36. SKYE
SKYE
Before Justice got to the mall, Aubrey and I went into Macy’s. From there we went upstairs on the department store’s escalator. Once we were upstairs, we peered over the balcony and waited for him to arrive.
I could feel his raw energy as soon as he came past the food court. He was on that guy in a flash, never giving him the undeserved time to defend himself. That little girl was shocked for a moment, but I watched her face turn disgusted and offended. It was as if to say, “How dare you ruin my date.”
Her rebellious ways were becoming too much to bear. It was going to shorten my time with that family. If she were my child… I don’t know what I would’ve done. Homeschooled her? Put her in intense therapy? Send her to military school.
Something had to give.
In my past I’ve had clients who were problem children. I’ve dealt with clients who had problem children. Intense therapy didn’t always work. Military school didn’t always work.
Some kids — although rare — were just anti-social. Authority was nothing more than a mere nuisance, something to circumvent. They were often compulsive liars, cruel and enjoyed escalating intimidation.
That’s something that made me nervous about Storie.
If she was what I really clocked her as, and I wasn’t being dramatic, then I was afraid.
She was definitely escalating in her terrible behaviors.
Justice needed to put me and his businesses on the back burner and pour all his energy into correcting this girl before someone gets really hurt.
“Skye?” Aubrey called out to me after we’d watched the commotion. We saw Justice manhandle her out and disappear from our view.
“Yeah…”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know. I can’t go back there right now. I don’t want her to know it was me who called her father. It’ll just give her fuel to come at me. Besides, it’s best if she thinks her father has eyes everywhere. Maybe she won’t pull this shit again.”
“She seems pretty strong-willed,” Aubrey added.
“I gotta get away from that family. This will ruin my chances of…”
“Slow down. You need more cash. Just take it day by day. Stay out of her way though.”
She wasn’t the only one whose way I needed to stay out of. I needed to stay out of Justice’s way too.
After a while we left the mall, grabbed something to eat and then hung out at her house for a bit. I stalled as long as I could before I went back to Justice’s house.
When I got there, Prime was in the kitchen with Dream. She sat at the table swinging her little legs, vanilla ice cream dripping down her chin.
“Miss Skye!” Dream lit up. “Uncle Prime let me have ice cream for dinner!”
“Uncle Prime is a bad influence,” I laughed.
“I’m just doing my best,” Prime replied with a grin.
“Do you want some?” She asked me.
“Sure.”
Prime turned to the freezer and scooped me a bowl full of the sugary delight.
I ate with Dream and shortly after, I gave her a bath and put her down for the night. When I got back downstairs, I was finally able to ask all of my questions.
Storie’s door stayed shut.
I passed it twice. No light under it, no sound. She’d been up there since Prime brought her home. Nobody had gone up. She hadn’t come down. Upstairs had that held-breath feeling of a house with something locked in a room at the end of it.
I did not knock. I want that on the record.
Whatever that child was, whatever she’d done, some worn-out part of me still wanted to knock, still wanted to sit on the edge of a bed with a fifteen-year-old who’d had a terrible day and ask if she was okay.
That instinct never fully dies in a woman, no matter what gets done to her.
But I knew better. So I left her door shut and took myself downstairs.
“Where is he?” There was a slight panic in my voice.
Prime sighed before responding, his blue eyes twinkling under the light.
“He was arrested for whooping that guy’s ass. The nigga isn’t pressing charges but because there are witnesses he’s being held. He’ll see a judge tomorrow and we’ll be able to bail him out.”
“Jesus…” I murmured. I was so concerned for him. I knew that Justice could hold his own but I didn’t want him in jail. I wanted him home, with me.
What?! No not with me. With his girls. I cannot be falling for him.
But it was sweet what Prime was doing. Standing in his brother’s kitchen, a soft wall between Dream and the truth. Feeding her ice cream. Letting her believe tonight was just a fun night. An Uncle-Prime-came-over, ice-cream-for-dinner night. Not the night her daddy sat in a cell.
I loved him a little for it, right then. These Banks men were hard as concrete with the world. Then you caught them like this, holding a child up out of deep water.
I’d heard so many stories about them from Rita. In the moments when she was lucid and when she wasn’t. She divulged many secrets about the brothers that I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to know. But let’s just say, I knew how dangerous they were.
Which meant that guy that Justice beat up in the mall better run away, because Justice wasn’t done with him.
“How’s Rita?” I asked.
“Down already. Ate good, took her medicine, went easy tonight, thank God. Quest dropped her off about an hour after I was already here with Storie. She thinks Justice is out of town on business. That’s what we told her.
She don’t need to be up all night worried, and honestly, by morning she might not remember we said anything at all.
” His face changed when he said it. He moved right past it, because that’s a grief nobody in this family had figured out how to hold yet.
“She talks about you a lot. Always saying you’re her baby. You look just like her oldest son. And how much she misses you.”
“Man, I gotta do better about seeing her. I feel like shit. I just… I got twins, a lil boy. Then the business. Then this damn family is always dragging me into some shit,” he laughed.
“From what Rita says, y’all live for it.”
He let out a chuckle and shook his head.
“Thank you,” he said, out of nowhere. “For being here. For all of it. My brother don’t say it, but he don’t trust easy, and he trusts you with everything he’s got in this world.” He looked at me steady. “That means something. In case nobody told you.”
My chest went tight, and I had to look down at my hands.
Because I was a liar sitting in a good man’s living room, and I could not tell a single one of these people one true thing about who I was.
“Get some rest, Prime,” is what I said instead. “I got the house. You go on and lay down in the guest room, or go home to your family. We’ll be alright till morning.”
“Yeah,” he said, getting up with a groan. “Aight. I’m right down the hall if anything moves.”
Later, in the dark of my own room, I couldn’t sleep.
The house was quiet. Prime’s door was shut down the hall. Storie’s was shut at the other end. I lay there in the middle of all that Banks money and all that Banks trouble, and my mind went somewhere I don’t let it go in the daylight. It went to the darkest of times.
Not to the courtroom this time. Past it. To the part that came after. The part almost nobody knew. The part that still cut deeper than losing my entire career in a single afternoon.
They walked me out of the firm that same week. A couple of days after the court hearing. They replaced me as defense with another one of my colleagues.
It was so unceremonious. Two senior partners who couldn’t even look me in the face, a folder slid across a table, words like liability and reputation and the best interests of the firm.
It was all so hazy. I heard their words in spurts.
I thought that I would be able to debate my way out of getting fired but that sex tape playing… it was too damaging.
No other law firm would ever hire me again. I knew that the moment it played.
Fifteen years I’d bled for that place. I built my name in those halls. They walked me out past my own associates with a cardboard box and a security escort. Not one person I’d mentored said a word. A woman with a sex tape and a lost case is radioactive. Everybody knew better than to catch it.
I held my head up as I walked to the car. I didn’t cry until I hit a red light three blocks away. Then I cried so hard I missed the green light.
But losing that job was survivable. I could rebuild a career. I’d built one from nothing before, I could do it again. I almost had myself believing it.
Then I turned onto my street.
My babies were out front in the last of the daylight, my sister watching them from the porch steps. And my son was running with the neighborhood boys, and they were playing with guns. Those guns looked so real. They weren’t the plastic water pistols that I still cringed at him using.
Fingers out, thumbs cocked. Pow. Pow. Got you. You dead. Diving behind the recycling bins, popping up to fire. It should have been nothing. It was nothing, on every other street in America that evening.
But I stopped the car in the middle of the road and watched my boy, and everything in me went cold.
The other boys were sloppy with it, laughing, falling all over themselves.
My son wasn’t laughing. He took his time.
He aimed. He held that small hand up steady, one eye closed, like somebody had taught him how.
He waited for the shot. And when he took it there was a stillness in his little face I had never put there, a focus that did not belong on a seven-year-old, and I knew exactly whose it was.
“Baby. Come here.”
He trotted over, sweaty and grinning, my heart in a pair of dirty sneakers.
“I don’t want you playing guns,” I said. “Not like that. Guns aren’t toys. You hear me?”
He looked at me, confused, a little down. And then my beautiful boy said the thing I have carried every single day since.
“But Daddy says shooting is what men do.”
I stopped breathing.
Because that wasn’t my son talking. That was something poured into him, slow and careful, by a man who’d been reaching into my child’s chest on the weekends and rearranging what he found there. Building him. Word by word. Turning my sweet boy into a loaded thing and calling it raising a man.
And I couldn’t stop it. That’s what took the air out of me right there on that sidewalk.
I had a law degree, a sharp mouth, a career built on winning fights.
None of it mattered. The court gave that man my son half the week, and there was no motion in the world I could file against a father teaching his boy to love a gun.
I could say no on my days. He’d say yes on his.
And a child believes the parent who lets him hold the dangerous thing.
I got down on my knees on that concrete and took his face in both my hands.
“Listen to me,” I said, and I made my voice as sure as his father’s must have been, because certainty was the only weapon I had that matched. “That is not what men do. A real man protects people. A real man would rather die than hurt somebody smaller than him. You hear me? That is what a man does.”
He nodded. Because he loved me. Because underneath everything being done to him, he was still a good boy.
But I saw it in his eyes. He believed his daddy more than he believed me.
His daddy was big and certain and let him hold the dangerous thing.
I was the tired mama who cried in the car and took the fun away.
Even then, even that small, the scale had already tipped.
I was already losing him. And years later I sat on the floor of a dark bedroom in Justice Banks’s house and had to press both hands over my mouth to keep the sound in.
Because I knew now exactly how far I’d lost him.
And I knew what it cost.
I opened my eyes in the dark of my room in Justice’s house. My face was wet and it was three in the morning.
Down the hall a house full of other people’s children slept behind their doors. One of them grieving her mother. One of them shut in a room at the end of the hall with something wrong in her I could see even when nobody else would name it.
And I lay there in the dark and thought about how you can love a child with everything you have and still watch the poison win. How I knew that better than anybody in this house full of people who thought Storie was just sad.
I knew exactly what a child looked like when something got its hooks in early.
I’d raised the beginning of one.