The Principle (Legacy Book 2)

by Rain Carrington

  Matt didn’t think he’d relate to any of the men gathered. He sat as far from the doctor as he could without sitting right across from him. Ben took the chair next to Matt, whispering, “You look like you’re gonna crack. If you need to leave, the nurse is right down the hall to the right.”

  He didn’t need a nurse, he didn’t need anyone. What he wanted to do was to go back to his room and spend the year there, covered in his blanket and letting himself slowly start to wither away.

  Once the session started, however, Matt was blown away by the things he started to hear. The first one to speak, Gary, told a story that was familiar to him, but he hadn’t quite gotten it before, the depths of the heartbreak felt by the boys and men called The Lost Boys.

  “I felt like trash. Like trash my moms threw out, ya know? Daddy didn’t tell me anything beforehand. I figured we were heading into town for supplies, like always. He always took me with him, I got a strong back. Then he turned off the main road and we drove and drove so far, I didn’t know where I was. Off in the desert, no one around for miles.

  “I…I couldn’t believe when he told me to get out of the truck. I was lookin’ around, trying to see what he could want me to fetch or carry or whatever. I think it hurt him to do it, his voice cracking like he was about to cry, and believe me, my daddy never cried. I got out, still wondering what the heck we could be doin’ there. My birthday was comin’ up, see, so maybe he had a present for me that none of the other kids could see or something.

  “Anyway…anyway, I got out, still kinda excited. Then…then he drove off. I watched him, and not once did he even look in the rearview. He just drove off. I was dumped.”

  One of the others jabbed, “Don’t tell me you never heard that happened.”

  “Sure, I did. But I heard it happened to guys that, you know, hit on the girls that were already betrothed to some other man. I didn’t do that, not once! I found out later it’s ‘cause the prophet saw me smile at one. I smiled at her! Her ‘n me, we were friends since we was kids. Played together all the time. For smiling, I was dumped like trash. I walked for two days to get back, and they held guns in my face, telling me to git. I never thought anything could hurt so bad. In a minute, I’d lost everything. I didn’t know how ta read or write good, never worked except for around the compound. They only schooled us to a point, so we didn’t have diplomas. I got a ride to town from some farmer, and he said I could work for him once in a while, but I’d have to find a way out there, and his place was twenty miles from the town where he dropped me. Said he saw too many of us and couldn’t offer me a place. I was in town, where I’d only gone to once a month or so, to the feed and grocery store and home. I wasn’t allowed to look around or talk to anybody. But there I was, so lost, so scared. I never been scared of nothin’ but my daddy’s belt before. Right then, there wasn’t nothing I wasn’t scared of.”

  “Gary, thank you for sharing, but what did we speak about, using your new classes in your everyday speech?”

  “Oh! Sorry!”

  Matt wanted to yell at Rodrick, tell him to shut up and let the man talk, but he kept quiet. Gary didn’t seem offended by it, so why should he?

  One of the older men spoke, and Matt understood more.

  “I lost them all, and they had every right to go,” he said of his wives after his compound had been raided ten years earlier. “Losing them, losing my kids, all thirteen of ‘em, it cut me deep. It took that, though, to open my eyes. All the things we were told by the prophet, they were lies. All of them, lies on lies, and my wife and kids suffered over them lies. To think, my daughters, three of ‘em, were married to men they didn’t love, didn’t even care for. I can’t ever take that back. Never. My grandkids will never even know my name, one of my boys told me.”

  Hearing them all, story after story. Most were from FLDS compounds like him, but a few were from other cults. They were all the same, though. Mind control, control over their bodies and minds to the point they were little more than flesh and bone walking around, doing as the man at the switch told them.

  Matt didn’t speak. He couldn’t. The more he listened, the tighter his throat became to the point he was finding it hard to breathe. When it was over, an hour later, he could barely get up from the plastic chair. Dr. Rodrick was next to him right away, asking, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he gritted, wanting to get away from there.

  “I think it’s a good time for a one on one.”

  Matt stared at him, gaping. “I just got through this by the skin of my teeth and you want to pick my brain now?”

  Tom’s hand lay on his shoulder, explaining, “What better time to look at the frayed wires than when the casing splits and is open?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, I used to be a journeyman electrician, and I mistakenly use those terms with my doctoring. Come on, follow me to my office.” To Ben, he said, “I’ll escort him back to the room, Ben, thank you.”

  “Sure, Tom.”

  Matt figured he’d have a file, telling him Matt’s story, and would know all of it, or as much as Helen knew, being that she’d set him up to go there. That wasn’t the case. Tom made him tell his story, and he got most of it out, with a lot of prodding. It came out stuttered and incomplete, but at the end, Tom simply smiled at him and said, “You survived, now you have to learn to thrive.”

  “What’s that even mean?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  It went that way a few days. Tom took him to his office after each group, let him talk a little more, preparing him to speak in group. He said sometimes folks needed to learn to talk about it, the thing that was bothering them. He didn’t know how. He’d been taught, as all of them in The Center were, that talking was bad. Listening to the elders, to the prophets, or the cult leaders was all they knew.

  After one private session, the one he confessed to being gay and having a boyfriend, or he hoped he still did, Tom suggested another group that met once a week. It was for the LGBTQ residents of The Center. Matt was hesitant, unwilling to out himself there that early, but Tom told him, “You’d be surprised how many are here.”

  Ben was good to him, backing off when he needed it, and helping him find a room or whatever he needed when Matt would ask.

  Josh was different. He rarely said a word in group, and Matt had no problem with that, he’d yet to share either, but Josh sulked through them, like he did everywhere. They were encouraged to keep a journal, and Matt hadn’t touched his yet, but Josh wrote in his constantly. He’d read for an hour, also encouraged, but it was that journal that got most of his attention. He could be found day and night, bent over the thing on his bed, scribbling away, his tongue out of the side of his mouth as he bit down on it.

  Not that he tried to communicate with him. Matt kept to himself too, staring at the iPod Steve had given him, but not playing it. He thought it would be too hard, hearing the music Steve had loaded. Thinking of him at all hurt too much.

  Then, a month into his stay there, Ben woke him up, shaking him hard. “What the heck?”

  “Matt…he’s…he’s dead. Josh is dead.”

  Matt bolted upright and stared over at Josh’s bed. There he lay, grey skinned and cloudy eyed, eyes that seemed to be staring at the ceiling though Matt knew he wasn’t seeing the white tiles. He got out of bed, standing close to Ben, shivering all over. “Dead? How?”

  His words were on a breath, they were so quiet, and still they boomed in the silent room.

  “I don’t know. I…” Ben didn’t say another word, but turned to leave, and Matt was left there with Josh. It brought back the image of Dean, lying on the cold steel table, unaware they were there, unaware of anything. How he’d hurt that day, seeing Dean there, dead, and the guilt of it. That guilt came screaming back to him, wondering if he could have stopped Josh from dying, if he could have said or done anything to stop it.

  The room was soon crowded with people, nurses, doctors, other residents. Matt was pushed out of
the room by Tom, and Ben pulled him down the hall, headed for the common area outside, where, with shaking hands, he lit two cigarettes and handed one to Matt.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Yeah, well, you might want to start.”

  The first pull of the smoke choked him, the second made him dizzy, but in that dizziness he found calm. Less than half was smoked before he put it out, but he soon craved another, taking one from the pack Ben left on the bench where they sat.

  The day was warm and the breeze warmer. Wherever they were in New York, it was nothing like he’d pictured it. On television, in movies, it was always about the city, so the beautiful countryside didn’t match his expectations.

  It was a perfect day to die, to leave the world, he thought crazily. Josh, gone, only twenty-two years old, and gone. “Did…did he kill himself, Ben?”

  “Probably. He’s tried a few times just since he’s been here. Stole pills from one of the residents, that the resident wasn’t supposed to have. He saw him taking them, so he stole them and thought they were sleeping pills or something. Turns out they were for erectile disfunction,” he said with a little chuckle.

  “Did he get sick?”

  “Oh, yeah, but he had wood for a week after too. It was crazy. That was the last time, and I thought for sure he’d never try it again, just because of the outcome of that.”

  Ben was built like a linebacker and had sunshine blond hair, but his baby face gave away his age. For a nineteen-year-old, he’d seen a lot, and Matt learned more and more in group. “Doesn’t it ever get to you like that? Like…like you’d rather just end it?”

  Thinking Ben might be shocked at the question, he was surprised when he was quickly answered, “Of course.”

  He wasn’t the only one that thought it, but they were both there, alive, on that bench. “I know I don’t talk much, in group not at all. I…I don’t want anyone to know.”

  After a long drag on his cigarette, he let the smoke out as he spoke, “Doubt there’s anyone’s story here that is singular.”

  “Mine…mine probably is.”

  “It’s because you still think you’re special or something. I’m not saying that to be a jerk. We all do. We all have these stories that we’re sure will shock everyone who hears them. The things that were done to us and the things we did, all of them can be brought back to how we were raised, and the things we thought were true. Shoot, one guy here still hustles. He’s not allowed to here at The Center, but he makes no bones about doing it again once he gets out. Says it’s good money, and he’s careful, so he sees nothing wrong with it. It started for him like it did me, not having any other way to survive, but when I found another job, I stopped. He didn’t so much as look for other work.”

  The things they’d all gone through, and became, all because of a religion, a group of other people that believed so strongly, it sickened him more than the cigarettes.

  After Matt finished snuffing out the second one, Ben handed him the rest of the pack and warned, “You’ll hate it, but it’s better than booze or drugs.”

  “Is that what we all become? Drunks, drug addicts, prostitutes, or worse? Even with this year long, or more, therapy?”

  Ben shrugged a shoulder and answered as best he could. “Whatever we become, drugged out losers or suicide victims, is it better than what we came from?”

  Those flashes again, Angela’s young face, turning to him, tears trailing down into her hair, mouth opening in a scream that was cut off with a big hand as it covered her lips, her pleading voice…

  That was what he’d seen in that hospital room, before everything started to bombard him. The screams and the tears, frightened and hurt girls reaching for him to help them. He’d played with them all out in the sand, told stories with them, knew them like sisters.

  Faces breaking in pain, young eyes so red from tears, he couldn’t see the brown or blue or green any longer. Lashes wet, red streaks down pale faces, all of it haunted his every moment. He didn’t have to guess why he’d blocked it from his memories. Something so horrible had no business being remembered.

  There was a special group that afternoon, dealing with the suicide of Ben and Matt’s roommate. Matt had no intention of speaking, really had nothing to say. He listened as a few of the residents as they unloaded their own stories, no one much talking about Josh. There was fear, however, he could hear it in the voices of the men speaking. He could recognize that easily and their voices blended with the fearful sounds that ran through his mind on an agonizing loop.

  They were all worried that they, like Josh, wouldn’t get past the feelings they had deep inside, and those feelings would chase them until they had no choice but to silence them once and for all.

  He was worried about the same.

  Gary cleared his throat as the third to speak sat back in his chair, after pacing for the previous ten minutes. “I guess I’m just sitting here, wondering why we’re sitting here. We all knew this was going to happen.”

  There were general protestations to that, but he went on anyway.

  “Come on, who here didn’t know he was going to off himself? It was so obvious.”

  Matt felt his hackles rising. Sure, he wasn’t close with Josh, barely spoke to him the month he’d been there, but he saw him every day. He slept in the same room as the man, and his own guilt at not knowing, at ignoring his pain, it started to get the better of him.

  “Gary,” Tom reasoned, “there was still a chance for him, if he’d participated more, if he’d opened up a little more. Maybe, instead of writing him off, you can at least see what he did as an example. Open up, participate, share, and don’t keep all of it inside.”

  More anger rose at that, but Matt let his head drop as he leaned over his lap, unwilling to show it.

  “Doctor Tom, we all share, but that doesn’t cure us. Shoot, we share too much sometimes, but I ain’t cured. I never will be, and he didn’t even try. Maybe it’s good he’s gone, and that’s our example. Either get over it or off yourself.”

  That broke it, Matt’s tentative handle on his fury. He stood, shouting, “He was a person! A person that counted, that mattered! You say he didn’t share, so how the hell do you know what he’d been through? Did you ever think it was bad, like really bad, worse than any of us? You writing him off tells the rest of us we don’t fucking count! We don’t matter! We matter! We fucking matter!”

  He left the room swiftly, but he didn’t run. He knew that if he broke into a run, there’d be no stopping him. The running would go on and on until he ran himself to death.

  He got to his room, slamming the door, wishing they had locks on them. As he started for his own bed, he turned to Josh’s, that was currently nothing but a bare mattress and box springs on a cheap metal frame.

  Before he knew he would, he went to that bed, so like Josh. Bare, down to nothing but what was underneath the frills and disguises of the sheets, blankets. This was Josh, stained, worn, but still worth something, even if he was only to give a little comfort for someone else. Josh hadn’t seen that, though. He hadn’t seen his worth, like Matt found it so hard to find his own. He was loved on the outside, wanted, and he couldn’t fathom why most of the time.

  Josh’s things had been collected and were in a box by that bed. Matt sat on the edge of the mattress, staring down into the box. A scattering of clothes, toiletries, a pair of gloves for winter, a pair of sunglasses for summer. There was nothing more to tell the world who he was, and what his story may have been.

  That’s when his eye caught the journal. Nothing but a spiral notebook, the cover creased, and half torn at the binding. He reached for it, knowing he was about to invade the private thoughts of another person, but unable to stop himself.

  The cover opened, he read the first page, which was one simple sentence. Make it stop.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The third time he’d seen the shadow outside, he knew he wasn’t imagining things, not paranoid. He had his gun cocked and ready, but al
l the intruder did was rattle the knob, then step off the porch.

  He went out after him, but whoever it was, was gone.

  On the phone with Charlie later, he explained what he was seeing, and Charlie took him very seriously. “Get the hell out of that house. You’re secluded, you have to sleep sometime, and they’re after you. They know about you, Steve.”

  He’d thought the same. They’d effectively taken down the sex trade of a minor cartel who’d been looking to go to the big leagues, and the supplier of the girls. He wasn’t popular among the lawless, and the worst part was that they knew where he lived.

  Charlie sent a few men to get him the following day, and he met he and Stacy at the airport, taking their offer to help. The apartment they shared was a comical mix of the two of them, messy, like Stacy, filled with the equipment of her profession, and then there was Charlie’s favorite collectable, a jersey of his favorite quarterback in a dustless frame over the mantle, and a neat stack of mail in a basket marked with his name.

  He sat on their sectional sofa, spilling out what had happened. Stacy, with her fiery temper, cussed throughout it all, but offered at the end, “Come work for me. We work well together, we’ve got informants inside the feds now-”

  “What the hell? Stacy!”

  Charlie was not thrilled with her calling him an informant, but Steve wanted to laugh at his shock and Stacy’s little smirk.

  “There’s no way I’m moving to Washington.”

  “Good, because I’m not asking you to. Charlie got some news while we were all running around in New Mexico. Seems he got a promotion.”

  Steve stuck out his hand for Charlie to shake and asked, “That’s great, buddy! Well deserved!”

  “He’s running his own field office. Nothing fancy, of course, but a promotion nonetheless.”

  “Where? Tell me about it.”

  Charlie’s blush was adorable, and he chided Stacy, “No one was supposed to know yet, dear.”

  “Like Steve is gonna blab,” she said, brushing off Charlie’s concerns. To Steve, she said, “San Antonio. I have a friend that lives close, and he just so happens to be living with your man’s cousin.”