“You should take your girlfriend home.”
I fixed a cup of tea for my mother, and I bring it to her now, at the table, where she’s holding an ice pack to her swollen eye. The swelling’s gone down a bit now, but the corner of her eyeball is all red and veiny where it should be white.
I can’t take Chatham home. In fact, I’m wondering if she should ever go back to the Churchill again, now that Damien knows where to find her and what she means to me. He was spying on us; he saw her in bed with me.
And the whole mess with the photograph is another thing. How is it that he had a photograph of the same mysterious girl whose picture Savannah tucked into her journal? And she is the same girl. Chatham and I compared the two side by side.
That photograph is a direct link between whatever happened at Chatham’s family farm and my ex-stepfather . . . and maybe Rachel Bachton, if Rachel happened to be the phantom girl under the floorboards in the stables.
Chatham’s down the hall in the girls’ room now, reading to them. And I don’t know how Rosie’s going to react, but I’ve already decided that Chatham should stay here with us until she can find another place, a safer place, to stay.
“How long have you been together?”
“Long enough.”
Rosie sips the tea. “Why didn’t you tell me about her?”
“Would it have mattered?”
She doesn’t reply beyond the shrug of a shoulder.
Silence buzzes between us.
I hear Chatham’s rendition of Dr. Seuss, and it makes me smile, despite all the turbulence in the air tonight.
“So, you going to tell me what happened?” I ask. “Or am I going to report the scene that’s on repeat in my head?”
She meets my glance. “Report.”
“You’re not seriously considering not telling the police, are you?”
The look on her face tells me that’s exactly what she’s considering. “Damien called me, Josh, and offered to make dinner for the girls and me. I went willingly.”
“Why would you do that? Didn’t you see the pictures I texted?”
“Yes, Josh, but you know how Damien is. You have to let him think he’s in charge. Look. If I’d started ignoring him, he would have kept coming over. I needed things to be on my terms, okay? So I had it all planned.”
“Was the black eye in your plan?”
“I figured I’d go, and I’d tell him that I knew about the other girl, and if he wanted, I’d just let him have her on the side.”
I shake my head. Disgusting that she’d simply look the other way.
“You don’t understand,” she says. “I know why he has that girl. Because it makes him feel good to be getting away with something. I took that away from him.”
“So tonight was—what?—a success?”
“Do you always have to be such a smartass?”
“You shouldn’t have taken the girls.”
“Well, I couldn’t get a hold of you. You said you’d be here for the girls. You said—”
“It’s Homecoming,” I remind her. “There was a dance.”
“Oh.”
“What’d you think? We were just out at a party, dressed up like this?”
“I’m sorry, Josh. You have to tell me these things.”
“I swear I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
It’s a pointless argument. “Back to the girls.”
“When I couldn’t get a hold of you, it was too late. Damien showed up to get us, I figured we could just go, have a nice dinner—”
“Because he’s changed.”
“—and I’d confront him some other time. But he knew I knew. Just by looking at me. And your sisters . . . they weren’t on their best behavior, and it got to him. I gave them my phone so they could play games, but then they started fighting over the phone.” She hides behind her mug when she says the next part: “He sent them to the room as punishment, and that’s when it happened. That’s when I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You confronted him.” My head is in my hands now. “You provoked him. On his turf. You went with him willingly, when you knew something like this was going to happen. Rosie, you have to . . . at some point, you have to realize you allow this to happen. I get that you’re in a tough situation. He’s their father. You loved him. But he’s incapable of loving you back. He’s dangerous and violent, no matter how good you want him to be. We have a restraining order against this guy, and you took your baby girls to his house. You have a black eye, and he’s going to get away with it because you won’t go to the hospital, and you won’t call to have him arrested.”
“I voluntarily violated the order of protection, Josh.”
“So lie to the cops. How about this: he came here, forced you to go with him, I came to get you when Margaret called, and long story short, here you are.” I shove her phone a few inches across the table. “You’ve lied to them every time I’ve called, so what makes tonight any different?”
She drums her fingertips against the table, and has a hard time meeting my eyes. “You know why I threw away that letter from Miami University?”
“Yeah.” She was perfectly clear about that this morning.
“Do you know how far away Miami is?”
I let the question hang there, but I don’t take the bait. I don’t want to talk about Miami, and if she isn’t going to call the police, there’s not much else to say anyway. I clear my throat and redirect. “Why did he have that picture? Who is that little girl?”
“I don’t know. But it’s just a picture, Josh. It’s not like the child was unclothed, or anything.”
“If you won’t call about the beating he gave you tonight, call about the picture.” I don’t want to get into specifics with her as to why, in particular, the picture is concerning. But I don’t think she’s going to make the call without it. “Chatham’s sister ran away and she had a picture of this same little girl in her journal. Something’s wrong, Rosie.” I fill her in on what she might have missed regarding Rachel Bachton’s case, the Baby A buried at the confluence of rivers in Chatham County, Georgia, the rumors about what Savannah and Chatham may or may not have seen in the floorboards of the stables.
“What are you saying? That Damien’s involved in Rachel Bachton’s kidnapping somehow?”
“Wouldn’t put it past him.”
“The man who took her is described as five-ten to six-two, and nondescript. Damien stands out in a crowd. He’d be noticed.”
“Would a little kid know how tall he is? I’ll bet if you ask the girls how tall you are, they’d say you’re six feet. And he hasn’t always been as big is he is now. He gets bigger every time I see him.”
She considers for a second, then nods. “Maybe.”
“Or maybe . . . maybe he didn’t take her. Maybe he scouted her out for someone else to take her. Maybe he kept her for a while at the cabin.”
Again she shrugs and sips her tea. “One of the problems with the case is that they had too many leads in the first few months. Thousands of leads. Our police force doesn’t have the kind of manpower to work through all those leads, and if we accused Damien just because he has a picture . . . look, he’s a lot of things, but he’s not capable—”
“Yes, he is.”
She shuts up.
“Do you remember that black lab we used to have? Benny? And one day, we came home, and the dog was hanging by the swing from the tree out front. Damien said he must have gotten tangled up with the ropes. Do you remember that?”
I’d always suspected Damien killed the dog, and Rosie probably had thought so, too.
“He kept Benny’s collar, remember. To remind us of what he could do. And it’s still hanging on the wall. I saw it tonight. He killed our dog, terrified the girls, and he hit both of us tonight.”
For the first time, maybe, since she stumbled out of her ex-husband’s shack, she looks at me. Maybe it’s the first time she sees that I’m wearing the mark of Damien, too.
“He and I got into it earlier,” I say. “At the Churchill. And then he had me by the throat when I went in to get the girls. By. The. Throat.”
“Josh.”
“You call, or I’m going to. And I don’t care how many times you lie, I’m going to keep telling the truth. Damien Wick is dangerous, and I can’t stay here, Rosie, if you’re going to let this happen again and again. If you’re planning to keep covering for him, I just might go to the U. I’ll show you I can do it even if you don’t believe I can.”
“If you follow that letter all the way to Florida,” she says, “I don’t know how I’m going to manage. I believe you can do it, Josh—I’m sorry I made you think you couldn’t—but I can’t do this without you.”
I’m sure some mothers say things like this all the time, but mine? Not so much.
I could sink into the moment and take stock in this, but that could backfire. It’s like telling a girl you like her only after she tells you the same thing . . . and then finding out that she was joking. Can’t expose yourself to the vulnerabilities. That nearly happened to me once already today.
Chatham: I love you.
Me: I love you, too.
Then hours later . . .
Chatham: This was a mistake.
My stomach goes hollow with the memory. If I acknowledge Rosie’s commentary, next I know, it’ll be thrown back in my face. Besides, she’s on the defensive. Because I came to her rescue today, I actually have a leg to stand on, so pretty soon, she’s going to be scrambling for a way to kick it out from under me. She’s always got to have the upper hand.
So I wait it out.
Chatham’s voice carries down the hall.
“She seems great,” Rosie says.
This might be the only thing we agree on.
She tries again: “The girls really seem to like her.”
“They do.”
“But someone I’ve never met shouldn’t be sitting with the girls while they’re sick.”
And there it is. I look at her. “Call the cops.” I push back from the table.
“I told you to stay home that day.”
I turn toward the girls’ room.
“Josh.”
I wave her off.
I quietly walk into the girls’ room, careful not to disturb them. While I’m sure the events of this evening will rear up in their little heads and eventually prove damaging, they’re safe and content now, huddled in the same bed, with a book propped between them. They’re staring at pictures of Dr. Seuss’s fictional creatures.
Chatham is perched on the floor opposite with one of the girls’ doodle pads on her lap. She’s sketching, and reciting words. Not reading. Reciting and telling the girls when to turn the page.
This girl is amazing.
Once the story about Sneetches is over, and the girls are all but sleeping, I lead Chatham past my mother, who doesn’t even look up to acknowledge us, and to the basement.
I know Rosie’s expecting me to take Chatham back to the Churchill, but even if I weren’t worried about her being there alone, she and I are not done tonight.
She all-out flipped out earlier, and maybe I was wrong to jump to conclusions about her hair, but there’s something she’s not telling me.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” For all the energy she put into Dr. Seuss, she isn’t saying much now. She pulls a few tiles from the Scrabble tray on the side of the table that has become hers over the past weeks.
She places letters A, R, T, and C on the table, and at first she plays crate, but then rearranges the letters to play trace.
I want to confront her about what happened. I want her to explain what the big fucking deal was that I noticed something about her I hadn’t noticed before. I mean, how does a girl have no problem with me kissing her most intimate scars, how does she tell me about her nightmares of little bodies beneath floors of a stable, but not want me to know she’s naturally blonde? But I don’t know how to ask without sounding pushy, and I don’t want to scare her.
So I go with: “You know Dr. Seuss by heart.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“Not like that.”
She shrugs a shoulder. “If you memorize a story, you can tell it to yourself even when you don’t have the book in front of you.”
“I guess you can.”
Silence.
I try again: “What happened earlier in the car . . . are you okay?”
“I’m sorry,” she finally says. “I don’t know why it upset me so much.”
“It’s all right.” I’m sitting on the other side of the table, leaning forward with my elbows on my knees, and I can’t help looking at her. It’s like I don’t want to look away. I want to memorize the way she looks tonight.
Her skin is ivory-white, a stark contrast to her dark hair and dark red dress. Her chameleon eyes are sort of green around the rims tonight.
The longer I look at her, the more easily I can imagine her as a blonde. “For the record, I don’t expect you to be anything. Your hair could be purple for all I care.”
“I think, maybe, you’re the first person ever who could say something like that and I’d actually believe you.”
Silence. She starts rearranging the letters on the board again. Pulling letters from words we’ve already played, and even some from the pool.
C, H, A, T, H . . .
She’s spelling out her name. Fine by me, I want to tell her. Label everything in this whole damn place. It’s all yours, if you want it. Because I’m yours.
“It was the way you said it,” she says. “Like you thought I was lying to you or something.”
. . . A, M, C, L, A . . .
“I didn’t mean for it to come across that way. I was just surprised, that’s all.”
She licks her lips.
. . . I, B, O, R . . .
God, I want to kiss her. “I mean, I feel like I spend most of my free time looking at you, and I’d never noticed. I was excited, and not because you’re blonde underneath but because I’m excited every time I learn something new about you.”
. . . N, E.
“Like your sculpture. I might not understand it,” I say, “but you can bet I’m going to be thinking about it for a long time because whatever it is, it’s part of you.”
A hint of a smile appears on her lips, and while it’s not much of an invitation, I lean over the table, take her face in my hands, and press my mouth to hers.
“I meant it,” she says. “Everything I’ve told you today, everything I’ve told you since the caboose park. I mean it all.”
The doorbell sounds just as we’re about to kiss again.