Page 77 of Rock & Roll Nights: The Lila and Rivers Edit
“Now talk. You told me on that playground that you’d give me the answers I wanted. Since then, you’ve quit the band and nearly knocked me over in your hurry to get off the bus that brought us here. You’ve alienated everyone in your life and look like death warmed over. I know where you came from. I know Jonesboro is part of your past. And I know no one has ever bothered to really ask you what happened here that hurt you so badly. You owe me answers, Rivers, and I’m not leaving until I get them. So talk.”
I felt my mouth drop open in surprise at her words—at the fact that she knew so much already and was actually saying everything out loud.
No one knew I’d come from Jonesboro except Matt, Hudson, and Noah, and even they didn’t know I’d been born here. I’d never told them about the trailer park or the drive to the orphanage in that car that smelled like burnt upholstery and alcohol. Despair and hopelessness. They knew my mother had left me there but didn’t know she’d done it when she’d still had a house of her own where I could have lived.
I might have been three years old, but I knew enough to know that I could have stayed with my mother if she’d wanted me.
I’d spent my entire life dealing with that thought and everything that came after it, but I’d never shared it with anyone. It had felt too personal, too heavy for people who didn’t have to carry that sort of thing around with them. And I hadn’t really wanted anyone else having that sort of power over me.
Until Lila was sitting in front of me acting like she had every right to the information and would know exactly how to carry it if I handed it to her.
The scary thing was, I thought she just might.
I gulped and tried to get my brain to kick in. Tried to find the defenses I’d spent so many years building up to keep me and the people around me safe. Searched desperately for the filter that had always kept my past hidden from those around me.
They were all missing. I couldn’t find a single wall or stubborn instinct in my body. Everything in me wanted to lean back on my butt in the grass and hold Lila’s hand there in that dark field and pour my soul out to her.
So after a moment of hesitation, that was exactly what I did. I turned my face up to her, our knees resting against each other in our poses. I reached out, took her hands, and pulled them into my lap, our fingers twisted together and her thumbsrubbing what they could reach of my hands. I looked into her eyes, dark now rather than their usual green, but just as open and welcoming...
And I started talking.
I told her about my first memories with my mother. The cigarette burns. The constant abuse. Me hiding under the bed whenever I could get there and the trail of men that had made their way through our trailer. The fact that I had one aunt who had cared about me, but that she’d shown up less and less often as time went on, and that on most nights we hadn’t even had enough to eat, much less enough blankets on the bed.
And how she’d still been my mother and somewhere in my toddler’s brain, I’d known that at some level she was the only one I could count on. How I’d always hoped that she’d make things okay. Even when I knew she wouldn’t.
I told her about the day my mom and her latest boyfriend had dropped me off at the orphanage. How she’d toted me up that long walkway, handed me right to that tall man, and then turned away like it hadn’t mattered. Like she’d just dropped off a bag of potatoes. Or something even less valuable, as she definitely would have kept potatoes to herself.
How she’d walked away without looking back, leaving me there.
Her hands spasmed in mine and she suddenly squeezed even harder. “She just left?” she whispered.
I shrugged, trying hard to act as if it hadn’t mattered. “I guess she must have thought I’d have a better shot at happiness if I could find another family.”
Lila’s mouth thinned at that and her face got downright furious. I’d never seen that expression from her before and I almost laughed at how unnatural it looked. My Sunshine Girl had become something fierce and determined, like she wasready to go to war over something. Ready to claw someone across the face. I wondered how often she wore that expression.
I wondered how much she had to care about someone to look like she’d fight to the death for them.
And then I told her the rest of the story. The abuse at the orphanage itself, where we were little more than servants, set every day to cleaning or weeding or dishes or laundry. How Matt and I had found each other early and how we’d been taken in by Noah and Hudson, who were older and wiser and, if you’d asked me or Matt, practically gods.
“And I bet they looked just as intimidating then as they do now,” she said, smiling slightly.
I let myself smile a bit at that. “Not even close. They were skinny kids, just like us, but they had a couple years on us and both had reputations that made the bullies avoid them. After that, things got better. Until we were sent out to foster families.”
I tried to spare her the details about those. I didn’t want to tell her about what they’d done to us in those houses that were supposed to be more like homes. I didn’t want her to have to know. I’d wished a million times that those things weren’t in my mind. I wasn’t going to curse her with the knowledge.
But she didn’t give me a choice. I’d start a story and fade to quiet when I got to the bad part—the abuse or the beatings or being locked in a closet for days—and she’d poke at me and ask questions until I finally gave her the information she was looking forward. And she didn’t shudder. She didn’t start crying or look away. She sat there and stared back at me, listening and taking all of my pain into herself like she was drawing poison from my wounds.
Like she was saving me one story at a time.
“But you know none of that was your fault, right?” she finally asked quietly. “You know that didn’t have anything to do with you. It wasthemfailing.”
I bit my lip at that, wondering if I had the strength to tell her the rest. I’d thought it so many times, knew it deep down in my bones, but I’d never told anyone. I didn’t know if I had the words.
Though I guessed if I was going to find the words for anyone, it would be this sweet, gentle girl who was giving me the only safe space I’d ever known.
“It was me after a while,” I said brokenly. “I started doing bad things on purpose, just so I would get sent back to the orphanage. Burning down their sheds. Destroying their houses. Leaving dead things in their beds.”
I put a hand over my mouth at the thought, hating that I’d let anyone drag me down that far, but she reached out and ran her fingers down my cheek, drawing my eyes back to her.
