Breathe (16 page)

Chapter Twenty- One

Abby

“She wants to talk to you,” Sheriff Wilson told me when he exited the interrogation room where I’d sat earlier that morning. I could see Maggie inside through the tiny window. She crossed her legs and sat back in her chair.

I didn’t know how to feel. I’d been prepared to forgive Garrett when I’d believed it was he had killed Tom Ford. But Maggie doing something to protect me seemed like uncharted territory. She’d come down to the station after Uncle Jim had called to tell her they’d arrested Garrett and I for Tom’s murder. Told Sheriff Wilson that that she had done it. Now she wanted to talk to me.

Garrett squeezed my shoulder and I felt a new confidence surge within me. I could face Maggie and whatever she had to say. I could handle anything life could throw at me so long as he was at my side.

I opened the door, stepped inside, and took a seat across from Maggie. I played with the necklace she had given me the night before. Felt the weight of it in my hands.

“There’s some things I need to explain to you,” she told me. “Lord knows I was never the best mother. I tried there, in the beginning. You were so tiny when you were born. You were six weeks early and even after they fattened you up at the hospital your Uncle Jim could fit you in the palm of his hands.

“I was terrified every time I held you, like I might break you in two. I prayed every night that God would make you stronger. That he’d give me a girl harder than stone.”

She lit a cigarette from the pack on the table and took a long drag before continuing. “I must’ve prayed too hard because by the time you could walk and talk you were stronger than I ever was. And you took care of me more than I ever took care of you.”

“Mama…,” I grasped the pendant in my fist and she cut me off with a wave of her hand.

“Let me finish,” she said. “See, I knew you were too good for this town. Too good for me. And I knew someday you’d be on the first bus out of this place and I’d be alone again. I didn’t want to be alone, Abby. No one should ever have to face life like that. So I made some bad choices because they were all that was available at the time, and some of those men weren’t too kind to you.

Her voice shook and I wanted to tell her that she could stop. That I understood. That I loved her and none of it mattered now. But she had asked me to let her speak, so I did, listening silently to her voice as if she were telling me a bedtime story.

“At first,” she continued. “I would have none of it, but as I got older and my options got fewer, it became easier to look the other way.” She looked down at her hands and I could swear she was trying not to cry. “Believe me when I tell you—even with all the mistakes I made—I would never knowingly allow a man to hurt you the way Tom tried…”

“It’s okay, mama. He didn’t hurt me. Not like that. I wouldn’t let him.”

“I followed him that night. He’d been sneaking off more and more and I was getting curious to know where he was going all those nights. I’d assumed he was cheating on me. I never expected to find him with you. He hit you in the alleyway and I wanted to stop him then, but he had you in the car before I could tell my feet to move.”

A tear rolled down her cheek as I brushed one off of mine. She puffed on her cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke. “I followed you to Waverly,” she confessed. “I couldn’t watch at first. I was too scared to leave the car. Too afraid of what I might see,” she told and the tears came harder. “But after a while, I decided I wasn’t about to let no man destroy you the way someone had destroyed me. I went to the trunk of the car, pulled your uncle’s shotgun out. But by the time I got to the beach, Tom was on the ground and Garrett’s truck was pulling up by the road. I could see his headlights through the trees. I saw that Tom was breathing but you were too shaken up to notice.”

She took another long drag of her cigarette then stubbed it out in the ashtray. “I waited for you to leave and then I sat there. It must have been hours but I waited for that son of a bitch to wake up so he could see that it was me that did to him what I done.

“I pointed the barrel of the shotgun at his face and before he could finish begging me not to, I pulled the trigger.”

“I’m so sorry, mama,” I told her and I cried harder too, tears falling freely from my eyes, dampening my skin.

She shook her head, took my hand in hers. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry about, sugarplum. This mess is all my fault.”

“But I could’ve—,”

“No. You did exactly what you should’ve done. I’m so proud of you. You stood up for yourself in a way I was never able.” She released my hand and slipped another cigarette between her lips. “You’ll be going away soon. Leaving this town behind. Leaving me behind. And I won’t be there to see you go, but I want you to promise me something.” She paused for a moment to light her cigarette and then reached for my hand again. She looked down at them, our two identical hands, linked together across the table and continued. “You never know what life’s going do to get in your way and knock you off your feet,” she told me. “All you can do is hope for the best. Hope’ll keep you going even when life’s betting you’ll stay down. I always had hope for you. So I need you to promise me something.”

“Promise you what?”

“Promise me you’ll always fight back like you did that night. That you won’t always just accept it when life offers you a raw deal. That you won’t be like me.”

I left the station with Garrett and Uncle Jim thinking how easy it must be to solve a mystery when you have a clear idea who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. Harder when everyone’s a victim in their own way. When there’s not wrong or right, no black or white. Just various shades of gray. Just human beings—damaged, flawed, and real—just trying to get beyond the tethers of our past and survive. Treading water. Struggling to keep our heads above the surface. Wanting just to live. To breathe.

The End

Epilogue

“That’s the last of it,” Uncle Jim told me, setting a box down next to the sofa in the living room of the apartment above the bar.

“You sure you don’t want to stay with us at the house? Little Jimmy would love to see you every day,” Becca asked, plopping down beside me on the couch.

“No, this is perfect,” I replied, slinging my arm around her shoulder.

“I’m still not sure I’m comfortable with you living with a boy all summer long,” Uncle Jim said.

“It’s not just some boy, it’s Garrett,” I reminded him. “You like Garrett, remember?” After all, he’d been living in the apartment above the bar rent-free since last year. My uncle saw more of him these days than I did.

“Yeah, I like Garrett as Garrett. No so sure I like him as the boy who’s shacking up with my niece.”

I removed my arm from Becca’s shoulder and grabbed a throw pillow which I chucked across the room at my uncle. It hit his massive chest and fell to the ground. “Eww,” I cringed. “Could you not say shacking up?”

“I will if you swear on my life that you’re not shacking up with this boy.”

Becca stood and walked over to where Uncle Jim stood. Wrapped her arm around his waist. “That’s my cue to drag you out of here,” she told him.

“Thank you,” I said as she yanked him toward the door and back toward the bar.

“Just remember,” Uncle Jim said. “I’m right downstairs and I can hear everything.” I tossed the other pillow at him just as Becca closed the door behind them. She peeked her head back in a moment later to invite me to dinner.

“I can’t. I’m meeting Garrett, but maybe we’ll stop by later,” I told her. But later as I walked to the river to meet him, I hoped not. I hoped we’d be too busy to do anything that night.

It wasn’t like Garrett and I never saw one another. He came to my meets when he could and visited on weekends when he wasn’t working. But it’d been nearly six weeks since the last time he traveled to see me at Penn State. Six weeks too long. Of course now we had 3 months to enjoy each other’s company.

I walked through the woods removing my clothing, stripping down to my bikini. Garrett waited for me up ahead on the dock, wearing only a pair of red swimming trunks. Charlie laid on the dock beside him, basking in the sun. Turns out my Uncle Jim cashed in one of those favors Sheriff Wilson owed him and got Charlie a pardon. Garrett and I went to pick him up just a week after we’d dropped him off.

Garrett turned when he heard me approaching and he smiled at me. A warm smile that told me nothing had changed in the last three weeks. That he’d missed me too. That he still loved me. It was funny how one look could say so much, but it did, and I knew we wouldn’t be going anywhere else that night.