Dylan’s Redemption(16)
“Your voice is ringing in my head.” He stared into his coffee cup but glanced up to say, “You look good. Life’s apparently turned out all right for you.”
Jessie shrugged that off, focused more on the lost look in Brian’s round, sad eyes.
“I thought you died that night. I left and he killed you. Where have you been?”
“Around. Mostly Solomon. I have a house about twenty miles outside of Fallbrook.”
“You do?” The surprise lit his face.
“I started my life over. It’s time you did the same.”
Brian ignored that. Mired in the past, he asked, “What happened to you, Jessie?” His soft, anguish-filled voice pierced her heart and made it ache. She didn’t want to go back. She wanted to fix things for him now and move on.
She stood and walked away and stared blankly out the window. She hated thinking about that night. She didn’t want to talk about what happened, but Brian needed to hear it.
“What do you think happened that night?”
She’d heard some of the rumors, but she wanted to know what he thought. He’d been there at the beginning and on many other similar nights.
“Dad had been drinking pretty hard. After we quit for the day, he and some of the guys sat around knocking back a few while you put tools away and cleaned up the jobsite.
“We got home and you went in the kitchen.” He paused, thinking back. “You were chopping an apple at the counter when he started in on you, slurring his words, yelling, cussing. I don’t remember about what. Doesn’t matter. Never did. He’d pick something out of thin air for no reason, except to get in your face.”
He took a sip of the steaming coffee and shook his head, trying to clear the images from his mind. She knew from experience it wouldn’t work. Some things were burned into your cells. “He threw you up against the wall and choked you.
“I’d seen him do that so many times before, I can’t even count them all. I’ve seen him punch you and slap you.
“You never cried. Sometimes, I’d see the tears come into your eyes, and maybe one would fall, but you’d never cry. You took every blow, every nasty word, and you never backed down.”
Brian’s intense stare bore into her back. She hadn’t moved from standing in front of the dirty window looking out at nothing but a past she didn’t want to remember or hear about ever again.
“He wanted to break you. Beat you down and make you weak. He never could.”
No, he never could. The harder he’d tried, the harder she’d fought to stay strong.
After losing Hope, she’d come close to giving up. Even then, she’d somehow found the strength to go on, but it had been a near miss, standing on the edge of life and oblivion.
“He was angry with Mother. Not me. He blamed me because she killed herself. Really, he blamed her for leaving him. I was here, she wasn’t.”
“He yelled you weren’t his daughter. He screamed about how you look like her, and then he backhanded you.”
She turned from the window and focused on her brother, a pile of misery sitting on the couch. “I reminded him of her and her betrayal every day she was gone. She had an affair, and then me. The note she left when she died said she couldn’t accept the other man didn’t want her, had left her, and she didn’t want to live without him. The old man blamed me.”
“So you aren’t his daughter?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? Who cares? A friend of mine pointed out yesterday he was the only father I had.” She held up her hands in a “whatever” kind of gesture. “What’s important is you are my brother. We’ll bury the old man tomorrow and be done with the whole mess.”
“But all the blood. I left in the middle of the argument. I came back to an empty house, the kitchen floor covered in blood. I can still see it, smell it, like it was yesterday.
“You were nowhere to be found. When Dad came back the next morning alone, I thought he’d done something with you.” Brian hung his head and stared down at his now-empty coffee mug. The alcohol had worn off, the fog thinned. The guilt hung on him, weighing down his shoulders, his very spirit. The turmoil in his eyes and laced in every word tore at her.
“Brian, listen to me. It wasn’t your fault. He did it. Not you.”
“I left you alone with him, and he hurt you!” Brian roared from the couch. “How many times did I walk out the door and leave you behind without so much as one word in your defense? Never once did I pull him off you, or stand between you.”
“I don’t want to do this with you. It’s over. Done. Stop blaming yourself for something you couldn’t have prevented or stopped. When have you ever known me to need someone’s help?”