Wait.” I shook my head, sure I was missing something. “What are you saying, Jesse?”
“I was adopted.”
I couldn’t reply. At least not right away. Had I heard him wrong? Had he said it wrong? “You were . . . adopted?”
“Yes. I was taken out of my home when I was four by Child Protective Services. From there, I drifted around in the foster care system for about a year until Neil and Rose—my mom and dad—adopted me.”
The stall spun a bit. Information was coming at me a little too fast. “C.P.S. took you away from your parents?”
Jesse cleared his throat. “They took me away from the people who conceived me.”
I wasn’t sure whose expression was more broken: his or mine. “Why?” It didn’t make sense. Why hadn’t I known? Why hadn’t anyone told me?
Jesse’s arm went rigid around me. “Because they lacked . . . parental skills.” His words were flat and emotionless, but his face wasn’t. His face gave away the pain running through him.
“What? I don’t understand.” In fact, I didn’t have a clue. “Did they hurt you? What happened?”
“Yes, they hurt me. Yes, they didn’t take care of me.” Jesse shifted and dropped his head against the wall. “The point of me telling you this now is that I wanted you to know you’re not alone, Rowen. I know what it’s like to want to curl up and die rather than get up and face another day. I know what it’s like to feel like not a single soul in the world would care if you died. I know what it’s like to lose all of your faith in humanity.”
I had a sudden and overwhelming urge to protect Jesse from both his past and future struggles. To drape my arms around him and hold him tight the way he did me when I needed comfort.
“God, Jesse,” I said, wrapping my arm around his stomach. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry seems like the worst possible thing I could say. But I can’t think of anything else.” What did a person say to that? How did a person comfort another after that kind of a reveal? I didn’t know. I’d never had anyone show me the loving way to respond.
“I’m sorry works,” he said. “I’m not telling you because I’m looking for sympathy, Rowen. I’m telling you so you know you’re not alone. So you know you can walk away from a tragic past and live a peaceful life.”
A peaceful life. What I wouldn’t give to have one, but I was certain I’d never attain it. People like me, who’d lived the kind of life I had, didn’t live peaceful lives.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” I sat up and twisted on the bale so I could look at him square on. Why hadn’t he told me? We’d talked about seemingly everything else. I wasn’t naive enough to think we didn’t still have some secrets, but I didn’t think they’d be those kinds of secrets. Monumental ones.
As I thought about all of the things I’d written off, it seemed so obvious, I should have figured it out. The lack of any physical similarities between Jesse and the rest of his family, the absence of his baby picture on Neil’s office wall with the girls’, people dropping hints about Jesse’s life not always being so paved with gold. It was all so clear after I’d been given the last piece of the puzzle.
“I was going to, Rowen. Soon.” Jesse turned so he looked me straight on as well. The skin between his eyebrows had been pinched together the entire conversation. “But it’s not something I tell just anybody.”
“Was it because you didn’t trust me enough to want to tell me?” I worked to keep my voice level and my eyes on his.
“Of course not. I’d trust you with my life, Rowe
n. I trust you implicitly.” His forehead wrinkled, too. “I didn’t tell you right away so you could get to know me, who I am now, before I told you who I was then. I wanted you to know my present before you knew my past. I wanted to know that if you chose to be with me, it was because you loved me. Not because you pitied me.”
I wiped my eyes before the tears forming could fall. “Are you ashamed of it?”
Jesse leaned forward. “No, just the opposite. I’m proud that Dad and Mom saw something in me I didn’t, and they believed in me.” He looked down at where our hands were entwined. He stared for so long, I wondered if he saw something in them I didn’t. “I just don’t see how it’s relevant for every person I come in contact with to know I was adopted. It’s my past. Yeah, I had a rough go of life. But I buried it six feet deep, made my peace with it, and moved on. I’m not going to let my past ruin my future.”
He buried it, made peace with it, and moved on. Could I ever do the same?
Right then, after everything that had happened, it didn’t seem so likely.
“And you had questions?” I asked.
He nodded and his eyes returned to mine. “I had so many damn questions I didn’t know what to do with all of them, but I stopped looking for answers that never wanted to be found and moved on. When the Walkers walked into that adoption agency, they took a huge chance on a troubled boy who likely would have turned into a violent teen. I wasn’t going to repay them for taking that chance by living up to what everyone thought I’d turn into.” He lifted our hands to his mouth and brushed his lips over my knuckles. “You and I are not so different, after all.”
And that was where he was so very wrong.
“Jesse, don’t you see?” I said, my voice high. “Our stories might have started out the same, but that’s the only similarity. You took a bad situation and turned yourself into the person you are today.” I paused just long enough to catch my breath. “I took a bad situation and let it define me.”