Rock the City: A Midnight Fate Novel (18 page)

“That must have hurt.”

The first few times I went home and came up empty, I couldn’t make sense of why she was hiding from me. I figured she was angry that I left in the first place. Never in a million years did I think she was on drugs and swinging around a damn pole every night of the week. “She’s the only family I have left. I haven’t heard from or seen my dad in forever. I can’t even think of the last thing I said to him, that’s how long it’s been.”

“What happened to your mom?” she asks cautiously, not wanting to stress me out more than I already am. What she doesn’t know is that Lemon is walking in our mother’s footsteps and she probably doesn’t even realize it.

I hid a lot of the shit I dealt with back then, or at least as much as I could. Whether I was hiding pills and rolled-up dollar bills so Lemon didn’t see them or I was stashing liquor bottles and beer cans so she didn’t see how much our mom drank every night of the week. I did whatever it took. I found out about that world way too young, and I didn’t want Lemon’s childhood to have those kinds of memories in it. I did a pretty good job until the night Mom took it too far. There was no coming back after that.

“Lane?”

I chew on the inside of my cheek to keep from breaking down. I’m a grown-ass man, but nothing can stop me from turning into the eight-year-old little boy I was when I realized I couldn’t protect my mom or Lemon anymore. I was the man of the house and I had failed them both. With a shaky voice, I tell Noelle, “My mom worked her nights at Lola’s and slept most of the day until the night she overdosed. I can still remember the way her room smelled when I found her. It was like diving headfirst into an ashtray.”

“Lane, Mommy won’t wake up to make me pannycakes. Will you make them for me?” Lemon asks in her sweet, sugary voice.

“Yeah, go get dressed,” I tell her when I bypass the kitchen to check on Mom. I heard her come in after three in the morning, stumbling into the walls and knocking stuff over like she does when she smells bad and can barely talk.

When I open her bedroom door, pictures of Dad are torn up and scattered on the bed around her
—
all ones he took and sent to her with the money I took with me to the grocery store every two weeks. There’s never anything for us in the envelope, not even an ‘I love you’ from him. Sometimes I wonder if he can’t say it because he hates us so much.

As much as I can’t stand that he’s always gone, even if it’s quieter without him, I bet he wouldn’t let Mom stay out so late with her friends. But Mom had us young, and she likes the attention she gets when she’s not inside this stuffy house. I can’t blame her because I’d rather be at school, even if the other kids are punks because we don’t have a lot of money and live on the wrong side of the tracks. Even my paper route money isn’t enough to get Lemon the toys she wants
—
a Barbie with a bathing suit, and Ken who loves her. All Lemon’s ever wanted is to be loved.

“Mom,” I whisper as I shake her shoulder. She doesn’t budge, so I do it twice more before I try to roll her over. When I do, her mouth has bubbles coming out of it, and some dried white stuff is stuck to her face. But what scares me the most is how cold she is and how blue her lips are. It’s not normal, even if nothing she ever does is.

“Mom!” I scream louder, begging her to open her eyes and look at me. She doesn’t budge, her small body lying lifelessly beneath the cover, a wine bottle on the table next to the bed with a little mirror and a rolled-up dollar bill next to it.

Lemon hears me yelling and runs into the bedroom, stopping as soon as she sees how scared I am. I can usually fix things and make them better for her, but right now, there’s nothing I can do to make this go away. And to make it worse, I scare her even more when I yell, “Get out of here, Lemon.”

Even though I told her to leave, Lemon knows it’s worse than it’s ever been and starts crying, her blond curls bouncing as she finally runs away from me. I try to protect her because I never want her to know how bad we have it. The older she gets, the more she figures out on her own. Before long, I won’t be able to make her pain go away with candy and stuffed animals from the corner store.

Like it or not, this is the angry truth of what life in Sea Port is like for a lot of families like ours. If you consider a family a house with an eight-year-old and his little sister inside it. There’s never a normal mom and dad to tell us to do our homework or when to go to bed. Everything I know, I learned from watching TV.

“Where are they taking her?” Lemon asks the woman who came to sit with us while they took our mom away. She asks a lot of questions and looks around the house
—
it makes me nervous. I’m old enough to figure out she’s here because she has to be and not because we want her to be. No matter how hard I have to work or who I have to fight, I’ll never let anyone split us up.

“Life went to hell that day, but it was about to get ten times worse than it already was—especially for Lemon.”

I glance at Noelle, afraid to see her reaction. I sigh when she has tears streaming down her cheeks. “Did your dad come home?” she whispers.

“For about a week, until my uncle came to live with us. His life was fishing though, and he couldn’t stay. At the time, I didn’t care if he stayed or left, because he was so quiet it was like he was a different person. I didn’t understand why back then; I was too young. If I knew then what I did now, I would have been nicer to him—maybe even tried to get him to stay with us longer. But once Uncle Tom was settled, Dad went back to fishing like nothing ever happened. I guess you can’t miss someone you never saw in the first place.”

“I’m so sorry, Lane. No child should ever have to experience that.”

I reach my hand to her thigh, squeezing it so she understands that I’m okay. “I had a shitty start in life, baby, but it’s gotten a whole lot better. I have my music, and I have you. That’s all I really need.”

She turns her body toward mine as she adjusts her seatbelt. “You need your sister, too. As much as you think you’re okay with how things turned out, you’re not. I can see it in your eyes.”

“She’s my sister. Of course I want a relationship with her.”

Noelle brushes a few more tears off her cheeks before saying, “I don’t understand how you can love so hard and with so much of your soul when you were never shown that kind of love before. You should be so angry and so hateful, but you’re the exact opposite. You have the kindest heart I’ve ever known.”

“Drugs aren’t human. They take control and they destroy. The only good thing that came from them was I knew early on how I didn’t want to live my life. Some kids have a perfect example of how to mature and grow. I had a shining example of what not to be. My only choice was to try to have a better life than what I was shown. I easily could have fallen into the same path like Lemon did. I was lucky I got out when I did, because all the men who destroyed our mom had kids who were raised by addicts. Those kids are the ones who grew up hateful and angry, and they’re the ones destroying Lemon. She’s following in Mom’s footsteps and probably didn’t realize it until it was too late. Now she’s in the thick of it with no way out because I wasn’t strong enough to pull her away from Trey when I had the chance.”

“Who’s Trey?”

“I can’t right now, Noelle. If I talk about him, I can’t be stuck in a car with no air.”

She unclips her seatbelt and rests her head against my bicep, kissing me through the fabric of my shirt. “I want to know all of it—the whole story. But you don’t have to say another word about it until you’re ready. What you choose to tell me, I’ll cherish. Not because it’s something to celebrate, but because it’s something you trust me to keep safe in our relationship. And that’s exactly what I’ll do with it. You’re my rock, Lane, and I want to be that for you.”

“You are, baby. It’s Lemon I let down. She’s the one I have to make it up to.”

“From what you’ve told me, she’s worn her pain like diamonds around her neck. You can’t deny how strong she is, and if she’s anything like you at all, she’ll come through this stronger than ever.”

“And if she doesn’t, she’ll be dead. I can’t sit around and wonder if she’s alive anymore. She has no idea what it’s like to walk in on someone who overdosed. She doesn’t understand that you can’t ever unsee that shit. I don’t want someone to walk in on her and be stuck with that pain for the rest of their lives.”

With complete and absolute resolve, she says, “Then we’ll do whatever it takes to help Lemon.”

As we pull into the parking garage and into my assigned spot, I turn my head and realize there’s not a single woman on this planet I’d rather walk alongside than her. If I’m doing this, we’re doing it together.

The prayer I silently recite to myself in the elevator does no good. Once Lane unlocks the front door and pushes it open, we’re faced with darkness. Without saying a word, we both know Lemon’s gone.

Lane walks in first, flips the switch, and lights up the living room. He takes one look around and storms into the kitchen. After flipping open a few cabinets and then the fridge, he growls before slamming it shut. I can’t tell what he’s looking for, but before I can get to him to calm him down, he lets loose. Angrier than I’ve ever seen him, his pain goes from his heart all the way to his fist. I gasp when he punches the wall so hard his hand goes through the drywall, leaving a gaping hole behind.

“Lane!” I yell in a mixture of shock and fear. I’m not scared he’ll hurt me; I’m scared he’ll hurt himself even more than he already has.

For the briefest of seconds, I can see him debating whether to do it again. But once he hears my voice, he backs away. With his hands clasped behind his head, he tries to catch his breath. “Check if she took anything of yours.”

“I’m sure she didn’t.”

“She did,” he says, while staring at the mantle.

Even though I want to give Lemon the benefit of the doubt, I check the closet in Lane’s bedroom. The hangers that held my clothes are bare, and when I open my suitcase on the floor, most of what I left in there is gone, too.

It’s the same in the bathroom. Some of my makeup is gone, my shampoo and conditioner aren’t in the shower—even the roll of toilet paper is missing.

My stuff can all be replaced, but what scares me the most is that she needed all those things I take for granted every day of my life. When I get ready, it’s all there waiting for me every single day. To think she doesn’t even have enough money to buy herself shampoo makes me sad.

I sit on the edge of the tub, wishing I could have met her before she left—helped her even.

“It’s all gone, isn’t it?” Lane asks from the doorway.

I nod, wishing I could tell him everything was right where I left it. “She didn’t take it all, but most of it.”

“Motherfucker,” he says as he pinches the bridge of his nose, no doubt trying to figure out what to do next. Even though we’re a few feet apart, I can feel the anger coursing through his veins. While I want to tell him it’s okay, we both know what she did is anything but okay.

“Did she take anything else?”

“Food and water. Some of the pillows off the spare bed.”