I didn’t get that, even from LeeAnne. She was a bitch but she’d seen me in the hospital and she knew her son did that to me.
She knew it wasn’t me who beat the shit out of Pete. It wasn’t me who came home that fucking, shitty, awful night and attacked me far worse than any of the times before. Times which could be brushed away as too much drink or what Pete called “our passionate but volatile relationship” (I thought it wasn’t much the first and too much of the last). It wasn’t me who tried to rape me, who I had to fight back, scared silly, losing the fight, only somehow to escape and drive over to Morrie’s house.
It was just me who happened to pick a time when Alec was at Morrie’s. And it was me who was battered, bloodied, my clothes torn, barely able to hold myself up, having performed a miracle by driving myself there in one piece at all. And it was me who Alec took one look at, turned to Morrie and said, “You see to her, I’ll see to him.” And it was for me that Alec drove straight to my house and nearly beat the life out of my husband.
“Please, LeeAnne, give me his number,” I said.
“Still can’t see right out of his left eye, my boy,” she countered.
I didn’t doubt this was true. Alec did a number on him. Detached retina, amongst other things.
It wasn’t more than he deserved. He’d done a number on me. We were both in the hospital at the same time.
I got out earlier.
Pete got out and left town. He didn’t press charges. This was likely due to Morrie, Dad and a variety of other townsfolk making this Pete’s only option.
I wasn’t going to say I was sorry.
I was sorry. Very sorry. So sorry it had seeped into my soul. But not sorry for Pete Hollister.
Having had a very long time to look back, Pete had always been an asshole. But he’d been a good-looking one. Not as good-looking as Alec but with Alec lost to me, Pete would do. And I needed someone. Someone to fill the hole Alec left. No, it wasn’t a hole. It was a wound. I couldn’t close the wound so I needed someone to numb the pain. Or take my mind off it. Pete did that, he was good at it. He delivered his own brand of pain in order to succeed wildly in this endeavor.
What I was sorry about was the fact that Alec hurt Pete and I knew he’d hate himself for doing it instead of hating me. And I was sorry that I put him in that position. It was the only one he had, he and Morrie had been looking after me so long they didn’t know how to do anything different even if things had changed between Alec and me. And I was sorry that he saw me the way he did, beaten, not his February, never to be his February again. She was gone like he told me the Alec he was once was gone. Pete had beaten her out of me. I answered to my name but I didn’t know who February was any longer. I’d spent nearly two decades trying to figure it out but never could. The only thing I knew was she wasn’t the girl I used to be.
“LeeAnne, if you don’t want to give me his number then just please call him and warn him –”
“I’ll call. I’ll tell him the bitch is back and he should brace. It was a dark day, the day he met you.”
Then I heard her hang up.
I flipped my cell phone closed and curled my fingers around it.
“Well, that’s done,” I told Jessie and Meems. I was shaking.
I’d forgotten how much I hated LeeAnne. I’d always been so focused on how much I hated Pete that I forgot to hate his mother. But now I remembered.
I knew hate, even as a kid because I always hated Alec’s parents.
Even as a kid, before I understood it and before it happened between him and me, I hated the way Alec’s face looked when the call came, his Mom telling my Mom to bring him home (those times she remembered he was over at all). Or when his Dad would come around to get him.
Then when I grew older and I understood somewhere right and true inside me that he was mine, I hated them more when he’d get in a mood because of them. Because the town was talking about something they’d do that was crazy, like when his Mom went drunk to the liquor store and fell into a display, making a bunch of bottles of rum fall over and crash to the ground and the police had dragged her in. Or when his Dad showed up sauced at a football game and stood at the other team’s bleachers and alternately bragged loudly about Alec or insulted their boys and he’d been jumped before some men from our side, some of the coaches and even some of the players, including Alec, had had to pull his Dad out of the fray.
But that hate slipped away after that night when the police took his Dad away and Social Services had told his Mom he wasn’t coming back and Dad and Morrie moved Alec into Morrie’s room. Because after that night, he was safe, he was healing, he was finally home and I didn’t have to hate anymore.
And for awhile, those years when Alec finally was mine, I forgot what hate felt like.
Glory days.
“Feb –” Meems started.
I got up. “I need to get to the bar.”
“Ain’t no one gonna be bothered, you take a coupla days off,” Jessie told me.
“I’ll go into hiding when the town finds out anyone who ever looked at me funny might be the next one to end up bloody and dead in an alley.”
Jessie and Meems looked at each other before they both looked back at me.
“No one’s gonna blame you for this, Feb,” Meems told me.
“Right,” I replied.
“Feb, everyone on some level is gonna understand you’re feelin’ exactly as you’re feelin’ right now,” Jessie said.
“Maybe, after Alec catches this guy and the fear fades away. ‘Til then…” I let that hang.
I’d been in a lot of small towns, sometimes spent only months in them, a couple, the towns that reminded me of home, I spent over a year. I knew how people thought. I knew how they could turn. I’d even seen it once and it hadn’t been pretty. I hadn’t even been involved and it still hurt to watch.
“Girl –” Meems started again.
“I need to get to the bar.”