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or plan she had to pay the bills, one that didn’t involve Mason at all.
Sadly, she said nothing. She didn’t even look at me as she went about fixing us supper. It was as if she’d forgotten I was sitting right freaking there and had heard everything that had just been said.
For a second, I wondered if maybe she didn’t understand what Mrs. Garrison had meant. But hell, I’d only been ten or eleven at the time, and I’d understood. She’d flat-out sold her own son for rent money. So I figured she hadn’t realized I understood what had just happened, which only made me more upset.
Because if I’d been old enough to understand, then I’d been old enough to stop it.
Except I didn’t.
I never warned Mason. I tried to convince myself that whatever Mason had done that Saturday we’d left him home alone had been his own decision. If Mom had consented to it, planned for it behind his back without even giving him fair warning, then it couldn’t have been as bad as I’d imagined. But deep down, I knew it had been.
I thought Mom would come through and save him, that he’d blow off Mrs. Garrison, that everything would be okay. Except he was never the same again after that Saturday.
When we arrived home that evening, he’d been in the shower. After he got out, he hadn’t looked Mom in the eye, and she hadn’t looked him in the eye.
From that night on, he changed. He visited the landlady more, and she got him a new job at the country club. There, he met other women who paid him for stuff. Bad stuff.
The guilt ate away at my insides because I’d never told him how Mom had set him up, mostly because I didn’t want him to hate me, but also because I didn’t want his affection for Mom to die the way mine had.
He still thought there was some good left in her. He continued to believe her when she told him she was no longer stealing my medicine and taking it herself. He wanted to think things were getting better.
But they weren’t.
When Reese came along to babysit me two years after he’d started selling himself to provide for us, it felt as if all my dreams had been answered. She helped drag Mason out of the hell Mom and Mrs. Garrison had put him in. She sparked to life that part of him that had died so many months before, and when she moved back to Ellamore, Illinois where she was from, she took Mason and me, and Mom with her.
For a while, it was a fresh start for all of us. Mason and Reese moved in together and started their happily ever after. Though her cousin Eva stayed with them for a few months until she met Pick Ryan, owner of the Forbidden Nightclub, and moved off with him, she never really disturbed their love nest. Mom actually stopped taking prescription drugs. And I met Brandt when he moved to town five months later.
For a while, life was great.
But drug addicts had a way of tripping up and falling back off the wagon. When I noticed some of my pills going missing again a few months ago, I knew exactly what had happened. And I knew what would happen if she kept it up. She’d self-destruct.
Once again, I said nothing.
A part of me wanted her to pay for what she’d done to Mason. A part of me wanted to hurt her for treating me as if I wasn’t a real human being, and yet another part of me was just too tired to deal.
I was fifteen years old, for crying out loud, stuck in a wheelchair with a disorder she’d probably caused by her drug use. Mom told everyone I was born premature, and that had caused my cerebral palsy, but I could tell by the look on Mason’s face when she said it that wasn’t true. Since CP came about from complications before, during or after birth, I figured she’d used while she was pregnant with me, or maybe she’d dropped me on my head when I was an infant. Whatever the case, I was just...done with it.
I knew I should’ve told Mason. But he was finally happy, and I didn’t want him to have to worry. So I tried to hide my medicine from her.
Except she always found it.
The day I came home from school and stumbled across her lying dead in bed, I realized I should’ve hidden my medication better, gone to Mason first thing, and not ignored what had been happening around me.
Twice now, I’d kept quiet and my only two family members had suffered because of it.
This new wave of guilt plaguing me was absolutely paralyzing. I couldn’t talk to Reese. I couldn’t talk to Mason, let alone look him in the eye. I basically couldn’t talk at all. I just wanted to die right along with Mom. It was my fault she was gone. No matter how crappy of a parent she’d been, she’d still been my freaking mother, and I missed her.
Yet I’d killed her.
After the police had come and I’d answered question after question through a few typed words here and there, Mason and Reese took me back to their apartment where they’d let me console myself in their bedroom.
My CP always acted up more in times of great stress or excitement, so my body went haywire as I tried to pull my knees up to my chest and hug myself into the fetal position. Squeezing my eyes closed, I focused every thought on going still, but muscles continued to tic anyway. Stupid muscles.
I hoped that if I thought about controlling them hard enough then I wouldn’t have to think about anything else.
That didn’t work.
Mason’s angry voice floated down the hall. Every once in a while, I caught a clear word from him, until I realized he was fighting to get custody of me before Social Services stepped in. Until that moment, I hadn’t even thought about what would happen to me. Steeped in so much guilt, I hadn’t even realized how drastically my entire life had just changed.
