Finally, I had to start. I cleared my throat. “It was spring break. My dad was on a business trip, and I was home just for a couple of days. I was planning to meet up with some friends in Cobo. My mother had been more noticeably absent than normal, but I barely noticed. It wasn’t that unusual for her to disappear when my father was out of town. It was like she got a free pass to pretend like she wasn’t married.”
I looked back over my shoulder. I saw Lex’s raised eyebrows. “Oh, yeah. My mother cheated on my dad like crazy. I am pretty sure he knew about most of them. Her last one happened to be the same loser that was selling her drugs. Who knows? Maybe she thought she’d get a discount if she let him in her pants.” I felt the familiar ache of anger in my gut as I thought about how my mother seemed to forget that I even existed in the world those last few years. She had been a terrible mother. It took a lot of therapy for me to finally realize that it wasn’t about me, but all about her. There had been something missing and wrong inside of her.
Staring back out at the window, I let my thoughts drift back to that day. “I was getting ready to leave to go meet up with my friends when my phone rang. It was my mother’s number, and I was tempted not to answer it, but I did. Turns out, it wasn’t my mother. It was this guy she was fucking around with. He was hysterical saying something about my mom being passed out and how he couldn’t wake her up. He said I had to come get her.”
I paused as I remembered how disgusted I was as I made my way to the address the guy gave to me. One thing I had to give my mother credit for, she got her drugs from some pretty highly connected places. “He lived in a brownstone over in the Upper East Side. I remember how angry I was at her that she was ruining my break just like she ruined everything in my life.”
I stepped backward from the window. How many times had I wished that it opened up so that I could throw myself out of it and end it all? Too many times to count. I continued my story. I had to get it out. “Turns out that whatever drug cocktail he gave her didn’t agree with her in a really bad way. I found her naked under the covers in another man’s bed. She was dead. Her body was already starting to cool. I went nuts. I started yelling at the guy, called him an asshole or something like that, and then he swung at me. It was his fault, but he was acting like it was mine. I shoved him. That’s all I did. A simple shove. But we were standing at the top of the stairs on the second floor.”
Lex gasped. I looked at her then. I had to tell her this so she could see the truth of it in my eyes. “It was an accident. Do you know how many times I’ve said that to myself? I see it over and over again in my mind, yet I have to believe that there was some small part of me that recognized how close he was to the steps. I was so angry at him that he gave an obviously confused and fucked up woman a bunch of drugs, and then when he knew something was wrong, he called me instead of an ambulance to save his own ass. If he had called an ambulance, she might have lived. As much as I had wished her dead, I didn’t want it to be like that.”
“Oh, Shayne,” Lex whispered. She stood up, but I put up my hand.
“No. That’s not the whole of it. I knew that I was in deep shit. I called my dad. I didn’t know what else to do. He cleaned it up like it never happened. The official story was that she OD’d, but in her own bed. I don’t know how he pulled it off, but he’s always had some friends in some high places. The next six months after that was a blur. I was supposed to go to college. I tried it for a year, but then I dropped out because I was failing every class. I wandered around for another year drinking and partying until I had blown through most of my savings. My father refused to give me any more money unless I did something with myself. There was an MMA fight on TV that night, and I decided I’d do that. Best case scenario, I’d get hurt so badly that I died. That was what this started as. My awesome career was built on my desire to get beat up to atone for my sins.”
There it was. My deepest, darkest secret was out in the open. Now Lex would leave, and I couldn’t blame her. I was a killer twice over. There was a part of me that wanted to believe that what happened with that asshole who pumped my mother full of narcotics was an accident. I had desperately wanted to believe it because to think any differently meant that I was some kind of monster.
That demon had been on my back for years. I thought I might have shaken it, but if anything, what happened that night with Lex told me that it had only been hiding. It was still there waiting for me to let my guard down.
When her arms slipped around me, I jumped. I felt her cheek press against my back as her arms around my chest tightened. I shifted, and she slipped around to hug me full on from the front. I didn’t touch her immediately because I felt like it would be too painful. She was going to tell me goodbye any minute. At least, she was being kind enough to let me down gently.