King ran his thumb over the back of my neck. “You should know by now I’m not a man who takes no for an answer, Pup. This isn’t a negotiation. When all this shit is over I’m taking you home. With me. If you want to fight it, fight me? Go right on ahead, because honestly, I’m getting hard just thinking about you handcuffed to my bed again.” His words vibrated against my throat as he spoke them right into the sensitive place behind my ear.
“Are you on that damn houseboat, child?!” Nadine called out from the dock. Between the tree branches, I saw Nadine. She was standing on the dock with my shorts in her hand. “That thing is ten seconds from rotting into the water. It’s not safe.”
“Go,” King whispered. “I love you.” He took a deep breath and disappeared under the water, barely making a ripple in the surface. The hammering of my heart the only real reminder that he was ever really there. I stepped out from behind the trees and Nadine’s head snapped toward me.
Nadine pushed out a hip and stuck her hand on it. “Girl, I’ve been looking for you everywhere! What the hell are you doing in there? I came to check on you, and you were gone. You scared the bejesus out of me!”
“Sorry. I couldn’t sleep and decided to go for a swim,” I lied.
“During the storm?” Nadine asked skeptically.
“It wasn’t storming when I came out here.”
Seeming to accept my answer Nadine tossed me my shorts. I shimmied back into them before emerging back onto the little beach.
Nadine guided me back up to the house by my elbow like I was an elderly person who’d wondered off. “Not feeling like you’re home just yet?”
I shook my head.
Nadine patted my hand. “You know, those waters are pretty dark at night and there are things lurking in there that most sane people would be very afraid of.”
I tried to contain to contain my smile.
If you only knew…
Chapter Six
Doe
I was about to get back in bed when the light from the phone I’d plugged in earlier illuminated the room, casting a glow on the ceiling. I unplugged it and crawled onto my stomach over the comforter, resting it on the pillow. The message on the screen indicated it was fully charged.
I slid the home screen open, but another message appeared asking for a password. I looked around the room and the first thing my eyes landed on was one of the sketches of Sammy hanging from the corkboard.
S-A-M-M-Y, I typed.
The screen unlocked. The home screen was wallpapered with a picture of Sammy, who was sitting a high chair, smiling from ear to ear, blue frosting all over his face. I smiled at the smashed cake between his fingers. A candle sat in the middle of the annihilated desert in front of him. “Ray obviously needs a course in creating better passwords.” I muttered.
I clicked on the camera icon and started scrolling through the pictures. Most were of Tanner and Samuel. One was a selfie of all three of us in a park that we must have taken several times because there were several varying versions of the same picture. We were all smiling.
We looked happy.
I don’t know how the pictures made me feel other than confused. I was about to turn the phone and finally get some rest when something in the background of one of the pictures caught my eye.
Not something.
Someone.
Lingering on a park bench not far from where we were taking our group selfie, sat a girl about my age with bright red hair. I blinked several times thinking that I was just seeing things. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew the girl. Her eyes had dark circles around them. Her clothes were tattered and torn. I scrolled back through the pictures again and there she was in each and every picture, looking directly at us as we snapped away. In the last picture she was smiling, but it was a sad smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
I sucked in a deep breath.
No, no it couldn’t be her.
It made no sense.
I raced around the room and searched through the various framed pictures, knocking some over in the process, until I found what I was looking for.
Until I found her.
The picture in my hand was taken in one of those old-time photo booths where they make the people in the picture look like they are from the Old West. Tanner and I were both in the picture as well, dressed like a cowgirl and cowboy. Tall hats and boots, bandanas tied around our necks. And there she was between us. Her foot hitched up onto an overturned barrel. Her dress falling off her shoulders, the side split clear up her thigh to her hip. She looked very different than the way she looked in the picture in the park, but there was no mistaking who she was, especially since in the old west picture she was aiming a fake gun directly at the camera.
I’d seen her do that before.
The gun aimed at me.
Holy. Shit.
And them something happened. Like a plug finally connecting into a working outlet. At first it was just a sputter of light and images. But then it grew into a steady flowing stream that once it got started developed into full fledged rapids, that once you floated into them, there was no getting out. Wave after wave flooded into my mind.
It was the very first.
It wouldn’t be the last.
A memory.
“Just one more time, Ray. I promise. I won’t ask again, but I have nowhere else to go.”
It’s the third time in a month my best friend has come to my bedroom window in the middle of the night and asked me to sneak her in. It breaks my heart, but this time I’ve decided I have to tell her no.
“I can’t. Not this time…and not anymore. What if my dad catches you? He said he’s going to call the cops. Besides, you can’t keep climbing up the tree and coming to my window in the middle of the night. What if Sammy was here?”
“Sammy is here?!” she exclaims loudly. She looks past me into my dark room. Sammy is at Tanner’s and once again she was listening to every other word I said. “Sammy loves his auntie! Hey Sammy! It’s me! Your auntie is here!”
“SSSHHHHH! No, he’s not here, but you’re going to wake up the whole house!” I don’t want to scold her like she is a toddler. I want to talk to her like we used to. I want to have a regular conversation with her like she is still the girl I bonded with when I was four years old. The girl I went to preschool with, the girl I got my first detention with because we talked too much in class. But that best friend, that girl I’ve known my whole life, no longer exists, and in her place is a person I don’t recognize.
Her once auburn hair is now some strange shade of reddish purple. Her once bright green eyes are glazed over and unfocused. And for someone who used to take ballet very seriously and who moved around with ease and grace, she is now as jittery as if she’d downed several pots of coffee. Her nails look as if she has chewed them down to the cuticles.
“So, you don’t want me around your son now?” She crosses her arms over her chest but sways. Reaching out she grabs onto a tree branch for support so she doesn’t topple to the ground. Part of me wants to let her in just so she doesn’t fall and break her neck.
“No. I don’t.” Usually I dance around the truth with her and normally I would say something like ‘Of course, I want you around him, but…’ and make something up. But I’d danced that dance and sang that song for too long and I’ve been watching my best friend withdraw from me more and more, sinking lower and lower into drugs and sex.
It started out as just another teenage girl rebelling against her strict parents. Our freshman year of high school she’d sneak out in the middle of the night and go to parties the seniors were throwing. She’d get drunk. She’d get high. She’d hook up with boys in our school.
I don’t want to cut her out of my life, but I remind myself that this girl isn’t the friend I’ve always known, the one who was more family to me than my drunk of a mother or my controlling father had ever been. But nothing I’d done has worked. She’d been to rehab three times already. During the third time, she didn’t even bother completing her ninety-day stint, and on the day she turned eighteen, she’d signed herself out and walked out.
That’s when her parents cut her off for good. That’s also when she started disappearing. I wouldn’t hear from her for weeks at a time. Then months. Sometimes I thought she was dead and then she’d appear out of nowhere, looking thinner and thinner. Her clothes shabbier. Her hair more brittle. Her skin covered with pock marks and scratches. Dirt caked under her nails. She’d confess to me that she’d been living on the streets. By the time she disappeared again with whatever money I could scrounge up, she’d just appear again at another time, even worse off than before.
“Fine, I won’t come in,” she says, “but I’m starving. Can I have some money? Just enough to last a week or so. Maybe a hundred?. For food.”
“If you’re hungry I can make you some food and bring it out to you, but no more money.” I am so close to cracking, but I hold strong.
“But…” Her lower lip starts to tremble. “Skinny will kill me if I don’t have money for him. I’m supposed to give him fifty bucks tonight, but I don’t have it. I spent it on a cab to come here…to see you.” There it is. The guilt. And it works because I am about to tap into the last of the birthday money from the great grandmother I’ve never met and hand it over to her.