Camille was in the middle of nowhere without her phone.
She turned on her hazards, threw open her door, and stepped out into the rain, her purse still slung over her shoulder. She stood there—paralyzed—staring at her flat front tire with no idea what to do as rain soaked her hair and her clothes, plastering them to her body.
Where was the Lord?
Where was God in this mess of a year?
“Where are you?” she shouted at the rain.
A car door slammed shut.
Her head jerked up.
A car idled behind hers, its headlights shining through the downpour. And a man—a large, broad-shouldered black man with sagging jeans and a hood pulled over his head—walked toward her.
Fear grabbed her by the throat.
She took a step back, reaching inside her purse.
The man stopped and held up his hands, his attention darting to hers. He stood like Darius stood all those months ago in her yard. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. “I just wanted to see if you needed some help.”
Fear let go of her throat.
And she let go of her gun.
Fifty-Eight
The first week Taylor came home from the hospital as a newborn infant, Camille became compulsively obsessed with her daughter’s breathing. Taylor would sleep for five-to-six-hour stretches at a time—making other moms groan with jealousy—but Camille couldn’t enjoy it. She woke up every hour on the hour and found herself incapable of falling back asleep until she felt the soft, sure pat of baby breath against her fingertips.
She was so terrified that Taylor would die in her sleep.
The same fear seized her, only this time Taylor was seventeen and it wasn’t a simple pat of breath that would reassure her. This time, reassurance came with blood.
Tonight Camille watched her daughter stick herself with a needle. Every muscle in Camille’s body had tensed. It took everything inside her not to say something. Not to step forward and do it for her, because Taylor seemed to be holding the needle wrong and shouldn’t she inject more to the left? Neil must have sensed it, because he placed his hand on Camille’s shoulder, and she bit back the advice. Taylor was doing fine. It was the first night of all the rest of her nights. At 9:15 p.m. Through the summer. Through her senior year of high school. Through college. On her wedding night. When she was old and gray. This would be her daughter’s routine. Her day would end with a needle.
Camille stood in Taylor’s doorway, watching her sleep as rain continued to fall outside—a steady downpour that might not ever stop. A steady downpour that would forever remind her of a flat tire and a man with a hood and a gun in her hand and the day everything in the world turned upside down.
By the time she returned to the hospital, two hours had passed. Two hours, and Neil didn’t say anything. Not about her soaking wet clothes. Not about her missing phone. He didn’t ask any questions. He wasn’t angry at her disappearance. He just invited her to sit down, and then they watched Liz show Taylor how to inject the Lantus at night.
Now he was at the grocery store, picking up food recommended in the binder, and Camille couldn’t stop staring at Taylor. She was an infant all over again, only now Camille loved her even more. She loved her more now than she did when she was a tiny newborn. This little stranger who grew inside her body. She loved her so much, she felt like her heart was going to collapse.
Camille crept closer, as if a magnet irresistibly pulled her. If she climbed into her bed, Taylor would be annoyed. She would push Camille away. That was all she did anymore—push her away. But so what? Maybe that was part of being a mother. Being pushed, and pushing back.
Only this time Taylor didn’t push. As soon as Camille eased under the covers, her daughter turned around and looked up at her through the dark with eyes so big and round, it was like they stepped inside Anaya Jones’s time machine and traveled thirteen years into the past, when Taylor was four and terrified of the wild things, convinced they lived under her bed and if Camille left they would roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and roll their terrible eyes.
“You have to stay with me, Mommy,” she would say. “You have to fight them for me.”
“Those monsters don’t stand a chance against your mother,” Camille had always said.
Only this monster was one Camille couldn’t fight.
“I’m scared,” Taylor whispered.
Camille tucked a strand of Taylor’s hair behind her ear. “I’m scared too,” she whispered back.
“What if I can’t run anymore?”
What if…
Oh, Lord. What if?
Camille set her chin on top of Taylor’s head and inhaled the scent of her strawberry shampoo. “Then we’ll jump that hurdle together.”
Taylor buried her face in her mother’s chest and cried herself to sleep.
* * *
A raccoon was rustling through the garbage. Right in front of Camille. It kept rubbing its paws together, looking at her with gleaming, beady eyes—as if daring her to chase it away. When she didn’t, it would dive back in.
Rustle, rustle, rustle.
Neil sighed heavily in his sleep.
But wait…
Camille wasn’t lying beside Neil, and there wasn’t a raccoon digging through the trash. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. She was in Taylor’s bed. The clock on her nightstand glowed 1:12 a.m., and cool air blew from the vents. She lay for a still second, waiting for Taylor to breathe again. When she did, Camille extricated herself with painstaking slowness from her daughter’s long limbs, wincing every time the mattress squeaked.
The rustling sound continued.
Camille crept through the hall, down the stairs, into the kitchen.
Bags of groceries created a maze on the kitchen floor. The big, intimidating binder from the hospital lay open on the counter, and Neil was hunched over it, holding a green box of Nature Valley granola bars.
“What are you doing?”
He whirled around, brandishing a yellow highlighter. He exhaled a breath and set down the box of granola bars. A yellow mark highlighted the carbohydrate count on the nutrition label.
Camille’s heart swelled with affection.
He was going through groceries, highlighting important numbers on nutrition labels at one in the morning, because he loved Taylor like she loved Taylor. No matter what happened between them, they would always have that. These children they’d made, and these children they loved.
“I can’t believe you’re still here,” she said.
“I was trying to get things organized. Make meal planning a little easier.” Neil put the cap on the highlighter and hitched his thumb awkwardly toward the foyer. “Do you want me to go?”
“No,” she said. She wanted him to stay. She needed him to stay. With the foreign nature of this new diagnosis, she needed familiarity, and despite being gone for the last ten months, Neil was everything familiar. She sat on one of the kitchen stools, sliding her hands over the cool granite and then folding them together.
The world had gotten very small, like it did when they brought Taylor home from the hospital.
“I keep thinking about the day we brought Taylor home from the hospital,” he said.
She looked up. “I was just thinking the same thing.”
“We thought the nurse was so crazy, to let us leave with this tiny human being. I remember looking in the rearview mirror, watching you watch Taylor in her car seat, and feeling…utterly terrified.” Neil ran his hand down his face, his palm scraping against whiskers—the stressful kind that grew in hospital waiting rooms. They were completely gray. When had Neil’s whiskers turned so gray? “I felt the same way driving you two home from the hospital tonight.”
“Me too.”
“I keep wanting to go up to her room and check her bl
ood sugar.”
Camille smiled. And she blinked too. She blinked away moisture.
“Remember that bike we got her when she was five?” he said.
“Oh, do I remember.”
Dora the Explorer.
“Hola, my name’s Taylor!” She and Neil said it at the exact same time, with the same perfect intonation that five-year-old Taylor used to use as she walked around the house with that beloved, tattered Boots doll tucked under her arm.
They smiled at each other.
“She was so determined to learn how to ride it without training wheels. Remember that?”
Camille nodded. Taylor had stubbornly refused training wheels. Seven-year-old Joseph across the street did not ride his bike with training wheels, so Taylor would not either. It caused more than a few fights between her parents. Neil wanted to take them off. Camille thought Taylor would kill herself.
“I remember when it finally clicked, and she took off pedaling. She was riding so fast and getting so far away from me, and I was panicked, because I knew she was going to fall. I kept yelling, ‘Slow down, Taylor. Slow down.’ ”
A lump rose in Camille’s throat.
“But she didn’t slow down. She flew off the curb and completely wiped out.”
“Five stitches.”
Neil nodded.
That had caused a fight too.
Camille remembered him carrying a wailing Taylor inside, a bloody gash in her knee. She remembered her words too, as she frantically searched for something to stanch the flow. “I told you not to take off those training wheels!” She was so sure, as she sat with Taylor on her lap in the waiting room of the ER—because she was going to handle this now—that it never would have happened on her watch. The truth was, on her watch, Taylor probably never would have learned to ride.
“Our daughter makes me feel that way a lot, you know? ‘Slow down, Taylor. Slow down.’ I’m her dad, and she’s always having to drag me along.”
“At least you don’t stop her altogether.”
Their eyes met.
Silence sat between them.
“Somehow,” Neil said, “we’re supposed to believe that this is for her good.”
A puff of air escaped Camille’s nose.
“It’s what our faith says, anyway.”
Our faith.
Camille had a hard time understanding how Neil could still share her faith. How could he leave and continue to worship a God who told husbands not to leave? But then…she thought about Cody, who went to Fellowship of Christian Athletes almost every Wednesday. And her uncle, who taught Paige a filthy word but went to church every Sunday. She thought about herself, who never once confronted Uncle Ray when he said it. And her neighbors across the street, who brought their children to Awana on Tuesday nights but called the police when they saw a black kid on her front lawn. They were all such hypocrites. Such broken, in-need-of-grace hypocrites.
“It’s hard to wrap your mind around, isn’t it?” Neil said.
Yeah. Just a little.
Camille wound her hand around the back of her neck. “I remember hearing that verse in church as a little girl—the one about all our days being ordained before one of them came to be. I used to picture these invisible numbers hovering over everybody’s head, and every time the clock struck midnight, the number would tick down. I would look at people and think, What’s your number? I never really thought about our days being marked with other things.”
Like diabetes.
Like a husband leaving.
Like a tire blowing out on the road.
The man’s name was Chris. He was nice, a father of two little girls. He stopped when nobody else stopped and changed her tire. And she almost shot him.
“The newspaper was right,” Camille said. “I’m racist.”
“What?”
“I almost shot someone tonight.”
Neil jerked his head back, his eyes widening.
“That’s where I was when I was gone. I was driving. I didn’t even know where. Then my tire blew out. This man got out to help me. This really tall, really big black man.”
She pictured him, holding his hands up like Darius. Another snapshot in her mind. One she would have with her until the day she died. Chris, with his hands in the air and the same fear in his eyes that she had seen in Darius’s. Because he knew. He saw her hand reach inside her purse.
“He had his hood up because it was raining, and I got scared. I…” She shook her head. What if she had done it? What if he hadn’t put his hands up in the right way or he’d been a little closer and she slightly more startled? What if she had yanked that gun out and pulled the trigger? That man would be dead. His invisible number would have been up. Or maybe she would have ended it early.
Camille shuddered.
“I’m sure it didn’t have anything to do with his color,” Neil said. “I’m sure you would have been afraid of any large, hooded man.”
Maybe.
Maybe not.
Camille didn’t know. And there was the rub. She honestly didn’t know.
Neil reached across the counter and put his hand on hers.
His touch broke something inside her.
The lump in her throat gave way.
She put her head on her arm and wept.
Neil took his hand back, and for a second she felt abandoned all over again. Bereft and alone. But then suddenly, she wasn’t. He wrapped her in his arms. He drew her head to his shoulder and absorbed her tears.
Fifty-Nine
Anaya didn’t feel any more comfortable at Camille Gray’s house the second time around, and Darius had the audacity to ask to come with her. Here, to this neighborhood where people assumed he was a prowler. She told him no, of course.
He was at home with Mama, who was so preoccupied and stressed with the South Fork news and where Darius would go to school next year that when she saw his black eye on Thursday morning, she held up her hands and said, “I don’t even wanna know.”
So far, no police officers had shown up on their door to read Darius his rights. So far, Cody Malone’s mother hadn’t followed through on her threat. The stress of waiting to see whether or not she would was starting to take its toll.
Anaya rang the doorbell and took a step back.
A few seconds later, the door swung open.
A tall, trim, middle-aged man with a receding hairline and Paige’s bright blue eyes answered the door. Paige’s father, she guessed. Only she thought Taylor’s parents were divorced or separated. One of the two.
“I’m Anaya Jones, Taylor’s coach.”
The man shook Anaya’s hand. “And Paige’s teacher.”
She held up the card and the small gift from the team. Yesterday was sectionals. Shanice and Alexis both qualified for state. The whole team felt Taylor’s absence. Anaya did too. “I wanted to stop by and see how Taylor was doing.”
He called inside the house for Taylor and invited Anaya into the foyer.
It was practically bigger than her entire house.
Taylor came down the stairs, looking normal and healthy. Her hair was wet, her skin freshly scrubbed. Anaya wasn’t sure what she was expecting—some sort of diminished, sickly version? “Hey, Coach,” Taylor said, looking from Anaya to her father.
“I’ll leave you two to talk.”
“Want to talk outside?” Anaya asked. “It’s really nice.”
“Sure.”
The two of them sat on the front stoop.
Anaya handed her the card and the gift. “Just a little something from the team to let you know we’re thinking about you.”
Taylor opened the card. Get Better Soon. It seemed odd, but Alexis brought it to practice on Friday, and Anaya wasn’t about to point out the fact that maybe it was a little insensitive. As far as she knew, people didn’t
get better from diabetes. Everyone signed it, wrote little notes. Taylor read them, then set the card aside and pulled out a coffee mug from the small gift bag. It had the words Strong is the New Beautiful written in colorful, swirly font.
“Thank you,” Taylor said.
Anaya rested her elbows on her knees. “I know you had some big goals for state. You’ll get ’em next year.”
Taylor turned the mug over in her hands. She gazed inside, like whatever she was thinking so intently about sloshed around like coffee in a cup. “What if I can’t?” she finally asked.
“Can’t what?”
“Run.”
“You still have your legs, don’t you?”
“You know what I mean. What if I’m not good anymore? What if I try and I lose every race?”
Then the world would keep turning.
Taylor would still go to college.
Her mother wouldn’t have to quit night classes and take a second job. Taylor’s parents had plenty of money to send her to college without any need of a scholarship.
She’d find something else to motivate her.
She’d meet a guy. They’d fall in love and get married and have kids and live in a neighborhood like this one.
But Anaya couldn’t say that.
She was a coach, and right now one of her runners was facing a really big hurdle that had been unexpectedly tossed in front of her. “I know what it’s like to be the best at something and then have that taken away.”
Taylor’s attention flitted to Anaya’s ankle. Did Darius tell Taylor what happened? Did Taylor know that once upon a time, Anaya thought she would be running for Team USA, not coaching track for Suburbia USA?
She picked up a small pebble and tossed it into her other hand. “I guess the question you need to ask yourself is, What do you really love? Running or winning? If it’s running, then you’re not really going to lose anything.”
* * *
A glucose meter. Meter strips. A lancet device. Lancets. An insulin pen. Extra screw-on needles. A bag full of snacks and juice boxes with exactly fifteen grams of carbohydrates. It was Monday morning, and Camille was shuffling through the monogrammed tote she purchased at Rebecca’s Thirty-One party two summers ago to make sure everything was there.
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