Nineteen
Trina
The world around me was a fog, darkening and pressing into every side instead of lifting with the morning sun and heat. Ever since I opened my eyes in the hospital and saw Cole, everything was different.
Not better.
Not worse.
Dreamlike.
If I allowed myself to believe I was free of Jonathan, my reality would come crashing down on me and I’d be back to my forever torment.
No. I needed to stay smart. Think ahead. Plan and figure out how to make it through this so when Jonathan arrived—and I had no doubt he would—I would not be the one at fault in any of this.
It didn’t matter if it made me cold for being so willing to throw Cole, and perhaps Valerie and Kip, and their part under the proverbial bus, but they hadn’t lived my life.
They hadn’t had to do what was necessary to survive.
I wasn’t getting out of this without more scars.
The only thing I had a chance at determining was how deep those cuts went before they scarred over.
Was I thankful to be away from Jonathan? I couldn’t even say. I knew him. Knew how to read his moods and respond appropriately. I knew my limits and my boundaries. At least, I did until he changed them without notice. Here, back in Deer Creek, there was no safety. No boundary.
I had been whisked away and snuck into Cole’s house, and in the few conversations I’d had with Valerie, I hadn’t let her explain what happened. The less I knew, the better.
One thing for certain, Jonathan wasn’t just going to come for me.
He was going to come for Cole once he figured it all out.
That he had a part in my disappearance wouldn’t be far-fetched considering the business card. The card our cleaning lady somehow found in my underwear drawer and stupidly left on the dresser.
The card that had fueled Jonathan’s rage.
The card that started it all.
My fault for keeping it. For wanting one tiny, insignificant reminder of when life was good and I wasn’t trash.
“Enough.”
I climbed out of the bed. I’d lingered long enough and the quicker I went along with Cole’s plan for fresh air and sunshine and absurdity, the sooner I’d be back in this bubble in the strange empty room with the smiling little girls who brought tears to my eyes every night.
Happy tears for Cole who had what he’d always wanted. He’d wanted children. Now he had them.
Sad, tortured tears for me. For every choice I had made in this life that had led me to being broken beyond hope, ruined far deeper than any bruises would ever show.
If Cole was planning some massive rescue operation, he had to realize it was a failure before it ever began. He might have temporarily saved my body, but he’d never find and rescue all the parts of my shattered and tattered soul.
I was already dressed and while it probably wasn’t necessary for a car ride, I clipped on the knee brace. You never knew who was watching. Who could see me. It’d be better if he saw me as the still-healing wife, forced here against her will…waiting for when she could be returned.
And perhaps that’s what I should do.
Go back. Explain.
Maybe…
I limped out of the bedroom and into the downstairs bathroom. Cole’s house wasn’t large, but it was homey and a normal-sized home for Deer Creek. Clearly a split-level, I’d been stashed in the downstairs bedroom, right outside what looked like a movie watching area and a toy room. Everything was neatly put away. If I hadn’t already seen the pictures of him and his girls, I’d know he had daughters. Pink and purple toys and books and buckets and baskets lined one large wall.
I yanked my gaze back to the carpet.
The pain was too much to see. The regret too large to face.
Had I been smarter that could have been mine.
Cole must have heard me coming. As I started up the stairs, thumps came from my right. His body cast a large shadow over where I hobbled up the stairs, and then he met me in the entryway space. It was small, and he was too close. His presence too large and his scent too memorable.
I kept my gaze on the floor.
I’d thought of him every minute since that day on the street. When I cried myself to sleep, once I was assured Jonathan’s snores meant he was sleeping, I thought of Cole. The easy smiles he gave, the boyish charm, the stubborn set on his features. All of it came mixed between memories of the boy I used to love and the man he’d become on that sidewalk.
In reality, all of him was harder now, more jagged, but no amount of maturity or growth could eviscerate the joyful glimmer in his eyes he’d always had. Like life was one big party and he was along for the ride. There was a time I’d followed along on that ride, hands up and enjoying every moment of it.
I now knew different.
“You ready?”
Cole asked.
I glanced at my hands, empty of any belongings, and shrugged. “Not like I have anything to bring with me.”
It wasn’t a cut at him, and since I couldn’t bear to look at him any more than necessary, I had no idea how he reacted, but there was a beat and then a heavier pause before he sighed. “I can get you a phone. You’re not a prisoner here. Valerie and Kip thought it’d be better for you.”
That didn’t take a genius to figure out, and having my wallet or phone or whatever else was in my Hermès bag, an apology from Jonathan for a bruised rib last year, wouldn’t do me any good anyway.
“Whatever.”
Like I needed my failures thrown in my face. Who cared if I had a phone? I had no one to call. No one to miss me. No one to talk to. Other than Valerie, I no longer had a single person in my life who cared about my existence.
Cole had offered me his, along with suggesting I could use it to call the therapists Dr. McElroy left for me.
That list was in the trash, and his phone had gone unused outside the two talks with Valerie.
I didn’t need therapy. The last thing that would be good for me would be to talk about my decisions. I wasn’t an idiot. I had made choices. Born of greed and fear and worry and dreams and fantasies, but I’d made them all the same. There was nothing to discuss.
I was a stupid person who made worthless and destructive choices. No amount of therapy could change who I was at the core.
“Let’s just go,”
I mumbled. I hadn’t been this surly since I last left Deer Creek. “The sooner we go, the sooner you can get rid of me.”
“I don’t…never mind. Truck’s in the driveway,”
Cole said, and he stepped toward me, reached around and opened the storm door. My body locked as he moved and didn’t release until he stepped back.
He saw that.
I knew he did, and yet he never said anything.
Of course he wouldn’t.
I was now the woman he pitied, and that’s all I’d be to him. A pitiful excuse for a woman.
Who could blame him?
The town was different. So vastly different I could barely recognize many of the streets we drove through. Cole lived on the northwest side of town, in an older neighborhood I did recognize because many of my friends had grown up in the area, but as we drove south toward the old downtown, there were vast differences.
Additional lanes and stoplights at intersections that had once been two-lane, four-way stop signs. Gas stations that had never existed. There were rows of townhomes going up on my left that used to be trees we’d spend all day exploring as kids. A new YMCA sat across the street from at least four baseball fields.
It was unnerving. As much as I’d quit believing I’d ever be able to return to Deer Creek, a small part of me had hoped I would and that it would feel like home.
Cole’s truck had a country music station playing at a low level, something easy to talk over, and yet my gaze was stuck outside my window.
“It’s different, huh?”
It was the first thing he’d said to me since we got in his truck and pulled out of his drive. If he was expecting me to answer, he didn’t act like it because he kept talking. “Town’s growing. Doubled in size, at least, since we were kids, and our old high school is the new middle school. New high school is on the other side of town off Mountain Road, and all that side of town that was Traventine’s farmland is now school and homes and businesses. We’ve also got a new library finished last year so we don’t have to drive all the way to Boone.”
As he spoke, he turned left on the main road that went east-to-west through town. We took a bridge over the lake that had my already stressed nerves tighten further.
We’d hung out at the small beach at that lake, bemoaned the lifeguards that kept us from having too much fun, we’d laid on the grass as close to the private airstrip as we could get and watched the small private planes fly overhead. We snuck off onto worn mountain trails and made out in the woods. Some of that land backed up to homes…one in particular I knew too well.
“Don’t,”
I rasped, as we came to the turn that would take us there.
I couldn’t. Couldn’t bear to drive past my own neighborhood.
Without missing a beat, Cole turned in the opposite direction. Years ago, this had been a dirt road that led to land and homes that had enough acreage for horses or small, family homesteads. It was now paved, like the rest of the town, but as he turned away from my childhood home, the church that’d be nearby where I spent as much time in as my home, my lungs released like a valve.
“Thank you,”
I whispered.
“They love you, you know. Never stopped. They were never angry with you. Worried maybe, but never angry.”
I’m not angry… just disappointed. I couldn’t count the amount of times my dad or mom would say those words. It’d be followed by Bible verses about how we should live, a teaching moment and a quick prayer and then all would be forgiven. It hadn’t been a bad childhood…but it’d been a small one.
At least, that was what I thought back then.
“Do they know I’m here?”
“No. Some men at the station know, Mom and Marie, my ex, and that’s because they had to. Mom and Dad said they’d keep it quiet until you were ready.”
“I don’t want to see them.”
I doubted I’d ever be ready, and I wasn’t sure there was a point. Jonathan would find me. Why give them hope I was home if it was only temporary?
“Okay.”
There was a shrug from him in my peripheral vision and I turned, barely enough to face him. “That doesn’t bother you?”
“They’ve waited a long time to have you back. They’ll wait forever.”
The last thing I wanted was to give them hope when it would only be torn away. Truth was, he was probably right. My parents, Mom especially, still reached out to me. Not often, and I wasn’t brave enough to return her calls, but when Jonathan had told me to block their numbers so I couldn’t talk to them, I’d changed both of theirs to Spam Risk in my phone’s contacts. Amazingly, he’d never searched my contacts and found them, but it allowed me to occasionally, usually around my birthday or holidays, hear my mom’s voice.
Karen Mills was soft-spoken but bold. She was kind and loving and never showed a hint of fear. And she loved me despite myself. Which was why I always listened to her voicemails in the bathroom with the shower running…so no one could hear me cry.
“It doesn’t matter,”
I told Cole and faced the window as he drove by the new library he’d mentioned. “My life ended the day I left town. I’ve been nothing since.”
Maybe if he finally saw the truth of who I was, he’d move on from trying to save someone who couldn’t be saved.