Ghost (Boston Underworld #3) - A. Zavarelli Page 0,30
what I’m seeking out.
I can hear Magda downstairs in the kitchen, and there is no sign of Franco. The door is open. All of the screens are off. And I step inside.
His scent still lingers in the space. The large oak desk is well worn, with lines that tell a story of who this man is. A constant companion over the years, it seems.
I sit down in the chair and glance at the drawers. They are all locked. One of the few things that poses no obstacle to me. I had a good teacher. A friend. A distant face that I think of sometimes, but pretend doesn’t exist.
Because it’s easier that way. It’s easier to die knowing that nobody cares.
I retrieve a bobby pin from my hair and go to work on the first drawer. It doesn’t take long for the skill to come back to me as if it were yesterday. When I was just a kid on the street. Always looking for my next meal. My next aversion to the constant well of pain inside of me.
The drawer yields nothing but a black notebook and some pens. Addresses, names, and a makeshift ledger with neat scrawls of penmanship across the blank pages. I put it back and move to the big drawer. The one on the bottom. A file drawer.
It opens. That organ in my chest beats again. Harder.
There are only two files inside. Two brown paper files.
My fingers hesitate to touch, but my brain demands answers. So I pick them up. Neither has a name. Or anything noted on the blank space where it should be. My mouth is dry when I glance at the door and open the first.
What I find is worse than I expected. More than I can handle.
The pages of my life. Summarizing my existence into a series of mercilessly blunt chapters. Birth certificate, health records. But worst of all are the photos of my family. Of my mother and my siblings. The newspaper records printed in black and white. And then the careless notes of the case worker who handed me off to anyone who would take me.
I keep flipping through the pages. Catching only words and fragments of sentences as they collide with images in the story of my life.
Murdered. Tragedy. Children. Monster.
Disappeared.
Then there are photos. My airway is choking the life out of me. I can’t breathe.
That little girl. It isn’t me. I don’t know her. That isn’t me.
Those faces. Four angels. My mother’s halo of hair in the bathtub, her eyes open and the only smile I ever saw on her face. My lips are singing the words as I examine the photos I never knew existed. Angels in the morning.
Crime scene.
My eyes are flickering open and shut, and my body is rocking back and forth in the chair. Footsteps move in time to the beat inside my head.
Muffled words. A curse.
And then a hand, reaching out to take what isn’t his to take.
I claw at the files, and he pulls. The paper rips, and pieces of my life rain to the floor. I’m on my knees, crawling around in a frantic effort to conceal them. He doesn’t deserve to see. He doesn’t deserve to know these things. And I don’t want to remember.
I reach for a photo just as a strong arm wraps around my waist. But it’s wrong. It’s all wrong.
This is not my mother in the bathtub. This is someone else. Another woman in a different bathtub.
And there’s blood. So much blood. Murky red water and a face I don’t recognize. The photo is snatched from my hand before I have a chance to make sense of it.
“Breathe.” I hear through the haze of my confusion.
My chest is heaving hard. Deep in the grips of a panic attack. Something I have not experienced since I was a child.
There is no breath in my lungs. I’m clawing at my throat, and he grabs my hands.
“Shh, shh, shh….” The words are whispered into my ear as his hand rubs my back.
The attack ebbs away with the soothing tide of his voice. I open my eyes and meet pale blue. And something else returns as I jerk away from him.
Anger.
My lip trembles when I speak. “This is why you took me.”
It’s the only sentence I can manage to get out. But it means so much more. And the guilt and shame in his eyes leave no doubts to the answer.
He could never love me. Because I’m damaged beyond repair.