Old Ghosts: Gypsy Riders MC (3 page)

But we never saw it coming. Up until the day of Rosie’s birth, the pregnancy was normal and routine. When Rose’s water broke that morning, our hearts swelled with happiness that our little bundle of joy was finally arriving. But shortly after we arrived at the hospital, Rose’s doctors kicked me out of the room, and I paced up and down that hallway like a lion, consumed with worry. It was eight hours later that the doctor finally came out and told me Rose didn’t make it, but the baby was okay.

I was devastated, and I broke down right there in the hospital hallway, sobbing in Reaper’s arms as he tried to keep me from collapsing.

The next few days were a blur of the most fucked up mixture of happiness and hell. I held my perfectly healthy, happily cooing baby girl in my arms, as I watched them lower her mother’s body into the cold ground on a rainy Sunday morning.

It’s worth repeating - if I didn’t have my brothers to help me through all of that, I never would have survived. I owed them my life.

The first year was incredibly hard. I missed Rose fiercely and the loss of her broke me. There were days when it was all I could do to look in Rosie’s eyes because they were Rose’s eyes staring back at me. I was alone with my new daughter and the ghost of my wife, with nothing but my love for Rosie and my club to keep me going.

Both my parents and Rose’s parents had died long ago. I wasn’t prepared for the exhaustion that settled into my bones, a result of raising an infant on your own. Those long, sleepless nights almost did me in, but then when it got to be too much, I finally let Reaper and Sandman come over and help me out at night.

I’ll never forget those mornings after I was able to get a few hours of much needed sleep, and waking up to the sight of Reaper singing lullabies and cooking pancakes in my kitchen, while Sandman gave Rosie a bottle — they still made me smile to this day.

On Rosie’s second birthday, all the brothers chipped in and surprised Rosie with a puppy. I was pissed at first, because they didn’t ask me beforehand. I was so overwhelmed at being a single parent already, and the last thing I needed was a damned puppy. But Rosie promptly named him after me, since she had been begging for a little brother, too young to understand that you needed a mother for that.

When I heard her say his name the first time, and saw the joy that washed over her face when he snuggled up against her, there was no way I could protest, as much as his name embarrassed the fuck out of me at first. I forced myself to take the brother’s teasing in stride and after a while I didn’t mind at all. That’s when I became ‘Big Mike’, and it just stuck.

It was memories like that, the ones that crept into my brain at the oddest of moments, that made me love these men like my own brothers. They were the most loyal people I had ever known.

Loyalty and fierceness. That’s what the club was built on, and that’s what our future would be built on, too.

☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼ ☼

Stop it, Daisy!

All day long, I had to catch myself and put my thoughts back in more appropriate and safe places.  As hard as I tried, I just couldn’t stop thinking about him for very long. 

I’d be grading papers, and before I knew it, I’d find myself just staring at the paper, my mind filled with an image of his smiling lips.  Or, I’d be standing at the chalkboard and talking to the class, and one look at Rosie’s smiling eyes and bouncing curls would make me think of him — of his kind, brown eyes, of his hair that looked so soft I just wanted to bury my face in it, of his irresistible smile formed from lips I desperately wanted to kiss — and I would begin to stutter and lose my train of thought.  While this was of great amusement to a group of twenty-five seven year-olds, it was really bad news for this thirty year-old schoolteacher.

What the hell was wrong with me - fantasizing about an outlaw biker?  An incredibly handsome, irresistible, leather-clad, masculinity-oozing, outlaw biker - but still!  This was no way for me to be acting!

Not now.  Especially now!

Hadn’t I learned my lesson?  Wasn’t I old enough to know better by now?  Didn’t I already learn everything the hard way?

I was eating lunch in the cafeteria at the teacher’s table, politely smiling and barely listening to anything the other teachers were saying as my thoughts carried me a million miles away to a place I really didn’t want to go.

Todd Hamilton.

Todd, the charmer.  The gentleman.  The man I had once loved, at least in the beginning.  And now he was a ghost.  A figure in my past that I wished had never existed.

Todd had always been one of those guys that everyone loved, because he was so jovial and happy all the time.  Always willing to lend a hand to a friend in need, he was the first person his friends called when they had a problem.  Not only was he a model citizen, he was also a model cop.  Working his way up the ranks of our small town precinct with smiles and hand shakes, he received award after award throughout our five years together.

As if that didn’t already make him the most upstanding citizen in all of Wood County, in the last year he had become a  shining star in the Mormon church.  He went to services three times a week, twice on Sundays.  When I first met him, he didn’t go at all, but about a year before that fateful day, he decided we both needed to purify our lives.  And he became increasingly fanatical after that.  The Mormon lifestyle wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I played along.  Everyone was just so fucking nice, it was hard to be the one swimming against the tide.  So I endured it.  I did it for Todd.  Like I said, in the beginning I loved him.

Everyone loved him.  But not everybody had to live him.  Nobody knew what a hypocrite he was.  Not everybody saw the insanely controlling side of him that only came out late at night, after he had been alone with a bottle of his forbidden tequila for a few hours.  Not everyone saw his Jekyll and Hyde personality emerge.  Not everyone cowered in fear in the dark corners of the house when he lost control so badly that he would threaten to hit me, his arm raised, the back of his hand poised in the air like an angry snake that never actually attacked.  And all for some minor transgression.  Something innocuous like not putting the lid on the tube of toothpaste, or not folding the towels perfectly before I put them in the cabinet.  The tiniest things escalated into nightmarish evenings of screaming and threats.

It went on for years.

Until that one, fateful Friday night.  When the snake finally struck, and he dealt a blow so hard across my face that my nose bled.  That was the night that changed everything, even though I could see now that the change should have come much sooner.  I would regret not leaving sooner for the rest of my life.  But you live and learn, right?

For some it takes even longer, I guess.

Like my old best friend, Lacey.  When I first met Lacey, she was young and vivacious, a strong, independent woman that I looked up to and admired.  I wanted to be around her all the time, and we spent so much time together, we were like sisters.

But then she met Louis. Louis was a domineering asshole who somehow managed to get her under his thumb, and once he did,  he didn’t let up.  Seeing her in an abusive relationship killed me, and I spent countless days trying to convince her that she deserved better, that she had options and other places to go.   But she never listened, she never left, she just kept taking the abuse day after day.  I had such a hard time reconciling the strong woman I knew and loved with the weak and sad woman in front of me every time she told me she had decided to stay.  

It baffled me.  I swore to myself I would never live that life, and that’s why, when Todd hit me the first time, I knew I was done.

I waited till he left for work the next day. I packed my shit, and I left with nothing but a swollen nose and the clothes and few possessions I could fit in the cab of my red pick-up truck.  I left Texas, headed west, and prayed the whole way there that the truck didn’t break down.  I didn’t look back until I hit the coast.

I contemplated leaving a note for Todd.  In the end, I figured words weren’t necessary.  When his calls and texts began flooding my cell phone as I got halfway across Texas, I turned it off.  I figured he didn’t deserve the pleasure of ever hearing my voice again.  Not if I could help it.

It took me a few days, but I drove straight to the coast, stopping in rest stops along the way to sleep in the truck, my doors locked and my eyes always searching my mirrors, afraid that Todd might find me.  

When I stood in front of the Pacific Ocean for the first time, I pulled my phone from the pocket of my jeans and threw it as far into the crashing waves that I could.  I never wanted to talk to him again, not if I could help it, and I had absolutely no regrets about it.  

I got a room at a run down motel for a few days and I spent the weekend scouring neighborhoods and rental listings in the newspaper, nursing my sore nose.

With my newly purchased cell phone with a brand new California phone number, I called my school to quit my job.  With a shaking voice, I explained to the principal why I was leaving and how much I was going to miss my students I had grown so fond of.  But staying wasn’t an option for me, and luckily they were beyond kind, even continuing to pay me for a short amount of time so that I could relocate to a safer place.  

I was lucky.  I had resources, I had a small savings to help rebuild my life, but not every woman does.  I got out alive, and I was well aware that wasn’t the case for every woman.

But now, here I was.  Months later, and I was grateful to have the chance to start over.  I moved to Los Angeles, thinking it was about as far as I could get from tiny Mineola, Texas.  I wanted to go to a place where nobody knew my name and I could blend into the background.

Growing up in Mineola was about as apple pie as you could get, at least on the surface.  Somehow, the smiles and happiness the community liked to present publicly did a wonderful job of hiding the seediness that lurked in the dark corners of that small, east Texas town.  

I could have stayed.  I could have reported Todd, sure.  But he was the most decorated officer in that tightly-knit, tiny police force, and domestic violence was something that everyone in the town seemed to have taken a vow of silence about. I could have told someone in the church, but the occasional black eye on someone’s wife was something that was accepted silently and politely swept under the rug.  Lacey wasn’t the only one enduring hell where she was supposed to be finding sanctuary.  But I would have died before I allowed that happen to me.

No fucking way.  So, I knew reporting him would do absolutely nothing, but getting the fuck out of dodge?  I could do that.

I figured I would hide as well as I could, and if Todd decided to follow me, then I would cross that bridge when I came to it.  At least if he followed me to LA, then I knew I would probably have a chance of finding some sort of protection once we were off Todd’s personal territory.

Turned out, I loved California.  It was so crowded and crazy and the bustle of the place made me dizzy at times, but there was nothing that compared to sitting on the beach and watching all the craziness unfold around you.  People watching quickly became my favorite past time, and when I wasn’t searching for a place to live and a school that might be hiring, I planted myself on the hot sand every chance I got.

Finding an apartment was easy, and I quickly fell in love with my quaint little one bedroom, with its little side office and a sunny balcony that opened up over a busy street smack dab in the middle of Silver Lake.  When I was offered a job teaching second grade at one of the highest ranking elementary schools in the area, I felt like my luck was finally turning around. The school felt like home as soon as I stepped through its large, old doors and the other teachers and staff welcomed me like family.  I had finally begun to heal a little, and let a little bit of hope for my future seep into my heart.

Now that Todd was out of my life, now that I was finally settled in my new city and my new job, I felt like I could breathe again.  I felt free, in a way I never had before.