Saving Rain(49)
“Hey, it’s okay. You—”
“He hurts me sometimes, yeah,” he quietly confessed, every word coated in shame. “But he hurts Mom more.”
Back when I had been a kid, sometimes, I’d hear my classmates making comments about my family. How old my grandparents were. How weird my mom was. Shit like that had mostly been innocent, looking back on it, but the implications hadn’t been innocent at all. My skin would prickle and itch as every nerve ending in my body would scream at me to fight, to defend and protect.
That was how I felt right now, listening to Noah talk about his dad.
“Hurts her how?” I asked, bringing my gaze to the window above my sink to look out and watch Ray’s house. As if the bogeyman in the big silver truck might show up at any moment.
“Mostly when he wants her to go in her room with him and she says she doesn’t want to. Then, he gets, like … really mad.” Eleven meowed at Noah’s feet, but Noah was too focused on what he was saying to pay attention to the kitten that was starting to look a lot more like a cat these days. “He pushes her, and, um … I don’t know. I don’t really want to talk about this anymore.”
“Yeah …” I cleared my throat of my anger and the urge to beg him to continue as I hurried to make the sandwiches. “It’s okay, buddy. Don’t worry about it. I’ll just finish this, and we can eat, okay?”
***
Later that day, after the sandwiches were eaten and Noah got tired of playing with Eleven, I walked him back home. His house wasn’t more than thirteen steps from mine, and he always insisted he could go alone, but I felt better, walking him back myself. You never knew with people these days. Especially ones who drove obnoxious pickup trucks.
Plus, walking him home meant seeing his mom.
He unlocked the door with the key he carried and headed inside, immediately shouting that he’d see me later as he ran to his room while I found Ray in the kitchen. She sat at the table, holding one of my letters in her hand, and I tried not to think too much about what she might be reading. It was fine that she was looking at them, fine that she was learning more about me, but something about being present while she read them …
It made me want to run away and hide my head in shame.
“Hi.” She looked up at me with a smile.
“Hey,” I said, unable to stop myself from looking at her lips.
It had been days since she’d last kissed me, and I wanted to do it again. Hell, I wanted to do it a lot. But I wouldn’t push it. Those things were always better when they happened exactly when they were meant to rather than forcing it along.
She lifted the letter she had been reading. “This is my fourth one,” she said before allowing her smile to droop. “I’m so sorry you went through all of this.”
I invited myself to sit down across from her. “It is what it is.”
“You say that like it’s so normal to be thrown in prison right after your best friend died in front of you and to not have anybody at all come visit you or even write …” She shielded her eyes with a hand and rubbed at her brow. “Nobody deserves that, Soldier. I mean, even freakin’ … Charles Manson had people writing to him. He had visitors.”
“Eh”—I shrugged—“if I were a celebrity criminal, random people would’ve written to me too.”
She patted the letter lightly with her fingertips. “I should’ve written to you. I mean, I wish I had. I had heard about what happened, and I thought about it, but I …” She blew out a deep breath and closed her eyes, as if she couldn’t bear to look at anything else. “I was going through my own stuff at the time, so I never, um … I never did … but I wish I had.”
I shrugged again, more nonchalantly this time. “Seriously, it’s fine.”
Ray rolled her eyes at that, now looking as though she might even be annoyed with me for being so dismissive. “But it’s not.”
“Here’s the thing, Ray,” I said, folding my hands against her table. “It has to be fine because there’s nothing anybody can do about what has already happened. The only thing any of us have any control over is what’s happening right now, in this moment, and all we can do is our best to not let the bad shit happen again.”
Ray studied me for a moment, her green eyes dancing as her lips turned into a little melancholy smile. “You are a remarkable man, you know that?”
I laughed awkwardly, shying away quickly to eye a cookie jar shaped like a cow.
One of its ears had been broken off.
Now, Ray had a twelve-year-old son. Things were bound to break at some point. But a twinge of intuition told me that cow had been broken in a way Noah had nothing to do with.
So, I turned from the cow to level Ray with a serious expression and said, “Speaking of remarkable men, why don’t you tell me more about Noah’s father?”
She swallowed and sat up a little straighter in her chair to favor the wrist no longer wearing a brace. It was a small tell but like I had already told her once before, if she wanted me to believe her stories, she would have to learn to act better than that.
“Did he do that to your wrist?” I asked point-blank, and she answered with wide, angry eyes and the opening and closing of her mouth. Like she wanted to say something, but didn’t know what. So, I added, “Noah told me he hurts you.”