12. SKYE
SKYE
The driver dropped the girls off a little after four. I heard Dream before I saw her, that quick light patter of a six-year-old who ran everywhere she went, calling my name down the hall before the front door shut behind her.
“Miss Skye! Miss Skye, guess what.”
“What, baby?” I came around from the kitchen and she launched herself into my legs like she hadn’t seen me in a year instead of since breakfast. I put my hand on the back of her head.
My chest did the thing it always did with this child, went soft and stupid and unguarded before I could stop it. She brought up so many memories.
“We got to feed the class fish today. Both of them. And one is named Beyoncé and the other one is named Jeffrey.” She said Jeffrey like it was the funniest word in the English language. “Who names a fish Jeffrey?”
“That is a serious question. Jeffrey is an odd name.”
“That’s what I said!”
Storie came in behind her and slid her earbuds out of her ears. “I like Jeffrey. Reminds me of Dahmer,” she directed at her sister.
And then she slipped them back in. But didn’t speak to me. She never did. She’d made it clear from day one that I was furniture she hadn’t asked for, and I’d stopped reaching for a girl who didn’t want to be reached. But what she just said was disturbing as fuck. Does Justice know how off she is?
“I made y’all a snack,” I told Dream, steering her toward the kitchen. “Go wash those little hands.”
I’d cut apples and laid out the good peanut butter, the kind Dream liked, with pretzels and cheese in the sections of a plate so it felt like more than it was.
Dream climbed up on the stool and narrated the rest of her day between bites.
The fish, a boy who cried, a sticker she earned.
I stood at the counter and let the warmth of her wash over me.
I wouldn’t let myself sit with how much I’d started to need this.
Storie took a plate without a word and stood at the far counter, apart, always apart, watching her sister be happy like it was a language she’d never learned.
Down the hall, Rita was parked in the TV room in front of her stories. Her new favorite show, Beyond the Gates. She hollered at that television like the people in it could hear her.
“Mm mm mm. Baby, don’t you trust that woman. She smilin’ too hard. That’s a smilin’-too-hard woman if I ever saw one.” A pause, and then, delighted, scandalized, to nobody: “See! What I tell you!”
I smiled to myself. An hour of peace, a happy child eating apples, an old woman fussing at her programs. Two weeks in and this had started to feel like a life. My life. A dangerous thing to let it feel like.
While the girls ate, I slid my phone out of my scrubs pocket. I tried to convince myself I was just checking the time. I wasn’t. I typed the name into the search bar, small, fast, in the corner of the kitchen with my back half-turned.
Solomon Sheffield.
And there he was. A fresh headline, hours old.
He’d given an interview from inside. There was a photo, my Solo, older now, grayer, thinner in the face than the man who’d wrapped his big hands around mine across a steel table and thanked God for me.
And under the photo, in his own words, the thing that reached down my throat and closed a cold fist around my heart.
“My lawyer was incompetent. I sat in this cell for years because the woman defending me dropped the ball. She had my life in her hands and she didn’t do right. If I’d had real representation, I’d have been home to my kids a long time ago.”
I read it, and the kitchen tilted.
Because he was wrong, and he had no idea how wrong, and I could never in this life tell him. I hadn’t dropped the ball.
But Solo hated me now. I could see it in his eyes. And if I were him, I’d hate me too.
“What are you looking at?”
I hadn’t heard her move. That was the thing about Storie, she moved through a house like a cat, and now she was standing close behind my shoulder, close enough to read my screen, those flat pretty eyes already on it before I could think.
I exited out fast, smooth, everything I had left in me poured into making the motion look like nothing at all.
“Just the news.” I turned and gave her an easy face, the face I could put on in my sleep. “Nothing interesting. You should go get started on your homework, baby.”
She looked at me a beat too long. She hadn’t been trying to be friendly, coming up on me like that.
She’d been trying to see. There was a difference, and I knew it in my bones, because I’d spent a marriage learning the difference between a person who wanted to know you and a person who wanted to catch you.
“I want to make dinner for my dad tonight,” she said. “I’ll do my homework after.”
It caught me off guard. In two weeks I’d never once seen this child lift a finger for anybody in this house.
“Oh. Well, I was going to cook—”
“I want to do it.” Her face did something quick, there and gone, too fast to name. “I owe it to him.”
The words sat wrong. Couldn’t tell you why. A daughter wanting to cook for her father was a sweet thing, a normal thing, something that should have warmed up the kitchen. But it came out of Storie flat and certain, like a line she’d practiced, like a debt she was settling.
I owe it to him. A strange thing for a child to say.
“Fine,” I said, keeping it light, keeping my face soft and open. “Kitchen’s yours, chef.”
She held my eyes one more second, then turned and started pulling things from the refrigerator like she’d had the menu picked out before she ever walked in the door.
I went back to wiping a counter that was already clean, watching that girl move around the kitchen with a purpose I couldn’t read, and I told myself I was being paranoid.
I told myself a teenage girl deciding to be nice for once was not a thing that required watching.
But even knowing that, I had to watch her anyway.