Amy will never get over the pain of her family’s secret. But I’ll do whatever it takes to save her from the darkness that nearly took my own life.
I cradle her face in my hands and I kiss her.
‘I just wish you told me, Amy, from the beginning. It should never even been a question. From now on everything.’
She smiles a smile that could end world suffering. ‘Everything.’
The sun strobes through the roof, hits our faces. We lie together with the smell of wet earth. Crows caw. The wind roars against the cottage.
Amy hesitates to reach out for a tiny white knitted cardigan. ‘Where did all this come from?’
‘It belonged to my mum.’ I touch her face with my fingers.
Are you real?
‘This DVD of your mother . . . I know it’ll be hard to watch, but maybe this will help identity your father.’
I laugh coldly. ‘I don’t need to watch it, Amy. I already know who my father is. You see that car she’s sitting in?’
The cover of my mum’s DVD is set inside the interior of a car.
Amy nods her head.
‘I’ve been inside it. Helped repair it, in fact.’ I laugh bitterly. ‘That’s the interior of a classic red Mustang. It belongs to Bishop Clark.’
Bishop was twice my mother’s age when he abused her. And I’m the thing born from that evil.
‘I’m so sorry, Shepherd.’
Amy’s hand curls on my chest. I put my fingers in the cup she makes with hers. We stay like that for a bit.
I do my damnedest to drive away the dark past, concentrate on plotting the curve of Amy’s spine, the shape of each stacked vertebra, the freckle just under her shoulder blade. But then I see how frail she is, how raw. Her skin is pale, her shoulders narrow.
To Amy, I recount the horrors of my childhood, and the hell inflicted on me in Nazareth. I disclose everything. Including the night I tried to hang myself.
I confess every raw piece of me, and it feels like the knife stabbed in my soul is being pulled out. We go into the darkest corner. Our pain pulls us together like a blackhole, pulled into destruction. Annihilation. And we cling to each other’s darkness.
Whatever hurt I’ve got inside, nothing compares to Amy’s horror. Amy is already dying. Fuck if I’ll be the death of her.
Something thuds at my feet.
The hell?
A large piece of concrete collapses from the ceiling. I grab Amy and pull her up behind me, shielding her. Rubble and dirt block up my world. I kick through the fallen rubble and stoop to flick up a piece that kinda looks like a star. I put it in Amy’s hand.
‘Whenever I was locked up in the cellar of the children’s home, I’d look up at this little shining star through this small window. The little bright in the sky. I always wondered what it was. All I knew was, it gave me something to focus on in the dark.’ I run my fingers through her hair. ‘You’re the little bright I wished for as a kid. You’re my North fucking star.’
The fucking unreachable.
‘Now I’ve got you — Mine.’
Amy and I just look at each other. The real us.
She’s the whole of my fucking universe right there.
Standing in the ruins of my past, in the darkness, Amy and I can be anything we want to be in the chaos. Just me and her.
Standing in the doorway, I peer around like a man waking up. I feel my mum’s ghost close.
The dead drawn to shattered hearts.
‘I love you, Mum,’ I say to her ghost. ‘Rest in peace now.’
I pocket my mum’s silver seahorse bracelet and go outside. The biting cold feels good on my aching bones.
I start to find things in the long grass. There’re jam jars and hinges, bent spoons and pram wheels, a rusted bath of brown rainwater and a rusted pitchfork.
My inheritance.
I fill the jam jars with water, kick through the brambles to the roses that climb up the side of the cottage. I take out my penknife and cut the stems. Amy helps me put flowers in each room before we leave, and get rid of any weeds. If my mum returns, there’ll be light in the darkest corners of our shattered home.
I hold Amy’s hand, and I walk her out of the dark woods.
I stop and turn to her. ‘Amy, I need to do this.’
‘Go do what you need to do,’ she says with sad eyes. ‘Just promise to come back to me.’
‘I promise,’ I say.
My father is evil. Am I born from evil?
‘I’m a monster, Amy.’
‘You’re my monster.’ I hear her heart break. ‘We’re the same, Shepherd. We’re both born from pain.’
No Amy in my life is like putting a gun to my head and pulling the trigger.
Every man has a purpose in life. I couldn’t see mine until Amy. Protect and love her . . . it’s all I am. It’s all I was born to do.
I touch every inch of her face with my fingers.
‘What are you doing?’ she says.
‘I just want to remember every bit of you.’ The little white brain of her hair is coming loose. She is so beautiful. Too fucking beautiful for an ugly soul like me. ‘Amy . . . you bring me crashing to my knees. I’d fall into Hell if it meant being with you.’
Standing together at the edge of the woods, I pull out a pen from the inside of my leather jacket.
I trace the outline of her shadow, cast on the grass by moonlight, on the inner wrist of my left forearm. A tattoo for future’s wish. A permanent reminder of when all the lies died.
