Bent not Broken (214 page)

I nod at him, closing my eyes against the tears that threaten again. “Let me go clean up and then we’ll talk, okay?”

He nods, pulling the zipper closed on his jeans and leaning forward on his thighs.

I pull on my sweater and jeans and go into the bathroom to clean up. When I get back, I sit on the couch next to Leo. He’s still sitting with his elbows on his thighs, his head down, but as I sit, he leans back. He doesn’t look at me for a minute and then, “I guess the best place to start is my arrival in San Diego.”

CHAPTER 27

“Okay, but first, why did you change your name?”

He sighs. “Lauren asked me if it would help me to get a new start if I started going by my middle name, and of course, my new last name. I said no at first, but after that first week, I agreed. I wanted to become someone else – truthfully, I wanted to escape myself. Of course, a name change can’t do that, but it seemed like a start at the time. I registered for school as Jake Madsen and no one has called me Leo until now.”

I nod. I can’t pretend I don’t understand this. At many times during my life, if someone had offered me the chance to become someone other than Evie Cruise, it would have been a very tempting offer.

“You have to know that when I left you here, I meant every word I said up on that roof that night. I meant it to my soul. I knew there would never be anyone else for me, and I was right. There never has been.” He looks at me searchingly.

“You told me there were lots of women, Leo,” I whisper, turning my head away from him to gaze out the window for a minute. I can’t lie, it hurts now that I know who he really is.

“None of them meant anything to me. Not one. Not even close. I’m not proud of that, in fact, I’m ashamed of it. But it was never anyone except you. I was fucked up, Evie. But I’ve never loved anyone except you. You have to believe that, even if you don’t understand.”

He sighs, dropping his head. When he looks back up, he says, “I arrived in San Diego on a Sunday night. On Monday morning, I started my letter to you. I wrote a little bit on Tuesday, and on Wednesday. I intended to write to you every day of the week until Friday, and then put the letter in the mail on Saturday. I stopped writing on Thursday.”

“Why? What happened on Thursday,” I ask quietly, looking back at him but almost afraid to know.

He’s silent for a minute and then, “On Thursday afternoon, I was down in the finished basement trying to learn how to play pool. We had this big pool table with red felt and … Anyway, I was just messing around. My new dad, Phil, was at work. My new mom, Lauren, as you know… he pauses, grimacing a little… she came down wearing this little nightie thing. I was uncomfortable but I had never really had any kind of normal home life. I thought maybe that was what moms did, walk around in their bedclothes. Or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself.”

My eyes are wide now because I’m pretty sure I know what’s coming, and I don’t know if I want to hear him say the words.

“She poured herself a drink and then she poured me one too, and I took it, even though all kinds of warning bells were going off. I just didn’t know what to do.

“We played pool for a little bit, and I finished my first drink and she poured me another. She was making all these shots, bending over the pool table and it was weird, but the alcohol started numbing me and so it was easier to pretend it was normal.” He lets out a humorless laugh and then looks down.

He sighs and he’s still looking away from me but continues his story. “After a little while, she started rubbing up against me, touching me. I was a young, horny kid with two drinks in me, and I was confused and struggling with what was happening with this woman who I thought had taken me into her home to mother me.”

He sighs again. “Shit, this is hard.”

I want to touch him in some way, but I instinctively know that that’s not the right thing to do, so I remain silent and still.

Finally, he continues. “Finally she just got completely naked and bent over the pool table and started begging me to take her. She seduced me, but I didn’t resist very fervently. I fucked my new
mom
over the pool table in the basement while my new
dad
was at work. How fucking sick is that?”

Tears are rolling freely down my cheeks now and I choke back a little sob.

He continues staring ahead when he says, “We ate dinner that night as a family and my dad toasted to their ‘new son!’ I could barely keep the food down. I fucking hated myself and all I could think about was how I had done it once again. I had let down someone who loved and trusted me.
Again
.”

He pauses for several minutes. “They had tried for several years but never could have kids. Phil made it clear to me that he was thrilled to have a son now who could one day take over his company. We had talked a lot before that day, and he made me feel good about myself, like he thought I was smart.”

I manage to ask, “I thought you told me your adoptive father worked in a hospital here.”

“He did. The x-ray technology that’s now used by Homeland Security, started out as medical equipment.”

I nod. “Sorry, go on, Leo,” I say quietly.

A look of pain crosses his face when he hears me say his name, but he continues.

“Anyway, that afternoon in the basement was all it took to make me realize that once again, people only wanted to use me. First, my birth parents to take care of my brother and to take their anger at the world out on, and now these two people. My new mom for obvious reasons, but then it was also easy to twist my new dad’s interest in having a son just to use as a workhorse, someone to train and mold into what
he
wanted me to be.

“No one ever cared about who I
was
, just what I could do for them, except you, Evie, and my brother, Seth. And now I had destroyed both of you. I had promised Seth I would take care of him, and now he was rotting in some state run facility somewhere, and I had no idea where, and I had promised you I would save myself for you, be true to you, and it only took less than a week for me to betray you. I honestly thought about slitting my own wrists I hated myself so much.”

I grab a tissue from the box on the table next to my couch and blot my cheeks. “Leo, surely you know now that she took advantage of you, right?” I say quietly.

His face gets hard. “I know what all the psychology books would say about it and yeah, she was wrong. But I could have resisted more. I could have run. I could have… I don’t know. But I could have done more than I did. And not only that, Evie, but it didn’t stop that day. It happened regularly until the day I moved out and went to college. Even then, she tried to continue things, but I could successfully avoid her then. She claims she’s in love with me and that she knew it the minute she saw me at the foster home. How twisted is that? Jesus. I was fifteen.” He scrubs his hand down his face.

I cringe. “You didn’t think you could trust me enough to tell me?” I ask softly, a sob making my voice hitch.

“A million times I thought about how I could explain to you what happened. I needed you so desperately, I thought I would die of the longing. But what was I supposed to say? I couldn’t even make sense of it myself, much less try to explain it to you. I was just so deeply ashamed.

“And eventually, I considered the longing for you my penance for being
me
, someone who destroyed the people he loved. The thing I couldn’t get around was what my silence must be doing to you.”

He stares straight ahead, stoic. “Eventually though, I convinced myself that being apart, you had a fighting chance. I figured I was broken and that some people can’t be fixed, or if they can, it’s only by love so big it destroys the fixer. I couldn’t destroy you any more than I thought I already had, Evie. I convinced myself that knowing the truth about me would have hurt you more than leaving you alone.

“I just wanted to disappear. But you also have to understand that I hated myself for leaving. And I suffered as much as you did.”

We’re both quiet for several minutes, me still blotting my eyes, absorbing his answer, when he continues.

“I grew six inches the summer I moved to California, and I started playing sports, working out. It helped a little as an outlet, and I continued through high school, but it didn’t help enough.

“I started drinking, doing drugs, partying, using girls. In part it was because I despised myself, and I craved anything that would numb my pain, but in part it was because it made Lauren livid to see me go through one girl after another, and I had grown to despise her too. She’s a manipulative bitch. She was lying to Phil, she…”

I interrupt him. “She’s a pedophile, Leo.”

He looks at me finally and says, “I guess, but I take responsibility too. Especially, since it continued and it became our secret from everyone, especially my dad.” He looks away, a look of shame crossing his face.

“Did you ever try to tell him?” I ask.

“A couple months after it started, I thought about telling Phil, but I felt so damn guilty and shameful for my own part in the situation. What if he didn’t believe me? And what if he did and I destroyed them? Could I live with that too? Eventually, I just focused on numbing myself.

“And then, even more shameful for me, I wanted to have a family so much. I loved all the things they were giving me; the luxuries, the trips, stuff I never had before. And that made me hate myself the most.” He scrubs his hands down his face.

“Anyway, I was a fucking mess in high school. I dragged my parents through hell. Lauren always bailed my ass out with my dad, for obvious reasons, and my poor dad just tried to help me. But there was no help for me, not then. He had to think,
‘what the fuck did we do adopting this kid?’
a million times, but he never, ever said that to me.

“Things started getting better for me when I moved out to go to college. I finally got some distance from my
mom
,” he lets out a humorless laugh, “and started thinking a little more clearly. My dad and I were hanging out more outside of the house, and I developed a relationship with him - finally. He had to have been doubtful that I’d
ever
be trustworthy enough to learn the ropes at his company, but about a year after I was out of the house, he came to me and asked me if I’d work with him. I said yes and we started getting even closer. It was nice. He was a good guy; a workaholic and distracted, but decent and good.

“Anyway, when I graduated, he and Lauren bought me a Porsche as a gift. The night of my graduation party, Lauren cornered me in my bedroom and made another one of her passes. I pushed her off of me, and she was pissed about it so she lashed out and told me that she hadn’t wanted to break it to me this way, but that she had gotten information on my brother years ago from the family attorney. I was constantly asking her to find any information she could so that I could visit him. She told me he died three years before of pneumonia but she hadn’t told me because she knew it would upset me. Jesus. Upset me? I practically raised that kid from the time he was born. And she just threw it out there because she was mad that I didn’t want to have sex with her.”

He stops and I can’t help it, I grab his hand and I squeeze it. He turns his head to me, an expression of pain crosses his features again before he goes on.

“I tore out of there, taking my new car, driving like an idiot, tearing around corners, accelerating to speeds I knew were dangerous, suicidal even. I lost control, side swiped a semi and flipped my car six times. Or so I’m told. I don’t remember any of it. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital with a head wrapped in bandages and tubes sticking out of me.”

I suck in a breath.

“I had a fractured jaw, had shattered my right cheekbone and broken my nose all to hell, I had an eight inch gash across the back of my head, three cracked ribs, a ruptured spleen, two broken arms and a broken leg. I was in the hospital for six months while they rebuilt my face and my body healed.”

“Oh my God,” I breathe.

“I had nothing to do but lie there and self reflect, so in one sense it was the best thing that could have happened to me. A part of me actually
had
died and was being reborn. I almost had no choice but to face my demons. The unfortunate part was that Lauren came to see me every day and there was nowhere I could run. One day after I had been there about a month, she came by to tell me that she had convinced them to let me come home with her after my next couple surgeries so that she could nurse me back to health. I protested, got angry, told her I was over eighteen and there was no way I was letting her get near me. She tried to convince me by throwing back the covers and going down on me. There was nothing I could do. I was literally helpless to stop her, although I was railing at her to cut the shit, that I wasn’t going to stay quiet anymore. That’s when my dad walked in. She jumped back and we all just froze, stunned for several minutes, and finally he said, ‘This is why? All these years, this is why you hated us both.’ It was like it all finally just clicked into place for him. Then he started clutching his chest, and Lauren screamed and pressed the button for the nurse. He had had a major heart attack.”

“Oh God, Leo,” I whisper, more tears coursing down my cheeks.

He continues but he sounds tired, almost monotone now. “He regained consciousness the next morning, and we thought he was recovering, but he got a blood clot five days later and that’s what killed him. It can be common after a heart attack. The morning that he came to, they wheeled me in to him, and he put his hand over his heart and told me how sorry he was, and that he didn’t blame me. I cried like a damn baby.”

I squeeze his hand again.

“The day after that, his lawyers came to the hospital and he changed his will to give me full ownership of the company. Lauren has all she needs to live the life she’s become accustomed to until the day she dies. But the company is a hundred percent mine.”

We’re both quiet for a minute as I consider something. “Was it Lauren who came to your hotel room in San Diego and answered your phone?” I ask quietly.