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23
The trailer park was about two miles from the barn. The route was familiar, something I’d done a hundred times or more. A life spent avoiding others had taught me all the less traveled paths and given me an edge at staying invisible.
I kept my head down and walked past homes and stores. I knew enough to act like I belonged without making eye contact. My fifth-grade teacher walked past me on the street. My pulse raced, worried she’d stop me and say hello. She didn’t even acknowledge me.
Soon, I was out of the shopping area and cutting through neighborhoods and parks. In the distance, I could make out the trailer park that had been my home my whole life.
Some of the residents were outside this morning. Ethan McIntyre, a regular of my mom’s, was sitting in a blue plastic kiddie pool with a can of beer in hand. I wrinkled my nose. How my mom was willing to even let him in her bedroom, let alone between her legs was a mystery to me.
A dog barked and ran toward me, only to be pulled back by a chain.Fuck. My heart was racing and I felt like a criminal. Sure, I was after something that didn’t belong to me. That was if it even existed. But I was sneaking into my own house. It wasn’t like my mom would give a shit if I took anything. She’d likely not even notice that I stopped in.
Finally, I arrived at the shitty trailer I’d grown up in. Rust covered the exterior and the places that still had paint were chipped and peeling. Everything about it was even worse than I remembered. What was with this place? How was it that it all got even more run down in the week I was away?
Deciding it didn’t matter how I entered, I went for the front door. It was less noisy and my mom would probably think it was a visitor. I figured I could be down the hall and in my old bedroom before she got to the living room to check.
Carefully, I turned the door handle and pushed the aluminum door open. It creaked a little, but nothing like the back door had last time I’d used it.
I stepped inside and froze. I wasn’t alone.
“I told you never to come back.” My mom was sitting in a chair in the living room. She blew a cloud of smoke from her lips.
“I’m not staying.”
“I don’t have any money if that’s what you’re after,” she said.
My jaw tensed. “Real nice, Ma. Like I don’t know that you don’t have any money.”
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
“What happened to you?” I couldn’t help it, I had to say something. “You were a good mom once. You cared for me. Unless I imagined all of that.”
“I did the best I could,” she said.
“No, you didn’t. You gave up. You had a child to take care of and you quit. You quit on yourself and you quit on me.” I was louder than I meant to be, but I was furious. All these years, I’d held back my resentment. Living with her might have been worse than living on my own. Yet, I couldn’t run from Wolf Creek. I’d been a prisoner here with a mom who didn’t give a damn about me.
“You have no idea the hell I’ve been through. You’re alive and you were out of here. That’s all I wanted for you. I wanted you to have a better life than I did. A chance at starting over. I told you to leave. You can’t even do that right.” She took a drag on her cigarette.
“You want to help me?” I demanded. “Fine. Here’s your chance. I need whatever was left behind by my grandfather.”
She coughed, choking on the smoke she’d just inhaled. After catching her breath, she smothered her cigarette in the ash tray. “What are you talking about?’
“I know, Mom,” I said. “I know what he did and why he was cursed. All the things you hid from me. I also know his curse was his alone. Not yours, not mine. I could shift if I didn’t have it in my head that I couldn’t.”
She pursed her lips and didn’t deny a damn thing.
“You knew?” I’d never felt so betrayed in my life. “How could you?”
“It was better this way,” she said. “If you shifted, you’d draw attention to yourself.”
“I drew attention to myself by not shifting. Did you not notice my black eyes? The broken ribs? The bruises I came home with every day from school? How was that better? What the fuck were you protecting me from?” I demanded.
“You think you know pain but you don’t know what I spared you from.”
“Then tell me,” I said.
“If you shifted, it was a matter of time before your father found out about you,” she said.
“So what?” I cried.
