Rewired (The Progress Series) Read online

  Charlie nodded and wiped a lone tear from her cheek. “Go on.”

  “So, I shook him a little and he blinked twice. It scared me so much that I fell backward out of the house and the chickens squawked and jumped. I ran inside and grabbed a glass of water and brought it out to him. I crept back in—god it was so hot in there—and sat with him. I offered him the water but he didn’t move. It wasn’t until I said the words ‘I’m not going to hurt you’ that he finally turned his head toward mine. I still don’t know if I imagined it, but I think I saw his chest rise and fall in relief.”

  “Did he ever tell you?”

  “You mean, what happened that day?”

  Charlie nodded.

  “Bits and pieces. I don’t think anyone has the full story, and you know Jess’s memory.”

  Charlie turned and looked out at the blooming sunflowers, wanting more of the story and not wanting it.

  “I didn’t know who Jesse was, and he didn’t speak to me for weeks. I took him in, not knowing where to begin my search of who he was, if he was wanted by the police, or if someone wanted to hurt him. He never said a word to anyone. On occasion I’d hear him shout names in his sleep, but even that was rare. I knew that whatever he had gone through, the last thing he needed was more strangers. So I left it alone and waited. It was almost two months after that day that he said his first word to me. He was helping me out, bussing a five-top table that just left. I went to help him and we both reached for the bus tub at the same time. When my hand accidentally touched his, he jerked back and sent the tub of dirty dishes crashing to the floor.” Lily snapped back into the present and almost bored a hole through Charlie’s head with her eyes. “Charlie, he looked mortified, like I would hurt him. Me!” Lily shook her head. “He just muttered ‘sorry’ and jogged back to the kitchen.

  “It slowly got better after that. He started speaking to me in two and three word sentences, until one afternoon everything was just…normal.”

  Just like that.

  “So when did he tell you about his past?” Charlie asked, trying to keep it together.

  Lily smiled and rolled her eyes. “One night, Jesse broke the lock to the liquor cabinet that I keep for the restaurant—mostly just cooking wines, vodka, vermouth—and I heard some music coming from downstairs. It was probably midnight when I marched down the steps. Thank God I don’t have any neighbors, or they would have called the cops for sure. Anyway, I found him over there,” Lily pointed to the corner where the jukebox was, “and he was drunk as a skunk!” They both let out soft giggles. “And that’s when he told me what happened that day, what happened with Mandy, his dad...” Her smile had been replaced with a quivering chin. Lily rubbed her eyes and continued. “He told me his dad was an asshole. A mean drunk. All he said about his mom was that she was the one who told him Mandy was dead. Mandy was his sister—”

  Charlie nodded. “Yes, I know about Mandy. She was found a few miles from their house when he was supposed to be watching her.”

  “Yeah, well she did survive for a little while. She was in a coma. But right before social services came to pick him up, his mom told him that Mandy had passed away.” Lily suddenly grabbed her chest, feeling Jesse’s sorrow. “Can you imagine that, Charlie? Ten years old and feeling responsible for the brutal attack and death of your little sister?” Lily sniffed and tried to shake it off. “As for what happened the day he arrived here, that is something completely different altogether. If you think the story of his home life is heartbreaking, what this kid had to endure in the foster system might actually break you. Now normally, I hear a lot of great things about the system, more so these days. But back then, there were a lot of people just wanting that money from the government, and they didn’t care what they needed to do in order to get that check every month.”

  Charlie leaned in closer and repositioned herself on the chair.

  “This is what I’ve pieced together from what Jess told me and the trial afterward—”

  Charlie’s eyes shot open wide. “The trial?”

  Lily nodded. “Oh, yeah. That was big news around here for a while. A few miles away from here is a small light-green house. It’s abandoned now, but back then a mean old bastard lived there. We all knew who Colby was, and kept our distance. That’s probably why we didn’t know he had Jesse there with him. People of this town would have been checking in on him left and right if they woulda known.”

  “Who was this man?”

  “Colby?” Lily huffed. “Colby was the kind of guy that hung kittens from his clothesline out back. The kind of guy who shot at people that came too close to his property line. The kind of guy…” Lily stopped.

  “Go on,” Charlie urged.

  “The kind of guy who, we found out during the trial, had…raped several of the young people in this town.”

  What had started as an unsettling feeling within Charlie had now stretched through her gullet and into her throat. She hadn’t expected to hear that word. Her eyes squeezed out a sudden burst of tears, and she was unable to contain them. She felt a constriction in her stomach and tried to keep the bile down, but she could taste it on the back of her tongue.

  Lily jumped up quickly and put her arm around Charlie’s shoulders.

  “What did that fucker do to Jesse?” Charlie sobbed, unable to stop the prickling of her skin as her emotions switched from pain to anger.

  All of the information came crashing down at once, and Charlie couldn’t pretend to be strong while hearing it all. And after what she had been through herself, knowing exactly the kind of man that Colby had been wasn’t making the situation any easier.

  Lily grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and passed it to Charlie to wipe her eyes and nose. But knowing what it felt like to be in a room for five minutes with a man like Colby didn’t compare to what it must have been like for Jesse to live with one. It took several minutes of weeping before Charlie gained enough composure to continue.

  “Tell me,” Charlie finally said.

  “Are you sure? There’s not a whole lot more to tell you.”

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  Lily nodded. “I don’t think he ever got to Jesse like that. I can’t be sure, but I think he might have tried. The day I found him out back, Jesse had Colby’s blood all over him. Colby didn’t die, but he’s living a nice, cushy life sentence out east. During the trial Jesse admitted to crushing a rock over Colby’s skull the day before I found him, and Jess had bruises everywhere. Some fresh, some old. And the scarring on that poor kid—the burns…” Lily shook her head. “After Jesse took the witness stand during sentencing and talked about the violence, it took a jury all of fifteen minutes to decide to send Colby to prison.”

  “They never asked him if he was raped?”

  Lily nodded and sighed. “They did, during the criminal trial. I wasn’t allowed in, so I just sat on a bench outside the courtroom, trying to hear what they’d been asking him. Colby actually had the nerve to try to send a fourteen-year-old boy to jail for hitting him. But someone must have contacted Jesse’s real father and told him about the trial. Just as the lawyer was asking Jesse about it, his father walked into the room. I didn’t know it was him, but I saw the look on Jesse’s face when he walked in. Jesse went from nervous to stone in the time it took for the door to close.”

  Charlie strained to remain unaffected. “How long did Jess live with Colby?” she whispered, her voice cracking.

  “Nine months, eleven days, four and a half hours.”

  *

  Driving back to Jesse’s apartment, wiping the residual tears, Charlie looked in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were puffy and her hair was a tangled disaster.

  She began to hum her song as she opened the door to his apartment—and Jesse heard the familiar tune that he hadn’t quite placed yet.

  “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you all morning!” he shouted when she walked into his entry.

  “Sorry. My phone was off.”

  “So
where the hell have you been?” This was the most temper he had displayed all week.

  She exhaled and looked to the floor. “I went to see Lily today.”

  He picked up the remote control to mute the TV. Eyeing her curiously, he responded softer, “What? Why?”

  She shrugged, looking guilty. “I had some questions.”

  He stood up and his chest jutted out defensively. “Jesus, Charlie, why couldn’t you have asked me about them?”

  “I didn’t want to bother you with them,” she replied, keeping her head down.

  Sitting back down, Jesse raked his hands through his hair in distress, breathing heavily.

  “I knew you’d pick and choose what you wanted me to know,” she added.

  “What did she tell you, exactly?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  She deliberated her answer as Jesse waited, holding his breath; his tension defined a whole new level of anger.

  “More than I wanted to know, but exactly what I needed to.”

  “There you go again, playing the fucking shrink. You and your cryptic fucking answers.”

  “You’re struggling right now and I just want to do all I can to help. I needed to know what all I was dealing with—” she pleaded.

  He stood and his eyes hollowed. “What do you know about struggle? You have no idea what struggle is—” His frustration was mounting quickly.

  This is it, Charlie. He’s on the edge. It’s time to push him over. “Of course I don’t. Not like you, Jess. ‘Cause no one can understand the depths of you,” she said, shamefaced.

  “Look at this! Right here.” He stomped his way over to her and shoved his arm in her face, revealing the cigarette burn. She flinched, avoiding the lunacy in his eyes.

  Emphasizing his words, he spoke sharply. “I know pain,” he began, taking deep breaths between each sentence. “I know abuse. I know abandonment,” his volume now increasingly high, “I know fear. I know crazy…”

  The more he listed, the stronger his words became, each word chipping away a different spot in Charlie’s heart. And with every word he was now shouting, Charlie winced at how they sounded and wanted to scream over how they felt echoing through her chest.

  “I know recklessness! I know desperation! I know loss!” he continued to shout. A slight hesitation came before his eyes went slack and he whispered through gritted teeth, “and yes, Charlie, I know rape.”

  She covered her mouth and held her breath, tears streaming again. Her other hand reached for her stomach as she tried not to throw up.

  “Stop crying! And stop telling me you’re just trying to understand, or worse, that you know how the fuck I feel. Because this is the shit I live through daily, not the pathetic little hems and haws about the chaos in your tiny and insignificant life. This shit is real and it’s not going away anytime soon! So you can either live with it and accept me for who I am, or you can walk the fuck out that door. I don’t give a shit anymore. If you’re going to love me, do it with some fucking conviction! Don’t do it because you pity me.”

  She swallowed, then shook her head. “I’m not going anywhere until you ask me to,” she whispered, sniffling and wiping her wet face with her forearm still wrapped around her midsection.

  “Get.

  “The.

  “Fuck.

  “Out.

  “Is that clear enough for you, Charlie? I don’t want to see you ever again. Oh, and fuck you for going behind my back. If you wanted to see me humiliated, you’ve certainly succeeded.”

  Chapter Nine

  There comes a time in our lives when the pieces start to fall into place. For some of us, we realize certain things about our lives; events and people become glaringly obvious as we come to an understanding of why things happened to us.

  For the entire struggle Charlie had known and all the events in her miserable childhood, she looked at Jesse’s life and understood why she was brought to him, why this force—this unexplainable drive—had hovered over the two of them since the day they met. This was it. They were the same.

  There will always be people in the world like Charlie and Jesse. The people we look at and say to ourselves, “Thank God I’m not them.” But they’re out there. Everyone has secrets they keep to themselves, some good and some bad. It’s unfair to compare them, because everything is relative. Trauma is trauma, no matter what the experience or to whom. But it’s what we do with it afterwards that defines us, challenges us, and either stops us dead in our tracks or propels us to move forward. Charlie had figured this out long ago. But Jesse was still stuck in the mind of a very scared fourteen-year-old boy.

  *

  Three weeks without Jesse was what Charlie needed to pick up the scattered pieces of her shattered confidence. She wasn’t going to give up. She had lost almost everything she held dear, and nothing had been redeemed.

  Jesse hadn’t called, which she figured was probably for the best. His medication had now taken over and was doing its job to numb him enough to be able to stay away.

  It was the middle of summer and she was occupied with cleaning and turning apartments to get them ready for new move-ins, and still trying to catch up after the two weeks’ worth of vacation.

  Charlie’s birthday was in four days. She hadn’t made contact with either Jess or Sam, and every day was a little more difficult to handle than the day prior.

  *

  “Hey, Pops,” she said, setting a bouquet of roses onto the grave.

  “I need to talk and sort some of this shit out. Whether you can hear me or not, I just need someone to listen.” She stood and looked around the cemetery. The grass was a faded green and the white stones were lined up like soldiers in an early war.

  “I love Sam. With all my heart. And I don’t know if I’m in a position to forgive myself for all the things I’ve done. But I can only hope I will make up for the gigantic mess that I’ve created.

  “I’ve chosen to help Jesse. It’s the only way I could see redeeming a small part of the horrible decisions I’ve made in the past few months. And I really don’t know what I’m doing, but the good intention is there. I know you understand that about me; I know you don’t worry about me because I always find a way to make things right. But I’m doubting myself, and I don’t know what more I can do.

  “Since you’ve been gone, I’ve spent a lot of time trying not to think about your disappointment in me as a daughter.” A tear fell from her cheek and landed on the soft grass below. “And in the past few weeks I’ve realized that you probably don’t look at me that way. You always said that life was about making mistakes and learning from them.

  “That night with Jesse was a mistake. And it’s up to Sam to let me know whether or not I’ll spend the rest of my life paying for it. All I can do is hope that I can eventually come to terms with what I’ve done to Sam and not let it shadow my conscience for eternity.

  “I know Sam has forgiven me, and I wish to God I could run back to him now; I don’t want to spend another day without him. But Jesse still lurks. Not only in my mind, but literally around the corner. It’s not over with Jesse. I can just feel it. But how much more time do I give Jesse? How long do I make Sam wait? How much more time do I need, myself?”

  “I’ve been preaching to Jesse to forgive the people from his past because it’s the right thing to do—to move ahead with his life, to learn and grow. And I should probably be preaching to myself about that. I was always weak and vulnerable. There were people that held me back because of the gruesome memories I had. And now I’m in a position where I need to forgive myself for the things I’ve done, because I’ll never be able to learn and grow if I don’t.”

  A mist slowly crept its way through the trees, and a small water droplet splattered onto Charlie’s nose.

  So do I stay with the person who needs me the most? Or do I forgive myself and be with the person I love?

  Looking up to the sky, she saw the dark clouds clustered to the west and there was a clearing to the east. A faint r
ainbow appeared as the rain came down harder and she ran to her car seeking shelter.

  On her drive home, her phone buzzed. She dug it out of her purse and checked the message. It was from Sam.

  Hi. I thought this would get easier, but it’s not.

  Just a little more time, baby. Please. I know I’m going to figure it out soon.

  Just as she was shoving her phone back into her purse it buzzed again.

  I want to come home now.

  Pulling over to the side of the road, she contemplated how to respond. She watched the windshield wipers glide back and forth, clearing her vision of the road ahead just as quickly as the rain smeared it again. After several minutes, feeling scared and uneasy, she finally typed:

  Give me one week. I’ll meet you at the Chinese restaurant next Sunday if I think we can make it work. If I’m not there by noon, I’ll leave you alone forever.

  One week. That’s all I’ve got. I can’t expect him to wait forever.

  *

  The next morning, after a cup of coffee and a shower, she sat at her computer desk and typed in the name John Sanborn into a search. There were too many of them. Even in a refined search, she still found nothing that could connect Jesse to a John Sanborn.

  There’s gotta be something here. There has to. Something I can use.