Chapter 21 Poe
POE
We made Maeve stay in bed on New Year’s Eve. She said she was fine but her face was the color of a ripe plum, and she winced when she bent to rub it against Ray.
And it wasn’t just her face.
Her eyes were haunted, and she’d been having trouble keeping food down. She was trying too hard to convince us — and probably herself — that she was fine, but it was obvious she was a long way from fine, and we finally put our foot down and left her in my bed with Ray and the big TV.
We’d spent her first night back there, all of us piled in around Maeve, like we could retroactively protect her even though we all knew that was impossible. The only way to protect her now was to kill Ethan Todd, and I couldn’t wait for the moment when the light left his eyes forever.
I went to work making her breakfast, trying to think of things that might be easy on her stomach: oatmeal with a little butter, brown sugar, and milk; scrambled eggs, soft, the way she liked them. While I worked I thought about other ways we could make New Year’s Eve nice for her.
Nice and quiet. That was what she needed: to get her strength back, to feel safe again.
“That for Maeve?” Remy asked when he came into the kitchen from the gym.
It was a good sign that he was working out again. We’d barely slept over the past week, had barely eaten, and even Remy had fallen out of his maniacal health routines.
We hadn’t talked about our next steps vis-à-vis Ethan Todd, but whatever they ended up being, we need to bring our A game.
“Yeah.” I stirred the oatmeal, beginning to simmer in the saucepan, and contemplated adding banana.
“I could make her a smoothie,” Remy said.
Normally I would have told him to shove his smoothies up his ass, but it wasn’t a bad idea. Maeve was probably still dehydrated, even malnourished from the days Todd had kept her locked up in the dungeon under the castle.
My mind turned into a blank sheet of rage at the thought, and I realized I was gripping the pan’s handle so tight my knuckles had turned white. I probably needed to get into my studio, hammer away at some metal, feel it bend and twist under my hands.
“A smoothie’s not a bad idea.” I turned my attention to the eggs cooking in the skillet on another burner. I had the heat on low, and I’d scrambled them with water, the way Maeve had taught me.
Remy went to work pulling stuff from the fridge. “I’ll keep it alkaline, nothing acidic since her stomach’s been upset.”
“Whatever,” I muttered. I wasn’t in the mood for his nutritional bullshit.
He started loading stuff into the blender. “Think she’ll stay put?”
“Probably not.”
“We should stay in tonight.”
“No shit.” I turned off the heat on the stove and tipped the oatmeal into a waiting bowl.
He leaned against the counter and folded his arms over his chest. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”
He shrugged. “You seem like something’s on your mind. I mean, I know we all have killing Todd on our mind, but is something else going on?”
I thought about the question while I stirred the eggs. I sprinkled them with sea salt and started the toast I’d put in the toaster.
Maeve had been eating a lot of toast.
I sighed and turned to face him. “Honestly, this whole thing has me kind of fucked up.”
He furrowed his brow. “Fucked up in some other way than wanting to kill Todd and chop him into a million pieces before feeding him to a hundred different animals on the mountain?”
I scrubbed at the corner of my mouth with my thumb. “I’ve been thinking about my mom.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Your mom?”
I nodded. “What Todd did to Maeve, what he’s doing to other girls, well… I’ve just been thinking a lot about my mom.”
I didn’t want to say it out loud, like saying it out loud might make it true.
“You’ve always wondered whether she left or whether she was taken,” Remy said.
I’d mentioned it before, but just in passing. It had never been something I wanted to think too hard about, She’d been gone since I was a kid. Whit and I had been raised by my grandparents.
What else was there to say?
Except I was finding I actually did have more to say, more to think about the whole thing.
“Yeah, and I think I always told myself she left because even though that would be epically fucked up, it was better than imagining the alternative, even though that kind of shit happens to our people all the time.”
“Fuck. I’m sorry, man.” And I knew Remy was sorry. He was a good listener, a good guy. Not that Bram wasn’t. Bram just had a hard time tapping into his softer side. “I guess all this stuff with Maeve makes your mom’s disappearance feel close.”
He’d put into words what I couldn’t, and I nodded. “Yeah, that’s it. It feels close. Like I keep thinking about the night she went missing, wondering what it was like for her, what happened next, if she was scared and alone like Maeve.”
Remy crossed the kitchen and gave me a hug. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “That’s fucked up.”
“Thanks.”
“Anything I can do?” he asked, going back to the smoothie he was making for Maeve.
I shook my head and turned off the eggs. “It’s been over twenty years.”
He returned to the blender to continue making Maeve’s smoothie. “Did they ever… I don’t know, investigate her disappearance or anything?”
“If you could call it that. They told my grandparents that she’d probably left on her own.”
“Assholes,” Remy said.
“Yeah.” I sighed and ran a hand through my hair as if it would clear my thoughts of the past.
The numbers spoke for themselves: Native women were twice as likely as white women to go missing and a hundred times as likely to still be missing after thirty days, statistics most Native people in America knew because they were personally affected by them in some way.
And yet their cases got a tiny fraction of the media attention showered on missing white women.
I didn’t begrudge the missing white women that attention. I just wanted all women to matter the same.
My mom hadn’t mattered to anyone but us.
I went to work setting Maeve’s breakfast on the tray, because there might not have been anything I could do for my mom, but Maeve was home where she belonged.
And I would do anything — sacrifice anything — to keep her safe and sound.