~Song: Demons~
Chapter twenty-seven: Broken pieces:
"I don't know where to start." He rubbed his hands over his face and sighed. "I guess I'll start from the very beginning. My mom who you have already met, had a drug problem when she was in her early twenties. Her mother found out about her and helped her get into rehabilitation, maybe 'helped' is too light a word. More like forced. Anyway, that's how she met my alcoholic dad.
"Not the most romantic beginning I guess, but whatever. So fast forward a few years and my mom is married to David DeVito and she's a few months pregnant with Lea. Lea's born and three years later I come along. My parents have their shit together finally, my dad has a respectable corporate job and my mom is a housewife.
"It's fairly normal and it seems like everything would be alright, right?" His eyes looked so far away. I was afraid to touch him. "Well that's too easy. The whole reason it started was because my father got let go at the office and that's when things started to go wrong. I was eleven and Lea was fourteen, my mom was maybe six months pregnant? Something like that.
"My father. . . started drinking again, first he started coming home later than usual, I remember waiting for him to come home one night when I was supposed to be sleeping. I heard him come in and stumble around. Lea started to sneak out once it got worse. He would come home and yell and throw stuff around. . . beer bottles, chairs, books. My mom was lucky he never threw anything at her when he was in one of his rages. But that didn't matter. He still made it worse.
"I got out of school early one day because of a freak snow storm and I guess my dad didn't have a backup plan for when we got home that day." He said. He wasn't looking at me, he was looking at the wall behind me. He was in a different place and time right now. "I get home and I see my father on the couch getting all handsy with this lady. So what does he do when he sees us? He asks her to leave, saying, 'they'll finish up later' then he gives us both ten dollars he got from God knows where and commands us to keep our traps shut and not tell mom. We told her anyway.
"But she wasn't prepared for when my dad's mistress comes over a week later when he's out -- surprisingly -- looking for a job and Lea and I were at school. No, she wasn't prepared for a nineteen year old to come swinging fists and throwing angry words, she couldn't defend herself even if she had been." I felt sick listening to this. "So my mom is lying on the floor, battered and bleeding and no one even knows until we get home about two hours later. So we rush to the hospital to get her treatment and she's gone into labour and it's way too early for this baby to be born, yet somehow we make it to the hospital and get her in a room. I wasn't in there because from what I've heard childbirth is pretty graphic, I was only eleven.
"But from what I eavesdropped later that night this is the gist: He was born a month earlier than expected, his lungs were underdeveloped so he couldn't go home with us that week, he was losing oxygen by the time we made it to the hospital so they had to do a C-section to get him out, and there was a good chance that he would have died." He paused. His eyes were filling. "Andy. . . is a fighter. He really is. My bastard father could have kept him from living because of his stupid choices in life, but he fought through it.
"Our 'family' returned to as normal a routine as we could, given the circumstances. My father still came home drunk every now and then, he and my mother still fought, Lea still snuck out. . . that was our normality.
Andy did eventually get to come home with us, but we ran into problems again. My mother had been prescribed oxytocin for her pain and she started abusing the pills. My dad had left to go somewhere and Lea and I went to go check on Andy and we found him spasming and shaking in the crib, she screamed for my mom but she didn't come.
"Andy was fine after less than a minute though. That didn't mean it was any less scary though. We went and started banging on the her bedroom door to get her out and she was not answering. Lea had to call 911 because she never came out. She didn't come out until she was on a yellow stretcher. . ." His eyes were closed, his head tipped back. The dim light sifting through my room allowed me to see his golden eyelashes. He blew out a thoughtful breath.
He was probably relieving that day, how it felt to see his mother paper-white and looking dead on a stretcher. I could see a younger Lea holding hands with a young Chris, cradling baby Andy watching a flashing ambulance pull away in my mind's eye.
I almost wanted to tell him to stop because while he might not have been saying it or showing it, I knew was hurting and it was tearing him up inside to talk about it but I wanted him to be comfortable talking to me. To feel like he didn't have hold everything back, that I wouldn't judge him.
"She didn't die. She overdosed but she lived. I'm going to skip all the court dates and trials and crap because it's unnecessary. To cut it short, I -- we ended up in the custody of our oh-so-angelic father. He had a job and she didn't, his alcoholism had been tamed 'years' ago as far as the court knew and my mom had recently been hospitalized because of drug abuse. He won the jury over easily. So despite protests, tears, and a lot of yelling, we ended up in an apartment with my dad."
That was beyond fucked up.
"Lea stopped sneaking out to watch over us and make sure nothing was going on. We did a sort of tag team when it came to Andy. If my father came home at night we hid him somewhere so nothing would happen to him. But we didn't have control over some of things my dad would do. For example, he had a gambling problem and sometimes he would take Andy during the day to even out the stakes. How do you put your own flesh and blood in a game? Knowing that you could lose them because you messed up?" He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. "I can't. . . Sometimes. . ." He sighed. I wrapped my fingers around his wrists and pulled his hands away from his eyes. He looked away.
"You can do it." This was the first time I said anything since before he started talking. "I'm not judging." I clasped his hands in mine and put them in my lap.
"It's just sometimes. . . I mess things up all the time, I'm a jerk, and I have too high of an alcohol tolerance to not act on it. . . I'm like my father." He said in horror.
This was the first time I'd ever seen him so vulnerable. . . and it scared me. It to see his eyes so big and about to spill over with tears. I felt like I had been naked while I was telling him about my past. Chris might has well have pulled his heart out of his chest and started pointing out all the scars on it.
"You're not like your father," I said softly. "You have made mistakes but everybody does. It only makes you human." A singular tear rolled down his face. I wiped at it with my finger.
"This was why I didn't want to tell you." He said, his voice nearly inaudible. "Besides not wanting to talk about it, I don't want to go back and relive it. But I can't get around telling you anymore can I?" The look on his face was making my heart ache. "For the most part, we had little interaction with our father. He came home in the dead of night but we had food in the fridge. He was not as sober as he probably should have been often times, but he didn't do anything to us if we stayed out of his way. He was out a lot during the for whatever reason so we had a babysiter, Lori." He visibly shuddered. My eyebrows knitted toghether at his expression.
"She was twenty-seven, one of my dad's acquaintances. . . she used to watch us when he was out. Lea didn't like her and she would take Andy out in the stroller whenever she was there." Why did he put so much emphasis on she? "Then it was just me and her. I-- One day...She..." He stopped talking.
I was suddenly hit with a memory of my mom talking about a client late one night. "...the girl could barely talk about the incident and she kept getting closed off and falling into herself, could hardly get the words out, poor thing." She had been talking about a victim of molestation.
Oh my God.
"Did she... touch you?" I said quietly. The silence that greeted me was more than enough in answer. "Chris?" His face was blank and that was what scared me the most. His eyes were empty and focused on the wall behind me.
He was hurting and reliving it in his head, feeling whatever she had done to him again. I squeezed his hand to try to bring him back to me. His eyes refocused and he turned his gaze back on me. "Yes," He murmured. "She did. Again and again and again and again..." His voice cracked. It went silent. His hands shook slightly in my mine but other than that he was still.
"Did you ever tell anyone?" I finally said.
To my surprise a slight smile curved up on his lips. "Yes. Lea took us to the mall once and while I was waiting in line for the bathroom, I met this kid wearing a cape, he was really weird looking. I recognized him from my school.
"I was standing next to him and he was staring really hard and suddenly he says 'what's wrong' and I don't know why but everything came rushing out. I couldn't tell Lea and I couldn't tell my father but I could tell some weird, green-eyed punk everything. That was Brett."
He paused and he seemed lost again. "No one would have ever found out about her had one of the people next door not heard things going on. Apparently the walls were paper thin, and they heard me yelling at her to stop. They called the police and they came arrested Lori, they investigated the house and put us in foster care until our court date.
"Lori went to prison and apparently my dad's sneaky behavior was due to him selling illegal moonshine. What a dumb fucking thing to get charged with right?" He laughed without mirth. "They pinned him for that and they found out about his existing alcohol problems. Mom was clean at the time but she didn't have a home." He sighed.
"Foster care again. We were in and out of homes for a month, some of them were good and others not so much." He lifted up his sleeve and showed me that scar on his shoulder. "Fourteenth birthday. The people fostering me at the time had a son and he took a piece of broken glass and stabbed me. Guy was crazy. This went on until my mom had a place. She took us in again but Lea couldn't do it and neither could I.
"Lea emancipated herself, took out her savings, got a job and an apartment. I went with her. Mom's been in and out of our lives, sometimes clean sometimes not, sometimes she brings money sometimes she doesn't." I couldn't imagine life without my mother, or life with her being a drug addict. It was beyond comprehension to me. This was why Lea was almost never home, why she was so hardened. She couldn't trust strangers when the people closest to her were like this.
"You're strong Chris," He shrugged. His face was blotchy and I was blown away by how much he looked like Andy. "I would say I'm sorry for what you've gone through, but sorry is too little a word." I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him close.
Whatever walls he had put up hold himself to together crumbled down. For once I was the one comforting him instead of the other way around. Hearing Chris cry was as heart breaking as it got and I decided that I never wanted to hear him cry again. I let him cry until he didn't have any more tears left to give, and he was just sniffling.
For a while we sat in near silence, us locked in an embrace, the only sound was our breathing and heartbeats. After a few more quiet moments he said, "I'll be right back, I need to go to the bathroom." I pulled away and nodded, watching as he walked out of my room.
I was still trying to figure out how to absorb all the information he gave me. How could he deal with that? Knowing that everything was not okay. Knowing that his brother was not safe all time. He slaps a smile on his face and he rolls with it. Everyday. He was right, he was messed up, any one would be after that. But I was too.
Most of this was a result of his father's poor decisions and actions. At that moment I felt a pang of anger towards his father because of everything he put his family through. How could a man do that? It's pretty easy fuck things up but it's hard to do it on that scale.
Chris had never ever come close to messing up that bad and he never would. I knew he wouldn't.
If I could go back in time and fix his past and, I don't know, attack Lori, take his mothers drugs, kill his father's mistress? Maybe that would make it better. But if I learned anything from Back to The Future it's that if you change one thing you mess up everything. Maybe if one of those things hadn't happened we wouldn't have met. . . maybe all bad things happen for a reason. Maybe.
A ringtone went off and it wasn't mine. It was coming from Chris' s jacket. I crawled to the end of the bed and glanced at it then glanced at the door. I'm sure he wouldn't mind if I just. . . I bent over the edge of my bed and grabbed his jacket. I pulled it up and set in my lap. I checked his pockets and pulled out his phone which was flashing at the arrival of a new message.
I felt my anger flair up when I read the contact name. How dare she even text him when she knew he was over her? I opened the message and I felt all the emotion, all the the feeling drain out of me. I didn't know how to. . .
"Oni, can --" He had pushed the door open and he didn't look at me immediately. When he did look up he saw me staring blankly at his phone, trying to comprehend what I was looking at. "What are you doing?" He said slowly.
"I could ask you the same thing." I replied, emptied of everything. "I really could." His facial expression was bewildered.
"What are you talking about? You're scaring me."
"Let me read it aloud to you. 'Chris, I don't really know how to say this but I guess I'll start here. I've always liked you, like liked you. Which is why I overreact to a lot of things concerning you. I know after my recent behavior you may not want anything to do with me, but I think your going to have to get along with me to some degree. I think maybe you'll love me over time, or I think you should try to now. What with me being three months pregnant with your child and all.'" I choked on the last part.
He stared at me wide eyed and sank to the floor. "Any chance it's not yours?" I whispered in a cracking voice. His lips moved silently as he counted and I had my arms around myself rocking back and forth.
"I..." He said after a long stretch of silence. "I'm sorry." And that was all I needed to hear. We were over. Ashlynn won.
★-★-★-★-★
O.o not going to say anything. We are drawing to a close people! Please don't hate me, and if you do please do it in the comments section. . .