Bedful of Moonlight by Raven Held (audio ebook reader .txt) 📕

father, I wouldn’t have to hit you like that.”
Caleb held a hand to the spot where Gareth had struck him. “Kristen’s right. I don’t even know why I’m helping you when you obviously want to get hauled back to jail again.”
“Oh, Kristen’s right, now, is she?” Gareth reached forward and grabbed Caleb by the neck of his t-shirt. “How’d you know it’s not her who ratted us out to that prick today, huh? Don’t you know what he’s going to do now? He’ll call the police for damn sure.”
“You should’ve thought of that when you harassed Aunt Belle today. What exactly do you want, dad? When you first came here, you wanted to get back together with mom again. That was what you said, and it was why I decided to help you. But now, you’re just lounging and about asking money from Aunt Belle –”
Gareth let go of him. “Well, I can’t exactly drop by your mom’s office for a chat now, can I? I just need some more time. Wait till this dies down.”
“Well, you just stirred up more attention to yourself today. If you keep doing that, when is anything ever going to die down? When the hell are you going to start behaving like a real dad again?”
“I’m a good father, I raised you well.” He jabbed a finger in his chest. “Bite the hand that feeds you, why don’t you?” His voice dying down to a growl, he said, “You screwed up, Caleb. Like always. All I asked was for you to keep me safe somewhere for the time being, and you couldn’t even do it.”
This time, when he threw out his fist, Caleb stuck out his arm, ready to fend off the blow. He pressed his arm against Gareth’s collarbone and tried to back him against a wall, but Gareth kneed him hard in the gut. Caleb grunted and fell back onto the couch.
“So this is what we’ve come to, eh?” Gareth said.
Caleb stared up at his father. The shaft of moonlight gave him a ghostly pallor. And then he picked himself up and left through the front door.
I did not wait around any longer. With any luck, I would be home before Caleb and he wouldn’t know I had been at the shack too.
But he saw me just as I tried to slip back into the shadows. His was long, stretched out before him across the deserted lane.
“I know you’re here, Kristen. You might as well come out now.” He sighed. “You,” he said, when I stepped sheepishly into sight, “make a terribly spy. Too much noise. And didn’t anyone tell you not to make quick movements? It’s more noticeable that way.”
“That’s because I don’t spy on people often,” I said.
“Which is a good thing.” He started walking again. “I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”
“Talk about what?” I widened my eyes. Upon the look he shot me, I said, “We can talk about me. Isn’t that what you always do – direct attention away from yourself?”
“Are we really going to open this can of worms now?”
Our footsteps were loud; my flip flops made a squishy sound with every step. “Thank you.”
He looked at me. “That, I must say, is a nice change of topic.”
“For today. The whole Blake thing.” I shrugged. “It doesn’t change anything, but it just made me feel better.”
He stopped, so I did too. And then, in a manner and moment more unexpected than this morning, he leaned over and kissed me. It was as gentle as before.
“It doesn’t mean that you’re forgetting him or letting him down just because you’re starting to live again,” he said, once we broke apart. He took my hand and continued walking. “Although you’re quite far from having moved on, it wasn’t as bad as before. At least you’re not burning rooms down now. Speaking of which, Gabriel sure is taking a long time to repair your room. I’ll remind him tomorrow.”
“That’s okay,” I said. After a pause: “You didn’t see the look he gave me in my dream.”
He stared. “You do realise that sounds…”
“Stupid? Yeah, I do.” And before I could think twice about it, I had told him how my nightmare had played out, with him leaving with Gareth, and Blake holding on to me with a betrayed look.
He laughed when I was done. “I’m sorry,” he said, when I shot him a look. “It’s just – your dreams are vividly amusing. Well, not the part about Blake, of course, just the fact that my dad would pat me on the back and commend me for leaving you.”
“But that’s not that far-fetched an idea, if you come to think of it. There is a possibility of it happening.”
“The only possibility of him ever telling me I did a good job is when I do what he wants me to.”
I waited. He had to realise it.
“He doesn’t … Getting me to leave you isn’t what he wants, Kristen. I highly doubt he cares if I do – which I won’t, as long as you want me around and can differentiate between me and … you know, Blake.”
“Why did he – you know, why did he say you failed him, like always?”
He shrugged, and kicked a stone out of the way. We were walking down the lane to our house now. It was strange how accustomed to that idea I was now, when Wroughton seemed so alien to me just about a couple of weeks ago.
“Nothing ever seems to satisfy him,” he said. His voice, in that confession, rang out loudly in the lonely night. “With mom, he wanted Aunt Belle. With me, he wanted Oliver. With his office job, he wanted more money.” He glanced sideways at me. “You know how it is.”
“Do you think we’re all just searching?”
“Searching for what?”
“Something to fill us up. We grow up having such high hopes, such big dreams, for the world, for our lives, that by the time we actually learn that there isn’t anything much to look forward to, we’ve become too used to searching, too used to wanting, and we can’t stop.”
I had expected him to roll his eyes or let them glaze over. But he listened closely and nodded. “Could be. Or it could also be that we just don’t know where to look.”
“What if there isn’t anywhere we know to look anymore?”
We did not seem to be talking about that anymore. I didn’t know what we were talking about, but I was insistent in getting my point across – whatever that might be.
“Then we’ll help each other look.” He smiled and squeezed my hand. “I’m not going to let you drown in pessimism again.”
The mug was sitting on the porch step, the tea lukewarm by now. It had been a long day, and an even longer night, so, wordlessly, we kept the mug and went to bed.
It was only after I was in bed that I realised what was niggling at my mind. We had, by choice, just skirted some form of disaster by not talking about what happened tonight. If Gareth could do it tonight, he could always do it again.
And when that happened, could I do what was right? How did you know when to step in, and how much space to give someone? I could either stop Gareth from hurting – and using – Caleb again, or make Caleb hate me for thwarting his plan to restore his family.
But his family was no longer what it was. Maybe it never was the way he saw it. Who was I to say?
“Hey, Jade?” I waited. “Are you awake?”
“Mm?”
“Do you ever miss your dad?”
There was a rustle, and then: “It’s four in the morning, Kristen.”
“Sorry.”
“Never mind.” A pause settled itself so comfortably I thought she had gone back to sleep. But she went on, “I don’t miss my dad, haven’t for a long time. You can’t miss what you never had, after all. I was never really all that close to him.”
“Was Caleb really close to him?”
She flipped over to face me. Her eyes were shut. “He looked up to him, just like Ri. The only difference is that Ri officially hates mom now, for marrying Gabriel and handing dad over to the police for beating her up. But Caleb is…” She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s ever going to work out again, between mom and dad. He can’t accept that.”
When I spoke again, I was hoping she would be asleep, but she was not.
“This is going to sound weird, but … have you ever been afraid to love someone?”
She cracked open an eye, but it quickly fell shut again. “Are you talking about my brother?”
“I’m talking in the hypothetical sense.”
“Okay. Hypothetically, I wouldn’t be afraid unless I’ve been hurt before. Right?” She paused. “This is about your ex-boyfriend, isn’t it? I saw that picture of you both under your pillow.”
I sat up in my bed. “What were you doing under my pillow?”
It was probably my tone that made her open her eyes. “Changing the cases, I swear.”
Sliding back into bed, I apologised.
“It’s okay,” Jade said. “That was a nice photo. Candid ones are always better. Do you still think about him often?”
“Everyday.”
“I guess it’s not something you can get over after a while, is it?”
I made no response. Awhile later, I heard her steady breathing, and watched her form rise and fall under the sheets.
That photo was the only thing I had allowed myself to keep. There was another stack of them somewhere in our old house that I had made myself hide in a floorboard under my bed. I wondered if it was still there, if some things, like memories, just got lost over time.


Twenty-four


“The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.”
~ Sophocles (Greek playwright, BC 496 – BC 406)


On Saturday morning, the estate celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the Beaming Rose Home for the Elderly. Apparently, the Rose – as everyone called it – was a rehabilitation home for elderly people who needed some time off from the world, or just some company.
“Or, you know, because they don’t want to do their own laundry and make their own meals,” Jade said, before we went down for breakfast.
“Really.”
“So what was all that you were blabbering on about last night? I was half awake then, but I distinctly remember you saying you were afraid to love someone? Why would you be afraid to – oh, right. Sorry.”
And there it was again – the elephant in the room. For the first few weeks after Blake left, everywhere I went people either gave me sympathetic looks or hugs, or scrambled around for something to say as a detour to the invisible topic.
“Anyway,” Jade said, pulling her hair into a loose ponytail, “did you hear about yesterday?”
“What about yesterday?”
“My dad. Some people are saying they saw him.”
“Where was he before? You know, after he came back and left again?”
She dropped her hands. “For someone who keeps telling me not to air family laundry, Caleb sure tells you a lot of stuff. I mean, no offence, but –”
I nodded.
“Well, you know, after he got out from jail, he came back looking for us. But mom had moved on, and so had we. Or at least, I had. I don’t know about Caleb, and Reilly sure hasn’t. Later, I saw him in the papers as a suspect for burglary and car theft, but he never got caught. Mom told us he’d left