Need You Now Read online

  “Good. Once you’re done, you have homework in the church.”

  “The church?” Beth asked and I stiffened all the way up.

  Usually after dinner we all did homework together at the table, but questioning The Wife was a bad call.

  “Rosa,” The Wife said, “I think Beth can finish washing and drying the dishes on her own, don’t you? Go get your schoolwork. Carissa, finish clearing the table and meet us in the church.”

  I didn’t even look over my shoulder, because the night was coming apart and whatever happened there was only one truth for me: I could not save Beth.

  I could only save my baby.

  * * *

  At ten we left the church and went up to our rooms. Simon would keep studying, and a lot of times I did too. I’d fucked up a lot of stuff, but I believed Marco when he said we would figure it out and I’d still get a chance to go to college.

  But tonight the air was too tense to study. The whole house felt like it was going to break open.

  In our rooms Beth sat on the edge of her bed.

  “I’m scared,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  “What are they gonna do?” she asked, looking up at me with blue eyes.

  I shrugged because I really didn’t know. In the whole menu of shit that could go down, I couldn’t say definitively what they would pick.

  “I’m scared for Tommy,” she whispered.

  “Yeah, well, he’s for sure scared for you.”

  “Is this what love is supposed to be like?” she asked.

  I sat down on my bed. My feet were sore and my back felt like crap. And this was going to be a long night.

  “I don’t know a lot about love,” I said. “My family didn’t teach me. But Marco—”

  The lump in my throat came up out of nowhere. Sometimes in this place I missed him so much it hurt.

  “He’s scared for me right now,” I said. “Even though I haven’t told him how bad this place is. I know he is freaking out. And when my dad first found out I was pregnant, I was scared for Marco. But mostly, being in love with him feels good. Like it does in movies, you know? Like I can be myself and he can be himself and we can just be good to each other.”

  “I just want to be good to Tommy,” Beth said, starting to cry. “I swear I never wanted him to get in trouble.”

  “Listen,” I said, reaching across the small area between our beds. “You didn’t fuck up. This place is fucked up. Remember that.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” she whispered. “I just always mess things up, you know?”

  I laughed, even though nothing was funny. “Yeah,” I said. It was easy to feel that way when the deck was stacked against you. Like the mistakes were ours, but really we were funneled into them.

  The Wife came by and knocked on our doors when it was our turn in the bathroom. I could sense behind all the locked doors the waiting energy, the dark fear. I couldn’t hear it but I knew the knocking system, the way we all communicated, would be in full effect.

  We went to the bathroom and took turns showering. We brushed our teeth. Washed our faces like it was all a normal night. Like everything was fine. And then we filed back into our room, changed, careful not to look at each other, and then got into bed. I was reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting and it sat dog-eared on the table between us.

  I grabbed it but couldn’t read it.

  “Lights out,” The Wife said and Beth reached over and clicked off the light.

  Now, I thought. Now is when the monster comes.

  It didn’t take long. It felt like forever, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t long.

  I’d been watching the moon out our window, its bright rise over the tree in the side yard. The slow arrival of the few bright stars we could see over the neon lights of the city. Planes making their ways to exciting places. Taking people to other parts of their lives. Or maybe brand-new lives.

  I clung, even in this awful place, to the hope that that would still be possible for me. A brand-new life. Marco. The baby. And if it couldn’t be for me, then I would do everything I could for Ariella and Marco.

  I just had to be careful.

  And I had to be smart.

  Slowly, quietly in the silent room, I opened the book and found the folded-up piece of paper I’d stashed there and slipped it into the front pocket of my hoodie. Step one.

  And then I tore the thick cover from the front of What to Expect When You’re Expecting. It was somewhere between cardboard and paper and I hoped it would do the trick.

  In the bed beside mine Beth had fallen asleep, exhausted, maybe, by stress and night after night of fitful sleep. Or maybe she fell asleep convinced, as the time had gone on, that nothing was going to happen. But I’d been here longer. And I knew better.

  The Pastor was going to come for her.

  And then there was the sound of the key in the lock, the bright slice of light taking out the darkness of our room. He stepped into the room, his great hulking shadow thrown across our wall and the foot of my bed. I closed my eyes so he wouldn’t know I was awake. And so that my eyes, used to the darkness, wouldn’t get acclimated to the light.

  Oh, I was going to use all the tricks my father taught me. The Burns family legacy had gotten me thrown in this place and I prayed to God it would get me out.

  Quietly, he closed the door behind him and the room was dark again. So I opened my eyes and watched him cross the room. He walked around my bed to Beth’s, standing in that small slice of space between our two beds. In the moonlight I could see the key ring.

  For a moment he just looked down at Beth, watching her sleep, and nausea burned in my throat. I could not imagine what he was thinking. As bad as my father was—he wasn’t like this.

  The moment was so still and so quiet it felt like glass, and I fought to keep breathing regularly. To stay still. Be silent. When what I wanted to do was scream a warning to Beth.

  But I needed someone else to cause the distraction and I felt terrible, I really did, that I needed it to be Beth. That I intended to capitalize on her trauma.

  Don’t think about it, I told myself.

  Slowly, The Pastor leaned down and put a hand on Beth’s shoulder, and when she opened her eyes with a start and, disoriented and scared, began to scream, he smacked his other hand down across her mouth.

  I closed my eyes against the sound.

  But Beth, like I knew she would, began to fight him. I could hear her.

  He lifted her out of the bed, her nightgown tangled around her legs, and she tripped and they both fell backward against the wall. A thud that undoubtedly woke up anyone who’d managed to fall asleep.

  Good, I thought. We all need to be alert.

  “You have to be quiet,” he said to her. Chilling and awful. But what he didn’t say was or else.

  But it was there.

  The or else was what kept us all here. What kept us silent and trapped in our own abuse.

  He lifted his hand from her mouth and Beth, that fighter, screamed again, pushing against The Pastor’s bulk. And he half-carried, half-dragged her across the room.

  I eased my legs out from under the blankets and he didn’t look my way, occupied the way he was by trying to subdue Beth.

  He was holding her hard and it had to hurt, but she didn’t stop and he was busy, he wouldn’t see me slip the thick paper cover out from under my pillow or see me roll quietly off my bed, dressed in black and clinging to the shadows, unless he really tried.

  She nearly got free again at the door and he stopped, and I just barely caught myself before I ran into him, that’s how close I was behind them. And in that second, that split second, I seized an opportunity I hadn’t been expecting and grabbed the key ring off his belt. It could not have been easier.

  And then he got Beth under his arm and carried her out into the hallway, and I slipped the cover of What to Expect When You’re Expecting between the door and lock, so the door shut but the lock didn’t eng
age.

  And the missing click of the lock was the loudest silence I’d ever heard and I waited, holding my breath, to see if The Pastor heard it too. But no. He was making his way down the hallway with Beth, who was not giving up the fight.

  The office door was open, and I knew when he shut it, the lock would engage.

  I waited ten seconds until I heard the door to the office close behind them. One more breath to see if, for some reason, The Wife was going to come running. But no.

  Like a shadow, with my hoodie pulled up over my hair, I slipped out of my room into the brightly lit hallway. I had the key ring, more than I thought I would have, and walked over to Carissa’s room. I knew which key was hers immediately. It was the one that was the most worn. The oldest in the bunch.

  I opened her door to find her standing there, like she was expecting me. Silent and still, wearing pink pajamas that did nothing to make her look innocent.

  “He took her to the office,” I said. And she stepped into the hall and looked down the hallway to the dark door at the end of it.

  “I’m leaving,” I said, and she nodded. And then we surprised each other by hugging as hard as we could.

  “Be safe,” she whispered in my ear.

  “You too.”

  And then she took off down the hallway to the stairs leading into the kitchen. It seemed like she, too, was making her escape. The boys’ room was at the end of the hallway, facing the office. As silently as possible I tried the first key, but it didn’t work. I tried the second, feeling every moment that my window for escape was closing. I would spend this time trying to get all of us free and we wouldn’t actually get anywhere.

  Except Carissa.

  And suddenly, that seemed like enough. If it was Carissa who got free, then I’d done a good job.

  In the office at the end of the hall I could hear thumps and voices, and I knew Beth was fighting him. Still. With everything she had.

  Keep going, Beth.

  The last key finally slid in and the lock clicked open. The relief made me numb.

  Carefully, I eased open the door, only to find Simon standing there, sweating and wild-eyed with panic.

  “Stop!” He put his hand up and caught the swing of the chair that Tommy was using as a weapon against whoever was coming in the door. They’d never expected it would be me. Simon grunted as the chair hit his shoulder, knocking him back toward the bed.

  Tommy turned, ready to charge, but then he caught sight of me at the door.

  All he could do was blink. And I didn’t blame him. But the clock was ticking and I needed to get gone before my window for freedom was closed.

  “I’m out,” I whispered. “I’d rather be in jail than here.”

  “How’d you get our door open?” Tommy asked, his voice as low as he could make it. Everyone knew my history with breaking and entering, but not the specifics. Just like I knew Tommy came from some shit family situation and Simon had some personal vendetta against a powerful man who’d killed his family. Or something. We never got into specifics. And frankly they didn’t matter. Whatever we did to get put away in this place was not as bad as what we would do to get out of it.

  Of that I was sure.

  I held up the key ring with five keys on it. “Fucker’s not as careful as he could be when he’s excited about raping teenage girls.”

  Tommy looked like he was gonna vomit.

  “Did he just drop them in your room?” Simon asked. “The keys—”

  “You got bigger problems than how I got the keys,” I said. “He just took Beth. You’ve got time before shit gets real.”

  Tommy stepped past me into the hall. Five doors. Mine was open. So was Carissa’s. My door was shut. There was another locked and empty bedroom next to mine and then his office at the end of the hall.

  There was a creak on the stairs and we all went totally still.

  The Wife.

  And just like that the window was closed. And I’d failed my baby and Marco. Wherever they were going to put us next it was going to be farther away from Marco and I’d never be able to do what I needed to do to make sure he, and not my father, had custody of the baby.

  I sagged under the weight of my failure and the knowledge that I’d been pushing away this whole time, that I would not know my baby, not even a little bit, because my father was going to give her up for adoption. Or keep her and treat her terrible. It was a lead weight in my body and I honestly, honestly didn’t know what I was going to do.

  Part of me wanted to die.

  The top step creaked like it always did and I bounced on my tiptoes, ready to charge. I was lightheaded from not having enough food, but I was ready to do this.

  But it wasn’t the wife coming up the stairs.

  It was Carissa in her pale pink pajamas. The moonlight coming through our bedroom door turned the long butcher’s knife in her hand to silver.

  Relief made me nauseated.

  I collapsed against the door, sucking in air.

  Carissa was the youngest of us. The smallest. That knife was half the length of her leg.

  “Open the door,” she whispered, all murderous business. Well, as much as a fifteen-year-old half-Chinese girl in a pair of pink pajamas could mean murderous business.

  Which was a lot, actually.

  Simon, who’d been checking the keys, lifted one in the air. “Got it!”

  “I’m out,” I said, my hand over my stomach. None of them blamed me, that I knew.

  I lifted a hand in goodbye, sure that I would never see them again. If they survived this night they’d be locked up and put away for their rest of their lives.

  So would I. Which meant I had to get shit done. Now.

  I ran down the steps as silently as possible, and at the front door, fast as I could, I threw open all the locks, one after the other, and then opened the door.

  That’s when I realized I wasn’t alone. The Wife sat on the couch in the living room. In the dark.

  She knew what was going on and she wasn’t stopping anything.

  “Good luck, Rosa,” she said, and I got the hell out of there.

  But this, I knew, was just the beginning.

  5

  THEN

  * * *

  Rosa

  It was the same outside. The same air. The same neighborhood with one-story houses built into a steep hill. Sloped yards. Dogs behind chain-link fences watching me like they’d never seen a pregnant teenager break out of St. Jude’s before.

  And fair enough. I doubt it had been done.

  But this was no time to get cocky.

  I took a second to appreciate that the air felt different now than it had earlier today, walking from the bus to the door. It was freedom and it wasn’t going to last very long. I understood that. I was breaking the terms of my sentence and whatever shit happened inside that foster home tonight, some of it was going to land on me.

  But there was no point thinking about that now.

  Healthy baby, Marco with custody.

  That was all that mattered.

  And truthfully, I’d been planning for this moment since the minute I’d been put in St. Joke’s, so I knew what I had to do. I’d been hoping I’d have more than just the clothes on my back , but I had to work with what I had.

  Basically, the skills Dad beat into me.

  So, first things first. A ride.

  The street was lined with cars. I walked along looking for an older model Honda Civic with the ignition that never put up a fight. I found one, but the door was locked and without my tools I couldn’t get in without breaking a window. I was desperate, but not desperate enough to get those dogs to start barking and wake up the neighborhood.

  The door of the second one was unlocked and I slipped into the driver’s seat, popped off the casing around the base of the steering wheel, and went to work.

  While other kids were mowing lawns for money in the summer or taking their babysitting courses, Dad had Benny and me out near the airport learning th
e family business.

  I’d asked him once what Mom would have thought about him making me do this and he’d split my lip. So I didn’t ask again. I just did what he told me and stayed out of the way of my half-brother, Benny.

  My mom was a red-headed bombshell who’d named me after her Mexican grandmother on her mother’s side, and I looked like her without the bombshell part. I had none of my father’s features.

  But it would seem my nimble fingers maybe came from him.

  Born a thief was a shitty way to be born. And my daughter would not be touched by this world, even a little bit, if I had my way.

  The car purred to life and I took off for the highway. First stop was my father’s house about three miles away from the foster home. I stuck to the side roads, obeying every stop sign and being real careful with my blinker. But, for the most part, the streets were empty.

  At my dad’s house, the front yard was full of guys sitting in lawn chairs. Beer cans littered the dead grass around them. I knew some of them. My brother’s crew from way back.

  They had a lot of problems with me.

  Because I wouldn’t look at them, much less fuck them.

  Because of my mom’s Mexican grandmother on her mother’s side.

  Because they were racist dicks.

  I parked across the street and kept the car running. Hoping this would not take long.

  The one thing I did have with me was the paperwork I’d kept folded up in What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Marco had found the right form and emailed it to me. I’d printed it at school, never really sure how this opportunity would present itself. If worse came to worst, my brother could forge my father’s signature.

  And Benny owed me. But with his audience of jackals, he would be unpredictable.

  My hands were shaking and the ball of nerves that had been growing in my stomach on the drive over here was about to gag me.

  The boys with their shaved heads and shitkicker boots all went on high alert as I walked up. Some of them started quick with the whistles and the “Hey, bitch.”

  Because that works?

  Benny got to his feet and I pushed down my hood.