Page 48 of Hart of Darkness
I cracked my neck, blinked about a hundred times, and winced. “Come again?”
He sighed as if he were shedding years of regret. “She came home about five months ago. Or maybe it was four. Or maybe it was the other night. I can’t remember.” His voice dripped with anguish.
Fuck his anguish.Hopefully, he was seeing the light, although I wouldn’t wait up for him to get sober.
“Of course you can’t,” I mumbled. “You’re a drunk.”
He didn’t look at me as he continued. “I got up off the couch to take a piss. I think it was two in the morning. I heard a noise like someone was shutting drawers. So I checked the rooms. When I opened Grace’s bedroom door, I flicked on the light. She was standing there with a flashlight, rummaging in her dresser, stuffing things in a bag. She wasn’t the innocent girl I knew. She had tattoos on her arms, her neck, and her hands. Her long hair was gone. That pretty hair she wore in pigtails is now shorter than yours.”
I held back from spewing all kinds of barbs. I wanted to tell him she’d lost her innocence when he started slapping her around and telling her she was nothing but useless. Instead, I probed more. “Did you talk to her? Did she say anything like where she was living? Did she ask where I was? Or Duke or Denim?”
“The only thing she said to me was ‘I was never here.’”
All signs so far were telling me she didn’t want anyone to know she was alive, which was giving me one big fucking headache.
Silence, murky, cloudy, and stinky, hung over us.
My father’s shaky fingers fussed with a thread on his blanket. “If I could take back what I did to her, I would.”
I drilled daggers at him, waiting for more. What about me, Duke, and Denim? But I wasn’t there to get an apology. And while every muscle in me had protested coming to the hospital, I was glad I had. The idea that Grace was alive six months ago, according to Syd, and four or five months ago if my old man was right, was perplexing, enlightening, exciting, and scary as fuck.
The idea that Grace was alive but hadn’t bothered to reach out to me was unnerving. I was her brother. I was the one who had protected her from the man that stunk to high heaven.
You were the one who left her to fend for herself against a monster.And for that, I was angrier with myself.
I opened a drawer on the table beside the bed and found a pen. Then I scribbled Manny’s address and phone number on a napkin that sat on top of the table. “When they discharge you, call this guy or stop by and see him.” It wasn’t a plea or a question, but a statement, and it was the only help I could give him. My father had shown more regret in the last fifteen minutes than he had my entire existence, and for that, my hatred for him diminished a tiny bit.
I didn’t wait for his excuse of why he wasn’t going to get help. I had a sister to hunt down.
