by Keri Lake
Just hadn’t figured that I’d never get the chance to tell her the truth someday.
Like a robot, I slid my arms beneath the frail woman and lifted her, almost effortlessly, from the chair. Fieriest redhead I’d ever known, whittled down to the quiet skeleton of a woman.
“Oh!” Sera scrambled to the other side of the bed and threw back the covers. “I didn’t … I wasn’t expecting you to pick her up by yourself.”
Jo looked around, maybe disoriented from the height, or something, and stared up at me as I set her down onto the bed. Still, nothing in her expression suggested she recognized me, at all.
“What happened to her?” I could barely push the words past the tight fist locked around my lungs, as I watched Sera tuck her into the blankets.
“Stroke. It’s been a long road for her, but she’s actually made some progress, believe it, or not.”
I’d suspected Jo had moved on with her life, maybe remarried and lived somewhere else. She’d always been a survivor that way. I had no idea she’d deteriorated so much over the years.
My gaze wandered the room, to the pictures set out on the nightstand, and in collages hanging from the wall. What felt like a wrecking ball smashed into my chest, and I willed myself not to crumble as I stared down at the many pictures of Eli. Healthy, smiling Eli as a baby, a toddler, and the teenager I’d last seen nearly a decade ago. The adoration in Jo’s eyes as she stared down at her son gnawed at my conscience.
Snap. Snap.
Eyes bolted shut, I looked away, while a tingling numbness seeped into my muscles. I clenched my hands into fists, suddenly unsure what the hell to do with them. I could feel myself slipping.
“Ty?” Sera tipped her head, guiding my eyes back to her. “Yo, earth to Ty. Is everything okay? You … look pale.”
“I could use some air.”
She nodded, setting her hand on mine, an action that triggered my muscles, and I jerked backward. “Why don’t you go downstairs, and I’ll grab my things and meet you?”
With one more glimpse of Jo, I backed myself out of the room as it began to close in around me. Suffocating me with the memories. My arm hit an object in my escape, and I pivoted just in time to catch the lamp teetering on the nightstand. I stumbled out of the apartment, down the stairs, and pushed through the front entrance, until I reached my bike.
My head urged me to get out. Get the hell out of there.
Sitting astride my Ducati, I stroked my skull, damn near rubbing it bald, trying to make sense of the last ten minutes. What the fuck had happened? Felt like I’d gotten caught up in some warped episode of reality TV, and somewhere an audience gasped at my ignorance. I needed to get the hell out of there, but my muscles had gone statue, feet glued to the asphalt beneath them.
What now? What the fuck do I do now?
A voice from the not-too-distant past echoed inside my head. ‘She’s the reason they snuffed the kid. The kid, your pop, they’d all be alive, if not for her.’ The last thing the Joker had said to me before I’d cut out his eyeball.
With a trembling hand, I slipped the key into the helmet holder lock and, at the brush of something against my arm, swung my fist back, knocking the keys to the ground.
Sera stood alongside the bike, holding a bouquet of flowers, eyes brimming with confusion and yanking me back to my present.
Splaying my fingers, I hid the evidence of the near punch she’d almost suffered, and fished for the key to the bike.
“Hey, you seem really jumpy. Did something happen?”
Yeah. Something happened. I’d gotten knocked on my ass by a whopping dose of reality that left the aftershocks still vibrating through my body. I took deep breaths and stiffly shook my head, the sound of engines winding down inside my skull as my body short-circuited. “That woman …. She reminded me of someone I once knew. That’s all.”
Sera’s lips tightened, and she brushed her finger over the roses, white roses, bundled in her hands. “Me, too. Do you want to cancel for tonight?” she asked, not bothering to look up at me.
Everything inside my head said yes. I should’ve said yes.
“No” I handed her the helmet and set myself on task to fire up the bike, to keep my hands from sitting idle, where she’d surely notice the tremble in them. At the very least, I needed to break shit off, but trying to form a coherent thought right then would’ve made it a joke.
“Damn, you’re persistent.” She chuckled and climbed onto the back, wrapping her arm around me and flinching my stomach muscles on contact. “You’re sure you don’t mind running the errand with me?”
Her voice at my ear shivered down my spine like a ghost whispering omens. As though my body had become hypersensitive to everything around me, I was hearing things, seeing things, and feeling things with twice the intensity. “Positive. Where we headed?”
“The cemetery.”
* * *
Mount Elliott Cemetery took up a decent chunk of land along Mt Elliott Street. I was very familiar with the place, since my father had been buried there, after the guys from his union hall had gotten together and given him a proper funeral. What remained of his body had been cremated and buried, with Devoted Father etched into his gravestone.
I followed behind Sera, through the old graveyard, maintaining a cautious distance between us. Shit hadn’t stopped feeling surreal since we’d left Jo’s apartment, and I kept waiting for the moment when I’d wake up. When reality would slide in from the periphery, and I’d be staring down at Sera’s lifeless face, my hands throttling her neck, and all the other crazy shit would be nothing but some warped flashback.
She knelt in front of a headstone, setting the bouquet of flowers down in front of her. As I approached, I expected to find that her mother had been buried in the same place as my dad, but that wouldn’t make sense, given where she’d grown up.
For the second time in less than a half hour, I couldn’t breathe.
I stared down at the small gravesite that read Eli Trombley, with only his birthdate etched into the stone. Of course, they wouldn’t have known the date of his death, because his body was never found. Acids climbed my throat, and I stood frozen, gazing at what I knew to be an empty hole in the ground.
“I lied to my father today.” She sat down on the grass, folding her legs. “Told him I was studying for exams all evening. He’d kill me if he knew I was here.”
“Why’s that?”
“He doesn’t understand the concept of love. The way it drives you to hang on, when everything else is forcing you to let go.” With a huff, she pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms around them, and hell if her words didn’t echo my thoughts right then.
I’d spent ten long years trying to let go, going about my life as a puppet of the justice system that’d ultimately failed me.
“I remember when I first came to live with him, right after my mother died. I was a mess. I’d lost the most important thing in my life.” She spun the bracelet at her wrist, her fingers brushing over the beads that spelled out, ‘I love you’. “The universe just came and plucked her right out of my world, and I was thrown into my father’s. I knew even then he didn’t want to deal with me. So I locked myself in my bathroom. My bathroom. I’d never had my own bathroom before then. I plopped down on the white tile floors and sliced my wrist with a … stupid pocketknife I used to carry around. I remember thinking, oh, my God, the blood’s going to stain the white tiles, and he’ll be so mad about that.” She breathed a laugh and sniffed, abandoning the bracelet for the grass she plucked from beside her. “It was Jo who found me. I’d passed out from the sight of the blood, but I hadn’t cut deep enough to do damage. She kept saying, Just hold on, honey. Hold on. Everything is going to be okay.” Her eyes watered with tears, and she quickly swiped them away, her chest rising with a deep breath. “That’s all I wanted my dad to tell me. And here was this stranger, saying the words that I was so desperate to hear. Hold on.”
Words I, myself, had spoken to Eli.
&nb
sp; I could almost hear the tearing sounds of Sera peeling back the layers on her face, the porcelain façade she wore, so well, that even I couldn’t see what was beneath. There was so much more to her, so much deeper than the surface.
“Eli was her son.” When she turned to face me, her smile coaxed the tears onto her cheeks, and she wiped them dry.
I remained silent. Watching her. Waiting for the ugly villain to rear her head and justify the anger I’d felt toward her for so long.
“I’m sorry. You’d think, after all these years, it’d be easier for me.”
“Why are we here?”
“I try to come once a month for Jo. She told me just before the stroke that she dreaded the day she’d stop coming to her son’s grave. So I … I do it for her, when I can.”
“You visit his grave every month?”
She nodded, tearing at the tall bits of grass grown up around his stone. “It’s actually an empty grave. He was kidnapped when he was about fifteen years old, him and another boy.”
Hearing her talk was almost laughable, as she recounted her version of what had happened to Eli and me. Except, as she knew it, we were held by the junkie homeless guy who woke up after a meth nap, with guns in his face, charged with murder. That was what the news had reported about it, anyway. The police had found Eli’s clothing, blood, and hair samples scattered all over an abandoned house near the Packard Plant. My statements were deemed contradictory and unreliable, and they’d arrested who they believed had murdered my best friend.
Sera pushed to a stand and sighed, staring down at the grave. “Have you ever hated someone you were supposed to love, and loved someone you were supposed to hate?”
I could hardly focus on her words, as all my strategies unraveled around me. I felt everything and nothing at the same time. Confusion and clarity. I needed to get away from her and reconfigure the plan, but as if my body refused to obey, I followed the new rules of the game. The ones where I no longer called the shots, but, instead, watched from the sidelines. Waiting for the next move.
“What do you mean? Who were you supposed to hate?”
“Jo accused my father of having something to do with Eli’s disappearance. When they caught the man who did it, she dropped the charges against my father and apologized, but he didn’t want anything to do with her after that.” She huffed, her jaw shifting as her brows pinched together. “He single-handedly ensured that she never found work again. And when she had a stroke, and they put her in that … horrible place, I …” Dropping her gaze didn’t hide the second round of tears welling in her eyes, and fucking hell, I didn’t know how much more I could hear. How much more I could take, like fate beating the shit out of me for being so blind to the truth. “I refused to let her stay there and rot like … like she didn’t matter to anyone.”
“You’ve been taking care of her all these years.”
“It was the least I could do for Eli.” With a glance back at his grave, she walked toward me, and we both kept on toward the bike. Pinching a strand of her hair, she twirled it around her finger. “Doesn’t matter now. He cut us off.”
“Cut you off, how?” Every question that spilled from my mouth only gave rise to new questions, an endless horizon of shit that didn’t make sense.
“My father pays for Joanne’s care. Her apartment. Her medicine. Her nurse. It was a deal we made. I’d study Criminal Justice, go to law school and follow in my daddy’s footsteps. He’d have his sole heir to take over the firm. In exchange, he would supply the funds to pay for her care.”
“You gave up art.”
“The alternative was giving up on Jo. Kinda felt like a no-brainer.”
Christ. She’d given up her life, her dreams to take care of Eli’s mom.
An ache throbbed in my skull, and I rubbed the heel of my hand against my temple. My whole body felt like a beam, swinging off balance, waiting to crash into something.
The game had changed before my eyes. Twenty fucking minutes with the woman had me seeing her in a different light. As if I’d been living under a dark cloud of lies the whole time, and Sera’s truth beamed through in powerful rays of light that left me blinded to everything else. And I’d almost ended her life because of it. The thought sank heavy in my stomach, sickening me with the visuals.
I’d made her out to be some heartless and haughty rich bitch, and the truth was, she had more heart than I’d given her credit for.
“You sure you’re okay, Ty?” She came to a stop, turning toward me, and traced her finger along my forehead. “You seem so preoccupied tonight. I can take a raincheck, if you’re not feeling up to—”
I lurched toward her, silencing her words with my lips. I didn’t kiss her out of fake charm, or any of that bullshit. I kissed her because I wanted to. Because I’d grossly underestimated the woman, and I hated myself for it. It had to count for something, her taking care of Jo and sacrificing her dream. Even if what she’d done all those years back didn’t make any sense with the present, my head was too fucking crowded to figure it out.
I’d save the complex questions for a fifth of whiskey and an empty rooftop to settle my mind. Right then, all I wanted to do was forget everything and go along with whatever the hell fate had just thrown in my lap.
“Jesus, what a date, huh?” She let out a chuckle, and her gaze fell from mine. “Sorry to dump all this crap on you. I’ve got a little time to figure things out. I will. I always do.” A wily smile lit up her face as she peered up at me. “So, are you going to tell me what you had in mind for tonight?”
I couldn’t even bring myself to acknowledge it, let alone say that shit aloud to her. Instead, I handed her the helmet and climbed onto the bike. “When’s the last time you had a really good burger?” I asked over my shoulder.
She smiled and slipped the helmet onto her head, before climbing on behind me, wrapping her arms around my waist. “Too long.”
22
Sera
The view through the window of the old fashioned, silver diner car wasn’t a place I’d have ventured to on my own. Harry’s Diner stood about a block up from the food bank on Beaufait Street, and its bright lights fused with the streetlights outside, making shady silhouettes of objects off in the distance. The surrounding factories, many of which looked to be abandoned, probably made it a great location in its heyday. Sometimes, Detroit reminded me of an old Norman Rockwell painting, a bit of old America lost in the destruction.
The interior of the diner probably hadn’t changed, at all, with the ragged soda shop stools lined along the faded wooden bar, and the ripped upholstery of the booths, where I sat across from Ty. The scent of fried food clung to the air, as though the deep fryers had never been cleaned in however many years the place stood.
Yet, something about it remained endearing, a pinnacle of light in the surrounding dark buildings that reminded me of an old noir film.
“My dad used to bring me here when I was a kid. Nights he didn’t feel like cooking, we’d pop in here. Sit for hours just shooting the shit.”
The way he sat, all kicked back in the booth and looking like the quintessential bad boy in his black T-shirt, sent a flutter to my stomach. He’d seemed edgy all night, though. From the moment he’d arrived at Jo’s apartment, his usual cocky charm had switched to restlessness.
“Well, I’m impressed. You took me somewhere I’ve never been before. I keep trying to picture you as a little boy. Little Ty.” Chuckling, I looked around again and sighed. “Your dad must’ve been laid back and easygoing. Must’ve been nice to have him to talk to.”
“He was. No bullshit with him. He just told you how it was. I miss that.”
“Your dad, he’s no longer—”
“Nah.” The curt way he dismissed it, with a wave of his hand, told me not to pry.
“So, I have a confession.” Sliding my hands beneath my legs kept me from fidgeting beneath the way he stared at me from across the table. “And … I’m a little embarrassed, but … you’re not at all wha
t I thought. I totally misjudged you.”
“Yeah. You’re not what I thought, either.” His gaze trailed over the inside of the diner and back to me. Always looking around, like he expected to get jumped any second. “Hey, this place okay for you? I know it’s kind of old, but … I wanted to take you someplace special, so …”
“Mm-hmm. It’s perfect.” Scanning over the outdated interior, I smiled at the thought of him choosing a place so meaningful. “You took a shitty day and made it infinitely better than when it started out.” I leaned forward and sipped the Boston Cooler, served in an old-fashioned soda glass, complete with whipped cream and a cherry on top. “I haven’t had one of these since I was a little girl. My mom used to make them for me all the time.”
“How long’d you stay with your mom?”
“Until I turned nine. That’s when … the cancer … it’s a long story, but I was sent to live with my dad then.” I circled the straw in my cup, slipping into memories of nights we’d lain out on the lawn and talked for hours, while staring up at the stars. “My mom was easy to talk to, too. I could tell her just about anything. Even now, the things I’ve said and done. She’d never judge me for them.”
“What kinds of things?”
Gaze glued to my soda, I pursed my lips to keep from smiling. “Well, she’d have probably been proud of me for getting on a motorcycle with a stranger. For climbing down a chimney and nearly falling to my death. She’d have loved this place, too. Just because it’s different. Like you.”
The smirk on his face dimpled his cheek and lured my attention to the deviant glint of his eyes. “Think your mom would’ve liked me?”
“Not to sound Jerry Springer, but I think my mom would’ve probably told me, if I didn’t go out with you tonight, she’d do it for me.”
With a snort, he shifted on the seat and rested his elbows on the table. “If she’s anything like you, I think I would’ve liked her, too.”
The smile on my face fizzled with the memory of hers, the way her eyes would go wide with excitement, right before she’d do something crazy, like belt out a song in a crowd, or pull me away from whatever I was doing to dance with her. “She’s nothing like me. She was wild and full of life, and she did her own thing. She didn’t let anyone keep her from what she loved.”