Chapter 22 #3
“Seventeen. Almost eighteen, so yeah, the teenager mindset didn’t help, but when I say she hated everything, I mean she hated it.
She used to fly into these uncontrollable rages where she would throw whatever she could lay her hands on.
Screaming at the top of her lungs. Cursing.
Kicking. Punching. You wouldn’t believe the shit she destroyed.
Furniture. Dishes. Vera had this nice collection of Hummel figurines that got smashed during one episode.
They tried doctors and counselors, then medication that Tammie refused to take.
I spent a lot of time at Caitlin’s place, but I still needed to be at home to protect my parents. Make sense?”
“I get it. I thought I’d feel sorry for Tammie, but she sounds like a little witch.”
He sighed. “I don’t know. Part of me blames her rotten childhood, but when does that just become an excuse?”
“Deep subject.” Sabrina’s fingers traced over his skull, scratching his scalp lightly with her nails. “One I’m not gonna speculate about. No one can see what’s going on in someone else’s head.”
Cam liked the head massage. “One night, I was at the house having dinner with Vera and Cecil. Tammie was supposed to come home after school. I hung out until she finally showed up. At three in the morning. Cecil had gone to bed, but Vera and I stayed up dozing in the living room. Tammie came in stinking of booze and sex. She was high or drunk or both. Some of the shit that spewed out of her mouth….”
His voice faded as his memories took over. “She told me she wanted to fuck me. That she would be so much better than Caitlin.”
He paused, images of that night coming back to him. “She ignored Vera, who sat right next to me on the sofa, and came over to… mount me. She tried to kiss me and hump me, telling me how good she could be. She grabbed for my dick, and I shoved her off me. I wasn’t nice about it either.”
Sabrina’s hands slowed. “That sounds really intense.”
“That’s one way of putting it. I told her that would never happen and she needed to straighten up her act.
She got mad, of course, and threw one of the flower vases at me, then kicked the coffee table until it broke into pieces.
Vera tried to stop her, and Tammie went wild.
She started slapping and punching Vera in the face.
I still remember Tammie’s nails digging into my mom’s cheeks and the blood from those wounds.
I shoved Tammie out of the way and shielded Vera with my body.
I yelled for her to stop, but she was so out of control, I don’t know if she heard me.
To this day, I have no clue why she didn’t stop. Either she couldn’t or she wouldn’t.”
Sabrina’s arms came around him in a hug, her body pressing into his back. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. I’m sorry for Vera and Cecil too. I’m not sure about Tammie.”
“It’s not over.” Cam swallowed the huge lump in his throat.
What would Sabrina think of him now? “Tammie picked up one of the broken table legs and started hitting me. It had jagged pieces on it, plus a few nails. It tore into me and ripped open my back as I was covering Vera. The fucking pain got to me. I… fuck… I lost it and hit my sister. Twice. Punched her right in the face. Dropped her like a stone. The cops said it was self-defense all the way, but—”
The sob caught him off guard. It took him a minute to figure out it came from his own mouth. Speech was impossible now.
Sabrina held him from behind, allowing him the courtesy of keeping his face hidden in the cradle. He appreciated that gesture, but he wished he could see her face to guess at what she thought about him now.
“I was almost six feet tall and over two hundred pounds of muscle. Tammie was five foot four and around one-twenty-five. I could have hurt her real bad. The first punch was to get her off me and my mom. The second… I think the second was from years of frustration and anger. It shames me.”
She placed her chin on his shoulder. “You ever hit another woman?”
“No. Never.”
Her breath tickled his neck as she spoke. “I believe you, and I bet I can guess what happened next. Lots of charges were made and some of them dropped. Caitlin broke up with you. Tammie was removed and sent to juvie.”
“Yes.”
“Why did Vera and Cecil keep Tammie in their will?”
He sniffed back his tears. “I think it’s because she was the last one in their care and the only one they failed to help.
On her deathbed, Vera asked Morgan, Kyle, and me to look after her.
We still do, but I’ll be honest, I resent it.
She never got clean. Since juvie, she’s been in and out of jail for a lot of things. Solicitation, shoplifting, assault.”
He paused. There were hundreds more stories about Tammie over the years.
Ones the movies never quite got it right as to how bad those situations were in reality.
It made confessing his true feelings hard to do, and he’d kept them bottled up for years.
He suspected it was the same with his foster brothers, but none of them had dared say the words out loud until now.
“I hate her. I hate my sister for what she did to my parents and what she did to me.”
If there was a stronger word than hate, he would have used it.
Loathe. Abhor. Detest. Some other description of the total disgust he felt when he dealt with Tammie.
He recognized that she was a broken person, but the ugly in her made it impossible to see anything else.
He didn’t have it in him to forgive his foster sister, even though he still helped her.
Sabrina kissed his neck. “We make a pair, don’t we?
Both of us had sucky moms, both of us had nasty siblings, both of us are estranged from family.
You let me cry it out, and now I’m letting you do the same.
I vote to be done with other people’s bullshit.
We’ll make our own life and family. I’ve decided it’s worth it for me to stay here and be a part of this community.
It doesn’t matter about Scrap and me or Rodrigo’s shit or Tammie. I’m gonna stick.”
“Think you’ll ever be afraid of me?”
She laughed. He wasn’t expecting that reaction, and it startled him.
“Not in this lifetime, sugar. Now, let’s go home. If you want, I’ll let you be on top this time.”