Page 99 of Down Shift (Driven 8)
When he lifts his eyes, they are the brightest of blue and hold so much turmoil, but it’s the words he says that tell me he’s ready to do this.
“Just jump.”
Chapter 29
ZANDER
Hurt Till It Hurts No More.
Twenty years is a long time to suffer. Getty’s right. It’s always going to be there, even if just a whisper of the pain. How come she can simply tell me it’s okay to be angry and I already feel better? How is it she can break through the bullshit clouding my head and make me really hear her? Validate my feelings with a simple statement?
Let someone in instead of shutting everyone out. . . . Sometimes it takes a new ear, a fresh voice, to put things in perspective for you. . . .
Colton’s words come back to me. Son of a bitch. How’d he know? I glance up to Getty, the faintest of memories coming back to me. Of after my mom . . . being at the House, the boys’ home where I was Rylee’s charge. And I’m not sure if it’s from hearing them tell my little brother Ace the story of how they met that’s created the memory, but it’s there: Rylee helping Colton overcome the trauma of his past. How she broke through and he actually heard her.
How in the end she helped him be the man he is today. The man who stepped up to the plate to adopt me, save me, set an example for the kind of man I want to be.
“Because he knew,” I murmur to myself as I stare out the window, my mind fucked, my emotions disjointed.
“Who knew?” Getty asks from behind me where she sits on the bed sorting through the papers.
“Nothing.” I give myself a mental swift kick in my ass for how I treated him. The things I said. The shit I did. The disrespect I showed to him. I sigh and run another hand through my hair. “Just something I should have known.”
I glance over to where Getty is stacking the unimpressive contents from the box on the bed. After we spent an hour going through it, I realized it looks like nothing more than the contents of a desk drawer upended and dumped into a cardboard box.
Maybe it was my dad’s desk. Maybe my mom’s junk drawer in the kitchen. I don’t know, but the inflammatory things I expected to find on the heels of her autopsy report just aren’t there.
And I’m not sure if I’m more upset or relieved that it doesn’t contain more about my past. More pieces of my mom to hold on to. A bigger insight into the life I lived and the man who stole it from me.
“Fuck.” I blow out a sigh and turn around to face the bed where Getty’s sitting, categorizing the items in piles. Old bills, maxed-out credit card statements, unpaid parking tickets, handwritten grocery lists, a warrant for my father for drug possession, an eviction notice. Nothing I can really draw conclusions from other than knowing what my mom’s penmanship looked like—she was still so young she signed our last name with a heart for the dot over the i—and that my parents were late on a lot of payments and about to lose the house.
I lift up the first thing on the stack closest to me, a folder from Child Protective Services. The letter inside turns out to be a warning addressed to my parents that the county had received a phone call from a concerned citizen about my well-being. CPS would be visiting unannounced to do well-checks on me.
I toss it back in the pile, then consider the humidor filled with the few things I wanted to keep. A picture I drew on a scrap of paper of two stick figures, both with belly buttons, one labeled Zee and the other Mom. The stack of pictures, a credit card slip with my mom’s signature on it, my original birth certificate, a cheap bookmark with a rainbow tassel that I remember used to hang out of the top of her paperback books, a red paper clip she had bent into the shape of a heart and had given me one night when we sat in my room and waited for all my dad’s friends to leave.
There’s one last item—a Matchbox Indy car. The tires barely roll and the paint is almost completely worn off from where I carried it with me everywhere, but I still see the shiny red paint. I still remember the elaborate tracks I’d make in my mind. And how I’d clutch it in my hand while I sat riveted to the television next to my dad for the one thing he’d make time to do with me, watch Indy racing.
Tears unexpectedly burn my eyes as I stare at this little piece of my past that somehow became such a huge part of my future. For the first time in forever, I wonder what my dad would say if he knew what I did for a living. Shouldn’t even think about that piece of shit, but at the same time, I wonder.
And that makes my mind shift to Colton. To the man who stepped up to the plate and took me as his own when no one else would. To the father I let down because I was too goddamn chickenshit to talk to him.
I set the old car back down beside my other mementos in despair at the depressing amount of things I have to represent the first seven years of my life.
“You okay?” Her voice is soft and her brown eyes are compassionate when I look up to meet them.
“Yeah. I’m just . . . I don’t know. I’m disappointed there’s not more and at the same time relieved there’s not the ticking time bomb I expected in there . . . if that makes any sense at all.”
“It does. It makes perfect sense.”
I exhale loudly and sit down on the bed beside her. The mattress dips, the old cardboard box falls onto the floor, and I grab her hand to stop her from getting up to retrieve it. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” She laughs softly at the phrasing and links her fingers with mine.
“What’s bugging you?”
“I’m pissed at myself.” I rifle through the perfect stacks she just spent time organizing and I love how she doesn’t rush me to finish the thought. There’s something about her silence that is comforting and encouraging. “I mean, why? I did all this, caused all of this bullshit for this box? And this is all there is? I hurt my family, fucked over the trust people had put in me, possibly screwed up my career, and for what? For a report I knew deep down wasn’t true and for some small trinkets of a life I’m probably glad I didn’t have to live?” My voice rises as I throw my hands up and walk back to look out the window, where the sky is darkening.
“Zan—”
“Shouldn’t I at least get some kind of closure? Some kind of valid explanation so I don’t look like the asshole I was when I have to go back and apologize to my family?”
