“Other people in the restaurant though. They might follow us.”
“Why?” I asked, turning sideways to look out the back window, grunting with the pain as my ribs protested the twisting.
“My mom.”
2
Beth
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“My mom held a press conference, telling people you kidnapped me.”
“Like the news?” he asked. “The national news?”
“I didn’t see…” I felt foolish, like I should have waited to find out that little fact. “I don’t know if it was national or local. Does that matter?”
He turned on the radio, scanning through static for a news report.
“She had pictures of us.”
“Pictures? From when?”
“The past few days. You were in Walmart getting me the socks, and I was at McDonald’s.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “They were following us but didn’t track either one of us back to the lodge?”
“I know.”
“That’s not Bates,” Tommy said. “He would have had the guys I just met in the bathroom beat me up and take you to rehab.”
“Is that what happened in the bathroom?”
“That was their plan.”
“Were they…were they going to kill you?” I asked. The words felt ridiculous coming out of my mouth.
“Well, if they weren’t then, they are now.” He didn’t look at me, switching from FM radio to AM.
My heart was beating behind my eyes, and I couldn’t catch my breath. They were going to try and kill Tommy because I wouldn’t let him drop me off with my mother. All of this…because of me.
“Watch your speed,” he murmured, and I realized I was going like a billion miles above the speed limit.
“Sorry,” I breathed and eased my foot off the gas.
“Calm down, Beth,” he said in that voice of his that immediately calmed me down. He left the radio alone, static a muted roar in the truck, and stretched his arm over the seat to squeeze my shoulder. “We’re safe. We’re going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that for sure.”
“I’m sixty percent sure we’re going to be okay.”
I laughed, but it broke into a sob. I clapped my hand over my mouth like I could shove it back in. Back down, with the rest of the sobs I’d swallowed over the years.
“It’s okay,” he said, still comforting me, which was ridiculous because the split over his eye just kept bleeding. I pushed my freak-out aside and leaned over and opened the glove box, looking for napkins or anything else he could use to stop the blood.
We were so clumsy trying to take care of each other.
Pest, Tommy’s squirrel/rat/dog was beside herself, standing on Tommy’s knee with her paws to his chest, whining in her throat.
I get it, Pest. I want to do exactly the same thing.
He found a crushed-up napkin in the back of the glove box and pressed it to his cut without even a wince. A hiss. Nothing.
Stone. That was Tommy. Made of stone. He was completely together despite having been beaten up by two assassin dudes. I’d just seen my mother on a television screen, and I was losing my grip.
Get. It. Together.
“Do you think they’re working together?” I asked. “Bates and my mom?”
I kept glancing between him and the road, waiting for him to say something. To give me some kind of indication if I should be freaking out more or less than I was at the moment.
Because I really, really wanted to freak out more. I wanted to freak out a whole bunch. I wanted…
“Maybe,” he said, back to scanning through the radio stations. His hand no longer on my shoulder. “I don’t know how. Or why—”
“We don’t know why those two do any of the things they do.”
His searing blue eyes sliced through me, but he didn’t say anything and a chill went down my spine. A sixth sense of a shift in him; what it was, though, I couldn’t be sure. Whatever he was thinking, I couldn’t tell.
But it felt like doubt.
Tommy doubted me. Weird how that put a sting in my chest. A solid lump in my throat.
“Right now,” he said, looking behind us again, “we just need to figure out where to go. We can’t just drive around forever.”
“Okay.” I blew out a long breath. “My apartment is out of the question. My mother will have people there. Your apartment is out of the questions, because Bates will have people there. Simon—”
“No,” he said. “I’m not bringing these people to his door.”
“The Yucca Family Lodge?”
“They followed us there. It’s not safe.”
Safe.
I had one safe place in my life. One. And it was the place he’d never even been allowed into.
There was a breathless place inside of me. Scared and vacant. Should I do this?
Could I do this?
Hurting someone as bad as this would hurt him…I’d never done that.
But we didn’t have any choices.
I had to do it.
In another twenty miles I would get on Highway 40 toward California. Instead of taking the 15 into Los Angeles, we’d head up 58, and from there it was back roads through the mountains and some of the state parks, down to the coast just south of Santa Barbara.
It was the long way, but no one would expect us where we were going.
“I know where we’re going,” I said. “It’s safe. We can make our calls. Be sure no one is following us. Regroup.”
The radio stations he was scanning through suddenly crackled to life, and we heard the word Jada.
Tommy stopped scanning and turned up the volume.
“—Jada, the costumed pop sensation who made headlines last week for collapsing onstage during her final show in Los Angeles, has been kidnapped, according to her mother, Dr. Abigail Renshaw. The once-prominent child psychiatrist has expressed grave concerns over her daughter’s mental state, saying she was due to check in with her at a rehab facility before changing her mind and leaving with a strange man. Dr. Renshaw has released pictures of the pop princess without her usually elaborate makeup and disguises, as well as pictures of the man she thinks has kidnapped her daughter. State officials have released a statement saying they are not investigating this situation at this time. TMZ has reported—”
Tommy turned down the radio, and I blew out a shaky breath of relief.
“They’re not investigating,” I said. “That’s good news.”
Tommy was silent.
“Right?” I asked, and when I met his eyes—well, eye and blood-soaked McDonald’s napkin—I didn’t see relief.
He was staring at me so intently I looked away, flushed and hot like I was guilty of something. And when I looked back, he was still staring at me. But it wasn’t Tommy watching me. It was a stranger. The driver who’d kidnapped me a few days ago. The version of Tommy who wanted to put as much distance between us as possible.
The version of Tommy who wished he didn’t know me.
“What?” I asked, laughing because this shit was suddenly awkward.
“Child psychiatrist?”
“My mom?”
“Yeah, Beth. Your mom is a child psychiatrist? And a prominent one?”
“Once,” I said, like it mattered. “She was once prominent.”
The silence between us seethed like snakes, coiled and hissing around us. Or maybe those were just my secrets.
“I don’t know why Bates is doing this shit he’s doing,” he said. “But…I think you know why your mom is doing what she’s doing.”
“What are you getting at?”
“You never told me anything about her. Ever,” he said. “And I’ve always just accepted that it must have been awful. That you must have been the victim of some serious shit from her. Because I figured we all came from shitty families.”
The betrayal sliced right through me, so fast and so sharp I actu
ally gasped.
“Now, you’re wondering if she’s right and I’m wrong? If I’m mentally unwell and she’s just trying to take care of me?”
“I don’t know who is right. All I know is those guys were going to hurt me, and now they’ll want to kill me, and my guess is they aren’t going to think twice about hurting you either, so maybe I just need more than trust. Maybe now I need some answers about you and your mother.”
I wanted to say a thousand childish things. I wanted to press my lips shut and turn my face away and ignore him until we got to that place that would drive a stake right through his heart.
But he was right. And what he was asking for was fair. I didn’t like it, but it was fair.
I took a deep breath and then another. Another. Stalling, yes. Totally. Because these words…they were not easy.
“Beth—”
“This isn’t easy, Tommy. So cut me some slack.”
I took the exit for Highway 40. It was unavoidable now. Not a possibility. But a real thing. The moment when Tommy would hate me for good was only a matter of time.
“My mother was… is, I guess… a prominent child psychiatrist. She rose to fame with some controversial treatments for kids who’d been diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders, believing largely in pharmaceutical solutions for behavior problems in children. Or in extreme cases, institutionalized care.”
“Can you…? In English, maybe?”
“She drugged the fuck out of kids with ADHD or who were on the autism spectrum or had bipolar disorder or about a dozen other things. She drugged them until they didn’t speak. Didn’t complain. Didn’t cause problems. And if that didn’t work, she told parents to put their kids in psych wards and hospitals. And we’re not talking a few kids; we’re talking hundreds.”
His silence was comforting in a way, and so was the highway. The sunshine through the windshield. Pest nudged my leg with her nose. And I clung to those small comforts because talking about this shit…about my mom…it was hard. Much harder than it should be, maybe, because I never talked about it. Ever. So the load of my mother’s betrayal was as heavy as it had always been.
“At first it was success after success, and she was going around the country giving speeches and talking to parents about how drugs could help kids with behavior problems and learning disabilities, and she claimed, over and over again, with her help—their families could be ‘normal.’”
“Uh-oh,” he said and I glanced over, surprised. But of course he would understand; he’d been labeled by teachers and counselors and doctors his entire childhood. All the kids at St. Joke’s had—it was part of the reason we got there. We’d taken pills, each of us, mornings and evenings. Drugs to even us out, calm us down. Make us normal. Make us be less of a problem. And some kids needed drugs to function. Ritalin changed lives for kids with ADHD, there was no question.
But all of us, right down the line, were overmedicated.
Just so we were easier to manage.
“Right. Uh-oh. She couldn’t make things normal for anyone. And really, honestly, I don’t think she liked kids. At all. I mean, she didn’t like me, and I did everything I could to be likable to her. Anyway, I think the world was just figuring out that there was no such thing as a normal kid, and the backlash started. And her reputation in a lot of places got tarnished and she became…desperate, I think. She backed down and became an advocate for sensible treatment for kids. And she made a public apology and recanted her earlier methods, but I don’t think she meant it.”
“Why?”
“Because I was turning thirteen and hitting a kind of rebellious stage that my mother just…couldn’t deal with. I’d always had some problems, sleeping for one. Panic attacks. I had some attention issues. Teachers called me dreamy. I was shy.”
“None of those things are problems,” he said.
“Well, the sleep thing was, and the rest of it—” I shook my head, hearing my mother’s words come out of my mouth. Ways to qualify and hedge and still somehow damn myself. “Yes, you’re right. But I grew up being told all those things were wrong with me. Being nervous. Scared to try new things. Throwing tantrums over food. I was told all those things were bad my entire life. Sometimes it’s hard to shake that. And I’d spent years, years trying to be the daughter my mother wanted me to be, without really knowing what that was. But I became a teenager and I was so fucking tired of trying.”
At that moment, I would have given every cent of the money I had or would have for him to reach over and touch me. His hand over mine, or cupping my shoulder. Anything. Because I felt impossibly alone. Talking about my mom always made me feel so alone.
But Tommy stayed on his side of the truck. And I stayed on mine, and I couldn’t be sure he believed what I was telling him.
“Anyway, she treated me—she treated every kid—like we were problems that could be solved with just the right kind of chemical answers. And she was right sometimes. But she was wrong so much more.”
“What did she do to you?”
I took a deep breath, my eyes burning with a grief and betrayal I hadn’t really thought I felt anymore. This was why I didn’t talk about this. Because it was a long time ago and it was right now all at the same time.
“She drugged the shit of me. I became like… a guinea pig. And it didn’t matter how I begged her to stop, or how I told her the drugs made me suicidal or feel like I wasn’t myself, she didn’t stop. She’d just change the cocktail. I counted at one point, and I had been on thirty different meds in the span of two years. And those were just the ones I knew about. She kept changing my diagnosis. Bipolar, manic depressive, OCD, ADD. I think she threw epileptic in there too, at one point.”
“Isn’t it illegal for family to treat family?”
“Isn’t it?” I said with a slightly hysterical laugh I quickly swallowed down. “I kept thinking someone would find out. Someone would see what she was doing. A teacher or a friend’s mom. But it just never…happened.”
“And you never told anyone?”
I shook my head. Embarrassed maybe that I hadn’t fought harder to be heard. Or seen.
There must have been someone I could have trusted. Someone who would have helped, and it was my fault that I never tried.
“Beth,” he said. A small gust of air full of sympathy. But that was all. Just my name. And I shook off those old recriminations.
“I ran away,” I told him. “I wasn’t very good at it, because at first I tried to stay in school, but the principal turned me in to my mom. I ran away again, and that time I didn’t go to school, I stayed in a friend’s basement, but her mom caught me and she called my mom. I ran away again, and then I was just… on the streets for a few weeks. A month, really. I got caught stealing fucking tampons, if you can believe it, and the store manager called my mom and that time…my mom called the cops. She said if I wanted to see what it was like without her, she’d help me. She sent me to St. Joke’s.”
She sent me there. To be raped. And traumatized.
But to meet Tommy, too.
The scales were complicated.
“We were told your mom came to the hospital that night after everything happened with the Pastor,” Tommy said, his voice quiet and even.
“Yeah, she came back, swept in, tried to make it seem like I was a problem child acting out and she’d been this long-suffering martyr mom.” I rearranged my sunglasses, pushed down the visor and then pushed it back up. Fidgeting because I had to do something. “There was this nurse, though. And she kept looking at my mom like she wasn’t buying anything Mom said. And she came in that night when my mom wasn’t there and asked me if I was okay.”
“And you told her?”
I shook my head, my throat thick. “That would make a better story, wouldn’t it? A Hollywood ending kind of thing. I can’t…I can’t tell you the number of times I wished that I had told her. I played it over and over in my mind, changing what I did, imagining what would have happened. But I didn’t tell her. I tol
d her what I told every other adult that asked if I was okay. If things were good at home. I told her I was fine. That I just wanted to go home.”
“You were just a kid, Beth. An abused kid.”
“I kept thinking about the thing you told me that day after we got caught in the art room. How I was a kid people listened to? And I didn’t understand how you could see that in me. Because I’d never tried it. I never told anyone what my mom did, because when I was a kid and told my mom to stop drugging me, she didn’t listen. I thought…I had no voice, until you told me I did.” I dared a glance at him, and he was watching me, his mouth slightly open like he couldn’t believe this story I was telling. And I didn’t know if he was having a hard time believing it because he was having a hard time believing me, or because the story was so awful.
And the difference between those two things was important. It was the distance I’d been grappling with my whole life. When you live something that’s hard to believe, it messes with your head.
“And I still couldn’t believe that I had a voice. I still don’t.”
“But your music? The concerts? The YouTube channel?”
“I live my life in disguise, Tommy. I have so many disguises, I’m not even sure who I am half the time. I’ve changed my name. My look. Everything.”
I had secrets and lies for every occasion. Every mood. I’d gotten so good at not being myself, I wasn’t entirely sure who I was underneath it all.
Nausea twisted in my stomach.
Because I liked to think that I’d handled what happened to me in that office. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe…maybe I was hiding from a lot of things.
“What happened with your mom? After the hospital?”
“I stayed with her for a few more months, pocketed some cash when I could. Figured out how to run away for real, and then I vanished. Middle of the night, got a bus ticket, and I was out of there.”
“How old were you?”
“I ran away on my seventeenth birthday. It was my present to myself.”
“Where did you go?”
“The place we’re going now,” I said, using all my strength to sound calm. To sound natural. To not look at him. “The man who lives there helped me. I stayed for a little over a year. Went to school. Made some money.”
Where I Belong (The Debt Book 2) Page 2