Back To Us Read online

  Back To Us

  Rachel Hanna

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Foreword

  Thank you for picking up BACK TO US. This is a stand alone contemporary romance based on a true story. I think you’ll fall in love with these characters just as I have!

  Before you start reading, please feel free to download SECOND CHANCE for free!

  Prologue

  May, 1987

  We stand there, backs facing the door leading from the garage into the house, pretending that nothing is going on in there. My sister, who is four years older than me, is clearly embarrassed in front of her newest boyfriend, Charlie.

  I honestly don’t know why she picks these ugly guys, but I won’t go there. Needless to say, his thick dark hair cut into that sugar bowl look - complete with bangs - is not doing him any favors. And those bushy eyebrows are in need of help or possibly a hedge trimmer, but Lord knows I better not say anything. We sure aren’t close as sisters. My opinions about her choice of boyfriends would be about as well-received as a kiss from a rabid porcupine.

  So we stand there.

  All of us.

  My mother, trying to look strong but anxiously chewing on her nails and white-knuckling it not to light up a Virginia Slims cigarette, stands beside me. She’s staring out of the open garage door, watching absolutely nothing. There’s nothing to watch in this podunk little town anyway.

  My sister is crossing her arms, like we’re interfering with her schedule or something. Her hair has problems of its own with those big wing-like pieces on the sides, plastered on by industrial strength hairspray. And someone - I still don’t remember who - gave her the ugliest blue eye shadow last Christmas, which she has caked on in an effort to woo Charlie, I suppose.

  And then there’s Charlie, who just looks like he wants to get out of here. I can’t blame him. I do too.

  The noises coming from inside the house are concerning. My Dad - typically the most mild-mannered man in America - is in there. I love him. I’m worried that he’s getting hurt.

  He’s in there with my brother. My drug-addicted eighteen year old brother who’s six-foot-three and strong as an ox. Actually, he’s my half-brother, but we’ve been raised together so I don’t normally think of him that way. Until recently. Until he started tearing the family apart.

  We share a mother, and she married her first husband at sixteen, probably to escape a lot of her family life too. She got pregnant, had my brother, got divorced at seventeen and then married my and my sister’s father.

  And I thought things were going well. Until they weren’t.

  For awhile, I think they tried to hide the dysfunction from me. I’m twelve, but I’m not stupid. I’m what they refer to as “too smart for her own good”.

  Today, my brother has disrupted a family dinner. One of those Leave It To Beaver, sit around the kitchen table and pass the mashed potatoes kind of Sunday dinners. The kind that make your family look perfect, but don’t reveal the cracks underneath.

  Like your sweet, but severely alcoholic grandfather.

  Or your also alcoholic uncle.

  Or your crazy grandmother.

  Or, in this case, your drug-fueled brother who is intent on hating the world and creating chaos wherever he goes.

  It’s the kind of life that either toughens you up or breaks you down, either makes you an addict yourself or makes you a tee-totaler who never wants to try a drug or rely on alcohol.

  I want to be a tee-totaler.

  “You will not act like this in our house!” I hear my father yelling. I hear things breaking. I know my father isn’t doing it; he’s “slow to anger”, as my mother calls it. Easy going to the max.

  But my brother isn’t. Sounds like he’s throwing a chair. Hope he doesn’t hit my Dad with it.

  I wonder why we’re standing here, doing nothing. We’re mostly women - except Charlie, as far as I know - so are we expected to just not get involved? Stand here and be safe?

  Why aren’t we calling the police? For one thing, the phone is on the wall of the kitchen and going back in there right now is not an option. For another thing, my mother wants to keep up appearances. The last thing she wants is for the neighbors to know our dirty little secret - that we have a “druggy” in the house and he’s destroying our family.

  My brother - oh, his name is Danny, by the way - changed almost overnight. Obviously, my family has addiction prone DNA or something, so when he tried his first bit of weed or pot or whatever you call it - well, he liked it. A lot. Too much.

  And that led to other stuff, I guess. My Mom tries to shield me from most of that. She tries to make out like everything is okay. Our family is normal. All families have stuff like this going on.

  The only problem is I’m not sure I believe her.

  I can’t tell anyone about this. It’s a secret. Which is why we’re in the garage, so Charlie doesn’t see it.

  Do they think Charlie is stupid? Maybe deaf? I see ears poking out from under his awful haircut, so I’m assuming they work.

  I think a passing cat would know what is going on inside of our house right now.

  And then there’s silence, followed by a loud door slam and my brother running out the front door. He jumps into his new Trans Am, a gift from our grandparents who give him everything he wants no matter how bad he screws up, and speeds off.

  And then we go back inside, lock the doors and continue eating Sunday dinner like nothing happened. Except we have one less chair at the dinner table - because it’s smashed into a million pieces on the other side of the living room.

  Chapter 1

  Present Day

  It’s funny the things that you remember when you come back to the place that made you into who you are. Like a time machine, I feel immediately transported to the twelve year old little girl who lived in this house. This small, brick ranch in a quiet neighborhood.

  I stand in front of it, thankful that it’s on the market for sale so the owners don’t think I’m a stalker. I’m also thankful the agent opened it for me, so I could take a look inside, take a walk down memory lane.

  Of course, it helped that I told a little fib about maybe wanting to make an offer on it. But I have no intentions of doing that. Visiting the memories is one thing; living with them again is quite another.

  I walk up to the front door and immediately have my first memory of all of the Easter pictures taken on the front steps. Some with my parents together; some with just me and my Mom and sister.

  Before and after a family split apart.

  I enter the foyer first. It’s smaller than I remember. I recall the closet where my mother kept the sex education book she tried to use to teach us the birds and the bees. It brings a smile to my face as I think about how embarrassed she was trying to explain everything to me with that inadequate children’s book that had questionable illustrations.

  Thankfully, I said I wasn’t interested, and she was more than happy to toss it back up into the dark depths of the little closet. I never saw it again and learned about sex like every other kid - in a public school classroom.

  The house looks different. Brighter, updated, but still so familiar. And so much smaller now that I am so much bigger.

  I go into the den, where we watched TV and hung out with guests when I was growing up. I remember the huge console TV we had and the brown shag carpeting
that was eventually replaced with plush white carpeting when that came into fashion. The dark wood paneling has now been painted a brighter cream colored shade, although it still feels a bit rough against my hand as I run my fingers across a section of it.

  I remember sitting in this room in 1986, home sick from school, and watching the Challenger space shuttle blow up before my very eyes on TV. It was one of the first shocking things I’d ever seen, and I often thought about that shattering of the pieces in mid air as being similar to the feeling one gets when their family falls apart before their very eyes. Everything is going along so well, and then it just isn’t. There’s no warning, only destruction.

  “Ms. Sanders?” the agent - whose name I think is Eileen - says from behind me as I stand motionless in the living room.

  “Yes?” I ask, turning around and noticing her repeatedly checking her phone, ostensibly for the current time.

  “I’m really sorry, but my son has missed his bus, and I’ve got to run over to the school to pick him up…”

  “Oh sure. I understand.”

  “Can you wait out there on the porch for a bit? I’ll be right back.”

  She’s trying to save her commission, which I totally understand. Even though I’m not in the market to buy. I’m just here for a few days, walking down memory lane. Which currently feels like walking on broken glass.

  “Take your time. I think I’ll just walk around the property for a bit, if that’s okay?”

  “Oh, yes! That’s not a problem at all,” the perky agent says. I watch her immovable blond bob, wondering what kind of hairspray she uses that keeps it from swaying in the gentle Georgia breeze. It’s early fall, and I notice the leaves changing to a deep shade of gold on the big oak tree out front. “The owners are out of town, so walk around and take a look at whatever you want. I’ll be back in a flash!”

  It occurs to me that she might need a medication to even out her peppy mood, but maybe that’s just the psychologist in me. Thankfully, I can’t prescribe medication.

  I first take a seat on the brick steps in front of the home, the place where I sat for hours as a kid, usually listening to the large boom box teetering on my lap. I close my eyes and suck in a deep breath of air, the smell of burning leaves in the distance reminding me of what Georgia is like in those autumn months before the unpredictable winter sets in.

  The tiny town of Peach Valley sits in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains, shaded by the alternating light grays and dark blues of the mountains towering above.

  For much of my life, Peach Valley offered an idyllic childhood with the Pumpkin Parade in the fall and the 4th of July parade in the heat of summer. Back then, a kid could walk miles to the local drug store to purchase copious amounts of rock candy without worrying about being snatched by some child predator. In fact, I spent many a summer walking to the local shopping center parking lot - at least a mile away - to ride the ferris wheel at the traveling carnival that came to town a few times each year.

  Those were different times.

  There was no social media. Bullying was expected and something we all had to overcome. Kids played outside until the street lights came on, and their parents rang dinner bells to signal supper time. Lightning bugs were something to chase, and cartwheels were something to be perfected in the itchy grass of every kid’s front yard.

  There were no cell phones, only phones hanging on the wall with rotary dials and curly cords. There were no reality shows, only three channels plus PBS. I smile as I think about the aluminum foil contraption that we kept on the rabbit ears above the TV just so we could watch Family Ties and Growing Pains.

  I look over at the big oak tree and remember the one time I rode a motorcycle in my whole life, and my brother ran us both into that tree. As I walk toward it, I can still see the huge gouge out of the trunk, and I am reminded that people can have tough things happen to them, but still rise up stronger even with deep scars. I can’t help but smile thinking back to that moment, though. Although I was so angry at my brother at the time, it was one of the only times that I can remember us doing something that was a brother/sister thing. Before he turned to drugs. Before he made a string of bad decisions that destroyed any hope for a relationship with me.

  As I stand looking at the oak tree, my eyes move to the left toward the street in front of my old home, and a wave of other memories sweep across my consciousness. The house - about the same size as ours - sits diagonally. It’s a tan color now, but back then it was dark gray with equally dark shutters. A cast of rental families had moved in and out of that house for years, as if a revolving door brought them in and then ushered them out months later.

  But one family springs to mind, and a small smile claims ownership of my mouth for a moment as I allow myself to think back to that early summer day.

  Late May, 1987

  It’s already so freaking hot. I really wish my mother would listen to my constant pleadings to move to a beach somewhere. After all, I’ve only been to the beach twice in my life, neither time I can even recall. At least the heat would be bearable at the beach.

  Being the third child can really suck sometimes. My parents seemed to have a lot more money when my brother and sister were younger, which I guess makes sense because it was one less mouth to feed. So they had all of these grand adventures - evidence of which I can see on those God-awful reel-to-reel family slideshows they force us to watch at least once a year - well before I was born.

  They had all the cool stuff - an above ground pool, a bigger house, even a station wagon! By the time I came along, we were living in a smaller house with my Dad’s work van and another car that definitely wasn’t the cool station wagon I craved. I learned a long time ago not to complain or ask why we didn’t take more vacations or have a bigger house like some of my other friends. I got the message loud and clear to be thankful for what I have and stop complaining.

  So today I am walking to my friend’s house, as I do almost every day. I saw a new family move into the rental house the other day. Actually, I saw a woman and what appeared to be a little girl. I can see everything out of my bedroom window, although none of it seems particularly exciting.

  I make it to Tabitha’s house, but she isn’t home. I kind of want to jump on her trampoline, but I also don’t want to do it alone, so I head back toward my house trying to think of a way to break the boredom.

  I feel like an only child even though I have a brother and a sister. My sister is into hanging out with her friends and dating ugly boys. My brother is into drugs and dating sluts. So, yeah, I’m feeling lonelier by the day. All of my friends seem to have good relationships with their siblings. They have these cool, built-in friendships that I just don’t have.

  As I walk across the main road that runs just behind my house, I notice the late spring yellow pollen sitting in puddles on the sides of the road, floating on top of the little pools of recent rainwater. Normally, the pollen is long gone by now, but for some reason it hung around this year - probably to further aggravate my allergies and asthma.

  I feel bad because my mother installed an attic fan in our house the summer before I was diagnosed with asthma. It wasn’t until she turned it on and started sucking the outside inside of our house that we realized I am highly allergic to most of the things floating in the Georgia air. So now the attic fan is an ugly reminder of my irritable lungs and the wasted money she spent. Maybe that’s why we can’t go to the beach. The attic fan sucked up all of our money.

  As I enter the small neighborhood where we live, I get a wisp of pollen straight into my nasal passages just as I pass the ugly gray rental house that is diagonal to my own home.

  “Achoo!” A huge sneeze escapes me, causing me to stop for a moment and bend over from the force.

  “Bless you.”

  Great. Now I’m hearing voices that aren’t there. I look around, but I see no one.

  “Achoo!” I let out again. I’m one of those “multiple sneezers” who cannot just sneeze on
e time.

  “Bless you.”

  I look around again, scanning my field of vision and seeing nothing. The old, mean man next door to my house isn’t outside. The alcoholic rose gardening man next to the rental house is usually still nursing a hangover at this time of day. And no one is outside at the rental house.

  And because they come in threes…

  “Achoo!”

  “Bless you.”

  “Okay, where are you?” I yell out, probably looking like a lunatic standing in the middle of the street as I throw my arms up in the air.

  Then I hear a chuckle. Deep, as in male, but not deep enough to be a man.

  “Over here,” he says. I turn toward the rental house and finally see him, his silhouette dark behind the screen of one of the front windows. “I’m Dawson.”

  I walk closer, wondering why he doesn’t just come outside and speak to me like a normal person. Besides, I’m wondering if he’s cute because that would be fantastic gossip to share with Tabitha later.

  “Indy,” I say, telling him the shortened version of my name. As I walk closer to his window, I can see most of his face now. He’s smiling, and it’s a nice smile.

  “Indy? Like Indiana? Or Indianapolis? One of my step dads liked racing…” He’s leaning on the windowsill, his tanned skin standing out to me first. I’m so white that there isn’t even a crayon color that would match my skin, so I envy tan people.

  “No. Like Indigo.”

  “Indigo?”

  “It’s the shade of color between blue and violet.”

  He cocks his head at me and smiles. “That’s weird.”

  “Tell my parents. They say it matches the unique color of my eyes,” I say dramatically as I lean against his window.

  He leans in, almost pressing his face to the screen and stares at me. “Hm. Nice.”

  “What?” I can feel my face starting to flush, another reason to hate pale skin.