15. SKYE
SKYE
Aubrey’s house smelled like somebody loved it.
Garlic, something sweet in the oven, a candle burning down on the counter.
That good, full noise a home makes when it’s packed with people who belong to each other.
I stepped through the door Friday evening and let it wrap around me.
I had needed to be anywhere that wasn’t the Banks house tonight.
I had needed to be a whole person for a couple hours instead of a performance, before I strapped the uniform back on in the morning.
“Auntie Skye!”
The twins rushed to me at the same exact time, talking clean over each other, neither one waiting on the other to finish.
Jodi and Chrissy. Ten years old, identical down to the natural arched eyebrows. They were pretty and growing so fast. I hugged them back and let them tell me everything at once. I smiled. I gasped in all the right spots. And I did not let one single thing show on my face.
Because they were ten. Exactly ten. And every time I laid eyes on those girls I did the math I kept swearing I’d quit doing. That ugly arithmetic that always landed on the same number. A birthday that should’ve been. A little girl who’d have been standing right at their height.
“They been counting down to Dreamgirls night all week.” Chase came out the kitchen wiping his hands on a dish towel. “I’ve watched this damn movie so much, I could play Jimmy.”
“Daddy. You can’t sing,” Jodi told him, flat, like she hated to be the one to break it to him.
“I most certainly can. And I will. Get downstairs before I change my mind about this popcorn.” He herded them toward the basement door and shot me a wink over their heads. “Good to see you, Skye. Don’t let my wife keep you up here scheming all night.”
“I’m not making any promises.”
He took his girls down to their movie. Through the floor I could already hear them fussing over who got to sit where.
Then I heard that man launch into “And I Am Telling You” in a key the Lord never authorized, the twins screaming laughing, all that warm easy sound a family makes when it’s whole and it knows it.
I stood there and listened to it a second too long.
Then Aubrey pressed a glass of wine into my hand and walked me out to the back patio, where it was just us, the string lights, and the dark.
“Okay.” She folded up into her chair and aimed those eyes at me, the ones that had clocked my every lie for twenty years. “Talk to me. How’s it going over there in Banks land? Living in the big house now. Look at God.”
“It’s good.” Which was its own problem, honestly.
“I gave up the apartment. He offered too much to turn down. Damn near double, plus room and board. Bree, I am saving almost every dime.” I turned the glass slow in my fingers.
“One more year like this. Maybe less. Then I’ll have enough.
Enough to get him back and get out of here. ”
“And the old lady?” Aubrey asked. “Miss Rita?”
“Rita.” I couldn’t even help the smile. “Rita’s my homegirl for real.
Funnier than anybody I ever met in my life.
She decided I was family the very first day and did not once ask my permission about it.
” I heard how reckless that sounded out loud and I said it anyway.
“I love her, Bree. Like, actually. And the baby, Dream. She’s so sweet. She’s truly amazing.”
And there it went. My lip started going before I could get in front of it. The tears started to pour before I could stop them.
“She reminds me of Golden.” It came out barely above a whisper.
“Every single day, Bree. Lights up the exact same way. And I go home to that little girl who isn’t mine.
I love on her. I put her to bed. And it is like getting my baby handed back to me for one hour and then losing her all over again. Every night.”
Aubrey was up out her chair with both my hands in hers before the first tear even dropped.
“Skye. Baby. You have got to stop doing this to yourself.” She squeezed hard enough to hurt, and I needed it to. “It was not your fault. You hear me talking to you? It was never your fault. What that man did, what he took from you, not one piece of that was you.”
“I know it wasn’t. But knowing doesn’t fix how it feels, Bree. Seeing Dream every day cuts me to my core. And I can’t even stop, because I need the money her daddy is paying me. So I just keep on letting it cut me. Every single day.”
She held onto my hand until I got my breath back under me. She didn’t say another word, because there wasn’t one to say.
After a while Aubrey topped off both glasses and switched up the weather. She always knew when to move me off a thing before it swallowed me whole.
“So what about the other one? It’s two girls, right? You told me about the little one. What’s the big one like?”
I took a slow sip. The professional in me sat up, the part that used to read a courtroom for a living.
“You know I can read people,” I said. “That was the job, Bree. Twelve years reading juries. Reading witnesses. Reading a client’s face to know if he was lying to me before I ever put him on the stand.
I built a career off knowing what’s sitting underneath.
And that girl.” I shook my head. “Something is off with that child.”
“Off how?”
“For one, she never speaks to me. She always seems to be lurking around and spying. And she’s only nice to her daddy. She’s pretty indifferent to everyone else. I don’t know, something is weird about her.”
“Mm.” Aubrey’s face shifted. “That’s a lot, Skye.”
“I’ve seen it before.” I met her eyes. “In grown men. The kind you read about in a headline later. I have never in my life seen it sitting inside a fifteen-year-old, and it stands every hair on my arm straight up.”
Aubrey was quiet a beat. Then she went where a good friend goes.
“You sure you not just being paranoid, though? I gotta ask. You out here living in a stranger’s house, sleeping with one eye cracked, running from what you running from. That’ll put a boogeyman in every corner, baby. It would for anybody.”
I sat with that. Honestly. Because she had every right to ask it.
“Maybe,” I admitted.
“And didn’t that girl lose her mama? Young?” Aubrey pressed, gentle. “That right there will turn a child clean inside out. Grief wears a lot of faces, Skye. Cold is one of them.”
“That’s true.” I let it breathe. “That’s fair. She did lose her mother.” I picked the glass back up. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m out here seeing ghosts. But I’ma keep an eye on her regardless. Can’t help it. It’s how I’m built.”
“Mm hm.” And just like that the weight slid off Aubrey’s face and the devilment climbed right back on.
“Okay. Now. You really gonna sit up in my backyard and not say one word about the fine one? Because you gave me the grandmother, you gave me the baby, you gave me the scary one, and you skated clean past Justice like I wasn’t gonna clock it. ”
And my mouth did the thing. That thing it did now, all on its own, before my brain could get a hand on it.
“See!” Aubrey jabbed a finger at me, delighted. “That! Right there! Your face just did an entire monologue about that man!”
“It did not.”
“You are grinning like a schoolgirl who just got passed a note.”
“I don’t even know the man.” I could not get the smile back down. “That’s the God’s honest truth. He’s fine, but he’s so secretive, Bree. Locked up tight as a bank. There’s a side of that man don’t nobody get to see. Every time I think I caught a piece of him, he closes it right back up on me.”
“Baby, everybody got secrets.” Aubrey laughed into her wine. “Shoot. Maybe that’s the thing right there. Maybe y’all supposed to crack each other’s codes.”
The smile came off my face.
“No,” I said, quiet now. “Trust me on that one. That man ever cracks my code, he won’t fall in love, Bree.
He’ll fire me. And that’s if I’m lucky.” I looked off into her dark backyard.
“If I’m not lucky, a man with reach like his hands me right on over to the people I been running from for five years.
So no. He can keep every secret he’s got. Because God knows I’m keeping mine.”
Aubrey didn’t laugh at that one. She reached over and squeezed my knee. We sat in the string lights a while longer, two grown women who’d known each other since before either one of us had a single thing to hide, listening to a grown man commit murder on a showtune through the basement window.
It was late by the time I made it back.
I came up that long driveway with my headlights cut, quiet out of habit. I don’t know what made me look up. But I did. Up at the second floor, where all the windows sat dark and sleeping.
All but one.
Storie’s room. Light on. And she was standing dead center in the window looking down at me. Just standing there. Still as a photograph. Watching me roll up the drive in the dark like she’d been posted up waiting to see what time I’d come dragging in.
Something cold walked straight up the back of my neck. But I did the normal thing. The harmless thing. I lifted my hand and I waved up at her, friendly and light. Hey. It’s just me.
Storie didn’t wave back. She held me in her eyes one more second. Then she turned and walked off from that window, and the light clicked out behind her.
I rolled my eyes at my own self, standing out there in the dark all spooked by a moody teenager in a window. Get it together, Skye. I let myself in, threw the locks behind me, and headed up the stairs.
And I passed Storie’s room on the way to mine.
Her door was shut. And there wasn’t one bit of light underneath it. No line of gold along the floorboards.
I stood in that hallway one second longer than I had any business standing there, staring at that dark seam under her door, running math that would not add up.
Then I made myself keep it moving. Because there were a hundred ways to explain that girl getting into bed quick.
Only one of them scared me. And I was too tired to hold the scary one tonight.
In my room I sat on the edge of the bed and finally let my shoulders come down off my ears. My phone buzzed.
Justice: At the casino. Gonna be here late. Everybody’s down, Rita took her pills at nine. Just wanted you to know where I was.
I looked at that a long minute.
Just wanted you to know where I was.
He remembered. I’d asked that man for exactly one thing. A heads up. So I would never again wake up in a strange dark house with no idea where he was. And he listened to me.
I texted back quickly, before I had to look too close at the fact that I was sitting there grinning at my phone.
Me: Thank you for the heads up. We’re all good on this end. Get home safe.
Three little dots. Then:
Justice: Always do.
I set the phone down and lay back on a bed that wasn’t mine, in a house that wasn’t mine, wearing a name that wasn’t mine. And for one dangerous minute, before I remembered every last reason I couldn’t, I let myself feel like I was right where I was supposed to be.