He leans across the distance between us, refusing to tame his stare. I feel my heart beating in my throat. “I’d sacrifice this life and every life I have coming for you.”
I have to close my eyes. “I’m so sorry, Torrin. God, I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to give up ten years of your life for me. I didn’t want you to give up whatever could have come after before you became this . . .”
He stretches closer. His eyes refuse to blink. “You were my first. And you were my last.” His words echo in the small space. “A man could have a thousand different partners and settle down with an amazing woman, and I’d still hold the bragging rights. Don’t feel sorry for me for that. I’m not.”
Everything I want is in front of me, but I can’t have it. It’s the carrot dangled in front of me—just out of reach, never to be realized. Life is so goddamn unfair.
“I’m sorry,” I say again because what else is there to say? He’s given so much, and I have so little left to give.
“I’m not sorry. Never.” The air stirs when he pulls back. “Besides . . . this is not a death sentence. This is not an executioner’s swing. I knew exactly what I was doing when I started down this path, and I went into it with both eyes open and with reasons other than just hoping to fail better at finding you.” When he smiles, it’s a sad one.
“What reasons?” I ask, glancing toward the doorway. I need to leave, but I’m not sure I know how.
Torrin rolls his fingers, and his knuckles snap one after the other. “Father Sullivan was my light in the darkest time of my life. I was hoping that maybe I might be able to be the same for someone else one day.”
I clasp my hands together when I feel them reaching for him. “You are that. To that woman inside that room, you are.” I lean back to look at him. He’s still hunched over. “You were that to me. You are that to me.”
When he glances up, I see it in his eyes again. That look takes me back in time to a dark sidewalk, to a certain question, and an answer in the form of a kiss.
Before he can say anything, I continue. I can’t risk him opening his mouth and changing my mind. “You became this for a lot of reasons. Good reasons. Remember those when you feel that conflict. Remember how great you are at this. Remember how many more dark places you can shine light on.”
“When I feel conflict, it isn’t those things I remember, Jade.” He holds his hand out for me to take. I want to. Everything inside me is being pulled to it. “I remember you.”
His hand hangs there for another minute, then his fingers curl into his palm, and he draws it back. He runs his finger beneath his collar like it’s choking him.
“I don’t get it. How you can be so good at this”—I wave at him sitting there in his black and white—“and not feel conflicted when it comes to us.”
“There’s conflict in me.” His eyes lift to meet mine. “So much I feel like it could eat me alive if I let it. I love what I do. I believe in what I do. I know I took vows, but I made a promise to you first. If I’m forced to make a choice, it will be you. Every time.” He exhales, and his eyes lower. “It will be you.”
I feel as close as I ever have to taking his hand and asking him to make that choice. I feel my resolve weaken, and I know the longer I stay, the worse it will become.
When his phone goes off again, I say, “I’ll give you some privacy.”
Standing up to walk away, I feel conflict of my own ripping me apart. I want him back. I want what we had back. Everything, not just the friendship and adventures. I want to pretend we can pick up where we left off and that the question he asked me that last night can become a reality.
I also want him to have as peaceful a life as he can from now on. I don’t want him to give up everything for me, because he’s already done it once. I’ve already had the love of a man who gave me everything—I have no right to expect it a second time.
To ask him to give it all up so we can be together would be such a selfish act that I think it could rip us apart anyway. He’s sacrificed enough.
“Jade—” He turns in his seat, watching me leave.
I keep going, but each step gets harder. Each one rips off another chunk of my heart. “Just let me go, Torrin.”
A sigh drifts from the waiting room. “I don’t know how.”
IT ISN’T GRIEF I feel when I pass through the cemetery gates this time—it’s rage. The kind that feels like it’s about to spill out of me in waves.
After leaving Torrin at the hospital and saying what I did, I’d fought the urge to turn around and go back—to tell him what I want to . . . but what I know I can’t.
Once the bus stops at that same bus stop and I get out, my mind shifts. It isn’t Torrin I’m thinking about now.
There are actual cars and people around today but not many, and instead of crawling through the gates like last time, I pass through them. As I storm down the same roads and paths, I feel hot instead of cold. It’s another sunny day, and I’m wearing another sweater that conceals my neck, but it isn’t anything on the outside that’s heating me—it’s coming from the inside.
A furnace has been installed inside me, and it’s pumping heat throughout my body. The closer I get to the gravestone, the hotter I feel.
Jogging the last bit toward it, I have to bite my lip from shouting what I need to say right here. This time, I’m glad he’s been buried out here because I can scream all I want and probably no one will hear.
This time, I don’t kneel at his grave. This time, I don’t cry silent tears. This time, I don’t feel confusion. This time, the only thing I miss are the ten years that have been stolen from me.
“It’s me, Earl Rae.” My voice quivers with its anger as I step onto the cement gravestone. I glare at it. “Remember that girl you decided to take one night and play make-believe was your daughter? That girl?”
I see Torrin’s face fall in that fifth-floor waiting room. I see him reach for me and me unable to reach back. I see his smile and hear his question and envision the way my life could have been.
Then I see red.
“You took my life from me, you sick, pathetic bastard. You didn’t ask. You didn’t care. You just took it. That was my life. Mine. It was a great life that you took away because you were a bad person. An evil man.”
I don’t wipe the tears away, because unlike the others, these are derived from anger. They don’t hurt as much as the other kind. They actually feel pretty damn good.
“I loved him. He loved me. And you took that from us. You took it, and I can never get it back because you twisted and twisted me until I’m not sure I even remember what love is. How it feels. How it looks. I can’t remember . . .”
When a splash of sadness soaks its way inside me, I grind the dried weeds still resting above his name with the toe of my shoe.
“He still loves me, and I still love him, but I’m a fraction of what I used to be. That’s all I’ve got left to love back with, and it’s not enough. He deserves it all, and all I’ve got left are scraps.” I surge with anger that rolls down from my head. I hope it soaks into the ground and somewhere, in that inner circle, Earl Rae’s hell gets a little hotter. “I hate you. I hate you so, so much. I hate you more than any person has ever hated someone else.”
I don’t know if anyone hears me. I don’t know if anyone sees me. I don’t care.
“You want to know why your daughter probably ran away with her mom, you sick, sick fuck? Because she couldn’t wait to get away from you. You want to know why she stayed away? Because she never wanted to see you again. Because look at your gravestone, Earl Rae—no one cares.” I kick the dried weeds away until they’ve disappeared into the grass. “You are a bad man, and no one mourns a bad person. You are a sick man, and no one loves a sick person.”
My throat constricts when I shout the last part, and I start kicking the gravestone. With the heel of my sneaker, with the toe of it, any part of it I can smash against it. “I wish you hadn’t taken the chicken-shit way out. I wish you hadn’t
because that was my right. You took my life; it’s only fair I get to take yours. Except I wouldn’t have used a gun and made it quick. I would have used my hands. Around your neck. Until the life drained out of you the way it has out of me.” I’m jumping now, like I can break the cement in half if I just don’t stop. “I want to kill you! Again . . . and again . . . and again.”
I pause for a minute, panting. I’m staring at the gravestone like I’m waiting for him to say something back. I’m waiting for an explanation or an apology or something that will give me some peace as to why my life was ripped away.
There’s nothing. Only silence.
There’ll never be an explanation. Never an apology. Never absolution.
And without any of that, how is peace possible?
“I hate you, Earl Rae, you hear me? I hate you.” I glare at the gravestone, picturing the innocent look on his face that night I disappeared. How could someone so evil master such innocence?
“Burn in hell.” I wipe the sweat from my forehead and pull at the collar of my sweater because I’m stifling from the heat coursing through me. “I’m burning in my own.”
WHEN I SNEAK into the backyard hours later, it’s dark, and more houses are dark than light. My parents’ house is one of the few with lights still on, burning brightly inside.
I’ve missed dozens of calls from them. I’ve missed just as many from Torrin, whom they probably called after being unable to reach me, assuming I’d be with him. I don’t want them to worry. I don’t want to cause them any more pain, but it seems inevitable. Even when I try not to, I still find some way to hurt them. Like I did Torrin today when all I wanted to do was protect him.
Like when I didn’t answer my parents’ calls because I didn’t want them to hear me as I’d been earlier—I didn’t want them to discover just how damaged their daughter is now.
In my desire to protect them, I still hurt them.
It’s inevitable. I’ve accepted that now.
I’ve absorbed a decade of isolation and despair. I am swimming in it, and I can’t just find the right place to squeeze and wring every drop of it away. I might be able to find a way to drain a couple of drops here and there, but it will take time.
It might take as long to be free of it as it took accruing it.
I might never be free of it.
My thoughts have been dark for most of the day, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to slip up to my room undetected and get a night’s rest before confronting my parents. I’ve barely turned the key over in the back door before I hear their muffled footsteps rushing in my direction.
By the time I’m inside and locking the door, they’re both here. Mom’s face is puffy, and her eyes are red. She starts crying again. The wear from the day doesn’t show on Dad so obviously, but it can be found in the finer details: the way his hair isn’t so perfectly laid, his wrinkled slacks, the creases at the corners of his eyes.
“Thank god.” Mom’s voice shakes. “Thank god you’re safe.”
“I’m okay, Mom. I’m fine.” I lift my hands and step inside like I’m surrendering.
“Where have you been? The library—you weren’t there when I went back.” Her hand braces around the top of a kitchen chair as fresh tears fall down her face. “Why didn’t you answer any of our calls? Did you lose your phone?”
I slide the phone from my pocket. It’s shut off. “I didn’t lose it.”
“Why, Jade?” Mom sniffs. “Why didn’t you answer?”
“Because I didn’t know what to say.”
“I just wanted to know you were safe. That you were okay.”
I lift a shoulder and stay by the door. “I didn’t know what to say.”
“Torrin said you were at the hospital today, that you two had a difficult talk. Is that what this is about?” Dad’s voice seems like a roar compared to Mom’s and mine.
“This is about everything. What happened. What’s happening. Torrin. You guys. The media. Earl Rae Jackson.” My parents recoil when I speak his name. “This is about everything.”
Dad pops off a little huff. I take it as a contradiction to everything I just said, and it fans the anger I wrestled into submission earlier.
“Oh, and you can stop worrying about Torrin and me, Dad, since I know the idea of us being together has always pissed you off. That’s over. All of it. Should make you happy.”
Dad’s forehead creases. “Happy? Do you think any of this makes me happy?”
I spread my arms and shout, “How do you think it makes me feel?” My vision blurs, but I blink it clear. “I lost everything. And even though I’m back now, I’ve still lost everything. I’m a twenty-seven-year-old with a high school junior education. I’m a woman in a girl’s body.” I pinch the billowing sweater hanging off from me. “I’m an adult living in her parents’ house who has to depend on them for practically everything. I love a man I can’t love. I want a life I can’t have.”
Dad reaches for Mom’s hand because she’s crying harder now.
“None of this makes me happy,” I whisper.
“And you think any of this makes us happy? Seeing you like this?” Dad motions at me, his jaw locking up for a moment. “Do you think it’s easy having you home after ten years and knowing you were so close that whole time? Knowing I’m a damn chief of police and couldn’t find my own daughter in the very same state she was abducted in?” Now it’s Mom reaching for Dad because he’s the one who looks close to tears. “I couldn’t find you, Jade. I should have been able to, and I didn’t. I had the resources and the manpower and the experience . . . I should have been able to find you. And I’m sorry. I’m sorry I failed you.”
I want to cross the kitchen and throw my arms around him, but I stay where I am. I’m too close to crying, and I don’t want them to have to watch me shed another single tear. I don’t want them to feel any more pain or guilt or regret than I know they already do.
“Dad, please don’t. You didn’t fail me. Please don’t blame yourself.” I have to look away because I can’t watch my parents like this any longer. “The man who took me’s to blame. Not the people left behind who tried to find me.”
Dad moves a little closer, but he lets me have my space. “The person who got taken isn’t to blame either, Jade,” he says in as gentle a voice as he is capable. “You promise to keep that in mind, and I’ll promise to take what you just said to heart.”
I nod after a minute—not because I’m agreeing but because I’m too exhausted to argue.
“We’re trying here, Jade. We know this is hard on you, but it’s not easy for us.” Dad shifts and opens his mouth like there’s more to say, but nothing else comes.
“I know. You guys are doing such a great job, I swear. It’s me. I feel like every morning I’m climbing a mountain, but when I look behind me at the end of the day, I’m still in the same spot. I try to move on, to get better, but I get nowhere.” I’m staring at my hands the way Torrin was earlier—like I don’t recognize them anymore. “I think it’s because I’m still hanging on to my old life. Trying to get back to that. If I have any chance of getting better, I need to create a new life as the person I am now.” My brain is finally working, managing to get the ideas put together and the words out in a cohesive way.
“And how do you do that, sweetheart?” Mom’s putting on the brave face, but I know she’d still be crying if I wasn’t standing in front of her.
“I don’t know exactly, but if I want to make a new life for myself, I need to move out and find my own place.”
Mom’s eyes widen while Dad swallows.
“Coming back to this house, my bedroom . . . it’s too hard to move on when all I see is my old life here.”
“You just came back, Jade. You’ve never lived on your own,” she says.
“I’ve been on my own for ten years. I can do this.”
“Not right away. Give yourself some time to ease back into the world.” Mom glances around the kitchen like the walls are collapsing around her.
>
“The longer I stay here, the more time I’m wasting.”
“What about the GED? College?”
“I don’t know yet.” I shake my head. “I just know that I can’t figure any of that out until I’m on my own, able to make my own decisions as the person I am now.”
Dad clears his throat. “When are you thinking you’d like to start looking for your own place, Jade?”
Mom glances at him like she’s heard him wrong.
“As soon as possible,” I answer.
Dad nods. “Okay. Tomorrow we’ll start looking.”
Mom’s eyes close, but she doesn’t argue. I think she knows I need this. She’s just not ready to admit it out loud.
“Thank you,” I breathe.
“And next time your mom and I call you over and over, would you please answer? After what happened to you . . . you can’t just go and not answer when we don’t know where you are.” Dad has to look away. “Please?”
“I won’t,” I promise, feeling guilt gurgle up my throat. “I’m sorry.”
As I make my way through the kitchen to go upstairs, Dad’s head turns. “And you should call Torrin back.”
I stop. That’s the first time Dad has ever suggested I call Torrin back. “I should?”
“He’s been put on temporary suspension.” Dad’s hand settles on his hip. “He could probably use a good friend to talk to right now.”
My tongue works into my cheek. Even when I try to make things right, everything just kind of goes wrong. “They suspended him?”
“Yeah. Temporarily, at least. He’s on some sort of probation.”
“Because of me?”
The room is silent for a moment, then Dad sighs.
I guess it wasn’t really a question. Of course it’s because of me. Of course his life is falling apart because of me. Of course he’s going to suffer because of me. Of course he’s going to lose everything because of me all over again.
My shoulders tremble from what I’m feeling. When I try to keep moving, my feet are stuck in place.