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Atlas
Welaidtherefor a while in the darkness, looking up at the stars. Wren was tucked against my side, one of my arms wrapped around her, holding her. Her hand rested on my chest, slowly tracing the small tattoo there.
Some time had passed, and my breaths were still ragged, my skin hot. I’d never been with someone where it felt like that. I took a deep breath. It had been so intense. So…perfect. It was like I was connected to her. As if she were mine. Not in the sense that I owned her or anything. More like my soul belonged with her now.
I wanted to ask her whether she felt the same. I wanted to know what was going through her mind now. Did she feel as changed as I did? Was I simply putting too much into this? Uncertainty roiled inside my gut, and I opened my mouth, but she spoke before I had the chance.
“What’s your tattoo for?” she asked as her fingers traced the thin, curved line of the C.
My pulse spiked. Not because I didn’t want to explain what the tattoo meant. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell her about Crew. It was because I hadn’t told her that anxiety shot through me. I’d told no one in Cypress Falls about my youngest brother. But Wren was different. I wanted her to know.
I covered her hand with mine, halting her movements against my skin. I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the stars, but I felt her watching me.
“There’s things I’ve kept to myself for a very long time, Wren.”
“Everyone has secrets,” she said softly. “No one understands that better than me.”
I squeezed her hand. I couldn’t meet her eyes, though. I wasn’t sure what I’d see when I told her everything. It was time to let her know what I’d done. To reveal the full extent of the faulty foundation I was built upon.
She wasn’t the only one who felt shame about the past.
“I’ve already told you a bit about my biological father.” I took in a deep breath. “But I had a mama too. She was sweet and kind, but she was also…delicate. My father often trampled her. Both physically and emotionally. He broke her. And then he got her addicted to drugs so she would always be dependent on him.” Wren’s body stiffened, but I kept going. “She always managed to get clean when she was pregnant, but it never lasted long. She tried, don’t get me wrong. She tried so hard, and she was a good mama. She just needed help.”
“Oh, Atlas—” Wren started, but I shook my head to silence her.
“I tried to take care of her. I tried to take care of all of us, but it was never enough. There was always something stronger: hunger, drugs, the cold, my father. Mama overdosed a couple years after she had my youngest brother, Crew. She died in her bed.”
Wren’s nails dug into my skin, but I didn’t stop her. The pinch of pain grounded me.
“Crew?” Wren asked, breathless.
I nodded. “Crew. He was the baby. Things were pretty bad around the house when he was born but he brought some much-needed happiness to all the strife. Some light in the darkness. He was the happiest little boy I’d ever met. He was always smiling and laughing, even when there was no reason to smile.”
“What happened to him?” she asked softly, her voice thick and grave.
“When he was three, he came down with some kind of sickness. I was nine at the time, and it was winter, so it wasn’t uncommon for one of us to get sick. But he wouldn’t get better. Food was hard to come by in the winter because I couldn’t go fishing in the creek behind the house, and our father regularly didn’t come home for days or weeks at a time after Mama passed. I tried everything I knew, but I couldn’t make the fever go away.”
A shiver shot down my spine at the memory of holding his little body close. Trying everything to break the fever, to get him better, but it never worked.
“When our father finally showed up and saw how bad Crew was, he started to freak out. I’d never seen him lose it like that. He threw us all in his car. We’d never been in the car before. We’d never been away from our property before. He started driving, and I thought he was bringing us somewhere to help Crew.” My throat felt restricted, and I cleared it. “But of course, he wasn’t. He drove us hours away, out of state, to an abandoned road far from any civilization. He left us there. He threw us out of the car onto the side of the road like we were trash.”
Wren gasped.
“I’m not sure how long we walked in the cold, but it seemed like a very long time before a car finally drove by us. It was Fred and Holly who found us that night.” I closed my eyes against the memory still clear as day. I saw the look on Fred’s face because he knew, he knew the boy in my arms wasn’t okay. “Crew was so little, though. He was so sick and by the time we were found—Crew hadn’t made it.”
Wren’s arms wrapped around my neck, and she held me, pressing her forehead against my cheek. I tightened my hold around her, my jaw clenching against the memories I often tried to forget.
“Sometimes, I wonder if there was more I could do for him. I just let him die in my arms when I could’ve done something to save him.”
Wren pulled back, her eyes shining as she looked at me. “You were a child, Atlas. Nothing more than a little boy. None of the horrible things that happened were your fault.”
I’d heard those words before, repeated by Fred and Holly, and the therapist they’d brought both Ty and me to as children. I never really believed them, though. But now, hearing Wren made me hope to believe it, one day. As if it would become my truth instead of an excuse given to me by people who loved me.
Wren pressed her lips together as her expression darkened. “The only person to blame here is your father. He’s the one who bears all the fault. Not you.”
There was an undercurrent of rage in her tone. Rage for what my brothers and I had gone through. A selfless rage.
A lock of curls had fallen over her face, and I pushed them back, tucking what I could behind her ear.
