by Nikki Roman
“I. Just. Did,” I say. “I learned from the best, didn’t I, Mommy dearest?”
Mom lurches at me and Dad restrains her. “It’s like—” she starts to say, her claws frozen in air, the veins in my father’s arms popping out as he struggles with her.
“Like you don’t even know me?” I provide. “It’s called standing up. A hard thing to do, when someone keeps kicking your feet out from underneath you. But Mommy, I’ve learned how to pick myself back up.”
I turn for the door, catching the hint of a smile on my dad’s lips as I do so. Sometimes pieces of Indigo shine through my exterior, the pieces that make me feel whole. Pieces that push me forward and force me to fight, when what I really want to do is crawl into a corner and cower in fear.
•••
Brown pine needles, cooked by the summer sun, crunch beneath my feet. I go into the woods, fighting off sharp branches with the video camera. The sun plows through the trees that should provide shade, as if they are nothing more than sheets peppered with bullet holes.
I sit on one of the boulders along the river and turn the camera on. I put Miemah’s tape inside it and watch it one more time.
For the very last time, I will observe how her face changes in pain, and I will listen to her father’s harsh words that make me shake all over. Second degree murder. The court pulled enough evidence to damn him. Even without my tape, he was sentenced to life in prison, or as I like to see it, death in prison because there really is no living in a place like that.
Miemah lights a cigarette. The smoke enters her lungs, exits. I think how funny it is that she’ll never have to worry about getting lung cancer.
In enters Papa. Some obscenities are thrown around. His thick hand meets Miemah’s face. Miemah falls onto her bed, a soft landing.
And then, she is inspecting her busted lip and worse, inspecting the two faces outside her window looking in.
The video ends. I dig a shallow hole with the toe of my boot and drop the tape inside. I cover it up with dirt and stomp on it. One less person to worry about.
Next, I put my tape in and watch it the same way one watches a scary movie: fingers spread over my eyes and head slightly turned away from the horror unfolding.
“You think it’s funny to record people getting beat up? Now you can be the star,” Miemah says.
I watch myself pass out as she rams my head into tile. I hold the camera away from me and choke on air like my throat has tripped over its own feet. Suddenly, I am dizzy and ill. I force myself to finish watching so that I can bury this tape, too. Bury all my problems in the ground.
Miemah laughs and says something to Cecil, in a voice that is menacing but quiet as death. I am unconscious.
Then Cecil turns the camera on somebody else. It lands on a shoulder, following it up to a neck and face. Green eyes stare back at me. “Turn that off,” Alana says.
•••
I pause the video, the same way my heart paused when I saw Alana’s face come into focus. Here she is in my hand—alive. Her voice as strong and full of breath as it was before she died. I touch the screen with the tips of my fingers, brushing at her hair and face. My mouth goes dry, my stomach clenches.
I am safe… here in… the… trees. Alana’s last words seem to be all around me. When I play the video again, I hear the sentence come from her mouth even though her lips don’t match up with the words.
Alana’s cameo should boil my blood. Naturally, it should make me think our friendship meant nothing to her, that it was all a setup. But eleven years is a long, long time to fake a friendship. And what good is it being angry at a dead girl?
The video has awakened all my senses, so much so that I think if I wanted to I could speak with Alana’s angel. I hear everything now, the birds’ songs, the crickets’ chirps and the splashes of fish as they swim in the creek…and someone walking this way. My sense of danger is awakened too.
I rise to my feet and bolt from the oncoming person.
Finding a tree with branches close together like the rungs of a ladder, I climb, something I never would have done before Alana’s death. Only now does it feel safe to do so.
With one hand on the camera and the other gripping branches, I pull myself up. The footfalls are coming closer, they splash in the creek. I reach the top of the tree, as soon as the person starts to break through foliage skirting the creek.
I’m twenty feet up. Maybe higher. And, I can see the top of the person’s head as he scratches it. “Is anyone here?” the man asks the trees and fish.
I recognize the voice as belonging to the tenant. I’ve had his camera for a month now, even though I promised to give it back the very next day. If he finds me I will have some explaining to do… or kissing.
“No one?” He shakes his head to himself for hearing voices and walks back the way he came.
When I am sure he is clear from the woods, I rewind the video and watch Alana come back to life again for the three seconds she is on camera.
I have finally climbed a tree for Alana and now I understand why she had ceaselessly begged me to join her all those years; up here the world is smaller and bigger, all at once. Up here, I have the upper hand.
I am safe here in the trees.
Chapter 38
Sydney
She sits on an algae dipped boulder, in her tiny striped bikini, waving and smiling at us. On tiptoes she jumps from boulder to boulder, I watch her lithe figure bend with each pounce. She has her father’s body.
“She’s going to fall,” Angel says. He’s sucking seeds out of a gigantic slice of watermelon and spitting them into the sand. “Honey, don’t do that!”
“Let her fall,” I say. “She’ll learn to be more careful.”
I suddenly remember a time when Bailey was hardly a year old; we had a pool at our first home and a baby gate surrounding it. I left her alone on the lanai because when I tried to bring her in the house to do the dishes, she threw a fit. I left the sliding glass door open like she was a dog that would come in on her own time. Moments later, I heard a soft Ker plunk and a cry.
Bailey had managed to open the gate and had fallen into the pool. I could see her black hair swaying in the water and her little arms flailing from the kitchen window. I watched her struggle to stay afloat and then sink to the bottom.
Finally, I left the kitchen and jumped into the pool to save her. When I pulled her out of the water she was silent but alive, her big blue eyes accusing me of letting her drown. I wanted to throw her back in.
•••
Bailey slips, her knee catching on one of the boulders. Angel leaves his towel and runs to her. Blood drips from her knee but she laughs at the pain. Angel gives her kisses and wipes sand off her legs. I burn with envy. I want her thin body to fall between the rocks and become stuck there.
Angel trudges through the sand, back to our setup of umbrellas and towels. He’s smiling with that twinkle in his eyes, that twinkle that used to be for me.
“She’s okay,” he says. “Cut her knee.”
Of course she’s fine, I’ve done much worse to her. She holds up very well for a small girl. There’s an instinct to survive threaded in her brain, I have seen it when I know very well she wants to be gone—her brain overriding her heart’s desire.
She could have died in the pool, or when I hit her in the head with a toaster, or when I pushed her down the stairs, or when…so many times I pushed her past the brink… the brink of pain that a little girl should be able to suffer and still survive. It had become a sort of game for me, as she grew older, how hard could I hit her before she’d be knocked out or …die?
“What are you thinking about, babe?” Angel says, punching a straw into his Capri Sun.
“’Bout our daughter. How happy she looks,” I say.
“She doesn’t look THAT happy.”
I shrug my shoulders. The baby inside of me flips, a little foot kicks at my ribs. I put a hand over my stomach, bringing attention to myself. Angel, who had
been watching Bailey intently, turns to me. “How’s the baby?”
“Kicking, thriving,” I say.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to name him?”
“Indy, like Indiana Jones,” I say.
“What a name,” Angel snorts.
“Yeah, and Bailey wasn’t a plain Jane name either.”
“No, it’s was a beautiful name for a beautiful girl.”
“What about Sydney?”
He feeds me a bite of his watermelon and gives me a sip of his juice. “Sydney? It’s not my first choice. Are you jealous of your own daughter?”
Yes. I hate her and love her, and wish I was her, just so I could have your love.
“I was just asking,” I say.
The love was there, right before Bailey was conceived and even a little after her birth. When she was born I couldn’t stop crying… the nurses took her away and I didn’t ask for her back. Angel fed her and changed her diapers for the first week. I couldn’t even look at her. She’d be in her crib and I’d be on the other side of the nursery, in a rocking chair; Angel would say things like, “She has your nose. Her eyes, Sydney, they’re stunning. She’s a beautiful baby. Don’t you want to hold her?”
I didn’t want to go within ten feet of her, but I had to. Angel went back to work, and that first day, I let Bailey cry for two hours or more and then I couldn’t stand it. I picked her up.
She was warm and sweaty from wailing and she was…beautiful. Just as Angel promised. I fell in love with her. I crushed her to my chest and showered her with kisses. I forgot she needed to be fed and changed. She fell asleep in my arms and it was then that I realized, I did love her—because how could someone not? But I hated what she stood for.
When I met Saint at Indigo, I took him home without an ounce of hesitation. We made love as soon as we got in the door. There wasn’t anything particularly special about him, he smelled bad and kind of reminded me of a muskrat…but it was my choice.
“Look,” Angel says, touching my arm.
Bailey is spinning on one foot, her other sweeping the surface of the water as it comes down. She knows Angel is watching. She’s putting on a show for him. Maybe she fears he will stop loving her the same way he did me, and I did her.
“She could have been a ballerina. She auditioned for the Joffrey school of Ballet in New York when she was fourteen,” I say.
“And what happened?”
“They wanted her…”
“So, why didn’t she go?”
“I tore up the acceptance letter. She stopped ballet after that. She thought she wasn’t good enough.”
“You did what?” Angel says.
I look at Bailey with scorn; she’s the reason Angel stopped loving me. “I wanted her to stay with me, it’s not like I had anyone else.”
“You cruel, vindictive…”
“Bitch?”
“How could you dash a little girl’s hopes and dreams? Did you not feel even the slightest bit remorseful?”
“You didn’t feel remorse… you only wanted to escape, even if forcing a young girl to drop high school and any hope of a career was the way to do it. Don’t talk to me about dashing little girl’s dreams. You’re no saint,” I say.
“You’re right, I’m not Saint, and I’m not going to pretend to love you just so we can fuck, or whatever else you did with that guy. How can I love you when you can’t even love yourself? Or your child, an extension of yourself? There isn’t any love left for her, or me, so where do you keep it all, Sydney? Or have your forgotten how to?”
“It’s a foreign language, love. You really screwed me over, Angel. You screwed us both over. Not all the kisses in the world are going to take back what you did. You took love and changed the words; made it something I couldn’t understand, anymore. It will take time to learn how to speak it again.”
“I did what I had to; you knew what you were getting yourself into. I wanted us to be together and have a family… at any cost.”
I take a piece of saran wrapped watermelon out of the cooler and a bottle of water for Bailey. She is walking toward us now.
“Most expensive decision I ever made in my life,” Angel mutters under his breath.
“Have some water,” I say holding out the water to Bailey. She chugs it, keeping her eyes on Angel and I. She must suspect something. Could she have heard our conversation?
“I got you something,” she says, putting the cap back on the water. She places a smooth pink shell in my hand; it matches her fingernails in shade and delicateness. “It’s your favorite color and look it even has a hole in it. You could make it into a necklace or bracelet.”
“Thank you, it’s pretty,” I say, closing my hand around it.
Since I can remember, Bailey would bring me trinkets, little treasures, always looking for a way to please me. The shell is a gift, to make up for her harsh words with me yesterday. She doesn’t realize there is nothing to be sorry for and good moms don’t beat their children and belittle them on a daily basis. Indy will never know of my abrasive side.
“Do you want to go swimming with me? The baby would like it, I bet.” Bailey smiles at me kindly, more kindly then I deserve. Her face is round and childish, pleading.
“I’m already feeling a little seasick,” I say. “Next time.”
“Okay,” she says forlornly. “Dad, how about you? The water is warm as a jacuzzi.”
Angel shakes his head. “I want to finish my watermelon…can you find me a shell, too? There are some really nice ones over there.” He points at no particular spot in the sand, away from the pier and far from where we are sitting. He’s trying to get rid of her. I feel like we’re tag teaming against her.
“Okay,” she says turning to go. “Wait, I forgot, what’s your favorite color?”
“Green,” Angel says.
“Oh,” she says. “I’ll have to find one with algae on it.”
A smirk appears on Angel’s face and for a second I love him. I love her, then the love vanishes and I forget how it appeared inside of me. I can’t get the feeling back and hate comes so easily—it’s my native tongue.
“Darling,” Angel says. “Even after all we did to her.”
We—it’s about time he starts sharing the blame. “Well, she didn’t learn it from me,” I say
“Yes, she did.”
The ocean beats against the coast; we are some of the only people left on the beach. The shadow of the umbrella disappears as the sun drops lower in the sky. It meets the ocean and sends a cone of its brilliant light over the tumultuous surf.
Bailey is still searching for that algae covered shell. Angel is wiping watermelon juice off his hands with the corner of his towel and watching the sunset too.
“You used to be very sweet. That’s what made me fall in love with you,” he says.
“I can be sweet again when Indy is born…I’ll be a good mother, maybe you’ll even feel attraction for me.”
“Attraction? I’m already attracted to you, you little minx. But I’ll admit if you could treat our daughter better, I’d be a lot more magnetized. Abuse is a major turn off and so is malice.”
“I’m bitter,” I say.
“So is cocoa before it’s made into sweet, sweet chocolate,” he says.
“But she isn’t normal.”
“Is anyone? Some girls are afraid of spiders…they squeal when they see one. So, she has a fear of the refrigerator. I get it. The fridge scares me, sometimes, too, especially when I open it up and find that it’s empty.”
“Maybe I’m over analyzing her,” I say flickeringly.
“You are. She’s just quirky. I like her quirks; she’s funny and naïve. I love that about her, it reminds me of how you used to be.”
“I can be quirky again,” I say. “After the baby is born…he’s going to change everything, I know it. I’ll be the person I was before we had Bailey.”
“You blame Bailey for what you’ve become?”
It’s dark now a
nd I have lost track of her. Maybe she got pulled under by a riptide. “Yes,” I say, all the breath gone from my voice. Maybe I got pulled in by a riptide.
“Are you going to blame Indy for all your problems, too?”
He’s got me there. I shut my mouth, I’m not about to admit that Indy is different, that I’m going to love him. Bailey was Angel’s escape and Indy is mine.
Angel shakes out his towel and takes the cooler to the car. Bailey comes back to me, and I sigh. She always comes back.
I tousle her hair, stiff from the ocean, and give her a hug.
“Love you,” she says. “Did you have fun today?”
“Love you too,” I say. “It wasn’t bad.”
It’s true, I love her; but only when it’s convenient for me. I had become something as evil and unspeakable as a stepmother from a Disney fairytale. And Bailey had become Snow White, fairest of them all.
Angel returns to gather up the umbrella and my towel. Bailey puts on her cover-up and tells us she’ll be waiting in the car.
“Did she find my shell?” Angel asks.
“Are you serious?”
“I’m kidding.” He chuckles.
The stars and moon are out now, silver light on the water’s skin and in Angel’s hair. His eyes light with it, like the rays are ignition. When we first started dating, he used to bring me here. He pushes his fingers between mine. I rest my head on his shoulder and close my eyes, seeing bits of starlight behind them. I’m exhausted, not having so much as a wink of sleep in the weeks since Alana went missing. Even Bailey has slept better than me.
A nightmare, the same one every time, has been waking me in the middle of the night and keeping me from falling back to sleep. It’s more of an altered memory than anything, really. A memory slightly twisted.
The dream plays out the same way every time; it starts out as my own true memory and then gradually morphs into a nightmare.
Years back, when Bailey and Alana were small, I had taken them to the park by our apartment in Parkway Village. As soon as we got there, Alana scuttled up a tall oak tree. Bailey went to the swings and asked me to push her. From a distance, I could see the red dot of Alana’s hair as she sat on a branch, her legs dangling.
