Dannika Dark - Six Months

Reno heard his phone ringing upstairs. When it stopped, the house phone rang.

“Reno?” Ivy called out from the kitchen. “Someone’s asking for you.”

He crossed the room and took the phone, then leaned against the wall. “Yeah.”

“I think April’s trying to kill herself.”

Reno’s heart stopped and he almost dropped the phone. It was Trevor. “Is this your idea of a sick joke?”

“I need your help. Long story short, April’s mother overdosed and April’s staying in her motel room.”

Blood pounded in his head and he almost couldn’t hear Trevor. “Where is she?”

“Holed up in a dump by the sound of it,” Trevor said in rushed words. “She’s drunk or something and babbling incoherently. I don’t know how long she’s been there, but she won’t tell me where it is. I have her cell number, but she’s not answering anymore. Look, she told me you were a PI. I’ve called all the motels I can think of, but I don’t know what the fuck her mother’s first name is or if she was the one renting out the room. Dammit! I’ll pay you whatever.”

“I already have her number and mother’s full name, as well as the man she usually stays with. I’ll have her location in less than fifteen minutes. And Trevor?”

“Yeah?”

“Keep your money.”

Trevor’s voice leveled out and dropped an octave. “I’m coming with you, so call me back.”

You don’t officially hit rock bottom until you’ve lost it all. I’d spent years despising my mother, and after I’d been given a fresh start, I wanted to mend the rift between us by trying to understand why she chose the life she did. Why she left Rose and me with our grandma after Dad died, and why she never once showed any interest in turning her life around. Tracking her whereabouts wasn’t difficult because there were only two places in town where she stayed.

This motel housed drug addicts. Every so often, the cops would organize a bust to make a public example, but it never stopped anyone from dealing and using.

My mom resembled nothing of the woman I once knew. Her body was frail and she didn’t look over ninety pounds. Her once beautiful blond hair was now thinning and dry. She had track marks all up her arms and in other places on her bruised body. Two of her teeth were missing and she behaved erratically—talking to herself and twitching, as if incapable of sitting still. I tried sobering her up with coffee, and she kept asking if I had any cash she could borrow. I wanted to buy her groceries and new clothes. I wanted to make her better again so she’d leave this life and stop using.

But you can’t make a user clean.

Mom made a call and thirty minutes later, someone brought her drugs. She had plenty of prescription drugs in the bathroom—either stolen or bought—but they weren’t enough.

I cried. I’d never imagined it was possible to feel so much empathy for a woman who had abandoned me. I mostly cried for the woman and mother she could have been but chose not to be. I cried because deep down, I just wanted to feel my mother’s arms around me and know her love.

Then things went from bad to worse.

She refused to talk about the past and seeing me must have made her shoot up more than normal. I went into the bathroom and broke down, ready to finally walk away for good. But it was so hard. All I’d ever wanted was for my mom to love me. I just wanted to be good enough for her. How could I walk away from the person who gave me life?

That was when it hit me how much our lives ran parallel. But I had something my mom never had.

Hope.

That single word was all encompassing. It bled into our lives as something that divided us—a concept she turned away from. It proved that despite our similarities, we were on different paths because of the choices we’d made.

When I finally emerged from the bathroom, my mom was lying on the bed, arms stretched wide. Her eyes were rolled back and vomit slid down the side of her hollow cheek as she convulsed.

I tried everything to resuscitate her. Despite my efforts, my mother died in my arms. The paramedics didn’t go above the call of duty to save a junkie—nothing beyond a few chest compressions.

What made the situation unbearable was that I told them I didn’t know her. I didn’t want the burden of having to pay for her funeral or cremation.

Exposed for what I was, guilt consumed me. I had sunk so low that I sent my own mother to an unmarked grave to save me the expense. After they took her body away, I spent the next three days in her room, overcome with grief. What kind of person had I become? She’d abandoned me and in the end, I had abandoned her. Loving someone is being selfless, and what exactly had I done in our relationship to demonstrate that I was anything but my mother’s daughter?

I took another swig of whiskey from the bottle, wiping my wet cheeks while sitting on the bathroom floor and staring at a pile of pills on my lap. I’d always been the strong one who kept going when the world went to hell. People looked at my bright hair and smile and never knew the life I led or the painful past I had survived. No one ever wants to look that deep. But it didn’t matter because I didn’t want anyone’s pity; the challenges life had thrown at me had only made me want to fight harder to overcome them.

All I’d ever desired was respect. I didn’t want to be judged for where I came from, but where I was going.

“Oh, Reno.” I wept as memories assailed me. “I wish I could do it all over again. I didn’t deserve you.”

Truly, I didn’t. Part of me wished he cared about me as much as I did him, but he could never love a human. I’d learned a lot in my short stint in the Breed world—most looked upon humans as third-class citizens. I was just a curiosity to him, and men like Reno didn’t pine over women who left them for another man. They got over it and moved on. They sought out gregarious, flirtatious women who had their lives together and balances in check. I, on the other hand, was Romance Novel Girl, living in a fantasy world.

“I always knew those books would be the death of me,” I murmured.

My long legs stretched out wide in front of me. My jean shorts disappeared beneath my oversized black shirt, which was heavy between my legs from a pile of multicolored pills. I wanted to see what my mother had chosen over me, so I’d spent the last hour staring at the tiny pills and tossing them into the toilet one at a time.

It was therapeutic.

“April! Open the door right now!” a man’s voice demanded from outside. Not outside the bathroom door, but even farther. Whoever it was hammered on the door several times while I took another swig from the bottle.

I hadn’t truly grieved her loss, and this was my night to get it all out of my system before I moved on. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. I didn’t have the heart to call Rose and tell her our mom was dead, although she probably would have just hung up. But the memory of the woman who gave life to me lying lifeless in my arms shattered me.

I tossed a pill into the toilet and spouted off another reason why I hated her. But I was honestly running out of reasons. The main ones had already been addressed, and now I was left with some of the good memories, which made it harder to let go.

A loud crash sounded in the other room and I drunkenly lifted my eyes. The bathroom door swung open in front of me and hit the wall with a thud.

“Hi, Trevor.”

His eyes were wide and staring at the pills in my lap.

“Babe, what did you do ?” he breathed, moving quickly until he was kneeling on the floor.

“You’re so handsome, Trev.”