I lift my head, trying to fight through the anguish pumping inside of me, and focus on Jamie, pushing aside the images swarming in my mind… of Jamie sitting there, with my mom and her husband, as they destroyed everything good inside her.
Jamie releases an exhale, her eyes drifting shut. “And then um…”
“Then what?”
“Then Joseph—he slid over a check. He said that it was more than enough money for me to start a new life somewhere else…” Her eyes meet mine again. “Somewhere far away from you.”
I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes, hiding my tears, hiding my pain. “Did you take it?”
“Of course not, Holden. Do you honestly think I would?”
“No,” I tell her truthfully, lowering my hands. “I know you wouldn’t.”
She looks away again. “I didn’t take the money, but I took what they said, and I went to the source of it…”
My stomach falls, and the ground slips from beneath me. “You went to see Beaker…”
44
Jamie
Five Years Earlier
It didn’t make sense.
As I sat in the pool house after Tammy and Joseph’s ambush, reading the police reports over and over, comparing our accounts, all I could think was it didn’t make sense.
Holden’s recollections of that night were far different from mine, and I couldn’t grasp how that was possible.
He said they had guns.
He said they used my name when threatening me, but never his.
He said one of them went through the car, searching through my bag.
It was impossible that he could know all that, see or hear all that, because he was beaten worse than I was.
Wasn’t he?
It didn’t make sense.
They left our phones, our wallets, anything of value we had on us—and the only thing they took was my driver’s license.
I poured over the police report, again and again, and I don’t know when it was that it clicked.
All that time, I think I forced myself to believe that it was a random attack. And even though I’d blocked out certain parts, it should’ve been so obvious they were looking for me.
And when I realized that, I grabbed the keys to the diner’s old delivery car that Zeke had given Holden and me, and I got behind the wheel and started the four-hour journey toward my house of horrors.
I wanted to know why.
As I stood in front of a door I hadn’t seen since Mom and I fled, that was the one and only thought going through my head.
I wanted to know why.
Before I raised my fist to knock, I checked in my bag one last time. My phone was there, fully charged and unlocked if I needed to call 911. Beneath my phone was the gun that Mom had kept in her bedside drawer. After she passed and I burned all her things in the field behind the trailer park, I kept the gun in the same place she did. I’d never used it. And I hoped I never would.
I knocked on the door, and within seconds, the man who haunts my nightmares answered.
It was strange—coming face to face with evil. Only he didn’t look as scary as I’d remembered. Maybe my age and size had me so fearful of him in the past. I guess I always remembered him as this giant, scary monster, but the man standing in front of me was just like any other guy who came into the diner and ordered toast for dinner. It was clear I’d woken him up, his dark, disheveled hair going with his dark persona and eyes the color of slate.
He was tall, but he wasn’t built, as I recalled. He was scrawny… or maybe that’s what years and years of drug addiction can do to someone.
He squinted against the morning sun as he stared down at me. I stared right back. Right into his eyes—these dark pools of venomous rage, and I could tell the moment he recognized me. His eyes widened, and he sucked in a breath, and then... then the weirdest thing... he seemed to soften. “Jamie?”
Even though I’d spent the entire drive rehearsing those few words—I want to know why—I couldn’t get them out. I could barely even breathe. All I could do was nod.
He opened the door wider, and I stepped inside.
I shouldn’t have.
Unlike the man welcoming me into my hell, the house was exactly as I remembered it. From the broken vase on the side table that Mom somehow pieced back together, even though it was her head that broke it courtesy of Beaker, to the framed pictures on the wall.
They were still there all these years later…
A perfect little family for all to see.
A Straight-Laced Beaker, Sober Mom, and Younger Me.
At a certain point in our lives, the pictures stop. It’s as if I stopped growing, or maybe they stopped caring, stopped wanting to show me off. I looked up at a particular photo of all three of us in front of the house with the Christmas lights lit up. I couldn’t have been older than four years old. Suddenly, I found myself drowning in this… this warmth. It clouded my chest and held my breath hostage, and I… I didn’t know why.
“That was the Christmas before… everything,” Beaker said from behind me.
I turned to him slowly, carefully. “Before what?”
His eyes narrowed. “You don’t remember, do you?”
I shook my head.
“Did your mom ever tell you how we met?”
Another head shake.
He motioned to the couch, where Dirty, Filthy, Younger Me was never allowed to sit.
It was surreal—being in the house with no yelling. No screaming. No fighting. I sat down, clutching my bag to my lap, and waited for him to sit opposite me.
He sat in a recliner and picked at the fabric of the arm, his gaze down as he seemed to relive the moments he spoke. “I was at a park with some buddies throwing a football around, and one of them ended up throwing long, and the ball flew toward you and your mama.” He sighs, the corner of his lips lifting. “She blocked it just in time, and I went to retrieve it, and I… I took one look at her, and I knew I wasn’t going back to my friends. Man, your mama was a knockout. Kind of like you now.” He smiled, and I remember thinking that I couldn’t recall him smiling before. At least not in a way that wasn’t threatening or sinister. “You weren’t even one yet,” he says. “She had you sitting up on a blanket, and you were squeezing grapes in your tiny little fists.” He shakes his fists out in front of him, mimicking his words. “You were the cutest little thing.”
I sat ramrod straight, my heart beating harshly against my ribcage.
“She told me that day that she was couch-surfing until she could find a job and a place to live, and I told her I had enough room for both of y’all.”
“So she just left with you?” I breathed out.
He shook his head. “Not at first. We dated some. But, within a few months, we’d made this your home.”
That was a lie. I’d never had a home.
“Not a lot of guys out there would take in a jobless, single mom, but you… you have to know… I loved you both with all my heart, Jamie.”
Tears formed in my eyes, but I refused to let them slip. Refused to let him have them. “So what the fuck happened, Beaker?”
His eyes drifted shut at the loudness of my voice, and I clutched my bag tighter, felt the gun beneath my grasp.