Unacceptable (8 page)

I could feel myself screaming as I looked down to see blood covering my body and my attacker lying at my feet motionless. Holt was holding one of the bar knives in his bloody hand. He grabbed me and pulled me into the main area of the bar as my eyes locked onto the man strapped to the chair, half of his head missing and splattered all over the floor in front of him and Abel running toward me.

I started to fight and struggle in Holt’s arms. “Let go of me.”

“No. Crickett you have to calm down.” He was pulling me behind the bar. “Let me clean you up a bit.”

Abel was right behind us, trying to reach out to me. “Both of you get the fuck away from me. You’re a fucking monster Abel!”

I stomped on Holt’s foot, making his grip on me loosen.  I grabbed my gun and my bag and started to run for the door. Abel bolted after me, grabbing my arm right as I was about to shove the heavy wooden door open.

“Crickett. Wait. Don’t leave like this.”

“Fuck you, Abel. You just killed a man and I almost died.” I pulled the hammer back on my gun, keeping it pointed at the ground. “So help me God, Abel. Let go of my fucking arm. I need a little bit of time to process things.”

His face twisted and his jaw clenched. “Fine.” He let me go and I bolted to my car.

Chapter11.

I sped off down the road, my mind going a mile a minute. My plan was to go back to his place, clean myself up, grab my shit, and stay at the motel for the night.

I pulled down the gravel road as my phone started blowing up with text after text from Abel.

Abel: Babe. Go home. I will be there soon.

Abel: Please call me. We need to talk.

Abel: I am so sorry.

Abel: Crickett, I love you. Please call me.

I threw my phone onto the passenger seat and pulled a U-turn. If Able was on his way to the house, there was no way I was going to be there when he showed up.

I tried to not think about the blood that was drying on my arms, clothes, legs, and neck, but when I looked down to see my chest covered in that man’s blood, it running down my V-neck all the way to the top of my shorts, I started to go into a panic. I tried taking long, slow breaths, but to no avail.

My body was shaking, my breathing was out of control, and my mind was a jumbled mess.

My phone started blaring and I pulled off to the side of the road to see who it was.

I was surprised at how disappointed I was to not see Abel’s or Rave’s number coming up. I let the unknown number go to voicemail and leave a message.

I slid my phone open and the message started playing. “Hi, Crickett. This is Cindy, your mom’s neighbor. She asked me not to call anyone but I think you really need to get to the hospital quickly. She was mugged. I’m not too sure what really happened, but I found her this morning in really rough shape. The doctors won’t give me any information since I am not family and I have to go to work now, but call me if you get an update. She’s at Jackson on Fifth. I don’t know if they put her in a room or not.”

I went into autopilot. In just over twelve hours I could be at my mother’s bedside. My tank was full, my adrenaline was pumping, and the radio was blasting. I drove for just over three hours before I stopped at a quiet rest stop. Grabbing the hoodie from the back seat and throwing it over my bloodstained body, I rushed into the bathroom without anyone noticing the dark red that was splattered down my leg.

I locked myself in the handicapped stall and scrubbed my skin raw, threw out my white V-neck and soaked bra, and threw back on my hoodie. My black shorts didn’t show the stains too badly, thankfully. It took everything in my power not to picture the wide eyes of the dead man lying at my feet. Even though he’d had no problems with threatening my life, it didn’t change the fact that I felt bad that his had been ended. He was someone’s son, probably someone’s lover or father.

After filling up and grabbing a Red Bull, I was back on my mission. After ignoring over twenty calls from Rave and Abel, stopping a few more times for gas, and chugging a handful of energy drinks, I was finally pulling into the parking lot at the hospital.

The security guard was sitting behind the desk. She made a copy of my license, gave me my visitor’s pass, and explained the maze I was going to have to go through to get to my mother’s room.

Everything felt like it was moving in slow motion. I couldn’t believe I was back in my hometown, about to see my mother battered and bruised from another mugging. The guilt of running out on her was overwhelming as I gasped for breath and pushed open the hospital room door.

Right as I was about to take my first step into the room a nurse stopped me. “Ma’am, only family can go in there, and it’s not visiting hours for this floor.”

I cleared my throat, turning to the older lady who was standing there with a vial of medication and syringe in hand. “She’s my mother,” I muttered.

With a kind smile, she nodded. “Have you spoken to the doctor yet?”

I shook my head. “I was out of town. I got the news from a neighbor and drove more than twelve hours straight through to get here.”

“Let me give your mother her pain meds and then I will page the doctor for you. I am sure he is going to want to talk with you about her condition.”

I followed the nurse in to see my mother lying helpless in the bed. Her face was so swollen and bruised that I barely recognized her. She was hooked up to monitors and IVs, and her right leg was in a cast from the knee down.

I gasped for air as I rushed to her bedside. “What the hell happened?” I pleaded, but my words fell on deaf ears. The nurse had already left and my mom was passed out.

It only took a few minutes for the doctor to come into the room, but it had felt like years.

“Miss Hayes, may we speak in the hall?”

I followed the doctor out of the room. “Doctor, do you know what happened to her?”

He looked over her chart with a furrowed brow. “Your mother’s neighbor found her like this. Your mother said she was raped and mugged but could not give the name of her attacker. She has a few broken ribs and they almost broke her jaw. Her right leg looked to have been stomped on with a steel toe boot; her tibia and fibula are shattered. She’s lucky to be alive.”

I felt weak. My knees were about to give out. I leaned back on the wall. “I just can’t believe this. Is she going to be all right?”

He nodded, trying to smile. “She’s doing better. She’s stable now. We have her on some pretty heavy pain meds right now to help her rest. She should hopefully be able to go home tomorrow if nothing changes.”

“Thank you doctor.”

Exhaustion started to take its toll while I sat in the air chair in the corner of the room, watching my mother take shallow, labored breaths. The next thing I knew, it was the middle of the night and a blaring alarm was going off. I shot up out of the chair and ran over to my mother’s side as the night nurse came rushing through the door.

The nurse pushed some buttons, fixed a few things. My mom groaned as the nurse put the oxygen tube back in her nose. “Your oxygen levels started dropping. You need to keep this on.”

Through slits, my mom glanced at me. “What are you doing here?” she muttered, but before I could answer she was falling back into her drug fueled daze.

The nurse patted my shoulder. “She’ll be more with it tomorrow. Try to get a little more rest.”

Hot coals felt like they were embedded in my lower back as I tried to make the best out of the uncomfortable chair. After I flipped through the limited channels for a while, thumbed through a few magazines, and did a crossword puzzle, my eyelids finally started to get heavy.

The sound of coughing brought me out of a light sleep. I shot up from the chair to find my mother staring wide-eyed at me.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in.” She rolled her eyes, trying to sit up more in her bed.

I ambled over to her bedside, trying to rub out a kink in my shoulder and neck. “I came as soon as I heard you were hurt, Ma.”

“Don’t even feel the need to tell your momma that you’re leaving but you feel like you have to come here and play hero? My dear, you’re not needed here.” Her bloodshot eyes were boring into my soul.

“I’m sorry I ran out on you like that. I just couldn’t get stuck in the quicksand of that life forever.”

She hit the call button for the nurse before glaring at me. “Don’t get self-righteous on me, Crit. We don’t have to do this. You made your choice. Run back off to wherever you came from. I can take care of myself.” Her words were mumbled from her jaw being so sore.

“Obviously.” I twirled my finger around the room. “You can totally take care of yourself, Ma.”

The nurse came in. “Morning, Helen. How are you feeling today?”

“Like I got hit by a truck.”

Chapter12.

After the nurse left the room, my mother started to give me the good ole fashioned silent treatment. All the way through the doctor coming in, explaining the aftercare instructions, and discharging her—which took hours—my mom didn’t speak one word to me.

It wasn’t until we were in the car on the way back to the trailer that she graced me with conversation. “So where’d you run off to? Find a man?”

I rolled my eyes. “I went to find dad.”

She forced a laugh. “That deadbeat. I bet he’s dead in some ditch somewhere.”

“I found him.”

I could see her pissed off face out of the corner of my eye. “And?”

“He’s doing well. It was surprising to find him with hundreds of letters and page after page of legal papers. Why the fuck did you let me think that he had abandoned me for all those years? Don’t you know what that did to me?”

“He walked out on us, Crit. Don’t let that slime ball ever try to fool you into thinking otherwise.”

“Let’s just leave it. We’re not going to agree.”

I helped her hobble into the trailer and propped her leg up on the couch with a couple of pillows like the nurse had explained to me before we left.

“Get me my damn pills.”

I grabbed her purse out of her reach. “You can’t take one for at least another hour, Ma. You know that. And you have to eat with them.”

“Fuck you. You’re not the boss of me.”

I was over it. All of the feelings of guilt for leaving her washed away as she looked at me with complete loathsome disgust. I looked around the tiny living room of our trailer, which was falling apart. The two buckets were nearly full of water from the roof leaks, the mildew was stinking up the place from carpet that had needed to be replaced years before, and the furniture was falling apart and mismatched, but none of that bothered me. The fact that the stove hadn’t worked right since I was fifteen was fine, and the way that the faucet in the bathroom made a glugging sound while it ran wasn’t the issue. The biggest problem in that whole dilapidated place was the woman who’d settled for that shithole so many years before. She was the problem with my life that I was running away from. She was the wretched quicksand that tried to suck my life away. My mother was a miserable excuse for a human being. I had known it for years, but I was finally letting myself be at peace with it.

I handed her the bag and started to dial the pizza place just up the road. “If you’re going to insist on abusing your medications, then at least eat something so you don’t destroy what little liver you have left.”

I barely got her to eat half a slice of pizza before she was popping two more pills into her mouth and falling asleep on the couch with a lit cigarette between her lips.

I pulled a blanket over her, put out the cigarette, and decided to call it a night. She had taken enough medication to keep her knocked out for the night and the walls were thin enough that if she needed me, I would be able to hear her.

The feeling of my old room, my old sheets and bed, my old everything was awful. I hated how stifling being back there was. My phone vibrated with another unread text from Abel. I powered it down; there was only so much drama I could handle for one day.

I knew that he was worried about me and that it was probably wrong to ignore him the way that I was, but the image of him killing a man in cold blood right in front of me was something that was not going to go away easily. I wasn’t completely naive; I knew that it was the nature of the beast. Abel was the freaking vice president of the motorcycle club for crying out loud. I had seen a few episodes of Sons of Anarchy, I knew there was probably blood on his hands, but knowing it was probable and knowing it was fact were two very different animals in my book. Ignorance really was bliss. 

I woke up to a loud crash coming from the living room around five in the morning. I grabbed the robe that hung on the back of my door and raced to my mother’s side. She was laying on the couch, her eyes barely open, drool dripping from the left side of her mouth. She had knocked the side table over trying to shove up from the couch without her crutches.

“Do you need to go to the bathroom?” I asked, putting my arm under hers, ready to hoist her up. That’s when I saw the almost empty bottle of pills lying open on the floor next to my feet.

Horror rushed in. “Mom, oh my God! You didn’t.” She slurred a few words that I was unable to make out as I shook her. I looked down to her hand: she was gripping a syringe full of what I figured to be heroine. 

“Mom what the fuck do you think you’re doing? This is not the answer.” I kept shaking her and she came to a little bit more.

“Please, Crit. I’m so tired.” Her head rolled onto my shoulder and I sat down next to her, silently panicking.

She groggily patted my thigh. “I don’t want to fight anymore.” Her words slurred together as her eyes struggled to stay open.

My voice cracked as I tried to figure out what to do. “Mom, you can turn this around. Let me help you get out of this hellhole.”

“Honey, it’s too late.” Her drool was dripping onto my arm as she started to position the needle to her vein. “There’s nothing in this world left for me. They’ve taken it all from me. I have nothing left.”

I was like a deer in headlights, just waiting in the middle of the road for the accident to happen through the tears welling in my eyes. Slowly she pushed the drugs into her bloodstream. I knew that she was done. I knew that I should have been calling the police, but I just sat there paralyzed while I watched my mother take her own shitty life. The worst part, the part that really scared me, was that I wasn’t surprised. I wasn’t sad. I was just numb. Maybe deep down I knew that it was all for the best, and if that was what she really wanted then who was I to stand in her way?

I cradled her in my arms while she shook, tears rolling down her swollen, bruised face.

“I love you.” It was the first time in years that I had said those words to her.

“Love you too, Crickett.” Her eyes rolled back in her head as her slurred words faded. Her last breath was shallow, fleeting. I felt her leave, and I crumbled.

For what felt like hours, I held her in my arms and cried. Really it was only about twenty minutes before banging started on the front door as Abel’s and Rave’s yelling called to me.

I just sat there, scared to let them into the horrifying scene that I was entrenched in. Part of me didn’t want to open the door because once that happened, it all would be real. The whole nightmare of the past few days would all be too real for me to deal with.

It didn’t take long for Abel to kick in the front door. I was still a blubbering statue, clinging to my mother’s lifeless body as they busted into the trailer. The light flooded in from the open door, stinging my eyes as they rushed to my side.

Rave grabbed my mom and Abel scooped me into his arms. “Oh, fuck, babe what happened?” I fell apart in his arms. No words would form. It was all just too much.

Rave repositioned my mom onto the couch. He rubbed the back of his neck while he stared down at her. “I have to call the cops, Crickett. We have to get this taken care of.”

Abel whispered, “You didn’t…?”

I gasped and smacked his chest, pushing away from him with the little energy that I had left. “Who the fuck do you think I am? Do you really think I would kill my own mother?”

“Babe, don’t take it the wrong way. I had to ask. We don’t know what happened here.”

Rave put his hand on my shoulder. “I think we need to have a little chat, sweetheart. I know it’s hard, but you need to let us help you right now.”

I followed them into the kitchen, the three of us taking seats around the table. Through light sobbing I told them the whole roller coaster I had been on since I’d stormed out of the bar the day before.

“All right. Here’s what’s going to happen.” Rave started to pace around the kitchen. “I am going to call the cops and we’re going to tell them the truth, that Helen offed herself, that Crickett came to take care of her, and that we were just showing up to help out too. No lying, no crazy stories to keep straight. They might ask a lot of questions, but no one can get in trouble here, so there’s nothing to worry about.”

Rave walked outside to make the call, leaving Abel and I awkwardly sitting in the kitchen staring blankly at the walls.

“I am so sorry about yesterday, babe.”

I grabbed his hand. “I know you’d never put me in danger, Abel, but the life you live is dangerous. And the fact that you killed that man, it just haunts me.”

He weaved his fingers with mine. “I will do anything to make it up to you.”

I took in a deep slow breath and crawled into his lap. “Just love me.”

I was too tired, too shook up, and too in love with him to fight or push him away any more. He had driven almost thirteen hours to fight for me. It was the first time I experienced what that truly felt like, someone loving me enough to stop at nothing to get me back.

He sighed into me, kissing the top of my head. “You’re mine. I’m never letting you go again.”