Chapter 33 #2
I sat in the front seat, and when my dad turned to look at me, he looked like he wanted to cry.
“Mami isn’t here right now, so we have to leave without her, but I promise I will take her to you, okay?”
That’s the first promise he spoke that day..
The bed shifts under me, bringing me back to the present and away from my parents.
“What do you mean you were ripped away? Did someone take you from your home?” Aria asks.
When I look over at her, I find her sitting next to me, her arms wrapped around her knees, sympathy and sadness all over her beautiful face.
I wonder if the sadness is for me as the man I am now or for the boy I once was.
Not able to look at the sadness for much longer, I let my eyes travel down to her hands and find her picking at her cuticles.
She’s curious about what I’m about to say, but she is also nervous, possibly scared.
She is the first person I’ve talked to about this outside of my family, Ethan when we were friends, and my therapist. I need courage, so I tug on one of her hands so she can lend me all the courage and strength I need.
When her fingers wrap around mine, I let the words flow.
“I was ten when my dad brought us to Chicago. Before then, the only version of Chicago I knew was in movies. I didn’t even know my dad was from here, had spent the first sixteen years of his life here before his parents died, He had mentioned he had a brother a few times, but there were never deep conversations about him.
This place wasn’t even a thought.” I move my eyes from the woman in front of me to the ceiling.
“Why did he bring you here?”
My father’s face comes into view in my mind, the age I am now. He was my age with a wife and four kids, a complete contrast to who I am today.
I see his face perfectly, as if he stood in front of me. He looks so much like Drake, so much like the pictures of my grandfather I’ve seen thought the years. His hair is still very much a light brown shade, but his eyes are different, harder, angrier but full of sadness at the same time.
I push down the lump forming in my throat and answer Aria’s question.
“I didn’t know this at the time, but my mom had gone missing that morning.
My dad didn’t notice until he came home from work and found us alone.
From what I heard him tell Bennett, he thought Mom had just gone to her father’s house, since it was next door, but when he went to check, he found something disturbing and started packing us up, said we had to go somewhere safe. ”
The fear in his face was prominent. It didn’t matter that he was in the army here in the States for four years or worked with the military back in Mexico; he was terrified and thought his family was in danger.
The bed shifts under me again, Aria coming closer, her hands covering mine.
“What did he find?”
For a second, I debate telling her, but then I decide to go for it. I want her to know every part of me.
I look up at her so I can see her reaction. “Bodies.”
Her eyes go wide with shock. After a minute or so, she speaks again.
“Did he tell you that?” she asks, her voice shaky.
I shake my head against the mattress. “No. I figured that put years after. My mother’s family were people my father trusted with everything he had, so if something happened, he would have had us stay with them.
At the time, it seemed odd to me that he didn’t, but I didn’t question it until I was thirteen and looking for answers. ”
All the news articles that I read popped up as if I said a spell to conjure them.
“The online articles said my grandfather, one of my uncles, and my uncle’s wife were found dead, all shot in the head.”
Aria gasps, and I don’t blame her. I’m pretty sure I did too when I read the articles, right before I started to cry.
“Why would someone do that?” The question comes out low and small; if I wasn’t next to her, I would have missed it.
“My grandfather, my mother’s father, was in the middle of his reelection campaign for the governorship of Sinaloa, and from what I know, a lot of people hated him.
I guess there had been some threats made toward his family.
He brushed them off and didn’t take any of the threats seriously.
He should have; maybe then, it wouldn’t have cost him his life. ”
“Do they know who did it?”
I shake my head. The articles I read spoke about suspicions, even blamed it on a few cartels, but nobody was ever arrested. If I had to guess, the call came from within. There was a reason why my mother went missing, and I would bet every dime it wasn’t because she was taken.
“So, after your dad found out your mother was missing and saw her family was dead, he brought you to Chicago?”
I nod against the mattress, my eyes not moving from her face. “The family he had known for almost twelve years was dead, and his wife was missing. To him, keeping us there wasn’t safe. So, he brought us to the one place he could think of. Here.”
It’s interesting. I can remember a few things from when we left the house and every last detail of when we got to Chicago, but I can’t remember the in-between. I can’t remember if the plane ride was bumpy, if Drake cried when we were up in the air. I can’t remember any of it.
“And Bennett didn’t know about you?” Aria asks, shifting even more so I can feel her leg connect with my body.
“No. Bennett and my dad had a complicated relationship.” I think nonexistent would be a better description.
For the first ten years of my life, Robert didn’t mention more than needed.
“Their parents died when Bennett was eight and Dad was sixteen, and I think the pressure of raising his brother at a young age was too much for him. He ended up leaving a month later, according to Henry, and signed guardianship over. That was the last time they saw each other until we showed up on Bennett’s doorstep. ”
One thing that has always been very clear, even twenty years later, was the shock in my uncle’s face. I know now there was a point when he thought his brother was dead, yet there he was, standing in front of him, asking for help.
“What happened then?” Aria asks, shifting again. This time, though, she shifts so she’s lying down right next to me, pressing herself into my body. I don’t hesitate to wrap an arm around her and bringing her closer.
Reliving something like this, releasing the last day you last saw your father, is hard, and having her at my side, feeling her, is the only thing keeping me calm right now.
I press a kiss against her forehead before I speak.
“Dad needed to go back to Mexico, so he left us with Bennett and Henry. He said he wouldn’t be long, just a few weeks. He said he would find Mom and come back to Chicago. Bennett tried to stop him, I tried to stop him, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Anger boils inside me, just like it did when I saw my father walk away from us, but I try to keep it in as best as I can.
But when Aria pulls away to look at me straight on, I about lose it. “He didn’t come back, did he?”
I shake my head and realize this is as much of the story as I can tell her. My voice breaks when I answer. “No. No, he hasn’t made it back yet.”
I don’t know who lets out a sob, if it’s me or the woman taking every piece of me and marking it as hers, but it’s one of us, and there is no more holding back. She deserves to see every side of me.
Tears run down both our faces for a bit. It could have been a few minutes, maybe an hour, who knows—neither of us felt it or kept time, but they came. She cried for me and what I went through, and I cried for me and my siblings for being put in a situation we didn’t ask for.
The majority of my tears are silent, but I don’t care.
At the very least, I’m feeling something.
When all my tears have dried up and I’m able to move past the lump in my throat, I start talking again.
“Every day for a month, I looked out that window and hoped I would see my dad coming up to the house. I wouldn’t sleep because I was afraid I would miss him.
With each passing day, I hated this place more and more.
If my dad were here, it would have been different, but he wasn’t, and all I wanted to do was go find him.
I wanted to be anywhere but here, because if I was here, it meant there was a chance I was never going to see my parents again.
I even tried to leave once. It was late and dark, and Bennett stopped me before I could open the door.
That was the first time I told him I hated him.
He was a twenty-two-year-old kid trying to keep it together for his niece and nephews, and I told him I hated him. ”
“I hate you, and I hate being here.”
At the time, his expression didn’t register, but now that I think about it, he looked defeated, like he was afraid of failing us, and I had just confirmed he was.
“I know,” he had told me. His voice was curt, but it held sadness in it too.
“Was there any communication from your dad after he left?” Aria’s voice takes me away from the dark memory.
I tighten my hold. “No.” I should leave the story there, but I continue. “No calls. No mail. Nothing. He simply fell off the face of the Earth, leaving us to wonder if he was dead or roaming the world somewhere with no way to make it back to us. To this day we don’t know.”
Her body presses tighter against mine. “I know this is stupid, but I’m sorry.”
I crack something of a smile she can’t see.
“There is nothing to be sorry about. It happened. It messed me up, but it happened, and because it happened, I hated this house and being in Chicago. It was a constant reminder of what I had lost. One day, I had two parents, and then I came here and had nothing. So, when I got the first opportunity, I had Bennett send me away to high school in another state. When I graduated, I spent more time anywhere but here. There was nothing here for me.”
For a beat, we are both silent before Aria broke it. “You had your siblings, though. And Bennett and Henry.”
I shake my head slightly. “I had my siblings, but they were young. They were able to adjust to this new life better than I was. They couldn’t remember things like I could.
They didn’t see things I saw. Henry was there, but it took me a few years to trust him, to figure out he was someone I could lean on, someone who loved me. ”
“And Bennett?”
And Bennett.
I think, of all the questions she asked me tonight, this is the one I don’t want to answer.
I let out a deep sigh. “My relationship with Bennett has always been complicated.”
A finger draws circles against the black t-shirt I decided to wear to dinner. “Because you told him you hated him?”
I want to let out a snort.
If only it was that simple.
“I’m pretty sure that’s where it started, but it goes deeper.
There’s only twelve years between us, so we struggled with the type of relationship we should have.
I was his nephew, and he could have treated me as such, or even as a friend or a little brother, but he had to be a parent.
He had to step into a role left vacant, just like Henry had to do with him.
He tried his best, but I hated every moment of it.
In my eyes, he was stepping into a role I didn’t need filled.
I already had parents, and he wasn’t one of them.
Then, the hatred grew because I thought he wasn’t doing enough to find my dad.
Once I found out that wasn’t true, our relationship was already strained.
It wasn’t until Ella came into the picture ten years ago that we started repairing it.
It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely better.
I don’t go out of my way to avoid him anymore. ”
We lay there for a few minutes in silence. Once again, Aria is the one to break it. “You look like him. Bennett, I mean.” I let out a groan that makes her detangle herself to look down at me. “What? You do.”
“Yeah, people tell me that all the time, especially when I wear my glasses. Ella says we look almost identical.”
“Do you not see it?”
“I see it, but when I was teenager, I hated it. I always thought I looked like my dad, and I wanted it to stay that way.”
Her hand lands against my forehead, brushing my hair back. “I’m sure you look like your dad too. They’re brothers—their kids are bound to look like the other. I don’t see that as a bad thing.”
I don’t say anything because she’s right. Me looking like my uncle isn’t a bad thing, but that is something younger Elliot had to learn.
Aria’s hand lands against my cheek. “Thank you for opening up to me.”
I give her a small, sad smile. “Thank you for listening.”
She leans down and places a chaste kiss on my lips. “You listened to me when I opened up. You were there for me. I wanted to be here for you.”
“That means more than you will ever know.”
A smile crosses her lips, and she gives me another kiss. It’s short and doesn’t lead to anything else, but that’s okay.
She is all I need right now. She may be all I need always.
When she lays back down and burrows herself into my side, I promise to never let go, because we need each other is more ways than we know.