At least he didn’t kick me out. Or call a big mean nurse to escort me out.
“I brought you something,” I finally began, my voice coming out stronger than I’d expected. I was glad. I didn’t want him to think for even a moment that I was afraid to be here, that I didn’t want to be here. Reaching into my baggy purse, I pulled out a padded manila envelope and held it out to him. He didn’t take it; he didn’t look at me. He didn’t acknowledge my presence in any way other than the tension in his shoulders and the flexing of his jaw. Something I was sure had to hurt if he had loose teeth.
So I opened the envelope myself and slipped out the two cardboard cutouts from inside. “Stars. One with your name on it, one with mine.” They were tied together by a long string, reminding me of when we’d tied Juno and Pete together with Juno’s leash. I held them up for him to see, spinning the brightly painted school bus-yellow cutouts to show our names written in black Sharpie on either side, and then looked around the room for a place to hang them. Pulling a sturdy chair over, I climbed up on it, held the stars in front of the light for a few minutes, and then looped the strong over the bracket of the television. “Watch this.” I scuttled down off the chair and reached for the light switch.
The door of the room was open maybe an inch or two, allowing only a narrow wedge of light in the otherwise completely dark room. I picked my way carefully back toward him but didn’t sit on the bed, instead standing beside his chair, trying not to bounce up and down on my toes in anticipation. I desperately hoped this would work.
It did. It worked. Within moments, the large cardboard stars began to glow; not brightly, but in the darkness of the room, they were a beacon. “I borrowed some of Jordan’s glow-in-the-dark paint,” I whispered, my heart pounding in my ribcage. I was sure Sebastian could hear it.
I stood there, close enough to touch him, to smell the sterile, antiseptic aroma of hospital linens and bandages, close enough to hear his breathing when it stopped. I waited, trying not to panic, holding my own breath… until I recognized a new sound in the stillness. Sebastian began to cry, quietly, gently, his breaths coming out in short, punchy sounds.
I wanted to reach for him, to pull him into my arms—a thought that almost made me laugh when I thought about little pipsqueak me trying to cradle a guy as big as Sebastian in my arms—to at least touch him so he’d know I was there, but my dad had said his shoulders were covered in bruises and I’d seen his face. So I simply stepped a little closer and laid my hand on his forearm where it rested on the armrest of his chair, the same place I’d touched him so many times before. I’m here, the gesture said. I didn’t know what else to offer him.
My heart leapt into my throat when Sebastian’s other hand covered mine, when he took it, none too gently, in his, and squeezed, hard, desperately. “I’m here,” I said, this time out loud.
We stayed that way for several minutes while Sebastian sobbed quietly, his breathing harsh, the sounds being torn out of him against his will. My tears fell silently along with his as I shared his pain in the only way I could. I’m here.
Finally, the sounds started to quiet, his breathing came more evenly. My eyes had adjusted a little to the darkness, and I held out the box of tissue I’d found on the table by the bed. He took several pieces and pressed them gently to his face, but didn’t blow his nose. I suddenly remembered that it had been broken; I bet the last thing he wanted to do was blow it out. And I’d made him cry. I groaned inwardly for him.
“Your dad told me about Foster,” he murmured, his voice breaking on the man’s name. I squeezed his hand in acknowledgment but didn’t say anything, glad beyond words to hear him speaking to me. “I—I should have—” His breath caught again and I interrupted, not wanting him to carry this alone any longer. I wasn’t going to give him any false platitudes, empty words negating his feelings, but I wasn’t going to let him go through this dark place by himself.
“We all could have, should have done things differently, Sebastian. But we didn’t. And now we have to figure out how to go from here. Together. You’re not alone.” I dropped to my knees in front of him, knowing it was still too dark for him to see my face and vice versa, but needing the immediacy of being eye-to-eye anyway. “Marauders needs you. Like Gina says, you’re a poopdeck swabber, Sebastian; one of us. And you need us. I saw you come alive on stage last week. There’s nothing like it, is there? And now that you’ve tasted it, you’ll miss it if you try to pull away from us.”
He didn’t respond, but he didn’t push me away, either, so I continued, my voice sure again, although my stomach was tied up in knots. “My friends and family need you, too. The Clarks my dad told you about? They need someone to fill an emptiness in their home more than anything right now. And you need a home, Sebastian. You need a family—”
“I don’t need someone else’s family,” he cut in.
“No,” I agreed. “You don’t. You need a family of your own. And that’s all of us. Blood doesn’t make family, Sebastian. Love does.”
I felt his hand quiver around mine at those words, and I knew the battle going on inside him was fierce. But he was letting me in, letting me talk, and I wasn’t going to back away now.
I bumped his knees apart and scooted closer, my one hand still in his, the other one reaching up in the shadowy darkness to smooth the hair away from his forehead. “I need you, Sebastian. You have my heart, remember? And you need me, too. Because whether you like it or not, I stole at least a piece of yours, and as long as I have it, you’ll feel that missing piece every time you pull away from me.” I sat back on my heels and slowly, carefully, lest he have bruises I didn’t know about, laid my head in his lap, the shadows making me bold. “I love you, Sebastian Jeffries, and I’m here.”
A moment later, I felt his free hand settle onto my head, his fingers threading into my hair, his thumb brushing against the curve of my ear. I didn’t even have the urge to reach up and remove it.
“I remembered something last night,” Sebastian finally spoke, his tone resigned, but no longer quite so sad. “Probably why I couldn’t stop puking my guts out.”
I straightened slowly, and his hand drifted down to cup my cheek. It was still too dark to clearly see his features, but I could feel his eyes on me.
“That box they found? The one I put the gun in?”
I nodded, remembering that Dad had been curious about what Sebastian was leaving out of his story.
“Tish, I didn’t kill my mother.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Before he could continue, there was a knock at the door. Tom poked his head around and right behind him stood my father. He must have come straight from teaching his class.
“Hey, Dad. Come in, you guys, but please don’t turn on the lights,” I said quietly, not wanting to break the peace of the moment. I knew Sebastian was on the verge of unloading some pretty heavy stuff, and I hoped that the presence of these two men who meant so much to me wouldn’t stop him. I hoped they would soon come to mean a lot to Sebastian, too. They did leave the door open halfway so they could see where they were going, and the added light dimmed the glow of the stars hanging from the television, but Sebastian seemed okay with it. Dad and Tom dragged the other two chairs in the room around to sit close to us and I returned to sit on the side of the bed. Once I was settled, Sebastian reached for my hand again.
He told us everything he remembered from all those years ago, which wasn’t much. After all, he was only five when his world had been turned upside down. He was playing quietly in his room one afternoon when his mother came in, a gray metal box with a black handle held in one arm, and told him to grab his coat, that they had an errand to run before his dad got home for dinner. He followed her out the door, but instead of going down the main stairway to the first floor, she hurried him along the balcony that ran the length of the apartments to the back stairs at the far end of the row. Just as they reached them, he heard his dad’s voice call out for them to stop.
“My mom nudg
ed me ahead of her, told me to hold onto the rail tightly and go down ahead of her. ‘Eyes on the stairs,’ she always told me.” Sebastian shook his head a little disbelievingly. “I can hear her voice in my head again after all these years of—of nothing, and it’s so vivid. Things she said, phrases she used. It’s crazy.”
Little Sebastian obediently kept his eyes on the concrete stairs as he descended, believing her to be right behind him. He heard the tussle above him, but he still had a few more stairs to go before he could take his eyes off them. When he reached the landing at the bottom, he looked up to see his parents wrestling for possession of the box, his mother clinging to it for dear life as his father began to slap her, then punch her, until finally he wrenched the box from her grip, shoving her away from him hard.
“It was like slow motion, watching her fall, even back then. For a few moments, I thought she’d jumped, that she might be able to fly, that she’d swoop down and grab me, then carry us away together on her magic wings. I can still see it, like it just happened yesterday.” He shuddered visibly, even in the dim light, and I heard my dad grunt low in his throat. “She hit the stairs and it was like she just crumpled, a rag doll tumbling the rest of the way until she collapsed in a heap at my feet. It wasn’t real to me. It didn’t make sense to my five-year-old mind.”
He took a deep breath, straightened his shoulders as though preparing for one last battle, and then continued.
“Then my dad appeared at the top of the stairs, the metal box clutched under his arm. The same one the police found on the coffee table. The one I put that gun in, Mr. Ransome.” Somehow, Sebastian had gone from telling me his story to telling it to my father. I was glad to hand over the weight of that burden to someone I knew had much stronger shoulders than mine. “Like Mom’s voice, I remember it so clearly now. The same gray. The shiny little lock. That black handle. The box they fought over. He charged down the stairs that day, grabbed me by the shoulders, and roared in my face, ‘Look what you did!’ I just started crying. He let go of me, and I dropped to the ground beside my broken mother and cried, unable to figure out what I’d done that had caused such a terrible thing.”
Sebastian still couldn’t remember anything else that happened that day or in the days that immediately followed, and I wondered if he ever would. He ran a hand through his hair, wincing as his fingers brushed against bruises on his scalp. “The next thing I can remember is sitting on a bus with my dad, and playing the invisible game with him. He used to tell me we needed to pretend like we were invisible, because we didn’t want anyone to see us.” He let out a long, shuddering breath then. “And that’s been my life ever since. Trying to be invisible. To the world. To the police. To my old man. Two outta three ain’t bad odds, is it?” He chuckled dryly, and then cleared his throat.
I handed him a glass of water from the table by his bed and he took a long swallow.
“You know, from the time I was old enough to know he wasn’t such a good guy, I swore I’d never be like him. I didn’t talk like him, I refused to be his drinking buddy, I wasn’t interested in the kind of jobs he said he had for me. But I couldn’t get away from him. I’ve had my trunk packed to leave for more than two years now; been carrying around a three-day supply of necessities in my backpack just in case I had to make a run for it without my car. But every time I’d try, he’d drag me back down with him, reminding me of what a monster I was. He said I’d stolen his happiness when I killed my mom. He hit me and I took it without fighting back, because I deserved it. He took my money and I let him, because I owed him.”
He went quiet for several moments, but his fingers worked my hand like a stress ball, squeezing and rubbing, and I knew he was sorting things out. Dad and Tom stayed quiet, waiting.
“I came home from work a little early on Sunday and surprised him going through the few things I had in my room and something inside me just tripped. I started yelling at him and he came at me with fists flying. For the first time, I hit him back. Knocked him out cold. Scared the crap out of me, but I knew I didn’t want to be there when he came to, so I just cleaned up the best I could and came to practice.” He took a deep breath and said quietly, “Slept in my car that night. Too chicken to go home and face the music.”
I glanced over at Dad, wondering what he was thinking, knowing he’d sent Sebastian out the door to such misery. I knew it wasn’t Dad’s fault—Sebastian had refused to stay—but I knew him well enough to know he’d feel terrible anyway.
“I finally worked up the courage to go home after work on Monday, hoping to get my things together enough so when I came up with a solid plan, I’d be ready. When I walked in the apartment, there was that box, sitting on the coffee table, opened up so I could see the contents of it. His cache of weapons, including that billy club. And I knew. I knew it was my old man who’d attacked the guy in the lot. I knew he was responsible for the other muggings in the last year, too. And I knew he was after Foster. I recognized that box like I’d seen it tucked under Mom’s arm yesterday. She must have discovered his stash and intended to turn him in. I remembered everything. After all these years, I’d thought—” He broke off, sucked in air like a drowning man, and what came back out was a terrible keening wail that turned my insides to broken glass. “It wasn’t me. I wasn’t the monster. I’m not… the monster,” he gasped, his words so choked I could barely understand them. “And I’m so tired of being invisible.”
My dad stood suddenly, his movement shoving his chair back a few inches. He took two halting steps toward us and I felt Sebastian tense, his body going rigid. My dad wouldn’t hurt him, but even though I knew that, it was clear Sebastian didn’t. Dad slowly reached out both hands, placed them gently on either side of Sebastian’s battered face, and locked gazes with him. “You are not invisible, son. I see you. I see you. You are not a monster. You are not a killer. You are not unworthy. You are not alone.” He spoke the last words slowly, firmly.
I’m here, my mind echoed. I see you, too.
Tom draped an arm around my shoulders, not in a show of affection, but in a show of unity. I could almost feel his thoughts course through me toward Sebastian. We’re here. You are not alone. We see you.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Three weeks later….
We stood in a big group around Tom, preparing to send him off in style. My dad had borrowed one of the church’s 12-passenger vans to take us all to the airport together, and between the band, my parents, Jordan, and Tom’s mom, we’d filled almost every seat, thanks to Gina, who insisted on being there, and Allistair, who was amusingly starstruck over Gina. The little girl ate it up, taking him in hand and “sowing him the wopes.” Sly made her repeat the sentence three times before I stepped in and clarified.
“Not ‘sowing oats,’ Big Daddy.” I said. “‘Showing him the ropes.’”
“Ah. Yes. Pirate jargon. Shoulda known.” He still maintained a close eye on his boy, which wasn’t a bad thing, considering we were hanging out in one of the busiest airports this side of the Great Divide.
“It’s time,” Tom finally declared, standing and hitching the strap of his backpack over his shoulder. “I need to head to my gate so they don’t lock me out.”
He began to make his rounds, hugging each of us in turn, even the band members. Tom was just an affectionate guy. When he got to me, he wrapped his big arms around me, lifting me clean off the ground, and when he set me down, instead of stepping back, he grabbed my face in his hands and kissed me softly. He stepped back and turned to Sebastian, while I stood there completely bemused.
“That, my friend, is to remind you what she’s giving up to take a chance on you. Don’t blow it.” The group broke into a round of applause and laughter and Sebastian joined in, stepping into the careful hug Tom gave him as well. But over Sebastian’s shoulder, he said to me, “Something for you to remember me by, too.”
I didn’t punch him or poke him. I didn’t really even have the urge to. I just brought my fingers to my lips and smile
d to let him know I understood how precious his gift was to me; not the kiss, but his friendship, his love. I would treasure that gift no matter where life took us from here.
Sebastian chuckled as he stepped away from Tom, and even though his tone was light, I knew he was serious. “I think that needs to be the last time you kiss my girlfriend on the lips, my friend. That’s my job now.”
Tom froze for a moment, and then nodded respectfully. “I humbly defer to you, The Great Sebastian.”
Our little group stood close together and watched as he made his way through the security gate and waved until he was out of sight before we finally headed back to the van for the hour-plus drive home. Sebastian and I had already called dibs on the very back seat, but I had a feeling we’d be sharing it with Gina, too.
I took Sebastian’s outstretched hand as we walked, smiling up at him. His poor face was still terribly discolored, but the swelling had gone down around his broken nose and under his eyes so I could see the beautiful shape of who he was beneath the yellow and purple marks.
We were moving slowly, focusing more on gathering up the important pieces of his broken life. Little by little, he was finding his way out of the shadows, with the help of Dad and his recovery group—men who took Sebastian under their wings and walked with him through painful memories that sent my father home in tears some nights, the unconditional love of Mr. and Mrs. Clark who welcomed Sebastian into their home, and the brotherhood of Marauders who had embraced him without reservations from the very beginning.
Ani had arrived in Italy a week ago and it sounded like she was having the time of her life hanging out in the old country with all of Paulo’s relatives and friends. I was so happy for her, but I was looking forward to her return in a couple of weeks. I missed her walking through this with me.
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