Chapter 3
Chapter Three
BLUE
She’s sinking.
Vanishing.
Slipping beneath the surface of Hawk Lake, where the water turns dark thirty feet down, and catfish the size of dogs drift along the muddy bottom.
Someone must have pushed her in, and now she’s being sucked away from me.
Her hair writhes around her pale face as her sundress billows around her thighs. Her eyes are open, holding my gaze through the blue-brown, pleading for me to do something before it’s too late.
I thrust an arm into the water and shout for her to take my hand, but she doesn’t reach for me.
She just blinks, and when the ripples clear, she doesn’t seem afraid anymore.
She looks…sad. Resigned, as if she always knew this was how things would end with me, this man she should have known better than to think was someone worthy of her trust.
I try to move, to dive into the water, to swim down to save her before it’s too late, but I’m frozen, my every joint paralyzed.
By the time I finally manage to crack open my jaw and scream her name again, she’s twenty feet down, almost out of sight.
My legs still refuse to function, so I shove my hands against the splintered pier and push, slithering into the water with a clumsy splash.
The lake closes over me, silty and as cold as the family that turned me out when I was too young to understand everything that had been lost.
Stolen.
Beatrice is being stolen.
Why, Blue? Why? Her voice reaches me through the water, and suddenly, I know.
I’m the one who clamped a wrecking ball to her ankle and pushed her in.
I’m the one who did this.
I’m the bad guy. As bad as all the bad, bad men I thought I’d left behind. But I’m no different. I’m just as cowardly. Just as rotten.
To the core.
Iwake with a gasp, my hands clawing into the mattress.
For a second, I’m back in the dorm with the other boys, sweating in the summer heat, sticky in my damp sheets, listening to the air-conditioning rattle across the compound in the guru’s house.
For a moment, I’m trapped in the past, a prisoner of my twisted upbringing as much as the walls that surrounded the commune where I was raised.
Physical walls are relatively easy to climb and leave behind.
Mental walls are harder.
I exhale sharply. Release the back of my tongue. Blink and find a single point of focus. I watch the ceiling fan spin in circles until I’m able to pull in several slow, deep breaths. But even when my pulse finally steadies, the knot in my stomach remains.
I’ve fucked up.
I’ve seriously fucked up.
I know that with the quiet clarity that often arrives in the wee hours of the morning.
I glance at the bedside table, where the clock glows.
Five a.m. The same time, I woke up for morning chores, starting when I was just eight years old.
Running an off-the-grid, self-sustaining community is a lot of work, and violating child labor laws wasn’t something the Children of the Storm community thought twice about.
They didn’t think twice about much, aside from how to keep their followers under Daveed’s control.
Thinking the guru’s name used to be enough to make my jaw lock and my hands curl into fists, but not anymore.
His face floats across my mental screen and disappears without the slightest spike in my blood pressure.
He doesn’t control me anymore. I’m not that powerless boy, who he used and abused until I grew strong enough to run.
I haven’t been that boy for a long time. And I would never push Beatrice or anyone else into a lake. Especially that one. Hawk Lake is filthy, a good place to catch a brain-eating amoeba.
But I did push her away, and I didn’t even have the decency to do it face-to-face. I told myself a letter would be less intrusive, but in the pale, no-bullshit light of dawn, I can’t believe I bought that load of crap for a second.
And the check?
The thought of her pulling it from the envelope—right behind my note assuring her I don’t believe I’m father material—makes me cringe.
What the fuck was I thinking?
Could I have been more condescending? More cowardly? No wonder she didn’t respond to my text last night asking if there’s anything else she’d like to discuss before I leave to teach a skills camp in Nebraska next week. She probably wants to kick me in the shins.
Or worse, she’s hurt and feeling more alone than she did already.
I shove off the sheets and stand, the hardwood floor cool under my feet, despite the early summer swelter outside.
These days, I have my own, highly-efficient air conditioner.
I also have coping skills, hard-won coping skills I’ve worked to hone every day since I climbed over that fence and left the compound for good.
But with Beatrice, they’ve been failing me. Miserably.
I need a run.
I always do my best thinking on a run, and if I leave now, I’ll be across town at Bea’s apartment around six, a decent hour for ringing a woman’s doorbell. Or at least, halfway decent.
A part of me insists I should wait, give her space—or at least a couple of hours to wake up and have a cup of coffee—but that nightmare is still knocking around inside my head.
I need to see Bea’s face while it’s not underwater.
I need to know that she’s okay and apologize profusely for my shitty handling of this situation.
I grab thin track pants, a sweat wicking tee, and tie on my running shoes. My keys and cell go into the crossbody pouch I wear for longer runs, and then I’m out the door, taking the stairs fast, hitting the street at a jog.
The French Quarter is quiet in the way it only gets between four and six a.m., after the last of the drunks have stumbled home, but before the delivery trucks start their rounds.
The air is thick with humidity, the mucky smell of the river, and the scent of honeysuckle that swarms over the buildings in this part of town.
It’s a smell I’ve grown accustomed to.
Even developed an affection for.
New Orleans has its flaws, but it welcomed me with open arms and a massive signing bonus.
I enjoyed my time in Oregon after college, but New Orleans is special.
It’s a place where I’ve come fully into my own, where I feel settled.
I have good friends, a community outside the team, all the live music a man could hope for, and I’m playing the best hockey of my life.
I should have been strong enough to handle the news that Beatrice was pregnant, way better than I did.
Hell, I should have been able to send her home that night without touching her; that’s what I should have been able to do.
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. The control I’ve prided myself on for so long just…evaporated.
And I don’t know why.
I turn the question over in my mind as my sneakers slap a steady rhythm against the cobblestones.
I don’t have to think about the route. I know the way, even though I’ve never jogged to Beatrice’s place before.
I’ve only driven there a handful of times.
We usually meet up at a jazz club or a karaoke bar in the Quarter and only occasionally go back to my place for a drink after.
Occasionally. Because that’s what friends do—they meet up, have fun, and go their separate ways.
Beatrice and I are just friends. Were just friends.
Until that night in April that I regret with everything in me.
Do you? Do you really?
I stay with the question as I run faster. By the time I hit the Lafitte Greenway and head toward the high rises of Mid-City, my lungs are burning, and my shirt is plastered to my back.
The Greenway stretches ahead, a paved vein through Treme’s history, but I’m too locked in my own head to appreciate the murals or the community gardens sleeping in the dark.
I run past the industrial skeletons and the flickering streetlights, my breath coming in jagged hitches that have nothing to do with my cardio and everything to do with the sneaking suspicion that I don’t regret what we did.
And maybe…
Maybe I don’t regret the baby, either.
Maybe I’m just scared to fucking death. Scared in a way none of the meditation classes or Buddhist retreats in Tibet can touch.
I don’t know how to be a father, a partner. I never saw either modelled well, and the first time I was forced into “I do,” I failed my wife spectacularly.
It was an arranged marriage, brokered by Daveed in an attempt to quell unrest within the community.
I’d beaten the shit out of Lisbeth’s brother for assaulting a younger boy.
Then, his friends had beaten the shit out of me, damaging my face so badly that I had to miss a performance, which really pissed Daveed off.
Forcing Lisbeth and me to say “I do” was his way of “bringing our families together.”
We were strangers at first, then friends.
Then, I started to think I was in love—right around the same time, I also started thinking it was time to leave the community.
But Lisbeth was too afraid to even talk about that.
Every time I brought it up, she’d cry for hours, insisting I was ruining our lives.
I had no idea how to find a compromise and hated how ripped in two I felt in the months leading up to the night I finally decided to leave.
At eighteen, I barely knew how to be myself, let alone how to be a good husband. I’ve forgiven myself for my failure. Or…I thought I had. I didn’t realize how much the way things ended with Lisbeth still haunted me until recently.
Now that I’ve finally met another woman, I think I could love.
“Fuck,” I mutter as I cross into Mid-City, the scenery shifting from soul to steel.
I race through the BioDistrict, where the Voodoo’s Arena looms over me like a glowering judge. Judging me for missing the playoffs this year, then judging me even harder for missing the fact that I’m already in love with this woman.