A Missing Heart (10 page)

“We’re going to change, AJ. We’re going to grow apart if we can’t grow together. There’s no way around it.”

“Can we try not to?” I ask, realizing how silly and naive I sound.

“I want to,” she whispers.

“There’s always another way,” I tell her, not thinking this through thoroughly, even though I’ve been thinking this thought for weeks now.

Her voice sounds a little perkier when she says, “What is it?”

“Let’s move somewhere. We’ll put college on hold until we can support ourselves, and we can be together, drown in sorrow together, grow together, and put our lives back in some order for our daughter who should have been able to depend on us.” As the words dribble from my mouth like drool, they sound a little scarier than when I was reciting them in my head. It sounds real. It is real. I have less than five hundred dollars in my savings account and no experience for work, no real life skills either. But I love her and I’d go into this plan blind if it meant keeping her close.

“You want to run away?” she asks. “With me?”

“Yeah,” I say, sounding a little less sure than when I just explained everything.

“I don’t know what to say.” She truly means it. I can hear it in her voice, the truth being: she isn’t sure, which means she might think this is a good idea. What if this is a horrible idea? Giving up my scholarship
is
a terrible idea. I shouldn’t have spit that out. I shouldn’t have been thinking about it for the past month. But I’d be thinking about it forever if I hadn’t said it. I should let her decide and go from there. I can’t see Cammy running away from her parents, going against the grain, giving up college and a life she deserves to have. At least if she makes that decision, she’ll know I was willing to give it all up for her. I’d be happy knowing she knew that, even if she didn’t want to give everything up for me. She needs to know she’s loved more than I need to know I’m loved. I feel strongly about that.

“You can think about it,” I tell her.

“AJ, there you are!” Dad shouts from twenty feet away. “Why aren’t you celebrating with all your football buddies out there? They were just talking about some party at Chad’s tonight. Oh, are you…” he walks a little closer. “Are you on the phone?” He’s mouthing his last words, seeing that there is a phone pressed against my ear. “Is that Cammy? Your mother told me you weren’t―”

“Dad!” I shout. “Give me a minute.”

Cammy is laughing on the other end. “I’ll call you later,” she says. “Thanks for being everything to me.”

“I couldn’t be anything less,” I tell her.

“Love you, AJ.”

“You too.”

“What in the world has gotten into you, son?” Dad asks as he steals the empty seat next to me on the bleacher. “I’m worried about you.”

“I’m good, Dad.”

“Cold feet about college? Totally normal. I was the same way.”

“Nope, no cold feet.”

“Does it have anything to do with the fact that your friend, Cammy, is being dragged out of town by her parents because she was pregnant? Did you know she was pregnant? You never mentioned a word to your mom or I these past few months.” He pauses briefly with contemplation. “Although, I guess you haven’t really mentioned Cammy all that much either.” Dad’s words stun me like a Taser. He doesn’t associate with Cammy’s parents, and she kept her pregnancy pretty well hidden. I don’t know how he found out, but in this small town, news like that somehow gets around. “I know how it must feel knowing that someone you have been friends with for so long is suddenly going to be gone, but girls are going to come and go throughout your life. You’ll make new friends like her, son; don’t worry.” Here I thought
I
was naive. The one smart thing I’ve done in my late teens was never admit to my parents who I’ve been dating. This conversation would be a lot different right now if I had.

“Dad, I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

He slaps me on the back and winks at me. “You got it, kid. You should go enjoy these moments with your buddies over there. It’s an occasion you’ll want to remember. Trust me.”

“I’d actually like to go home right now,” I tell him. “I graduated, Dad. I’ve got my diploma and all of my memories for the last four years. My life here is complete, and I feel like I can walk away from it all now and be okay.”

“What are you going to do with yourself all summer?” he asks, standing up from the bleachers. “Oh, I know. You just got yourself a job working for me, installing carpets. Sound good? The pay is twelve an hour.”

A job. Money. It’s the first step to making my plan work. “Yeah, Dad. That’d be great.”

“Well, this is going to be a fantastic summer,” he says cheerfully. “Hunter’s coming home next week, and it’ll be just us three men working together for the next eight weeks until I lose both of my good men to school.” Geez, he’s getting all sentimental on me. “You know, son, you spend your life raising two boys to be men, and then they turn into men and you have to let them go. It sucks.” What I thought was going to be a long, drawn-out signature Dad speech, ends abruptly. I look up at him from my seat and I see a tear in his eye. “I’m so damn proud of you, son. I really am.”

I don’t deserve that. If he had any idea what I’ve done and what I’ve caused this year, those words would never find a way out of his mouth. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. I ruined lives this year. Including my own.

CHAPTER SEVEN

LIKE ANY COMPLETELY
sane person, I’m standing in the middle of the bedroom I have shared with Tori for the past year and I’m circling around, looking for a place to start. Top drawers are always where women keep their private shit, at least in the movies. Feeling only slightly bad for doing what I’m about to do, I pick up the picture frame with Tori and I shoving ice cream into each other’s faces from our first date, and turn it around to face the wall. “Sorry, babe, but this is for your own good,” I say to the back of the frame.

I pull open her top drawer, feeling a little more guilt spill through me as I push her black laced panties to the side.

After running my hands over every pair of panties she owns, I pull my hand out and close the drawer. Following with the next three drawers, I come out empty-handed each time. Before more guilt finds me, I’m on the ground, searching beneath the bed.
Nothing here either
.

My last resort is the closet, because I refuse to dig around through the basement right now, plus it’s mostly my junk down there anyway. When we moved in together last year, Tori came with very little. I believe it was less than a dozen boxes, three suitcases, a duffel bag, and a cosmetic bag. I never thought much of it, but I guess it was a little weird. Being in our late twenties, I’d expect us both to come with a decent amount of baggage. Turns out, she’s been hiding said baggage all along. The joke is on me.

Frustrated and annoyed, I pull myself up from the ground and do another circle around the room. I don’t even know what she’d be hiding. I’m looking for nothing and hoping to find the answer. I’m not that damn stupid.

Still, with my last ounce of hope, I open the closet door and search from the top down to the floor. She has a million fucking pairs of shoes but no answers as to why she’s turned into a damn loon. My anger is getting the best of me when I tear down shoe boxes from the top shelf, looking to see if there’s anything behind them. Of course, there’s nothing. Why would she be hiding something?
Fuck!

I shove everything back in, one box at a time, replacing it exactly as it was. As I position the last box into the closet, the lid pops off and a bunch of crumpled pieces of notepad paper flies out. What the hell is this?

I lift the box up and dump it on the bed, finding at least two dozen crumpled balls of hot pink notepaper. The idea of unraveling them makes me feel uneasy, but I have to know what this is. I uncrinkle the first one and smooth it out over the bed, finding words written in thick black marker.

The note reads:

This was a bad day. A very bad day.

The written words appear childish, not like Tori’s perfect handwriting. I begin unraveling more notes, lining them up on the bed. At first, I don’t know what order they go in but now I see each note is numbered by days.

In the order I have laid them out, the notes read:

Today was number two. I know this isn’t right.

Today was number five. We’re scared.

Today was number six. No one will care.

Today was number ten. I don’t know who to call but I think we need help.

Today was number twenty. We’ve run out of food and it smells in here.

Today was number twenty-four. I’m going to find help.

I feel less enlightened now than I did before, as I crumple each piece of paper back up and toss it into the box. Every kid does weird things. Maybe she was grounded for a couple of weeks. This discovery, although mysterious, is no help at all.

I place the box back into the closet and slam the door shut, realizing a second too late that I shouldn’t be slamming doors in a house with a sleeping baby.

I freeze for a minute, hoping Gavin didn’t hear the noise. No such luck, though. Crap. Gavin’s up, and he’s definitely feeling that pain in his ear now.
Shit, shit, shit.

Just as I kick the door one last time, my phone buzzes on the bed. It’s Mom. I forgot she was coming over with the prescription for Gavin. I’ve forgotten everything in the last thirty minutes.

With a couple of deep breaths, in and out, doing my best to calm the redness that’s likely splotched across my tell-all face, I leave my bedroom, walk past my screaming baby’s door, and head downstairs to greet Mom.

“Coming,” I shout, even though she didn’t ring the bell.

I need to take one last breath before I let her in, but none of the breaths I’ve taken in the past few seconds have done anything to ease my anger and frustration. I open the door and let it fly wide as I make my way back upstairs and into Gavin’s room to pick him up. “AJ?” Mom calls from the front door.

“Tori isn’t home; you can come in,” I shout back, in between hushes to Gavin.

Mom meets me in the hallway outside of Gavin’s bedroom. “Oh, my poor grandbaby,” she coos.

“Holy cow, your grandson has a load in his pants,” I say, getting a whiff of something rotten. “Give me a sec while I dispose of whatever crawled into his diaper.”

Mom laughs, a knowing little chuckle reminding me that she’s been here, and she’s done this. “Honey, I think you dropped a note or something out here. Want me to throw it away?”

“A note?” I question. “I don’t have any notes.”

Dear God, this is bad. I’ve been proud of myself for keeping my dad guts where they belong whenever I get puked on, shit on, drooled on, and peed on. I definitely get peed on at least twice a day even though I try to be faster than Gavin’s skill at hosing me down during the exact second the diaper is removed—he usually wins. I haven’t found a good method to stop the madness yet, so I’ve come to terms with his inhumane behavior, and I have convinced myself it is a normal part of life. “Being peed on should never be a normal part of life. Right, little dude?” I ask Gavin.

“What does, ‘Today was the last day. Maybe, tomorrow we’ll be safe,’ mean?”

“Mom, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I pull up Gavin’s little jogging pants and scoop him into my arms.

As I walk out of Gavin’s bedroom, I see exactly what she’s talking about. One of those damn pink pieces of paper somehow escaped out into the hallway. I take it from her hand and crumple it back up. “I have no idea what this is, nor do I want to know,” I tell her.

“It looks like a child’s handwriting,” Mom says.

“I know. The notes sort of fell from a box in the closet—one I was ‘cleaning out’,” I explain, using air quotes.

“Oh,” Mom says. With everything she’s been through in the past seven years with Hunter and losing his wife, she’s learned not to ask as many questions as she used to. Mom and I have a different relationship than she and Hunter, though. Hunter is a private person and I’m not. I tell her everything and anything she wants to know because frankly, I don’t really care if she knows. I’ve always told her everything—well, almost everything besides the whole having a baby at seventeen, thing. Whatever the case, if she judges me, it’s usually because I deserve it, and I’ve come to terms with that.

“Tori left here a few minutes ago, telling me she needed to go talk to her therapist. It’s a little weird, but not as weird as her having a complete meltdown on the side of the highway while we were heading home from the hospital.”

“On the side of a highway?” Mom repeats, concern lacing each word.

“Yeah, it’s exactly how I’m making it sound. She had no clue what she was doing, and then she apologized when she got back into the car.”

“I don’t understand.” Mom sweeps her hand up the side of her face and walks slowly down the stairs and into the living room. “It’s like something happened at some point in the past year. She is not the girl you first met, and I feel so confused about it. I just wish we could help her.”