Indigo: The Saving Bailey Trilogy #2

by Nikki Roman

  She stands in the doorway, watching Bailey sleep.

  “You can go in,” I say.

  She sits down with her back to the wall, facing the bed. “Mom didn’t do my laundry today,” she says. “She didn’t make me breakfast, or ask me to take a shower, or remind me to brush my teeth.”

  “She’s been busy. You’re a big girl, you can do those things on your own,” I say, sliding down the wall beside her.

  “It’s not the point, Spence,” she says. “I think she likes Bailey better than me.”

  “Sarah—” I begin.

  “And who wouldn’t? She’s sweeter and prettier, and braver, and everything I’m not,” she scowls. “Mom loves her.”

  “Mom loves you, Sarah. You’ll always be her little girl. She just feels sorry for Bailey is all… she feels obligated.”

  “Mom didn’t tell me that,” she says.

  “Well, I’m telling you. Bailey’s very sick. Mom’s only trying to make her feel better, and then she’ll be back to taking care of you like normal, I promise.”

  “Are you going to marry her?” she asks out of the blue.

  “I would like to,” I say.

  “She’s going to replace me. That’s what’s going to happen. Mom will love her more.”

  “Yeah and how do you know that?”

  “Because… even I love her more than myself.” Sarah rises and kisses Bailey’s forehead.

  •••

  A few days pass. Bailey becomes well enough to walk to the park and observe our little tree, thriving in the summer heat and showers. Mom braids Bailey’s hair and sometimes she styles it in a half down ponytail- a powder blue ribbon in her hair, like a piece of the summer sky is always with her.

  I teach Bailey how to grow roses. We buy a bush at Home Depot and plant it in a large clay pot. I show her how you trim the stalks that are only thorns and no roses—deadwood.

  “What about this?” Bailey asks, her hand under a damaged stem.

  “Damaged wood.” I take Mom’s gardening shears and cut it back an inch to healthy wood.

  “What about the dead roses?”

  “You remove them,” I snip one off and put it in her hair. “It’s still pretty, isn’t it, though?”

  Bailey smiles at me and turns in her sundress. These past few days mark the happiest I have ever seen her. Like the roses, she blossoms under my touch. I cut back the damage and the deadness. New buds form, they open and flourish in their own perfumed splendor.

  •••

  One day at the park, over lunch break, grazing underneath the shade created by our little tree, Bailey tells me that she punched her pregnant mother in the stomach. She says that she was sure she’d killed the baby, but last time she spoke with her mom she had gone for an ultrasound and the baby was fine.

  “It’s a boy!” Bailey says with relief.

  “You wanted a brother?”

  She nods her head furiously, smiling with her sandwich between her teeth. “I’ve always wanted a little brother…I knew it was a boy.”

  “So, who’s the father?”

  “Saint,” she says sticking out her tongue. “She told me when we were in a moving truck on the way to our new apartment…it was the day I thought I had come home just in time to stop her from having sex with him.”

  “Who is he?”

  She takes one of my chips and shrugs. “Some sleazebag Mom brought home from Indigo. They just did it and bam—baby!”

  I want to tell her that’s not how it works, you don’t just do it and then you’re pregnant. That first there is love, deep love that warrants an offspring. I want to tell her that I wish there were little Baileys running all around us now. But then I think she would argue that her mother and father conceived her, and there never was any love involved. She’d never known such love, until she came into my family. I just kiss her head and steal one of her chips to get even.

  “I keep thinking that maybe I’ll leave her. Let her raise the baby alone. Like starting new. Maybe then she wouldn’t abuse him,” she says, squinting at the sun.

  “Your eyes are watering,” I say.

  “It’s the sun.”

  “You couldn’t leave your mom and she couldn’t let you go. It would never happen,” I say.

  “You’re right, I love her too much.”

  I tell Bailey that she should just run away from her mom. Maybe move to the mountains…a secluded meadow atop a hill and build a house on it. I say that we’ll live together and I’ll sing a new song every day so she’ll never be bored.

  Bailey says, “Sometimes the sun shines too strongly on our tree; it wilts its leaves and shrivels them up like prunes. But it doesn’t hate the sun; it doesn’t hide from it or run from it.” She shields her eyes and shifts her gaze to me. “Because it still needs that sun to grow.”

  Chapter 21

  “Come on in,” Thomas says cheerfully. It’s sweltering in the 8x8 aluminum shed. I wonder how anyone could be happy in such suffocating heat.

  “So, you finally got a home,” I say, finding a place to sit in the dirt.

  “Yep,” he says. “Home is a place with a roof and four walls.”

  I tuck my knees under my chin.

  “Are you hungry?” He holds out a red apple with dull, bruised skin to me.

  “Oh, I couldn’t—” I start to say.

  “I have six of them and they’ll be rotten by the end of the day in this heat.”

  He places it on my knee and I stare. “How were you able to afford this shed?” I ask, my eyes remaining on the apple as it wobbles on my bony kneecap.

  “The owners of the Circle K got tired of me sitting in front of their store every day.” He takes a bite out of his apple too big for his mouth, putting a finger up as he chews. “I told them I was being a statue, free of charge. And they said they appreciated the gesture but that I didn’t fit in with the outside décor.”

  The baby girl squirms and fusses in his arms.

  “Then they bought me this shed,” he points to a sign hanging in the window, a piece of plywood that says, Welcome home, in robin-egg blue cursive.

  I laugh inside myself, thinking that a random shed at the side of their gas station looks much more obtrusive than a loitering man and his infant child.

  “What’s her name?” I ask, nodding to the baby.

  “Starkey,” he says.

  “Who named her that?” I ask, my eyebrows shooting up.

  “Her mom did. I like it, don’t you? It’s different.”

  I shrug.

  “Do you mind it here?” Thomas says.

  I look around and shrug once more. “What’s not to like?” I ask. “It’s quaint and you can smell the flowers.” There’s a black plastic flower bed at the back end of the shed and the flowers look even thirstier than Thomas, but just the same they seem happy to be out of the sun.

  “You’re a grub worm, just like me, aye?” he says shaking my boot.

  “What’s that ‘upposed to mean?” I finally bite into my apple.

  “You don’t mind that your clothes don’t match and your shoes haven’t had laces in years. You could skip a shower or two and you wouldn’t feel any the worse off for it.”

  I look down at my boots. One has a white shoelace knotted in six different places and the other has no laces. They are of some type of black suede; Mom purchased them for me a couple of years ago from a thrift store. She brought them home as a birthday present and I was thrilled to bits. They are so much comfier than the wedges she got me last year.

  Cinched at my waist are a pair of Sarah’s soccer shorts. A grey T-shirt I found hidden in the back of Spencer’s closet hangs loosely on my shoulders. “I wear what I can find,” I admit.

  “And you don’t feel any worse off than someone who wears fancy designer clothing, do you?”

  “I figure I’d still be the same Bailey. Maybe just shined up a bit more.”

  “I like you just the way you are,” Thomas smirks, juice from his apple dribbling i
nto his beard. “An apple tastes just as good with dull skin as it does with shiny skin, don’t it?”

  “No.”

  Thomas raises an eyebrow.

  “It tastes sweeter,” I say, winking.

  Sweat drips into my eyes and I blink it away. “So, what’s your story, Thomas, how did you end up living in the back of a Circle K inside a shed doubling as a sauna?”

  “I thought you wanted me to leave you alone? You were angry I came to your house and asked for more money. What do you care what my story is?”

  “People say stupid things when they’re angry. I like you. I like being around you and Starkey. You are my friends. Tell me your story, please?”

  “All right, that’s all the convincing I need,” he says, with that charming toothless grin.

  His steely eyes, the same color as the smooth, grey trunk of a birch tree, lock on mine. “This is how it starts,” he says, taking out a stack of Polaroid pictures from a black weatherproof box. At my feet, he puts down a picture of a young, blonde green-eyed girl. “My girlfriend, Emmy.”

  He puts another picture down of a young man with the same grey eyes as his but a face so full of life and youth, that I can’t find anymore resemblance between the two. Then he digs something else out of the box, a little plastic baggie. He pushes the two pictures side by side and places the baggie over them. “Cocaine,” he says. “Emmy started doing drugs.”

  “And then you dumped her?”

  “Not exactly. I couldn’t, because I needed her desperately at that time.” He picks up the picture of the young man and bends it. Starkey, who had been quietly sucking on her hand, giggles at the sight of the bent photograph propped up like a tiny bridge in the dirt. “I broke my back at work.”

  I turn the picture upside down and make it rock for Starkey, she giggles harder. “You lost your job?”

  “When my back healed I tried to go back, but they wouldn’t take me… said my spot had already been filled. I stayed with Emmy for a while, but she eventually kicked me out. She was cheating on me with her drug dealer.

  “I was already homeless when I found out about Starkey, but I was so lost and lonely, I didn’t tell the hospital that I didn’t have a home for her.”

  “And what happened to Emmy?”

  “She passed away after giving birth to Starkey. It’s a miracle she was able to carry her. Her body was all screwed up from the drugs and childbirth did her in.” He sits Starkey on the pictures and she giggles again. Her little face shines, her smile hiding her gaunt cheeks and hungry eyes.

  “I would be nothing without her,” Thomas says, his chin bent down to his chest and eyes shining with tears.

  “You are something to me,” I say putting a hand over his and another on top of Starkey’s head. “You’re remarkable and so alive. Thomas, we live while others just exist.”

  “Thank you, sweetie,” he says, squeezing my hand.

  “We’re closer aren’t we, to death? And we appreciate life more than someone who’s in no fear of losing it.”

  Thomas closes his eyes. “I hear a voice,” he says, “calling you.”

  “Yeah, who is it?” I ask, thinking he’s hearing voices in his head.

  “God.”

  “What? What is he saying?”

  His eyes fling open. “I’m only kidding, child. I think it’s your boyfriend.” A knock follows the end of his sentence.

  “Bailey? Are you in there?” Spencer says.

  “You’re a jerk,” I scowl at Thomas, whose resolute eyes have lit up from his antic.

  “You believed me,” he says, grinning.

  Spencer opens the door and takes a step back from the heat wave that escapes the shed. “It’s like an incinerator in here,” he says wiping sweat from his forehead. “You ready to go, Bailey? I have a surprise for you at home.”

  I uncross my legs and swipe dirt off them. “I hope you aren’t tricking me, too,” I say with a sideward glance at Thomas.

  “No tricks, just treats,” Spencer says holding the door open for me.

  We cross the muddy ditch connecting Circle K and Goodwill. It’s full of wriggling tadpoles and mosquito larvae from a recent torrential downpour.

  “I windexed the jewelry display case while you were chatting with your new friends,” Spencer says. He pushes a couple of flimsy medical books toward me and smiles lightly. “No offense.”

  I sit on them, not the least bit offended. His truck must have cost upwards of fifty grand, and the leather seats are real, as real as my vintage leather boots at home.

  •••

  A truck with rusted exterior and missing tailgate is smack dab in the middle of Spencer’s driveway like a fountain centerpiece. He got me a rusty, old truck? That’s the surprise?

  “No, it’s not the truck,” Spencer says reading my mind. “Your surprise is inside. Hurry up!” He picks me out of the truck and spins with me to the front door.

  “Is it for me or you?” I giggle. “You’re more excited than I am!”

  “It’s just that I’m about to make you smile real big and I can’t wait.” He opens the front door and peeks inside before letting me in. I walk in slowly, keeping my eyes peeled. I look on the kitchen counter, and there next a bowl of giant grapefruit, is my locket.

  “Where is he?” I run into the kitchen and scoop the locket into my palm. Instantaneously, Dad pops out from behind the counter; his arms open wide for a hug, I spring into them and stick to him like cooked rice to carpet.

  “I’m happy to see you, too,” Dad says, laughing.

  All of the sudden, I burst into tears, an uncontrollable flood of tears. Not happy tears or sad tears, but worrisome tears.

  Spencer comes behind us and unlocks my arms and legs; he takes me from my dad, even though I cry harder. His hands firmly gripping my shoulders, he steers me into his bedroom and has me sit on the bed. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m worried,” I say, wiping at my tears.

  “About what?”

  “That Mom will take me away from him. I’m scared that when I go to live with him it won’t even be a day before my mother rips me from his arms. It’d be like living the same nightmare all over again. Spencer, I can’t go through that a second time!”

  “Bailey, you’re an old soul. You worry about every little thing. I say be a kid for once. Don’t worry about what your mother is going to do. Just believe that your dad is going to take care of you, no matter what happens.” He grabs my face and pushes back my bangs. “You go with your dad, okay? He loves you a lot. I promise, Bailey, you’re going to know what love really is.”

  “I already do,” I say, “you’ve shown it to me, not once but a thousand-fold.”

  We’re leaning in for a kiss when the door opens, Dad stepping in. We snap our heads from each other at whiplash speed.

  “Is everything okay?” Dad asks, looking at me.

  I squirm under his concerned gaze; tears threaten to fall from my eyes again. “I’m just overwhelmed,” I say.

  He comes to sit on the bed beside me. “Darling, you don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”

  “Of course I want to,” I say. “I wouldn’t want to live with anyone else.”

  “Not in the mountains with me?” Spencer asks.

  I grin at him sheepishly and say, “There’s still time for that.”

  “Okay,” he agrees. “You should go get your things from Sarah’s room.”

  B.B. put her foot down after the third night of Spencer and I sharing a bed, so, I’ve been staying in Sarah’s room. She’s standing in the middle of it, my boots swinging in her hand by the one, white shoelace that she has painstakingly raveled through the both of them.

  “Your shorts,” I say, loosening the knotted string.

  “No, keep them,” she says. “I have lots.”

  We’ve grown close over the week; sharing the same bed can do that to people.

  She hangs my boots over my shoulder.

  “I have to go, Sarah. Th
anks for sharing your room with me.” I give her a quick embrace, and leave to find Dad and Spencer.

  They are sitting a good distance from each other on the couch; Dad fumbling a picture that he nearly drops when I walk into the living room.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready,” I say.

  Spencer smiles at me wryly. “Don’t be a stranger.”

  I give him a kiss goodbye and hold a hand out to him, my dad pulling me through the front door by my other.

  •••

  Dad’s truck smells wet and moldy, like it has been dragged up from the bottom of the ocean. The seats are damp and stained; the air conditioning blows hot air. McDonald’s ketchup packets and foil hamburger wrappers cover the dashboard. Pepsi cans and sweaty T-shirts litter the backseat.

  “Sorry about the truck,” Dad says.

  “Vintage,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what Mom calls things that are old and beaten up. Vintage,” I explain.

  “Oh,” he says, combing his fingers through his hair. “There’s a lot I need to learn about you and your mother.”

  I close up right then. There’s no way I’m going to let him in on all of Mom’s abuse.

  “Spencer didn’t tell me anything; he said you would explain it all… the reason you aren’t staying with your mother.”

  I clear my throat to let him know that I am listening.

  “You were your mommy’s princess before I left. Do you guys argue? It must be hard getting along because you’re a teenager now.”

  You don’t know the half of it.

  “You don’t have to tell me yet,” he says.

  I wasn’t planning on it.

  I’ve become accustomed to awkward silences shared on long drives; I’m practically a professional by now. Sneeze, cough, grunt, and tuck your hair behind your ear; bodily functions that let the driver know you are alive but not quite up for chit-chatter.

  “Eleven years,” Dad says, reminiscing. “You know how many TV series I’ve missed? I’m gonna have to spend the next twenty years in front of the television just to make up for it.”

  I laugh a little.

  “Do that again,” he says.

  “Do what?”