Today's Promises (Promises #2)(14)

“Jaynie, just come to me, please.” His voice is a whisper, a comforting caress. God, I need him. He’s the only person who can ever understand my pain, especially when it comes to this subject.

So I go to him.

And I let him slip the hoodie on me.

I then sit on the floor, across from him.

I also let him smoke his damn cigarette in peace.

Flicking an ash into a discarded paper cup, he tells me how after lunch, on a whim, he asked Crick to drive him up to the Lowry property.

“Why in the world would you ever want to go back up there?” I ask, truly perplexed.

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “I just kind of wanted to see it today. That place where so much bad shit went down. It just seemed… I don’t know…”

He’s trying to explain, but this is clearly hard for him to put into words.

Flynn puts the cigarette to his lips and inhales, sucking smoke deeply into his lungs.

On his exhales, he says in a tight voice, “Hey, at least I didn’t break any promises.”

“What do you mean?”

“You hadn’t yet asked me not to go up there. That didn’t happen until tonight.”

He has a point, so there’s no good reason to dwell on promises that weren’t technically broken. He went to the Lowry’s and that’s the end of it.

“So,” I begin, curious to hear the rest of what happened up there. “You felt like you needed to see the place today…for whatever reason.”

“Yeah, yeah, I did,” he says, nodding.

“Why, though?” I press. “Why today of all days?”

He leans away from me and blows a puff of smoke out the open window. He then lowers the window a little when he sees me shivering.

“It’s stupid, I know,” he says, taking another drag. “Like you said, why today of all days? The whole time I lived in that f*cking town, when we were apart, I avoided the Lowry property like it harbored the plague. But today, after getting the job, and after seeing Crick, I just felt like I needed closure or some shit.”

In a small voice, I ask what I suspect may be the real reason Flynn was compelled to return to the Lowry property. “Did it have something to do with trying to heal?”

He looks down. “Maybe a little.”

I nod, finally getting it, at least a little. Though I don’t plan to ever return to that house of horrors, unless there’s a damn good reason, I understand where Flynn’s head was today.

See, he’s not fully whole, either. And sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes you need to revisit the past to spur yourself to the next step in your life. We all have different ways of dealing with grief. Flynn confronts it head-on, whereas I like to bury it.

“So,” I breathe out. “What’d it look like?”

“What?” he asks. “The house?”

“Yeah, the house”—I make a sweeping motion with my hands—“but the rest of it too. How’s the barn where we worked look? And what about all the surrounding land?”

“It all looks abandoned, Jaynie. Supposedly, the state owns everything now.”

“Hmm, interesting,” I remark.

The cigarette is down to little more than a butt. Flynn holds it like a joint and takes one last hit of nicotine.

Then he says, “They’ve seized all the property. That’s what Crick told me. You should’ve seen it, though. There are all these big red ‘No Trespassing’ signs, posted everywhere you turn. They’re on the trees lining the drive, on those huge gates out front…just all over the place.”

He chuckles, and I ask, “What’s so funny?”

“Eh, not funny like ha-ha. More like funny as in ironic.”

“What’s ironic?”

“Well, no one pays any attention to the signs. People still go up there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Crick told me teens party up there all the time.” An ash falls to the ground. “And it’s kind of obvious. Remember that high wire fencing all around the perimeter, the one with barbed wire on top?”

“Like I could forget,” I mutter, recalling our prison fencing all too clearly.

“Well, despite those signs to stay out, there are all these huge gaping holes in the fence that the partiers have created. I guess so they can get in more easily. Better than climbing, you know. That’s what I kept thinking, anyway, when my ass was crawling through one of the bigger holes.”

“Crick went with you, I hope?” I ask. “Please don’t tell me you went in there all alone.”

“I can take care of myself,” Flynn assures me.

“Still…” I hate the idea of him up there all by himself. What if something had happened? “Where was Crick when you were deciding to trespass?” I add.

“He waited in the truck. I told him to keep guard in case someone showed up. You know, seeing as we weren’t supposed to be up there snooping around in the first place. He’d told me earlier that the state cops have been stepping up patrols to keep the party crowd out.”

“Well then, that was some good thinking on your part.”

I smile over at Flynn, but he’s busy staring out the window, out into the dark night.

“You should see it, Jaynie,” he says, at last. “It’s all f*cked-up. The house is in pretty bad shape. Looks like midnight plumbers have hit it up a time or two…or ten.”