42. SKYE
SKYE
Dream had been counting down to career day all week long. And I couldn’t lie, I was excited about helping her.
Every night at dinner it was the same. “Don’t forget my ’scope. Don’t forget my scrubs. Should I say I’m an RN or CNA?” The questions were adorable. But I knew she was mostly excited about dressing up.
That baby was going to be a nurse if it killed both of us.
She’d picked it the second the teacher announced it, no hesitation, none of the flip-flopping the other kids did between astronaut and rapper and whatever their daddy was.
A nurse. Like me. She said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
So, the night before, I washed the child sized scrubs I found online. They were a teal color and they looked adorable on her. I even included a toy nursing kit I found online for her. She was so excited she made me pinky promise nothing would go wrong.
I pulled the scrubs out of the dryer the next morning to lay them across her bed before she woke up. I couldn’t wait for her to see them. She was going to be so happy.
Then I actually looked at what was in my hands.
Something was wrong. There were white splotches eating right through the teal, one big ugly bloom across the chest and a trail of little ones down the pant leg, the fabric gone chalky and stiff where the color used to be. They were completely ruined.
“No.” I actually said it out loud to an empty laundry room. “No, no, come on.”
I stood there trying to walk it back in my head.
I’d run Rita’s whites last night. There’d been bleach on the counter.
The cap was probably not screwed on like always.
I must’ve set the scrubs down in something.
Must’ve splashed the drum and not rinsed it.
Must’ve done a hundred things I’d have caught if I wasn’t running on no sleep with my mind a thousand miles away.
Because that was the truth, wasn’t it? My mind hadn’t been in that laundry room last night. My mind had been on that construction sign and how many hours I had left in this house. And while I was off somewhere planning my own disappearance, I’d bleached this child’s scrubs. Or did I?
Some nurse. Couldn’t even keep my own laundry alive.
“Miss Skye?” Dream padded into the doorway in her socks, hair already brushed, face shining and ready. “Is it time to put on my nurse clothes?”
She saw them before I could hide them. Saw the white splotches. And I watched that beautiful light in her face just… dim.
“What’s wrong with them?”
“Baby, listen—”
“They’re ruined.” Her voice went small and wobbly. “That was gonna be my costume. Everybody’s bringing a costume. Now I’m gonna be the only one with nothing.”
“Hey. Hey. Come here to me.” I got down on her level, both hands on her little shoulders.
“I can fix this. Don’t worry, sweetie.”
“Are you sure?” She gave me the world’s most skeptical six-year-old face, lip still trembling.
“Yes, I’ll get you right.”
She nodded but she still didn’t believe me.
Right then, Storie came drifting past the doorway on her way to the kitchen, taking a nice long look at the whole scene. The scrubs in my hand. Dream’s crumpling face. Me down on the floor.
“You ruined her costume? It’s literally the one thing she’s been talking about all week. Don’t you know how to wash clothes?”
“We’ve got it handled, Storie.”
“Mm. Doesn’t look handled.” She plucked a grape off the counter and popped it in her mouth. “The driver’s coming in like fifteen minutes, by the way. We’re gonna be late ’cause of this.”
She strolled off to the kitchen without another word. I let it go. I did not have the time or the spare heart to go a round with a teenager who woke up looking to start shit. I had a heartbroken baby and we were racing against the clock. Everything else could wait.
I have never in my life been able to sit still in a disaster. Some folks freeze. Not me. Something breaks, I go straight to work with my hands, and I have ever since I was little. So that’s what I did.
“Okay. New plan, and it’s better. We’re not doing boring old scrubs anyway.” I was already up, already pulling my phone out, already thinking three steps ahead like the courtroom taught me. “We’re going vintage.”
“What’s vintage?”
“Vintage means old-school. Fancy old. Back in the day, before scrubs, the real classic nurses wore something way cooler, and that’s what you’re about to be.
The kind they put in the old movies.” I pulled up a video, propped the phone on the dresser, and grabbed a sheet of white cardstock out of her craft bin. “Gimme two minutes. Watch this.”
I folded that paper the way the lady in the video did, creased it down sharp with my thumbnail, drew a little red cross on the front with one of Dream’s markers. Set it on top of her freshly-done hair.
She turned to the hall mirror. Went quiet.
“…Ooh.” Small and surprised. “That part’s kinda cute.”
“Kinda cute? You look adorable. A real vintage nurse needs a white dress.” And that’s where I stopped. Because I knew exactly where something like that might be in that house, and the second I thought of it, everything in me locked up.
Monica’s closet. She had to have a white button-up that I could fashion into a vintage nurse costume.
I had never touched that door. Not once, all these months.
Everybody in that house knew the rule without anybody ever saying it out loud.
You didn’t go in Monica’s closet. Justice kept it exactly how she left it.
Three years and counting. Every blouse on its hanger, every shoe in its box, a room holding its breath for a woman who was never walking back through it.
Even Storie’s tennis bracelet had come out of there like something lifted off an altar.
That closet was sacred. And I wasn’t family.
I was the help with a fake name, and I had no business on the other side of that door.
The driver was coming in ten minutes.
I put my hand on the knob and just stood there a second, feeling like a burglar, feeling every wrong thing about it. Then I saw my baby’s face falling apart in that laundry room all over again in my mind, and I turned the knob.
Her perfume was still in there.
That got me. Three years gone and the woman was still in the air of that closet, something soft and powdery worked so deep into her clothes it wouldn’t let go.
I stood in the doorway of a dead woman’s life, hung up in neat color-coded rows, waiting on her like she’d just stepped out for the afternoon.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. To her. To the empty room. To nobody. “I just need to borrow something. For your baby. I’ll bring it right back, I promise.”
I found a crisp white button-up, the kind that would hit her at the knees and belt up into a proper little dress.
I got Dream into that blouse, rolled the sleeves up, cinched the waist with a white ribbon leftover from her birthday party, popped the collar. I slipped the cap on. Grabbed the toy stethoscope I bought for her. Stood her in front of the mirror.
My girl lit back up like somebody flipped a switch.
“Well, well, well.” I stood behind her in the glass. “If it isn’t Nurse Dream.”
But her face was doing something complicated. Bright eyes, mouth still a little down at the corner.
“I wanted to match you, though,” she said, quiet. “I wanted to be a nurse like you. In the blue ones.”
Lord. That one went in deep and twisted.
Because it wasn’t about a costume. This baby wanted to be me.
Wanted to grow up and be the woman standing right behind her in that mirror.
And she didn’t have the first idea she was pointing at a ghost. There was no real me to grow up and be like.
The woman she loved didn’t exist. Even the name she called out a hundred times a day belonged to nobody.
And I was going to leave her. Soon. That’s what near about took my knees. This child was gonna wake up one morning and I’d just be gone, no note that made sense, no goodbye that told the truth, and she’d spend a long time wondering what she did to make Miss Skye disappear on her.
I knelt down and straightened that little paper cap on her head so she wouldn’t see my face do what it wanted to do.
“You look cute. Go in there and kill it,” I said.
“Ugh come on! The driver is here!” Storie called out.
I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes at Storie in front of Dream. I kissed the top of that paper cap, threw her backpack over her little shoulder, and marched my one-of-one nurse out the door to career day.
I had a feeling that Storie bleached those scrubs but I couldn’t prove it. And there was no point in bringing it up to her father without proof.
Then the house went quiet, quiet like it only gets after the kids are gone, and I was left alone with the thing I’d been dodging all morning.
I needed to get out of here before shit hit the fan with Roman.