“I’ll bet. Where’s Tom?”
“Working full-time at the same grocery store, but as nightshift manager. The twins are doing all right in school. They’re in their last year.”
She’d missed these people, her family. She wanted family around her all the time. She thought of Hank and Amy. Yeah, she liked having family.
Everyone was older. She no longer had the weight of their care. She could talk to them now as adults. As peers.
She felt lighter, felt like smiling.
“We’re moving,” Shannon said.
Hence the boxes stacked in the hallway. “Where to?”
Shannon mentioned an area of town that was so much nicer than this one.
“We’re going to pool everyone’s wages and rent a house. We’re throwing all of this away—” she gestured around the living room “—and getting all new stuff.”
“Oh, Shannon, that’s so great.”
Shannon leaned forward. “Do you remember when I was real small and I used to call you Mommy?”
“Yes,” Janey whispered.
“You made me stop, kept telling me Mommy was in heaven and you were my sister. So then I called you Sissy.”
Janey had forgotten Shannon’s childish nickname for her.
“The thing is, you were my mother,” Shannon said. “The only one I’ve ever known.”
Janey’s throat hurt. Her skin felt raw, as if she’d been flayed with the sharp end of a poker.
“I never realized while you were taking care of me how young you were. Younger than I am now.”
Shannon reached across the distance between them and grabbed Janey’s hands. “Thank you.”
Janey swallowed. She hadn’t known that anyone cared about her.
“I missed you so much. Then there was Cheryl and you didn’t live with us anymore,” Shannon said and sniffed. “But at least I could still visit you and pretend Cheryl was my baby sister.”
Janey’s vision misted. “I used to love the way you played with her.”
“I loved her and then she was gone.” Shannon swiped a hand across her eyes. “Then you were gone, too. We all miss you both a lot.”
“Oh, Shannon, I’m so sorry. I was hurting so badly. I couldn’t stay in that apartment anymore and I couldn’t come back home. I’ve missed you, too.”
Janey didn’t know who moved first, but they were in each other’s arms, and the grief of the past year exploded out of her.
She dimly heard C.J. clear his throat and leave the apartment. How could she have forgotten that he was there? Shame reared in her, making her more emotional. So much to cry over—her loss of innocence and her childhood and her family and her daughter.
She cried until her emotions were spent.
There were still people in this world to love, still those who loved her right back. She hadn’t realized how much her family did that for her. They were her soft place to land. Her throat felt raw. They were a fundamental part of her that she didn’t want to lose.
“So many times in the past year I would come home from school,” Shannon confided, “and I would want to phone you about a problem I was having there or with my friends or with a boy. You were always so smart, always had all the right answers.”
“I did?” Janey asked.
“Yeah, you did,” Shannon emphasized. “You have always underestimated yourself.”
Yeah, too true.
“Sissy,” Shannon whispered, “don’t stay away again.”
“I won’t. About a week ago I realized how empty I felt without you in my life.”
Janey led her to the sofa and they sat together. She held Shannon’s hand, then pulled a tissue from a box on the coffee table and wiped her cheeks.
She told Shannon about the store. “You have to come see it.”
“Yeah, I want to do that.”
“Shannon, I’ll come back to visit. I have a regular paycheck and some money in the bank. I can buy bus tickets now.”
“I want to see the place where Cheryl stayed.”
“Sheltering Arms? I’d like that. I’ll send you bus fare.”
They smiled at each other and Janey felt a weight lift from her shoulders.
“Don’t stay away so long next time. You’re part of our family.”
Janey’s smile felt shaky and her eyes watery—she had no idea how that was possible with all she’d cried. “Tell them all that I miss them and that I—I love them.” She cleared her throat. “I have to go.”
Shannon wrote something down on a sheet of paper and handed it to her. Their new address and phone number.
“We’re moving next weekend.”
“I’ll visit,” Janey whispered and meant it. She wanted to see the rest of her siblings, and her dad.
C.J. waited for her in the hallway, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
“You okay?” he asked.
Her cheeks felt hot. “Sorry about that. I didn’t realize it would get so emotional.”
“No problem. I’m glad you saw your sister today.” He smiled.
“Me, too.” She returned his smile.
She followed him down the narrow stairs of the three-story walk-up and stepped out into sunshine. Janey blinked, aware of a different consciousness, of a brighter day.
She’d started to heal. She could finally see that, in her memory, the good times outweighed the hard times. She was less ready to rail against fate and impotence and more ready to accept the changes in her life, to accept responsibility for future change. To make her life happen.
She had more work to do, still had to return to see the rest of the family, and put more issues to rest.
At this moment, though, it was time for a far, far more difficult visit.
She gave C.J. directions to the cemetery.
“SOMEONE LEFT FLOWERS. Shannon, most likely.” Janey walked ahead of C.J. He figured they were visiting her daughter’s gravesite.
He watched Janey sit on the grass beside the stone and touch the petals of a yellow aster that was starting to turn brown.Her hand shook.
The small plastic vase had tipped over. Dry as a bone.
Janey straightened it.
“I miss you,” she whispered and rested her palm on the grass, about where C.J. figured Cheryl’s heart would be.
“Who brought you flowers?” Janey picked dried leaves from the stems. Her voice sounded shaky and rough. No wonder. What if it was Liam buried here? It would kill C.J.
Janey had crushed the dry leaves in her fist. She brushed the remnants from her palm. “Yellow flowers always were your favorite, weren’t they?”
C.J. felt like an eavesdropper, but hesitated to leave in case she needed him.
She pulled a tissue out of her pocket and polished the small flat plaque, then pulled longer grass away from it so Cheryl’s name wasn’t covered.
“Does that feel better, baby?”
“Are you okay?” C.J. crouched in front of her and studied the small gravestone. He did the math and shook his head. “She was only six.”
“Yeah.” Janey brushed her hand over the grass with such tenderness, almost as if she was brushing hair from her daughter’s eyes. “She was so beautiful.”
C.J. had tried hard not to judge in the last week or so, but being here in Billings where Liam was conceived, leaving his son with a social worker so she could determine whether he was a fit father, all were playing havoc with his sense of fair play.
“Why did you never tell the father about his child?”
“It’s—it’s not what you think.” She reached a hand toward him then dropped it in her lap.
“Hey, as far as I know there’s only one way to get pregnant. With two people.”
“People get artificial insemination.”
“Not fourteen-year-olds.”
“I know!”
This wasn’t getting him anywhere. She wasn’t going to tell him. He looked at the grave and his anger softened. “How did she die? Did the cancer come back?”
>
“The cancer didn’t kill her.” Janey’s breathing hitched. “In the end, she was hit by a car.”
Damn, fate seemed to take what it wanted, one way or another. “I don’t remember hearing that. When was it?”
“A year ago.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s about when my world sort of blew apart.”
“What happened?” She seemed to really want to know.
“If I tell you my story, will you tell me yours?”
She seemed to fight some kind of internal war before she finally nodded.
“You first,” she said.
He sat on the other side of the grave. “I told you about how Davey and I got a little wild in our late teens. I was rebelling against my father.” He hesitated, didn’t really want to get into that now. “That’s another story for another time. Anyway, it all fell apart when Davey died. I went really wild after that. Left the rodeo. Left Ordinary. Moved to Billings and drank too much and flirted with drugs.”
He’d been so young and filled with anger and frustration and full of himself. He’d thought he was indestructible.
“I met a woman. Vicki.” She’d been so sweet at the start. There were times when he still missed that part of her.
“Liam’s mother, right?” Janey guessed.
“Yeah. She was fun and kind. But she had something painful going on inside of her. Something had happened to her, but she would never tell me what.”
His smile felt infinitely sad.
“We got mixed up with a rough crowd, went to a party one night and tried cocaine for the first time.”
“How was it?” Janey asked.
He remembered it pounding through his veins, a jittery high unlike anything he’d experienced before.
“I hated it. It made me crazy paranoid. I thought Vicki was trying to kill me and punched her.” The horror of what he’d done flooded through him and all he could see was the swelling and bruising of her face the morning after. “It terrified me. Scared me straight. Vicki wasn’t so lucky, though. She kept going back for more.”
“Maybe she wasn’t as strong as you.”
That was debatable. He hadn’t felt strong those days. “I guess not. Anyway, she started hanging with those people and got hooked. I tried to get her away, even took her back to Ordinary with me. She got on a bus the next day bound for Billings and cocaine.”
“What happened?” Janey asked. “What about Liam?”
“About two years ago she called asking for help.”
“Help with Liam?”
“She didn’t tell me about Liam.”
Janey gasped. A lightbulb seemed to go on inside of her. Yeah, now she understood why he was so upset about her not telling the father about their child.
“What kind of help did she need?” she asked.
“She wanted money.”
“Did you give it to her?”
“I knew she’d blow it on drugs. I gave in, though, because of the old affection I’d had for her. I drove into Billings and met her at a bar.”
Remembering how bad she looked, too old for her age, he swallowed hard. “She kept calling periodically and I kept bringing her money. Then about a year ago, we met at her apartment. That’s when I saw Liam for the first time. He wore a dirty diaper and nothing else.” He swallowed again to hold back his bile. Liam had been so small, the sheets on his crib so smelly, the look on his face sober, as if he knew that life had already failed him and it might never get better.
“The place was a pigsty,” C.J. continued. “I gave her all the money I could afford and took Liam home with me that day.”
He laughed bitterly. “For two years I’d had no idea I had a son.”
“Did Vicki fight you about taking Liam?”
“She was real happy to have the money.”
“Okay, I’m starting to really dislike this woman.”
Sometimes he hated her, too. “Her parents sure hated that I’d taken Liam home with me.”
“Why had they left the baby with a drug-addict mother?”
“They didn’t. They had started proceedings to have Vicki deemed an unfit mother, but I showed up before they could get custody. I sometimes think Vicki called me that week and let me come to her apartment on purpose, like maybe she hadn’t wanted her parents to have him.”
C.J. pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose where a doozy of a headache was brewing.
“Anyway, Children’s Services decided that I was a good candidate to be Liam’s father. They were sure that Liam was mine and that I had a right to have custody.”
“How could you all be so sure that Liam was yours?”
He tapped the indentation in his chin. “I knew right away he was mine.”
“Definitely a family trait.”
C.J. stood. “Let’s walk a bit.”
“Okay.” She rose to walk beside him.
“Your turn,” he said. “I’ve told you all about Liam and me. What’s your story? How was Cheryl conceived?”
Janey stopped abruptly. Something happened to her face, a kind of shutting down.
He stepped in front of her and took both of her hands in his. She squeezed. Her hands were small, her wrists fine-boned, but it felt as though she was going to crush his fingers. Something was very, very wrong.
He bent his knees, tried to put his eyes on the same level as hers. “Tell me.”
When she opened her eyes, they looked bleak, desolate.
Oh, God, not—
“I was raped.”
The air left his lungs, shot right out of him. He couldn’t breathe. Why was the world such a cruel place?
“When you were…?”
“Fourteen.”
Man, this was huge and awful and nauseating. It really, really sucked. It particularly sucked that at the moment he couldn’t find a stronger word for it than sucked.
Maybe the right word hadn’t been invented that described how evil rape was.
Janey had lived through it. She was relatively sane. What an amazing, amazing person. He’d been slowly understanding she was a deeper person than he’d originally thought, but her survival over this made her heroic.
“You never knew who did it?”
She shook her head. “He jumped me from behind.”
“Coward.” C.J. thought of a lot of things to call a rapist who would prey on a girl barely older than a child, but couldn’t bring himself to say them out loud in front of Janey. She looked as though she was hurting enough already.
“I did nothing wrong,” she said. “Just stayed a little late after school. It was dark, though. You know how early night falls in November.”
He nodded, numbed by ugly images that no young girl should ever have to live through.
“How? Where?”
“I’ll show you.”
They walked a couple of blocks to a row of thick hedges at the edge of a schoolyard.
Janey stopped.
“Here?” C.J. asked. “This is where it happened?”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JANEY HAD BROUGHT HIM to the edge of the high-school grounds. She stared at the bushes, remembering how they’d scratched her, how her skin had burned for a week, and even so the pain had been minor compared to her torn hymen and her bone-deep shame.
What she hadn’t expected was that saying it out loud, telling C.J. about her rape, would make her feel worse. Another betrayal. First the rape, and now, thinking she was putting the whole rat’s-ass incident to bed by saying it out loud, she’d made it worse.She’d hidden from it for years. Now she felt stripped bare and her emotions were reeling.
“You were only fourteen,” C.J. said, and she heard the shock and the anger in his voice, a mere echo of the tornado ripping through her.
“He smelled like cigarettes and beer.” She clenched her hands at her sides.
“I never saw his face.” Her voice rose. “I never even knew who the coward was who did it.” A spasm filled her throat and rage flooded her che
st.
“I had a right to choose my baby’s father,” she screamed.
C.J. shoved her and she hit the bushes.
“What the—” Her mind seized.
C.J.?
He shoved her harder. Branches whipped her body.
Betrayal roared through her. Not again. Not C.J.
“What are you doing?” she screamed. She shoved him back.
“Hit me,” he ordered.
She pulled away from him, but he shoved his face into hers and yelled, “Hit me.”
The tornado tearing up her chest whipped out of her and she turned her rage on this man, on his betrayal. Couldn’t he see her pain, and yet he’d inflicted more?
Her hand flew to his face, slamming against his cheek, shattering her paralysis and her fear and her shame.
Pain shot through her hand and up her arm.
The filthiest words flew from her mouth. She pounded her fist against his chest—the sound loud and hollow—and she hit him again. And again.
She shouted, “Yeah!”
She slapped him again. He stood still and took it.
“I hate you. I hate what you did to me.”
She stopped and stared at her rapist, breathing hard. She shook her head and her rapist’s amorphous face changed into C.J.’s. She’d been yelling at the man who’d attacked her eight years ago and C.J. had stood and taken it.
C.J. smiled and she suddenly got what he had done. He’d used himself as a surrogate, offering himself as a target for all of that toxic rage she’d turned in on herself because she couldn’t take it out on her unknown assailant. C.J. had tried to give her back her self-respect.
He’d baptized a small corner of her soul. She felt better. There would still be so much work left to do, but today was a start. Baby steps.
Like a balloon sitting in too-hot sunlight, the fight seeped out of her. She breathed hard, barely able to understand what had just happened.
C.J. smiled, softly. He looked proud of her. “Nicely done. For a small woman, you pack a powerful punch.”
“I’m—”
“Don’t you dare apologize.” He narrowed his eyes and pointed a finger at her. “You needed that.”
“Yeah, I did.” She touched the red imprint of her hand on his face.
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