by Callie Hart
“You mind if I have some of your Lucky Charms?” Even in this small thing, if she feels less indebted to me, if she feels like she is doing me a favor, then that could change the dynamic of our painfully awkward relationship. She looks up at me from drawn brows, and I can tell she’s assessing me, trying to work me out.
Eventually she whispers, “Sure,” slowly pushing the box toward me with her elbow.
I pour myself a modest bowl, making sure not to take too much. “This your favorite?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” I pour the milk, and then take a bite, trying not to pull a face at the saccharine sweetness.
“Because of the powers,” she tells me.
I stand up straighter. “What do you mean?”
“The charms. Each one gives you powers.” This rings some vague and distant bell in my memory—a childhood remembrance, fuzzy and dusty from old age. I look down at her breakfast and notice that she’s separated out all of the marshmallows on the very edge of her bowl, stranding them, running yellow and pink and green food coloring into the rest of her cereal as she eats. “All of the charms, they’re supposed to be good for something if you eat enough of them,” she continues. She leans across the breakfast bar between us and scoops one of the moons out of my bowl and pops it into her mouth. This feels like a breakthrough of sorts. I grin at her.
“Okay, Lacey, you’re gonna have to fill me in. What do they all mean?”
Her lips form a nervous, drawn smile. She doesn’t make eye contact; she looks at the table between us. “Clovers are the one everyone knows. They give you luck, but it’s smart because you never know what kind of luck you’re going to get. Good or bad, so…” She shrugs. “And then horseshoes, the power to speed things up. Shooting stars give you the power to fly. Hourglass to control time, rainbows to zip from place to place.” She presses her index fingers together, and then jumps them apart. “Balloons mean you can make things float. Hearts, you can bring things back from the dead.”
I look down and I see all of the charms she mentioned sitting on the edge of her bowl, uneaten. She ate the crescent shaped charm from my bowl, the only one she hasn’t explained. And from the looks of things, that’s the only one she’s eaten from her bowl, too.
“And what about the moon charm? What does that one do?” I instantly regret asking. Her face falls, shoulders curving in to form a barrier between the two of us.
“I’m not sure, actually. I forgot.” She takes a deep breath, pushing away from the counter. “You mind if I use your shower? I feel pretty gross.”
“Of course. No problem. Like I said, make yourself at home.”
She avoids making eye contact with me as she quickly washes her bowl and hurries from the kitchen. Once she’s gone, I can’t help myself; I look it up on my phone:
Blue Moons—the power of invisibility.
Dr. Walcott, Yankees baseball fan, profuse creator of perspiration, giver of diazepam and other wonderful drugs, has a nervous disorder. I’m pretty fucking sure he does, anyway. Every meeting we have, he chews his way through at least three pens. Three pens in the space of an hour. That’s gotta be costing the state at least a couple of hundred bucks a year, I figure, considering I’m hardly the scariest bastard in here—he must go through at least five with those guys. He plays the part of looking relaxed, but I know if I move too sharp he’ll shit his pants and call for the guards. Pathetic, really. I mean why work in a prison if you’re this terrified of your patients.
Except we’re not called patients in here. We’re called inmates. If we were on the outside and sitting in an office with good ol’ Walcott, drinking our coffee, he might actually be a good doctor. But with mandatory treatment like this, people tend to be a little reticent. Obstructive. Unwilling to cooperate, if you will. I usually fall into the latter category, but today I’m being forced to sing a different song.
“So the appeals board has reviewed your case, as you’re aware.” Walcott flips over some paper inside my file, eyes nimbly scanning its contents while somehow still managing to keep one of them trained on me. “You’ve been advised that they originally rejected your lawyer’s request for early release right out of hand?”
“Yeah.” Charlie’s lawyer, the slick city boy with the immaculate hair, immaculate suit and immaculate shoes did tell me that. Not like I’d even hoped the appeal would go through, anyway. To be honest, I was surprised the judge had only given me ten years in the first place.
“Given the violent nature of your crime and your apparent lack of any remorse, they didn’t feel it appropriate that you be released until you serve at least half your sentence. Where are you at with that right now?”
“Two years served.”
“Well, you’ve got a long way to go then, Mayfair. At least another three years before any chance of parole unless we do this thing right.”
“Three years isn’t so bad,” I tell him, smirking. But of course it’s bad. Three years might as well be thirty in here. Anyone tells you they kicked back and did an easy stint in Chino, they’re a fucking liar. This place is hell on earth.
“But what if I were to say you could walk out of here in six months, Mayfair?”
“I’d say that sounds good.”
Walcott shakes his head, sighing, looking over my papers once more. “I really don’t know how he did it, to be honest. A deal like this frankly should not be on the table for you, Mayfair. Your lawyer must be playing golf with the right people.”
Fuck my lawyer playing golf with the right people. The deal the parole board cut me had more to do with Charlie’s boys paying a few visits to a few judges’ houses. No violence involved, of course. Just bricks of unmarked bills, a few bottles of single malt and a few choice words whispered into the right ears.
“And so this is where we find ourselves, Mayfair. If you work with me willingly, then we both win. I get to help you, and you get to leave. Do we have a deal?”
I feel like I’m giving something away when I reply, “Sure.”
He can tell I’m none too happy about it. “Great. Okay. Well customarily I’d start with the offence that landed you in here, but I think perhaps today we’ll go back to the beginning. Let’s start off with your childhood.” He sits back, the end of the black ballpoint he’s been turning over and over in his hand going into his mouth. He just fucking looks at me like he’s waiting for me to tell him something very terrible and specific that explains exactly why I am the way I am.
“I’m sorry, did you ask a question?” I growl.
“Your childhood, tell me about it.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Was it a happy one? Did you have many friends? Did you get on with your parents? You know, that sort of thing.”
Typical bullshit psychologist. My chair groans as I slouch back in my chair—I’ve stacked on a hundred pounds of muscle since I was dragged, cuffed, through the gates of this shithole. “It was fucking miserable. When I was four I went to live with my uncle in California. He was a drunk and he liked hurting little boys.” I suspect not everyone Walcott interviews is quite as blunt as I am. The man blanches.
“And when you say he hurt you, do you mean…” he trails off uncomfortably, gnawing on his pen again.
“No, I do not mean sexually. I mean with a baseball bat. I mean with his steel toecaps. I mean with his fists.”
Walcott writes that down. I can practically see it on the fucking paper now: Was beaten as a boy. Explains violent tendencies in adult life. An attempt to understand, to control what happened to him in his early years. An attempt to take back his perceived loss of power.
But even as a kid when my uncle was wailing on me and my still forming bones were snapping like kindling, I didn’t feel like I’d lost my power. I was just waiting. Waiting for the day when I was bigger and stronger than he was. Biding my time.
“And what about your parents? Why did they leave you with your uncle?”
“Because they died. My father had a h
eadache. They were going out to a movie, left me with a babysitter. My mother said she’d drive but she was pregnant, ready to pop, so he wouldn’t let her. Doctors said he had a burst aneurism at the wheel and wrapped their Chevy around a street lamp.”
Talking about my parents isn’t something I like to do, but with that six month get out of jail free card on the table, I don’t really have much of a choice. I don’t tell Walcott about the important stuff, though. The few hazy, coveted recollections that kept them alive inside me—the smell of my mother’s perfume, sweet and light and floral; her dark, wavy hair that tickled my face when she kissed me good night; the booming, joy-filled laughter of my father; the thrum thrum thrumming of the baby’s heartbeat inside my mother’s tautly stretched, round belly. I’d sit for hours listening as the unknown creature flipped and kicked inside her, while my mother gently stroked my hair, telling me stories.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Walcott says. He affects a level of sympathy in his voice that almost makes me believe him. “And what about later? After you left your uncle?”
This is now treading into dangerous ground. I won’t talk about Charlie. I can’t. I’ll die in here before I ever get out otherwise. “I lived on the street. I did what I had to survive. Stole, worked casual jobs, moved around a lot. Avoided the system.” My uncle kept on cashing the care checks the government sent, supposed to be spent on looking after me, until the day I turned eighteen and they refused to send them anymore. They have no proof I even really know Charlie. To bring him up now is to open a can of worms marked danger: extremely hazardous to health.
“I see.” He writes all of this down. No fucking point, though. The story I’ve just given him is the same one nearly every other inmate in this place shares. “Okay, Mayfair, can you please recount to me your single happiest memory from childhood?” His pen having caught up with him, the nib hovers over the paper ready to record whatever profound moment I am about to impart.
“No.”
Silence.
“Listen, if you go back to not cooperating—”
I cut him off. I can’t be fucked dealing with administrative threats; I just want this session over. “I’m not being difficult, Doctor Walcott. I can’t tell you about a single happy memory in my childhood because there isn’t one.”
“Not even one?” He seems doubtful.
I tell him the truth. “Nope. Not even one.”
Because even the memories of my parents—the perfume, the hair, the laughter, the thrum, thrum, thrum—they are perhaps the saddest parts.
If anything, Lacey grows quieter as we approach Pippa’s apartment. It seemed like a bad idea to take the girl to the practice. It’s an undeniably medical place, and I get the feeling that’s the last thing Lacey needs. Especially given her reaction to her recent experience in a hospital bed. I park my Volvo in the underground lot and we take the elevator up to the sixteenth floor of Pip’s apartment block. The vista is breathtaking as we exit the elevator—the space needle is a distant grey hiccup in the skyline of the city, almost swallowed by the other high rises. Green parkland stretches for miles between here and there, dappled with the bronzed, evolving colors of fall.
When she sees the view from the window, Lacey shrinks into the hoody she’s wearing, two sizes too big and most definitely not hers. I’m oddly uncomfortable about Lacey wearing Zeth’s clothes. God knows why.
You’re a crazy person, that’s why. He’s not yours. And you’d be mad to want him as yours, a sharp voice in my head advises me. That voice has started to bear a shocking resemblance to Pippa’s, a fact that makes me want to unreasonably slap my best friend square in the jaw. I know she’s protecting me. I know that, and yet I can’t help but resent her words of caution. To his face I might be reticent and as standoffish as possible, but the honest truth of the matter is that I can’t stop thinking about him. Can’t stop thinking about his hands on me. His hot mouth teasing over my skin. His strong hands possessing me in the most demanding way.
“Do we really need to do this?” Lacey’s small voice cuts through the silence of the hallway. She looks tiny, delicate. Fragile, like her name I guess. Like lace. Above all else, she looks frightened.
“It’s gonna be fine,” I tell her. “Think of it this way—you’re here of your own volition. We can leave any time you want. You don’t have to take any pills or tell Pippa anything you don’t want to. There won’t be any record of you ever being here, and it’s free. There’s nothing for you to lose, Lacey. But a lot to gain, right?” I carefully place my hand on her shoulder and gave it a soft squeeze. I haven’t touched her at all yet, and I think I’ve kind of expected her to shy from the contact. She doesn’t, though. She doubtfully nods her head, pinching her bottom lip in between her teeth.
“Okay. And we can go whenever I want?”
She obviously needs the extra reassurance; I give it to her, smiling, and guide her to Pippa’s apartment.
I rap sharply—my police knock—and Pippa only leaves us waiting on her doorstep for ten seconds. The door smoothly opens and there she stands, in neat blue jeans and a crisp white shirt, tucked into her pants. Pippa’s casual wear is akin to something I would wear to a job interview. Her hair is down, though, flowing to her shoulders, and the effect makes her look less severe. Less doctorly and more soccer mom.
“Hi, girls,” she says, smiling broadly. Her breezy tone makes it sound like we’re gathering to watch movies, drink wine and talk about boys. Absurd, but necessary. Lacey flashes her a grimace that could pass for a smile—a painful one—and the two of us enter Pip’s apartment. The place smells softly of lilies and jasmine. Beautifully kept, the place has the pristine feel of a showroom to it, although small touches make the place seem homely all the same. Her couch is the only reason I ever come over here: the thing is huge and beaten, the leather grown soft and supple with age. I immediately collapse into it, gesturing for Lacey to do the same. She sits on the couch beside me, tugging the neatly folded throw from the back of the chair behind her and wrapping it tightly over her legs. The action makes it seem as though she wants to bury herself from sight.
Blue Moons—the power of invisibility.
Pippa points a thumb over her shoulder toward her open-plan kitchen. “I was just making a cup of tea. Would you guys like one?”
“Be great. It’s freezing out there,” I reply.
Lacey nods, too, just once. Pippa goes about making the tea, kettle rumbling its irritated rumble, spoon clanking, the bright chime of china clashing against china, and Lacey dips her chin into the throw, staring at the floor. I’m about to ask her if she’s okay when my phone buzzes in my pocket. It’s a number I don’t recognize. I answer the call, getting up and pacing to the window. “Hello?”
“It’s me.”
That voice. “Why aren’t you calling from your number? And where the hell are you?” I hiss.
Silence from the other end of the phone. Perhaps Zeth Mayfair isn’t used to people being so hostile with him when they take his calls, but tough fucking luck. If he thinks he can just dump his responsibilities on me and vanish into thin—
“This phone’s a burner. Had to get rid of the other one,” his gruff voice informs me down the phone. “And I’m driving. To California to try and get your sister back. Forgotten already?”
Well fuck. I can’t really chew him out when he puts it like that. “No, I haven’t forgotten,” I snap. “It’d just be better under different circumstances.”
“You mean if you’d gotten your way and you were coming along for the ride?” His smirk is the audible kind, the kind that I can imagine all too plainly tugging persistently at the corner of his mouth. I shake my head, trying to dislodge the image of those full lips bowed into a knowing curve.
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean.” Behind me Pippa arrives with three mugs, two of them clasped precariously by the handles in the one hand, the other carrying just the one. I turn my back, hissing again into the phone. “When are you gonna be back?
”
Caring for Lacey is hardly a job I would have volunteered for, but my urgency for Zeth to get his ass back to Seattle also pertains to my sister. Two years is such a long time. It seems impossible that she should be kept away from her home a second longer.
“Need me already?” Zeth growls. “Don’t worry. I’ll be around to take care of you as soon as I’m done.
My cheeks blush hotly. “No, I do not need you to come take care of me!”
“You sure? I’m betting you’ll be begging me to use that key the second I hit the city limits.”
I hate the arrogance in his voice. Equally, I hate that I lie to myself and tell myself it doesn’t turn me on, too. Every dark, hazardous aspect of him turns me on. I’m drowning in the dark, velvet folds of his voice even now, my skin breaking out into gooseflesh at the highly sexual dip in his tone. Fucking get a grip, Sloane! “Just bring my sister home okay, buddy.” Buddy? Where the hell did that come from? Zeth is a lot things but he isn’t a buddy. A deep, throaty chuckle meets my ears.
“I’m on it. I just—” A deep inhalation says he is thinking on his next words. “Just keep an eye out, okay? There’s a chance someone might be following you.”
What. The. Fuck? Someone following me? My body reacts like a struck tuning fork. “Why? Why would someone by following me? What someone?”
“My boss’s a little jumpy. He might have put people on me. Could be they saw me bring Lacey to you,” he says matter-of-factly. A cold wash of dread percolates down through my chest to pool in the pit of my stomach.
“Seriously?” I try and fail to keep my voice down. Both Lacey and Pippa look up from their hushed conversation, entirely one sided by the looks of things, to give me quizzical stares. I spin around, facing my back to them, whispering, “How dangerous are these guys? Do I need to call the cops?”
