“Just take a seat,” I told her. If I’m going to do this, then I need to do it now.
“Okay,” she said softly, hoisting herself up onto the bed with her feet dangling.
I paced back and forth, not sure where to start.
Here goes nothing.
“I grew up as a military brat. Born in Knoxville and moved all over the country for the next eight years before we landed at Fort Benning in Columbus, Georgia.”
“I thought you grew up down the shore?” Ari asked.
“I’ll get to that.” I ran a hand back through my hair and started pacing again. “My dad…well, I’m still not sure what he did for the Army. He was gone a lot, so my mom basically raised me. He had been deployed overseas and one day, when he came back, and he was different. I was only nine years old, so my mom didn’t give me any details.”
Ari wrung her hands in her lap. Her face was a mask of concern. “Did something happen to him overseas that made him different?”
“Yeah. He set a house on fire, but they hadn’t gotten all the civilians out. He could still hear their screams when he went to sleep.”
Ari’s hands flew to her mouth. Her face was stricken. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry yet,” I said grimly. “My dad insisted that he didn’t need to see any doctors. He just needed some fresh air to clear his head. He retired from the Army, moved us back to Knoxville, and spent the next year skinning squirrels alive in the woods.”
She flinched at my brusque tone.
I wished there were another way to tell this story. I wished there wasn’t a story.
My hands were trembling, and I fought for control. I was going to need it. I gulped and continued, “I regularly woke up to my dad’s screams in the middle of the night. Even though my mom was working two jobs to try to make ends meet while taking care of me, she told me not to worry about the screams and to just stay in my room.”
I turned my back on Ari, breathing heavily. My heart felt like I’d dropped it into a blender and set it on high. I couldn’t keep it together, and I remembered exactly why I’d never told anyone else. I had to peel back layer after layer just to force the story out.
“Grant,” Ari said, hopping off the bed and wrapping her arms around me from behind. “You don’t have to tell me the rest.”
She was trying to protect me from my own memories.
But I had to continue.
“One night, I awoke to my mom’s screams. I didn’t have any rules against checking on my mom, so I made my way down the hall. My dad had pulled a gun on her, and she was begging him to come back to her. She just kept yelling, ‘Come back to me, Mike.’”
My throat seized as a vision of my mother cowering on the opposite wall hit me like an arrow to the heart. I could still see my father standing threateningly next to the dresser, telling her that he couldn’t save her, that he hadn’t been able to get her out. I imagined my ten-year-old eyes growing wider and wider, knowing what I was seeing but not believing that it was happening.
“I ran out to cover my mom, not wanting anyone to get hurt, but all I did was startle my dad. He freaked and fired without warning. I ducked, trying to pull my mom down with me, but she was already gone.”
Ari gasped behind me, and in that second, I was glad that she couldn’t see the tears welling up my eyes.
“He shot her in the chest twice.”
“Oh, Grant, I’m so sorry,” she whispered, coming around to my front and holding me tight to her.
“The gunshots broke my dad out of his stupor. He saw my mom dead, and he blamed me.”
“What?” Ari asked, pulling back to look at me.
“If I hadn’t jumped in the way, it would have been like every other nightmare. Nothing would have happened.”
“You don’t know that!”
“She’s gone! It doesn’t matter!” I roared.
She shrank back, and I immediately regretted taking my anger out on her.
“I’m sorry, Ari.”
“It’s okay. What happened to your dad?”
“He pistol-whipped me, and I blacked out. The neighbors had heard the gunshots though, and they called the cops. I was taken to the hospital, and my dad was taken to jail. He got an attorney to claim that he had PTSD, so instead of first-degree murder, his sentence was reduced to manslaughter with the option for parole. I moved in with my aunt and uncle on my mom’s side, the Duffies.”
“So, the dog tags,” Ari said, holding them out from herself. “They belonged to your dad?”
“Yeah.”
“How could you wear them all the time?” she asked.
“I told you once, they remind me of the man I want to be. And I want to be nothing like my father.”
“You’re nothing like him,” she told me simply.
“How do you know?”
“I’ve seen the man you hide from the rest of the world. You would never be careless with your family. You love them fiercely, even the ones who aren’t blood.”
I said the words that I’d been holding back for years, the words I believed to my very core, “I could have saved her.”
“You were ten years old. You should have never been in the position to have to save her. It’s not your fault.”
I wanted to believe those words so badly. But thirteen years of convincing myself of the opposite just wouldn’t go away.
I could have saved her. I’d never forgive myself. I’d never forgive him.
Chapter 30: Aribel
Whatever I’d thought Grant was going to tell me…was nothing compared to what he’d just revealed. We all had skeletons in our closet, but this wasn’t a skeleton. This was a body bag and a twenty-plus-year jail sentence. This was uprooting his entire existence to move in with his aunt and uncle. This was thirteen years of guilt weighing down on his shoulders.
No wonder he had hidden this from the rest of the world. Yet, I couldn’t imagine hiding this, being all alone in my grief, not having anyone to lean on. The fact that he was as normal and stable as he appeared was a miracle. Experiencing something like this could have done a lot worse to him than turning him into a callous playboy.
I felt a newfound respect for Grant blossoming. He’d survived so much, and while it was clear he was still in pain from it, he had risen above what had happened to him. He had friends who would kill for him, a younger cousin who adored him, and legions of adoring fans.
And he was here…with me.
“So, that’s my story,” he said. His eyes looked off in the distance as if he was still lost in that tragic night.
“You made it through a lot and without any help. I mean, you didn’t even go to therapy or anything, right?”
Grant scoffed. “Therapy was the bottom of a bottle and a warm pussy.”
“That sounds like you. How did you survive when you were a kid though?”
“My guitar. It saw me through all the hard times,” he told me. “My guitar and the tags.”
I sighed as he mentioned the dog tags that were still hanging around my neck.
I slowly pulled them over my head. “Grant, I don’t know if I can keep wearing these.”
“What?” He looked astonished that I would even think of taking them off after he’d given them to me.
“I don’t think you or I should have a constant reminder of what happened. I think you should just…let it go.”
I knew it was easy for me to say. I hadn’t been there thirteen years ago. I hadn’t experienced what he had gone through. I had no idea what it would be like to see my mother die right before me, to see my father sent to jail, to feel the guilt that had clearly sunk into Grant at an early age.
“I can’t let it go,” he said the words like an insult. “I…you don’t understand.”