Legacy of Lies (Empire of Lies 3)

“Okay.” He kisses me. “I’ll do that. What else?”

“I want you to tell me the whole story about who you were before, how you turned out to be who you are…”

I brace for him to shut that idea down, but he doesn’t, surprisingly. He leads me out of the shower and dresses me for bed—returning the wedding ring to my finger. After dressing himself, he positions me on top of him, on the mattress, and looks into my eyes.

“Let’s start with when I was twelve…” He starts slow, finally discussing the fact that he hid his identical twin brother from me. He sits still for hours and lets down his guard, temporarily letting me hold the shield.

We remain in the bedroom for the next day and a half, with him holding me close and unraveling the years, only stopping to take bathroom breaks or wipe away my tears when he retells the worst moments. Occasionally, he makes me stop listening so I can rest, but he’s always ready to pick up right where he left off, whenever I wake up. (He still can’t sleep for more than five hours at a time, even all these years later.)

When he’s uttered the last word, I expect him to say that he never wants to talk about it again.

Instead, he pulls me close and whispers, “I’ll answer your questions tomorrow…I know you have at least twenty-one.”

“Can I ask one right now?” I say.

“Yes.”

“You said that there are two guys left on your list, one for you and one for Trevor.” I pause. “Is there a reason you’ve saved this particular guy for last?”

“Yes.” He nods, pulling me into his chest. “If it wasn’t for him, none of this would’ve ever happened to me…”

Michael

Long Before

When Someone Burned Me That Badly

I park outside the National Foster Youth Institute Center in Los Angeles, staring at the bright yellow and red statues that they’ve flown in from their former headquarters in New York. They’ve painted over the old quote that once read, “All children deserve a safe home,” and replaced it with, “Children are the world’s greatest gift.”

I can still remember the brochures that they sent to my Uncle Avery’s house, how he tossed them down to the basement for us to read. It only took me three issues to never crack open another one; the smiling kids’ faces on the pages always made me want to vomit.

Getting out of the car, I walk past the foster center, toward the row of houses down the street.

I stand under an oak tree and light a cigar, waiting for the woman who lives in 3246 to walk outside her front door.

At exactly nine-thirty, she steps onto the front porch—wearing a bright yellow sundress and a matching floppy hat.

With her long brown hair and light green eyes, she’s pretty, but not in a striking way.

I’ve watched her from afar for an entire year, taking flights during my free time just to get glimpses of her life. She has two sons, a husband she adores, a spot on The Parent Board at the exclusive school down the street. Her name is Lauren Clarkson, and I’ve wanted to force her to sit down and talk for years, but I can never pull the trigger. No pun intended.

All of her “friends” know her as the mom who likes to bake cookies for the neighborhood kids on Sunday afternoons. Her husband works in Silicon Valley, and he has no idea that she was once two steps away from a heroin overdose, one strike away from losing everything she had.

I watch as she picks up one of her sons and kisses him on the cheek. He laughs and demands to be put down to return to the swing set. The other son runs into her arms to take advantage of her time.

She’s doing for them what she was never able to do for me and Trevor. She didn’t have the time or money “to handle two really advanced boys,” so she gave them up to the very uncle who’d abused her when she was younger. The uncle who promised to keep us “only for a little while,” and make sure we were placed into the best foster care.

She never called to check and see if he did it, though. Once she dropped us off on his doorstep, we no longer existed.

Instead, she placed us in the back of her mind and never sought us out. And after picking up the pieces of her miserable life, she checked into rehab and got clean. She washed away all of the things that made up her past—her children included, and then she hitchhiked here. To the fucking West Coast.

Once, I sent her a Christmas card—telling her that we wanted to reconnect. That Trevor was wondering if she was still alive and well, and that he still held out hope that he’d be able to see her again.