“Your family sold drugs,” I said reluctantly.
“Not just sold. Manufactured, tested, marketed, delivered… it was a real family affair.”
“You wanted nothing to do with it,” I offered.
Sawyer shook his head. “As soon as I was old enough to understand that I could leave, I started planning my escape. I’d made the mistake of just trying to pack up my shit and walk out of the doublewide I shared with my folks and twelve brothers and sisters, but Pops wasn’t going to let the black sheep of the family just walk out the door and start spilling all those family secrets.”
“What happened?” I asked as I gave Sawyer’s fingers a gentle squeeze.
“My older brothers showed me the error of my ways,” was all he said. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what he was talking about.
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Before the beating or after when I finally woke up from the coma I’d been in for two weeks?” There was no anger in his voice, no pain, no sadness, no nothing. It was like with every word he was distancing himself more and more from what had happened.
“I guess I was around fourteen. After that, I got smart and came up with an actual plan. I was eager to show everyone I was now with the program, but an accidental fire in the meth lab here or letting myself get rolled for some five-figure product there quickly landed me in a less hands-on role.”
I felt sick to my stomach as I imagined a then teenaged Sawyer fighting for survival in a world like that.
“What role did they put you in?”
“A financial one. Since I was pretty much the only one in the family who could count higher than ten without needing to expose more body parts than my hands to do it, I was given the task of counting the money. I skimmed enough money off the top to get me out of there for good and then I was gone. I finished my undergrad in just two years and then applied to vet school.”
“How did you support yourself? It couldn’t have been easy to go to work and school with that kind of pace,” I offered.
“Actually, it was. What wasn’t easy was taking even one wrong step that would put me back in that hellhole for good. I slept in the boiler rooms of different buildings on campus; I’d offer to close at the fast food restaurant I worked at so I could both eat what I wanted and sleep in the break room at night. You should have seen me on the first day I got my own apartment. It wasn’t even an apartment, really. It was one room with a bed that bumped up right against the so-called kitchen, and you had to walk to the end of the hall to use the public bathrooms to take a piss or shit. Showers involved me standing in the middle of my kitchen in the widest bucket I could find and dousing myself with pitcher after pitcher of tap water that never got hotter than lukewarm. They were cold as hell and I usually made a mess of my floor, but I took one of those showers every night. Every fucking night,” Sawyer grated out.
“You made it,” I reminded him as I tugged slightly on his hand to get his attention so he wouldn’t stay buried in that hellish past.
When Sawyer looked at me, it was like he’d forgotten I was even there. “Yeah,” he said weakly. His phone chose that moment to ring but like so many times before, he merely glanced at the caller ID and then silenced the phone.
“What about you?” he asked. “I know you’ve been living in Oklahoma, but is that where you grew up?”
“Um, yes and no,” I began. “When I was living with my mom and dad, it was in Connecticut. Both of my parents taught at Yale. My father was a professor in the English department, and my mother ran the genetics program.”
“Wow,” Sawyer responded. “You come from some good stock.”
I smiled. “I was raised by two of the most amazing people on this planet, but I don’t really know where I came from. I’m adopted. My parents, DCFS, my caseworker—they all spent years trying to find out how I’d ended up sitting alone at night in a sandbox of a closed park. No one ever came to claim me, I wasn’t old enough to talk, and other than being a little on the thin side, I was in perfect health.”
“Did you ever try to find your birth parents when you got older?”
I shook my head. “It wasn’t something that ever drove me. I was who I was and even though my mom and dad had a lot to do with that, I think we each have that thing inside of us that makes us follow our own path. Like you,” I said cautiously.