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I’d never seenBeauty and the Beastuntil River wanted to watch it that night. Her obsession with the beast made sense since she seemed to like me so damn much. But the part that got me was when she asked, “Why the beast give up? Him not fight.”
Ignore her use of monosyllabic details, I did, and focus on the question.
Why’d the beast give up?
My answer then was he was a pussy, but was he a pussy? He’d lost the girl. Why fight anymore?
Scarlet lays her head on my shoulder. “I miss you, ya crazy bastard. And I’m thankful you’renot dead. It’s not the same at the house without you.”
My throat tightens. I don’t say anything in return.
“Camden misses you.”
Tears sting my eyes. I won’t cry. Fuck that shit.
Scarlet’s hair gets in my mouth. I tell her to move. “He shouldn’t.”
Her eyes meet mine, tying her hair up and out of the way. “He does. Kids are resilient like that. He begged us to let him come with us.”
I didn’t want Camden to see me like this, but then again, he’s seen me at my worst, hasn’t he?
“Have you heard from—”
I cut Scarlet off. “No, and I won’t.”
“Are you doing okay in here?”
I stare at the grass, my hands, anything but her face. “I don’t know.”
There’s an uncomfortable silence.
Scarlet speaks again. “Do you feel okay?”
“I don’t know.”
She sighs. “What the fuck? Talk to me!”
I turn to her. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“You’ve got to get better,” she tells me, concern on her face. She cares. She shouldn’t.
“I don’t know if I can. I’m fucked up and I did fucked-up shit. I’ve got huge problems and they. . . even I don’t understand them. Just that they are there and deep. I don’t know if it’s fixable.”
“Everything’s fixable.”
I nod; it’s not going anywhere like this. My problems are inside me and it’s up to me to fix them. Not my family
“Have you seen River?” I don’t know why I ask. It just sort of comes out. Probably because I fucking care and want to know if she’s okay.
“No,” she admits, swallowing and fidgeting with her hands. “I talk to Amberly, check in. River’s turning four next month.”
Again, I nod, my heart pounding, my hands shaking. I didn’t want River. I never wanted to be a dad. Does that make me a bad person? To some, okay, maybe many, it does. But hear me out. I didn’t want her to know me. This guy. The one who destroys everything.
And then I realized, somewhere within the last few weeks here, she has nothing to do with that. She’s innocent. She’s been brought into this world without regard to what she wanted. When I looked at it that way, I can’t turn my back on her.
I look anywhere but at Scarlet. The ground, the trees, the blinding blue sky. I don’t want them coming here, but Scarlet keeps coming, every couple of days. As if she feels the need to remind me someone loved me.
They tell you to work on relationships in rehab. The ones you inadvertently destroyed, or in my case, purposely. I wanted isolation because the fewer people who cared, the better off they were when they realized what a piece of shit I really was.