Next Stop Love, #1

by Rachel Stockbridge

  “We didn’t know what to do with them,” Nath said, shifting one of the vases in the foyer aside with his shoe so he could set Beatrice’s overnight bag on the floor. “I thought we should chuck ’em, but Dad said you should get the final say.” Frowning, he poked around in the blooms until he found a small white envelope. “Here. Three guesses who they’re from.”

  Beatrice let out a shallow breath and took the card from him. She didn’t need three guesses. There weren’t too many people in her life who would try to suffocate her with over-the-top, expensive gestures like this.

  She tore open the envelope with shaking fingers.

  Please give me another chance, Beatrice. This wasn’t how anything was supposed to go. I know you don’t believe me, but I love you. I want to make this work. Let me see you. Please.

  - G

  A strange sound escaped Beatrice’s throat. Somewhere between a high, humorless laugh and a yelp.

  He’d terrorized her in front of her own home, spat curses in her face, and might have struck her if a neighbor hadn’t interrupted . . . and she was supposed to get over it. Let it go like it had been some minor disagreement. Like she was still overreacting about some stupid dress.

  “Oh . . . go to hell!” she snapped, tearing the note in half.

  “Beatrice?”

  She looked up. Joyce and Mike stood frozen inside the doorway, gaping at her. Like neither of them had ever heard the word ‘hell’ before.

  Heat flooded Beatrice’s cheeks. Everyone kept treating her like a delicate piece of china, perched on the edge of a high shelf. Like if they so much as breathed in the wrong direction, she would fall and break.

  But they were too late. She’d already shattered. And the shards she was left with scraped the inside of her skin. Trying to keep it all in was tearing her apart.

  “I can’t—” She slapped the pieces of Greyson’s note on the table, trying to find something to look at that didn’t make her want to scream. The furniture and clutter and all the idiotic flowers were closing in on her. Even the walls seemed too close. “I can’t—”

  “Are you all right, sweetheart?” Mike asked, in the nervous tone they’d all adopted whenever they spoke to her.

  It was too much. That last, well-meaning question pushed pressure levels to critical. She let out a frustrated, strangled scream and burst into tears.

  Beatrice’s personal fleet of helicopters sprang into action, trapping her in a whirlwind of comforting hands and soothing voices that only made it harder to breathe.

  “Would you all just stop?” Beatrice cried, tearing herself away from them. “Just let me—” Half-blind with tears, she stumbled over one of the garish flower arrangements on the floor, knocking it over. Water soaked into the living room rug, leaves and petals scattering across the floor. “Dammit!”

  Sunny zipped out from under the coffee table to the back of the couch and stared at the scene with wide, scandalized eyes. Even her cat was appalled with her.

  “Honeybee—” Joyce began, catching Beatrice’s sleeve before she could start cleaning up.

  “And stop calling me that!” Beatrice sobbed, spinning around to face her mom. “You only call me that when you’re pretending you give a crap about me, and I’m sick and tired of everyone pretending they give a crap about me!”

  Joyce rocked back, as though Beatrice had physically pushed her. “Hon—Beatrice, you know we care about you. We all do.”

  Beatrice let out a strangled sob, curling her arms around her middle like the lie had cut her open again. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, you don’t. You put up with me because I never cause any trouble, and I never have any feelings, and the rest of you need a referee for your ridiculous sparring matches!”

  “Bee—”

  “When have you ever cared what I’m doing when I’m not in mortal peril?” she went on, refusing to acknowledge the hurt expressions on her family’s faces. She couldn’t hold all her broken pieces inside any longer. They tore through her skin like shrapnel, and she didn’t care who else got cut. “You never ask me about school, or work, or if I’m handling things okay on my own. And I’m not. I can’t handle everything by myself. I’m drowning. I’m drowning, Mom. And no one even notices. No one cares.”

  “But we do care, baby,” Joyce said, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “How can you say that? We love you.”

  Beatrice choked on another scream. The words—we love you—tore at her heart. The only time she ever heard them was when someone wanted her to shut up, or stop fighting, or swallow everyone else’s guilt in the interest of peace. No one actually meant it. No one ever meant it. And Beatrice could prove it.

  She marched into her room and threw open the closet door.

  “Beatrice?” Joyce ventured, following her into the room. “What are you doing?”

  Beatrice didn’t answer. She shifted a box out of the way—ignoring her mom’s anxious reminder that she wasn’t supposed to do any heavy lifting—and dropped to her knees to dig into the box underneath.

  “Beatrice, honey . . .” Joyce tried again, hovering in the doorway.

  The cards were shoved down at the very bottom of the box. Thirteen in total, all in their original envelopes, addressed to Beatrice in block letters.

  She stood and shoved the multicolored envelopes at Joyce.

  Her mother stared at her for a moment before she took the cards. Mike had come to stand at her shoulder. Nath poked his head through the door, watching the scene with wide puppy-dog eyes that Beatrice couldn’t meet, afraid guilt would overwhelm her.

  Joyce turned the envelopes over in her hands, a sharp line between her eyebrows. “What are these?”

  “Birthday cards. Christmas cards.” Beatrice dashed a rogue tear off her cheek. “You said they were from my birth dad, but I know it was you. I know you wrote them. You didn’t even bother to send them out of a different postal code.”

  Joyce covered her mouth with her hand, eyes still on the envelopes. “Bee . . .”

  “I’m not a kid,” Beatrice said. “You can quit lying. I know you only sent me those so I’d stop bringing everyone down with my stupid feelings. I know you hate it that I remind you of when you were with Frank. I know—” She choked on the words, but forced them out anyway. “I know you would have rather I was never born.”

  “Oh—God, honey, no,” Joyce said, sliding the cards on Beatrice’s desk and gingerly touching her shoulders. “That isn’t true at all.”

  Beatrice pulled out of her reach, shaking her head. “Then why did you send them, if you didn’t just want to shut me up?”

  Mike cursed under his breath, rubbing his jaw. “It wasn’t your mom’s idea, sweetheart. It was mine.”

  Beatrice felt dizzy. All her life, she’d known that her step-dad had serious issues with the way Frank treated Joyce when they were married. But there must have been a tiny piece of Beatrice that still hoped Mike didn’t hold it against her, because the admission hurt. She gasped in some air and sat down hard at the foot of her bed. “God. Did you hate me that much?”

  “What? No!” Mike said, pulling out her desk chair and sitting across from her. “Are you kidding? You’re my little girl. I love you just as much as if we shared the same blood. I’d do anything for you. Those cards weren’t supposed to shut you up, they were . . .” Mike scrubbed his hand over his jaw again. “You don’t know what it was like, watching you hurting. You were a sweet little kid. You should’ve been happy about presents and cake and all that, and instead you’d cry and cry. It didn’t matter what we said, you were convinced that lowlife didn’t love you because you’d done something wrong.”

  Beatrice pulled her knees up to her chest, hiding her face in her arms and trying not to sob. She couldn’t deal with this. She couldn’t tell whether Mike was lying. Part of her wanted him to be lying. She couldn’t take any more heartbreak.

  “It killed me, seeing you like that,” Mike said, gripping her wrist. “If I could’ve knocked some sense into
him, I would have, but we didn’t even know where he was half the time. There was nothing I could do to make Frank a better father to you, and you needed proof that it wasn’t your fault. I didn’t know how else to give it to you.” He moved his hand to Beatrice’s shoulder, squeezing lightly. “Maybe it was a mistake. I didn’t know you kept them. I didn’t know you thought . . .” His voice wavered, and he stopped to clear his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said gruffly. “I never wanted to hurt you, sweetheart. Never.”

  Beatrice couldn’t answer. There was no reason to doubt anything Mike said, but . . . Believing her parents secretly wished she didn’t exist had turned into armor. It kept her safe from being hurt by the truth.

  But if she was wrong about the truth, that belief hadn’t been protecting her at all. It was armor that was rusted and too small. More like a cage that kept her bruised and bleeding and deprived of oxygen.

  She didn’t know what to do about that. Cage or not, she had been convinced it made her safe. She didn’t know how to leave it behind.

  “How long have you been sitting on this, Bee?” Joyce asked, perching on the bed next to her. She stayed far enough away that they didn’t touch, probably wary from the last couple times Beatrice had jerked away from her.

  “Pretty much since I figured it out,” Beatrice hiccuped, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. “Maybe before. Everyone always used to get so angry when Frank came up in conversation. And no one would talk about why he left, it was just . . . he was awful and he treated you badly, and it . . . it seemed like everyone wanted to forget he even existed. And I thought—since he was my dad—maybe you wanted to forget me, too.”

  Joyce bit her lips together like she was struggling not to cry. She wrapped her arms around Beatrice and held her tight. “No, baby. No, no, no. I’m so sorry. I should have made sure we talked about Frank a long time ago. But you stopped asking about him, and I guess I thought it didn’t bother you anymore.” She pulled back and smoothed Beatrice’s hair. “Wishful thinking on my part, I guess.”

  “What do you mean?” Beatrice hugged her knees tighter, trying to resist the temptation to retreat back into the painful familiarity of her cage by assuring her mom there was no need to talk about him at all. She didn’t know how else to protect herself from whatever horrible story she was about to hear. “Talk about him how?”

  Joyce took a long breath. “Frank was . . . a troubled man. He had some mental health issues that he didn’t cope with very well. He tended to self-medicate. Mostly alcohol. And then it was marijuana. And then he started getting into harder stuff. I didn’t even notice it at first. I thought his mood swings were a reaction to stress. We’d gotten married less than a year before, and I was pregnant with you a few months after that . . .”

  She stopped and pressed her lips together. “I should have left as soon as I realized he was shooting up. But I was scared of being a single parent, and I didn’t know where to go. Part of me kept hoping that he’d get himself together once you were born.

  “I think he tried,” Joyce went on, meeting Beatrice’s eyes. “I think he wanted to get clean and sober for you. He went to a few meetings. Seemed dedicated to getting it together. But it just . . . didn’t take. He slipped. And I should have noticed. But I didn’t. I didn’t, and I still want to kick myself for not realizing in time.”

  “Why?” Beatrice asked. “What happened?”

  Joyce swallowed, gripping her hands together in her lap. “You were about six months old. It was late, and we couldn’t get you to go to sleep. So Frank took you out for a drive. The motion of the car usually got you to drift off.

  “Only—he was gone too long. Over an hour went by and . . . nothing. Neither of us had a cell phone back then, so I couldn’t call him. I was about to borrow a neighbor’s car to go out and look for you when the police called and said you were both . . . both in the hospital. Frank had run the car off the road.”

  Beatrice’s mind skipped back, trying to dig up some memory of the event. It seemed like the kind of thing she should remember, even if she was only a baby. Traumatic car accidents weren’t things people just forgot, right? But all she could come up with was dead air.

  “You were fine except for some bruising where your car seat got you,” Joyce said, smoothing down Beatrice’s hair like she wanted to assure herself that no lasting harm had been done. “That was a blessing. Frank got the worst of it. Whiplash, a broken wrist . . . plus a .17 blood alcohol level, and heroin in his system. The police found more heroin in the glove compartment, and a bottle of vodka under the driver’s seat. Frank never admitted to it, but they were pretty sure he’d taken you with him to meet his dealer. And then the son of a bitch got high before driving you home.”

  Joyce’s nostrils flared, her mouth set in a hard line. “I was livid. I would’ve killed him if he hadn’t already been arrested by the time they told me what he’d done. If he was going to risk your life because he couldn’t stay clean, I wanted nothing to do with him. I didn’t want either of us to have anything to do with him. He could have killed you, and I just wanted to put him behind us. So I filed a restraining order on your behalf that night, and I filed for divorce, and I packed us up and moved us in with my sister.”

  “Is that why he never called? Because of the restraining order?”

  “Well . . .” Joyce exchanged a guilty look with Mike.

  “He did call a few times,” Mike said. “Right around the time your mom and I got married. Kept saying he had a right to see his daughter. I wasn’t too happy about it, but we took you to a park to meet him once. You probably don’t remember. You’d only just turned two. It . . . ah . . .” He huffed out a breath, tapping one finger harder against his knee. “It didn’t go well.”

  “Frank was still an addict,” Joyce said. “He was twitchy. Kept hinting he was strapped for cash. Then he bumped into you by accident and you scraped your knee and started crying.”

  A dusty memory came to Beatrice as she spoke, of blinding sun and a stinging knee, and Mike arguing with someone while her mom whisked her back to the car.

  “That was the last straw,” Joyce went on. “We cut him off for good after that.”

  “Because we loved you and we wanted to protect you,” Mike put in, scrubbing Beatrice’s arm. “Never because we blamed you in any way for Frank’s behavior.”

  “You were the bright spot in my life when I was with Frank,” Joyce said, gathering Beatrice into her arms. “You were the reason I found the strength to get out of there. I have never, for a single second, regretted having you. Okay?”

  Beatrice managed a small nod. She needed time to process all this new information before she could accept it. She’d been wearing that old armor for so long that she’d grown into the shape of it. She didn’t know how long it would take to rid herself of the imprints and scars it had left on her.

  “I’m so sorry I didn’t notice you were suffering,” Joyce said. “You’ve always been so responsible and independent. I guess we let you fall by the wayside, didn’t we?”

  “It’s okay,” Beatrice said, feeling guilty for how she’d shouted at everyone.

  “No, it isn’t. I should’ve paid better attention. I don’t know what any of us would do without you.”

  “Probably kill each other,” Nath said. He was still only half inside the room, his arms crossed. “Because of sadness,” he added when both Mike and Joyce shot him reproving looks. “What? You think we’d all three magically start dealing with our feelings like emotionally mature adults? Not a chance.”

  “Nath,” Mike scolded.

  But Beatrice laughed wetly. “Come here,” she said, beckoning Nath over.

  Nath dragged his feet across the room and then jumped on the bed behind Beatrice. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and squeezed.

  “Are we okay?” Mike asked. “Do you want to keep talking?”

  Beatrice shook her head. “We’re okay. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Mike said.


  “You’re allowed to fly off the handle sometimes,” Nath said, dropping his chin on her shoulder. “If you can’t scream at your family, who can you scream at?”

  “I love you, Honeybee,” Joyce said, joining the hug. “You know that, right?”

  Beatrice still felt raw and bruised, but for the first time in years, she didn’t let herself listen to the knee-jerk reaction in her head that heard I love you and thought lie. She set that thought aside and cautiously, experimentally, accepted the words without question.

  Nothing bad happened. The world didn’t end. Her heart didn’t break. She felt like someone had opened a window and let in a warm breeze.

  Beatrice took a deep breath, put an arm around her mom, and pulled her dad into the hug, as well. “I love you, too.”

  Twenty-Six

  The morning after Beatrice was released from the hospital, Kinsey drove her back down to the city. The police had asked Beatrice to go over her original statement at the station when she was feeling up to it. She probably should have put it off another few days, but she welcomed an excuse to steal a few hours away from her little band of helicopters. Even if she wasn’t perpetually frustrated with them anymore.

  Beatrice spent much of the drive sleeping. She was still doing a lot of that, even though she was trying to only take her pain meds before she went to bed. She woke up halfway over the Harlem River to Selena Gomez and a white mocha latte, which Kinsey must have stopped for while Beatrice was asleep.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to take you straight to Sasha’s?” Kinsey asked as she edged the car onto FDR Drive.

  “I’m okay,” Beatrice croaked, rubbing her eyes. She pulled her seat up and took a sip of coffee. It was warm and felt nice in her hands. “I think I can manage sitting in a chair for twenty minutes without dropping dead.”