And I remembered Luther; he’d been around a lot back then. I also remembered never liking Luther, as in never. Luther was my first lesson in how to spot bad people because, in Luther’s case, he was very bad people. He reeked of it. Luther had always scared me.
I was glad when Luther went away about a year after my Mom disappeared. What I wasn’t glad about was knowing, even at twelve, that my father had assumed Luther’s elevated place in the crime world.
Tom kept talking, “She wouldn’t be swayed, even Kitty Sue tried to talk her out of it but Lizzie was determined. She said if she didn’t work with me, she’d go to someone else. I thought, if she had to do it, it was better if she worked with me. I thought that I could keep her safe –”
He stopped talking, his eyes closed tight and he looked away but not before I caught the pain that slashed through his gaze.
My heart was in my throat, clogging it, that hot, hard thing in my chest started burning.
I knew where this was going and I didn’t like it.
Not one bit.
But, for some reason, I still squeezed his hand and kept squeezing it until his eyes opened and came to me again.
“Go on,” I encouraged softly.
He stared at me a second then took in another deep breath. “At first, she couldn’t get me anything I could use. When she saw it wasn’t working, she started taking risks.”
I felt the tears hit the backs of my eyes at the thought of my Mom doing the same thing I did with Hector. I knew how scary it was and I knew the consequences and knowing now that she took the same risks, felt the same fear, all of it for me, made the burning in my chest intensify.
I found I was still squeezing Tom’s hand, this time not to encourage him to go on but because I had to.
Tom reached out and took my other hand, holding both of our hands between us.
“She started to get some good stuff, found someone in Diggs’s network that didn’t like your father, didn’t like Diggs. They started to work together not just to take down your father but also to take down Diggs. She never told me who it was, I asked but she wouldn’t give. Then, one day, she was supposed to meet me, she said she had something for me, something she thought was big, important, but she never showed.” He hesitated, I clenched my teeth, waiting for it, knowing it was coming then he went on, “I never saw her again.”
There it was.
“Please, no,” I whispered before I could stop myself.
Tom gave me a hand squeeze.
“I looked for her, Malcolm and I did it together. We had to do it on our own time, your father never filed a missing person report, he told everyone she left you. I knew she didn’t, I knew she’d never leave you. Never Sadie. Never.” He shook my hands so I knew he meant what he said and I nodded, biting my lips, knowing he thought this might make me feel better at the same time knowing it didn’t make me feel better, not even a little bit. He went on, “Malcolm knew that too, so we looked for her.”
“What did you find?” I asked but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“Leads, lots of leads, all of them dead ends. We searched for over a year, but, Sadie, we found nothing, the leads dried up and with nothing to go on, I’m sorry, honey, so, so sorry, but we had no choice but to stop.”
I nodded.
I didn’t blame him, he tried. He tried to protect my Mom and he tried to find her when she disappeared. He was a good person, I knew that. I had no doubt he did the best he could.
But what he was saying meant that someone made my Mom “disappear”, just like Uncle Vito wanted to make Ricky disappear. And that meant my Mom had been scared and alone. That meant my Mom was never coming back. That meant that someone had taken her away from me.
And that someone might be my f**king, f**king father.
On that thought, something in my brain exploded, pain sliced through my temples, I tore my hands out of Tom’s and shot out of my chair.
“Sadie –” Tom stood with me but I whirled.
“I’ve got to go,” I muttered, no friendly smiles now, no alternate Sadies to help me deal. It was just me and I needed to get out of there, go somewhere, I didn’t know where, I didn’t care where, it could be anywhere but I had to go there and scream at… the… top… of… my… lungs.
If I didn’t let out the hard, hot knot of pain that was in my chest, I knew it was going to burst and it was so ugly, so huge, if it burst, it would kill me.
In my blind escape, I ran smack into Hector’s solid body and his arms closed around me.
I looked up at him.