ONE
Eli - 1 year later
You'd have heard it all by now.
Don't drop the soap.
Hang a 'do not disturb' sign on your ass.
If you're someone's bitch, they'll protect you.
If you do chores, you can curry favor to keep a dick out of your ass.
And, to be fair, those were actually pretty sound pieces of advice. Prison rape was daily and brutal. If you were new, and especially if you were new and young and small, your ass was open game. One of the guys I got bussed in with was immediately taken in by the Neo-Nazis and became a bitch to the big guy. By the time I noticed him again six weeks later, he was thin, bruised, and a shell of the man he had been when we arrived.
You could avoid all that drama if you came in connected to one of the organizations within all prison systems. If you had a history of being a white supremacist, a wise guy, a Blood, a Crip, or one of the dozens of Latino prison gangs, you were likely to be protected.
If you weren't, well, you had to get crafty.
"What you think you're all big and bad because you beat the shit out of that politician's son?" I had been pushed up against the wall my third day there by some low-level Irish mob jackass. "You're in prison now, pretty boy. We know how to fight back. You want to start with me? Huh? Come on, throw a fucking punch, pussy."
See, I didn't want to start.
I had made the decision to keep my head down, do my time, and then move the fuck on with my life.
But when his hand landed on my shoulder, shoving me back into the wall, well, let's just say it happened.
You know what I mean.
The rage.
That thing that moved through my veins, that burned them like battery acid, that made rational thought impossible, that turned me into a monster I wasn't at any other time.
By the time the alarms went off, and the C.O. came running, the Irish dude's face was all blood and broken bones.
Me, well, I went to the SHU.
And had time added onto my sentence.
Not much since I was new, he was a bully, and the warden knew how it went, but time. They jacked me up to seven years, but I was told I would only serve six, then have a year of parole on the outside. Not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things. But time.
Extra time.
Because of the exact same thing that got me shipped off to prison in the first place.
Naked. In a cement floor and walled room with no window, no nothing except for a hard bed with no mattress and a stainless steel sink and toilet combo. For months.
Yeah.
It set a man to thinking.
It was the only way not to go crazy.
And, being I am who I am, my thoughts went first to my family. They'd been there. At my trial. Of course. I wouldn't have expected anything less. Hell, I had them tattooed on my arm.
Vis necia vinci.
A power ignorant of defeat.
It was right there on my skin, though anyone who knew the Mallicks knew that shit - that mentality, that loyalty, that love - that went right down into the marrow.
I hadn't engaged them. I hadn't even looked their way. Just like I hadn't given them what they needed from me at the police station the night of my arrest. They needed to hear it was okay, that I would be okay.
They needed that from me.
The problem was, I couldn't give it to them.
I didn't have it.
At the time, shame was something not unknown to me. I had felt it time and time again when I came back out of my spiral, when I realized what I had done. It had never been a lasting thing, though. I guess that was the difference. Because there had never been any kind of repercussions from my actions - mostly due to the fact that I only ever beat people who were in the underbelly and had it coming - I could accept it and move on.
This time, I couldn't do that.
Every single day I was paying for what I had done.
There was no accepting it and moving on when it was the very reason I was eating slop, showering with other men, and having lights out at nine at night like a fucking eleven-year-old.
It wasn't that the bastard didn't have it coming.
I'd never forget the sound of that woman's screams, her pleas for it to stop, for someone to help her. I could still see her face when I closed my eyes at night - all bloodied and broken open.
He deserved every last punch the motherfucker got for putting his hands on a woman.
But he wasn't in the underbelly.
He was connected.
And daddy-o wanted my nuts in a noose.
So he got that.
I would have gotten off if it was anyone else. No jury would have convicted me when they saw the pictures of that woman from the hospital. You know, the ones the nurses took before her husband's lawyer showed up and ushered her out for 'home treatment.'
It was a case of right time, right act, wrong family.
The shame didn't start until I was trying to get Coop to sit down for his treat, and the cops came out of nowhere with a warrant.
If there was one word to describe how I felt when they pulled up, sirens going, attitudes getting thrown around, my face getting slammed onto a hood as bracelets went around my wrists, that word was humiliation.
It was embarrassment I had never known before.
And it didn't stop there as I had been paraded through the station, interrogated, gotten called a lowlife piece of shit.
I heard it enough, I started to agree with it.
Off to jail to wait for trial. Strip search. Blue overalls.
Fucking animals, the guards would say.
To trial.
Like any other lowlife piece of shit.
Sentence handed down.
Bus to prison. Strip search. Orange pants and white tee. Trapped in a cage.
Fucking animals.
Given a toothbrush, travel paste, a bar of soap, and a roll of toilet paper.
Like every other lowlife piece of shit.
It wasn't until three weeks in the SHU that I realized it.
There would be no end to it.
The rage outs.
My own personal battle between Bruce Banner and Hulk.
The monster I had been groomed to become when violence hadn't come as easily to me as it had to Ryan, Mark, and especially Shane.
It was something that had become a part of me, something I used to help keep control over the family business, something that was an asset more than a flaw.
So as long as I was that man, the Eli Mallick I had been raised to be, so long as I was him, yeah, I could never hope to see an end to the rage-outs.
I would live the rest of my life worried I might flip again, get sent back to jail. Maybe kill someone and never get out.
That could very well be my fate.
So, alone in that cell, starved for fresh air, light, or any human contact, knowing this was no life for me, I made the decision.
I couldn't be that man anymore.
I couldn't live that life.
I couldn't - fucking forgive me - be a part of my family.
For my own good.
But for theirs as well.
See, I might not have been acknowledging them at the police station or my trial, but that didn't mean I wasn't aware. When my mother broke down. Hardass, take-no-shit, balls-to-the-wall Helen goddamn Mallick broke down. Fee and Lea had lost it too. My brothers, though they weren't exactly criers, you could feel the devastation even from across a crowded room.
And while they weren't there because it was no place for them, my fucking nieces...
I just took something from them. I took a person they loved from them, someone they trusted and depended on. I ripped that away from them. I took a little piece of the blissful oblivion of childhood from their perfect little hands.
By the time I was out, they wouldn't even remember me.
They wouldn't know me.
I would be some strange guy, not Uncle Eli.
I had done that. I had made my mother and sisters-in-law cry. I had crushed my brothers. I had let down my nieces.
I could never be that person again.
By the time I got out of SHU, the decisions had been made.
I would be cutting off contact.
It would make it easier on all involved. They could move the fuck on. Not have my memory hanging like a ghost in corners for six years, not having to be a spirit kept alive. They didn't deserve that. They deserved to be happy. They deserved to have Thanksgiving and Christmas without thinking Poor Eli, all alone at Christmas in prison.
I was giving them back their freedom.
They wouldn't see it as that at first. They would think I was punishing myself, I was adjusting, I was in a bad headspace. But, eventually, after a year or two, they could move on. They would have to. That was how life went.
It. Moved. On.
As for me, I was giving myself a chance.
If I never wanted the rage to win again, I needed to stay away from anything that triggered it.
Like the family business.
Like anyone at all who might mean them harm.
Like every single other inmate in prison.
The assault stunt that got me into SHU and got some extra time on my sentence, it had been enough to keep people from fucking with me. Even when I got out fifteen pounds thinner, pale, with sleep deprivation bruises, and shoulders that had the weight of the world on them.
No one fucked with me again.
Eventually, I just became invisible.
"Damn, man, your family fills your commissary every fucking week, huh?"
I used it for essentials at first, figuring it was a necessary evil, knowing the money came from one of my legit businesses. I stocked up on some extra toothpaste, deodorant, fucking toilet paper.
But then my focus switched as I passed an old man - a lifer, in for killing the man who had fucked his wife... with an electric meat slicer - painting in his cell.
I hadn't been aware that items like that could be gotten through commissary. When I went to check, sure enough, right there under domino or chess sets, there was a list of art supplies that could be gotten. Sketch books, canvas, watercolor paint, colored pencils, crayons, markers, and graphite.
So I stopped buying shit like shaving cream and detergent.
And I bought as many art supplies as I could with my money each week.
Spend your time well, an old man had told me when I got out of the SHU. I figured he meant that I should take college courses, get a prison job, and stay out of trouble. Maybe that was what he meant. But I didn't have any interest in the college courses offered. My job only kept me busy in the laundry a few hours a day. And thanks to becoming invisible and having some affable enough ex-junkie and ex-heroin dealer as a cellmate, I didn't have to worry about the third thing.
But if I was going to spend my time, he was right, I should do it right. I should do it being useful. I should do it engaged in something that had always made me happy.
Outside, in my old life, I had time to scribble here and there, to design shit for the menu at Chaz's or the flyers for Fee's business or shit like that.
But I never got to immerse myself.
So that was what I did.
That was how I chose to spend my time.
And when you work at something twelve hours a day for a year, yeah, you got good. The kind of good that got noticed. The kind of good that even guards were saying I should make a career out of it when I got out. The kind of good where some fucking old school wise guy gives you the name of a gallery and tells you to tell them to say that Anthony Galleo sent you and that he wants your art on the walls.
As much as I wanted to cut ties with the criminal underbelly, I kept that name scribbled on the back of one of the canvases. Just in case I wanted to use the contact.
Things were going par for the course.
Except I had underestimated my family.
One year down the line, they still hadn't given up. They still tried to call, tried to visit, tried to write.
I dreaded mail day.
Because it was like a motherfucking knife to the gut every time I had to return shit to sender.
It didn't matter that I had made my mind up. They were still there, in the marrow, buried too deep ever to be extracted. And a huge part of me wanted that contact, wanted to read what was going on. Shane and Lea had to have been starting their own hoard by then. Had Scotti and Mark gotten married? Were Mom and Pops well?
Fee had found a way around my rule.
Because, no matter how hard I tried to hand them back, I couldn't force my fingers to let go of the letters from the girls. I had walls plastered with their adorably terrible artwork. Even though it was painful to look at them, knowing I would never be a part of their lives again.
It was dirty on Fee's part.
But she liked to play that way.
"Yeah yeah yeah," the C.O. said, shaking his head as he flipped through the letters. "I know the drill by now. Oh, wait. This one isn't a Mallick." He held out the envelope with a shrug, showing me the name.
Autumn Reid.
Weird.
"I'll take that one," I agreed, reaching for it.
"Oh, and here, kid writing," he added, handing me a fat envelope.
So far, they hadn't been letters. The girls weren't great at writing yet, let alone getting their thoughts together enough to formulate an actual letter.
Just artwork.
It was hard enough.
Letters would fucking ruin me.
I took them back to my cell, opening the one from Becca first, finding a surprisingly improved picture of Coop.
Another knife in the heart.
I loved that fucking dog.
And I didn't have the damnedest idea what had happened to him. Had my family found him? If so, why was Becca still drawing him as a puppy? He would have been full-grown by now. If not them, then who? The pound. Ugh. I sure as fuck hoped not. Maybe Mark and Scotti took him on since Scotti wasn't like Lea who had a shoe collection that rivaled a department store.
I could hope at least.
I put that down to be hung later, climbing up into my bunk to rip open the letter from the Autumn woman, careful to leave the return address intact in case, for some unknown reason, I might actually need to write her back.
Eli,
You don't know me. Well, actually, you saw me once. On, um, the day you were arrested. Outside the coffeeshop. I was the girl filming the cop getting a little police-brutality-ish with you. Blonde hair. Blue eyes? Yeah, anyway. It took me this long to figure out who you are and, well, where you are.
Sorry for the delay.
I'm sure you've been worried.
After you were taken away, your dog started flipping out. No offense, but he was one ugly little sucker, and I didn't want him ending up in the pound. So I took him home with me.
He has a happy, active, shoe-chewing life.
He got enormous.
And he still likes those peanut butter treats from the coffeeshop.
You seemed pretty attached to him, so I wanted you to know he had a safe and happy home where he has learned a few manners - and disregarded all others.
I enclosed a picture. As you can see, he still won't be winning any beauty contests, but I think he is officially so ugly that he is cute. So he has that going for him.
- Autumn
My heart seized in my chest as I read the words, not realizing just how badly I had needed to hear them. It was a bit crazy, maybe, to have become so attached to a dog so quickly. Especially one as poorly behaved as he was. But, what can I say, I had never had a dog growing up and had always wanted one, but just never got around to it. Finding him had been fucking fate.
The worst part of getting arrested was sitting in a cell that night wondering what happened to Coop.
All for naught, it would seem, since he had been with this Autumn woman all along.
I remembered her too.
Kind of hard not to.
She was a knockout with her tall, lean but womanly body, long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a certain kind of laid-back confidence she wore around her like a perfume.
Hell, she had been shamelessly watching the whole scene with my ex, not even trying to hide how much she was enjoying the show.
She was gorgeous.
Then when shit went down and got a little uglier than it needed to, she had been quick to try to get it on tape, to make sure there would be evidence to back-up a claim if something ever happened to me.
So beautiful, with her head on straight, and a dog lover?
Sounded a lot like the perfect woman.
Sounded a lot like somewhere I wanted Coop to be raised.
I reached into the envelope to find a picture of the dog that had still been a bit of a puppy in my mind - small-bodied but big-footed. He still had big feet, sure, but the rest of him had caught up with them. She was right too; he hadn't gotten even the smallest bit better looking with age. He was now just a giant ugly dog.
He seemed happy too with his big bright blue collar that matched his eyes, sitting on a sidewalk with a cookie half-hanging out of his mouth. You'd swear he was smiling.
Curious, I looked past him at the store he was situated in front of, squinting at the picture that was taken from a distance.
But then my lips curled up when I made out the sign.
Phallus-opy.
She took a picture of my dog outside a sex store? What's more, she sent me a picture of my dog taken out front of a sex store?
Either it was a mistake, or this Autumn woman was one interesting character.
I'd say time would tell, but, well, let's face it, it wouldn't.
I had five more years behind bars.
I would never meet this woman.
It shouldn't have, but that knowledge gave me a small pang to the left side of my chest, deep in the black hole I didn't even recognize as a heart anymore.
I figured time inside would do that to a man.
It was harder for those who had a wife or girl on the outside, knowing they were away for a while and unable to fill her needs, worrying that she might step out on him, or get rid of him completely while he spends every night with his dick in his hand thinking about her.
I was in the lucky minority in that I didn't have that worry. I didn't have a girl, and I sure as fuck would never have demanded she wait for me even if I did.
So I wasn't plagued with that insecurity. And, well, I had a sex drive like anyone else, but suppressing it wasn't exactly hard in a place full of men, that smelled constantly of a bathroom and sweat and shitty food.
"Jesus, the fuck happened to his hair?" my cellmate, Tank, though his actual name was Bobby, asked as he came in, leaning up into my bunk because the idea of 'personal boundaries' was wholly lost on the man.
"Dunno. I found him like that when he was a puppy."
"Thought you said you have no close family," Bobby observed. "You know, aside from the kids."
"I don't," I agreed. Knife, meet gut. I still hadn't gotten used to the sensation. I wondered if I ever would.
"Who has the dog then?"
"Some chick at the coffeeshop where I got arrested. Took him home with her."
Bobby's lips tipped up, giving his already good-looking face a little charm. "She hot?"
"Incredibly," I agreed.
"Well," he went on with a shrug. "I guess when you get out, you're gonna have to go take him back from her," he said with a twinkle in his eyes before he dropped down into his own bunk to read the half a dozen letters he got each week from various family members who never gave up on him, even though this was his fourth trip to prison since he was sixteen.
Honestly, the idea never even occurred to me.
Six years was probably more than half of Coop's lifetime. He wouldn't even fucking remember me. He had a good life with the Autumn chick.
I had no right to go back and reclaim him when I got out.
But, somehow, once the idea got planted thanks to Bobby, there was no stopping it from starting to sprout and grow.
3 years
"I wish my hustle was half as good as yours," Bobby said, shaking his head over my shoulder as I counted the cash that Big Tony had handed me for the huge canvas I had just painted for him. It was a massively detailed piece of him, his wife, their kids, and their grandkids that I had needed to put together from a dozen photographs he had handed to me and, well, my pure imagination since there wasn't a single picture of more than two of them together and it needed to look like it was made from a real family photo session.
It had taken me three weeks to finish it, just under the line for him to be able to get it to his wife in time for their fortieth wedding anniversary.
How he was going to get it out to her, what palms he would need to grease to get that kind of shit done, yeah that was none of my business, but he apparently had it all worked out.
The piece had set him back six-hundred, a number he hadn't even raised a brow at. You had to love the wise guys. They always had cash to throw around.
"You need a hustle that won't add any more time to your fucking sentence, Bobby."
A hustle was a prison term for some kind of job that you did that the prison didn't know about - or pretended not to know about - that made you some extra cash to spend at commissary or use to barter for other shit within the prison.
My hustle was portraits or artwork. One guy had me do an album cover for him, even though he had another eight years left on his bid.
Bobby's hustle was selling pot.
How he got pot into the facility, quite frankly, I didn't want to know. All I did know was that he had almost been caught dealing it three times, and was looking at another couple of years if he did.
"Easy for you to say. Not all of us are talented, man."
"It took work," I told him truthfully, knowing the shit I had been putting out when I first arrived paled in comparison to what I could do now. "And there are plenty of guys in here with a clean hustle. Fucking Rick proofreads letters to families, lawyers, and non-profits, so the guys don't sound like idiots."
"Barely finished eleventh grade here, boss," Bobby reminded me, shaking his head as he dropped down across from me at one of the chess tables.
"Poet writes poems for anniversaries and birthdays. Marty cleans cells for commissary money. Andy fixes all the busted electronics. Thomas fixes shoes and clothes. Fucking Al makes candy in his cell. Plenty of hustles if you're actually willing to do a little work."
That was perhaps a little bit pointed.
See, Bobby was getting out in six months. He got time shaved off for good behavior since no one ever caught him handing out the pot. And I had a sick feeling that the bastard would be right back in again in less than a year if someone didn't try to push him toward a life that didn't involve ending up on the wrong side of the law.
"That's your privilege talking, man."
I snorted at that, shaking my head.
Privilege.
I grew up in a crime family. I was raised in a town that was nothing but criminal enterprises. Financial security didn't come until I was in my teens. Until then, we had to scrimp and save and barely get by just like anyone else. I didn't go to college; it wasn't even an option.
Both of our stories were similar.
We had good families in somewhat shady areas. We were both male, white, around the same age, and had the same chances in life.
The fact that he continued to choose easy money whereas I planned on going straight, well, that wasn't privilege. That was a choice. A bad one. But a choice.
It wasn't like when he got out, he was going to have no place to go, no one to help him get back on his feet. He didn't have to go live in a slum where the only money to be made was in illegal jobs.
That was the reality for more than half of the prison population. But it wasn't for Bobby.
He was just fucking lazy.
"You got the same chance as me of getting out and keeping your nose clean."
"Yeah, sure. You ain't never been in here before and gone back out there. When you do, then you can talk to me about readjusting. You don't know shit about it."
Bobby blew hot too easily.
Another reason he couldn't keep a straight job.
The fact of the matter was, the time, it wasn't hard. For me anyway.
It wasn't the hours locked in the cell, the fact that other people told you when to eat, shower, go outside, sleep. It wasn't the random shakedowns. It wasn't the shitty healthcare. It wasn't being stuck.
All that, I dunno, I had adjusted well enough. It becomes rote after a while. If you weren't the type to bemoan your fate, the time wasn't awful.
What was hard was the man I had needed to become to ensure my life could never go down this road again. What was hard was denying thirty-some-odd years of traditions, of loyalty, of love. What was hard was hollowing out a heart that used to be full of my parents, brothers, sisters-in-law, and nieces, and making it stay empty. What was hard was knowing that three years in, they still weren't accepting that the Eli they knew and loved ceased to exist when he walked into these walls. What was hard was knowing that while I was a hollowed-out shell, they were still holding onto hope that I would come around.
After three years, that wasn't even possible anymore.
There was none of that man left.
All that was left was the cold, the detached, the depersonalized psyche that the shrinks had wanted to medicate, thinking it was due to some prison horror that I wouldn't discuss.
They refused to accept that it was self-inflicted.
And, well, once you carved enough away inside, there weren't even any edges that could grow back together. You were just pieces.
Disconnected was a state I lived in.
I got up, I made my bed, I did checks, I brushed my teeth, I ate breakfast, I went to work, I showered on days it was allowed, I had my hour or two in the yard, I worked on my art, I slept.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Feel fucking nothing.
The only time there was even a hint of anything other than absolute and complete disconnection was when a letter would show up from one of the girls.
Yeah, letters.
Because they were big enough to write them now.
Three years of Fee keeping that candle lit for them, not knowing she was only hurting them, not accepting that just banking it out would be the kindest course of action.
Once I got the first letter, in all caps and full of information about her new cousins - you know, babies I would never get to see - I had felt a pain akin to something being ripped out inside. From then on, I accepted them, but couldn't bring myself to open anymore. Not even when they started not only coming from Becca, but Izzy and even Mayla. Then, soon after them, artwork started from Jason who couldn't have been more than a toddler by the looks of things, and whose parents, yeah, I didn't even fucking know which of my brothers had him.
That realization was the last, most lethal, painful pang of my dying fucking heart.
I kept all of them unopened now, locking them away in a box under the bunks. I tried not to even look at the names on the address labels.
Better not to pry open that can of worms.
Better to treat it like junk mail you keep forgetting to throw away.
Better to not have a family at all.
Better to shut it all the fuck down.
"Yo, Mallick," the guard called, stopping outside my cell. "Missed mail call," he said, holding up a small white envelope.
Normally, you missed mail call, you were fucked. But I had made this guy a portrait of his baby that died of SIDS to keep on his mantle, so he was a little more forgiving of any of my small indiscretions.
"You know the deal," I said, exhaling hard. Mail days sucked.
"Nah. Not your family, less you got some distant relative with the last name Reid."
I turned fast, too fast, showing just a hint of a weak spot that I didn't want anyone - not even a guard - to see.
"Girlfriend?"
"Chick that stole my dog," I corrected, going for a calm tone as I took the envelope.
"Stealing a man's dog then writing him. What a shit move," he said, shaking his head as he ambled off.
My hands went almost a little frantically for the tab, sliding my finger under to rip it open.
Why was she writing again? After two years of nothing?
Did Coop get sick? Die?
Why put that on some dude already in prison if that was the case?
It was a pretty dick move.
I couldn't tell you why I was so desperate to read it, aside from genuinely hoping my dog was okay. Maybe it was a genuine need for human connection, for a contact on the outside, to be reminded of normal life.
It was easy to adjust to prison.
When there weren't reminders that there was another way to live.
I had successfully stayed clear of them.
Except for now.
Eli,
Coop wanted to show you his Halloween costume.
I hope prison is better than it looked on Oz.
- Autumn
What the fuck was that?
Even as I reached for the picture still in the envelope, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the fuck she was sending me a letter.
She was a good-looking woman. She didn't need to write some shithead in prison so she could get some male attention.
What was her motivation?
I pulled out the picture, unable to hold back a laugh/snort hybrid that escaped me at what was staring back at me.
Autumn, whoever the fuck she was, was either really creative herself, or shelled out a shitload of money to have a three-headed dog costume made. With two extra of Coop's heads. One was missing an ear as if the real Coop had maybe gotten to it. Which, well, was very much like him.
Unfortunately, looking down at it, my first thought was how much Becca, Izzy, and Mayla would have liked seeing him like that.
This Autumn chick was making it hard to forget about my old life the way I wanted, to seclude myself away from it, to avoid any thoughts that could conjure up images of my family.
Why then did I reach for a pencil and paper?
Why did I write back?
Why the ever-loving hell did I actually mail it when I did?
5 years -
It was wrong to think.
I knew that.
I knew that there were men in here, men with women and children they desperately wanted to get back to, but likely wouldn't until the kids were grown, if ever at all.
They would kill for it.
To be on their last leg.
To be one foot out the door.
And here I was, half not wanting to leave.
What can I say, after over five years, even a place like prison can start to feel like home. You get used to the rhythms, find a certain comfort in the sameness. Nothing changed. Faces did, power dynamics as well, but every single day was almost identical to the last.
It wasn't the routine, though, that had a fist of trepidation settled in my stomach. I liked my old life, being able to come and go as I pleased, eat what I wanted, go to bed if or when I wanted, go for a drive, see movies, buy shit without a strict budget set in place by someone other than me.
It was what I knew would be waiting for me when I left.
Hell, I would bet my left nut that someone - if not a group of them - would be sitting outside the jail on release day.
The letters still came.
Even the ones from the adults.
And now it wasn't just Becca, Izzy, Mayla, and Jason.
Now there were new names too.
Jake. Joey. Danny. Ford.
And, to top the cake. Eli. Little Eli.
If I had any heart left, that would have fucking sank it down in acid.
One of them, and I had no idea which, had named a child after me. Even after not seeing me, hearing from me for five years. Even after having letters and gifts sent back. Even after I turned my back on all of them, they still had hope.
Only fools had hope.
I didn't have hope anymore.
I had plans.
I had goals.
I had a system of things to set in place to make a new life.
A life I couldn't allow them into.
A life they wouldn't want to be in if they knew the man I had become.
Or, knowing them, they would still want in, but only because they thought they could fix me, they could undo the five years, the shame, the humiliation, the regret, the disappointment in myself.
There was no fixing that.
But they were good people, and they loved me, so if they found me, they would work their asses off to get me back.
Unfortunately, I was getting paroled to Navesink Bank, so I had no choice but to set up shop there.
According to my lawyer who was the only connection to my old life I allowed, my family had kept up my apartment for me to go back to. I thanked him, not telling him that that wasn't my intention. I would deal with it eventually, but I wasn't going back to it, right where they would look for me.
Instead, I had had Bobby, who was surprisingly not back in a cell yet, work out a duplex for me in a crummy area of town. They were somewhat secluded, and I could come and go without being seen. He was in one of the duplexes across the street with his girl and, if he was being honest, working a straight job. I figured he wasn't being honest, but I needed someone on the outside who wasn't connected with my family to help me arrange shit for release day.
Once I was out, I had my accounts to get me going.
Then I had my plans to work selling my art to keep me going.
Would I be living as large as I used to? No. But it would keep me from that world, keep me from becoming that man who could transform into some rage-monster without warning.
And it would keep from hurting my family when they realized what I had to become to get rid of the person they once knew.
I knew it would happen eventually, a run-in.
It was inevitable.
The town wasn't exactly small, but it wasn't a big city either.
I would see one of them.
And then I would have to rip their hearts out like I had needed to my own.
The difference was, theirs would mend. They would sew one another back together. They would be mostly whole again.
That simply wasn't in the cards for me.