The Wall of Winnipeg and Me - Mariana Zapata Page 0,124
All I know for sure was that she wasn’t at home then.” Sometimes she’d disappear for a few days at a time, but that was my burden to bear.
“Who let you out?”
“They did.” They unlocked the door and made fun of me for being a baby and peeing on myself. It had taken me an hour to get myself to crawl out of there.
“What happened after that?” He was still talking in that effortless, patient voice that screamed ‘wrong’ at the top of its lungs.
Shame and anger made me shake. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“No.”
“Did you tell your mom?”
“Of course I told my mom. It was her closet they put me in. I’d peed in there. She had to get the carpet replaced because it smelled so bad.” I’d smelled so bad. My hands had been so messed up from banging on the door, and my voice so hoarse from screaming at them to let me out… or to at least turn on the closet light… or if they couldn’t turn on the closet light to turn on the bedroom light… to no avail. I never knew for sure what they’d done in those two days I was in there, and frankly, I didn’t care at all.
I didn’t. Because kids that young shouldn’t have been left alone to begin with.
His chest started puffing against my back as if his breathing was difficult. “She did nothing to your sisters?”
I wanted to crawl into myself. The tone he was using raked at my nerves, pulling the sides of the stab wound called my childhood wide open for inspection. It made me feel small. “No. She yelled at them, but that was it. I mean, she stayed home for a month or two afterward” —that was one of the times I remembered her being mostly sober— “and I slept with her every night. After that, I moved my things and shared a room with my little brother.” I’d started locking the bedroom door after that as well.
The fingertips on my knees kneaded for a second, but I bet my life it was a subconscious gesture, mostly because his labored breathing hadn’t gone anywhere.
“I have to sleep with a light on,” I admitted to him, feeling his chest huff behind me. Dumb, dumb, dumb. “I don’t know why I just told you that. Don’t make fun of me.”
There was a pause. A hesitation before, “I won’t,” he promised effortlessly. “I wondered why you had so many at your apartment and in your room.”
I knew he’d noticed. “Please don’t tell Zac. I wouldn’t hold it passed him to hide under the bed when I’m sleeping to try and scare the crap out of me.”
“I won’t.” His palms shaped my knees. The insides of his arms seemed to frame my shoulders and arms. His breathing was low but not so steady against my ear. “It isn’t stupid that you’re scared. You shouldn’t be embarrassed. It’s everyone else who should be ashamed of themselves.”
The only way I managed to answer was with a nod that I wasn’t sure he knew of or not. Another rattling breath made its way out of my chest like a gust and I touched a patch of skin somewhere around his knee as I kept my eyes closed. “Thank you for helping me calm down, big guy. I haven’t lost it like that in forever.”
“Don’t worry about it,” was all he muttered in return.
I kept my hand on his leg, my fingertips against the coarse dark hairs that covered his legs. My breathing sounded too loud, my heart was still beating a little weird, while Aiden’s was soft and barely audible. I focused on the in and the out of my lungs.
The other woman in the elevator mumbled, “This sucks.”
It did. It really did.
The silence ate up the minutes, and I let my back loosen, the top of it touching Aiden’s pectorals. The insides of his upper arms cradled me. His breathing was so even it made me sleepy.
The elevator gave a jerk that had me opening my eyes in reaction as the lighting flickered twice and stayed on. The woman on the other side squealed, but I couldn’t even be remotely scared. I only cared about the lighting.
And it was right then, not being plunged in the dark, that I finally witnessed with my own two eyes the sight of me sitting on Aiden. Two long, muscular legs circled me, so long that the knees jutted out way passed where mine ended. Two heavily muscled