Chapter 8
UNDERTOW
“Who was he?” Rig asks.
He’s sitting on my couch when I get home the following night, holding a photograph of me with a small baby on my chest, hand on his tiny bottom. It’s the only picture I’ve got left. Cold blows through my soul.
“Where did you find that?”
If I could be bothered, I’d object to his rifling through my things.
But I’m not the kind of person who gets riled up about stuff like that.
Especially since he’s done so much for me in the two days he’s been here.
And I hide this photo from myself … He could have come across it anywhere.
Most of the time I forget I’ve got it, and I definitely don’t want to see it.
“Picked up a book to read, it fell out.”
Figures. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy all the photographs. I had to keep one. I roll my lips together. “My son.” Fuck, I don’t want to talk about Charlie.
He shuts his eyes. “Your son?” His eyes pop open again. “A son you no longer have.”
I nod. My throat closes up. He reaches out and squeezes my hand.
“The guy I was with”—I swallow—“the guy I was with beat me up six weeks from my due date. I went into labor early. Charlie … he struggled when he was born, bleeding on the brain. The damage was extensive. They tried so hard, but …”
“How long did he live?”
“Three weeks.”
Rig’s eyes shutter closed, and I grimace. “That’s when I kind of …” I gulp as I stare at the window that looks out over the street. “I gave up. I just … too much grief, you know? I started drinking. Nothing startling or unusual about it. Moved back here then, too. Had to leave that place.”
“What place?”
“St. Louis. Left one day and started driving, ended up back where I grew up.”
“You lived there with the asshole who …”
“Yeah.”
“How long were you with him?”
“Five years. This is going to sound like I’m making excuses for him—I’m not, believe me.
If he came through that door now, I’d stick a knife in him—but he was okay most of the time, mellow, easygoing.
But he had a friend he’d meet up with sometimes who gave him speed.
When he did that, all the rage came out. ”
Rig flexes his shoulders. “Fucking hell. What happened?” I can tell from his expression that he doesn’t really want to know, that anger is building under his skin like it’s lived under mine all these years, so I dodge the question.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been right in my head, you know? He kept going on at me about how I didn’t understand things a lot of the time.”
Rig’s face darkens. “You seem pretty fuckin’ okay to me.”
I laugh and sweep my hand around the living room. “You think? The mess this was in when you first came here. It wasn’t exactly the Ritz, was it?”
“So, being messy means you’re not right in the head?”
I eye him balefully. “How many bottles of vodka did you find in your great apartment cleanup?”
His mouth tightens. “My great apartment cleanup? Are you fucking with me?” His neck starts to go red.
“You’re all fired up to set me straight, just like he was, but you’re …”
“You’re comparing me to some bastard who beat his girlfriend so bad that she went into labor and his kid died?”
“No, of course not, I …”
“Fuck that, babe.”
He throws the picture on the bed and stomps through to the kitchen, and I stare at the wall of the bedroom and pull in a shaky breath. I don’t want to tick him off. When I follow him in there, he’s yanking on his boots, coat stretched across his broad back.
“I’m going out,” he says.
“Don’t storm out, I didn’t mean …”
“Too angry now, babe. We’ll talk when I get back.
” And he opens the door and the whole apartment shakes when he slams it behind him.
He’s been hiding in here all day but is going out now?
I bite my lip. I guess it’s dark and there are a lot of deserted places to walk at this time of night.
No one in their right mind wanders around this town after dark.
I don’t know how long I stand in the kitchen, but I do know what cabinet Rig tidied all the vodka into.
Grabbing the nearest bottle and a glass, I head to the bedroom.
And I sit down on the bed and place them on the nightstand, hand shaking as I pour myself a generous measure.
The first sip is like bliss burning down the back of my throat.
I pick up the picture from where he threw it on the comforter.
Charlie had been deteriorating for days when this photo was taken, and they’d lifted him out of his incubator to put him on me—all his wires and tubes attached, his small body curled up on my chest. And I have the happiest smile on my face, because when I was sitting there in that blue hospital chair, I felt a love so strong it seemed to take over every thought I’d ever had.
Even though I knew it was near the end, I still hoped.
He was alive, and despite knowing he wasn’t going to make it, I loved holding him, loved how his tiny body tucked so neatly into mine.
I take another swallow of vodka. Mark disappeared after he laid into me.
He never came to see Charlie. I sent him pictures, and he blocked me.
I had to make the decision to turn off the life support on my own.
I couldn’t tell him about the funeral or anything.
I don’t know if he has any idea whether his son is alive or dead.
If he ever cared. I had Charlie cremated in St. Louis and brought him with me in a box in the car.
There was just me at the funeral the pastor here did for me, standing by that tiny hole in the ground, burying his ashes in my best black dress, the pain in my body a living thing.
One of the nurses from my hospital job came with me.
I haven’t seen hide or hair of Mark since he disappeared.
How do people deal with the pain? I don’t understand how to stop myself trawling through it over and over again.
If I’d done something about his friend Dray earlier, if he hadn’t come home and slept it off at Dray’s, if Dray hadn’t come back with him and been egging him on.
I can’t sit on the anger, and so I drink until it all goes back down again.
I don’t know how much I drink or how much time ticks by, but I wake in the dark with a start to find a shadow looming over me. My hand flutters up to my chest.
“Who knows?”
Rig. “Fuck, you scared me. Don’t creep up on me like that.”
“Babe, you were dead to the world. A herd of elephants could have stampeded through here and you’d have slept through it. I’ve been trying to wake you for about five minutes.”
I push my hair out of my face with a shaky hand and roll onto my back, and Rig leans over and turns on the light by the side of the bed. He sits down next to me as I scoot my hips over.
“Sorry I scared you, babe. Who knows about him?”
“No one.”
“What do you mean, no one?”
“I have no family to speak of. A distant uncle who cleaned out the house, but he never contacts me.”
“Cleaned out the house?”
“My mom and dad’s house. My dad died when I was twenty-five.
Car accident. Pointless and stupid. He’d been drinking.
” I hold up my hand. “Yeah, yeah, you don’t need to point out the parallels.
My mom was never the most stable or courageous person in the world, and Dad’s death tipped her over the edge.
She’s still alive, but she was committed and she’s in a state hospital and doesn’t remember who I am.
My older brother disappeared a long time ago.
He never got on with my old man and took off when he was seventeen.
I think he went into the military. I never hear from him.
Marni’s the closest person I’ve got to family.
Her and some of the little old ladies I look after. ”
“How come your uncle doesn’t keep in touch?”
“He’s my mom’s brother, and we were never close to her family.” I shake my head. “I have no idea where he is. There was some dispute between them that I never understood; it happened long before I was born. He only got involved with clearing the house because he was looking for valuables.”
“Wouldn’t it all belong to you and your brother?”
“My parents didn’t have a damn thing, Rig. All they left was a big pile of debt.” I sigh. “I think my uncle thought he might find something, but I could have told him there was nothing.”
I shift in the bed and prop myself up on a pillow. “Mark, Charlie’s dad—although believe me I don’t want to call him that because he was never any kind of dad to him—he doesn’t even know Charlie died. He disappeared. I texted him from the hospital, and he blocked me.”
“The asshole blocked you?” Rig’s fists clench, and he’s clearly still holding on to his rage by a thread. He gets up and paces away from the bed. “Fuck. Thought I’d calmed myself down.”
He blows out a long breath and stands with his hand propped on one wall, looking down at the floor. Then he walks out of the bedroom, and the front door clicks and the metallic sound of boots against the top of the iron staircase reaches me. The bellow he lets out makes the walls shake.
“Swear to God,” he says when he comes back, “it’s just as well this guy doesn’t live here, or I’d find him and tear him limb from limb.”
I nod, and he looks at me. I can’t tell him the rest of the story now; that’s for a later date. “I don’t know what to do with the anger,” I say.
“Did you report it to the cops?”
“Yeah, they know. But Mark disappeared, and I was drinking a lot to help me through it all, and I got the feeling they weren’t that interested in what they called ‘a domestic dispute.’ They kept asking me what I’d done to provoke him.”
“Swear to God …” He lets out a long breath again. “Don’t understand how you aren’t punching walls.”
I laugh. “Maybe I am inside. No way you ever recover from something like that.”
“Yeah.” He sits down on the bed again and runs a calloused hand up my arm. “Babe, you need some help. Professional help.” He grabs me by the neck, pulling me into him. “I’m gonna find you some help.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I made money on this fight. I can do that. Let me do it. Fucking drugs. A lot of people on the circuit take them. I’ve fought people on speed.
I understand how to deal with them now, but it’s scary as fuck.
They go wild. Pretty sure that guy the Bear was taking them the night I fought him. You gotta let me do this.”
I can’t tell him that I’ve had counseling before, that I don’t want to get over losing Charlie. I’m the only person he’s got, so if I don’t remember him, if I don’t care, who does?
But something is warm inside me nonetheless. How much effort and care Rig’s putting into me is slowly making something unfurl inside me. So I nod my head.