by K. S. Thomas
Slowly, his eyes come back up to meet mine. “Then that’s going to be a problem. Because I won’t be happy unless you’re happy. Same as you’ll be miserable watching me be miserable. And I will be miserable if you make me stay.” His mouth tightens up and I can see him swallow hard before he whispers, “Don’t make me stay, Cooper.”
Chapter Seven
Gun
7 Years Earlier
“Wasn’t expecting to see you here.” I lean back in my seat, trying to appear casual. Doesn’t really matter how often I’ve sat in some dreary, little mirrored room of a police station, it’s still a little unnerving.
“Wasn’t expecting to have to come here,” Mr. B responds. He’s lacking the bitterness I’d have expected from a man I stole from. “But someone had to bail you out and drive you home.”
“What?”
“Were you expecting me to be here for some other reason? Think I was going to press charges or something?” He’s definitely angry, but apparently not for the more obvious reasons I would have bet on.
“You’re not going to?” It’s not usually in people’s nature not to screw me. Mostly because I don’t do a whole lot not to screw them. It’s not that I go out of my way to be the bad guy, just a matter of survival really. If I have to choose between Cooper’s well-being or someone else’s, she’s always going to win.
“No.” He shakes his head. “Not this time.” He waves his hand for me to get up. “Come on. We’ve got a lot to talk about, but we’re not doing it here.”
I’m really fucking confused right now. “If you didn’t report me for stealing the cash, what did I get dragged in here for?”
“Your own good probably. Now let’s go, we have a court appointment and we need to have a serious chat before we get there.”
I get to my feet, but I’m still not prepared to just walk out of here with him. I need answers. Some I can wrap my mind around. “You want me to come back to the house. After I ran away. And stole from you.”
“And let’s not forget the girl you’ve been sneaking in and out of there,” he points out. “But yeah, I want you to come back to the house.”
“Why?”
He studies me for a minute. Then he pulls out the chair across from me and has a seat, gesturing for me to do the same. “You want to do this here, fine. We’ll do this here.” He sighs, waiting for me to sit. Again. When I do, he slides a huge folder across the table toward me and continues, “I read your file, Gunnar. Every page. Every word. And we both know there are a lot of both. You’ve been getting screwed from day one.”
I scoff. That’s an understatement. And I don’t need to read that in some file to know it.
“You’ve also been screwing up plenty from day one,” he adds. “You screw up so frequently, and so effectively, it’s hard not to be distracted by it. And, I spent half of my time reading your file thinking just that, you were a total screw up and all I had to do was push you through the next seven months and past that final birthday and then, you’d be out of the system, out of my house, and no longer my problem.”
I’m not sure how to take any of this. He’s not wrong. But, for a dude who gives off a very happy go lucky vibe ninety-nine percent of the time, hearing him sound so cold and callous seems somewhat out of character.
I shrug, doing my best to make him think I don’t give a shit either way. “You could have two out of three right now. Walk out. I’ll be moved somewhere else. I’ll be someone else’s problem.”
“And I might have done just that tonight if I’d only read half of your file, drawn my conclusion and skimmed the rest. But I didn’t. I read the whole thing. And then, I read it again. And I wasn’t distracted anymore. I didn’t see all the ways you were screwing up. I saw something else.”
“What?”
“Not what. Who. Jane Cooper.”
I scowl involuntarily. It’s not his fault he doesn’t know her name. “It’s just Cooper.”
He seems confused but doesn’t argue. “Cooper. She’s the one constant in everything you do. She’s the one who’s been crashing in your room. The one you ran away with. Again.”
“So?”
“So, you’re not screwing up all the time.” He sits up, folds his hands over the table and leans forward maintaining eye contact the entire time, challenging me to look away, to lie. “You’re protecting her.”
I laugh but it’s a defensive move. This is the first time in nearly a decade anyone’s ever looked at my life and seen it so clearly. Figuring out what makes people tick, that’s my thing, it’s what I’m good at, it’s what’s given me the tools I’ve needed to manipulate this system and the people in it, to know when to push and when to lie low. Having someone on ‘their’ side see through all of my carefully constructed plans to see my full intentions, my only intentions, screams of a bad situation.
“I’m not protecting her,” I say as smugly as I can, “I’m fucking her.”
Mr. B takes my response in stride. “She’s your girlfriend.”
“Sure.” I roll my eyes. Condescending always goes nicely with cocky. “She’s my girlfriend. Whatever.”
“Oh, I get. She means nothing to you. She’s just a piece of ass. A means to an end. Sure. Then you didn’t care, last year, when you found out her foster mom’s boyfriend was taking those pictures of her?” He reaches for the folder that’s been lying here untouched and starts to flip through the pages as he talks. It’s not my folder at all. It’s hers. “Or the time she nearly died because one of the older girls in her house decided it would be funny to slip some roofies into her water one night when they were bored and home alone. I mean, if you’re just fucking her, why would it matter?”
I’m staring straight down at the floor, focusing on the piece of gum that’s been worn into the ground so hard it looks like a dull pink stain, but it’s not enough. I can’t tune him out. And I can’t pretend I can’t hear, which means I can’t not feel what I’m feeling and the one thing I’ve never been good at hiding is my anger.
“Don’t talk about her like you know,” I snarl under my breath.
“Oh, I know. Probably a lot more than you think.” He rests his elbows on the table, leaning into them. If his face gets any closer to me it’s going to meet with my fist. “I even know how you two met. Sitting in a closet. In the dark. Probably starving. Two nine-year-olds, completely helpless. I’m sure that’s just the sort of experience that makes you not give a shit about someone.” His use of cold sarcasm isn’t what pushes me over the edge. It’s the thing he’s leaving out of the story. The thing he doesn’t know. The guilt.
“Shut up!” I’m on my feet and I don’t even know when or how I stood up. “Shut the fuck up!”
“Fine.” His whole demeanor changes. He leans back, waiting. He got what he wanted. I cracked and now, all he has to do is peel back the edges and watch all the shit spill out. “I’ll shut up...if you start talking.”
I don’t want to fucking talk about it. I used to. Used to try and tell everyone. For years, all I fucking did was talk about it. But no one ever listened. No one ever wanted to hear. So, I learned to shut up and take care of things my way.
Mr. B’s just staring at me from across the table. Not mad. Not even curious. Just, waiting. Like he really fucking gives a shit. Like he really wants to hear. So, maybe I’ll start talking. Maybe I’ll tell him and he’ll be exactly like everyone else. And I’ll be right again. I could live with that.
“They said she liked to play hide and seek.” The disgust I feel at the sound of those words still turns my stomach. “Said it was her idea of a game. That she thought it was funny to scare the other kids in the house by locking them in there with her.” I kick at the floor, at the nasty old gum, but my foot can’t catch on something that’s been made one with the ground, so it just skids over the surface until my leg has no room left to stretch. It doesn’t make me feel any better. Nothing ever does.
“What really happened? How did you two wind up in there?” he as
ks quietly. I’m sure he knows. Doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. Just someone with enough balls to face it.
“Old Ray and his wife had a lot of kids in the house. Some coming and going, many of us were there to stay. Their idea of keeping control over the herd was displayed on hooks inside the pantry doors. Belts, paddles, a few feet of rubber hose, you name it, it was back there, a constant reminder of the consequences that came with breaking one of their rules. And they had plenty.”
“You ever break any?”
“Nah. Not at first, anyway.” The edge of my thumb slides into my mouth and I start to bite at the nub of nail still left there. “I spent the first few years of my life living in the backseat of my mother’s Volkswagen. Most of the time she was off either scoring a job or scoring a hit. I knew how to lay low and mind my damn business long before I ever wound up in that hell hole.”
“But something changed. You must have done something to wind up in that closet. Was it her? Were you helping her?”
I turn to my side to spit out a sliver of nail. “Cooper had nothing to do with it.” I scoot back into my chair. This is going on longer than I expected. He hasn’t changed the subject once. Hasn’t called me a liar. Hasn’t even broken eye contact. And I’ve tried. Every time I look back though, he’s still staring straight at me. “New kid showed up. He was little. Maybe three or four. Got in trouble more than anyone I ever saw there because he wouldn’t speak properly. Two weeks after he got there I figured out why. He did speak. It just wasn’t English. When I tried to tell them, they laughed and told me to leave them alone while they still thought I was funny. A few nights later, I found him crying. He was hungry. Wanted a fucking banana. No one understood. So, I got him one.” I laugh harshly. “Ray wasn’t all too happy with me after that. Stealing food, that was the worst offense. That was like stealing money right out of his pocket. You got worse than anything they had hanging in the pantry for that. You got solitary.”
“The closet.”
I nod.
“And your friend, Cooper, she was already in there?”
I nod again. I keep nodding. Over and over because words, words are gone now. Just the flashes of memories. Her tiny voice telling me not to be scared. Her scrap of an old beach towel, the only blanket she had, and she still shared it with me. The smell. God, the smell. And the constant darkness...
“Gunnar.” His voice cuts through the chaos and I snap my head back to look at him. “What happened next? How did you guys get out?”
I swallow down the sick and mucus clogging my throat, forcing everything else down with it, back to the pit of my stomach, the core of my being, where that darkness still lives, never sleeping, never at peace.
“She didn’t. I did. Monday morning, I was sitting back in school, because missing class would have been a problem for ‘Mr. Follow the Rules’ Ray. I told my teacher what happened the second I walked in. I was sitting in the back of the social worker’s van and headed to a new home before first recess. Cooper was too. Because she was troubled and unsafe for the other children,” I drawl. What a fucking joke. I stare at my fingers. My thumb’s bleeding from where I was chewing on the nail. Or where there used to be one. I wipe it on the side of my pants, smearing a long red streak along my thigh.
“No one believed you,” Mr. B says quietly.
“Nope.” I sniff loudly. Not because I’m about to bawl my eyes out. I’m not. But this shit makes me feel like I can’t breathe. Makes everything feel tight and constricted and clogged up and the sniffing just happens, like some instinct to make sure I can still take in air.
“They’d believe you now,” he offers. It’s bullshit. We both know it.
“No one believes a screw-up,” I remind him, grinning, because it’s either laugh or die around here.
“I do.”
“You’re the first.” I sit up to match his pose, elbows on the table, hands folded, leaning forward. “Five months. That’s how long I lived there. Five months and I never met her. Never had any clue she fucking existed. Until that Friday afternoon in the closet.” I hold his stare. “Tell me how to deal with that. How to accept it. Because I can’t. But I’ll damn sure screw up as often as it takes to make sure she never gets locked in a fucking closet ever again.”
Reed
Present Day
One hour. A one-fucking-hour drive. That’s how little it took to cross the distance between Cooper and where I’ve been living the last seven years. I don’t know how to wrap my brain around this anymore. I don’t know how to make sense of her being here this whole time and my never knowing, my never being told by anyone. Worse yet, being lied to. But it stops now. Today. Starting with my sister.
“Kerri!” I shout her name loudly while I proceed to pound on her door. The bell would probably be more effective but also far less satisfying at this moment. Therefore, I keep pummeling away at the wood with my fist until she answers.
“Reed? Oh, my God!” She completely ignores my attack on her entry way and instead comes flying at me with outstretched arms. Within seconds, she’s a blubbering mess. “I was so worried about you. Where the hell have you been?”
I don’t hug her back. I can’t. “I went to find Cooper.”
Instantly, her arms slide down my neck and she takes a step back. She looks scared.
“Guess that answers the question of whether you knew or not,” I sneer.
“I can explain,” she says hastily, her fingers twisting at her stomach. Kerri’s dramatic as it is, but this is sincere. She’s nervous. She has reason to be.
“I’d love to hear this.” I don’t spare her any sarcasm.
She turns over her shoulder then glances back at me. She doesn’t want to do this outside for the whole world to see. Appearances, my family lives and breathes for those.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, just please come inside,” she begs, “Let me make you some tea and we can sit down and talk. Really talk.”
“Whatever.” I brush past her into the house and don’t stop until I’m in her kitchen. I can hear her shut the door and start to walk in my direction but as slow as she’s moving, she’d get here faster if she hitched a ride on a freaking turtle. “You’re my fist stop, Kerri. Hurry it up. I’ve got more places to hit before heading back to the coast for dinner tonight.”
She shows up in the doorway. “You’re going back to see her later?” She looks surprised.
“Yeah, Kerri. I plan on seeing her a lot from now on. I have seven years of not seeing her to make up for.”
Her head goes down as she passes me on her way to the stove. “I know you’re probably confused right now, Reed. But you have to know, everyone did what they thought was best.” She fills the kettle with water and places it on the burner closest to her. She looks up toward me. “Best for both of you.”
“What?” I shake my head. I can’t even believe she’s saying this. She can’t possibly believe that. “How exactly was it best for me to be separated from the woman I love? How was it best for me to be lied to? To be denied the one single solitary memory I had of my life before?”
She cringes. “You have to understand what it was like, Reed. Can you imagine what that did to Mom? You waking up and not recognizing her? The woman who gave birth to you, who raised you? But asking for a girl you barely knew, spent maybe half a year of your life with? A girl who nearly wrecked your whole future? Mom was devastated.”
I close my eyes and count to ten. Deep breath. “So...it was in Mom’s best interest.”
Kerri catches on a little too late that she misspoke. She’s about to attempt to fix it when the sound of the front door flying open draws both of our attentions.
“Reed? REED!” Sam comes tearing around the corner and doesn’t stop until she’s pressed to me tightly, peppering my face with a million kisses. She’s so relieved to see me, she barely breaks to breathe until she’s covered every inch of my face with her soft, frantic lips.
“I was so worried about you,” she
whispers, cradling my chin in her small palms. She pushes up on her tiptoes to plant another kiss onto my mouth. “You scared me, running off like that.”
“I’m sorry.” I am. Until this very moment, I’d pushed Sam so far to the back of my mind it was easy to pretend that walking away from her would be easy. Simple. Painless. Because, after all, I’ll be walking toward Cooper when I do. And, even if Sam doesn’t know it yet, I’ll be setting her free to find the man she’s meant to be with. It’s not me. It can’t be me.
Thing is, standing here with her, taking in the scent of her perfume and feeling her warmth seeping into my chest and remembering how she clings to me, needs me, there’s no room for that sort of denial anymore. It’s Sam. And I love her. Not like I love Cooper, but enough to make me think spending the rest of my life with her would be a pretty damn good way to spend my life. Up until a week ago anyway.
“Where were you?” Her big brown eyes are sparkling with tears.
I clear my throat. “I had some things I needed to sort out.”
She fists the front of my shirt with her hands, tugging me down closer to her. “You silly, stupid man. Don’t you know that you’re supposed to take me with you to sort things out? That’s what giving me that ring was all about. You and me, together. Through everything. No matter what.”
“I wish I could have come to you with this, I really do.” I glare at my sister over the top of Sam’s head. She did this. Must have texted her from the foyer. That’s why she was moving so slowly. Luring me in with the promise of an explanation was nothing but another bullshit excuse. I can’t keep doing this. Better to just rip off the lies like an old Band-Aid and see what I find underneath. “I had to go and find Cooper.”
Sam’s brow crinkles. Finally, someone who hasn’t been lying to me.
“Who’s Cooper?”
My relief is short lived. Because now I have to tell her. And I have to walk away from her after I do, something I know would be infinitely easier if I had a reason to hate her.
Cooper
I’m standing in the middle of my room, still wearing the same wet clothes from my visit with Gun. I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. I walked in, not paying attention. I walked in not knowing where I was going. Wasn’t until I looked up. Then I understood. Then I stopped. And I haven’t moved since. So, I’m standing here. Staring at my closet. A sick desire to go and sit inside it.