She stays silent.
“I am about to help you disappear from the planet. I deserve to know the truth.”
“You deserve Chelsea, that’s all you deserve. Go back to her truth.”
“I want yours.”
“I don’t want yours, so leave me alone.”
For ten minutes we lie in the darkness lost in our own thoughts. Mine are regrets, hers are… I don’t know what.
Eventually, after a long silence, she speaks. “My father was bad.”
I frown.
“He was always a petty criminal but my mom thought she could change him. She fell pregnant with me by accident…” Her voice trails off as if she is far away.
I lie patiently waiting for her to finish. “So she married him?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I frown. I can tell this is hard for her to revisit.
“When I was a little baby, he started getting into organised crime and Mom threatened to leave him.” She pauses. “He beat her so bad, she spent a week in hospital.
The more she tells me, the colder the room becomes.
“When I was two, he got locked up and Mom saw it as a way to escape. We ran to a country town and changed our name.”
Silence falls again.
“When I was five he found us.”
I frown and she stops talking. After a long pause I ask, “What happened?”
“He shot my mother and kidnapped me.”
“She died?” I whisper.
She shakes her head. “No. The police were somehow tipped off where he had me hidden and they got him. He went back to prison.”
“Was your mom okay?”
“She survived but was never good after that. We lived on the edge of fear, changing cities and names every few years. We never had any long-term friends and we were always broke. Not even our family knew where we were.”
I can’t imagine growing up like that. For all of my flaws, my childhood was a dream.
“Then three days before my eighteenth birthday he found us again.”
I sit up and look over at her in the darkness. Her eyes are glazed over and her voice is faint. This is a painful memory for her. She has a distracted air about her as if many tears have been shed.
“He tied me up so I had to watch.” She pauses and I know she is right back there as if it is happening again. “He cut her throat and let her bleed out.”
Fuck.
“I watched as the life drained out of her.”
This time it is me who has no words.