Chapter 11
Byrdie
Makhi stinks of booze.
How he got up the three flights of stairs to the roof will forever be a mystery, especially since it took Nash to steady him or he’d have fallen down them at least five times.
Vonn decided we’d move our conversation from the roof to the living room that Nance and Makhi turned into my bedroom. He gently nudges me toward my bed and lifts the covers over my legs, and I smile as I sit with my back to the headboard.
Makhi flops to the floor near my door. It looked more like his legs just gave up on him.
He catches me looking and gives me a wink, like he’d intended to collapse in a heap on my floor.
His cheeks were flushed, and he was swaying a bit before, so it wasn’t as intentional as he’d like the rest of us to believe.
Nash does not believe Makhi’s collapse/slump was intentional from the brief smile that stretched across his lips. He sits on the floor with his legs straight and his arms folded neatly across his chest.
Vonn sits leaning against my bed.
He’s big all over, over six feet tall and with the muscles to fill each of those feet and inches, so his additional weight presses my bed against the wall in a way it hadn’t before.
It’s past midnight, and they’re all fully dressed. Does anyone in this house sleep?
When Nash looks at me, I lie down and pull the sheets up.
They want me to talk.
That’s why they’re all here. No one has said a word since we settled in my room, and their need for answers bears down on me in a way I don’t like.
What do they want me to say?
Are they waiting for an explanation of what I was doing up on the roof?
Well, I can’t give them one.
I don’t know.
I don’t want to know.
“Makhi told us about what he did,” Vonn says, glancing over at me. “Firing you and kicking you out.”
I catch his eye, and he takes my hand, which I’m resting on the bed.
“I wasn’t using my brain,” Makhi says.
“He was being a fucking idiot,” Vonn adds with a growl.
“Yes, well, I saw the necklace and—”
“His brain left his body,” Nash cuts in and covers his mouth to muffle a yawn.
Makhi glares at him. “Yes, I get it. Makhi is a brainless idiot.”
“But not all the time,” Nash says to me. “I believe he thought he was protecting us from you.”
“Is that why Vonn punched you?” I ask Makhi, relieved he’s not asking if I forgive him for what he did, because I don’t know if I have. I’m glad he came after me—glad they all did—but it doesn’t hurt any less when I remember him slamming a door in my face.
Nash shakes his head. “That came later. When we couldn’t find you, guilt was eating him alive.”
I glance from Nash to Makhi, who doesn’t look like he’s feeling all that guilty to me. With his bleary eyes and slumped pose, he looks like he’s trying to stay awake. A product of all that whiskey that has him smelling like he got lost in a brewery.
“How did you find me?” I ask.
“We spoke to an old woman who was on the same bus as you,” Vonn explains. “She’s staying with her son, whose wife just had their third baby. She remembered getting on the same bus as you at Deming, New Mexico. So we had a place to start.”
I remember Alice, the old lady who would have thrown a cheese and ham sandwich at my head if I hadn’t accepted her generosity, and I smile.
“She was… pushy. But in the best way. She gave me a sandwich and water, then lectured me on how too many people are pretending to be gluten-intolerant. I thought she was going to throw a bottle of water at my head.”
Makhi eyes me like I’m crazy. “You’re smiling like that’s a good thing.”
“Not the throwing part. The fussing over part. It felt nice.”
“So we got in the car and made the drive to Deming, and then wandered around until we found someone who’d seen you before,” Vonn says, surprising me by not asking why I was so grateful to be fussed over.
Even if that fussing over might have included being taken out by a bottle of water from a pushy old lady.
We cling to the kindness that comes when we least expect it. Especially when we’re not expecting it.
“That sounds like a needle in a haystack.” I pull my comforter up to my ears.
“It was, but we knew you’d gotten on a bus,” Nash explains. “If you’d had a car, you’d have been driving it, so we just asked around. An old homeless lady told us where she saw you and gave us our next big clue.”
I struggle to believe anyone would go to all that trouble to find me.
“I remember her,” I say quietly. “She was so rude to me at first, and then she was kinder than I thought she would be. She took me to the women’s shelter when someone stole my food.”
“Someone stole your food?” Nash’s eyes flash with barely suppressed rage.
“That feels like a lifetime ago.” Like it had happened to someone else.
I’d run from the homeless man, hidden behind a car, and then eventually walked back to the church where a woman had given me a package of food. The food was gone. I’d been relieved that the man had gotten my food instead of me, but how long would I have lasted on the street?
He wasn’t even the scariest person I’d run into. That had been the first homeless man whose stinky cardboard house I’d crawled in to escape from the rain and been chased out with a roar and a can of food flung at my back.
I was na?ve and stupid. I would not have survived long on the street.
When I blink to refocus, they’re not pushing to know how I wound up on the street. Just watching me, waiting for me to climb out of my memories.
Vonn says, “She said you were in an Amish dress, and you seemed lost and had bare feet, like it had been your first time in a city. We guessed you’d escaped from a cult or something close to it, and the rest was research on the internet and guesswork.”
“My mom took us to the compound when I was seventeen,” I explain. “Even though I was there for a year, it felt like a different world when I was back in a city. Everything felt strange. People were in jeans and had cell phones. It was loud and dirty, and everyone stared at me.”
“You didn’t have any other family you could have gone to?” Vonn asks quietly.
I tuck my hand under my pillow, wanting to hug it for comfort. “It was only ever Mom and me. Well… she had boyfriends before, but they wouldn’t have taken me in.”
They dumped her, and they never had much interest in me. I stayed away from the ones who stared at me too long, and things never worked out between them and Mom. So we moved to another town. Another city. Another place where she hoped she’d find someone who would love her the way my dad had.
A pause fills the room, and none of the three men quietly watching me asks about a past they must all be itching to know.
Questions make me defensive and clam up, ashamed of a life I willingly walked into. When no questions come, it’s easier to tell them what happened, even if I can’t tell them all of it now, or maybe ever.
“Jeremiah said I was a leprosy,” I say, remembering how it felt to be looked at like nothing.
Everyone turned their back on me. Shunned me.
I told myself I didn’t like them, love them, or want their friendship.
But their rejection still hurt. Even now, it hurts.
“And she went into the desert, and there she died. That’s what Jeremiah said. ”
A death sentence I hadn’t known was coming until it was too late to run. Words that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
“Vonn broke a guy’s finger getting info out of him,” Makhi announces, and Vonn curses.
“Jeez, don’t tell her that,” Vonn snaps. “Shit.” He shoots me a reluctant glance as if afraid to see what my reaction will be.
Shocked, my eyes slide from Vonn to Makhi, and back again. “What?”
“It was a guard from the compound,” Makhi explains with a tired yawn, blind or indifferent to the dark glare Vonn is aiming at him. “Sat on his chest and everything. It was impressive the guy didn’t immediately piss himself. I would have shit my pants. Literally.”
Vonn shuffles away from me, all while glaring at Makhi.
“No filter at all,” Nash mutters, shaking his head.
“Why are you moving away?” I ask Vonn.
“In case you’re afraid of me.”
I give him a long, thoughtful look, taking time to consider how I feel. “You said the army taught you how to save people.”
“It did.” Vonn’s pause is two beats long. “They also taught me how easy it is to kill… and do other things that you don’t need to know about. Nash was right. Makhi has no filter.”
I take his hand and squeeze it. “Thank you for saving me. Even if that included breaking a man’s finger to find me.”
His hard face softens, and I know he would have broken a lot more than that. He killed the gardener when the gardener put his hands on me. I look at Vonn, and I see a man who would do anything to protect me because right from the start, that’s what he’s always done.
The pounding on a door startles me awake when I don’t remember falling asleep.
Raised voices grow louder.
I wrench my eyelids open. The sun fills my room, and I’m alone. There’s no sign of Vonn, Makhi, or Nash.
In the entryway, voices are rising.
I get out of bed and tiptoe to the door, pushing it to see what’s going on, and soon wish I hadn’t.
Nance is complaining. A man in a sheriff’s uniform is ignoring her.
Another cop in uniform is eyeing Vonn closely with one hand hovering near the gun tucked in his belt.
Makhi is cursing as he glares at the sheriff, who finishes reading Nash his rights and yanks him away from the wall by the handcuffs he snapped behind his back.
Nash must feel me watching, though I don’t make a sound.
He turns, looks right at me, eyes bleary like someone yanked him from sleep seconds before. He smiles slightly and mouths, “It will be okay.”
The sheriff spots me then, and his eyes narrow as they sweep up and down me. As if he’s memorizing my face. His stare is that intense.
His lips flatten, and he turns away. Using his tight grip on Nash’s handcuffs, he pushes Nash out of the open front door. The other cop, still eyeing Vonn warily, follows him out and slams the door behind them.
Makhi starts kicking a wall as I push the door open and step outside.
“What’s going on?” I ask Vonn, who’s pulling his cell phone from his pocket.
Vonn glances at me, and though he intends for his smile to be reassuring, it’s tight with strain. “Sheriff arrested Nash.”
I lick my dry lips nervously. “What for?”
“Murder.”