“Claire,” Trixie said, reaching across the table to touch her sister’s hand.
“When I was eighteen, I got away. I left. I couldn’t take any more,” she looked down at the table, took a moment, and raised her head, “of the night visits. I wasn’t going to let him touch me again. I didn’t have any money, I didn’t have anything, but I knew I had to get away. I figured I’d either kill him or I’d kill myself if I didn’t leave. I couldn’t count on my mother to protect me. She had her bottle to protect her, and who could blame her. It was the only way she knew how to deal with the pain. The only one who could help me was me. So one night, I packed up what I had, which wasn’t much, and at four in the morning, I slipped away and never went back.” She looked at her husband and reached over for his hand. “Don took me away.”
But then her eyes shifted to Trixie. Her face started cracking. “And I left without my sister.”
Don slipped his arm around her. “Come on, honey.”
“If I had taken you with me,” she wept, holding Trixie’s hand, Miranda’s hand, “maybe your life, maybe things could have been better for you.”
“I got out too,” Trixie said.
“But not right away. You were only fifteen. You had to live with…you had to live with that for almost two more years.”
Claire Bennet grabbed a couple tissues, dabbed at her eyes. “Every night I thought about you, cried myself to sleep worrying about you, praying that you’d leave too.”
“I did, Claire.”
“But you went from one bad environment to another. Bikers, strip clubs, drugs.”
“As bad as it was, it was better than what I left behind,” Trixie said, although she didn’t say it with much conviction. “I didn’t exactly have what you might call a high opinion of myself. I didn’t believe I deserved anything good. I felt worthless.” She was holding back tears of her own. “But something changed when I had Katie.”
“What changed?” I asked.
“I’d seen how Claire had managed to survive, to pull her life together,” Trixie said. “She met Don, this wonderful, wonderful man.” He couldn’t keep himself from blushing. “They got an apartment, they got a house, and finally they got this house, they have a life. A normal, decent, life. A safe life. And I thought, that’s what I want for Katie. I didn’t want her to have a life like mine. She was barely a year old when her father died, was murdered, by a man he thought was his friend. These were the people I was associating with, these were the people I was working with day in and day out. And this was the world I was going to bring my daughter up in?
“And so I began to plan my way out. When I started working at the Kickstart, I was dancing. Shit, stripping. That’s what I was doing. But I’ve always had a head for numbers, and gradually I worked my way off the stage and into the room upstairs, showed them I could do a lot more than shake my titties.”
Claire glanced in the direction of the living room, assured herself that Katie was occupied with the television.
Trixie continued, “Wasn’t long before they valued me more for what I could do with their books than what I could do onstage.”
She told me a tale of fraud, setting up dummy accounts, faking invoices, skimming from here and there, covering her tracks, trying to gather together enough money to make a life for herself and Katie.
Claire said, “You haven’t told them what else they did.”
“Claire,” Trixie said, caution in her voice. “Everything in time.”
“What?” I asked.
“Later,” Trixie said.
“Then, when the thing happened, when the others got killed, I had to get away right away. That night, I disappeared, with Katie.”
“And ended up on our doorstep,” Don said. There was no resentment in his voice, no sense that Trixie was a burden to them.
“She was in trouble,” Claire said. “It was finally my chance to make things right, to help her out.”
“I asked them to take Katie,” Trixie said, and now it was her turn to tear up. “I knew that Gary—Pick, we used to call him.”
“I heard,” I said, pointing my index finger toward my nose.
Trixie shook her head at the memory of his personal habits. “Anyway, I knew Gary would figure out what happened to his money, that he’d be looking for me, that he’d put the word out, that he’d have everyone keeping an eye out for me. I knew Katie’d never be safe with me. And so Claire here, and Don, took her in.”