With a deep breath, I sat back on my heels and rested my hands on my knees. “Good guys go to jail too, Noah,” I said, choosing my words carefully, still not wanting to divulge too much information. “Unfortunately, sometimes, accidents happen, and even good guys have to pay for them.”
“So, is that what happened with you? An accident?”
I still wasn’t sure that his mother wanted me to talk about this stuff with him. But he was curious, and his questions were incessant, and trying to steer him away from them was exhausting.
“Yes,” I said with a held sigh. “It was a horrible accident.”
“So, like … if it was just an accident, why did you have to go to jail?”
I released my breath and squinted up toward a sky that looked like it was about to pour at any second. “Because … I made a decision—a really bad one—and I had to be punished for it.”
I glanced over my shoulder at him again to watch the gears in his head turn. He was a smart kid, even in the things he didn’t understand. He reminded me of myself in a way—except his mom was better.
His mom was more like Billy’s. The kind I’d always wished I had.
“I know you’re a good guy,” he finally said. “But I think my dad’s a bad one.”
My eyes narrowed at him with suspicion. “Why do you say that?”
“Because he does bad things and they’re not freakin’ accidents.”
There was no way I was getting more gardening done. Not with the sky looking like that and certainly not with Noah dropping bombshells out of nowhere.
So, I stood up, brushed my hands off on my jeans, and asked Noah if he was hungry because I was starving. He followed me into the house—Ray had lifted the restriction after realizing I wasn’t in fact a creep—where I grabbed my T-shirt from the back of a chair Harry’s wife had helped reupholster and pulled it on. Then, I went into the kitchen to make us a couple of bologna sandwiches while Noah hung out with Eleven.
“So,” I said, taking out four slices of bread, “what do you mean, your dad does bad things?”
“Like …” I glanced over my shoulder to watch as he pulled in a deep breath while his mouth twisted angrily. “Like when he hurts my mom. Crap like that.”
The brace that had been on Ray’s arm came to mind immediately, and I clenched my hand tighter around the butter knife as I slathered mayo onto the bread.
“He hurts your mom?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Does he hurt you?”
Noah didn’t reply right away, and I took another glance over my shoulder to see him frozen with his hand resting on Eleven’s back. I didn’t want to push him or dig for information I wasn’t privy to. The last thing I wanted was to make him uncomfortable. But I also wanted him to know he could tell me if he didn’t feel safe, if he was scared. I wanted him to know that, as long as I was around, I’d do anything to protect them—him and his mom.
“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.”