Page 53 of The Last One You Loved
He sighed, raising his hand and scratching the back of his neck as if nervous all of a sudden.
“Janie Withers had been growing herbs out the back of the abandoned Cross farm, and one day, while she was there, she heard a baby crying and glass breaking from inside the dilapidated house. She was too scared to go in and check it out, so she called 9-1-1. I’d been working for the sheriff’s department for about two years by then and was sent to check it out. When I arrived, I heard a baby wailing as if it was being tortured, so I busted open the door and found Mila. She was covered, head to toe, in dirt and grime, a disgusting diaper, and was screaming at the top of her lungs. She was so skinny you could see all the bones in her chest as she sat in the middle of a floor covered in mouse droppings. When she saw me, she stopped crying and put her arms up. It was the damndest…”
His voice dropped off, clogged with tears, as if he was right back there finding Mila. It disgusted me and made me hate Mama and myself both a little bit. If I’d been here, would I have been able to stop that from happening to Mila?
Somehow, I doubted it. Once Mama and I had split ways, we’d never seen each other again. She’d taken off, and I hadn’t cared to find out where to. Even if I’d been in Willow Creek, I wouldn’t have known she was pregnant. I wouldn’t have known about Mila until Maddox found her. But it didn’t ease the feeling that I should have known. As if the moment the bond had been created, the universe should have informed me. It was ridiculous but true. All I could do at the moment was be glad it was Maddox who’d found her.
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
MADDOX
I’LL JUST HOLD ON
“Girl I know you’re a gypsy soul,
And I’m just a stop along your road.”
Performed by Blake Shelton
Written by Hayslip / Simpson / Olsen / Olsen
I was backat the Cross farm, reliving that day, miles away from my living room and McKenna with Mila safe in the room down the hall. Instead, I could smell the pee and vomit and the refuse of the house. The mold from the cracked roof and the rain pouring in. Feeling the cold that had made me shiver when I was fully dressed, and when I’d picked up Mila’s tiny body in only a dirty diaper, she’d been so cold she’d almost been blue.
“Where was Sybil?” McKenna prompted, and I continued down the dirty hall of the Cross place in my mind with Mila clutched to my chest and my gun in my other hand.
“I found her in the next room, passed out in her own vomit. For a moment, I thought she was dead.” I remembered the relief the thought had given me. I’d felt like such a bastard for having it. For wishing someone dead. But when she’d groaned, anger had filled me instead. “I got them both back to the station and got them cleaned up. When Sybil came to, she denied Mila was hers. Said her friend had left the baby with her while she’d gone to Knoxville to get them some dope.”
I finished my beer, not wanting to relive those moments.
“Why didn’t CPS take Mila?”
“She wouldn’t let go of me. Every time I tried to hand her off or someone tried to take her, she screamed bloody murder, like we were pulling her skin off. We all thought it would be easier—at least for a night.”
“You could have just let her scream,” McKenna insisted.
The CPS worker had told me the same thing, saying Mila would stop crying eventually. That she was just traumatized. But there’d been something about her that had made it impossible for me to let her go. Contrary to what I’d told McKenna in the bar the night before, I’d seen the similarities even when Mila was fourteen months old. There’d been something in her gaze that had called to me, reminded me of another person who’d looked at me with scared eyes and begged me not to leave.
When I’d found McKenna at age eight, her gaze had pleaded with me without a word to not give away her hiding spot. Sybil had stormed over with a whiskey bottle in her hand, asking me if I’d seen a dirty little girl, and I’d just shaken my head.
And McKenna had been dirty, dressed in an old, ragged nightgown, her feet bare and black from crossing the road, her hair an oily tangle about her face. As little as I’d been, I’d known deep in my soul I would do anything to help her. There’d been no way I was going to tell the woman yelling profanities where she was at.
“It didn’t feel right,” I finally told McKenna. I suddenly realized she’d moved on the couch so she was right next to me. She picked up my hand and squeezed it.
The touch was painful, slamming through my senses, waking up nerves I’d tried to put to rest ages ago, filling me with a need so great I thought my chest might explode from the desperate longing.
“Thank you,” she said quietly, “for looking after her like you looked after me.”
I hadn’t said any of the words aloud about finding her in the shed, but somehow, just like Mila could read my emotions, McKenna had read my mind, had known where I’d gone. I couldn’t speak, just nodded, slowly pulling my hand away because I couldn’t keep it there and not try to touch her in other ways.
“When did you find out she was Mama’s and not her friend’s?” she asked.
“Officially, about two weeks in. We finally found her friend in Knoxville, and she laughed when she heard Sybil had said Mila was hers. The judge forced them both to get DNA tests so we would know which one of them to press neglect and abandonment charges on.”
“Officially?” she poked at the word I used, but I didn’t respond to her dig. She knew what I meant.
“I called you then,” I said, turning to her and trying to keep the hurt out of my voice.
She grimaced. “Kerry was so angry when he saw your name flash across the screen. He thought I’d lied about asking you to stop calling. Thought I’d been talking to you behind his back the whole time. He bought me a new phone with a new number and basically said if I didn’t take it, he’d know I wasn’t serious about us.”
