2. SKYE
SKYE
I drove the speed limit the entire way to Aubrey’s office like somebody’s church usher, both hands on the wheel, eyes flicking to the rearview at every light.
Nobody was behind me. There was never anyone behind me.
I checked anyway, because paranoid is just good pattern recognition, and the one time you quit looking over your shoulder is the exact time the universe decides to teach you something.
I’d already taken that class. Flunked it, too.
The Banks had me on lock the entire ride over.
Rita’s house was something else. It was big and warm, dripping with money, grief hanging up under all that good furniture thick enough to spread on toast. Inside, desperate to find their grandmother a caregiver, were three grown men and their clipboard-carrying sister.
They grilled me as the queen held court from an armchair.
That’s the part people never understand about a caregiver interview.
It is not about the questions they ask you.
It is about the ones nobody’s got the nerve to say out loud.
What’s this family scared of? What do they need to hear before they can hand over the person they love and still fall asleep that night?
I had it inside ten minutes, watching the sexiest brother’s jaw tighten up every time his grandmother got mouthy, and I aimed every word out my mouth straight at that soft spot till the man damn near sighed with relief.
Worked like it always works. And I hated, just a little bit, how good I was at it. There was a time I ran that same game in front of a jury, and I got paid well to. Now I run it to keep myself breathing. Growth?
Ellis Care Staffing sat on the second floor of a strip plaza off Central with gold letters on the glass Aubrey paid entirely too much for. She looked up the second I came through the door, took one read of my face, and lit up like the first of the month.
“Well hurry up! Tell me you charmed them Banks people.”
Aubrey and I had been best friends since we were in middle school.
Both of us born and raised in Charlotte, NC, we stayed joined at the hip until we went to college in DC.
We did undergrad at Howard but eventually I went to law school at Georgetown.
Eventually I moved to Atlanta and well… life took a turn.
“They didn’t say yes yet.”
“Oh, they will. Sit down. Talk to me. How was Miss Rita Banks?”
Aubrey was eager and I appreciated it. Because I needed a gig like this more than anything. The Banks family had money money. And it was enough to get me out of Dodge.
I looked at Aubrey’s pretty face. She had a light caramel complexion and raven black hair that she cut in a pixie cut. Her father is Filipino and her mother is a beautiful Geechee woman. Aubrey and I were a pair of baddies when we were on that Howard campus and had a limitless line of suitors.
I chose the wrong one.
“She was sharp,” I said, dropping into the chair. “Sharp, scared, and too proud to admit that she needed help. She told me straight to my face she didn’t need no damn nurse.” I couldn’t help the little smile. “I want to be like her when I grow up.”
“And the boys?” She propped her chin in her hand, nosy as ever.
“You mean the men? The family full of fine ass men? The oldest one barely said three words to me. He just heavily watched me like I was going to rob them. As if I had a chance.”
“Uh huh, that’s Quest.” She waved a hand. “That family isn’t too warm with strangers. They been through it, and they have too much to protect.”
Too much to protect. I tucked that one away. I’d felt it in that house, sitting there thick under all the money and the watchfulness running through every one of them. I could tell they were used to being on edge with strangers. The quiet one was worst of all. Justice.
“Prime didn’t come near me. Just watched from afar. And then Justice… That one…”
“Oh the middle child.”
“The grandmother made up her mind for all of them before I got to the door,” I said. “Justice can watch me all he wants. Rita already signed the paperwork in her head.”
“Mm.” Aubrey gave me a look I did not care for, quick and a little too smart. Then she let it go, thank God. “Good. Good for you, boo.”
“Thank you for sending me, though.” I leaned back. “I know you have aides who have way more experience but thank you.”
“Yeah, girl, no one is going to pay like the Banks. And even though you’ve only been a CNA for the last eight months, you’re really good.
Every family who’s had you has left you glowing reviews and I know the Banks will too.
So when you get that contract, I’ll only take ten percent, rather than my usual fifty. That’ll get you to your goal quicker.”
“That’s robbery of yourself.”
“It’s my agency. I can rob myself if I want.
Besides, this has been the best year yet.
I’ve done double my revenue goals.” She reached across the desk and squeezed my wrist, just once, and her voice came down out of the joke for a second.
“You did me a favor showing up when you did, working for peanuts and never once complaining. Let me do you one back.”
I looked down at her hand on my wrist and felt the thing I always felt around Aubrey. I was comforted and at home. She was the only person I had left in my corner. She was the only one that knew everything about me and still loved me.
“Oh.” She perked back up, grinning like she’d been dying to get to this part. “And you want to know how I really made sure you shined in there?”
“Do I?”
“The three appointments before yours.” She ticked them off, delighted with herself. “Rodney, La’Monakita, and that girl who fell asleep sitting up in their waiting room.”
It took me a full beat. Then it clicked. “Aubrey. You did not send them.”
“I sent them.” She said it like she was accepting an award.
“I know that family. I know what they can’t stand and what they’re scared of, same as you sniffed it out in ten minutes.
So I paid a few people to go in and bomb their interviews.
By the time you came floating, you looked like a saint.
” She spread her hands. “Sis. You’re welcome. ”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“You are a menace,” I told her.
“I’m a businesswoman.” She stood up, scooped a folder off the corner of the desk, already three moves ahead. “Now take your blessed self on out my office so I can call these people before they come to their senses. Come on, I’ll walk you out, Mel.”
The name hit the floor like a dropped plate.
I was up out the chair before I decided to be, and whatever came across my face wiped hers clean.
“Don’t.” It came out flat and quiet, nothing at all like the sound I’d just been laughing with.
“You cannot do that. Not in here, not on a phone, not even in your sleep. That name is dead and buried. You gotta put it back in the ground every single time it tries to come back up, or you keep your mouth shut. Those are the only two options.”
“Skye.” She set the folder down slow, both hands coming up. “Baby, I’m sorry. It slipped. There’s nobody in here but me and you.”
“It only has to slip one time in front of the wrong person.” I opened my hands before my nails could dig any deeper into my palms. Aubrey hadn’t meant anything by it, but accidents could still get me killed.
For a second we just looked at each other across that little office as I forced myself to calm down. It was an innocent mistake but we couldn’t have those.
“Skye,” she said, careful, setting the name in place like she was handling her good china. “Skye Mercer. Drive safe. Text me the second you get in that house.”
“I will.” I picked up my bag. At the door I stopped, because I couldn’t leave her standing there looking like that. “Thank you. For sending in the duds, Aubrey. I mean it.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” She already had the phone up to her ear. “Go home, girl.”
Home was a one-bedroom on the back end of a building that had seen its good years come and go, and I loved precisely one thing about it. It had a single door.
One door meant one point of failure. One thing to watch. I’d learned to think like that the hard way, learned it in a season I don’t revisit if I can help it, and I’d rebuilt my small quiet life around shaving the failures down to the fewest I could keep my eyes on at once.
That door had three deadbolts I put in myself, plus the one that came with the place, plus a steel bar that dropped into a bracket in the floor. My landlord didn’t know about them and I was definitely not getting my security deposit back. A small price to pay for safety.
The security camera that was over the doorframe fed straight to my phone.
I’d checked that feed maybe forty times over the course of the day, outside the Banks house, in Aubrey’s parking lot and at every red light between there and here.
Nobody came. Nobody ever comes. I checked anyway, because that was my life now.
I ran the locks in order, top to bottom, then spun around and threw every one of them again behind me, top to bottom, a little rhythm my hands do without asking permission.
Then I did the thing I do every single evening that I would take to my grave before I said it out loud to a living soul.
I pulled up the inside camera, the little one tucked on the bookshelf facing the room, and I stood there in my living room watching footage of my own living room, thumbing back through the empty hours of the day.
Empty couch, empty carpet, just me walking in thirty seconds ago and freezing the frame.
Nobody had been inside. I could see that. Still, I watched until my heart finally slowed down.
If only I’d thought of all this years ago. Back when it would’ve counted for something. Back when watching a door might have changed how it all went down. I wasn’t always a woman who watched doors.
Once upon a time I was a woman who believed I was safe. I slept easy in a house full with everyone I loved. I thought safe was something you could own outright instead of something that gets lifted clean out your hands while your back is turned.
That woman paid for every dumb thing she believed. Paid the bill and I was still in debt. I built this new one out of deadbolts and camera feeds so nothing would ever get taken out from behind me again. Too late to matter now. I do it anyway.
I set the phone face-down on the counter and went to the bathroom to take a shower.
The water took a minute to get warm as I waited impatiently. I peeled out my interview clothes, folded them neatly out of pure habit, and caught myself in the mirror over the sink before I stepped in.
There I was. Skye Mercer. Whoever that was supposed to be.
And laid across my chest, riding just over the top of my heart, the scar. It was an ugly keloid slash that stretched almost as wide as my collarbones. I hated it. It was like a brand and the scars in my mind were enough of a reminder.
Baby killer.
The words moved through me like a lightning bolt, same as they do every night, in a voice I stopped being able to tell apart from my own a long time ago.
I looked at it a little longer. If I were still a high powered attorney, I would’ve gotten the thing lasered off by now. But those days are long over.
I stepped into the water. I ran it as hot as those sorry pipes would allow, and I did not cry. I used up all my crying back in another life, and it never once, not one time, made me feel better.
I stood in there until the heat quit on me. The Banks would call in the morning, or they wouldn’t. Either way I’d smile, say thank you kindly, and start counting days on a brand-new calendar in my head. Every job was a countdown to the next thing. Every dollar went to the same get-away account.
There was a number I needed. The day I hit it, I was gone, and Skye Mercer would lay down in the dirt next to the name that came before her. I’d wake up somebody brand-new in a place that had never heard of either one of them.
Till then, I’d sleep in a room with one door and four locks.
And I’d be the sweetest, warmest, most heaven-sent caregiver a rich, grieving family ever let through their gate.
I’d hold that old woman’s hand and mean it clean down to the bone.
I may be desperate for the cash, but I was also going to do a great job. That family deserved it.
I got out, dried off, and checked the locks one more time before bed. Top to bottom, every last one.