Beneath the Skin

by Kyla Stone

  “There you go.”

  “Well, see, here’s the thing. Your brother also said he only heard one gunshot.”

  My gut clenches. I don’t move. I don’t blink. “What does that mean?”

  “I just wonder why Aaron only heard one gun shot. Unless the timing was spread out. One gunshot earlier, while he’s down the street playing. One killer. Then another gunshot, later. When he’s closer to the house to hear it. Maybe a second perp. Maybe a cover up?”

  I’m sure the detective can see the guilt scrawled across my face in dripping red letters. My heart hammers against my ribcage so loud the whole world must hear it. Heat flushes through me. I’m dizzy, white stars exploding around the edges of things. I have to hold it together. I cannot fall apart, not here, not now. “Detective, is there something you think I can help you with?”

  The woman stands up, brushes the wrinkles from her pants, and takes a step toward me. Our faces are only inches apart. I can see the veins webbing the whites of her eyes, the enlarged pores in her cheeks. My fingernails dig into my palms until they draw blood, but I do not look away. Breaking this staring contest will be tantamount to admitting guilt, I’m sure of it.

  “Did you have a reason to kill him?” Her breath trembles against my cheek. “Was it self-defense? The judge would be very sympathetic.”

  I can barely force out the words. My throat is coated in bile. I’m going to vomit. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.”

  “My mother confessed. You people already caught the killer.” My voice snags on the word ‘killer.’

  “Maybe we did, maybe we didn’t. You know, we also found another fingerprint on the gun. Yours.”

  Fear jolts through me. I lick my lips, will myself to sound calm. “So what? I shot that gun all the time at the range. You can check with Reggie. He’s seen me.”

  After a long second, she steps back. “I wonder, if we’d tested your hands for GSR that night, would we have found something?”

  I tremble from the effort of remaining standing. My thoughts flap around in my head, banging wildly against my skull. I need to think. And fast. Do I have the right to make her leave? Suddenly I wish I’d paid more attention during those Bill of Rights discussions in Government. I make myself sound confident, even though I’m about to throw up all over her trench coat. “I think it’s time for you to go. My aunt will be here soon.”

  Detective Henricksen hands me a business card. She smiles benignly. “I hope you’ll think about our discussion. I’ll let myself out.”

  I shut the door behind her and sag against it. I cover my mouth with my hands, gagging, gasping, gulping in air that just won’t come. I see Frank’s face, his cold marble eyes. I feel the gun, the heft of it, in my hands.

  I crumple the card in my fist. But I don’t throw it away. I can’t. I am not innocent. I am the guilty one, the one getting away with murder, the one letting someone else take the punishment. Guilt and shame spike through me, pinning me to the floor like one of Jasmine’s butterflies to their display boards.

  31

  I go to Arianna’s house after she comes home from school. She makes me sit at the island while she cooks. She flips through a box of recipes scrawled on old three by five cards.

  “There’s Pinterest for that,” I say, blowing air into my frozen hands.

  “These are family recipes dating back to my great-grandmother. My abuelita used to make the best flan. And arepas. But my mom? Not so much. Here we go.” She pulls out a faded, dented card. “Sudado de pollo. You like chicken and rice? Oh, and bananos calados. Colombian-style fried bananas. Not nearly as exotic, but I guess it’ll do.”

  “I don’t even know what you just said. Other than it must be fancy. Don’t make that for me.”

  “I’m making it for me. It reminds me of my abuelita. And it calms me. I basically cook all the family meals now. Not like we actually eat as a family.”

  “Are you eating? Like, actual food?” I ask pointedly. Her leggings look baggy.

  “I think we have everything we need here already.” She ignores me as she bangs through the cupboards and the fridge, pulling out ingredients.

  “Can I help at least?”

  She shakes her head. “No thanks. I love doing this.” She chops up onions, red peppers, fresh garlic, and tomatoes. She pours some oil in a large pot and adds in the chopped veggies, salt and pepper. “Now tell me what’s going on. Besides the obvious, I mean. Something else happened.”

  I give her a hard look. “You’re terribly perceptive for a bobble-headed Beauty Queen.”

  She smiles grimly. “I’m multi-talented, too.”

  I tell her about the detective’s visit, what she said. Her frown deepens the more I talk. She adds pink chicken legs, water, cumin powder, and something called Sazòn Goya spice to the pot and stands at the stove, stirring.

  “What about Aaron?”

  “He lied for me, but he didn’t know there were two gunshots.”

  “Poor kid.”

  I stare at my hands, twirl my rings around my fingers. My thoughts are rolling around in my head like marbles. I can’t get them into a straight line. “Maybe I should call her.”

  “Call who?”

  “The detective.”

  Arianna puts down the wooden spoon and stares at me. “Are you crazy?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Sidney Shaw? Wondering about the right thing to do?”

  “I have my moments. I don’t know. I hate making Aaron lie for me. I hate making you lie for me. I hate that my own mother is taking the punishment instead of me. Maybe the detective is right.”

  Arianna sets up a rice steamer and pours in two cups of dry white rice. “Or maybe she’s just trying to get into your head.”

  My stomach cramps. My mother is going to prison. My mother is sitting in a jail cell, right now, surrounded by concrete walls. She is guilty of many things, but not this. What is she thinking? Why is she doing this? “It’s working.”

  Arianna turns and faces me. Her hands press against her stomach, right over her scar. “Why did you do what you did?”

  “To make it stop. To protect my family.”

  “Are you doing that? Are your brothers safe?”

  “Yes, but—”

  She chops the round yellow potatoes so hard the knife sticks in the wooden cutting board. She dumps the potatoes in the pot and turns toward me, her face wrinkled in concentration. “If you were sitting in a prison cell right now, would the boys be safe with your mom?”

  I imagine the boys huddled in their rooms, scared and hungry. I imagine Frankie having to make the meals, clean up after Ma. Would he always remember to stub out her cigarettes? Would he be able to get to a grocery store without a car? Would he be strong enough to get her into bed when she passed out on the couch or the floor? “She barely remembers to feed herself, let alone them.”

  “So maybe this, right here, is the best possible outcome. The most just.”

  I shake my head, start to protest, but she interrupts me.

  “Your mother chose to confess. Maybe you need to talk to her. To really know why, before you can find peace with this.”

  “I don’t know if I can.” Just the thought paralyzes me with guilt and terror. My muscles tense. Dark anxiety coils in the pit of my stomach.

  “That’s up to you. Just remember, whenever you start to doubt. You aren’t sending her to prison, she chose to be there.”

  I let her words sink in. “This is awfully weird coming from you. I thought you’d be all gung-ho about God’s justice and punishment for sins and honesty is the best policy.”

  “God is just,” Arianna says simply. “And God’s justice isn’t always man’s justice, either. Don’t forget that. God isn’t bound by man-made laws and judges and notions of punishment.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  Arianna takes out bananas, butter, brown sugar,
orange juice, and cinnamon. She peels and cuts four bananas in half, then lengthwise with quick, sure hands. She’s frowning and chewing on her lower lip. “In a better world, you never would’ve had to pull the trigger. Someone would have listened to you and stopped it. Or your father wouldn’t have done what he did in the first place. We live in a world where girls are raped, but the rapist is a rockstar college athlete so he gets 30 days in jail. That’s not justice. But we’ll all face God for the things we’ve done before it’s all over. And He will mete out justice which is fair and true. And mercy, where mercy should be offered. That’s all I know.”

  “You sound so sure.”

  “I am.”

  “You never doubt?”

  “About this? No.” She adds the bananas, brown sugar, and cinnamon to the skillet, stirring constantly. She adds the orange juice, and I watch the bananas darken in the pan. “You know,” she says slowly. “Rahab lied to save the lives of the spies she had hidden in her attic. So the Israelites saved her and she was praised in the Bible.”

  “Is that your whole plan in all of this? To get honor in heaven, more rubies on your crown?”

  She laughs. “I wish.”

  “Why do you say it like that? You’re like the most perfect person I know. Minus Lucas.”

  “Very funny. Do you not remember the depression, the cutting and the eating disorder? All beneath a cheery Christian veneer? Oh, and to top it off, I preach love but I’m really a coward who watches her friends bully people relentlessly and doesn’t do a thing about it.”

  “Former friends,” I say.

  “Former friends.” The corners of her mouth lift, but it’s more grimace than smile.

  Suddenly I want to make things better for her, to do something to ease the pain behind her eyes. “You were that person. But you’re not anymore. You made a choice to do something.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “I’m always right.”

  She places both hands on the countertop, as if to steady herself.

  “Are you okay? Are you dizzy?”

  “It’ll pass. It always does.”

  “Shouldn’t God save you from this?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This. Whatever’s wrong with you. Isn’t that the whole spiel? You give God your money and your faith, and He blesses you and takes away your problems.”

  She shakes her head. “I have faith in God because He loves me, in spite of all this. He never promises to take it away. Just to help you through. Until Heaven.”

  “Well, that sounds like a raw deal.”

  “It’s not.” She takes a deep breath and keeps moving. She puts the bananas on little dessert plates. “The ice cream will melt. We’ll add it later.”

  Arianna truly believes. However misguided, she is sincere. There is a kind of power in believing in something larger than yourself, I think. Maybe salvation.

  She spoons the rice on a plate, then adds the chicken and potato mixture. She adds a fork and pushes it across the island toward me. “Eat.”

  “You too.” The whole time I was living at her house, she barely ate anything other than rice cakes, egg whites, carrot sticks, and Diet Coke. Only when I sat next to her would she eat a few small bites of whatever elaborate, authentic Colombian meal she’d created. Her parents never noticed or said anything. They were barely even home.

  Just the smell makes my mouth water. And it tastes as delicious as it smells. “I’ve never had a better meal than this,” I tell her around a mouthful of succulent chicken drenched in sauce. “Better than Bill’s, and he makes the best mushroom burger on the planet.”

  She smiles wistfully. She scoops up a forkful of saucy rice, but doesn’t take a bite. I can’t imagine not eating, the will it must take to deny primal hunger.

  “Do you want to die?” I ask her.

  “What? No. Of course not.”

  “Are you punishing yourself because you don’t think you’re good enough? By starving yourself?”

  She stares down at her plate. “I don’t know. Maybe. Stupid, right?”

  I know a thing or two about self-punishment. “Stupid, but understandable.”

  “It’s easy to think how stupid it is in my head. To say it out loud. But not in my heart, deep down inside me.”

  I spear a chunk of potato, stare at it. “You think if you punish yourself enough, you can pay for your sins. Then the guilt will stop tormenting you.”

  “Something like that.”

  I think of the ladder of scars up and down my legs. “It doesn’t work.”

  “I think I know that, too.”

  “It’s something else. Something even harder than hurting your own body.”

  She looks at me, tears glistening in her thick eyelashes. “What?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know yet.”

  She just gazes down at her fork. She looks so sad, so tired and lost. It’s hard to imagine now how I thought she was so perfect, so shallow and vain. Here in front of me, I can see all her broken places, all the hollowed-out parts of herself she’s sacrificed for others.

  Even now, she’s sacrificing a part of herself for me. It makes me all warm and smooth inside, like a swig of hot apple cider melting me all the way down, but also guilty as hell. And scared for her. Like me, she doesn’t have anything more to give away. I push my plate over to her. “Please eat something.”

  She cuts a slice of fried banana into tiny morsels. She looks at me, sees I’m still watching her, then gingerly lifts her fork to her mouth. I sit with her until she finishes the whole piece. We sit, side by side. I listen to her soft breathing. And for awhile, at least, this is enough.

  32

  In my nightmares, Frank comes for me. His eyes haunt me, stalking my dreams. Beautiful and cobalt blue, but flat and hard. Lifeless. Like marbles. I wake up fast, sucking in air, drenched in sweat. My heart thuds against my rib cage. My fingers scratch the sheets into my fists. It’s just a dream. I blink rapidly until the images fade away from the backs of my eyelids.

  The bedroom is dark. The lights from a passing car arc across the far wall. Frankie’s dresser, his bed, and the opened closet door shift and take indistinct shapes. Everything is draped in shadow.

  There is no one here. I’m safe. My father is dead. He can’t do anything to me anymore. Slowly, my fingers release the sheets. He’s dead. Still, his eyes haunt me—his glassy, lifeless eyes. Eyes that never stop staring at me even when I close my eyelids.

  I’m done sleeping for tonight. I slip out of Aaron’s bed and pad into the kitchen. I open the fridge and pour myself a glass of milk. My hands are still trembling. The chair makes a scratching sound on the linoleum as I sit down at the new table Aunt Ellie bought a few days ago.

  My father’s face swims in my mind’s eye, and behind his floats my mother’s. I ignore Frank, block his eyes from my mind. Ma is harder. Susan Shaw has multiple faces: one blank and stupid, the mouth slack, eyes rolling back in her head from the alcohol and the pills, another face hard and sharp, eyes filled with scorn and jealousy. And then her last face, the smile quick to appear, the eyes bright and cheerful. Which one is my mother? Which one is real?

  The window over the sink gleams at me like a lidless black eye.

  “Sidney?”

  My gaze jerks up. “It’s you.”

  Aunt Ellie flicks on the light switch. She steps into the kitchen as she pulls her silky, sapphire blue kimono around her large midsection. Everything about Aunt Ellie is big—her height, her girth, her booming laugh, her commanding presence. Her burgundy hair, usually smoothed into a glossy helmet to her chin, is smushed on one side. Her long fingernails are painted a glossy plum purple. She wears billowy satin shirts with bold patterns and colorful slacks and skirts. She looks years younger than Ma, though she’s five years older.

  “Difficulty sleeping, dear?”

  “Something like that.” I’m still not used to this woman. She’s like a whirlwind spinning into my life, kicking up a fl
urry of dust and light in a house filled with secrets and darkness. She keeps up an exhausting storm of conversation and activities. It’s like being dragged behind a truck.

  In her first three days here, Aunt Ellie took me grocery shopping multiple times, buying more food than the cupboards can hold, until dozens of soup cans, bunches of fresh fruit, and boxes of pasta are crammed on the counters. We spent two entire days picking out a brand new table, new comforters for the boys, sheet sets for all the beds, and a new dresser for me to replace the one the cops broke. She’s rearranged all the furniture in the house to “transform some of this depressing energy sapping the joy out of life.”

  She tried to take me clothes shopping after shuffling around in my closet, groaning in dismay. But I swore I’d never wear the frilly, flowery girly-clothes Aunt Ellie picked out. I’m keeping my baggy jeans and oversized sweatshirts, thank you very much. Aunt Ellie sighs excessively and passes her hand over her eyes whenever I come out in the mornings. “You’ve got to look the way you want to feel, honey,” she says. Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

  So far, our conversations have been about the weather, whether the couch should go in front of the living room window, what color best energizes an east-facing kitchen, when I’m up to going back to school, and how to get the boys back. In the evenings, she scrolls through eBay and Etsy, searching for more costume jewelry to add to her collection. When she’s not shopping in person or online, she’s on the phone with various court and DHS employees. She’s filled out reams of paperwork. A worker came out to the house and asked a bunch of questions. We’re just waiting for approval.

  Sometimes, I catch Aunt Ellie looking at me, her mouth pursed and her eyes hooded, like she wants to say something more important than lamenting over my fashion choices.

  “Sorry if I woke you up,” I say.

  “Oh, no worries, dear. I couldn’t sleep either. Often happens. You mind company?”

  “Sure.”

  Aunt Ellie opens the fridge and pours her own glass of milk. She gets a plate, a spoon, a jar of peanut butter, and a loaf of bread. Even though she’s fully clothed, she almost looks naked without her usual jewelry. I’m pretty sure half of her suitcase must’ve been packed full of vintage costume necklaces, earrings, bracelets, and brooches. Her earrings are giant dangling hoops inlaid with rubies and sapphires, emerald tear-drop pendants with tiny squares of beach glass, or carved turquoise pearls rimmed with filigree gold whorls.