I wake with a start, lungs and mouth gasping for breath with the dream that haunted me so often many years ago. I haven’t had the dream of Tinley walking away with tears streaking her face in nearly a decade, but being back home, seeing her again, has brought that demon right back. Only the one I just woke up from included a crying baby in her arms as she left me for good. Still unable to get the sounds of their pain out of my head, I cup my hands over my ears and hum until it goes away, like I did many times in my closet as a child hiding from my drunk grandfather. If I was quiet enough, he’d forget I existed and would wallow in his own pain and misery until he passed out.
When I open my eyes, I busy myself with making a pot of coffee, hoping the tremble in my hands will dissipate as I work. It doesn’t. Of course, it doesn’t. That shake, half anger and half terror will stick around until I have answers. Knowing this, I pull out my phone and call the office.
“What’s up, man? We were just talking about you,” Wren says right as the call picks up.
I don’t doubt they were. The guys at Blackbridge Security gossip more than anyone I’ve ever met.
“I need everything you can find on Tinley Holland.”
Without questions of his own, I hear Wren’s fingers move over his keyboard. I can’t even concern myself with the fact that I’m on speaker phone and there’s no telling how many members of the team are in the room to hear what he’s about to say. I need answers, and as much as I’d like to keep my private shit private, I know they’ll be talking about it the second I hang up. At least this way they’ll get the information straight instead of through whispers of half-truths and exaggerations.
I hear whispering, but it isn’t loud enough for me to decipher.
“Tinley Renee Holland,” Wren begins before giving me her social security number, date of birth, and her home address, one I’m intimately familiar with. “She’s currently employed at Big Freight in Houston. She currently has fourteen college credits from El Centro Community College in Dallas, all general studies. She left her previous employer, another discount store, eleven months ago.”
“And that’s it?”
“She has a son, almost thirteen years old, named Alex,” he adds.
“Is that his full name?” I ask, the palm of my hand growing so sweaty I nearly drop my damn phone.
“Alejandro Cooper Holland,” Wren says, and I can tell he’s reading from the screen in front of him.
A cough or a gasp, some sound of shock, filters through the phone, but barely registers. Wren has just confirmed what I suspected but wouldn’t fully allow myself to believe over the last eighteen hours.
“Hey, isn’t your middle name Alejandro?” someone asks, but I end the call before I can be bombarded with a million other questions.
Alejandro Cooper Holland.
Tinley knew my middle name from making fun of my driver’s license photo. I never told her I hated it. Never confessed that it was my dad’s first name, and one that will haunt me until I die, a little piece of the man that stole my mother from me.
Cooper is her father’s name making her brother a junior. CJ, as the younger Holland is known, was an acquaintance of mine before his sister moved to town. He was always down for trouble despite being several years older, but that friendship crumbled when I began to show interest in his younger sibling. I was good enough to get high and steal with, but when it came to Tinley, he didn’t want me anywhere near her. He only stuck around town for a couple months after her family moved here thankfully.
I shoot off a text to Wren wanting him to gather everything he possibly can on her entire family. He confirms that he’ll send it all in an email once it’s compiled. I know I won’t have to wait long but sticking around here until it comes through isn’t an option.
What turned into a week or two to get my grandfather’s shit in order after his death has managed to turn my life upside down. I want to be happy, proud that I have a son even though what I saw of him at the school and in the parking lot tells me he’s sort of an asshole in desperate need of redirection, but right now all I can feel is a sense of loss and irrational anger at Tinley for keeping something so important from me.
Pacing won’t help.
It won’t calm me down.
It won’t make my need for answers any less prevalent, and since I’ve always been a man to face my problems head-on, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.