“I could have, and they would have helped me. But it would have taken clear thinking to get there, and even though my mother wasn’t using, she was still pushing drugs on me. She was happier when I was high. I think it made her feel better about herself. You might have noticed our presidential names. What a joke they are. When she named Kennedy, she told me it was important to have an unforgettable name, since we’d have forgettable lives.” He paced again, his gut knotting painfully. “I tried to get Kennedy away from her several other times, and when Lincoln was born, I tried to take them both.” Tears sprang to his eyes. “I knew better than to let them grow up on the streets.” He looked up at the ceiling as his tears fell, guilt tearing at his heart. “It was an awful cycle. I’d try to go without drugs to be there for the kids, steal food for them, formula for Linc. They cried all the time. I felt so fucking guilty about them, about Truman, I’d turn to drugs to…” He dragged his forearm across his eyes and forced himself to meet her crying eyes and said, “To fucking escape the repulsive person I’d become.”

She looked down, and in that moment he knew he’d lost her, but he had to go on. He had to tell her everything.

“Days, weeks, years, blended together. I stole food, money, clothes. I did so many things I’m not proud of to make sure those babies survived. I stayed with them every minute I could to make sure nobody fucked with ’em. Then Tru got out of jail and tracked me down. He tried to convince me to get clean, but when you’re an addict, you don’t see what others see, and somehow you also do see it. It’s confusing because you don’t realize—or don’t want to realize—you’re wasting your life and hurting everyone around you, and you make them into the villains. But at the same time, I felt like such a waste, and the guilt ate me alive. I couldn’t handle being around the brother who had worked so hard to save me. I was afraid to tell him about the kids because I’d already ruined his life, and I knew my mother’s posse of crackheads would come after him if he tried to take them away. I couldn’t do that to Tru, not after everything he’d done for me.” He clenched his teeth, guilt rising to the surface again, and said, “So I told him to fuck off, and then I did what I’d learned to do best. I went deeper underground with the kids and our mother so he couldn’t find us. I wasn’t thinking about how bad it was for the kids, and I should have been. There’s absolutely no excuse.” Tears rolled down his cheeks. “When I think of how they lived…”

He turned away, trying to regain control, but the self-loathing and sadness was bone deep. Letting those horrid feelings out was the only way he’d get past them, so he faced her again, speaking faster. “Months went by, and one night I’d gone out to try to scrounge up money for formula, and when I stumbled back into the place where we were staying, I found our mother lying lifeless on the floor. She’d overdosed, and the babies were screaming their heads off on an old mattress where they’d been sleeping when I left. I felt like that thirteen-year-old kid again, lost, powerless, and as ashamed as I had been the night I’d killed that fucking rapist. So I called Tru. I knew he’d take the kids, and then I could disappear. Get as far away from the three of them as I could, so I’d never hurt them again.”