#54 Four Scars - Ceithre Chraiceann

After the sun set and Lyle and I finished with our evening routines we lay in bed. Frankie - who I offered the couch to - opted to stay in the bathtub.

My head rested on Lyle's stomach with a few pieces of scratch paper by my side and a pencil in hand. I was trying to draw a recent guest who checked out earlier this morning. She was an older woman around eighty traveling with her husband. I often found older folks more intriguing to draw, usually it was because I perceived there to be so much inside of them. Many more experiences in their little tow than could fit inside the mind of a person half their age.

People past the age of sixty also seemed more open, not necessarily in sharing but in kindness. Almost every week a white haired individual offered to help me with the dishes or told me I didn't have to trouble with making their bed. The kindness acted as a sort of mirror, they didn't try to hide behind it like a mask. To me it was more fulfilling to play with and capture the duality of pain and content through the eyes of those who knew it so much longer and had come to a conclusion of how to manage it.

Tonight however, it was hard to concentrate. My drawing was slow moving as I kept coming back to what Frankie mentioned in the bathtub.

You know.

I didn't know. In fact I didn't even know what direction to search for what Frankie hinted to when he uttered the simple sentence. Before Lyle went to live with Beth and Ivy something happened, but what? Her biological family? She never spoke about them. Lyle didn't talk much about anything that happened before we met. I got the feeling that it wasn't because she wanted to hide it from me, but because she simply didn't see the relevance. I knew her now and that was it, what happened to her or who she was before was irrelevant. But not to me. I wanted to know all of her.

"Hey Lyle." I stirred putting down my half finished drawing and turning to my side so my cheek lay on her stomach. At my voice Lyle put down the book she'd borrowed from Grace giving me her full attention. "Remember when I asked you about your parents?"

"Asking a question about asking a question? We're getting tricky now." She laughed but didn't discard my words as she nodded.

"Can you tell me about them?" I ventured. "Frankie mentioned you two went to high school together and then something happened, but I didn't really get much of the story."

"Why do you think it was my parents?"

"I don't know you just never talk about them - I mean you never talk about much in your past - but I just figured you had to live with someone before Ivy and Beth." I paused. "You don't have to tell me, but I am here if you want to. Believe me, I know it's easy to keep your past close to your chest and I never imagined I would share my story with anyone but here I am. And honestly I am so happy I did because you... you know."

And this time both of us did know.

We knew that before Lyle came into my life I could hardly be defined as a person. I was a mannequin, filling the space where May went. Running through the motions and avoiding the pain.

Lyle took a deep breath rocking my head with her actions. "There's not much to tell. They were never around and I spent most of my time at my neighbors."

"Beth and Ivy?"

"Yes, they took care of me. More than my parents ever did"

"Why's that?"

"They were both just took invested in their jobs to notice me. Then one day on their way to work they got hit by a truck and –" She stalled and my hand found hers giving a reassuring squeeze. "And I moved in with Beth and Ivy. Quit school and went with the wrong crowd for a bit."

"Is that when you started..."

"Stealing things?"

I nodded against the cotton fabric of her shirt.

"It was pretty much right after. At first it was a way to get my anger out, just something fun to do. God, the rush was enough to make me forget - even if it was temporary - and I was good at it." She chuckled to herself but then sobered. "They were little things like pickpocketing assholes who I'd see harass women on the subway but as word got around I got picked up to do bigger jobs. I never did it to hurt people, but I'm not sure I ever truly had control of that."

Her voice dropped and for a second we were both silent. Without a word she reached around me taking my shoulders to move my head off her body and rest it on a nearby pillow. My stomach tensed and my first instinct was to wonder if she was angry with me for pushing her.

But I wasn't pushing her. If Lyle did anything it was because she wanted to and for one of the first times she wanted to explain beyond what I asked.

She sat with her back to me a foot away. Timidly I rose and was about to wrap my arms around her when the material of her shirt rippled as she removed it. Unconsciously, I sucked in an audible breath as I took in the uneven colors and raised grooves on her back.

"I stayed with an underground group that pulled off burglaries in the city until this." She forced a laugh and reached back to point at a two inch scar on her right side just below her ribs.

I didn't say anything, I couldn't as I stared at her bare back. On the train ride to Unit #16 when I asked her how many times she'd been shot there was always a thought in the back of my mind that she'd been joking. Making up a remark to make her seem more badass, but now I knew it to be true. Firsthand I could see just how many times she'd taken a beating.

From the moonlight trickling in from the window I counted three scars not including the one I already knew to be on her upper arm. I'd seen her naked back before. I'd run my hands over this exact spot dozens of times, and usually my hands ached to touch her bare skin, but today I couldn't bring my fingertips closer than an inch away. Naked vulnerable flesh that had been hurt lay before me, and I was scared.

Would I hurt her too?

It was then that I understood why she kept her life so close to her chest, tucked away beneath her rib cage. She'd felt physical pain, she knew the scarring of the ripped skin and the ache in her stomach. She knew pain stronger than I could ever imagine, and that is why she assumed a protective role. Lyle wanted to keep me from the same pain she'd experienced, but also on a deeper level that maybe she didn't even recognize she was protecting herself.

Her walls kept the metaphorical bullet holes from lodging themselves within her brain. If she didn't, I knew from experience it was easy to lose count.

Lyle sensed my hesitation and found my hand with hers guiding it to the healed wound at her side. The skin was patched but the wound left a ridge a few shades lighter than her natural skin tone.

"Beth fixed it up pretty good didn't she?"

"Did these all happen at the same time?"

"No, over a few years." She pointed to each one reciting a brief story.

The tales of the other two that grazed an inch of her left side and upper shoulder were short and similar tales of home owners who showed their disapproval of Lyle sneaking into their homes by firing a few shots.

"Besides the one you wrapped up on my shoulder this one is the most recent." Again she indicated to the largest scare by her right hip. "It's why I left. I realized I wasn't doing it to help myself anymore. I was hurting people."

"What happened?" I allowed my hand to roam from scar to scar grazing each one lightly as if too much pressure would reopen the wound.

She sucked in a breath and I waited patiently for her to begin. "The two others I ran with – Keely and James - got word of a Monet at this house on Green St. in the middle of the city. The whole thing went smoothly, I found the painting and was on my way down the stairs when another group showed up. Apparently they heard the tip too, goes without saying that they weren't about to leave just because I got there first." She swallowed hard. "Then I saw this woman. I'd jumped the stair railing and was running to the backdoor. She was just standing in the kitchen. She couldn't have been younger than 80. She was drinking a glass of water when I came tearing through. There was barely enough time to register her face when they shot at me – at least I think it was me because the first round got me - but the second time they missed." She spoke slowly as if in each word she was struck with a new memory. "I should've found out who was going to be at the house that night." She pulled her shirt back over her head.

"I left right after that and didn't steal a thing for 7 months. I quit, I really did and I was happy, but then..."

She stopped as if trying to remember why. I took the opportunity to wrap my arms around her torso in a tight hug. I could tell it was difficult for her to continue, she'd said so much already and I was grateful she was allowing herself to be vulnerable with me. Yet in the silent moment I couldn't help the thoughts firing through my head. If she quit why did she fall off the wagon? It wasn't that she was offered up the job, she had to go through the extra trouble of poaching it from Smith and Jones. Was the temptation just too much?

Lyle was so strong willed it was hard to imagine her giving in to mere want without a driving motive. What would that be? She had no connection to White Pine and obviously not to my mother's painting. I thought back to what she told me on the train the night our story began. Her code, she didn't steal from people she didn't think deserved it. When we first met I thought her statement to be rather robin hood and maybe a little self-conceited, after all who was she or anyone else to decide who got hurt. But after hearing her story the pieces were coming together, the code was a guardrail. Preventing her from going over the edge that she careened over the night she stole the Monet from the old woman.

So what had Monroe done to warrant Lyle's re-entry to the crime scene? Was it simply because he was filthy rich?

"What made you come to White Pine?"

Lyle turned her body to face me but her head refused to lift high enough for her to make eye contact with anything but the faded sheets. "My parents."

"Wh-" I started reaching my hands to rest on her knees but then it hit me. I'd always assumed money to be her motivator, but that was before I knew her – really knew her. It had never been about money, the painting, Monroe, the lost look in her eyes I recognized all too well. Her drive so similar to my own making it that much easier to overlook. This was about family.

"Lyle?"

She hummed in response bringing her head up to meet my gaze.

"Where did your parents work?"

There was no hesitation this time. "X-Enterprises."

Her eyes were bright in the night and I nodded urging her to go on.

"I was only sixteen when they passed but I pushed all of my parent's flaws onto the business. It was the reason they were never home and the reason they died." She shook her head. "I don't blame the business anymore. I know it's not as simple as that, but when I heard those two idiots bragging about their work for X-Enterprises and all the money they were going to make I couldn't ignore it." She ran her hands through her hair.

"I had this whole thing in my head that I would finish this job - just this one- and use the money to buy Ivy and Beth something nice to repay them for all they've done for me, or put flowers on my parents grave stones – I don't know. Somehow everything that happened would balance out." She took a deep breath a tight smile fighting at her lips. "I see now that money isn't capable of that. I guess that's why I went back to you after you left me at the diner. I saw some of my own anger and loss in you and I-" She shrugged at a loss for words, but she didn't need them. I understood.

More profoundly than anything I'd experienced before I understood her pain. While both of us had found homes, she with Beth and Ivy and I with Grace, we were still untethered. Single and flailing in the wind as if the gravity escaped from our personal bubbles leaving us floating in space. For so long we'd gotten used to it, but now as we eased back down to land our footing was unsteady and we held onto each other for guidance.

"What were your parents' names?"

"Margaret and Miguel."

All I could do was hold out my arms. She lay her head on my shoulder as she crawled into my lap. "Thank you for listening."

"I can be quiet when I want to."

A muffled laugh rippled through my sleeve and I smiled as I stroked her scarred back.

-

It took a while but finally we're learning about Lyle's past !