Page 45 of The Heart Remembers

He was alive when I went off, but he didn’t take me to the airport. They did.

He was alive when I came home on leave for a visit, but I stayed with them, not him.

And I kissed a girl in their hallway as repayment.

When my father died, I stayed with them again and kissed that same girl under alley lights.

I’ll be waiting, she said.

The wait had been too long. She was going to marry someone else instead.

I follow a path I can see in my sleep. It’s dark, but I find my way to the spot. My heart hammers harder as I near that fateful place, the one I hadn’t ever been able to visit before. I had to live in my father’s house because I was still a minor, but I never came out here again.

Not after my brother planned to kill himself and called me to find him.

I hate you. Those were my last words to him. I hated him for letting Tricia go, for forcing her to leave, for never protecting me. Although I’m certain over the years, he took his own set of beatings in order that Dad didn’t take his fists to me, take out on me his miserable life.

I find the place among the trees and stare as if I can still see him. I still hear the shot in the dark, the echoing in my ears. I didn’t run back then. I knew what he’d done, yet the world slowed down instead of sped up.

I wouldn’t have been able to save him.

I hadn’t saved my team either.

I hadn’t been able to save my relationship with Alicia.

I had no one to blame but me.

Turning in a slow circle among the dark trunks, I realize I’m wrong. I have someone who needs me. I have my son.

Standing taller, I take a deep breath of the summer night. Although the scent of death should fill my nose, it doesn’t. My nose fills with memories of baby soap, sleepy skin, and fresh floral perfume.

Dismissing the last one, I whisper his name. “AJ.” I breath in, breath out. He needs me.

Despite my mother walking away.

Despite Trent’s death.

Despite the lack of love from my father.

My son needs me.

“I will not be like you,” I say to the woods. I will not be like my brother and the way he treated his wife. I will not be like my father and the way he treated his sons.

I need to be a better man for AJ.

As I’d once wanted to be for Katie.

My shoulders fall, accepting that I’d been too late for her. I didn’t have it all together, but this week, I felt hope for the first time in a long time. Promise seemed written on the horizon in a town I equally hated and loved, and it was time to make some decisions.

Standing there, I accept I cannot make it alone. I am not really alone. AJ is already a handful through no fault of his own, and I need family, the family I’d earned, not the one I’d been born into. I loved Tricia and Leon, and I had their support. I wanted to be closer to them, with or without Katie.

It was time to come home.

“I forgive you,” I whisper into the black night, not sure I fully mean it, but I still feel a weight rolling off my shoulders. I forgive my father for leaving me alone as a child, my mother just for leaving period. I forgive Trent for doing what he’d done and even Alicia for walking out. I forgive them all because I must if I plan to move on.

And I even forgive Katie for choosing a better man than me.

She’d waited long enough.