KEEPERS

PROLOGUE

WINTER 2014

I sat across the table from the man who had battered and tortured and brutalized me nearly twenty years ago. I had imagined him to be his sixties-he had seemed so old to me back then-but, in fact, he was in his late forties, less than a decade older than me. His thinning hair was combed straight back, and his right hand, trembling and ash white, held a filter tip cigarette. His left clutched a glass of ice water. He looked at me from behind a pair of black-rimmed glasses, his brown eyes moist, his rose running, the skin at its base red and flaky.

"I don't know what you want me to say," he said in a voice devoid of the power it once held. "I don't know where to start."

In my memory he was tall and muscular, arrogant and quick tempered, eager to lash out at those under his command at the juvenile home where I spent nine months when I was fifteen years old. In reality, sitting now before me, he was frail and timid, thin beads of cold sweat forming at the top of his forehead.

"I need to keep my job," he said, his voice a whining plea. "I can't lose this one. If any of my bosses find out, if anybody finds out, I'm finished."

I wanted to stand up and grab him, reach past the coffee and the smoke and beat him until he bled. Instead, I sat there and remembered all that I had tried so hard, over so many years to forget. Painful screams piercing silent nights. A leather belt against soft skin. Foul breathe on the back of a neck. Loud laughter mixed with muffled tears.

I had waited so long for this meeting, spent so much time and money searching for the man who held the answers to so many of my questions. But now that he was here, I had nothing to say, nothing to ask. I half listened as he talked about two failed marriages and a bankrupt business, about how the evil he committed haunts him to this very day. The words seemed cowardly and empty and I felt no urge to address them.

He and the group he was a part of had stained the future of FOUR BOYS, damage them beyond repair. Once, the sound of this man's very walk caused all our movement to stop. His laugh, low and eerie, had signaled an onslaught of tournament. Now, sitting across from him, watching his mouth move and his hands flutter, I wished I had the nerve and the courage to fight back. So many lives might have turned out differently if I had.

"I didn't mean all those things," he whispered, leaning closer toward me. "None of us did."

"I don't need you to be sorry," I said. "It doesn't do me any good."

"I'm beggin' you," he said, his voice breaking. "Try to forgive me. Please. Try."

"Learn to live with it," I told him, getting up from the table.

"I can't," he said. "Not anymore."

"Then die with it," I said, looking at him hard. "Just like the rest of us."

The pain look of surrender in his eyes made my throat tighter, easing the darkness of decades.

If only my friends had been there to see it..