Thaddeus (Heartbreakers & Troublemakers Book 2)

by Hope Hitchens

  “They’re at school. It’s a weekday.”

  This was the part where she should have realized that of course the children were at school. Schools the country over were opening for the fall. She should have asked what school they had ended up going to and whether they were enjoying it. Where was it? What was their arts program like? What was their sports program like? She asked none of those.

  “Who’s picking them up?”

  “I am. If I can’t, I have someone who can do it.”

  “That naked guy who answered the door when I came over?”

  I narrowed my eyes at her. She was going to sit there and judge me. Was she really? Because there wasn’t a laundry list of things I could justifiably judge her about?

  “I know you aren’t sitting there trying to criticize me. Have you forgotten how it is that the kids came under my care in the first place?”

  “I could have told you when I came over but-”

  “But you decided to make your kids cry instead. This isn’t about me. It’s about you, and it’s about them. What the hell were you thinking leaving them alone like that?”

  “I didn’t mean to do it.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you meant. In the end, you did it. You left two seven-year-old children in a locked house on their own the whole day without telling them where you were going or telling anybody else that they were there. You told them you went out for cigarettes. Cigarettes.”

  She was silent.

  “Do you know what your son said to me? He asked whether cigarettes were more important to you than he and Nikki.”

  “You can’t believe that that’s true.”

  “Then what is?”

  “I was seeing this guy. I really liked him, but I found out along the way that he was a dealer. I stayed with him.”

  “You started using?”

  “It wasn’t supposed to get that serious,” she said, answering and not answering the question at the same time.

  “Using what?”

  She was quiet again. Marijuana did not make you forget your children were in the house on their own. Marijuana didn’t make you abandon your kids to live with your dealer boyfriend.

  “Should I guess or are you going to tell me?”

  She didn’t say it. My mind immediately went to the worst of the worst.

  “Is it an injectable or are you snorting it?”

  “It’s pain pills, all prescription. Nothing gross,” she said. Like that was better. She left them because she was blasted on Oxycodone. It wasn’t meth, but it was still a fucking drug.

  “Are you still using?” I asked her.

  “I’m trying to stop.”

  “You need to contact us again when you have stopped.”

  “I think having the kids with me will be good. It will keep me busy, so I don’t want to use.”

  This was one of those times, like when I had had to choose the school where the kids would go to out of the three in the Peninsula school district. I had to make a decision about Nikki and Christopher’s lives, namely, whether or not they should be able to see their mother.

  “I can’t let you do that, and I think you know why,” I said. “My job now is to take care of them. You proved once that you couldn’t do that and the last time you came, you made them cry. You think they should be with you, but I think they need to be with their mother, and that is not who you can be for them right now.”

  I couldn’t imagine how much she must have hated me. Who was I? Some little young bitch with no kids of her own and a failed marriage telling her she was an unfit mother. But it wasn’t her feelings I had to prioritize; it was the kids and their feelings.

  “I can’t believe you would do this to me.”

  “I have to do this—for them. If you ever want to be in a position again when you can have them, you need to prove it. You need to seek whatever help you need to seek and get your life together. When Bart comes back from his deployment, maybe you two can talk, but until then, you have to earn it.”

  There wasn’t much left to say after that. She picked at her food when it came, and she didn’t offer to pay or split the bill, which was fine. I didn’t care. All I wanted was the stipulated amount of time to elapse, so I could go back to the house and see the kids. I would have to tell them something about why their mom wouldn’t be seeing them for a while.

  Kids were adaptable and resilient, but I didn’t want this to be the sort of thing that haunted them and made them untrusting or unstable as adults. I had received a text message from Thad saying they were at Bart’s house and not at his. I didn’t know what to expect, but I had a suspicion that I wouldn’t find them doing their homework.

  I walked into the house and checked the dining room for them where they would usually sit with glasses of juice or milk to do their homework. They weren’t there. I walked into the living room and saw the kids lying on the ground with their pencils in hand and worksheets in front of them. Nikki was reading out loud from her sheet while Thad sat between them cross-legged. I smiled looking at him. I didn’t even know his body could fold down that way.

  I greeted them and gave the kids hugs and kisses.

  “I honestly thought I’d find you guys watching television,” I told Thad, kneeling onto the ground next to him. I kissed him.

  “You’re gonna have to start trusting me one of these days,” he said to me. He put his arm around me and pulled me into his side.

  Nikki had stopped reading, and both of the kids were looking at the two of us.

  “What are you looking at?” Thad asked them, in a mock-menacing tone. The kids giggled and looked at each other before turning their attention back to their work.

  “Have you guys had a snack? I’ll make something, and you guys can come eat when it’s done.” I got up, tugging Thad’s arm so he would come with me. I pounced on him the second we got to the kitchen, wrapping my arms around his neck and parting my lips to feel his tongue inside my mouth.

  “Mm, was the snack for me or is it for the kids?” he asked. I smiled and kissed him again.

  “I can’t be happy to see you?”

  He followed me to the counter where I started slicing apples and slathering them with peanut butter and chopped almonds.

  “How was the talk with Laurie?”

  “Not great. She’s on drugs. That was why she left them. She’s taken up with some dealer.”

  “What, like heroin? Meth?”

  “Pain pills.” He frowned a little.

  “So, we won’t be seeing her around for a while, I suppose.”

  “You suppose right.”

  The kids walked in and descended on the apple slices, not bothering to take the plate with them to the table. Thad was right behind me; he kissed my temple. One of his arms was around my waist.

  “Thad?” asked Chris.

  “Yes, Christopher?”

  “When you and Aunt Ron get married, do we have to call you ‘Uncle Thad’?”

  The answer, of course, was yes, but I kept quiet and looked back at Thad. He didn’t look surprised or mad. He looked amused.

  “Yeah. You will,” he said.

  “When are you guys going to have babies?” Nikki asked.

  “Guys, I talked to your mom today,” I said, seeing Thad about to answer her question.

  “Is she coming back?”

  “Your mom… is going to come back but she can’t come back right now.”

  “Why? Is she sick?” Chris asked.

  “Yeah. She’s sick. She needs to get better before she comes back.”

  The kids were quiet, munching on their apple slices.

  “How long is it going to take for her to come back?” Chris asked.

  “I don’t know, it might take long, or it might just take a short while. Why?”

  “Do you have to leave when she comes back?”

  “Is she going to take us back to the old house?” Nikki added.

  “I’m not going anywhere, sweetie. You aren’t going back to
Berkeley.”

  “I like living here,” she announced. I smiled. She was home.

  “I like living here too,” I said. I felt Thad’s hand on my back and sighed. I really liked living here.

  It was home for me too.

  24

  Thaddeus

  It was just like when she had had the D&C, all over again. It was like that but worse this time.

  She kept saying it wasn’t a big deal; it wasn’t like she was having open heart surgery. Here was the problem with that statement; it didn’t matter. It was still surgery, and on that alone, something could go wrong. Anything could go wrong. She could hemorrhage, she could react badly to the general anesthetic, they might fuck up and snip something they weren’t supposed to, the doctor could choose her surgery to show up to drunk. The grim possibilities were endless.

  She had done this more than me. I could accept that. It was just true. I didn’t have a uterus and the rest of the stuff down there, but quite frankly, I was mad about how cavalier she seemed about all of this. She and her uterus had seen some hard times. She had had that miscarriage, then that other miscarriage, then that thing that was the continuation of her second miscarriage that hadn’t miscarried all the way.

  And, then she had had that D&C where they had cleaned her out like a stag’s head before you taxidermied it. I could see why she was, what, like jaded at this point but she needed to understand. I didn’t like the thought of someone poking holes in her for any reason. Fertility-related or not.

  I hadn’t had surgery before where I had to be put under, not even my wisdom teeth or anything. I’d had a friend of mine, a colleague during my first deployment working for Constellis, tell me to bite down on a strip of leather while he dug a piece of shrapnel out of my leg once. That had been fun. Then there was that other time back in the SEALs when one of my teammates, Bart actually, had had to stitch this cut I’d gotten in my side. I had kicked the shit out of him so bad he’d had to get two other guys to hold me down, so I’d stay still.

  Maybe when he was back from deployment, he and I could tell the kids. After he had beaten me up for getting with his sister, and after he had categorically told me, and told me again not to do that.

  No. Technically he had said he hadn’t wanted me dating her, and she didn’t like that word. If that defense didn’t fly, there was the one that I was in love with her, and we were planning a family.

  That was an overstatement; we weren’t planning a family. We were having unprotected sex and in the event of pregnancy, would just go with the flow. She was actively trying to get pregnant. I was actively doing things to her that would get her pregnant.

  It had to mean something that I loved her. He wouldn’t beat me up over falling for his sister. She would say something, right? He couldn’t be mad, not when he came back home and saw what a good job I had done at keeping his family happy.

  We would deal with Bart when the time to do that came. Right now, I was freaking out.

  Her surgery was at three in the afternoon. Who the fuck had surgery at three in the afternoon? She hadn’t had food since the night before, and now the doctors were going to stick her full of holes and put a bunch of machines inside her. I swear she elected for an afternoon surgery so I wouldn’t be there. It was probably better this way because I would have already done something to make the doctors mad, like demand to be in the room while they did it like she was delivering a baby or something.

  She had me doing the school run, picking the kids up and taking them home until it was time to go and get her. That was the plan that we had agreed on, but she should have known by now that that was just not going to fly.

  Me? Go to the house when she was in the hospital being vivisected? The fuck I would. I pulled into a parking spot at the kids’ school and got out, scanning the crowd of kids for them.

  I saw Nikki, then Chris coming towards the truck. They had both gotten into the habit of hugging me when they saw me, which was awkward at first, but they were kids; I wasn’t going to make them feel bad for being nice people. They were good kids. I liked them. They had been a big part of the reason why Veronica’s admission of wanting children so badly hadn’t scared me away.

  They got strapped in, and I started the car.

  “How was school?” I asked them.

  “We have to practice multiplication when we get home,” Chris said wearily. “Mrs. Foster gave us three worksheets to do for English,” he complained.

  “I thought you were good at English,” I said to him.

  “No, I’m good at English. Chris got fourteen out of twenty on our spelling test,” Nikki said.

  “What did you get?”

  “I got everything right,” she said proudly.

  “That means you can help your brother,” I said.

  We had done this before, the kids and I. It was under different circumstances, but all the major details were the same. We were in the car, on the way to the hospital to see their aunt and I was shitting bricks from the anxiety, just like last time.

  They knew she was in the hospital, so they weren’t hysterical like the last time. She had told them that she was going to have surgery, and they had spent time asking her what it was for and things like that, so they wouldn’t be worried.

  The plan had been to take them home, so they could do their homework and then go to the hospital and pick her up. She must not have known me very well because if she thought I was going to leave her there alone after she had just had surgery, she had another fucking thing coming.

  “I hope you guys aren’t hungry,” I said to the twins.

  “Why?” asked Nikki.

  “We’re going to the hospital. Your aunt is there, remember. Her surgery was today.”

  “She said she wanted us to do our homework at home first,” Nikki reminded me.

  “Yeah, I remember,” I said, driving towards the hospital.

  “We’ll get in trouble if we don’t have it done,” she said.

  “Your aunt’s going to be really sore and want to see you after her surgery. I’m sure your teachers will understand.” They were a lot more relaxed that day, thankfully. There was probably like, a waiting room where they could have done their homework as they waited. They could eat Snickers bars from the vending machines if they got hungry.

  Once we were at the hospital, there was no saying when we would actually be able to go and see her. It was supposed to be quick, under half an hour if everything was gravy, but it could take longer if everything wasn’t.

  We had gotten there at twenty minutes to four, the time we finally got to see her was close to five. The kids had finished their homework, eaten snacks and drained half the juice in my phone battery before we could go see her.

  I was freaking out. I was just waiting to see her, and my heart was pounding like it was me getting the procedure done. The nurse who led us to the room warned us that she would be in a lot of pain and that she wouldn’t be able to move by herself; she would need a wheelchair when we were ready to go.

  “Have you guys been trying long to have more kids?” she asked me.

  “We have,” I said. It became less of a lie every time I said it. When people would talk about her like we were a couple, there was nothing to correct them about anymore. At this point, we were fucking with the intention of eventually getting something out of it. A baby.

  I had told her she would have one, and I was serious.

  We pushed the door open and saw her lying on her back, sipping water through a straw. A nurse was helping her sit up. She stopped the kids when she saw them try and get up on the bed.

  “No, it’s okay. Just let them,” Veronica said hoarsely. The nurse directed them not to touch her anywhere on her torso because that was where the incisions were. The word made me feel sick. The kids sat on the bed on either side of her legs. She asked them how school was.

  Did she ever stop? She could drop the super-aunt thing now of all times, and nobody would even blame her for it. I slowly walked up
to her. I should have brought something, like flowers, or whatever. I didn’t do this very often. I was shitty at this whole boyfriend thing. She smiled when she saw me. I kissed her gently. She took my hand and held it.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked her.

  “My stomach really hurts, but I’m okay,” she said. She sounded like she had eaten a pound of sand; like her throat hurt her to talk.

  “I wanted to come in earlier before you woke up, so you wouldn’t have to wake up alone,” I said to her.

  “It was okay. It was fine. The nurses were really nice. They got it all out.”

  “Are you happy?” I asked.

  She inhaled deeply.

  “They said I might be able to have a baby,” she said. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “That’s great news,” I said.

  “Thank you so much, Thaddeus,” she said.

  “Thanks for what? I want the baby too. This surgery was for me. I’m not doing this so I can see you get pregnant with some other guy’s kid,” I told her. She laughed and coughed a little holding her stomach.

  “Don’t make me laugh; I’ll pop my incisions.”

  “Did you need surgery because you’re having a baby?” Nikki asked.

  “The surgery was to help me have a baby, sweetie. A cousin for you and Chris,” she told her. The nurse who had been there before returned and instructed the kids off the bed. She was free to leave. She would need at least two weeks of recovery time, during which she would have to go back for a checkup with her doctor. The children were very excited at the idea of a new baby, Nikki especially. I was too, but I was a little better at hiding it.

  “This picture, the doctor said this was my left fallopian tube. The thing over there attaching the two walls was an adhesion; they had to take it out.”

  I looked at the picture Veronica was explaining to me. It was on her phone, and she had zoomed it in so I could see the thing that was attaching the two walls. We had spent a lot of time together. A lot. I had told her things I had never told anyone else but this, this was a whole new level of bonding. Her doctor had let her have some of the images from her laparoscopy, and she was showing them to me. I couldn’t imagine why she thought I wanted to see them, but there we were.