44. SKYE
SKYE
Dream had been home from school a couple hours, and I’d made her finish every bit of her homework at the kitchen table before I turned her loose.
That was the rule in this house. Homework, then horse.
She’d rushed through her math so fast I made her check it twice, her leg bouncing, her eyes cutting to the window every thirty seconds like that horse might disappear on her.
Thankfully career day had gone well. Her little costume was a hit and so was her presentation according to the teacher’s handwritten note.
I’d saved the day after damn near ruining it.
Or maybe it was Storie. I would never know but if she bleached those clothes, something was truly disturbing about her.
That was something my ex-husband would do. Sabotage me to make me look incompetent. Where did this little girl even learn such dirty tricks.
Now it was going on evening, homework done, and she was out in the yard burning off the last of her energy while I sat on the deck with my feet up on the railing and Aubrey in my ear.
The sky was a watercolor sight of pinks, golds and purples. The stable was off to the side. There she was doing cartwheels in the grass having a ball, while I sat on the phone.
I’d been on the phone with Aubrey for a while. She was trying to talk me off of a ledge but it wasn’t working. I knew I had to get out of here soon.
“I don’t think he knows you’re here,” Aubrey said in my ear.
“I did some digging. Roman’s still got his main office down in Atlanta, but he picked up a gang of new contracts around the DMV this year.
Big ones. Government money. So he’s been going back and forth.
Couple weeks here, couple weeks home. He hasn’t moved up here for good. Not yet, anyway.”
“Not yet.” I watched Dream do a cartwheel. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“I’m just telling you what I found, boo. I’m not saying it’s good news. I’m saying it’s not the worst news. There’s a difference.” She paused. “You still thinking about running?”
“I’m always thinking about running, Aubrey,” I whispered.
“I feel like you’re settling in there.”
“Yeah, a little too much. I’m lying to this man and he’s working with Roman. It’s just a matter of time before the truth comes out. I gotta get the hell out of here.”
“What about your son? You were doing this to get him back and run away.”
“I have to figure something out, Bree.”
I listened to her get quiet as the wheels in her head started to turn.
Out in the yard, Dream popped up and brushed the grass off her knees.
“I’m gonna go feed Midnite, Miss Skye!” she hollered, already pointing toward the stable. “It’s her dinnertime! She gets mad if I’m late!”
“Go ahead, baby. I’m right here watching you.” I turned back to the phone and pressed it to my other ear.
“Listen, I can give you about $10,000. I can take it out the girl’s college fund.”
“No. Absolutely not. This is my mess. I created this…”
“Ahhh!!!!” I heard a screeching shriek that was loud enough to reach the neighbors who were miles away.
I have heard a lot of screams in my life. I have made a few of them myself. So I know the difference between a child playing too rough and a child in real trouble.
“I gotta go,” I said into the phone, and I didn’t even hear if Aubrey answered. I dropped it on the deck chair and ran.
I went across that yard in my socks, over the cold grass, calling her name the entire way. “Dream! Dream, baby, I’m coming! Where are you? Talk to me!”
She was standing in the mouth of the stable. She wasn’t moving. She had both hands clapped over her mouth. Her little body was trembling from the shoulders down. She was staring at something inside that I couldn’t see yet from where I was running.
I hit the ground in front of her on my knees, grabbed her, and turned her face hard into my stomach so she’d stop looking at whatever it was. “I’m here. I got you. I got you, baby. Don’t look. Keep your eyes on me.”
Then I looked past her, into the stable.
Midnite was down on her side in the straw.
She was not sleeping. I knew it in one look.
A horse doesn’t lie down like that, all wrong, legs stiff and shoved out straight, the neck twisted at an angle no living thing would ever hold on purpose.
There was a mess of sick pooled up by her mouth, foam gone strange colors in it, some of it dried at the edges already.
Her one open eye was catching the last of the light coming through the stable door, and that light wasn’t doing a thing in it.
Just glass. She was gone. From the look of her, she had been gone a little while. She had died alone in her stall.
Something about it was wrong. I couldn’t name it standing there, but I felt it settle in my gut like a stone. A healthy young horse does not drop dead.
Animals that die like that, foaming, cramped up, twisted, sudden, they got into something. Something that didn’t belong anywhere near a stable. I pushed the thought down into the back of my mind, because the child shaking against me needed all of me right then.
“Okay.” I got my voice as flat and calm as I could make it. ”We’re not gonna stand here, baby. We’re going in the house. Come on. Up.”
I scooped Dream up off the ground. She was too big to be carried and I did not care one bit.
She wrapped her arms and legs around me and buried her wet face in my neck.
That was when she really started to cry, the deep kind that comes up from somewhere underneath, the sobs shaking through both of our bodies at once.
“She’s dead, Miss Skye.” She could barely get it out. “Midnite’s dead. I came to feed her and she wouldn’t get up, she wouldn’t get up—”
“I know, baby. I know. I’ve got you now. Don’t look back there, you hear me? Just hold onto me and don’t look.”
I carried her out of that stable and back across the dark yard, and I did not let her turn her head to look behind us one single time.
I brought her in through the kitchen and lowered myself onto the floor with her still wrapped around me, my back against the cabinets.
Then I just held her there and rocked. There was nothing to say that would fix it.
Sometimes the only thing you can do for a hurting child is be something solid for them to fall apart against. So that’s what I made myself. A wall for her to break on.
Storie came in from the hallway.
“What happened?” She looked down at Dream shaking apart in my lap. “Why is she screaming like that?”
“Something happened to Midnite.” I kept my eyes on the back of Dream’s head and kept smoothing her hair down, over and over. “Don’t go out there, Storie. Please. Stay out of there. Let me get your daddy on the phone.”
She was already moving toward the back door.
“Storie. I’m serious. Don’t go out there.”
She went anyway. She always did the opposite of whatever I said, but this time I didn’t have a hand free to stop her, and honestly I don’t know that I would have.
She was gone about a minute. I sat on that kitchen floor holding Dream and listening to the silence past the back door, waiting. When Storie came back in, she had one hand pressed flat over her mouth and tears were coming down her face.
“Oh my God,” she said. “She’s dead. Midnite’s really dead.”
I held my own baby close and told Storie I was so sorry. I meant it. I would have gotten up off that floor and put my arms around that girl too, dry-eyed and difficult as she was, if my hands weren’t already full of a six-year-old who couldn’t stop crying.
But I was watching her. I couldn’t help it. It’s a thing I do, a thing that kept me breathing for a lot of years, reading a person while they think you’re only listening. And how Storie was crying sat wrong with me. I could feel it in my bones.
I couldn’t put a name to it. And I would never in a hundred years have said the thing out loud that my body was trying to tell me on that kitchen floor.
It was too ugly to think about a child that way.
I had no proof of a single thing. I was a woman living under a name that wasn’t even mine, and I had no right to look at anybody’s tears and call them fake.
But the tears were running down her face while her eyes stayed flat somehow underneath them.
She was watching me. Watching Dream. Checking the room, taking the temperature of it.
Measuring us. Grieving people don’t take inventory.
They fall apart, or they go numb, or they go quiet.
They don’t stand in a doorway with wet cheeks quietly counting the reactions in the room. Storie was counting.
A cold sensation went straight down my spine.
I pulled Dream in tighter against my chest and reached up onto the counter for my phone to call Justice.
And God forgive me for the thought, because I already knew how it sounded even inside my own head. I thought that I needed to be gone from this house even sooner than I had planned.
For the first time, it wasn’t Roman I was running from.
The front door opened down the hall.
“I’m home,” Justice called out. His voice was low and even, that settled quiet he gets when something’s been handled.
He came around the corner into the kitchen still pulling his jacket off, and he stopped cold.
Me on the floor with my back against the cabinets. Dream wrapped around me, face buried in my neck, her little body still hitching with sobs she couldn’t stop. Storie frozen in the doorway with her wet cheeks.
Whatever calm he’d walked in with was gone in an instant.
“What happened?” He was already crossing to us, already dropping to his knees, already reaching for his baby. “Skye. What’s wrong with her? What happened?”