The Years After (38 page)

She finally lifted her finger and tapped on it.

Hi.

Hi? Was he for real? She nearly screamed out loud and threw her phone against the wall until it smashed into pieces.
Hi?
After everything he’d done to her?
Hi
is all he had to say to her?

Then it pinged again. She dropped it on her bed like a hot potato. It was almost like he knew she was holding the phone and staring at it.

I don’t know where to start. But I think I should start somewhere. I’m sorry. In every way, I’m sorry.

She stared at his message. Then her fingers hurriedly typed her reply:
I’ll NEVER forgive you.

You shouldn’t. But I’m not committing suicide. I’m trying to find a way to live with it. Seeing a therapist now and she said if I’m sorry, I should say so. So I’m trying to start there.

The statement
almost
made her smile in a grim, sick kind of way.
I guess that’s good. Still not forgiving you,
she wrote back.

Goodnight, Olivia.
Then he put a freaking heart imogee after it. Derek never used them. Every one of her texts to him had at least a dozen of them punctuating her messages. She stared at the pink heart and swiftly shut her phone down.

But he texted the next day.
How are you?

Was he for real? First
Hi
, and now,
how are you
? He all but ruined her life, and totally suspended her freshman year in college. Now she hovered in her room at her parents’ house, afraid to venture into the world again.
How do you think I am?

Wishing I was dead?

His curt statement almost made her mouth lift into a smile. Almost. There was nothing funny about being kidnapped and overdosed. She answered,
No. Too easy for you. Wishing I never met you. I fell for a guy who sells drugs. I didn’t even catch on to the hundreds of lies you told me. I almost got killed for my stupidity.

I did lie. I’m trying to stop. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have to always be lying. It’s as easy and natural to me as putting underwear on in the morning. It’s just what I always do. I started young by lying to my dad to keep him from hitting me. I lied after I killed him. I lied when I was selling drugs. I lied to pacify Quentrell and keep myself out of prison. I just lie automatically by force of habit. And I’m sorry. You weren’t being stupid, I was too sickly good at it.

Why should I believe you now? What point is there in rehashing all this?

I’ll tell you the truth. As much as I know. The point is: you deserve whatever answers you want.

I don’t believe you’ll ever be honest. But I guess it doesn’t hurt to read a few texts from you. So… Quentrell was really your brother?

Yes. He took over my dad’s operation after I killed him. My mom gave me to him to “work.” That’s what she called it in exchange for keeping her supplied.

Quentrell didn’t care you were his own brother?

No. It was a sick game to him. I’ve been shitty to Max. I didn’t protect him, or even get to know him. But I never wanted him doing the things I was. I thought by protecting Max from Quentrell, I might make up for some of the things I was doing. But I see now, it didn’t.

What kinds of things did your dad do to you?

He liked to hit and kick all of us. So did my mom though. He was just stronger and could really hurt us. They didn’t protect us from anyone. None of the shits that dealt for them, or the ones they were hooking up with. I was weaned on that stuff.

You were beaten? What else? What else did they do to you? Tell me, I need to know.

Everything. They did everything a parent could do to kids. Quentrell was big and mean, always, even then. They ignored him. Max was small and quiet, and I tried to deflect their wrath away from him. It was me who my mother hated most. I was beaten. I was even raped by one of my mom’s johns. I was neglected. I was shot full of drugs when I was eight to shut me up when I got too loud one time. The list goes on. Do you really want to hear more?

Yes.

Why?

To understand. To understand who I fell in love with. You were raped?

Yes. Can you understand why I don’t want to talk about it?

Yes. But ignoring it or lying about it doesn’t erase it. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. How old were you?

Twelve.

Her heart twisted and bile climbed up her throat.
I had no idea.

It’s why I’m such a lousy person.

Did you really kill your father?

Yes. I really did.

Do you regret it?

I regret everything I’ve ever done. Even you, and everything I did to you.

How could you lie so long?

Years of practice. It’s no help, but I only lied when it came to drugs or Quentrell. Lying is the only thing I’ve ever really known. The guilt about it, towards you, didn’t come until later, after I started to understand what lying was. What loving someone was supposed to mean. I didn’t know, Olivia. I never loved anyone. Not my parents, not even my brothers. If Max and I did, we never learned how to show it.

It hurts me to think of you being beaten and abused and neglected and raped. It hurts me so much.

Long pause, during which she wondered if she’d lost him.
Thank you. No one’s ever known. No one’s ever hurt for me.

You hurt me.

I hurt me too.

She closed her eyes at his simple sentence and stared at it long and hard. Tears filled her eyes and dripped over her eyelids. God it was all so horribly difficult.

She glanced down when another text came through.
Please show these to Tony. Ask if it’s okay if I contact you. If he says no, then you’ll never hear from me again.

Her eyebrows shot up in surprise.
You want me to ask my dad if I can talk to you?

Yes. I have terrible judgment of right and wrong. You might not have clear judgment when it’s about me. Tony does though. He’ll know. He’ll tell you the truth, which is what you need.

OK. Have to say, you don’t sound the same.

I’m not the same.

She stared at the conversation for half an hour. Then she surprised herself by going downstairs and showing it to her parents. They both sat down and a strange silence filled the kitchen. Gretchen rubbed her eyes. “Shit. This is… tragic. How can I hate him? I want to hate him.”

Tony nodded and rubbed her neck. Then he leaned over and touched Olivia’s hand. “I know. That’s what I felt too. Will says he caught him in a severe panic attack a few weeks ago. He is seeing a therapist now. Will says he isn’t well. This, what happened to you, really changed him.”

Olivia shut her eyes as the horror of it all filtered through her head. She blinked her eyes a few times to hold the tears back. She was tired of crying for herself and Derek, and now, just for Derek. “He was raped. How does a twelve-year-old boy handle that?”

“Lie, cheat, steal, act out, some do drugs.”

“Can he ever be normal?”

Gretchen let out a huge sigh. “If I say he can’t, I am denying the purpose of my entire life’s work, which is all I’ve ever focused on. No one is too broken. Everyone can be fixed. So…yes, I have to believe he can. Do I want you to be the one involved in his rehabilitation? No. But…”

“But you can’t decide that for me,” Olivia finished in a hollow tone. Her heart squeezed and more tears filled her eyes. She whispered softly, “I’m still…”

“We know, honey, we know you are,” her mom said as she got up and came around to hug Olivia against her chest.

It became much harder to hate him as she did before. He kept contacting her, and she kept letting him. She showed his texts to her parents. Never again would she be blind-sided by him. But neither could she ignore him totally.

It turned out what he told her was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg of terrible things Derek Salazar suffered, or witnessed. She learned all of it over the next few months. Small snippets started to emerge although most of their correspondence started out with
how was your day?
She learned he was often locked in a closet, and learned to hide in his room, afraid of seeing the raging fights in the living room between his parents. Or his parents and someone else. He described how the walls vibrated from the impact of bodies being smashed against them along with grunts and groans. Everything could be heard from where Max and he usually hid in the corner of his room, behind the door. One incident after another was reported in detail. It usually correlated to something he was discussing with his therapist.

They never talked to each other. Not once, no matter how heavy or terrible a situation they were discussing, neither of them lifted up the phone. Their correspondences were nearly anonymous and exclusively through text messaging. He didn’t lie when he wrote to her, not like he did so easily when speaking to her. He seemed to know that too.

Why did she talk to him? She didn’t really have an answer to that. Was it because she still loved him? Yes. No matter how much resentment and hatred she felt, she also had an unending amount of empathy for him. That led to understanding, which led to forgiveness, which led to hope… which she immediately tried to squash.
No. No. No!
Finally accepting what happened to her was definitely not the same as opening up her heart and being with him.

Still, his life was a freaking Shakespearian tragedy. It wasn’t funny. There was nothing kind or decent or moral about it. How could he have done any better? The few redeeming personality traits he possessed were more an accident of nature rather than from any kind of nurturing by another person. He raised himself. He believed when he was younger, his mother was a little better. There was some love from her, until he was around eight. That was when her drug addiction completely took over her life. That Derek wasn’t hurt or killed despite the war zone he called his childhood said a hell of a lot about his survival instinct.

She almost felt guilty for the life she’d been given. She could have been Derek. When her grandma died, she was only eight years old, and there were no other relatives. She could have easily fallen into the labyrinth of foster care and who knew where her life would have gone? It certainly would not have been the happy, decent, wonderful childhood she enjoyed with Gretchen and Tony.

Her parents. Yeah, maybe she was overly close to them. But how many adults choose their child? She was selected by them. She was rescued from the nightmare of institutions and it was something she would never forget. The thing was: everyone was having difficulty in shutting off that urge to help, only it was with Derek now.

Tony had just heard from Will and Lindsey, who knew a lot about Derek. Olivia knew more than most girls might know about an ex-boyfriend whose brother tried to overdose her.

Still, she continued texting with him.

****

Things went okay for a few months, although the weird panic attacks still happened. However, he learned a few things that alleviated the pain and made him feel a little less like he was dying in the next moment. He wasn’t very good at practicing the techniques to deal with it, at first. He even thought at the times when he was calm that they sounded stupid and too ridiculous and easy to do. But in the heat of the attacks, when he needed to use them, they became nearly impossible for him to implement. Eventually, however, the exercises began to work. He learned to breathe in, through his nose, while counting to five, then letting it out just as slowly with a hand on his chest. He tried isolating different muscles in his body, and focusing all of his concentration on tightening and relaxing them until the symptoms lessened. Sometimes just walking around prevented them from occurring.

He confessed more about himself and his childhood to his therapist and texted over his phone to Olivia than he had ever strung together during his lifetime. It was a pretty horrific picture. Even he recognized that.

He also knew there was a lot that wasn’t his fault. However, what he did now with it was entirely his responsibility. He was aware of that new and profound reality: he just had no clue what to do about it.

Then Max came home one evening very late and Derek was the only one home. Max ran in and straight up the stairs. Derek followed him only to stop dead in the doorway as Max was throwing his meager items into his dirty backpack.

“What are you doing?”

“Leavin’”

He watched Max’s desperate movements. “Why? Where do you think you’re going?”

He stopped and threw the bag down. “I got caught.”

“Caught? Doing what?”

“Fightin’. Principal’s gonna be callin’ ‘em. J-j-just gettin' out before they find out.”

“Fighting! Shit! What did I tell you about that? Was it for money?”

“’C-course. Why else do it?”

Derek almost turned and grabbed his stuff. His heart beat louder and began escalating.
Run. Max was right. Just run
. Something bad was bound to happen. They were doomed to fail. They were doomed. Period. Living this kind of life was hard. And would have to end at some point, so why not end it on their terms?

But then again, where would he take his thirteen-year-old brother?

“We can’t just leave. There’s nowhere left to go, Max. This isn’t Marsdale. I have no contacts here. I have nowhere to go, and no wheels to get there.”

“They’re not keeping us. Get a c-clue. Better now than later.”

“Max?” Noah’s voice thundered from behind Derek, who flinched as he turned. Noah was striding down the hall. “I got a call from the school principal.”

He stopped dead in the doorway and his eyes scanned the scene in front of him. “What are you doing?”

“J-just leavin’. Don’t worry; I’ll be gone so you don’t have to deal with it.”