Bury Me(43)

“I’m sorry about that. The medication she’s on sometimes makes her say some pretty strange things,” he explains. “Before my father died, she used to work at the prison doing palm readings for some of the tour groups. She’s always had kind of a sixth sense about things and your father thought it would be something fun to add to the tours. Mostly, it’s a lot of just reading people and their reactions, telling them things you know will get a rise out of them. It’s not like she actually speaks to the dead or anything.”

Nolan laughs uncomfortably, but I look away from him and stare at the prison off in the distance, thinking about the words she spoke to me. He continues talking to fill the awkward silence.

“I heard shouts and screaming coming from the woods that night. I had woken to give my mother her medicine,” he explains, his hands still moving softly up and down my arms while he speaks. “I ran into the woods and found you lying there on the ground, bleeding from the head. I scooped you up and took you back to the prison. Your father told me to put you on the floor and leave immediately. When I tried to argue with him about calling the police or getting you to a hospital, he threatened my job. He told me if I said one word about anything, he’d fire me and kick my mother and I out of the house.”

Swinging my gaze away from the prison, I look up at him, seeing the truth written all over his face: the truth, the guilt, the pain, and the remorse.

“Your father only gave me this job because he felt bad that my father had a heart attack here on the prison grounds while he was working. If I lose this job, I’ll have no way to pay for my mother’s medication, and we’ll have nowhere to live. I couldn’t risk that, Ravenna, I just couldn’t. My mother is all I have left,” he finishes, a slight quiver of emotion filling his voice.

“It’s fine, Nolan, I get it,” I tell him, resolving him of some of his guilt. Even if I don’t understand the kind of love and affection he has toward his mother, I’m not so cold and dead inside that I can’t see he had no other choice. If my father found out he shared this with me, he’d toss them both out onto the street without giving it a second thought. He doesn’t care who he hurts, as long as his secrets are safe.

T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER!

“It’s not fine, Ravenna. I should have told you. If I thought that information would help you figure things out, I would have, I promise. You already know your father has problems, and he’s keeping things from you. Telling you he threatened my job and my family’s home wouldn’t have done anything but make your father follow through with his threat and I just couldn’t chance it,” Nolan finishes.

“So your father worked here before you did?” I ask, changing the subject before I start to enjoy having his hands on me.

His hands drop from my arms as I move away, but I give him a smile so he doesn’t think I’m mad at what he told me.

“Yes, he got the job when I was a couple years old,” Nolan confirms, walking with me back to the prison.

T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER!

“Your mom said something about pulling a little body out of the water. Do you think she meant the accident in the lake when I was little? Was your dad the one who rescued me?”

Nolan shrugs. “It could be true, but I have no idea. Sometimes the things she says make sense, and other times she’s extremely confused, mixing up things that happened in her life with things she read in the newspaper or heard on the news. I never heard either one of them talk about you falling in the lake when you were little and my father pulling you out, so it could just have been her mind playing tricks on her.”

T means death, death means T. Remember T. REMEMBER!

I don’t remember meeting Nolan’s father when I was little, but that doesn’t mean anything since I don’t remember much of my childhood.

With another promise to Nolan that I’m not angry that he kept this secret from me, I leave him to go back home to tend to his mother while I head upstairs to figure out a way to force my father out of his office.

“My name is Ravenna Duskin. I’m eighteen years old, I live in a prison, and I have no idea why the letter T fills me with dread.”





Chapter 16





“T means death, death means T,” I say to myself softly, writing the words on the back of an old grocery list my mother left pinned to the front of the fridge.

Underlining what I just wrote, I set the pencil down on the kitchen table and lean back in my chair to stare at the words. I have no idea why I’m trying to figure out if the ramblings of a sick, dying woman mean something, but I’m out of options right now. I can’t get the image of her eyes out of my head. They weren’t in a daze or clouded over like someone on the verge of death, pumped full of so much medication that they weren’t aware of anything. Beatrice’s eyes were bright and clear, and they never strayed from my face. I don’t care if Nolan thinks her palm reading was just an exaggeration of a sixth sense she has or that she sometimes confuses things she’s seen or heard with real life. The words she spoke made the hair on my arms stand up and made me want to run from the room so she’d stop talking. As much as I hated it, I couldn’t ignore it. If I hadn’t trusted my instincts recently, I’d still assume my mind was playing tricks on me and I couldn’t swim. If I’d ignored my gut feelings, I’d still be dressing the way my parents demanded and braiding my hair every morning. I never would have found that suitcase full of clothes I knew were mine, and I never would have remembered being in that spare bedroom before.