Page 98 of Down Shift (Driven 8)
His chuckle is soft, exasperated, self-deprecating. “Well, considering the only other thing I pulled from the box and looked at says I was the one who killed my mom . . . let’s hope you’re right.”
His words startle me. “Wait. What?” My hands are in midair between us. He’s thrown me so thoroughly for a loop that it’s like my gestures and my thoughts are in two different worlds.
Zander doesn’t say anything; he just stares at me. And I’m not sure if he’s waiting to watch my reaction or if he’s testing me to see how I process the ridiculous comment he just made. But the longer he searches my eyes, the more I see that he really believes what he’s just said. It’s in the quiet intensity of his eyes, the gritted clench of his jaw, the unflinching tension in the muscles of his neck, and the overall deflated sadness that I’m watching slowly sap the vibrancy from his expression and posture.
Needing to make a physical connection with him, I carefully move the pictures out of the way with the mind to cross the small space separating us. But before I can finish, he shifts suddenly so that he lies sideways across the bed, head in my lap like a little child, face toward my stomach and one arm hooked around my back.
My heart breaks and swells all at the same time.
“Talk to me, Zander,” I murmur softly. My fingers run through his hair on reflex. His breath is hot through the thin cotton of my shirt. His fingers cool beneath the hem of it at my back. Contradictions. Everything about him right now tells the same story: a grown man struggling with the memories of the little boy he can’t quite remember being.
And so I do the only thing I can: I give him time to find the words to speak. He’s been flying on broken wings for so long, I’m sure it’s going to take him a minute to figure out how to land so we can repair them and make him whole again.
I thread my fingers through his hair. Over and over. Soothe. Comfort. Let him know I’m here.
“The first thing I pulled from the box,” he begins, voice thick with emotion. And I just keep doing exactly what I’m doing: fingers through hair, body relaxed, thankful for the trust he’s bestowing upon me. “It was her autopsy report. I don’t know why I even looked at it. It’s not like I didn’t know how she died. I was there for fuck’s sake. How could I ever forget that?” The break in his voice breaks me too.
“What was her name?” I speak softly, wanting to bring him back to the important thing. To her. Not the blood that I can imagine stains his memory of her. Because, yes, while we both know the pain of losing a mother isn’t something that can be quantified or compared, Zander, by far, has had the tougher of our situations.
“Lola. Her name was Lola.”
“Lola,” I repeat. His fingers flexing against my back are the only sign he’s heard me. “I think Lola would be proud of the man her son’s become.”
His ragged sob catches me off guard. All the emotion he’s held in for what I can assume is so long manifests in that single, heart-wrenching sound. The storm rages outside the windows and I have a feeling it’s similar to what’s happening inside the man before me too.
All I can do is sit here, wait it out with him, and hope to be his lighthouse this time around.
“I remember her lying there, blood everywhere,” he finally continues sometime later, a dreamlike quality to his voice. The emotion that was nonexistent the day he told me amid the pine trees comes back tenfold in his tone right now. “And there was the handle of the scissors against her neck. She couldn’t . . . her breath . . . it was hard for her to breathe and I thought it was because of the scissors . . . so I pulled it out.”
And that last statement tells me what the report says. What the adult in me can infer but what the scared little kid could never have known: that dislodging the scissors most likely opened up an artery. Caused her to bleed out. But she was bleeding out anyway from all of her other injuries. Zander did not kill his mother. A fact that he has to recognize on some level.
But I think the brutality of the report, the reopening of old wounds he couldn’t remember himself, was a reality he wasn’t ready to face.
His sudden spiral out of control. His continued avoidance of an innocent cardboard box. His lashing out at his family, his career—everything makes so much sense to me now. A man can’t control the uncontrollable.
“Oh, Zander.” I lean forward and press a kiss to his temple, leave my lips there, right above his ears, so he can hear what I need him to hear over the noise I’m sure is roaring in his head. “I don’t care what that report says. You did not kill your mother. Your dad did. I know the report might state otherwise, but you know differently. You were there. You were with her. You were the last thing she saw, her son, her baby. Her truth.”
The two of us are huddled together, his mouth against my stomach, mine against his head, my hands still in his hair, and we just sit here for a moment. Thinking. Accepting. Dealing.
“I know.” His breath is ho
t against my shirt. “I know,” he repeats, sorrow morphing to anger in a matter of seconds as he sits up and stares at me, head shaking, fingers on one hand fidgeting with the fingers on another. “But that’s the problem, Getty. I dealt with this shit years ago. Fucking therapists upon therapists upon therapists and then some more. I talked about feelings and drew pictures of my feelings, of what happened. Christ!” he barks out as he rises from the bed, paces back and forth, restless with anger, and scrubs his hands over his face. “I’m supposed to be over this shit. The memory of my mom shouldn’t fuck me up and yet it did and I’m so goddamn angry that it did. All this time later and something I fucking lived, breathed, and dealt with did it again. Took ahold of me. At first I thought my anger was at not knowing this. At how it was kept from me by Colton and Rylee. So that’s why I lashed out at them. But then when I came here, I had distance. Time. Space. I realized I was just angry because it shouldn’t affect me AT ALL and it does. And I can’t stop it.”
I get how a grown man can be so angry at being blindsided. At fate’s way of proving he’s weak when it’s all he’s bucked against his whole life. At feeling like you’ve overcome something only to have it resurface later and beat you back down, make you question what you always knew to be the truth.
“Zander,” I say his name, watch his feet falter. His eyes full of duress and emotion lift to meet mine. “You want to be angry? I would be too. I’d be fucking furious. Shouting and screaming and hating the world. There is no shame in that. There is no brushing her under the rug. She was your mother. Your everything. If this didn’t affect you, I’d be worried.”
Silence. The thunder rattles the windows.
“The robe I wear? The ridiculously expensive one you noticed? That robe was my mother’s. It’s the little piece of her I get to touch every day. I slip it on and feel close to her. It’s silly, Zander. It’s a reminder of the pain and a memory of her all at the same time. But sometimes we have to take the little things we are given to help on those days when all you feel is the hurt.” I look down to the box on the bed with me and then back up to him. “My robe is your box. It’s brought you both so far, the good and the bad. . . .”
His brow furrows, lips twist as if he’s having a hard time believing what I’m saying. “I don’t know what to say.”
The lost look in his eyes is so hard to handle and yet I can’t look away. My love for him is so strong that I can’t deny it anymore. The need to pull him into my arms and take all the pain away is so powerful, but he’s the one who takes the step forward. He’s the one who takes a deep breath, a forced swallow, and reaches out to slowly open the top of the cardboard box.
I watch him, methodical in his movements but his face a sea of emotion, and hope that my comments aren’t pushing him to do something he’s not ready for yet. And in the same breath I think he needs to face this, because until he does, the unknown will eat him whole.
He unfolds the flaps of the box, then moves the humidor beside it and opens the top. He picks up the stack of pictures he let me see earlier and places them gently in the humidor. The sight is bittersweet. A first step toward closure.
