The Things We Couldn't Forget

Chapter 17.

I'd left Faulkner the day I turned eighteen.

I'd finally aged out of the system and was given a course on how to survive alone and packed my one bag and left.

I didn't have much.

After my mother's funeral, I'd never gone back to the house. When the police came, finding me and Dallas huddled in the hallway together after I'd discovered my mother's body, they took us out of the house and sat us in the back of an SUV. I couldn't stop crying. I couldn't stop seeing the blood splattered all over the walls and into the closet.

Her paintings were all stacked up inside that closet and I'd seen the streaks of blood running down her once beautiful canvases.

"You know what this means now, don't you?" Dallas had whispered, holding me under his arm. "They are gonna try to place us with someone else."

"What do you mean?" My world was already tugged apart, seeing my father's face plastered onto every magazine and every newscast. The reporters were always near by, waiting for us to leave the property so that they could steal photographs of us. At least I'd had mom though. She was supposed to help hold us together through this.

I'd tightened my eyes against the image of her, laid out on the bed with half of her face just gone. Her beautiful face was mangled and shattered, nothing but bits of blown away flesh.

It was in the back of that SUV while clinging to my brother, the only thing I had left, when he'd told me he couldn't do it.

"Our only options are Ruth or they'll stuck us with random people." He'd said. "I'm not going to live with that woman. Not in that house." He'd seethed. "And I don't want to get put into someone else's house while they pocket money of the government to keep me like I'm some homeless dog."

"What are you saying?" I'd asked him but I already knew. I knew he was almost eighteen. And I knew he couldn't wait here for me.

He was going to leave me just like everyone else.

I'd wanted so badly to beg him to stay, for me, just to wait it out a little while longer and then we could disappear together. But we both knew I would never fit into his plan.

Papers were signed, rights were revoked, and I'd gone into a foster home. They weren't bad people. They gave me space and bought me clothes when I'd refused to go back to my home to get any of my stuff. They'd done their best. They tried to help.

I was just beyond helping.

I was a child who at that young age had already seen so much of the dark underside of this life. I'd already been exposed to too much. I'd never find my salvation there.

I didn't form any attachments to them and didn't tell them when I decided to leave. Like so many had done to me, I just disappeared.

I'd been shooting for Seattle, but only made it as far as a small college town in Washington.

Despite what I'd told Dallas, I didn't have a plan. I was supposed to go south, but I was too afraid. Too scared of the world to truly go somewhere that seemed so different.

Instead I got off the bus and walked into town, looking for a job.

I'd never worked before, but I knew it was the first logical thing to do. I'd need money and a car and somewhere to sleep.

I'd walked up and down the streets of the city, ducking into any and every establishment that I could find with no luck. I'd thought a town bustling with college aged kids would be a good place to find work, but literally everything already seemed to be taken by the students here trying to work off their own expenses.