Until Friday Night (The Field Party #1)(16)

“Is it true? About what Gunner told me . . . Did you see your dad . . .” He trailed off. He knew my past. Someone had found out and was spreading it around. I knew it would happen eventually.

I thought about my answer. I didn’t talk about that night with anyone. Remembering was too hard. Too painful for any human to endure. But West was losing a parent too.

So I nodded. I wouldn’t give him any more than that. I couldn’t put into words what I’d seen. Not again.

“Shit. That’s tough,” was all he said.

We sat there in silence for several minutes, staring off into the darkness.

“My dad’s dying. Doctors can’t do anything for him anymore. Sent him home to just . . . die. Every day I watch him fall away a little more. Further from our grasp. Further from us. He’s in so much pain, and there isn’t anything I can do. I’m afraid to go to school because, what if he dies while I’m gone and I never see him again? But then, like right f*cking now, I’m afraid to go home because he may have gotten worse and then I’d have to see that. I have to see the man I adore wasting away. Leaving this life. Leaving us.”

My mother’s death had been fast. Immediate. She hadn’t suffered except for that one moment I was screaming at my dad to stop while he pointed a gun at her. I know she suffered then. She suffered for me and what I would see.

But I didn’t know what it felt like to watch a parent die slowly before your eyes. To go to sleep at night and not know if they’d be there the next morning. My heart ached for him. Losing someone you loved was hard. The hardest thing in life. West wasn’t a nice person. He could be downright cruel. But the emotion in his voice was hard to ignore. I didn’t want to feel anything for him, even sorrow, but I did.

“No one knows,” he continued. “I can’t tell them. All they know is, Dad had surgery and is on disability now. He doesn’t work anymore. I blew it off when I told them, like it was no big thing.” He laughed again, a hard, brutal sound that held no humor. “These women in this town never accepted my momma She ain’t got any friends to talk to except your aunt, and I don’t think she’s even told Coralee. When Dad’s gone . . . I’ll be it. How do I do that? How can I be enough?”

Nothing I could do would ease this pain. Nothing anyone could do would make it better. So I reached over with my hand and covered his. It was the only thing I knew to do. Other than speak, and he didn’t need that. I wasn’t sure I could anyway.

He started to turn his hand over to hold mine when he stopped and pulled away. Then he stood up as if he were going to leave. I didn’t want him to leave like this. He had opened up to me about the demons he was facing. He had laid his secrets bare. He would go home to that nightmare and live it again and again until it was over. He didn’t want to tell anyone, yet he’d told me. Had he seen in my eyes what I’d seen in his? The sorrow and anger? The regret and suffering?

“I have nightmares every night,” I said. “I see my mother die over and over.”

Keeping Quiet Is How I Survive

CHAPTER 10

WEST

She hadn’t whispered this time. The sweet Southern drawl in her voice was beautiful. It wasn’t high-pitched, just a touch deeper.

The words she’d spoken were so incredibly revealing, it hurt to think about her reliving something like that every night. I didn’t know what to say to her. My dad was dying of cancer. It was ripping me apart. But she’d seen her father murder her mother. That kind of brutality was beyond anything I could imagine.

She closed her eyes tightly and took a deep breath. I watched her closely, unable to take my gaze off her. I was afraid she’d move or vanish. And I needed her. Right now at least, I needed someone to know my pain. Someone to understand it.

“It never leaves you . . . the hurt,” she said as she opened her eyes to look at me. “But you learn to live and you learn to deal with the loss. You do what you have to survive.”

I understood now. Why she didn’t talk . . . why she remained mute. It was about not reliving that moment. Not talking or laughing. Just keeping to herself. Until now. With me.

“You’re talking to me. Why me?”

Her gaze flicked over my shoulder, and I could see the sorrow in her eyes. “Because you needed me to. You need to know someone else has lived through pain like yours.”

I took a step toward her. “When you lost your mom, was someone there for you?” I asked, hoping she said yes. I didn’t like the idea of her battling this kind of horror alone.

She looked back at me. “No. No one understood. No one saw what I did. No one lived through what I had. I would have talked to them. But there was no one to understand. Keeping quiet is how I survived.”

I kept quiet too. Just not the way she did. I kept my father’s illness a secret. I didn’t have friends over, and I didn’t tell them what was happening. My dad had still been fine last year when I’d had a party at my house the week after spring training. Then this summer things started going downhill. The last three weeks they had gone from bad to worse.

Eventually everyone would find out, I knew that. This wasn’t a secret I could keep forever. But I didn’t want to tell them. I didn’t want to see the sympathy in their eyes. I didn’t want them trying to console me when they didn’t understand.

“Maggie!” Brady’s voice came through the darkness. I saw Maggie tense up and give me a small smile before getting off the truck bed and heading toward her cousin’s voice. She hadn’t wanted him to catch me out here with her.