Page 37 of Guitars and Mistakes
Lila was already jerking the wheel to the right, like she’d known ahead of time that Anna was going to say it, and I remembered Lila telling me that the girls had known each other long enough to be able to read each other’s minds. I wondered if Anna knew what we were doing, then. I assumed so, since she’d agreed to come along. I wondered if Matt did. I chanced a glance at him but he was busy hanging onto the door handle, his jaw tight with anxiety, presumably at Lila’s driving skills.
He must have known I was looking at him.
He didn’t bother to return my stare.
Right. If he knew, he wasn’t going to tell me, and for the first time I started to get nervous about this. Where were they taking me? Was this some sort of intervention? I didn’t think so; surely interventions didn’t allow so much joking around during the drive toward them. Or did they? No one had ever bothered to give me one, so I didn’t really know the rules for them.
God, did I need to start preparing or something? Should I be reciting what I was going to tell them when they said I was drinking too much, brooding my life away? Did I need to be on the defense here?
Then Lila turned and glanced at me over her shoulder, the corner of her mouth turning up in a slightly nervous smile and her eye glinting with hope.
That wasn’t the face of a girl who was about to sell me out or lecture me. That was the face of a girl who had a plan, and was hoping it would work out for the best.
I didn’t know what she had up her sleeve, but I hoped it was good. Because I already had a ride booked back to Nashville for later today, and this might be the last morning I ever spent with her.
I really didn’t want to spend it listening to someone lecture me about how much I was hurting the people I loved and letting them down.
* * *
I knew this trailer park.
And when Lila finally came to a stop, I knew the trailer, too. I knew the old, yellowed-out siding. The metal on the shutters. The broken-down stairs that led up to the front door that didn’t close all the way and the cracked pavement that should have been a parking space and was more like a pile of gravestones.
When I’d been a kid, I’d thought maybe theyweregravestones and that there were dead people underneath them. People who had once lived in our trailer and had died there and never been taken anyplace else. I’d been terrified that they would come get me at night and nearly as frightened of them as I was of the real men who paraded through the house.
Now I looked at the place with the same horror... and then turned my eyes to Lila, the panic already flooding through me. What the hell were we doing here? Why had they brought me to this place? How did they even know this place existed?
I’d trusted Lila not to lead me into harm. And yet she’d brought me to the place where all my nightmares started.
“Lila?” I asked brokenly.
She turned and looked at me with nothing but love and hope in her eyes. “I found them, Rivers. I’ve been looking for them for days and I finally found them. I know your mom left you when you were small and that it changed everything for you. I know what you went through because of that. But I also know that she’s told people she felt she didn’t have a choice and that she’s regretted it every single day since then. I know she loves you and wants to mend things with you, and I thought... I thought...”
She paused and frowned, like she’d just realized that she might have thought wrong or overreached, but then reached out and took my hand. “Iknowthat if she didn’t leave you for the reasons you thought she did, it changes things again. And I think you deserve the chance to hear how much she loved you and wanted the best for you. You deserve to know that it wasn’t your fault and that it wasn’t about you. I don’t want you to have to keep carrying that with you for the rest of your life.”
I didn’t know what to say. My throat had closed up and I couldn’t breathe, and even if I’d wanted to answer I knew I wouldn’t have the voice to do it. She’d found my mother. She’d been working on it for days. She’d figured out where she was and maybe even talked to her. Maybe asked her why she’d done what she’d done and had heard that my mom hadn’t had a choice.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
I didn’t know what to feel. Half of me felt like this was some sort of crazy dream because I’d taken the wrong sort of vitamins or something. Part felt like this was too good to be true. I’d known that this trailer park existed, of course, but I’d never thought my mother was still here and even if I had, I wouldn’t have come searching for her. I’d been so sure she didn’t want me, so sure she’d abandoned me, and it hadn’t occurred to me that we could ever mend that bridge.
I’d been too content to carry the damage with me for the rest of my life.
But what if she hadn’t had a choice?
What if it was like Lila was saying and my mother had thought she was doing the right thing for me? Maybe she’d been so broke she couldn’t feed me and had been desperate to turn me over to someone who could. Maybe she’d known what those men were doing to me and had done what she needed to get me away from them.
Maybe she’d been saving me, and I’d been wrong about her all these years.
It was a thought too beautiful, too precious, for my dark and shadowed life. A possibility that floated ahead of me like some sort of rainbow-colored cloud, almost too good to want to touch.
I bit my lip and gazed into Lila’s eyes, taking in the faith and hope there, the belief that everything could be okay because I was finally going to find my family... and then I got out of the car and made for the front door.
It was the hardest walk I thought I’d ever taken, though it got a whole lot easier when Lila appeared at my side and took my hand. She squeezed gently and fell into step next to me, and before I knew it we were at the door and she was reaching forward to knock.
I watched her hand with my heart in my throat, trying very hard not to throw up at the thought that I was about to see my mother again, and perhaps rewrite everything I’d ever thought of her. God, if this was all it took to change everything, if this actually told me that she was never who I thought she was but had loved me all along and done her best for me...
