Page 55 of A Lifetime in 30 Days
With a heavy sigh, Aden scrubbed his hands down his face. He walked back to the stairs again as if he couldn’t decide if he should leave or stay. But when he came back this time, it was to lean his back against the wall near the TV, only one hand going into his pocket this time. The other was in a fist at his side. He looked like he was posing for the cover of a magazine—the brooding businessman.
“He was a low-level drug dealer when we were in school,” he began. “Used to sell small bags of weed to the underclassmen at first, then the guys on the basketball and football teams. Once he became a brother, he supplied every party until he started messing up the money and got his ass kicked by his supplier. Me and a few other brothers, since we were supposed to act as his mentors, picked his ass up in an alley downtown one night after getting a call with him wheezing into the phone.”
He paused, looked toward the plywood wall, then back to her. “We sat at the ER with him that night, then took him back to the house. The next morning, we gave his ass a hard talk, told him to get it together or get out.”
“Kind of hypocritical if he was supplying your parties, don’t you think?” she countered with a smirk.
“Excellence,” he said. “That’s what we strive for. That’s what we represent. Excellence in all things. So no, it wasn’t really our thing to condone drug dealers—but hell, if you were gonna do it, then do that shit right. Caleb was a mess.”
His head fell back and he waited a beat. “I got closer to him than some of the other brothers. They were ready to kick him out after that first incident, but I saw something familiar in him, so I tried harder. Caleb was always trying to impress everybody, even himself. It was like he needed to prove a point, that he was somebody, that he was doing great things. And even when he was getting better grades and looking toward a future somewhere in the tech field, he didn’t believe in himself enough to see it through. It was like he was fighting against himself all the time. Do the right thing, but then you gotta turn around and do the wrong thing for counterbalance. He straddled that fence all the time, and nothing I said or did could sway him.
“Did you know his father used to beat him? I mean, from stitches in his head to broken bones. He was a cruel bastard, and Caleb took the brunt of his every mood swing. And his mother, hell, she wasn’t much better, talking to him like he was dirt. Hating him for what his no-good father refused to be.” Aden dropped his head, then slammed his fist into the wall behind him.
Vanna jumped.
“That’s why I didn’t want him with you,” he said when he brought his gaze back up to meet hers. “Yeah, I wanted you the first moment I saw you, but then he introduced you and said he was gonna make you his girl. I wanted to come to you so bad and tell you to stay away from him, but how was that gonna look? And for a while, I told myself,Maybe she’ll make him better. She’s smart and she’s pretty; she’s going to have a bright future, and maybe she’ll rub off on him.But I knew,” he said, bringing his fist up to rub the center of his chest this time. “I knew in here that things would only get worse. That Caleb would never change.”
Tears stung her eyes now, and she wanted desperately to keep them from falling, but it was too much. Everything he’d just told her, all that she’d lived through with Caleb—it all fit like finding the perfect puzzle pieces. Some things about his past she had known, but others—the selling-drugs part, the cruelty from his mother, because she’d never seen that, and Caleb always respected Gail—she just had no clue.
“I offered to pay for counseling for him,” Aden continued. “During our senior year. He didn’t have any health insurance, and the therapist was going to cost $125 per visit. I was going to use some of the leftover financial aid money I had to pay for him to go for a month or two, just to get some positivity poured into him. But he refused, said he wasn’t relying on no stranger to fix him, because he wasn’t broken. So many Black men take that same stance against any type of mental illness, or any trauma they need to work through.” He sighed. “I wanted Caleb to get better, Savannah. Not just for himself, but so that he could be better for you too. By then I knew you were in love with him, knew you would do everything you could to keep him happy. And by the time I graduated, I was so damn jealous of Caleb’s broken ass for having you in his corner.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she replied. “You’re giving me all this information now when it’s too late for me to do anything about it.” She interrupted him the moment she saw him open his mouth to speak: “And I get it. I know why you didn’t say anything, couldn’t do anything more than you did. But it doesn’t change what happened, and it doesn’t change what’s going on now.”
He pushed himself off the wall then, walked directly toward her, and stopped a couple steps away. She could smell his cologne, could see the muscle clench in his jaw as he stared at her. “I didn’t plant those bags in the basement. I’m not framing you.”
She blinked, and the first tear fell. Hurriedly, she swatted it away and swallowed.
“On some level, I guess I can understand your fear and unwillingness to trust again, because I knew Caleb, and so I can imagine what you endured all these years with him,” he said.
Another pesky tear fell, and this time, he reached out to thumb it away before she had the chance.
“But I’m not him, Savannah,” he said, quietly this time. “I never will be. And if you don’t see that,won’tsee that, then there’s nothing else I can say.”
She dropped her head then, because she knew more tears were going to come, and she just didn’t want him to see them, didn’t want him to wipe them away, didn’t want to feel this weak and defeated. The same way she’d felt when Diane had left her at that bus station. And every time Caleb had let her down.
A few moments later, she heard him walking away. Then she heard the door open and close.
Then she dropped back down onto the sectional and cried.
Chapter 17
August 20
There was sand in her eyes, and they were possibly sewn shut. That’s how Vanna felt when she tried to wake up to her blaring alarm on Tuesday morning. If she thought the struggle to open her eyes was real, rolling over and extending her arm to fumble around the nightstand until she finally found her phone was a herculean effort.
She was able to snap the phone free of the charger without seeing it, but to shut off the alarm that now had her ears ringing, she had to apply all her strength to opening first one eyelid, then, very reluctantly, the other. She punched in her password and swiped to kill the alarm, then dropped the phone on her chest and let her eyes close again.
How badly did she need a sick day? In the worst possible way. But if she took today off, she’d have to go in the Tuesday after Labor Day. With her birthday falling on a Saturday this year, that gave her a long weekend to celebrate. Taking that Tuesday after the holiday off was going to be icing on the cake—a mini vacation, of sorts—which she absolutely deserved. Staying right here in this bed for the rest of the day also held massive appeal.
Yesterday had been as trying a day as so many others she’d experienced this month, and there were still two more weeks to get through. How had her birthday month—the time she’d planned for all year long, the thirty days that would signify her launch into a new phase of herlife—ended up being two of the worst weeks she’d ever experienced? A part of her was afraid for the remaining days in this month, scared that whatever bad mojo was circling over her head had only just begun to make her life a living hell. Her breath hitched as a sob struggled to break free. But she clamped down on that emotion, pressed her eyes closed even tighter—causing even more pain, by the way—and forced back those feelings of pity and despair. She couldn’t afford them. Couldn’t sit here and feel sorry for herself or wonderWhy me?any longer. It wasn’t going to get her anywhere, and it would make her feel like a failure.
Pushing herself up to a sitting position and grappling to catch the forgotten phone as it started to slide from her chest, she took a deep breath. Then another and another, until she felt like she could at least get out of bed and make it to the shower. She needed the water as hot as her skin could take it, and used her eucalyptus and spearmint body wash to create a soothing lather all over.
Twenty minutes later, she emerged from the bathroom and went straight to her dresser to reach into her card box. Whether out of habit or some other reason she was too tired to contemplate, she hadn’t tossed it out the window, despite her thoughts of doing so last night. Once a week, she would remove all the cards and shuffle them, hoping that with each random selection, she would come up with exactly what she needed to hear on that given day. Today she needed a damn miracle of words.
“‘You are allowed to walk away from anything that gives you bad vibes,’” she read from the card she now held.
Moments ticked by as she stood there staring down at those words until she finally asked herself, “How do I walk away from criminal charges?” Or from a man who, in just a couple of weeks, had awakened feelings she hadn’t experienced in far too long?
