Page 101 of Down Shift (Driven 8)
She knew. That’s all I can think over and over. She knew he would kill her and loved me as much as I remember she did and needed me to be okay.
She really loved me. What a stupid thought, a bittersweet emotion that threatens to overwhelm me.
“Getty.”
I don’t even know if I say it out loud or if I’m just thinking it, but when she pushes open the door, I get my answer. One look at me, and she’s across the room with her arms around my waist in an instant.
I can’t speak. Don’t know what to say, how to explain, so I shove the letter at her so she can understand.
Still lost in my own storm of emotion, I watch her read it. Her bottom lip trembling. Her other hand flying up to cover her mouth. Something clicks in my mind. A moment of clarity amid the haze. And I scramble for my suitcase shoved in the bottom of the closet.
I’m a madman. Throwing shit out of the way, unzipping it, flinging it open to find the one thing I grabbed at the last second on the way out the door before I left home. The errant thought to grab the only thing I had from my childhood, the ever-constant security blanket of sorts to maybe help with the sting of the goddamn box that had shown up in my life.
And of course after the fact I felt like such a pussy for grabbing it that I left the damn thing in my suitcase. Made it easier so I wouldn’t have to explain to Getty why a grown man toted around a ragged, lumpy, threadbare stuffed dog.
In haste I grab the dog, my childhood lifeline after my mother died, and fall back to my ass on the floor.
“Do you think . . . ?”
Getty’s voice startles me. I almost forgot she was there. But when I look up to meet her tearstained face, I know she’s thinking the same thing I am. She’s off the bed as my hands press and push at the lumpy stuffing inside the damn dog.
They are the same lumps that have always been there. The ones I’ve worried through the outside cover when I rocked myself to bed as a little kid, scared and mute from the fear. Lost in my own mind from the sadness.
Getty runs out of the room and returns in seconds with scissors, her eyes alive with encouragement as she hands them to me. “On the seam in the belly,” she says as she shows me. “I can sew that back together like new.”
Excitement and emotion and every other fucking thing I can’t even name courses through me as I try to steady the blade and snip a small opening in the seam. Carefully I make a two-inch-size hole, drop the scissors, and use my fingers to dig around inside. I can’t feel shit other than stuffing clumped together and turned stiff from age. The high hopes I had of finding this one last thing from my mother slowly crashing.
And then I hit something hard with my fingertip. My breath hitches. My heart races. The little circle inside the doggy that I used to rub my fingers arou
nd and always thought was just a part sewn inside.
“What is it?” Getty’s voice is loaded with the same emotion that I feel.
I know before I pull it from the hole. Know that it’s my mother’s way of letting me keep a piece of her with me forever.
I put the small gold band between my thumb and forefinger and hold it up so Getty can see. “It’s her wedding ring.”
She gasps.
I’m paralyzed. Swamped with memories.
Her arms go around me.
I break.
Every fucking thing I’ve been holding in since I was seven years old comes out.
The anger. The hate. The loneliness. The relentless questions. The need to feel my mother’s love again. The guilt.
Every single piece.
Except her love for me.
Because I know that was true.
Chapter 30
GETTY
