The Secret That Intervened

by Lisa Marie Stum

  Peyton and Matt each grabbed me from underneath a shoulder, pulling me back.

  I had so much adrenaline flowing through me that I was able to drag both of them with me as I rushed toward JT again. They sure in the hell weren’t about to stop me. They might have had my arms, but I had my legs, and I also had no mercy. I landed two kicks into the sides of his body before Matt and Peyton were able to pull me back again.

  “YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!” I spit and screamed at him.

  “YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!”

  “YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!”

  “She’s lying, man. She’s lying,” JT said as he held the sleeve of his shirt to his nose to catch the blood. His eye was swollen shut and he had a knot above his eye that was oozing blood.

  “Oh my God! What the hell is going on?” Taylor shrieked, with her mouth gaping, staring in disbelief. She placed her hand over her mouth. My head whipped back toward JT.

  Peyton had my arms pulled behind me in a tight grip and Matt had his hands on my chest to prevent me from rushing forward. As I caught my breath and gained my second wind I screamed, “He raped Hailey.”

  Peyton released my arms and Matt got out of my way. I rushed toward JT and kicked him until his body went limp. He didn’t deserve to fight like a man, since he behaved like an animal. Peyton pulled me off of him again.

  “Dude, get him outside before Cody kills him,” Peyton said to Matt.

  Matt wrapped his arms underneath JT’s shoulders and dragged him out the door. A trail of blood followed behind.

  Taylor picked up the phone that had flown out of JT’s hand when I attacked him and placed it in her coat pocket. She followed behind Matt. I assumed she was checking on JT to make sure he wasn’t dead.

  I walked in circles, with my head in my hands, attempting to shake off the adrenaline. I would kill him if I didn’t calm myself down.

  Peyton got the metal folding chairs from behind the drum set and set them up in the middle of the studio.

  “Dude, take a seat. You need to chill out,” he said as he got two beers and a water out of the mini-fridge.

  I sat down.

  Some of the blood had dried to the side of my face. Droplets of blood continued to fall but I ignored them.

  Peyton looked to the doorway, “He alive?”

  “Who gives a shit. Matt said he was breathing as I passed them by,” Taylor responded.

  Peyton handed me a water bottle and told me to drink it before the beer. I gulped it down and then threw the plastic bottle onto the floor. Taylor sat her medical kit on a chair and then went to the refrigerator and grabbed me another bottle. My throat was dry and exhaustion built within my body as the adrenaline wore off.

  “Thanks,” I said as I took it from her hand.

  Taylor pulled a chair next to me and grabbed my chin, turning my face to her. She studied the cut on my forehead and then retrieved some gauze and tape from the kit and bandaged the wound. “It’s not too bad, but you’re going to end up with a nasty scar if you don’t get stitches.” She pulled out some antiseptic wipes and cleaned the blood up off of my face. She grabbed my hand and looked at my knuckles. They were swollen and bloody and hurt pretty bad. “You broke two of your knuckles.”

  I snatched my hand back and said, “Don’t care. Least of my concerns right now.” A hurt look came over her face, and I regretted being such an ass. “Thanks for bandaging me up, Taylor.”

  She nodded at me and gave me an understanding look. “I’m going to call Hailey,” she said as she stood up and walked out the door.

  “What the hell happened?” Peyton asked.

  “I went into her house and read her diary while she was at work.” Another wave of anger overcame me.

  Peyton took a swig of his beer and nodded his head slightly as he absorbed what I was saying.

  “I thought it was Jason at first that did it. When she told me it was JT, I remembered how he had left early that night.”

  Taylor walked back in. “She’s not answering,” she said.

  “It’s because she’s drinking,” I said.

  “What are you talking about?” Taylor asked.

  “She’s got a problem. That time the two of you went out wasn’t her first time.”

  “You should have told me,” Taylor said.

  I placed my elbows on my knees, dangling my beer from my hand between them.

  Taylor and Peyton were sitting across from me. Taylor pulled JT’s phone out of her pocket.

  “It’s not locked,” Taylor said, shooting me a glance. “The last text in here is from Erin.” She swiped the phone; it looked like she was scrolling through a conversation.

  “I’ll bring the money to the next show.” Taylor’s brows furrowed, and she tapped her finger on the phone. When she looked back up at me, her eyes were filled with horror. The phone slipped from her hand, and she crouched to the ground, shaking and crying.

  Peyton picked up the phone and shook his head at me with a repulsed look on his face.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Peyton searched for the words, scratching his head, hesitating to tell me. “It’s nothing you want to see.”

  “It’s a picture of JT on top of Hailey and they are both naked,” Taylor whispered as she ran her finger underneath her eye.

  “It’s a mirror shot,” Taylor continued. “His face is clearly in the picture.”

  Peyton searched through the phone.

  I went to stand up, pretty certain I was going to fucking kill him.

  “Sit down, dude. Last thing anyone needs right now is for you to get a lifetime sentence. It’s not going to help anything right now. You won’t be any help to Hailey if you’re in jail.”

  I planted my ass back in the chair, trying to think rationally and knowing that I had already caused severe damage to his body.

  Peyton took a seat across from me, still messing with the phone. He looked up at me and said, “He forwarded the picture from his email address.”

  Matt came back into the studio. “We need to get him an ambulance; he’s not breathing right. His nose is broken and his cheekbone looks like it is collapsed.”

  Peyton stood up and put the phone in his pocket. “Taylor, stay here with Matt. Check on JT, make sure that mother fucker doesn’t die…and call an ambulance once me and Cody leave.” He looked at me. “Come on, dude.” He grabbed onto my upper arm, gripping it tightly. I was certain that he was making sure that he could quickly restrain me again if I charged JT.

  Peyton got into the driver side of my truck and I hopped into the passenger side.

  “I want to go see Hailey,” I said.

  “Let’s stop by JT’s first,” Peyton responded. “We need to get to his computer before he does. He’ll destroy everything before my dad is able to get a search warrant.”

  I nodded at him.

  Chapter 31 - Hailey

  After Cody left I picked up Chloe from her new babysitter’s house. The world felt different, like it knew all of my secrets. It was the worst feeling in the world. Eye contact was difficult. I swore even the kids looked at me differently. The feeling of it choked me, and made me want to crawl into my bed and hide away from the world forever.

  There was emptiness inside of me. I was a fractured person with a fractured soul. Cody knowing my secret made nothing better, in fact, it made everything worse. I had convinced myself that initially people would feel sorry for me. I certainly didn’t want that, and I knew the pity would just fade into the kind of disgust I felt toward myself. The thoughts that had once privately haunted and consumed me would now be the thoughts of the one person I had never wanted to know.

  I couldn’t explain how my mind and heart rationalized things. All I knew was that I wanted the thoughts to go away, for the memory to vanish, for things to be different. Saying the words out loud wasn’t something I was prepared to do. Talking about it wasn’t an option. I guess I thought if I spoke the words I would release my private hell into the realm of realit
y even further. Things would just get that more real, and real wasn’t something I could handle.

  Every day things had gotten worse, and now that Cody had read my diary I felt like I was going to fall apart completely. He wasn’t going to let things drop, and now I was more convinced than ever that I would have to move out of town.

  I pulled the full-length mirror from my bedroom into the living room and rested it against the wall next to the television. Then I grabbed a six-pack of beer before taking a seat on the carpet. My cigarettes, lighter and ashtray were sitting on the floor next to me. I cracked a beer open, lit a cigarette, and stared at my reflection in front of me. That’s what I did every night. I’d sit, drink, smoke, and watch myself cry.

  The hateful thoughts I held toward myself grew into hateful thoughts about everything, consuming my heart. One night I got the picture of my parents from the bookshelf and ripped it in two. I had placed it in front of me and stared at it for hours. I hated him for leaving, and I hated her for never being there when I needed a mom.

  The next morning I taped the picture back together, disgusted at myself for ruining it, and put it back on the shelf.

  There were three things that I thought about every night as I sat in front of my mirror: My dad leaving and never contacting me. Jason not wanting me, and hitting me the way he did. JT raping me.

  Emotional abuse, physical abuse, and then sexual abuse. The only thing in common with those three things was me. In my mind it was only a matter of time before Cody would hate me too.

  I checked on Chloe and then grabbed my gray hooded sweatshirt off my bedroom floor on my way back to the living room. I put the shirt on, and then pulled the hood over my head. After sitting back down in front of the mirror, I lit another cigarette, took a drag and set it down in the ashtray. When I glanced in the mirror and saw my face I picked up my beer and finished it.

  I hadn’t yet numbed the ricocheting thoughts enough for the tears to pour out of my eyes. When the tears came they were always accommodated with silence. I would just stare blankly at my reflection and focus on the feeling of them dripping from my jaw.

  I went to the refrigerator to grab another beer or wine, anything, but there wasn’t any left. I needed to get more, but I knew that I had a buzz and couldn’t take Chloe with me. Ten minutes. That’s all it would take for me to get to the store and get back. I grabbed my keys and purse from the counter and shuffled to the door.

  When I pulled up to the liquor store I noticed Erin’s black BMW parked out front. I thought about driving over to Luville like I usually did after work, but I couldn’t leave Chloe for that long. It was part of the reason I had put Chloe into a daycare. Cody always showing up was certainly a factor, but Mama Mary had questioned me last time I was late to pick up Chloe. I didn’t want questions, I just wanted everyone to leave me alone.

  I wished I could have said that my desire to avoid Erin was stronger than my desire to get more alcohol, but that wasn’t the case. After sliding the car into park, I turned the car off and picked up my purse from the passenger seat. I sucked in a deep breath and then forced myself to open the car door.

  The bell over the door chimed as I opened it, calling unwanted attention to my presence. I ducked into the aisle to the right of me and headed as fast as I could to the refrigerator case in the back. After getting a six-pack of tallboys I paused. Erin was at the counter paying for her purchase. I hid behind the aisle until she exited the store. After she left I scurried to the counter and paid for the beer.

  When I walked out of the door I saw Erin leaning against my fifteen-year-old Honda Civic. The bag of whatever she’d bought was sitting next to her on my hood.

  “Looks like someone is just like her mother,” she said, smirking at me.

  I walked past her, avoiding any eye contact.

  “Damn, you look like a crack whore,” Erin said.

  I ignored her and opened my car door, got inside, and tossed the bag and my purse onto the passenger seat.

  She pushed herself off of my car.

  As I pulled the door shut it was met with resistance. She stood between the door and me with her arms crossed. “I always knew you were a whore. You’re the worst kind of whore though. How were my sloppy seconds? First Jason, then Cody, then JT…”

  I turned the car on and reversed out of the spot, knocking Erin on her ass when the door hit her. The bottles in the bag slid off my hood and shattered onto the pavement next to her. I pushed on the brake, then accelerated forward, slammed the door, and then drove off.

  When I came to the first side street I pulled over and sobbed uncontrollably into my hands.

  Chapter 32 - Cody

  I dropped Peyton off at his car after we left JT’s. Peyton had broken into his apartment and taken his laptop. He was going to take it and the phone to the police station. His dad was on duty that night, and Peyton had called him to let him know what had happened.

  JT had been taken to the hospital, Matt had gone home, and Taylor was waiting at the studio for Peyton. I was sure at some point I’d be arrested, but I wanted to get to Hailey’s house to check on her before that happened.

  When I rounded the corner to Hailey’s house, I saw a cloud of dark gray smoke shooting up into the air. I slammed my truck into park and raced toward the house.

  A loud gunshot-sounding pop went off as the sliding glass door to Hailey’s house burst. Flames were shooting out, climbing up the siding, up to the rooftop.

  I sprinted to Chloe’s bedroom window and kicked the glass in. It shattered with the second kick. A shard of the glass ripped through my back as I climbed into her room. Small pieces of glass were embedded in my hand from gripping the windowsill to pull myself through.

  Smoke poured into the room from the crevice underneath the door.

  Blood dripped from my hands.

  I balled my fists together to protect Chloe from the glass, and scooped her out of bed.

  I held her with one arm against my body as I frantically unlocked the window. The quick movement of freeing my hand so I could safely get her outside woke her up. She burst into tears, and started screaming.

  I started to fucking panic because I didn’t know how I would get her through it safely without being able to use my hands. Still having Chloe pressed against my side, I picked a stuffed animal off the floor and cleared the glass. I swung her back onto my forearms, fists still in a ball.

  I heard a woman’s voice. “Hand her to me!” I slid her sideways through window. The woman took her underneath the arms, and I used my arms to keep her legs propped up until the woman backed up enough to clear the sill and the glass that remained.

  Chloe was still screaming and the woman yelled, “Get out of there, boy!” when she realized that I had turned around. I grabbed the first piece of cloth in my sight, which was a small blanket on Chloe’s dresser. I shielded my mouth and nose and raced toward the door.

  The smoke came rushing toward me. It burnt my eyes, stung my throat, and caused me to cough repeatedly. I dropped to the ground to get underneath the heaviness of the smoke and crawled to Hailey’s bed while holding my breath. I couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of me. I ripped the comforter from it and felt around for her as I screamed her name.

  The fire charged up the fibers of the carpet at me. I kept looking for her, but the only thing I heard was the snapping and popping of the fire. Then everything went black. The next thing I remembered was coming back into consciousness as I was being pushed through the window.

  The next thing I knew I was on a stretcher and Taylor was screaming in the background. I looked over and Taylor was sobbing in her brother’s arms. The reflective strips on his fireman’s suit shot off the flashing lights coming from the police cars and ambulances. His hat hung from his hand, and I could tell from the way his shoulders were moving that he was crying.

  My mind had seconds of clarity and then I remembered him taking me from Ryan’s hands through the window before I passed out again. Ryan was Eri
n’s brother, and a good friend and co-worker of Taylor’s brother.

  That’s when I saw a stretcher wheeled in front of me. There was a black body bag on it. I started to scream. Panic. Fear. Desperation. I tried to wrangle free from the stretcher I was on but was so weak that the medics were able to restrain me.

  Taylor ran over to me when she heard the commotion and assured me that Hailey was not in the house.

  That’s when I spotted Hailey running toward me, pushing her way through the crowd. Peyton’s dad caught her by the waist when he spotted her. The medics rolled me up the ramp of the ambulance. The last thing I saw was Hailey trying to fight her way free before collapsing on the ground.

  “Please take care of her,” I called over to Taylor before the ambulance door shut.

  Chapter 33 - Cody

  Luckily, I didn’t have a roommate in my hospital room anymore. They had wheeled the old guy out a few hours ago to release him. He was non-stop chatty, so I was happy to see him go. I needed silence so I could figure out what to do next.

  My body was in pretty bad shape. My arm was bandaged, my hands had been stitched, and half of my forehead was bandaged. From what my mom had been told, a blast of fire had briefly hit me before Taylor’s brother had pulled me back. It had singed my hair and left third degree burns on my forearm and the tip of my ear. I must have heard the pop and shielded my face. But, I don’t remember for sure.

  The only person they had allowed in my room last night was my mom, and that was after they bandaged me up. Chloe was all right; they’d treated her for smoke inhalation, but other than that she was perfectly okay. Erin’s brother had died in the fire, trying to save Hailey. He was the one who pushed me through the window. I had come to for a few moments and had insisted that Hailey was still inside. Between the screaming, the sounds of the fire, the sirens, and me being in and out of consciousness I had pieced what I could together. I was pretty sure that’s why he went back in.